This is the fourth in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one, two and three here.

The New Year is well on its way (almost February already??) and chances are you have some new goals you want to achieve in your organization. As nice as it would be to simply make a checklist, hold a meeting, and then enjoy the results, experience and data show that to really see changes, you need to engage your staff in coaching. Like the personal trainer you may have hired to achieve some other New Year resolutions, we’re here to give some advice.

As we’ve previously written, coaching is not a science but an art. There’s not one simple formula for guaranteed success, but that being said, there are absolutely some steps that all companies should take:

1. Find the right coaches. When screening for coaches, organizations should consider more than just prior rep performance or general leadership skills. Great players don’t always make the best coaches, so beef up your talent search with some important criteria. For instance, our research finds that almost a third of the current coach pool falls into the “reluctant” category – meaning they don’t want to develop others as their core role—so coaching immersion programs and built-in coaching requirements help identify staff who will be truly successful as future coaches. Read More »

If you own a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer (okay, that should cover just about everybody), then you’re likely familiar with the slick video-recording capabilities that now come standard on these gadgets. And if you’re like me, you’ve been wowed at the ability of face-to-face video conferencing to bridge physical limitations, seemingly bringing people much closer together, even if only in a ‘virtual’ sense.

With technology enabling the world to better capture, store, and share video content, we’ve certainly seen a rise in the number of organizations wondering how they can use video to serve their customers—we’ve even blogged previously about the idea of using self-service ‘how-to’ videos and customer-generated content.

Indeed, the recent and rapid rise of services like Apple’s FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and Skype naturally leads us to think about the potential for service organizations to leverage this technology, and while it’s certainly too early to say for sure, here’s my take on the future of video calling for service:

Employee-to-Employee
Companies looking to at least experiment with the benefits (and limitations) of video calling are likely to first pilot the service internally, using their employees to prove (or disprove) the value in offering video calling to customers. This pilot phase needn’t be restricted to just the call center, though; in fact, the biggest benefits may be found in enabling better communication and collaboration between service and other areas of the organization.  For example, we have heard from a few financial services organizations considering video capabilities between branch employees and call center staff.  In addition, video conferencing often comes up in the context of coaching and engaging with remote reps. Read More »

Just about a year and a half ago, we shared the Customer Effort concept through the publication of our article entitled, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” in the Harvard Business Review.

Have you ever been browsing the Internet for self-service answers or awaiting an e-mail response from customer support, when instead you decide to turn to your social media chat platform of choice (e.g., Facebook, Google Chat, AOL Instant Messenger) to find a real-time answer from (who else)—your online friends! With the technology’s popularity expected to grow to 1.7 billion users by 2013, companies too are exploring (and, in many cases, already trying out) web chat as a customer support channel to save on phone and e-mail costs while capitalizing on the customers’ growing comfort with online chat in general.

And while chat can be a great tool to interact with friends, does it truly fulfill its promise of cost-savings and improved online customer experience as a service and support channel? Read More »

Will 2012 be the year when Marketing and Customer Service come together to deliver consistent customer experience on social media [Social Customer]

How channel switching is part of Thomas Cook’s multi-channel strategy [Travolution]

Food delivery company Seamless finds Twitter success through a dedicated team and quick responses to customer queries [Business Insider]

Successful customer interactions hinge on both the message and the medium, indicates Convergys 2011 U.S. Customer Scorecard Research [CSM]

Optus launches dedicated online customer support forum to address customer issues and foster discussion amongst customers [Delimiter]

How online retailer Live Out There used Facebook to communicate with customers during Web site downtime [Yahoo News]

In the context of online self-service, companies will often tell us “our customers like to do research online, but when they actually decide to fix their problem/transfer funds/purchase a product, they prefer to call.”  The big question in our minds, however, is this:

How do you KNOW that customers PRERER to call you?

The fact that customers still call (indeed, even that they call after having visited the website) should not be seen as proof that the live phone is the preferred channel.  In all likelihood, the reason why many of your customers still call is because your website has failed them in some way.

The key, then, to understanding how customers prefer to interact with your company—online or in another channel—is to ask the customer directly rather than making assumptions based on customer behavior.  This sounds like an in-depth survey process (and certainly it could be), but there are shortcut ways that companies are unearthing channel switching root cause drivers in a low-cost way.

Specifically, Fidelity Investments discovered a low-tech, customer-friendly method to capture customers’ reasons for abandoning Web self-service for live channels.  They use inbound calls as opportunities to conduct two-question surveys to gather in-the-moment customer feedback about the company’s online self-service and customers’ reasons for switching to the phone.

In addition, Fidelity is very careful about phrasing the questions so that the survey does not come across as an attempt to push self-service but rather a learning exercise.  We believe this is a big part of the strategy’s success—customers are not made to feel as though the company doesn’t want them to call.  Instead, the company simply wants to know more about what customers want from them.

CCC members, learn more about Fidelity’s two-question framework in a new summary here.

Related CCC Resources:

1. Improving Web Self-Service with Customer Voice (Event Replay)
2. Full Case Study: Fidelity’s Channel-Switching VOC
3. Diagnosing Online Failures (Study Chapter)

This is the third in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one and two.

The ideal New Year’s resolution is meant to improve upon or fix a problem that existed for you the previous year.  On the surface, it can be easy to see what your organization needs to resolve to do, but there are often deeper issues at play.  The key is to identify and fix the root causes of your problems, rather than focusing on the outward symptoms of them.  The tools we’ve designed the perfect resource for jump-starting your year and finding targeted areas of improvement where your organization needs it most.  Here’s a short list of some of CCC’s top audit tools and assessments: Read More »

When it comes to segmentation, choosing the right scheme is just the beginning. You must then make it work.

Over the past four months, I spoke with service leaders across industries to understand their challenges to segmentation. Many were concerned about executing a chosen strategy:

Would it require extensive – sometimes impossible – resource investments?

Would they need complex CRM or routing technologies?

Is it even possible to deliver segmented service without rep specialists or tiered staffing models?

Much of the time, these concerns are valid. Segmentation can be expensive. Take, for example, a segmentation approach that tailors service to customers’ value to the company. High-value customers are often routed to better-skilled (or even dedicated) agents, offered personalized web features, and bumped to the front of call queues. To provide this level of high-touch service, resource investment is surely required.

So what happens if you’re constrained by budgets? Are you out of luck if you don’t have the time or money to put into a scheme like that? Read More »

My two girls are close in age to one another, and they often get invited to the same birthday parties.  But, there are those occasions where one gets invited and the other doesn’t, and what follows is usually something along the lines of:

Daughter: “I want to go to the party, too.”

Me: “I know you do, but you weren’t invited to this party.  You’ll get invited to other parties, though.”

Daughter:  “But I really want to go to this one.”

Me: “I understand, but we can’t just show up at the door and expect them to let us in with open arms.”

And strangely enough I’ve found myself having a similar conversation with a number of business-to-business (B2B) companies in recent months.  More and more B2B service organizations are trying to discover how to better partner with their colleagues (especially in Sales) and are finding that they haven’t been invited to the party.  How come?

Read More »

Supermarkets use IBM Smarter Commerce to equip customers with high-tech offerings [MarketWatch]

Financial institutions increasingly use social media to resolve customer issues [MarketWatch]

But many Americans still have reservations about mixing personal finances and social media outlets [ZDNet]

Customer personal information hacked on Zappos.com; company toll free line temporarily shut down  [TheStar.com]

Proactive contacts with “shopping cart abandoners” can increase purchases [1to1Media]

Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score: the value of customer service metrics [ITWebBusiness]