Recent discussions I’ve had with members about selling in the contact center often  prompt me to remember conversations I have with my 5-year old daughter.  She has a knack for trying to slip in a request for a cookie into conversations that have nothing to do with food.

 “Daddy, I had a great day at school so… can I have a cookie?”, or “Daddy, it’s a beautiful day outside so… can I have a cookie?”

And while I applaud her perseverance, I’m not going to give her a cookie just because it’s nice outside – no matter how many times she asks me.  Unfortunately, this example parallels what I’ve heard members articulate as their typical approach to selling. Read More »

By Dan Clay

One of our biggest responsibilities in customer service is resolving customer complaints.  Many complaints are constructive customer voice, and some are more ‘noise’ than representative challenge.  But in either case, it’s our job to react and it’s our challenge to recover that customer’s loyalty. 

The stakes are high: escalated complaints cost a lot (in terms of staff time and customer compensation) and the rise of social media means these complaints can quickly reach the masses.  Thankfully, there are simple steps you can take to get ahead of complaints and save money resolving them.  To help here, I thought I’d tackle the two most common questions CCC gets about complaints:

• How do you define a “complaint”? 
• What’s the best way to respond to a complaint?

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About a month ago, I weighed the pros and cons of different automated channels for surveying customer – including e-mail, Web, and IVR.   To continue to help members select the right channel for their post-contact customer surveys, I wanted to use part two of this post to address manual channels – like outbound phone and mail surveys.       

By and large, compared to automated options, manual survey administration channels such as phone and mail are not as popular with members. This often due to time lag and resources required with manual survey channels.  Still, they offer a few advantages and pose some disadvantages worth considering. Read More »

At a dinner party recently, a friend who is a high school English teacher lamented that his students often google answers to their English homework rather than take the time to read.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
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CCC is kicking off our latest research project.  As with the beginning of every research project, we have a lot of questions right now, along with a few strong opinions.  And while we explore this subject in more depth across the next few months, I thought it might be a good idea to share some preliminary thoughts and begin to gather feedback.

So…what will be the future of quality assurance (QA; a.k.a. quality monitoring)?  Well, to answer that question, we need to first understand what our current state is.  A few things here:

Click to Enlarge | What is the Focus of Your QA Scorecard?

1. A legacy focus on productivity: Although most companies have shifted the majority of their focus to quality rather than productivity, many QA processes are still aligned to a cut and dry mindset that is very reminiscent of “just do it” productivity KPIs. In fact, a recent CCC survey revealed that 64% of companies use regimented performance criteria for QA (as opposed to encouraging a more tailored experience).  In other words:  Did the rep use the proper greeting?  Check.  Say the customer’s name?  Check.  Identify a sales opportunity?  Check. Read More »

While reading The Economist last week, the cover story on developing countries and innovation caught my eye.  The gist of the article: developing countries are not just low-cost sources of labor, but are in fact increasingly the source of product and service innovation.  Everything from Kenya’s leading use of money transfer by mobile phone to Bharti Airtel’s partnership with competitors to share radio towers was mentioned. 

This idea got me thinking more specifically about the service organization.  No, not about offshoring or outsourcing implications, although Dan has written on that topic recently.  I actually started thinking about times when new ideas come from previous unexplored or even unlikely sources.  Just like the world is waking up to the insight potential within developing countries like Brazil and India – service leaders are beginning to realize the untapped ability of their frontline reps to bring new ideas to the business. Read More »

I’m an early adopter and passionate advocate of Social Media. It’s part of my job (but primarily it’s because I like this stuff) to help customer service executives be aware, read, and follow some of the best thinkers in this area. This is a few weeks old I admit, however, but there were good takeaways from a SXSW panel on customer service in a 140 character world (e.g Twitter) that I wanted to share.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang (by the way, you should be following & reading this guy, he’s doing smart work in the social media space) for the heads up on this panel, which included customer service representatives from Comcast, Microsoft, and HP. Disclosure, the Council works with some of these organisations.

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Despite my background in sociology, I was always a skeptic of online dating. It just seems that using some personal data points to let an algorithm play matchmaker was missing something – the human element. But several of my closest friends have proven me wrong and are now happily married, and the track record for such services speaks for itself. It seems data can indeed broker the most human of interactions. 

Two weeks ago IBM announced the launch of the Real-time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP) – essentially this is the next generation of skill-based routing systems. The basic idea is to route customers based on data such as purchase history, account information, even basic demographics, to representatives that have demonstrated the ability to best serve a given customer segment or type.

Yes, it’s kind of like a matchmaker for contact centers.

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They say that strong communication is the key to any healthy relationship.  The principle holds true, of course, for both home and work.

Click Image to Enlarge

And while the role of the service and support organization is primarily to be a communicator—and in fact many organizations we work with have upskilled staff on all sorts of tactics for improved interpersonal communication with customers—we’re apparently doing a poor job when it comes to communicating with cross-functional colleagues, particularly as it relates to cascading voice of the customer data.

Here are the facts from this CCC  research on sharing Voice of the Customer (VOC) with internal business partners: Read More »