On my daily browse of the New York Times, I ran across an article listing the biggest pet peeves for consumers.  I had a sneaking suspicion that customer service would make it on this list, and as the title of this post infers, we did.  The comment on the service experience went as follows:

ENOUGH AFTER-CALL SURVEYS!
“You call, say, an airline for a reservation, and after navigating the monkey bars that stand between you and a human being, a recording asks if you can stay on the line once the call is completed and take a brief survey about the experience.  The answer is no. If the point is for Company X to improve its customer rep system, it is probably recording and “monitoring” those conversations, as we are often reminded by the same automated voice. So the company should eavesdrop on its own time without asking to take up any more of ours.”

The experience described above represents an unfortunate, but common, sentiment that could be dismissed as simply a rant.  But, what I find interesting about the complaint above is it shows how customers don’t always appreciate the different purposes and value between the IVR for routing vs. the IVR for surveys. Read More »

An article about remote reps caught my eye recently.  According to the article, remote reps amount to 7% of the total call center worker population in 2009, and the group is expected to grow by as much as 19% per year.  CCC’s data from its benchmarking database is strong as well, with about 13% of the companies surveyed using remote reps.

No doubt about it…and in case you’re still wondering…remote reps are here to stay.  Stories of “failed” programs are rare, and most companies have very positive experiences.  Commonly cited outcomes (when compared to brick and mortar operations) include:

• Better customer survey scores
• Higher productivity
• Lower turnover
• Environmentally friendly (This is a new one…we’ve recently heard some organizations publicize remote programs as a “green” initiative to cut the company’s carbon footprint—because fewer people are driving to work.)

CCC members, learn more about our remote rep research.

These benefits are great, but almost all of them are highly dependent on the reps you choose to staff the program.  If you hire the wrong type of rep, you’re investing time and resources into people likely to leave the job or, worse yet, stick around and be entirely unproductive.  When hiring remote reps, here are some things to consider: Read More »

Customer Service News

• Will Nordstrom’s online, customer-facing integration of store and warehouse inventory pay off? Sources say yes. [New York Times]
• Facebook’s informal valuation is now as high as $33.7 billion [FT]
• EMarketer estimates that 28% of the American public will access the web from smartphones in 2010, up from 17% in 2008 [Adweek]
• Intuit will launch new credit card platform for iPhone [Mashable]                       
• …while Consumer Reports pushes for more fraud protection on mobile payments platforms [ReadWriteWeb]                                      
• Throwing cold water on the smartphone hype [Mashable]                                           
• An in-depth analysis of the spread of Twitter in the first few years of the service’s life [Hubspot]                                   
• Pew study finds that social media use has nearly doubled for internet users 55 and up [Mashable]               
• Only 1.2% of executives say it is important to use social media channels to offer customer service [Marketing Profs]                                 
• Are consumers becoming desensitized to product recalls? [AdAge]
• CFI report shows decline in offshore contact centers for the second year running [Business Wire] 

A friend of mine, a librarian, just changed jobs.  At her old place of employment, she spent her last few weeks updating guidelines and refreshing handbooks, training her replacement so the transition would be seamless.  But, several weeks into her new job she still gets e-mails from her replacement asking questions (“What’s our inter-library book sharing policy for new books?” or “What if I get a request for a publication we don’t get?”)  She shared her frustrations with me, and wondered if there was anything she should have done differently to upskill her replacement before she left.

My answer? More or less, no.  The answer wasn’t a better transition plan, it’s a better knowledge management approach.  My biggest clue here was that she manually updated everything before she left – trying to cram all her tribal knowledge into the handbook after the fact, rather than updating the handbooks and guidelines in real time as things changed.  Of course she forgot to include things, especially if they weren’t everyday occurrences. 

The same can be said for the contact center.  There’s so much knowledge floating around about the latest product or the best way to handle a customer issue, but it’s not always in our frontline rep-facing knowledge base.  Or perhaps the information is in there, but is not up-to-date or is poorly written.

The answer for many service organization is to invest in the latest knowledge management technology.  And while technology plays an important role, I’ve come to believe the emphasis should be placed on the people and processes of knowledge management.  I’ve seen highly sophisticated knowledge management technologies fall short of their goals because the company had poor processes to support the technology. Read More »

In our ROI-driven world, apparently museums are the latest organizations to assess the value they provide to visitors.  Pressed by increasingly frugal donors to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments, museum staff are trailing art lovers through exhibits, observing them enjoy paintings.

While perhaps bizarre to some, or even a bit big brother-ish, the truth is that the service and support world can actually learn a thing or two from these art museums, particularly as relates to self-service channels. 

What these museums are examining is time spend—and using it a proxy for the quality of the visitor experience.  Too little time in a gallery (less than one minute, specifically) means a visitor is just rushing through and not absorbing much.  Several minutes could be a sign that the visitor is really engaging with the art.  Or it could indicate visitor confusion with unwieldy art descriptions.

Read More »

We are starting a new experiment on the blog today – aggregating the latest and best customer service news from around the Web on a regular basis, bringing you the freshest perspective on the customer service landscape.

Let us know if you like this approach, hate it, or other types of information you’d like to see in this aggregator.

Customer Service News

• The next big country to outsource your contact center to is…the United States? [NPR]
• American Express survey shows that customer service – or lack thereof – plays a large role in purchase decisions. We concur! [Brandweek, Customer Contact Council]
• New report: social media users expect requests for help (in emergency situations) to be answered within the hour [ReadWriteWeb]
• Wired’s Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff say the Web is dead, having been replaced by an ecosystem of semi-closed “apps” for mobile and desktop alike. Note that you are reading the article…in a web browser. [Wired]
• Taking self-service to the next level – a partnership between Bank of America and Visa will bring mobile payments to New York this fall [Mashable]
• Does more social media data mean more insights? Maybe, says Zach Hofer-Shall of Forrester [Forrester Research]
• Richard Branson’s first rule of customer service – and when to break it [LiveMint]
• A Boston hospital starts texting service for ER wait times (a twist on the web-based version we’ve blogged about) [The Boston Globe, Customer Contact Council]
• The Wall Street Journal takes on one source for continued innovation – your employees [WSJ]

This post draws from a story first presented by our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council, in their blog Wide Angle.

The U.S. is in a kind of tough place right now.

• Unemployment is hovering around 10%, not only idling millions of workers but keeping millions more stuck in jobs they don’t like
• It’s shaping up to be the hottest summer on record in many parts of the country
• To top it all off, traffic is getting worse as local governments run out of money to invest in public transit and new roads.

Add these (and many, many other) factors up, and it’s no secret why your average American is a little on edge these days.

So when JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater made a dramatic exit from his job recently, delivering an expletive-laced tirade to passengers over the intercom before grabbing beer from the service cart and sliding down the plane’s emergency chute, it wasn’t surprising when he became something of a cause celebre. A Facebook fan group established after the news broke now has more than 200,000 fans, and there’s talk of a legal defense fund (Slater was cited for public endangerment). Slater has been hounded by reporters and paparazzi since being released on bond, and his relatives have made the talk-show rounds. Read More »

I’m 35, balding & overweight.  So, I recently decided to get a grip on the one attribute over which I have considerable control (and, no, I didn’t get hair plugs).  I began exercising, and I hired a personal trainer to assist me through my “get-in-shape” journey.

My trainer is providing me with guidance on where I can get better (shed some unwanted weight), and how specifically to do that (which exercises to perform, along with a proper diet). 

And this kind of guidance is exactly the same sort of help many contact center leaders are looking for now that the 2011 planning season is under way.  Interestingly enough, though, few companies have an effective way to identify and narrow their list of potential initiatives for the coming year.   

Instead, often companies have “strategic” brainstorming sessions resulting in a laundry list of initiatives to tackle.  This list includes “pet projects” and well known opportunity areas, but often doesn’t reveal what to tackle first, and rarely uncovers previously unknown opportunity areas.  It’s similar to a person in my situation (wanting to get in better shape) going about it without a plan or a solid understanding of what to improve/how to make those improvements.  Read More »

Ever wonder how much of an impact “the little things” have on the customer experience?  Although many customer contact organizations are awash in data, most do not have the luxury of conducting scientific testing to find the answer to that question.  Until recently, CCC hadn’t conducted any tests either.  But, we had an opportunity this year to deploy a simple A/B test to test the impact of different rep behaviors on the customer experience.

In our experiments, both test groups received the same problem—and at the end of the day everyone got the same resolution outcome.  The only difference was the rep response. Read More »

I saw an interview on CNN over the weekend with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. In this short spot, only a few minutes long, one of Dorsey’s few talking points was how wildly popular Twitter is as a customer service platform. 

We all know that Twitter is popular. And not just among the millennial generation—almost 65% of Twitter users are over 35 years old. Last month’s World Cup Final is a prime example of Twitter’s reach—people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages, generating more than 2,000 tweets-per-second.

The opportunities in social media for customer service are many: drive loyalty, deflect contacts, educate customers, and capture VOC. Those are nice goals, but are they really different from goals of the live channel? Mostly not. But there’s something unique about the spirit with which Twitter accomplishes these goals.

Read More »