As the end of 2010 fast approaches, CCC is considering its research agenda for the coming year – just as many of you are planning your key initiatives and projects for 2011.  Here at CCC, we take the voice of our members extremely seriously and ask the membership to fill out an annual agenda poll that assesses key concerns and focus areas.

One thing we didn’t have to worry about was penetration – we had over 700 responses from an extremely wide range of individuals within the service organization, industries, customer bases, and regions.  Thank you to those who responded – we appreciate your feedback immensely as its extremely helpful in guiding our research.

A couple of things jumped out at me – including the following: Read More »

Here on the CCC research team, we spend quite a bit of time doing….research. And a few times each year, we are able to share game-changing insights with our membership using quantitative data and proven best practices from our network of companies. It’s a thrill for us to have that opportunity. But then this often happens: we send you off into the sunset with new ideas, and then we wonder what you’ll end up doing with those ideas. 

Every once in a while, we have a chance to hear how members have implemented our findings at their organizations. I’m happy to share that I recently caught up with the team at The Regence Group to learn more about how they’ve begun to implement CCC’s recommendations around personality-based, integrated coaching across their call centers.  Read More »

Customer Service News

• Although outsourcing took a hit with the recession, the industry is growing again. A new report expects global call center services revenues to reach $189.3 billion by 2015. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• Demonstrating the expected growth in the customer service sector, Ryla, a customer contact solutions provider, is looking to expand its call center facility by creating at least 1,400 new jobs. [PRNewswire]
• As Groupon looks to expand its market base and meet the needs of deal hunters, it plans to improve and grow its customer service operations. [CenterNetworks]
• A need for social media police?  Hotels are looking for some recourse to poor online reviews. [NYT]
• Taking a look at the attitudes of young adults: they believe they have the duty to change the world, but don’t believe that consumer choices have a large role to play. [Adweek]

As economies went into freefall roughly two years ago, executives across different functional areas converged on a short set of priorities.  In fact, you might say just one priority – survival.  That meant shedding costs and doing anything possible to drive cash flow, quickly.  But as markets pulled back from the brink, functional heads returned to a (more normal) pursuit of their individual agendas, from social media adoption to staff development.

As we talk to heads of Sales, Marketing and Communications about 2011, I see a swing back to handling a common enemy – this time, ongoing uncertainty.  Uncertainty isn’t terribly attractive to most, but executives seem to be accepting it as part of the new normal and are trying to figure out ways to live alongside it.  That presents a little differently depending on your role in the organization.  Read More »

Myers-Briggs, DiSC^®, Insights, HBDI.  All of these programs (and others like them) introduce the concept of individual personality styles & assist learners to not only understand their own personality style, but also those of the people around them.  The outcome of these programs?  The ability to understand how your own personality interacts with other personality types.

This skill, being able to recognize and “flex” to other personality types, can have tremendously positive results in service organizations including boosts to employee engagement & customer experience, improved coaching interactions, and financial benefits, too, like reduced callbacks and better selling success.     

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies in workshops around the world to train trainers on these techniques, and the enthusiasm for this approach to service is universally positive.  Companies rarely have difficulty justifying the implementation of personality-based service and the rollout of the training is not only engaging and exciting, it’s a heckuva lot of fun, too!  But getting this personalized service approach to stick has been a challenge for some.

So how do you make this behavior stick? 

Read More »

This is a guest post by Matt Kiel of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales professionals.

Don’t get me wrong: I love working with heads of Sales. But every now and then, something crosses my desk that reminds me of how much we can still learn from other functional executives.

And what could be more cross-functional than 2011 budgeting and planning? If you’re one of the many sales leaders reviewing recent budget projections and saying, “You want me to do what with what?!” then I’d encourage you to read on for a bit of good news from an unlikely source.

As it turns out, our sister research program that supports CFOs is strongly advocating that companies shift more resources to activities directly tied to sales growth in the near term.

Now, before you dismiss that idea as too farfetched for your penny-pinching CFO to get behind, consider these key findings that will help you speak their language: Read More »

This is the second in a two-part series on creating effective contact center organization dashboards.  The first post explores the topic of metric selection.

You probably know the saying, “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”  But in the hectic pace of the modern office, internal documents often suffer this exact fate.  If something looks like it will take a long time to read and digest, given everyone’s busy schedules it’s likely that it will be set aside to review at a “free moment”…that never comes along.  And, of course, the contact center operational dashboard is no exception to this syndrome.  So it’s important to make sure that your dashboard doesn’t take a lot of effort to consume, assuming you want your audience, particularly those outside of the contact center organization, to pay attention. 

So, here are five design tips to keep in mind to de-clutter your dashboard presentation and catch your audience’s attention: Read More »

Customer Service News

• The GAP recently introduced a new logo, only to revert back to its iconic blue box after hearing the voice of the company’s customers. [Yahoo News]
• During his upcoming trip to India, President Obama can expect to hear from Indian government officials regarding his position on U.S. outsourcing. [Economic Times]
• Speaking of outsourcing and politics…does the U.S. Congress have the right information about the influence of outsourcing on the American economy? According to some, the practice enables domestic job creation—not elimination. [WSJ]
• Lands’ End introduced live video chat on its site to help shoppers choose clothing. The launch was timed to coincide with National Customer Service Week. [Market Watch]
• With 75% of passengers booking flights online, a new study illustrates the growing customer appetite for self-service in all things airport-related. [Canadian Press]
• New article urges companies to stopping trying to be the “Nordstrom of your industry”, and instead focus on CCC’s Customer Effort Score. [Media Post]

As autumn is well underway, companies are making their holiday season arrangements before winter arrives. These plans are often quite visible as small retail outlets pop up in airports, malls, parking lots, and elsewhere. 

The statistics are impressive: Toys “R” Us to open 600 Express locations to provide more convenient locations to potential customers. Borders is doing the same, opening 25 Borders Express outlets in smaller markets.

More eye-catching is the number of staff required for the holiday season. Toys “R” Us announced plans to take on 45,000 temporary employees, and Best Buy, also expanding, will bring on 29,000 seasonal staffers.

As customer service knows well, this seasonal expansion is often invisible to consumers when it happens behind the walls of the contact center. Customers may notice more retail staff in the stores, but may not know the company also hires more contact center staff to keep up with increase in contact volume.  And, with holiday call volumes spiking as much as 10x normal volume, many more frontline staff are required to provide high levels of service for customers who have very urgent needs for the holiday season.  

But, a fast ramp up in staff size presents a tall order for the service organization: How do we quickly recruit and train seasonal staff to meet customer demands without a gap in service? Read More »

Last week (October 4^th through 8^th) was Customer Service Week – and how did you celebrate it?  For those who are unfamiliar, Customer Service Week was started by the International Customer Service Association in 1988 and today is celebrated by a wide variety of organizations around the globe. The purpose of this dedicated week is to recognize and celebrate the individuals who work at the frontline, providing service to customers.

And celebrate they do – I’ve talked with member companies and seen articles about a lot of fun Customer Service Week events from catered lunches to theme days to gift cards/giveaways to games.  After awhile, you start to see the themes emerge: frontline reps as superheros, dress-up days, peer recognition awards – and while they are all great ideas, I found a few more creative ideas I wanted to share as you think about Customer Service Week 2011 Read More »