(This is a guest post by Pat Spenner, who oversees the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing leaders and their teams. As social media is increasingly important for customer contact leaders and their organizations, we wanted our readers to be aware of MLC’s new article recently published by Harvard Business Review. This post serves as an introduction to the concepts discussed in the article.)

What can moscato teach us about marketing planning and skill sets of socially-savvy marketers? More than you might imagine.

This sweet wine sourced from the Muscat grape was a rounding error on annual wine sales in the US.

Until Drake came along.

“Of the Sir Francis variety?” you ask.

No.

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By Kirsten Robinson

Lauren recently discussed driving service-to-sales performance, detailing some of the more surprising takeaways from our frontline rep survey (e.g., over emphasis on monetary incentives hurts service-to-sales). So, now that you’ve heard about establishing a program, let’s take a closer look into what encourages the right employee behaviors—successful incentive campaigns.

Too often contact center leaders underemphasize recognition as an incentive, but it turns out that call center reps view recognition as a distinct reward. But, the ideal incentive program doesn’t emphasize one reward over another. Rather, focus should be distributed equally among recognition, monetary rewards, and non-monetary rewards in order to maximize sales performance. Read More »

Customer Service News

• Some suggestions for keeping your Generation Me customers happy [1to1 Media]
• Better or worse? A look at the impact the economic recession has had on the customer service experience [Irish Times]
• Some end-of-year awards salute the “Top 10 Retailers of Customer Service” [LA Times]
•  And the hi-tech equivalent: PC World surveys its readers to find out which “Tech Brands You Can Trust” [PC World]
• Will your phone lines be clogged with last-minute orders and post-Christmas support needs?  Find out which gifts will be popular this holiday season according to the Marketing Leadership Council [MLC]

Back in June, Lauren wrote a blog post launching CCC’s most recent research initiative on quality assurance (QA).  Judging from the comments on her post, Lauren seems to have touched off a nerve that sparked widespread interest in the future of the QA function.

Just a few months later, CCC has finalized its research on QA – Modernizing Quality Assurance.  Given the huge amount of interest in the topic, we’re experimenting with a “Web first” release of our findings.  Don’t worry – we’ll have meetings on this topics in early 2011, but we wanted to get this material to you as quickly as possible so that you can start using it immediately.

What I like most about our findings is that it explores solutions to long-standing QA struggles not by pushing more and more resources to tackle the problem head-on, but by taking a step back and considering the larger causes of ineffective QA programs to identify new solutions that often side-step original problem altogether.

It’s a bit like having blinders on while searching for the exit to a hedge maze.  Keep the blinders on – and blindly push forward until the hedge stops you from going forward.  Take the blinders off – and sometimes the exit is right there on your left. Read More »

“What are the trends in customer service?”  If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question, then I’d be a rich[er] man.  Joking aside, this question is constantly on the mind of contact center executives, and for good reason.  Keeping up with peers is important, especially when customer service is increasingly a feature of your brand.

We featured a webinar this summer on customer service trends, which includes things as adapting QA programs to better align with customers and incorporating VOC in a more actionable way.  These types of trends are what we hear through conversation over the years, but one resource I find interesting to use for surfacing trends is our benchmarking database (for CCC members), which is now five years old.  For its fifth birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to see what has changed since 2005. Read More »

Customer Service News

• Companies are increasingly promoting customer engagement strategies on the Web, which Mashable’s new “Best Social Media Customer Service” award reflects. [Mashable]
• The 2010 World Cup triggered unique customer service challenges for South Africa. However, South Africa Tourism tackled these issues by implementing a comprehensive customer service system. [1to1Media – requires free registration to view]
• The idea of “web stickiness” is sticking with companies; QVC promotes the Web and achieves higher profit margins in online sales, reinforcing customer desire for self-service.  [NYTimes]
• Seeking to incorporate self-service, mobile connectivity, and social media, SalesForce.com is leveraging old and new aspects of customer service methods to create more “democratic” customer service. [CRMBuyer]

By Kirsten Robinson

Are leaders in your organization constantly on the road? Is your organization geographically dispersed? We all recognize it’s important for employees to feel a connection with their leaders, but many executives struggle to make their presence felt where they can’t be in person.  Add the growing numbers of remote reps to the equation and you have a real engagement challenge on your hands.

Our sister program for corporate communicators, the Communications Executive Council, recently received a question on their Employee Communications Forum from an executive eager to hear about how other companies drive virtual engagement with leadership. Most organizations are using the Internet and other visual media to bridge the gap — here are a few of the takeaways from the thread:

• Get “face time” in real-time. Employees can get virtual face-to-face contact using a video chat program.  One member suggests Live Meeting, which hosts web conferencing in real-time meetings, training sessions and events. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Imagine a customer who made a complaint to your contact center and was so unhappy with the response, they posted a song on YouTube about it. By now most of us have seen or heard about Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars video, which has received over nine million hits and counting.

There are no surefire methods to avoiding a YouTube debacle, but there are ways to improve conventional approaches to handling customer complaints. Read More »

If you haven’t ordered a copy of the Corporate Executive Board’s Executive Guidance for 2011: Achieving Intelligent Growth, take my advice and do it now.  Since launching the order site for Executive Guidance, more than 6,500 copies of the book have been ordered by your peers and more than 1,000 executives have signed up for one of the upcoming Webinars in December.  Copies of the book are free, as are the Webinars. 

As you may know, our parent company, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), provides research and advisory services to several dozen corporate functions—from CFOs to General Counsel to CMOs, CIOs, heads of HR, etc.  Executive Guidance, a deliverable authored by our Chairman and CEO, Tom Monahan, is essentially our synthesized “point of view” for corporate leaders for the year.  For lack of a better description, it’s our elevator pitch to CEOs and their leadership teams—and it’s a good read. 

Our advice to managers for 2011 is couched in a framework we call “intelligent growth,” or the idea of “creating a long-term pattern of above-industry performance in both revenue growth and efficiency.”   Read More »

By Matt Hoffman

Technological changes often force contact centers to alter the way that they conduct business.  For example, many companies have had to alter their customer service models to adapt to the growing diversity of communication platforms (e.g., iPads, Blackberries, and regular old desktop computers).  Given the disruptive nature of technology, I often hear customer service executives asking how they should react to the introduction of new technologies that impact their current service offerings.  But should executives also be asking how they can proactively take advantage of opportunities created by new technologies to engage customers more effectively?

Consider the ongoing deployment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and smart meters within the utility industry.  Contact centers within utility companies have spent time thinking about how to react to this new technology but few have thought through how to proactively capitalize on AMI’s potential.

Read More »