By Corey Stout

I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty, which showed that people who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

Rogers and Norton showed subjects three different videos of a political debate:

1. The first video showed a candidate directly answering the questions asked.
2. The second video showed the same candidate dodging the question by answering a similar question.
3. The third video showed the same candidate dodging the question by answering an entirely different question.

And the winner? Video #2 (in which the candidate answered a similar question) was most preferred by the subjects, even more than the candidate who answered the questions honestly.

As Robert McNamara once said, “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked.” Read More »

In a few short days, 2010 will be gone and 2011 will be upon us.  As the CCC team gears up for several new research topics for 2011, I’ve been thinking about some of the emerging trends we’ve recently seen, and which of those will become hot topics for the industry in 2011. 

Without further ado, as I look into the crystal ball, here are my predictions for the coming year. Read More »

We’re now in full swing of that time of year when busy executives frantically try to cross items off of to do lists and hold last minute 2011 planning meetings.  All while maintaining solid end-of-quarter performance (and squeezing in time for a family vacation).

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships. Read More »

Customer Service News

• “Designing the Soft Side of Customer Service”—closely related to CCC’s work on low effort and the importance of the customer’s subjective impression, an interesting look at how emotions, trust, and control impact the service experience [Forbes]
• New call center leader The Philippines looks to add 70,000 jobs in 2011 [Manila Standard Today]
• Travelers vote TSA the worst customer service provider in the industry—but most point to policies and procedures (not service) as the actual source of headaches [Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
• Customer activism to the extreme: sure, a few hundred angry customers can put a dent in your brand…but a few angry hackers can bring your whole business to a screeching halt [AdAge]

Would it shock you to learn that…

• 65% of the largest 100 international companies have active corporate accounts on Twitter?
• 190 million people use Twitter worldwide (18 million in the U.S. – or roughly 6% of adults)?
• More than 2 billion individual tweets are made globally each month?

Maybe not. We know that many companies are moving away from using Twitter simply as a bullhorn for broadcasting corporate messages—and in doing so they’re capturing its potential as a tool for proactive outreach, as well. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is a great example: it aims to bring service and support to a place where customers already feel comfortable.

Part of this evolution involves recognizing that Twitter is a two-way street, and that listening is just as important as speaking (or in this case, tweeting). Deciding on a strategy for responding to individual tweets is an important step to be sure, but Twitter can also be leveraged to help you:

• Get ahead of issues affecting wider segments of your customer base before these problems snowball. Customers today are turning to social media outlets in ever-increasing numbers to share experiences (more often bad experiences than good ones) and banding together to make their collective voice heard. But this also means that minor issues can quickly become major problems; monitoring what customers are experiencing is crucial to staying one step ahead of these troubles. Read More »

Customer Service News

• What drives online comments? Negative emotion, mostly. [ReadWriteWeb]
• A glimpse at your future customers?  A teenager explains why teenagers don’t use Twitter (take with large grain of salt). [ReadWriteWeb]
• On the other hand, only 8% of online Americans use Twitter, so maybe the teens are onto something. [Pew]
• One executive says that a move to the CEO’s seat requires more than just technical expertise – you must also be able to empathize with the customer. [CFO.com]
• Are you taking advantage of the growing trend of virtual conferences and industry events? [NYT]
• The Department of Energy (U.S.) recently blogged some recommendations for the utilities industry to improve communications with customers about grid modernization projects. [Huffington Post]
• A look at social media (and customer service) where Wall Street meets Main Street – the franchised world. [Business Insider]

This is a guest post from Rick DeLisi, who many of you have probably seen present CCC’s research around the globe.  More to come from Rick in 2011!

Q: How can you get your employees to do the things you want them to do?

A: Trick question. You can’t.

Q: How can you be sure your employees will do what’s best for your customers?

A: Trick answer. Despite the fact that most companies believe they are customer-centric, most employees are actually trained to do what’s right for the company first.

Lately we’ve been asking ourselves:  What makes some companies more successful than others when it comes to creating world-class customer service?  In other words, what are the attributes of “a truly customer-centric organization?”

Here’s one hypothesis:  Customer-centric organizations believe strongly in empowerment – i.e., encouraging ownership of decision-making at all levels and supporting what’s called a “culture of action.” 

That doesn’t mean “giving away the store” or “buying loyalty” throwing money at customers who’ve endured a poor experience, but simply allowing front-line staffers to “do the right thing” without hesitation or having to run every new decision through a multi-step approval process.  Read More »

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and within CCC we all have very distinct (and sometimes diverging) outlooks.  And while we can all agree on the basics (i.e., coaching is the best way to drive rep performance, focus should be on customer effort rather than customer delight), we often have spirited conversations about the particulars of implementation or more granular concepts. 

I thought it would be cool to bring these dialogues to our blog so you can get a peek behind the research curtain and see what really goes on in our research meetings. 

Let’s take the topic of experience engineering: once we found out two-thirds of customer effort (the leading indicator of customer loyalty in service transactions) is driven by how a customer ‘feels’ about their service experience, we looked for ways to manage the customer’s perception their effort levels.  Enter experience engineering, a way to actively guide the customer through an interaction designed to anticipate emotional responses and preemptively offer solutions that create mutually beneficial outcomes.

Not just being nicer or more polite when you tell the customer ‘no’, but actively choosing words and framing conversations to leave the customer feeling like it was easy, even if it was a complex transaction.

Sound like it could cross some ethical boundaries? Sure it could, so I asked two fellow researchers, Pete and Dalia, to answer the following question: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Creating the best format and voice for customer response messages is essential—especially as service reps increasingly interact with customers by e-mail.

An executive in our Customer Experience Forum was recently in the process of redesigning e-mail response at her company, and asked to hear member feedback on the best way to execute responses.

In general, your e-mails should be short, and easy to read and scan. Subject lines and sender information should be clear and recognizable. Here are a few takeaways from the rest of the discussion: Read More »

As I sat down to write this blog, I tried to brainstorm a few general corporate functions that everyone gripes about.  The list I came up with was rather short (and probably very unfair): HR, Payroll, IT support.  Maybe you could pile on here (feels good to vent, right?).  Well, here’s another function on the list that hits rather close to home: Quality Assurance (QA).

As the CCC team spoke with countless companies across our months of developing our new research on QA, there were some common themes that emerged in conversations—including the poor perception of the QA team within the service organization.  One member even told us that his QA team would probably feel better about meetings with other peers in the contact center if there were metal detectors at the door to the conference room…people were that upset with QA!

Now, let me set the record straight.  This has nothing to do with the individuals on the QA team.  Rather, this is a reputation problem for what this group stands for, day in and day out.  And that is…be the bad guy. Read More »