• In case you hadn’t heard…SaaS is a booming business, and Salesforce.com is leading the way. [CMS Wire]
• Experts urge customer service in the Middle East to get “friendlier” in light of social media. [Business Intelligence Middle East]
• One employee’s customer service ethic saved a life, literally. [Business Insider]
• New eye-tracking device makes Web design and user experience analysis more affordable. [ReadWriteWeb]
•  Are you optimizing the mobile shopping experience as a next gen web project? [Mobile Commerce Daily]

It’s some of the smartest advice I’ve ever heard for improving business performance. Shift the middle.

At CCC, we’ve been preaching the benefits of increasing customer loyalty by reducing customer effort, using our Customer Effort Score (CES — a 5-point scale based on the question, “How much effort did you personally put forth to handle your request?”).

The research points clearly to the fact that loyal customers have the lowest-effort experiences.  But today, let’s focus on YOUR effort.

When you’re thinking about how to create better results among the thousands (or even millions) of customers your company serves, don’t create a lot of unnecessary angst worrying about how to fix the experience of every single customer in every single situation every single day.  Worry about the ones you CAN do something to improve.

That’s not every.  That’s some.  The ones in the middle of the bell curve.  Shift the middle. Read More »

If you happened to pick up the paper, access the internet, or turn on your TV last week, chances are you heard about the epic matchup that took place on Jeopardy! And if you’re anything like me, you watched with increasing horror as IBM’s Watson supercomputer brutally dispensed with the best opponents mankind had to offer.

When the trivia bloodbath was all over, however, we were left thinking one thing: what does this technology mean for our future—and, in particular, the future of customer service?

It seems the folks at IBM have, not surprisingly, already put some thought into this—and one of the most promising applications they see for the future of this technology is in the call center.

The question certainly raised debate among the research staff here at CCC as to the potential for the technology that’s behind Watson to fundamentally change the role of the call center and the Customer Service Representative. The conversation in our office devolved into “a battle of the Matts”, and below are our brief thoughts:

Question: Does Watson signal a shift in the role of the CSR? Read More »

I’d like to share some information related to one of the most unique research questions I’ve fielded across the last six years of working with CCC members.  Specifically, one of our Canadian members was building a proposal to institute a “clean desk” policy that would require contact center staff to eat lunch anywhere other than their desks.  Considering that 75% of office workers eat lunch at their desks two or three times a week, and nearly 50% do so every day, this member had her work cut out for her. 

This prompted a brief search on secondary literature, and, wow, we were surprised by the data we found.  Since we are in the peak of flu season (according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), I thought it would be appropriate to re-surface insights we found:

Health/Safety Risks—there are a number of very disturbing statistics that may give you pause the next time you lunch at your desk or even reach for the phone:

• 75% of office workers eat lunch at their desks two or three times a week, and nearly 50% do so every day.  One in three workers eats breakfast at their desks as well.
• Only 24% of workers always clean their desks before eating at them, and 20% of workers never clean their desks.
• The typical desk has 100 times as much bacteria as the typical kitchen table.
• The typical desk has 400 times as much bacteria as the typical office toilet seat (20,961 germs per square inch on a desk vs. 49 germs per square inch on a toilet seat).  Think about it…most office restrooms are cleaned at least daily.  When did you last wipe down your desk?  I’ll bet it wasn’t this morning.
• The telephone (more than 25,000 germs per square inch), keyboard, and computer mouse tend to have more bacteria than the desk, yet 60% of survey respondents do not clean these items more than once a month.
• Germs found in studies included both viruses (causes of colds and flu) and bacteria (causes of strep throat and pneumonia, among other illnesses). Read More »

Curious to benchmark your service and support organization’s 2011 strategic plans with those of competitors?  Think frontline staff performance improvement.

Faced with growing contact complexity, continued tight budgets, and increased revenue generation mandates, optimizing frontline performance has become the underlying motivation for most major service and support initiatives in 2011.

To address this growing challenge, many organizations are following tried and true solutions: conducting engagement surveys, emphasizing coaching, improving access to technology.  Yet even the most progressive organizations that have optimized these areas do not find the performance gains they anticipated, suggesting that these traditional levers are insufficient.

So how to best maximize frontline performance?  CCC increasingly believes that companies must address the environmental factors that prevent staff from best handling the customer experience. Read More »

Customer Service News

• Traveling? Take a look at who garnered top marks for customer service in the travel industry [USA Today]
• Remember the iPhone antenna crisis of 2010? Apple broke all the ‘rules’ in its response, but came out ahead anyway [HBR]
• When it comes to customer retention, loyalty programs may compensate for poor customer service [Market Watch]
• A look at how the recession has affected customer satisfaction with the big American retailers [24/7 Wall Street]
• IBM’s Watson proved itself to be the superior trivia contestant, but what are the implications for customer service? [Enterprise Irregulars]

CCC recently profiled a company who has transitioned their entire QA process from an internally-derived scorecard to a customer-led view of quality.  In other words, goodbye internally-scored service experience, hello customer-defined success.

For many companies the thought of shifting part of the QA process to customer voice is scary enough, much less moving the entire function to a customer-informed approach.

Now I don’t think there are many companies out there who would say that using customer voice to gauge quality is a bad thing, but eliminating internally-derived quality altogether?  That may be too much. 

So how can you dip your toes into this world of customer-informed quality?

CCC recently hosted a meeting where we got to talk to a room of your peers about this shift, and while some of them had the reservations you see above, they also had some ideas for getting started in this direction: Read More »

By Matt Hoffman

Brainstorming is a tricky art.  This is true across the board.  It’s difficult to brainstorm about your overall annual strategy, and it’s difficult to brainstorm about call routing protocols.

To help our members circumvent effortful brainstorming sessions, we spend a lot of time tracking down battle-tested ideas that we can teach to our members.  Some of our case studies, like this one from Ameriprise Financial, actually give members a way to avoid brainstorming about certain issues.  Nevertheless, there are times when there’s no getting around it:  you have to brainstorm a new idea.

More often than not, brainstorming sessions are inefficient.  You know the drill:  people are gathered into a conference room to ponder a topic for an extended period of time.  Soon, however, a few people begin to dominate the conversation.  Blackberries are fiddled with.  Drawings are doodled.  Ideas may ultimately be generated, but they rarely draw on the strengths of everyone in the room.

Read More »

• A new app lets users rate customer service on their iPhones. [PCWorld]
• And there’s more for customer service-related apps: another app allows support agents to manage a company’s help desk. [PCWorld]
• CCC Press Coverage: six myths about customer loyalty. [CEB-LiveMint Venture]
• A new internet scam: the lure of fraudulent customer service mystery shopping jobs. [The StarPhoenix]
• Tailoring cross-/up-sell to customer segments. [Collections & Credit Risk – free registration]
• Fun fact: Twitter set a new tweets-per-second record during the Super Bowl. [Mashable]

By Corey Stout

As CCC’s Spanish-Speaking Customer Support Guidelines illustrates, contact centers are increasingly faced with the challenge of providing a high-quality service to the growing Spanish-speaking contingent.

Not only is Spanish the primary language spoken at home by more than 35.5 million people aged 5 or older in the US, but the population of Spanish speakers in the U.S. is rising – and fast. It is predicted that the U.S. Spanish-speaking population, which currently constitutes 15.8% of the total U.S. population, or 48.5 million people, will triple by 2050.

In addition, there are currently 2.2 million Latin Americans in Europe and that number is expected to rise.

And there’s more. Spanish speakers are emerging as a key consumer segment. Read More »