As customer service leaders, we’re constantly interacting with internal business partners—coordinating support for new product launches and marketing campaigns, troubleshooting product issues, you name it.  But what’s the right way to engage the business?  Is it better to build relationships with them or challenge them?  What’s the right posture? 

While conventional wisdom would suggest that relationship building is the way to win over a customer, some recent research from our program for sales leaders, the Sales Executive Council, suggests that high-performing sales reps take a very different approach to engaging customers.

When we think about our interactions with business partners, it’s actually not that different from sales.  More often than not, we’re trying to sell a perspective, aren’t we?  For instance, maybe we’re getting flooded with calls on a particular issue and we need the business to fix the upstream problem so that customers don’t need to call in about it.  The business doesn’t have to listen.   They’ve got competing priorities of their own—different things that are vying for their time, attention, and budget—so we’ve got to sell them on taking action.  This is why the SEC findings are so interesting to us in CCC. Read More »

Senior executives who are effective at talent management generate up to 7% more revenue than their less dedicated peers.  Unfortunately, more than 80% of executives are either uncommitted to talent management, ineffective at it, or worse—both. 

Talent management, though, is not a matter of skill (most executives have the business skills necessary) or time (effective executives and ineffective executives spend roughly the same amount of time on talent management): the issue is focus.  Executives should approach talent management strategically—managing key talent like a corporate asset that is developed and deployed in support of business objectives. 

Becoming a Talent Champion outlines five key activities executives should focus on in place of day-to-day staff management, including building the high potential bench, holding the senior team accountable for talent outcomes, and owning the organization’s talent strategy.  To learn more, download a complimentary copy of this new publication or order the eBook.

CCC Members, check out our best talent management tools and insights in our Talent Management Topic Center, including:

• Building the Next Generation of Contact Center Talent
• Rep Performance: The Next Performance Boost
• Frontline Staff Skills Survey

By Corey Stout

There is plenty of buzz around the upcoming 65^th birthday for our beloved Baby Boomers. And it’s not just that stores need to start stocking up on cake mix and candles – companies need to start preparing themselves to anticipate more employees retiring.

Kirsten has been blogging on hiring retirees to fill the gaps left by retirees (no that is not a typo!).

Read More »

Those words are often uttered in a sales environment.  Like, “While I’ve got you on the line … let me tell you about the latest and greatest in the world of vacuum cleaners!” (apologies to any Hoover fans that I may offend).

But what about in the service world … why don’t we hear those words spoken from service reps?  Probably because there’s always an eye on the AHT clock and a fear that added seconds (and wait time) will negatively impact the service experience for the next customers. 

But what if that “eye on the clock” was actually causing a poor customer experience AND creating a higher cost to the company?  Wouldn’t a few extra seconds of AHT be worth it to avoid those missteps?

We certainly think so.

Read More »

• Need even more proof to improve your self-service channels? Consumer spending on digital goods is approaching spending on equivalent physical goods. [Mobile Marketing Magazine]
• Social networking is beginning to reach the saturation point, according to a recent report. [eMarketer]
• Can you do meaningful market research on Twitter? According to this post, yes (but we’re skeptical) [SmartBrief]
• Dubai may require newly hired taxi drivers to have training in customer service. [The National]
• Culture should not be treated as a soft topic – it can be a powerful tool for governing an organization. [Harvard Business Review]
• High-profile failures might signify the end of “silly” social media. [AdAge]

Note: This post is the final installment in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve offered our perspective on how to create a truly customer-oriented collections strategy—one that both leverages customer insight and motivates staff to exhibit customer-focused behaviors. In this final installment, I’ll discuss how tracking customer experience metrics for collections agents can motivate customer-focused behaviors that help preserve long-term relationships—a key challenge facing our membership given new enterprise standards for customer satisfaction and higher customer churn stemming from increased competition. Read More »

Reading through the WSJ the other day, and article “Fast Way to Gripe About (or Praise) Service” caught my eye.  Reading through the article, I got more and more interested about the new smartphone app and website the article highlights called Tello.  Tello is like Yelp, a website that lets customers review local companies – but, it is solely meant for customers to rate their customer service experience.

With Tello, a customer will give the company’s customer service a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, plus comment on what they liked (or didn’t like) about their service experience.  They can also tag their comments to the particular employee at the company who they interacted with.

Cool, huh?  Read More »

This interview was conducted by Tom Disantis, who leads the Advisory Services team for the Sales Executive Council and the Customer Contact Council.

In addition to the human impact of the tragic events unfolding in Japan, many companies are facing the potential of a disrupted supply chain as production slows and in some cases comes to a halt at factories affected by the earthquake.

To help our members respond to crises that have the potential of impacting our customers, I interviewed Rick DeLisi, Senior Director with the Customer Contact Council.  Mr. DeLisi also works with the Communications Executive Council and he has supported Communications Leaders with responding to a crisis.

(If you would like to donate to the relief effort in Japan, please visit The Corporate Executive Board Giving Campaign to support the American Red Cross)

According to Mr. DeLisi, for Contact Center executives, the primary impact of a crisis is the “creation of a significant amount of uncertainty with customers.  Any crisis heightens the amount of the ‘unknown.’”  As a result, members should be asking themselves, “are customers likely to make poor decisions with the information that they currently have?” Read More »

Customer Service News

• The AT&T/T-Mobile deal: what does this $39 billion buyout mean for customer service? [Network World]

• And speaking of the acquisition, what does it mean for existing call centers? AT&T says ‘business as usual’ [Wichita Business Journal]

• AMEX exec sheds light on the company’s renewed efforts to improve the customer experience [Forbes]

• Customer service cited as a top concern for UAE banking clients—and also the reason why many are choosing to leave their bank [Emirates 24/7]

• Microsoft customer support guru shares lessons from last week’s South by Southwest interactive conference (spoiler alert: CCC gets a shout-out!) [Official Tech News]

• And finally, an inside look at the “world’s biggest” travel call center that’s capitalizing on China’s booming tourism market [Business World]

Note: This post is the third in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”. In this series, we’ll discuss the research findings and best practices that can help your organization adopt a more effective approach to debt collections—moving away from a pure quantity focus and toward a quality, customer-oriented collections strategy.

Building strong cross-functional collaboration is one of those ever true key tenets of management literature.

In the past I have addressed how improved collaboration can help drive better customer insights and help organizations make better use of CRM investments, not to mention elevate the role of the service and support organization.  I want to continue the dialogue here by focusing on another, critical cross-functional collaboration opportunity whose impact is often underestimated: collections.

While it may seem that collaboration with collections is a lower priority, managing the collections process more closely can actually result in a win-win-win—better revenues, greater efficiency, and a better customer experience.  In fact, companies that do not make partnering with collections a priority risk operational inefficiencies, increasing delinquent account volume, and mitigating collections success.  In today’s hopefully recovering economic climate, that can translate to big revenue. Read More »