CCC’s Annual Operational Benchmarking Survey is one of the staples of our membership.  Many organizations participate year-over-year to better understand where their performance stack up to their industry peers.  Having a consistently measured set of benchmarks is the best way to obtain an accurate depiction of your performance.  Opening up again in January 2012, this survey will help you answer the most pressing questions you have on the three main dimensions tracked by typical service organizations: Read More »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »

Customer Service News

• Check out these predictions for the customer experience in 2012 (and read ours too!) [Customer Think]
• New study tests customer expectations for social media service [All Facebook]
• Speaking of social media, here are the Top Ten Lessons we learned in 2011 [Forbes]
• And finally, new daily deal company Womply takes customer loyalty ‘to the cloud’ [Fast Company]

If you’ve walked into any mall around the holiday season, you know that there’s nothing worse than crowded stores and long lines. Now, the UK fashion retailer Oasis is offering shoppers a more convenient, streamlined shopping experience with tablet technology.

In its flagship store, shop assistants are armed with iPads to help customers with all product inquiries from anywhere in the stores. In addition, shoppers can bypass the long cash register lines, and simply make their purchases directly from the iPads for home delivery. This service, only introduced a week ago, has made up 20% of all sales in that time. As a result, shoppers are able to avoid much of the stress that come with in-store shopping.

In the customer service world, we’re unfortunately no strangers to long queues. Peak times and holiday seasons indicate spikes in call volume and demand, and while call center reps can do much to enhance the customer experience, customer effort can begin much before they are even connected. So, what are some creative ways for organizations to manage lengthy queues and mitigate the ensuing customer effort?

Read More »

It’s been a great 2011 at CCC as we teamed up with our members to help them address a year’s worth of challenges. We’ve already looked forward and shared our predictions for what 2012 will hold for service organizations, so here is a look back at our best research published in the past year. We’re hoping this list will help you refocus your priorities for the New Year and aid in your planning for a successful 2012!

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance—when we heard from our members that rep performance was stalling despite continued investments in talent, we decided to take a closer look at what drives performance in the service organization today. What did we find? While traditional skill sets are still important, most reps were missing a crucial piece of the rep performance puzzle—one that has more than twice the impact on performance as any other factor. We call this set of skills and behaviors the Control Quotient (CQ), which quantifies a rep’s ability to exercise ownership over their day-to-day work, as well as to remain in control over themselves in stressful situations. In today’s quality-driven world, CQ is the number one lever that companies can pull to boost performance in their frontline. Read More »

Note: this is the second post in a three-part blog series on business-to-consumer segmentation. In this post, we will address the importance of setting goals for segmentation. Read the previous post on common B2C segmentation schemes and stay tuned to learn how to resource against segment needs.

Effective customer segmentation helps B2C companies achieve a number of service goals, such as:

• Increase revenues by driving customer retention
• Improve the customer experience
• Reduce costs by reducing call volume and/or callbacks
• Strengthen customer relationships
• Identify and maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

Given all these potential benefits, it might be tempting to jump right into a segmentation scheme.  Sounds like it could only help an organization, right?

Not so fast.

Our latest research on B2C segmentation finds that many companies dive into segmentation without first defining the goal of their efforts. As a result, many fail to see the ROI of their programs – or worse, they segment customers incorrectly (and actually harm the customer experience) or increase their own costs to serve. Read More »

A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review titled, “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” was unfortunately very relatable.  The core of the article explored how business conversations have evolved into bits of nonsense (e.g., “synergy”, ”value-add”) that make understanding each other much more of a challenge than anything else.  For example, we all fall victim to the excessive use of acronyms from time to time.  And while I find myself a culprit in using a lot of acronyms, I could relate to something else in the piece as well, as its description ties perfectly to research we’ve produced here at CCC:

Another term that has lost its meaning is ‘Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.’ …Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a [hotel] a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, ‘Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.’  The best way to start would be to take down that sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do…”

Read More »

Customers are increasingly likely to share positive service experiences, according to survey [MarketWatch]

But social media is taking customer conversations behind closed doors [PCWorld]

Credit unions beat big banks in customer service ratings [Fierce Finance]

Stores offer customer free shipping, but is it always good for customer service? [The Street]

Rep scorecards.   Shortly after the creation of the service organization came the creation of the rep scorecard, and with good reason, too.  In an effort to boost frontline performance service executives measure and report everything from calls answered to quality scores to sales performance.  But how about issue resolution?  Do you report that on your reps’ scorecards, and more importantly, should you?  That’s the question my colleague and I aimed to answer when we renewed our friendly debate. 

Let it begin:

Read More »

When you rub elbows with customer service execs from 400 different companies every day you hear a lot of issues and challenges that group together into common themes.  Some of the most common:

• How can we reduce our costs, without damaging the customer experience?
• Is there a way to create a consistent customer experience across multiple channels?
• What’s the best way to create customer loyalty?

There are a few different ways to word these questions — i.e, loyalty, satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth. However, there’s one group of questions that inevitably start with the same exact words:

How can we get our employees…

(to create a better service experience?) (become more engaged?) (be more efficient?) (go the extra mile for customers?)

Of all those words, the one that jumps out is “get.” How can we GET our employees…?

Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing a lot of work this past year in the areas of human behavioral reinforcement and employee psychology, and what I’ve been learning is that…

…you…can’t. You (as a leader) can’t GET anyone to do anything that they don’t want to do. Read More »