When looking for ideas to improve your service organization, where do you look to first? Is it the latest research from Harvard Business Review, a new directive from your senior leadership, or a recent blog post from Customer Service Buzz? (Pardon the shameless plug). What if we told you that there’s a source of ideas personalized specifically for you. Would you be surprised to hear that no one understands your service organization and your customer needs better than those in the frontlines: the reps.

Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) realized this untapped resource and created a rep-led process for gathering business ideas. From collecting leads to finally presenting proposals, ANZ’s four-step method for generating business proposals led to meaningful results in both service organization performance and staff engagement. In fact, after five initial iterations of this process, ANZ completed 10 policy improvements. Within six months of launch, frontline engagement increased by 11%.

In brief, here are some reasons why it worked:

1. Localized team meetings. Single, large meetings can be daunting and stifle rep voice or innovation. By creating a multi-step process involving more intimate team-level meetings, ANZ created the right conditions for reps to freely share their ideas.
2. Rep-owned and managed. Instead of a top-down approach of instituting change, this method gives frontline reps the reins to propose changes as they see fit. Such shift in responsibility helps foster rep creativity and results in impactful changes in the organization

Read More »

Customer interest in reducing energy consumption is higher than ever.

In fact, “80% of US households recently [invested] in some form of energy-related improvements for their home,” according to Stuart Sikes, President at international research firm Parks Associates.

Many are also interested in the potential cost savings of energy efficiency. Parks Associates research found that while “80% of customers don’t know the price they are paying for electricity, 62% strongly believe that saving energy and lowering their utility bills are desirable.”

So with national attention focused on the need to reduce energy consumption and budget-conscious consumers paying attention, what role can utilities’ service organizations play in engaging consumers in energy management? Read More »

Nearly all of my recent conversations and interactions of late have started with the same framing: The world has changed.

Admittedly, this is a relatively generic framing, but supplement it with data around rapidly increasing contact complexity, far more nuanced products and solutions, and complicated technology—not to mention customer expectations that now are dramatically heightened—and it quickly becomes apparent at how drastically different the service and support function of today is from that of even a year or two ago.

In fact, in some recent research, CCC highlights the function’s shift to what we call the “Quality 2.0 Era,” which is characterized by both complex issues and heightened customer expectations.  This is a long way from the “Productivity Era” of the late 1990s, early 2000s, when fast resolution of simple issues was sufficient.  As is it distant from the “Quality 1.0 Era” of the mid-2000s, where customers increasingly wanted successful resolution of more complicated issues.

Yet these changes have largely happened under the noses of most service and support organizations, many of which have not transformed their organizations to align to the changes in issue complexity and customer expectations.  In reality, many organizations have been caught offguard by how quickly customer demands and expectations changed.

Which begs the question: What does the next era of service and support hold?  And how should we prepare for it?

Read More »

Customer Service News

• High school offers customer support curriculum as elective to students [1to1Media – requires free registration to read]
• New Facebook loyalty program changing the face of customer rewards [AllFacebook]
• Meanwhile, loyalty app Viggle aims to do the same with TV viewers [CRM Daily]
• Will outsourced call center jobs be moving back to the US in greater numbers?  [The Washington Post]
• Forrester reveals the Top 15 Trends for Customer Service in 2012 [Forrester]
• Speaking of which, what are your peers’ customer service priorities for 2012? [MyCustomer]

This is the fourth in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one, two and three here.

The New Year is well on its way (almost February already??) and chances are you have some new goals you want to achieve in your organization. As nice as it would be to simply make a checklist, hold a meeting, and then enjoy the results, experience and data show that to really see changes, you need to engage your staff in coaching. Like the personal trainer you may have hired to achieve some other New Year resolutions, we’re here to give some advice.

As we’ve previously written, coaching is not a science but an art. There’s not one simple formula for guaranteed success, but that being said, there are absolutely some steps that all companies should take:

1. Find the right coaches. When screening for coaches, organizations should consider more than just prior rep performance or general leadership skills. Great players don’t always make the best coaches, so beef up your talent search with some important criteria. For instance, our research finds that almost a third of the current coach pool falls into the “reluctant” category – meaning they don’t want to develop others as their core role—so coaching immersion programs and built-in coaching requirements help identify staff who will be truly successful as future coaches. Read More »

If you own a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer (okay, that should cover just about everybody), then you’re likely familiar with the slick video-recording capabilities that now come standard on these gadgets. And if you’re like me, you’ve been wowed at the ability of face-to-face video conferencing to bridge physical limitations, seemingly bringing people much closer together, even if only in a ‘virtual’ sense.

With technology enabling the world to better capture, store, and share video content, we’ve certainly seen a rise in the number of organizations wondering how they can use video to serve their customers—we’ve even blogged previously about the idea of using self-service ‘how-to’ videos and customer-generated content.

Indeed, the recent and rapid rise of services like Apple’s FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and Skype naturally leads us to think about the potential for service organizations to leverage this technology, and while it’s certainly too early to say for sure, here’s my take on the future of video calling for service:

Employee-to-Employee
Companies looking to at least experiment with the benefits (and limitations) of video calling are likely to first pilot the service internally, using their employees to prove (or disprove) the value in offering video calling to customers. This pilot phase needn’t be restricted to just the call center, though; in fact, the biggest benefits may be found in enabling better communication and collaboration between service and other areas of the organization.  For example, we have heard from a few financial services organizations considering video capabilities between branch employees and call center staff.  In addition, video conferencing often comes up in the context of coaching and engaging with remote reps. Read More »

Just about a year and a half ago, we shared the Customer Effort concept through the publication of our article entitled, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” in the Harvard Business Review.

Have you ever been browsing the Internet for self-service answers or awaiting an e-mail response from customer support, when instead you decide to turn to your social media chat platform of choice (e.g., Facebook, Google Chat, AOL Instant Messenger) to find a real-time answer from (who else)—your online friends! With the technology’s popularity expected to grow to 1.7 billion users by 2013, companies too are exploring (and, in many cases, already trying out) web chat as a customer support channel to save on phone and e-mail costs while capitalizing on the customers’ growing comfort with online chat in general.

And while chat can be a great tool to interact with friends, does it truly fulfill its promise of cost-savings and improved online customer experience as a service and support channel? Read More »

Will 2012 be the year when Marketing and Customer Service come together to deliver consistent customer experience on social media [Social Customer]

How channel switching is part of Thomas Cook’s multi-channel strategy [Travolution]

Food delivery company Seamless finds Twitter success through a dedicated team and quick responses to customer queries [Business Insider]

Successful customer interactions hinge on both the message and the medium, indicates Convergys 2011 U.S. Customer Scorecard Research [CSM]

Optus launches dedicated online customer support forum to address customer issues and foster discussion amongst customers [Delimiter]

How online retailer Live Out There used Facebook to communicate with customers during Web site downtime [Yahoo News]

In the context of online self-service, companies will often tell us “our customers like to do research online, but when they actually decide to fix their problem/transfer funds/purchase a product, they prefer to call.”  The big question in our minds, however, is this:

How do you KNOW that customers PRERER to call you?

The fact that customers still call (indeed, even that they call after having visited the website) should not be seen as proof that the live phone is the preferred channel.  In all likelihood, the reason why many of your customers still call is because your website has failed them in some way.

The key, then, to understanding how customers prefer to interact with your company—online or in another channel—is to ask the customer directly rather than making assumptions based on customer behavior.  This sounds like an in-depth survey process (and certainly it could be), but there are shortcut ways that companies are unearthing channel switching root cause drivers in a low-cost way.

Specifically, Fidelity Investments discovered a low-tech, customer-friendly method to capture customers’ reasons for abandoning Web self-service for live channels.  They use inbound calls as opportunities to conduct two-question surveys to gather in-the-moment customer feedback about the company’s online self-service and customers’ reasons for switching to the phone.

In addition, Fidelity is very careful about phrasing the questions so that the survey does not come across as an attempt to push self-service but rather a learning exercise.  We believe this is a big part of the strategy’s success—customers are not made to feel as though the company doesn’t want them to call.  Instead, the company simply wants to know more about what customers want from them.

CCC members, learn more about Fidelity’s two-question framework in a new summary here.

Related CCC Resources:

1. Improving Web Self-Service with Customer Voice (Event Replay)
2. Full Case Study: Fidelity’s Channel-Switching VOC
3. Diagnosing Online Failures (Study Chapter)