This is the third 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 and two.

The ideal New Year’s resolution is meant to improve upon or fix a problem that existed for you the previous year.  On the surface, it can be easy to see what your organization needs to resolve to do, but there are often deeper issues at play.  The key is to identify and fix the root causes of your problems, rather than focusing on the outward symptoms of them.  The tools we’ve designed the perfect resource for jump-starting your year and finding targeted areas of improvement where your organization needs it most.  Here’s a short list of some of CCC’s top audit tools and assessments: Read More »

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 »

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…”

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If you’re the typical office worker, then you’re probably in the office right now and day-dreaming of the impending holiday season.  It’s difficult to not get restless over the idea of spending time out of the office to be with close friends and family.  To fill your pre-holiday doldrums, we’ve pulled together a list of our most popular diversionary blogs for your entertainment.  Enjoy! Read More »

One of the most common staffing questions we field here at CCC is whether organizations should operate their reps as generalists (can handle all but the most complex call types) or as specialists (handle only a few call types and are single-skilled).  This is clearly a topic of major interest, and rightfully so, because the model you choose has significant implications across the entire service organization.  There are many variables to consider when weighing these two options, so in an effort to bring the debate to the forefront of the membership, I’ve compiled a list of pros and cons for each model. Read More »

A colleague of mine recently moved to a different group within our company; so, as per tradition, he set out to write a goodbye e-mail to his local co-workers.  Instead of writing a goodbye e-mail, though, he decided to create a word cloud comprised of all of the goodbye e-mails he had archived from his past seven years at the company.  The result was a thorough display of the most common words contained within them.  By doing this, he was able to portray the prototypical experience people have when they reflect on their time with the firm.

While the idea of a word cloud is simple, it’s ingenious in its application.  Although tag clouds are frequently used (this site is an example), my colleague’s practical use of the idea really piqued my interested.  My next move was, of course, to figure out how to apply this idea to the service world.  Being a bit of a survey guru, the best idea I had was to analyze customer verbatim from the many customer surveys CCC has conducted over the years.

One of CCC’s more recent customer surveys has an open-ended question that I think would be helpful for all organizations to ask their customers: “In two sentences or less, please provide a bit more detail as to why you left the Web site.”  The answers to this question are an integral part of running a successful service organization, given the impact of channel-switching on loyalty and the huge cost benefits of Web self-service.  So without further ado, here is a word cloud composed of tens of thousands of customer responses to this one question: Read More »

When we released our Annual Operational Benchmarking Results last year, I wrote about trends we’ve seen over the past five years across our entire data set.  This year, rather than look at longitudinal differences, I’d like to feature some differences I noticed across different data segments.  Part of my motivation for doing this is to highlight the added functionality we have in this year’s version of our benchmarking tool, which now allows you to combine benchmarking categories to find the most applicable benchmarks. Read More »

Poor first contact resolution and customer channel switching are two significant drivers of customer effort, so pinpointing ways to improve upon these service failures should be on the to-do list for each contact channel you offer.  In this new four-part series, CCC will release key data points we discovered in our customer surveys in recent years for each of the following core channels: IVR, Web self-service, e-mail, and Web chat.

The focus of the first installment of this series is the IVR channel.  Here’s a sample “by the numbers” look at how customers describe their IVR experience: Read More »

CCC conducted a frontline staff skills survey as part of our major research initiative for this year.  As you can imagine, not every interesting data point makes its way into the final product.  Here’s a look at what was left on the “cutting room floor” in our third of three posts in this series (view posts one and two).

In reviewing PwC’s 11^th Annual Global CEO Survey, we at CCC observed that 30% of CEOs are focusing on “better penetration of existing markets,” above all other business growth opportunities.  Our key takeaway from that data point is that if this is what our CEOs care about, shouldn’t we in the service organization care about it as much as they do, if not more?  To that end, CCC has dedicated a lot of research to the topic of customer loyalty to specifically identify what drives it from a service organization perspective.

The reason I wanted to highlight this information in this post is because our latest staff survey data shows how frequently service organization leaders speak to their staff about customer loyalty today.  Surprisingly, loyalty it’s not the most frequently cited topic; rather customer satisfaction appears to be a pervasive force. Read More »

We’ve shown that lowering the amount of effort a customer has to endure to resolve their issue is the key to increasing their loyalty.  There are  many different ways to create a lower effort experience for your customers, but one that I believe will be increasingly important as contact channels like Web self-service continue to develop (and remain the preferred channel of customers) is the elimination of channel-switching.  When customers first visit your Web site, but ultimately have to call in to resolve their issue, their level of effort is dramatically increased.  Understanding how customers use your Web site is the first step in starting to do fixing this problem, but companies often fail to use the correct measurements to truly know the drivers of channel-switching, such as:

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