This is the second in a two-part series on boosting customer loyalty in B2B service and support environments. Click here to reference part one.

In my last post, I discussed CCC’s findings on customer loyalty in the B2B service and support world.  Specifically, I highlighted the opportunity that B2B organizations have to promote end-user positive word of mouth (i.e., loyalty) by teaching their customers something new during the service interaction itself.  And I ended on a question:

What kind of insights should B2B customer support organizations look to deliver to end-users?

I’m back today to answer that question for you. Read More »

This is the first in a two-part series on boosting customer loyalty in B2B service and support environments.

Those of you who have followed CCC’s research over the past few years know that our point of view—backed up by a lot of quantitative and qualitative data—is that service organizations should focus not on delighting their customers, but on reducing the amount of effort those customers must put forth to get their issues resolved (if you haven’t seen our work on this, check out the article we published in HBR last summer). 

But while this is universally true and, we’d argue, the right goal for all service organizations to pursue, there’s an important nuance to the story if you primarily serve business customers in your service organization. 

Unlike the consumer world, B2B service organizations have the unique opportunity to drive positive loyalty through the service channel by teaching their customers something new during the service interaction itself.  In other words, not just resolving the customer’s issue in as low-effort a manner as possible, but having done so, also offering unique insights about how to leverage your products and services in new ways—ways that will help make end-users’ jobs easier.  Read More »

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 »

If you haven’t ordered a copy of the Corporate Executive Board’s Executive Guidance for 2011: Achieving Intelligent Growth, take my advice and do it now.  Since launching the order site for Executive Guidance, more than 6,500 copies of the book have been ordered by your peers and more than 1,000 executives have signed up for one of the upcoming Webinars in December.  Copies of the book are free, as are the Webinars. 

As you may know, our parent company, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), provides research and advisory services to several dozen corporate functions—from CFOs to General Counsel to CMOs, CIOs, heads of HR, etc.  Executive Guidance, a deliverable authored by our Chairman and CEO, Tom Monahan, is essentially our synthesized “point of view” for corporate leaders for the year.  For lack of a better description, it’s our elevator pitch to CEOs and their leadership teams—and it’s a good read. 

Our advice to managers for 2011 is couched in a framework we call “intelligent growth,” or the idea of “creating a long-term pattern of above-industry performance in both revenue growth and efficiency.”   Read More »

The other day, I was thumbing through an old copy of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence and was thinking about how the management lessons they discuss in this seminal book–for instance, stay close to the customer–are still just as relevant today as when the book was first published almost 30 years ago.  This book has served as a guide for business leaders the world over who seek to understand what makes truly exceptional organizations tick. 

At the same time, I started thinking about all that’s changed in the world during the three decades since this book hit shelves–the pervasiveness of technology, the extent to which the global economy is more interconnected, etc.  

What has changed for service leaders in the past 30 years?  According to ICMI, Rockwell installed the first ACD system 30 years ago, suggesting that call centers existed perhaps decades earlier than that (or there would have been no demand for ACD as a technology).  The call center was a massively disruptive innovation to the service industry for it marked the beginning of the end of live (face-to-face) service as the dominant means of doing business with companies. Read More »

Note: This posting is the blog Matt & Nick wrote for the Harvard Business Review this week, which is the first in a series of three and can be viewed by clicking here.

Next time you’re on the phone with a call center, listen carefully to what the rep says. Chances are you’ll hear your name several times, hear a tone of empathy, maybe an “I’m sorry.” It would be nice to think the rep really cares — but of course she’s probably just following a script. That can be a bad idea, we’ve found. In our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“, we explored how customer service drives loyalty, including the role of managing the emotional side of customer interactions. Here’s some further insight about that delicate dance.

Most companies still suffer from the checklist mentality when it comes to managing how their reps engage with customers. Use the standard greeting…check…say the customer’s name three times…check…show empathy…check…ask if you’ve fully resolved the issue…check, check, and check.

Most companies will tell you it’s all about consistency. But, let’s face it, consistency breeds robotic interactions which fail to result in a tailored, low-effort customer experience.

We’ve seen companies move away from this “one-size-fits-all” approach and creatively teach their reps to use simple word choice — and in some cases, approaches founded on behavioral economics —to radically shape how a customer perceives an interaction. Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review.  If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy.  You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer. 

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. 

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer. Read More »

I’ve talked to hundreds of customer service leaders around the world about their strategies and challenges.  One of the questions I’m often asked is about the big trends we see coming down the pike.

Before talking about where we’re going, I usually tell our members that they first need to think about where we’ve been. 

Without a doubt, the biggest single trend we’ve seen over the past five years has been the shift away from a rote focus on productivity to a much greater focus on the quality of the customer experience. 

Some suggest the “Great Recession” has prompted a return to productivity focus, but we think the rumors of quality’s demise are premature.  As a trend, it’s better to think of the shift toward quality as “global warming,” not simply a “warm summer.” Read More »