Customer Service Buzz

It’s a focus for every company: How to prevent customer churn?

Following the philosophy that customers are easier to retain than they are to convert, over the past decade, companies have created escalation “saves” desks manned by staff empowered to do almost anything (read: offer discounts, refunds, or other financial incentives) to retain a customer once the customer says the magic words, “I’m leaving your company.”

The only catch is the cost to run these “saves” operations.  Not to mention the looming question whether such moves actually drive long-term, quality relationships with customers (or merely set precedent for customers to argue for major discounts year after year).

So how to save customers without having to offer sweet monetary incentives?  Certainly many companies have built comprehensive, predictive models to identify potential customer churn.  Such models of course can be helpful, but these models are resource intensive, and many organizations fall short in how they execute on the intelligence—they’re often too late.

In fact, it’s not just about modeling customer proclivity for disloyalty but proactively reaching out to customers before they actually become disloyal.

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In our ROI-driven world, apparently museums are the latest organizations to assess the value they provide to visitors.  Pressed by increasingly frugal donors to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments, museum staff are trailing art lovers through exhibits, observing them enjoy paintings.

While perhaps bizarre to some, or even a bit big brother-ish, the truth is that the service and support world can actually learn a thing or two from these art museums, particularly as relates to self-service channels. 

What these museums are examining is time spend—and using it a proxy for the quality of the visitor experience.  Too little time in a gallery (less than one minute, specifically) means a visitor is just rushing through and not absorbing much.  Several minutes could be a sign that the visitor is really engaging with the art.  Or it could indicate visitor confusion with unwieldy art descriptions.

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Review any service or support strategic plan from the past five years, and you’ll likely see the same priority repeat from year to year: Issue resolution.

No doubt about it, companies know issue resolution is important—CCC estimates that improving issue resolution can save millions of dollars each year and mitigate customer disloyalty by at least 219%.  But recent conversations with several companies suggest that when it comes to identifying first contact resolution (FCR) improvement opportunities, many companies are headed down the wrong path.

This is not due to poor data quality or improper data analysis; rather, many companies are merely scratching the surface when drilling into their FCR data, which is causing insufficient and even incorrect findings.  In fact, what typically comes to light as the primary obstacle to issue resolution is a laundry list of process and policy barriers. Read More »

Niche branding and segmentation—differentiating customers based on distinctive characteristics—are, of course, the bread and butter of the marketing world.  But we’re increasingly seeing a greater focus on this in the service and support world as well.

Segmentation isn’t a new concept for many service and support organizations.  In fact, many organizations use a segmentation structure that often comes directly from the sales and marketing side of the company.  But in an environment where many companies are looking to service and support as a “competitive differentiator,” companies are rethinking their strategies, and in many cases, seeking to expand them.

The problem is that many companies are going about this typically based on visible customer characteristics or behaviors: like where the customer resides or how much the customer spends.

Such segmentation strategies can be helpful for other parts of the business, but they offer limited insight into where the best service and support opportunities lie.  Indeed, using a segmentation strategy based solely on visible customer characteristics can lead companies to misplace service investments specifically.

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Pick up any business publication and you can’t miss the numerous articles on mission statements.  Books on the topic abound, consultants offer services—the economic downturn seems to have left many organizations soul searching, questioning their purpose, focus, and value.

Service and support organizations are not immune from this, and we’ve heard several companies thinking anew about customer bills of rights and service commitments.

CCC members recently debated the value of even creating a service commitment in the CCC Customer Experience Forum, and we see two camps emerge:

1. Those who are in favor of explicitly publishing high standards and expectations for both customers and staff.

2. Those who prefer action to statements—living the right philosophy, not spending time mincing words.

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Ask any organization how to achieve customer centricity, and cost figures immediately come to mind.  Dedicated teams, comprehensive surveys, high-end analytics systems—it’s an expensive proposition.

A company recently asked what it means to be more customer centric, and the thought exercise resulted the company vowing to take a “back to basics” approach.  In fact, organizations with large and small purse strings alike should take the basics to heart before extensive investment.

So what exactly do we mean by “back to basics”?  There are many considerations, but among the most powerful: Simply ask the customer.

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It’s an interesting conundrum: Give staff time and focus to cultivate relationships and they still revert to their old transactional behavior.

What gives?

Recent conversations with B2B companies suggest that despite dedicated, top-tier account teams and lengthy training workshops on relationship building, companies still don’t see the quality of customer relationships improving.

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At a dinner party recently, a friend who is a high school English teacher lamented that his students often google answers to their English homework rather than take the time to read.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
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They say that strong communication is the key to any healthy relationship.  The principle holds true, of course, for both home and work.

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And while the role of the service and support organization is primarily to be a communicator—and in fact many organizations we work with have upskilled staff on all sorts of tactics for improved interpersonal communication with customers—we’re apparently doing a poor job when it comes to communicating with cross-functional colleagues, particularly as it relates to cascading voice of the customer data.

Here are the facts from this CCC  research on sharing Voice of the Customer (VOC) with internal business partners: Read More »

Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and Walgreens are all limiting customer choice in the grocery and drug store aisle.  Why aren’t their customer service and support organizations following suit?

In line with the economic downturn, many retailers and consumer product good firms have realized that limiting customer choice can actually help drive purchase decisions.

The “Paradox of Choice” movement has evangelized this idea.  But it seems the message hasn’t trickled down to service and support…yet.

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