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?

A few hypotheses, informed by me and colleagues on the CCC research and advisory teams:

I. Service and support increasingly becomes a learning/teaching function.

As companies continue to work to make it easier to self-serve on simple issues, and the number of live or assisted contacts decreases, companies will increasingly look to help customers optimize their use and knowledge of products and services.  This could happen either on a 1:1 level or even 1:many level and could entail teaching about functionality and integration.

This is not to say that the service and support function will go away entirely, but it will have an altered mission.  This trend has immediate application to the business-to-business world but you could also imagine consumer customers engaging to learn more about products and services as well.  Self-service and multi-channel tools would be very relevant here.

II. Service and support will create greater focus on enabling customers to solve problems as opposed to the company always providing the answer.

In a world where issues are rapidly becoming even more complex, customer knowledge can actually outpace that of organizations, which means service and support cannot always give customers an answer (or the right one).  Furthermore, social media has in large part led to customers enjoying and desiring to connect directly with each other.

Social media, networking, and collective problem solving could well become not just another channel or nice to have, but really a philosophy and focus for the organization—and the olden days of staff solving problems will really give way to communities solving each other’s problems.  We’ve seen similar changes happen at technical support organizations where companies enable customers, and it’s quite probable that this could transcend to the service world as well.

III. Service and support becomes a very narrowly focused organization.

Too often today service and support ends up taking on one too many new responsibilities—generating revenue, differentiating the customer experience, collecting and analyzing voice of the customer—with the organization’s mission constantly expanding and often leading to “scope creep” and potentially hindering organizational performance.

As organizations gradually learn the “jack of all trades is the master of none” philosophy, there is a good possibility that the organization will shed some of its excess responsibilities, or at least start to prioritize its efforts (something that remarkably few organizations do).  My hunch is that revenue generation (not just cross- and up-sell, but also lead generation and qualification) and/or process improvement (largely through voice of the customer) will become the top priority.

What is your prediction about the next era of service and support?  Where are customers and the service and support function headed?

To help you prepare for the year ahead, CCC’s research and advisory team is putting its heads together to give you some additional perspective on areas of opportunity we see across a variety of companies—fresh ideas on how to enhance the customer experience and improve operational performance.

The intent here is not to increase your workload, of course, but to give you additional perspective on continuing to improve your service and support operations in the year ahead.

So let me start here with the recommendation of a relatively simple tweak: Ensure that all staff know how to navigate your company’s website.

It is a basic idea, but conversations with numerous service and support organizations reveal that most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.

And this is becoming an acute problem as forecasts indicate that self-service increasingly is a preferred channel of resolution (CCC research historically has found that the preference for self-service is equal to live service, if not higher).  And we’re continuing to work on new research on customer expectations for self-service, in which I would be highly surprised to find the trends reversing.

This change among customers—but lack of change among service and support organizations—inevitably leads to a well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful customer interaction along the following:

Frontline Staff: “After next week you’ll be able to check your account online to make sure that the changes have been updated.”

Customer: “OK.  Thanks for the tip.  And where do I go online to find that?”

Frontline Staff: “You’ll need to log in and you’ll find it on your account page.”

Customer: “I’m looking at your web page now and don’t see that option.”

Frontline Staff: “Unfortunately I’m unable to pull the web page up, so I can’t give you any more information right now.”

Customer: “OK….  I guess I’ll just call back if I can’t find the information next week….”

So what can be done to avoid this all-too-common situation?  A few ideas, arranged from least investment required to most:

1. Ask supervisors to do a coaching session on website navigation—Put out a memo to supervisors and coaches and ask them to spend some time orienting frontline staff to your company’s website, particularly the service and support functionalities.  A general introduction can be helpful, but also navigate the site based on a few issues customers commonly call about.  At a minimum, supervisors should do this once a quarter either in team or 1:1 meetings.

2. Tweak new hire training to focus on navigation—An entirely new curriculum isn’t necessary, but even creating a short module orienting new hires (and tenured staff, too) to the website, basic navigation, and important functionality to know about is a good start.  Supervisors and coaches can supplement this on an ongoing basis.

3. Integrate self-service steps into the knowledge base—It is helpful to have training and coaching on discrete website functionalities, but to truly ensure frontline staff can effectively advise customers on what to do on the web, knowledge bases should incorporate this information.  CCC members, learn more about effective knowledge management design principles here.

4. If staff do not have access to the external Internet, at a minimum grant access to your organization’s website—All sorts of historical reasons exist why some frontline staff have no access to the Internet (if you missed it, CCC’s latest research explains why this isn’t such a wise idea from an employee performance and engagement perspective).  Given the trend toward more customers going online and the large number of customers calling because they can’t find information on the web, this would be a good issue to put on the agenda for your next leadership meeting.

In the coming weeks, stay tuned for additional 2012 Resolutions to consider from colleague Rick DeLisi on why using the term “THE CUSTOMER” is not a good idea, and from Brad Fager and Judy Wang as well.

Happy New Year.

As it turns out, the prophecy has somewhat come true.

In this case, though, it’s not people setting up their own DIY call centers, but instead service and support organizations increasingly catering to DIYers.

In an interesting recent Wall Street Journal article, vacuum cleaner, lawn mower, and snow blower companies all report that they have seen an uptick in call volume from customers who increasingly are self-troubleshooting but getting stuck mid-way and calling for help.

Apparently this is yet another indication that cash-strapped and budget-minded customers are trying to get a little more mileage out of their current products instead of running to an expensive repair shop or purchasing new products.

As a result of this influx of DIY-related call volume, a number of companies have indicated that they are hiring additional staff to support this demand.

Here are a few ideas to minimize the need for additional staffing and to help to DIYers help themselves further.

1. Publish help videos on YouTube. Companies such as Dell have some very helpful troubleshooting videos—nay, a troubleshooting channel—which can make technical support much easier in certain circumstances.  Putting videos on YouTube in addition to a company Web site increases the likely that a customer will come across the information when searching for a solution using a search engine.

2. Make it easy to understand warranty coverage.  This admittedly can require some technology investment if you need to build out in self-service channels.  Even if your site doesn’t allow customers to log in and find out their specific coverage, it should be readily apparent on the Web what is and isn’t covered under particular warranty policies and what the timeframe is for the warranties.

3. Path customers to the right place on the Web to find the technical support. CCC has a lot of research on the importance of guiding customers to the correct place for troubleshooting in self-service channels, including an interesting idea from a high tech company on designing the support page to guide particular customer segments.  We’re continuing to conduct new research on guided customer experiences, so if you’re interested in learning more about this, please let us know.

Senior executives in the service and support organization must be heeding the messages from these articles, as we are seeing renewed interest in our research and benchmarking related to organizational design.

This is particularly true for B2B support organizations that we work with, many of which are now reassessing the way their function has operated and organized for years.

A number of reasons for the renewed interest exist, but the most frequently verbalized is this: Faced with the realization that the days of basic order entry by humans are nearing a close as more and more customers prefer to self-serve and operating budgets shrink, more B2B organizations are seeking to innovate and optimize the service and order management function.

Interesting to note, however is that B2B organizations aren’t merely considering role and title changes, but in some cases actually shaking up the entire order management function and reorganizing to align differently to the business.

Here’s a look at some of the most interesting trends we are seeing today:

1. Creating business excellence centers—This is primarily occurring in organizations that seek to create greater collaboration between service and sales, going so far as to collocate service and sales staff in a single location.  Typically these business excellence centers are central hubs in a single region and are organized by product, industry, customer, or other major segmentation scheme.  The benefit of this model is both the savings generated by consolidating a service organization footprint but primarily the collaboration and account information sharing that is facilitated.

2. Redefinition of staff roles—Many B2B organizations are going through role and skill clarifying exercises, meaning that companies are taking a second look at the skills staff need to effectively serve in their roles.  Organizations are not firing staff per se, but they are clearly laying out precisely what skills staff need to be effective in their roles, in many cases creating competencies for the benefit of staff and managers.  Interviewing staff to place them in the right role has become a focus, as is increasing training to upskill staff appropriately.

Of course time will tell how successful these long-term strategies are.  But those organizations in the middle of the journey report positive preliminary indicators.

Interested to learn more from companies in the process of reorganizing—where else are you focused today?

CCC Related Resources:

Field Support Organizational Structures

B2B Key Account Rep Activity Audit

Deepening the Customer Relationship (B2B)

Boosting Self-Service “Stickiness”

Companies like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte all have used gaming technology to better engage employees in training and data entry and make the tasks seem less tedious and more resonant.

What they have found is that winning virtual badges (indicating an advance to the next level) and interacting in entertaining landscapes and backgrounds (unsurprisingly) actually is far more engaging (for millennials and boomers) than sitting in a classroom for hours on end listening to someone.  And in some studies, videogames even yield better knowledge retention (some research finds that if learning is not put into action within 2 weeks, staff lose that knowledge).

Companies are both hiring external vendors and building new games internally, and the industry expectation is that work-related videogames will become far more prevalent over the next couple of years.

As companies make this transition, a couple of things to consider:

• Foster only a healthy dose of competition: A risk of “gamification” is that the competition can get out of hand.  Ultimately both training and maintaining a supportive team environment are critical to driving frontline staff performance.
• Don’t go overboard with the “gamification:” Some traditional classroom training (e.g., new hire training) is still valuable, as is ongoing one-on-one coaching.  While gaming is more scalable, particularly for global organizations, and can be helpful for certain topics, it is important to use a variety of development techniques.

For those companies who have created work-related videogames, what has the focus of the games been?  And what have you seen in terms of the impact on your staff?

CCC Related Resources:

CCC Research: Identify the Right Opportunities for Training

CCC Research: Practice World-Class Coaching

Peer Networking: CCC Talent Management Forum

In a quest for more accurate medical and insurance diagnoses, the U.S. is in the process of expanding its number of medical billing codes from 18,000 to 140,000.

(Read about some of the hilarious new codes here, including “bitten by squirrel, initial encounter,” “burn due to water skis on fire, subsequent encounter,” and “bizarre personal appearance.”)

Of course the code change is well intended—it is meant to drive improved public health research—but the execution will surely be a nightmare, as any service and support executive knows.

In fact, the headache (not to mention increased cost due to additional administrative headcount) that the medical community will soon face is well known to service and support executives.  Challenges with “call categorization” (i.e., asking frontline staff to document the reason code for a customer conversation) have plagued the function for years.

Despite numerous efforts, service and support organizations simply have found that accurate reason codes are hard to come by—staff simply are unwilling to sift through pages of codes to find the perfect match to the customer issue.

Indeed, call categorization data accuracy has become so poor, that many organizations have drastically reduced the number of reason codes, favoring high level accuracy.  What these organizations have realized is that having a code for every possible call type does not really drive value for the business.  Instead, focusing on accuracy of tracking broader issues and trends is much more effective and actionable.

The decision to adapt World Health Organization standards has already been made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but as the new billing codes are rolled out, healthcare organizations (and service and support organizations still struggling with accuracy) should heed two lessons learned from service and support:

1. Don’t establish reason code quotas—It may seem counterintuitive, but implementing quotas and attaching financial incentives to these can actually yield poor quality data as staff rush to meet quotas, favoring quantity over quality.

2. Make it easy for staff to find reason codes—With the introduction of 140,000 billing codes, organizations must create intuitive interfaces that mirror how staff think about diagnosing patients.  Without an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, staff are most likely to select the same top issues.

CCC Members, CCC has additional research on optimizing call categorization, including how a U.S. telecommunications company implemented a two-pronged call categorization approach to identify important customer issues, conduct root-cause analysis to better understand customer problems, and reduce spending on call categorization.

Also find peer perspectives on call categorization here.

Now there are many ways to optimize issue resolution and case closure, something CCC has researched extensively: measuring resolution more effectively, improving the knowledge base, and even revising staff incentives, among other strategies.  Admittedly, though, all of these are difficult to change and require investment to optimize.

But we recently surfaced an opportunity we believe most companies have overlooked.  The idea comes from a U.S. operations of a global manufacturing conglomerate, which recently decreased time to resolution 33% and improved issue resolution 26% over one month.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

What the company realized is that it’s not that staff aren’t motivated to resolve issues, it’s that they don’t always know how to resolve issues.  And even with an effective knowledge base, sometimes it’s hard for staff to know where to start.

Its solution? Regularly gather frontline staff together to collaborate and identify solutions to close unresolved issues, eliminating backlog and defining best practices for emerging issues.  CCC Members, learn more here.

Now the key differentiator here is not that the idea is so new—many companies establish periodic “war rooms” to gather the best minds and resolve issues—but it’s really the execution of the idea.

In fact, the company has discovered a couple of smart principles that really keep staff focused on issue resolution and speed to resolution, something incentives and better knowledge bases alone could never do:

• The sessions focus on recent trends—Leadership selects the topics for discussion based on issues with high rates of non-resolution.  The intent here is to identify emerging topics where there is a demand for answers and be able to immediately apply those answers.
• Peer subject matter experts, not leadership, facilitate the sessions—The limitation of leadership is that it typically does not have the expertise to resolve complex customer issues.  Instead, subject matter experts can create productive dialogue and promote best practice sharing.

And of course the key is that once the sessions end, staff have better information to resolve the outstanding issues, and the new information is fed back to the knowledge base.

The company’s finding is consistent with CCC’s latest research indicating that developing strong peer support networks is actually a primary driver of frontline performance.  CCC Members, to learn more, please click here to read our latest research on peer support.

I’ve shared this idea with many B2B companies, and I can tell you that the interest is substantial.  In fact, we know of several organizations that are working to determine how to pilot this.  This is just one more example of how a couple of tweaks to an established concept can make results go from good to great.

What other simple ideas has your company implemented to improve issue resolution scores?

CCC Related Resources:

• Rep-Led Issue Resolution Collaboration Sessions
• Improving Issue Resolution Performance
• Breaking the Issue Resolution Barrier
• CCC Issue Resolution Measurement Toolkit
• Developing Strong Staff Peer Support Networks

Certainly performance is adequate, if not quite decent.  But faced with mandates to decrease service and support costs while at the same time improve the customer experience, B2B service and support organizations are increasingly searching for the next opportunity to drive progress.

Which is why CCC’s latest research on frontline performance, The Next Frontier of Rep Performance, has resonated so well with B2B organizations, order management and technical support alike.

As some background, we find that the key to high performance in service and support organizations today is not basic communication skills, emotional intelligence, or even technical savvy.

Instead, the biggest opportunity is what CCC calls “control quotient,” or “CQ,” or the degree to which staff can take ownership over their role and handle a series of stressful and complex conversations and still remain resilient for the next interaction.

And the key to cultivating CQ in a B2B environment is by creating a strong workplace environment that trusts staff to make decisions and creates strong peer support networks.

(CCC members, if you have not yet seen the new research, we have several upcoming live meetings and Webinars on the topic.)

CCC hosted two B2B-specific meetings in June and July, and we had some very rich conversation about the next steps to drive performance, and specifically, what B2B staff need to be effective moving forward.  For those who missed on the conversation, I want to summarize some of the top-line thoughts from your B2B peers.

1. The relevance and effectiveness of strong peer support is not to be underestimated.  As B2B companies grow their global footprints, organizations increasingly are recognizing the significant opportunity to connect peers for the dual benefit of sharing knowledge across teams and silos and engaging staff.  Increased product and issue complexity combined with heightened customer expectations have really made the role of frontline staff more stressful and difficult, and there is recognition that staff can benefit greatly from connecting with peers to discuss and think creatively about issues.

One of the topics of greatest interest relates to leveraging internal social networking, or enabling staff to establish profile pages with areas of interest and expertise, and connecting staff based on question or issue types.  Many out-of-the-box social media platforms exist, making this a relatively simple idea to initiate.  Those companies who have already done so are finding this to be very effective.

2. The recognition that we are in a new era of service and support.  B2B service and support organizations are increasingly recognizing that consumer experiences are largely influencing B2B customer expectations.  This means that the experience of placing orders on Amazon.com Inc. and contacting Apple Inc. for troubleshooting guidance has led business customers to expect order fulfillment and technical troubleshooting to be just as simple and straightforward.  These heightened demands for tailored and personalized service are placing additional strain on companies that have historically had strong technical skills, but not necessarily the strongest relationship- and rapport-building skills.

3. The realization that many organizations are stifling performance by micromanaging staff.  Even though many B2B organizations have highly skilled and tenured staff, the prevailing management technique is to closely monitor—nay micromanage—productivity and quality.  For most organizations this micromanagement is of course unintentional, but metrics that mandate time spend and prescribe how to engage the customer often lead to micromanagement.

We heard several companies vow to examine their average handle time metrics and how they report the scores to staff to ensure that staff are truly owning the conversations with customers.  Others are continuing to revamp their quality assurance processes to ensure staff can creatively handle contacts while still remaining in compliance with quality standards.

What else would you add to the discussion?  Are you surprised by the applicability of these themes to the B2B world?

But given limited investment resources, the question remains which channels should be prioritized.  Some colleagues recently discussed the value of social media as a channel, but here we want to discuss e-mail and chat specifically.  In question: If you had to choose just one, is e-mail or chat the better investment?

Below my colleague, Matt Lind, and I discuss our perspectives.

Dalia:

Here are the facts from CCC’s customer channel preferences analysis:

• 5% of customers prefer using e-mail to contact service and support; 4% of customers prefer chat (compared to 52% of customers who prefer Web and 33% of customers who prefer phone).
• 47% of customers are confident they can resolve their issues via e-mail; 38% of customers are confident in chat (compared to 63% who are confident in resolving issues via the Web and 70% who are confident in resolving issues over the phone.

Given this data, and the fact that it is very simple to write an e-mail, one doesn’t have to sit in one place waiting for resolution, and an electronic paper trail exists (one doesn’t have to doubt whether the message was received), I think e-mail is the better investment.

Not to mention that in certain cultures (e.g., Japan) and certain business models (e.g., B2B customers—11% of B2B customers prefer using e-mail to handle requests v. 2% who prefer chat) really demand e-mail, e-mail is very much the preferred channel, if not something that is expected.

Matt:

I really want to believe that e-mail is a more effective channel (I personally love the channel), but we also know that e-mail resolution rates are quite poor—when you look at actual customer behavior, you find that only 36% of customers resolve their issues in one e-mail.  In fact, on average, customers send 2.14 e-mails to resolve their issues.

The benefit of chat is the opportunity to get in-the-moment clarification.  More often than not, customers write e-mails that generally appropriately identify the issue at hand, but the onus is on the customer to know what information is key to include.  If the customer omits something, then staff must initiate a back-and-forth to collect more information to resolve the issue.  With chat, this can be done instantaneously.  With e-mail, it’s a more protracted process.

And that has huge implications on cost to serve (if you want to model this for your company, use CCC’s E-mail Cost Efficiency Calculator) and customer loyalty.

Dalia:

I do agree that chat has the potential to be very effective, but I still think it’s not the e-mail channel itself that is flawed, but rather the management of the channel.  Too often organizations de-prioritize the channel, somehow perceiving e-mails to be less urgent than phone calls.  Ensuring the right technology such as an e-mail management system is in place is important, as is ensuring staff have the right skills for e-mail, but perhaps most important: Are you signaling to customers what is and is not well-suited for e-mail, and are you proactively calling customers when e-mail becomes inefficient?

Matt:

In the ideal world, I think you’re right that companies could call customers back when e-mail is not the most effective channel for resolution, but because of large contact volumes, I think organizations have a hard time making outbound calls for most issues.  This idea would work well in a B2B environment, but potentially becomes impractical in other environments.

And that’s why I think chat is so beneficial—it is much easier to put customers on the right path while they are still in the same channel in the moment—if necessary, you can push relevant Web links to the customer and you can offer click-to-call so the customer receives a phone call in the moment.

Furthermore, calling a customer who has e-mailed is not particularly dependable as it can be difficult to catch a customer in the moment.  Chat is just more efficient from that perspective—both parties are ready to talk.

Dalia:

Relevant points, though a lot of the same things could occur in e-mail as well—staff can include links to the Web site or a phone number to immediately contact someone….

I think the larger issue here is most organizations simply haven’t optimized their use of e-mail, which admittedly is very challenging to do, and they’re seeing chat as a quicker fix.

Matt:

I think that’s true—and we certainly know that chat is not a quick fix.  But companies have offered e-mail as a communication channel for a long time and have had multiple opportunities to optimize it and most simply have not done so.

***

The conversation could obviously continue a lot longer, but What is your perspective?: Is e-mail or chat the better investment?  Why?

CCC Related Resources:

1. Multi-Channel Customer Preference Data

2. E-mail Cost Efficiency Calculator

3. Managing Service Organization E-mail Volume

4. NEW: IVR Resource Center

Complaints are an added hassle, typically creating additional and time-consuming work, both for service and support and for other parts of the business.

So it is no wonder that for a long time, many organizations have minimized their attention to the efficacy of the complaint handling process.

The result of this?  Complaint policies that require customers to call a specific phone number, repeat their issue to multiple tiers of staff, submit a written report, and provide intricate evidence of an issue.  (These are all examples surfaced from companies we work with.)

Certainly all of these policies are well-intentioned, but they often signal to the customer that companies do not actually want to hear about the issue.

The good news is that we are seeing a renewed desire to reexamine the complaint handling process, in large part due to recent government mandates regarding complaint follow up, but certainly also due to increased attentiveness to customer centricity and tracking the customer experience from end to end.

These companies making improvements are increasingly realizing the true value of customer complaints, of receiving proactive input about problematic policies, processes, and products.  This is particularly true in an age when the percentage of customers who actually complain and provide feedback typically is much lower than the pool of customers affected by those problems.  (TARP Worldwide finds that 50% of affected B2C customers complain and 75% of affected B2B customers complain).

For those companies focusing on revising their complaint handling processes, below are a few pointers to ensure the processes are customer centric:

1. Take the time to root cause complaints. Too often companies take complaints at face value from customers, responding only to the customer-stated issue.  More progressive companies take the time to root cause complaints, asking probing questions to surface additional information helpful for both resolving the customer issue at hand as well as in improving the issue for all customers.

How To: Organizations either can create probing surveys to capture more specific information related to particular issues or train frontline staff on how to ask probing questions.  Providing frontline staff with a list of good questions organized by complaint type makes this very easy and intuitive.

2. Always set customer expectations as to timeframe for complaint resolution. Too often customers lodge complaints but lack clarity as to when the issue will be resolved, often causing them to call back and spend additional effort following up.   More progressive companies clearly set expected deadlines and follow up with customers to re-set expectations if necessary.

How To: Organizations can give guidance to staff regarding how to set expectations based on customers and issue types.  A simple matrix of issue type and expected resolution can be very helpful in giving customers more specific information.

3. Always consider the customer impact of complaints. Too often companies view complaints as lower priority than new incoming inquiries.  Progressive companies, however, take the time to understand what the urgency and long-term impact is to the customer and to the customer’s customer.

How To: Train staff to ask probing questions about urgency.  Industrial Automation firm Rockwell Automation teaches frontline staff to ask questions around circumstances, deadlines, and information requirements to better understand customer needs.  It provides staff with sample questions to ask such as, “If I got you an answer by Thursday, would that fit your timeline?” and “Is this issue holding up any existing products?”

If you have recently revised your complaint resolution process, what else would you add to the list?

CCC Related Resources:

• How to Respond to Customer Complaints
• How to Become More Customer Centric on a Shoestring Budget
• New Government Mandate: Good Customer Service
• Questions to Understand Customer Channel-Switching Behaviors