Back in November, we blogged about the advent of Siri—and what she might mean for the future customer acceptance of natural language IVR systems.  And while that connection has yet to be revealed, Siri is continuing to pop up in other contexts.

For example, a recent New York Times article positioned Siri as the latest public nuisance in the cell phone revolution.  It outlined several scenarios of people using Siri in less than desirable situations (e.g., public transportation) for things as mundane as sending an SMS message wishing a friend a happy birthday. 

One of the particular sticking points that many raise when complaining about Siri’s public presence is that users must speak punctuation and emoticons—along the lines of “happy birthday smiley face” or “how are you doing question mark.”  Certainly not what we are used to hearing on the street corner or subway.

What caught my eye, however, was this part of the article (emphasis is mine): Read More »

IVRs are, in many ways, a necessary evil of the customer contact world.  No one is going to readily say that they love interacting with even the best of the IVRs.  After all, when customers call, they are typically ready to speak with someone.  So it is no surprise to us at CCC that so many member companies ask for advice on how to improve their current IVR structures.  And while every system is unique and our feedback can vary significantly from company to company, there are always a few common themes that pop up.  And in the spirit of avoiding the reinvention of the wheel, I wanted to share with you all some of the most common pointers we discuss with members.

1. Be Concise: This applies not only to your menu options, but also to things that I’ll call “filler language”.  Even by cutting out the “please” before each “please press X to do Y” will shave time off of the customer IVR experience.
2. Avoid “Our Menu Items Have Changed”: Unless a significant portion your customers call so frequently (I’m thinking weekly, maybe monthly) that they would absolutely notice a change, most customers will not know the difference.  Moreover, hearing that announcement will often times turn these customers off to the entire IVR experience, feeling as though they are being “tricked” into staying in the system. Read More »

For those of you who read this blog consistently, you already know that we were hard at work in the fourth quarter of 2011 compiling new research on measuring the customer experience.  And with a no-nonsense title like the one I’ve chosen here (“what you need to know”), I’ll cut to the chase. 

Our research is finished, resulting in a number of new tools and resources for CCC members.  And while surveys are not the most glamorous of research topics, there were a few interesting points that are, indeed, “need to know.”  So without further delay:

Read More »

CCC’s blog is relatively young…we’re coming up on our second anniversary in early 2012.  What that means is that we are very much still experimenting with different types of posts and different functionalities for the blog itself.  One feature we added in 2011 is the ability to do real-time polling within our blog posts.  As we wrap up the year, we thought you might like to revisit some of our more popular questions to view the final results!

If these polls are any sort of window into the minds of our readers, then here is what we know about you:

1. You were torn on making a choice, but ultimately you think that social media is a viable, long-term option for service.
2. Indeed, you are tech-savvy…and would love to see QR codes become a new channel for service.
3. Forget the major IVR investments though!  You’re keeping it simple with low-cost fixes.
4. Everything to everyone—generalists are your employee of choice.
5. Keep it simple with those folks though…only 1-2 web chats at a time, please!
6. Your adherence policies do not give much leeway when it comes to reps taking a short “time out” after a difficult call. Read More »

Consumers aren’t the only ones who may be overspending their bank accounts. A growing body of research from our sister program for Corporate Communicators (CEC) suggests that repeated organizational shuffling across the past few years may have exhausted the “Engagement Capital” many business leaders have to work with (think of engagement capital as the degree of optimism an employee holds about past, present, and future events at their company).

Simply put, many of us are pushing internal changes through on disgruntled workforces that no longer have the stomach for it. We are morale-ly bankrupt.

Here are some of the facts…

First, more than half of our reps have probably experienced multiple, major changes in the past year – such as a new manager, a different role, a merger with another company, a new sales process, or a restructured team.  (This doesn’t even account for smaller changes.  For example, 81% of organizations we recently polled changed their QA scorecards at least twice last year!)

Second, these changes are stressful, and stress costs money. In fact, more than 60% of employees say that their level of workplace stress has increased in the past two years, and this may be creating an overall drag of as much as 9% on performance.

But why is the stress of change having such a debilitating impact?  After all, change happens right? Staff should be able to deal with it. But it turns out that it’s not so much the magnitude, but rather the frequency of change that is a problem. Read More »

Several months ago, I used this blog to announce the launch of CCC’s new research initiative on the topic of measuring the modern customer experience.  Since then, the team has blogged about some of our interim thoughts on topics such as survey fatigue and the value of survey incentives.  I hope you have enjoyed reading some of these study updates.

In an effort to get you information faster, we are going to be releasing our findings and newly created tools as we continue through the research process.  To that end, I’m excited to share with you one of our first deliverables: a post-contact customer survey audit. Read More »

Across the last several years, CCC has published quite a few pieces of research that explore the ideas of customer loyalty and customer effort.  To put things into an extremely simple nutshell, here are a few points to bear in mind as you continue to read:

First, the best thing a service organization can do is to provide a low-effort customer experience

Second, there are two ways you can reduce customer effort:

1. What a customer does (repeat contacts, repeating information, getting transferred, filling out forms).  This is an area influenced by service leadership, and we’ve blogged about ideas on how to reduce effort previously.
2. How a customer feels (literally, a subjective perception of the effort involved in the customer experience).  Interestingly, there are specific skills—what we call experience engineering—that can actively manage, even influence, customer perception, and this is in the hands of your frontline staff.  More importantly, this is an area that is two-thirds the overall impact of customer effort, yet only a small portion of companies are thinking about how to reduce this softer side of effort.

So why don’t companies try to reduce the “feel” side of effort? Primarily because it sounds rather hard to do at first glance.  We are talking about influencing perceptions here…and while it’s not Jedi mind tricks, it is a far cry from basic soft skills (see comparison at right).  So this feels like a lot of work to not only teach, but to even come close to mastering on a consistent basis.

Here’s the good news: There are shortcuts…easy ways to teach your frontline how to reduce the “feel” side of effort.  In fact, we have just finished a new set of training materials that will help our member companies teach frontline staff the art of experience engineering.  Read More »

We’ve been blogging a lot about the IVR lately …a “by the numbers” look at the IVR customer experience, tips on using customer feedback to script the IVR, and more.  One thing we haven’t discussed, however, is an IVR-related topic that is sure to spark some debate:

Is the IVR channel worth investing in for the future? 

In other words, should companies invest in additional IVR functionality and enhanced technology moving forward?  Or should we leave it alone, assuming that it is not a “channel of the future”…that our customers will NEVER want to use the IVR en masse (as much as we’d like them to)?

It’s an interesting question.  The CCC research team discussed it recently and it sparked a really good conversation.  To share some of the debate, I’ve asked Matt Lind to spar with me here.  Read More »

It’s always exciting to start a fresh project here at CCC, and I am very happy to announce that we will be starting next week on new research regarding measuring the customer experience. 

What about measuring the customer experience, you ask?

Well, we are planning to explore many different facets of this topic, so I think there will be something for everyone!  And one of the best things about new research projects in my opinion is that there is always an opportunity for our member companies to help guide the direction of our insights.  Sure, we have a general plan for what we would like to create and share with you, but so much of it depends on what we hear from you.  Where do you struggle?  What would be most valuable to your organization?  Where have you tried and failed?  Tried and succeeded?

I’m hoping that you’ll leave us a note in the comments section with some thoughts.  To get your creative thinking going, here are a few early ideas on our minds: Read More »

For many, summertime is often a chance to dust off the books waiting patiently on the shelf read…the ones you bought last year, five years ago, maybe even five days ago at a Borders liquidation sale.  It’s likely that you have one last summer vacation in your future before the weather turns cooler, so the CCC team recently brainstormed a list of books that we’d recommend you pack in your carry-on luggage or beach bag.

Here are some of the most interesting books that made our list:

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
Many of you have now had a chance to hear CCC present our brand-new research on The Next Frontier of Rep Performance.  In this research, we explored several different factors that drive rep performance in today’s customer contact organization—and emotional intelligence, or EQ, was one of those factors (spoiler alert: it wasn’t the biggest driver).  So we’ve been passing this book around the team to brush up on our EQ knowledge.   This was suggested by one of our U.S. members in the telecommunications industry.  It’s a pretty quick read and full of good information.  On a related note, we’ve been drawing A LOT of inspiration from Drive by Daniel Pink as well. Read More »