And, as customer service moves away from purely an order-taking, transaction-completing, productivity-based role and grows into a function that adds value to customer experiences, the potential of VOC has only grown.  Because, what better way to add value than to supplement market research or R&D and bring customers the next, big thing?

But in reality, all of this can/could/potential business is just that – sure it could happen, but it rarely does.

In fact, while over 96% of customer service’s internal partners say that customer service VOC is important, over 76% of them are not satisfied with the current quality of that VOC.  In fact, one of our members likened his efforts to ‘throwing our VOC into a big black hole – no one is listening to us.’

Service organizations that are successful in their VOC efforts – whose internal partners are not only satisfied with the VOC provided but use it when making business decisions, do two things (and don’t do one thing):

• They do point to the root causes of a problem, not merely the symptoms: Internal partners don’t pay attention to VOC analysis when it lists a bunch of customer complaints or issues, but not the reason behind those issues.  That customers are calling to cancel their warranty on a product is not helpful – but find out why they are cancelling and you’ll have data that your business partners would probably pay you to have.
• They do focus on problems that are important to their internal business partners: Spending your time and resources convincing your business partners that something is a problem is an uphill battle.  Focus on what is within your control and the areas your internal partners care about the most first to get some momentum going.
• They don’t allow their VOC scope to creep outside their ‘sweet spot’: In order to have the time to dig into root causes, leading service organizations deliberately narrow the focus of their VOC efforts.  They use VOC for what it is best positioned for – fixing customer-stated problems (since customers are calling to talk about their problems on a daily basis), rather than chasing new product development.

On that last point – seems to me like we may be seeing a bit of scope creep as customer service’s role has inevitably changed (and grown) over the years.  We were asked to do more, so we did.  But, what actually should customer service to be responsible for – and what should be out of scope?  VOC is one potential example – and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

But, I’m wondering – do you think the roles and responsibilities of the service organization have changed?  And are these new responsibilities reasonable or not?  Do we need to re-define the scope of what service can/cannot do?

CCC Related Resources:

1. VOC-Health Sharing Assessment
2. Use Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope
3. Use Customer Exchanges to Gather Raw VOC
4. Implementing Speech Analytics

I can’t believe 2011 is almost over.  Seems like just yesterday Lauren was blogging her predictions for 2011 customer service trends…and here we are again.

So, I polled the research team and chatted with a few members to get their perspective on what 2012 has in store for us.  I noticed a few topics that came up several times – some of which are ongoing over the past few years – and others that are newer, including:

• Investment in Technology (especially knowledge management, CRM, and workforce management (WFM))
• Organizational structure changes (primarily from B2B companies as they move from a service organization to center of excellence model)
• Expanding into new service channels (including mobile apps, Facebook, web chat, Twitter, and discussion boards)
• Sales (focused either on increasing cross/up-sell in the service organization or having a closer partnership with the sales team)

As I thought more about these things that service organizations are doing, I wondered to myself what could be driving all of these initiatives.  And I began to see some trends emerge that I think will be crucial in 2012.

So, in 2012 – I think that:

1. You’ll Have More ‘Competitors’ Than Ever Before: Your competitors (in the customer service realm) aren’t just your direct competitors anymore.  Now, your service is being compared to every other customer service interaction the customer has had.  And, many suspect that the customer is developing a ‘gold standard’ for customer service from their best interactions at some of the most progressive companies – and now expect all others to meet this new standard.
2. Your Customers Will Find Even More Advanced Ways to Game the System: Over the past year we have increasingly heard that customers do things like ask for pre-emptive escalations, using Twitter to simply get attention, expect near-instant response times, want to side-step regulations – the list goes on and on.  As customers get increasingly savvy, they’ll continue to find new ways to put you on the defensive when handling their requests.
3. You’ll Need to Proactively Get Ahead of Your Customers: Given these customer expectations, staying one step ahead of the customer will be crucial.  In calls, this means taking the lead to actively guide the customer to resolution – instead of simply reacting to customers.  It can also mean proactive alerts that can educate the customer or eliminate their need to call us.
4. You’ll See A Need for Transparency: As information is more readily available in general, customers will have access to all of the data and information – and they seem to like it.  So, they also want more of it.  Customer can now interact with companies in social media platforms and through other mediums, bringing the customer closer to the company.  And that often means that customers will be looking for transparency and information into your internal processes and workings too.
5. And…Your Reps Will Have the Key to Success: Besides your website, your reps (whether via the phone, web chat, e-mail, or social media) are your customer’s main touchpoint.  They not only need to have a different skill set for this more complex and demanding world, but they also have customer voice that is invaluable to success in the future.  Tap into what they have to say.

So, what does 2012 hold for you?  Share your thoughts!

CCC Related Resources:

1. The Next Frontier of Rep Performance
2. Voice of the Customer
3. Anatomy of a World-Class Contact Center
4. Keeping Pace with Today’s Demanding Customers

membership.  After a bit more data analysis and conversations with a host of members, we’ve uncovered a core area of focus for service organizations in 2012: understanding—and then keeping up with—customer expectations  (especially in today’s multi-channel environment).

The Current State
It turns out that today’s customers seem to be more demanding about service – savvier than ever and wanting a personalized, tailored interaction.  We hear everything from “the customer wants us to do everything for them – including calling a third party on their behalf – to resolve their problem” to “customers ask for escalation even before they interact with a frontline rep.”

That feels like a very difficult place to be – customers are selectively using outlier service experiences with other companies to define their expectations of service with your company.

And, there is a huge stake in meeting customer expectations.  If service organizations consistently don’t meet, they will see increased churn and lower customer loyalty as customers defect to companies who do meet their expectations.

Give Customers What They Want (?)
In response, many do what seems to be most reasonable – give the customers what they want to meet their expectations. Many are doing this by enabling the customer to resolve any issue in any channel at any time.  To accomplish this goal, there tends to be a three-fold solution:

1. Build out new channels: Increasingly, customers are interacting with companies through more channels – including web chat, video, text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter…just to name a few.
   
   Our question is – which channels to prioritize and how do you build a strong business case for each channel?  Do customers really expect us to have a presence in all these channels, or are we actually teaching customers to expect more and more from us by merely operating in some of these channels?
2. Expand capabilities of current channels: Seems like every channel could be more robust – whether it is adding more functionality to the website or redesigning the IVR.  This makes it easier for a customer to resolve any issue in their channel of choice.
   
   Our question is – what functionalities do customers actually use and how do they use them?  How should companies design things like their service websites to make it easy for customer to resolve their issues without forcing the customer to take the path preferred by the company (not the customer)?
3. Integrate channels: Of course, with so many ways a customer can interact with us – it is crucial to make sure those channels ‘talk’ to each other so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves every time they switch channels.  Many say that customers want a seamless experience through those channels.Our question is – how should you invest in the technology or other solutions to accomplish this seemingly humongous task?  Are there any low- tech ways to bridge these gaps?

With these areas of focus – and questions – in mind, CCC is setting off to better understand customer expectations today, and how service organizations can consistently meeting expectations.  We have to wonder things like: are customer expectations set – or can we influence them?  Do customers prefer more choice or efficient issue resolution?  What experience best reduces customer effort?

Track our progress on this blog – plus our research updates that includes our latest hypotheses.  We’d love to hear from you – so let us know if you have any comments or want to get involved in the research.

Also, we’ll be releasing a Customer Expectations survey to test customer preferences for emerging channels and their expectations within each channel.  The survey is open to all members, so please let us know if you are interested in participating to get a custom cut of the data.

CCC Related Resources:

1. Shifting the Loyalty Curve
2. Boosting Web Self-Service Stickiness
3. Voice of the Customer

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about service organization globalization – especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it’s questions about how to serve local markets, setting up new contact centers, working with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Serving global customers in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn’t especially anything brand new to us in the service organization.  We’ve seen our organizations become more global as our customers are become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues at CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while service organizations may be trying to serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what’s happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally.

The bottom line is that traditional corporate center functions will no longer be able to support global operations from a single, centralized geographic location – while there should be a common strategy clear to all stakeholders, the center must also be agile, manage risk, encourage global collaboration and trust, and think globally about talent. In essence, it becomes a global ‘corporate core’ – still the same corporate center functions – but now newly aligned with globally dispersed market-level operations.

If you want to read the full executive guidance (via hard copy or ebook) or assess the readiness of your company’s corporate functions, please take advantage of the tools on the Executive Guidance website.

CCC Related Resources:

• Providing Actionable VOC Insight to Business Partners
• Rep-Led Collaboration Forums (Fidelity Investments)
• Country Profile Resource Center

“What is the future of the customer experience?”

Seems like the $64,000 question, right?

Well, I had the pleasure of attending a summit on this topic a couple of weeks ago.  Sitting in with customer service executives from around the globe and across many industries – like financial services, retail, and telecommunications – it was a great couple of days away from the office to give me time to think about the answer to that question.

We talked about everything from big data to integrating service into the customer’s more mobile lifestyle to expanding into new channels to using VOC to, of course, social media.  We discussed customer expectations today, and how to drive change throughout the organization.

And at the end of the day, after having a chance to reflect on all the rich conversations – I had a few takeaway thoughts I wanted to share with you:

Customer Expectations, Today

Seems like the relationship between customers and companies has changed in recent years.  Previously, customers were kept at arm’s length– and while we today likely don’t give full transparency into our internal processes, our investments in social media and our tailored conversations with customers had an impact.  The traditional walls between customer and company have been broken down – and as more data and information flows freely – customers can and do take advantage of that.

Customers get to see what it is like to get near instant gratification on Twitter, or receive a more complete and artfully framed explanation behind a policy from a frontline rep (as opposed to ‘it’s just the policy.’).  And – no surprise here – they like it.

But, do they need it?  Or are we setting customer expectations that we may not be able to consistently meet?

As one attendee put it – ‘are we the ones setting the expectations or is it the customer?’  I think it’s a worthy question to ask, because if we are – how do we know if we are creating a highly valuable experience or a bunch of costly ‘nice to haves’ that actually won’t matter to long-term customer loyalty at the end of the day?

So, that got me thinking about a few other topics –

1- Social Media: There is so much data to show the wide (and growing presence) of the world’s population on social media platforms.  But, it’s use for customer service?  Given the debate we had on this blog a few months ago – seems like the jury is still out.

2- Online Customer Experience: We know that the customer increasingly prefers to self-serve on the web rather than call.  But what kind of online experience do they expect and what ensures they can successfully resolve their issue on the web?  We’ve done a little work on this in the past, and will revisit this topic in more depth through our first half 2012 research initiative.

3- Customer Data and VOC: There is so much data and customer voice to collect, but it’s often like searching for a needle in a haystack to reap true insights.  We’ve discussed ways to prioritize and focus these efforts to yield more actionable data, and CCC’s latest venture – CCC Loyalty View – is a unique way to aggregate that data and provide both actionable insights and advisory services to target high-impact improvements.

4- The Frontline Rep Role: With the remaining live contact volume at higher complexity, seems like the frontline rep has to adjust.  No longer can they focus solely on issue resolution or soft skills, but also have to possess greater ownership over their customer interactions and use their knowledge to provide in-the-moment advice.  Most of you are familiar with our most recent work on the topic – looking at an emerging skill set that is increasingly important for reps to have in today’s world.

What about you, Customer Service Buzz readers?  What do you think the implications of customer expectations today are for your role and your organization over the next few years?

CCC Related Resources:

• Social Media Topic Center

• Boosting Web Self-Service Stickiness

• How to Narrow VOC Scope

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance executive summary | full study

But if customers have all this power, what does that means for our frontline reps? Suddenly, they are dropped into a world that is not only increasingly complex (as products and services become more intricate) but also has well-informed customers that are demanding more.  Customers want things faster, they want the rep to know them, and to do more of the work for them to boot.

Pretty hard for a frontline employee who only a few years ago was probably focused on efficient resolution of pretty simply issues, right?

Well, the strain on the rep is starting to show.  81% of service organizations have not seen their frontline performance improve in the past few years.  Over 25% of reps say they are currently highly disengaged in their jobs – putting forth less effort and more likely to leave their job.

So, what’s the answer?  How can the service organization get the next boost in rep performance?   Well, we’ve identified a previously undiscovered, but extremely powerful skill set that will deliver a 11% increase in rep performance.  (Hint: it’s probably not what you think it is!)

In response, CCC conducted a survey of frontline staff across B2C and B2B companies – asking their supervisors to rate them against a host of skills and behaviors that we thought could drive rep performance.

What we found was that among all the skills and behaviors that could matter – only a few do.  And, the few that do statistically group (or factor) together into four skill buckets.

Three of the buckets are pretty straightforward, each having a small to moderate boost to performance:

-Basic Behaviors and Skills: Six skills and behaviors factored together here – all around basic knowledge of the company, multi-tasking, and communication skills.  These are considered the baseline for any employee.

-Advanced Problem Solving (IQ): These four skills and behaviors all focused on issue resolution skills required to diagnose and solve customer problems.

-Emotional Intelligence (EQ): This grouping of six skills and behaviors center around empathy and making emotional connections with customers.

Each improves rep performance between around three and a half percent to about five and a half percent.  Nothing to sneeze at, but there isn’t one clear skill set that is a winner in this new era of customer service.

Until that is, we reveal the fourth factor.  Coined the Control Quotient (CQ), its five skills and behaviors represent someone who is in control over their job, their interactions with customers, and themselves.

And CQ  improves rep performance by over 11% - accounting for nearly half of the total potential lift of performance, giving a greater boost than any of the other two factors combined.

So, what is the Control Quotient?  Well, it is the ability of frontline staff to take control over their interactions at work – including their ability to remain resilient, take responsibility for their actions, and respond well to constructive criticism.  This person doesn’t let one tough call or unhappy customer ruin their day – they do not take the baggage of one bad conversation into their next conversation.  They remain able to see the bigger picture, enabling them to be adaptive to customers in the moment to provide tailored service.

Okay – now you are probably thinking.  How do I get more CQ in my organization?  If you are thinking about hiring and coaching – those aren’t the most effective levers you can pull.  In fact, getting your reps to have more CQ has less to do with getting reps doing something differently – and everything to do with managing your frontline differently.  Your reps have the potential to demonstrate CQ – but it’s the service organization management that is inadvertently suppressing these skills.

See Dalia’s post to learn more about the three environmental keys you can use to boost CQ within your own frontline folks (Hint: it’s all about trust, alignment, and peer support).  In the meantime, learn more about CQ and what it’s all about.

CCC Related Resources:

The Next Frontier of Rep Performance executive summary | full study

CQ Hiring and Screening Tools

How to Demonstrate Trust in Reps

How to Align Reps to Common Goals

How to Build Strong Rep Peer Support Networks

In the healthcare industry, recent data found an alarming new trend among U.S. consumers taking risks to avoid healthcare costs:

-There’s been a 10% increase since 2010 in the number of Americans who have done without or postponed healthcare-related expenses, including medical treatments, exams, tests, and prescriptions.

-Not only that, but Consumer Reports found that almost 50% of Americans who are on prescriptions actually delayed a doctor’s visit, declined tests, or bought their drugs outside the country.

-Plus, 25% of folks with prescriptions also scrimp on their prescriptions – skipping doses, not refilling, and taking expired medication.

All of this is to save on healthcare costs and avoid doctor visits.

While it is certainly a risky personal choice to view healthcare as a discretionary expense and hold off in the hope that one will stay healthy (and that’s a whole different topic that our friends at Iconoculture cover), today I want to focus on the additional potential impact to the company – especially the service organization.

I could imagine potential impacts to reps as both customer’s state-of-mind and issue type changes – plus a larger potential impact on the company.

Let’s take reps first.  As customers begin to view healthcare as a discretionary cost, they will need to think through their options and make trade-offs about their medical care.  They may:

-Turn to frontline reps for advice: Increasingly seeing reps as potential trusted advisors to help make those trade-offs and better understand the potential medical costs.  Customers may believe reps have all the information to help them make an informed decision.

-Bargain with frontline reps: Ask for and even begin to expect greater flexibility around costs, payments – and service in general.

-More urgent issues: If customers put off tests and procedures, or prescriptions refills until the last minute, they may require faster turnarounds and service when they call in a panic.  These customers need what they want – and they need it now.

Seems like our frontline reps’ jobs just got a whole lot more difficult.

And what about companies?  Well, if customers forgo follow-up or preventative treatments and indeed end up falling ill – they may not only put themselves in danger but can also end up costing the company more to serve.

So, given the increased pressures on our reps from customers and potential increased costs to the company, it starts to make sense to help educate customers about their options and advocate a more holistic approach to healthcare.  We’ve seen progressive companies do this either through value-added proactive alerts to customers that target specific segments for education or by arming frontline reps to have a more collaborative conversation with customers to learn more about the customer to position the possible options correctly.

Of course, there are legal restrictions around giving out medical advice itself – but here I’m wondering if we can educate customers better about their options in a smart way.  And of course, this would probably make sense for other industries too – what do you think?  What is the impact of these changing customer behaviors on your organization?

CCC Related Resources:

Proactive Alerts

Teaching Frontline Reps Experience Engineering Skills

The Next Frontier of Rep Performance

Engineering the Low-Effort Customer Experience

A few weeks ago we sent out our annual agenda poll for 2012 – and over 900 of you answered the call to help direct next year’s CCC research agenda (thank you!).  As we start to parse through all the data, a few interesting things struck me that I wanted to share with you.

One: Despite a current environment of economic uncertainty and continued financial austerity, customer service’s organizational focus has not swung to cost containment at the expense of the customer experience.

And, two: In 2008/9, many of your peers looked at ways to reduce cost per contact as their key driver of cost reduction.  In 2012, more service organizations will find ways to reduce contact volume altogether – mainly through expanding self-service channels.

Let’s expand on both of these findings a bit.

And how does this impact customer service?  Well, I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had with customer service leaders where something like this comes up:  “Lara, we give the business all the voice of the customer (VOC) data they could possibly need, but we don’t know what they do/they do nothing with it.”  One member even compared it to a ‘big black hole’ where all the VOC got sucked into, never to be heard from again.

No wonder, when only 38% of staff use that data effectively.

To turn that trend around, companies must have high “Insight IQ”, which has three components outlined in the Overcoming the Insight Deficit brief:

1- Information must be attainable (i.e., the right information is available and easy to find)

2- Information must have usefulness (i.e., is of the right quality and in a usable format)

3- Employees must have capability (i.e., the ability and predisposition to analyze data effectively)

Organizations that do this on average perform 24% better than their peers across effectiveness, productivity, employee engagement, and market share growth.

The brief goes on with four solutions to increase Insight IQ, including: up-skilling employees to be more intelligent consumers of data, challenging the biases of the company and its employees, actively manage the data and information flow (at the same level as other core activities), and making information more usable through tools and presentation.

In customer service, we too can be part of this shift towards higher Insight IQ.  A fundamental customer touch point that gathers unique and potentially critical VOC (a topic we’ve written many posts on), we need to ensure our information is attainable and useful to our internal partners.

And I’d like to think that we can even help challenge biases of the company or more actively manage the flow of VOC we have – making that VOC more useable for our partners.

If the organization is going to focus on increasing their Insight IQ, we need to be on board too – and I bet it’s even a little relieving to know that people are getting serious about managing customer data and information to make better decisions.

In fact, our Voice of the Customer resources begin to tackle just that – ways for us to hone our VOC collection efforts to meet business needs, to use our frontline staff as a beacon for where to focus VOC projects, and ways to ensure VOC can help us get ahead of disloyal customers.

To learn more about Insight Deficit, or take a quiz to measure your Insight IQ – visit the Overcoming Insight Deficit resource page.

CCC Related Resources:

Using Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope

Use Customer Exchanges to Gather Raw VOC

Use VOC to Get Ahead of Disloyalty