How many times have you heard a rep cite company policy as the reason the customer can’t have his/her issue resolved quickly, even though the solution is a perfectly reasonable and achievable one? Often, right?

Service organizations have long struggled with the burden of policies that unnecessarily delay the process of addressing customer concerns and thus adversely affect customer experience. While it might seem easy to quickly eliminate effort-inducing policies, the fact is, given the number of policies and regulations, it is hard to identify the ones that cause maximum client pain and are not necessary for compliance.  Moreover, the service organization was likely not responsible for creating the policy to begin with, making the task of changing said policies a daunting one.

Ameriprise faced a similar issue of rising customer frustration with inflexible policies. It also realized that taking an internally-led approach towards identifying such policies would not accurately pinpoint sources of client pain. To address this issue: Read More »

Take voice of customer seriously to enhance customer experience and positively influence bottom line [ICMI]

Three questions to test if you offer good customer service [Forbes]

World Retail Banking survey indicates that global banks have a significant opportunity to close the customer sentiment gap and address the factors that matter most to them to increase loyalty including quality of service (53 percent) [Market Watch]

Buykeywordarticles.com, a leading content creation company, provides proactive live chat to increase customer support [SFGate]

Digital innovation is enabling customers to act smarter than the firms that wish to serve them. Is your customer service ready? [Huffington Post]

Issue resolution has been a top priority for most service organizations for quite some time now. As such, organizations have traditionally tracked First Call Resolution (FCR)–an important and widely used metric for improving issue resolution. However, we find that the key to reducing overall call volumes is resolving not only the customer-stated issue, but also the implicit issues the customer may not state or be aware of—a strategy of next issue avoidance.

Consider these issue resolution scenarios when you call customer service:

a.)    The CSR provides you details around your current issue (the primary issue) but doesn’t mention issues that are likely to crop up (secondary issues) as a result of your primary issue

b.)    The CSR not only addresses your current issue but also provides instructions on ALL follow-up issues you are likely to face as a result of your primary issue

Scenario A seems fine as it supports the FCR strategy, however, it misses the mark by not forward resolving adjacent issues that lead to nearly 50% of callbacks. Scenario B, on the other hand, seems like an improvement over scenario A because the CSR is addressing follow up issues related to the primary issue. However, what most service organizations often do not realize is that scenario B might lead to even more callbacks since forward resolving for all possible follow up issues overwhelms and confuses customers—and, as a result, unintentionally leads to increased callbacks.

To address this issue, Bell Canada develops the following solutions to enable reps in indentifying which follow-on issues should be handled in the moment: Read More »

A few weeks back, Lauren blogged about our latest research initiative on Organizational Design Methods. Since then, we have been speaking to members across industries and business segments to gather insights on certain organizational design challenges that companies often struggle with, specifically, managing global operations, overseeing multichannel contacts, and evolving support functions.

While we continue to work on this piece of research, I wanted to share some of our initial thoughts and findings here: Read More »

The first thing that hits travelers visiting India is the traffic! Mumbai, one of the world’s top 10 centers of commerce and the most populous city in India, sees an extremely high volume of road traffic at peak hours–and with high traffic comes increased instances of traffic violations and frequent police intervention. In Mumbai, it is not uncommon for motorists to have disagreeable showdowns and verbal slanging matches with traffic police. And the customary high handedness of many constables usually jars with the sensibilities of most commuters.

However, this is soon set to change. Traffic police officers in Mumbai are being trained to greet violators pleasantly before writing citations for traffic violations. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) will provide behavioral training sessions to police officers to make them a tad more genial. This ensures that officers resolve cases with the least amount of unpleasantness.

What this Means for Customer Service Read More »

In the context of online self-service, companies will often tell us “our customers like to do research online, but when they actually decide to fix their problem/transfer funds/purchase a product, they prefer to call.”  The big question in our minds, however, is this:

How do you KNOW that customers PRERER to call you?

The fact that customers still call (indeed, even that they call after having visited the website) should not be seen as proof that the live phone is the preferred channel.  In all likelihood, the reason why many of your customers still call is because your website has failed them in some way.

The key, then, to understanding how customers prefer to interact with your company—online or in another channel—is to ask the customer directly rather than making assumptions based on customer behavior.  This sounds like an in-depth survey process (and certainly it could be), but there are shortcut ways that companies are unearthing channel switching root cause drivers in a low-cost way.

Specifically, Fidelity Investments discovered a low-tech, customer-friendly method to capture customers’ reasons for abandoning Web self-service for live channels.  They use inbound calls as opportunities to conduct two-question surveys to gather in-the-moment customer feedback about the company’s online self-service and customers’ reasons for switching to the phone.

In addition, Fidelity is very careful about phrasing the questions so that the survey does not come across as an attempt to push self-service but rather a learning exercise.  We believe this is a big part of the strategy’s success—customers are not made to feel as though the company doesn’t want them to call.  Instead, the company simply wants to know more about what customers want from them.

CCC members, learn more about Fidelity’s two-question framework in a new summary here.

Related CCC Resources:

1. Improving Web Self-Service with Customer Voice (Event Replay)
2. Full Case Study: Fidelity’s Channel-Switching VOC
3. Diagnosing Online Failures (Study Chapter)

How often have you ended up selecting a wrong option in an IVR system? Indeed, don’t all IVR options even sound the same from time to time? It’s probably fair to say that we have all landed up in loops, switching between various IVR options and never really finding the right one that describes our problem.

While most companies look to enhance their IVR systems through technology or sophisticated design, they fail to take care of a simple aspect—customer-friendly language.

Companies often design their IVR systems with an internal focus—resulting in company-specific jargon in the IVR script. This makes the system complex for customers who cannot relate to the terminology.  Hence, customers end up in misrouted calls leading to frustration and increased effort.

How do you ensure your IVR system says what you customers understand? Well, you talk to your customers and find out how they define the issues they call you up for. Read More »