Recently, the Harvard Business Review published an article introducing the “Wallet Allocation Rule.” As the name suggests, this new metric measures the share of wallet that is allocated to companies – or simply, how a customer divides their spending among a company and its competitors.

The theory behind this metric is simple:

1. think about how much your customer prefers your company, and then
2. consider the number of competitors your customer is choosing between.

Knowing these two things will let you understand how your customers spend money, and how your company is doing relative to others. For instance, if you were the customer’s first choice and there is one competitor, then your position is different than if you were the second choice but there are many, many others behind you. Understanding this difference can help define strategy and hone in on certain initiatives.

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When looking for ideas to improve your service organization, where do you look to first? Is it the latest research from Harvard Business Review, a new directive from your senior leadership, or a recent blog post from Customer Service Buzz? (Pardon the shameless plug). What if we told you that there’s a source of ideas personalized specifically for you. Would you be surprised to hear that no one understands your service organization and your customer needs better than those in the frontlines: the reps.

Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) realized this untapped resource and created a rep-led process for gathering business ideas. From collecting leads to finally presenting proposals, ANZ’s four-step method for generating business proposals led to meaningful results in both service organization performance and staff engagement. In fact, after five initial iterations of this process, ANZ completed 10 policy improvements. Within six months of launch, frontline engagement increased by 11%.

In brief, here are some reasons why it worked:

1. Localized team meetings. Single, large meetings can be daunting and stifle rep voice or innovation. By creating a multi-step process involving more intimate team-level meetings, ANZ created the right conditions for reps to freely share their ideas.
2. Rep-owned and managed. Instead of a top-down approach of instituting change, this method gives frontline reps the reins to propose changes as they see fit. Such shift in responsibility helps foster rep creativity and results in impactful changes in the organization

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This is the fourth in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one, two and three here.

The New Year is well on its way (almost February already??) and chances are you have some new goals you want to achieve in your organization. As nice as it would be to simply make a checklist, hold a meeting, and then enjoy the results, experience and data show that to really see changes, you need to engage your staff in coaching. Like the personal trainer you may have hired to achieve some other New Year resolutions, we’re here to give some advice.

As we’ve previously written, coaching is not a science but an art. There’s not one simple formula for guaranteed success, but that being said, there are absolutely some steps that all companies should take:

1. Find the right coaches. When screening for coaches, organizations should consider more than just prior rep performance or general leadership skills. Great players don’t always make the best coaches, so beef up your talent search with some important criteria. For instance, our research finds that almost a third of the current coach pool falls into the “reluctant” category – meaning they don’t want to develop others as their core role—so coaching immersion programs and built-in coaching requirements help identify staff who will be truly successful as future coaches. Read More »

While watching your favorite TV shows, do you ever find yourself admiring that leather briefcase or those trendy ballet flats you see on the screen? Well, now thanks to a latest feature by eBay, you not only can find out exactly what those hot items are, but buy them online for yourself.

Aptly titled “Watch with eBay,” this new iPad app allows users to combine their television viewing and shopping experience into one. Users simply enter their program information (zip code, cable provider, and channel), and out comes all relevant program-related products in eBay’s current inventory. Want to look like a certain cast member? Just search their name and receive star-specific recommendations.

What this Means for Customer Service and Support

More than just efficient multitasking, this feature serves as an example of extremely smart segmentation. Instead of advertising all product lines to all customers, eBay provides highly personalized recommendations to customers based on their precise interests. The same strategy can be applied to the world of service—similar to differentiated tastes and values, customer service preferences now come in a variety of flavors. As a result, service industries can design segmentation schemes that target the needs of different customer groups and provide personalized service in a scalable fashion. From our research on segmentation, here are some steps to consider:

• Evaluate potential benefits of segmentation for your organization. Segmenting to customer needs can certainly provide a multitude of benefits, but before you jump into a strategy, it’s important to first do the necessary prep work. Understand your customers and products, and really assess if segmentation if right for your organization. Once determined, evaluate why you are segmentation and what you hope to gain. Use CCC’s goal-setting tool to choose SMART goals for your segmentation scheme.

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As fashion experts Stacy London and Clint Kelly would tell you, sometimes folks simply need a little advice to make a big difference. So in borrowing from the TLC show “What Not to Wear,” we as customer service experts want to bring you our own, “What Not to Do” advice as it relates to customer surveys.

To conduct successful post-contact surveys, companies need to do more than simply “ask questions.” From conversations with member companies, we’ve come across some common survey pitfalls and mistakes that detract from a successful survey. Accordingly, here is our compilation of things that you as a customer survey guru should avoid:

• Don’t ask too many questions. We’ve all unfortunately been stuck in surveys that seem to never end. When designing your survey, remain cognizant of the survey length and only ask questions that are necessary. Taking steps like setting a specific survey goal, defining a question limit, or rotating questions can be helpful for avoiding this faux pas.

• Remove jargon from surveys. Company lingo is good for boardroom meetings (or is it?), but your internal jargon is meaningless to the average customer. Including this type of language in surveys causes extra effort for customers and can lead to poor-quality responses. Before deploying your survey, make sure to fit your language to different audiences, and use the customer’s language, not yours.

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If you’ve walked into any mall around the holiday season, you know that there’s nothing worse than crowded stores and long lines. Now, the UK fashion retailer Oasis is offering shoppers a more convenient, streamlined shopping experience with tablet technology.

In its flagship store, shop assistants are armed with iPads to help customers with all product inquiries from anywhere in the stores. In addition, shoppers can bypass the long cash register lines, and simply make their purchases directly from the iPads for home delivery. This service, only introduced a week ago, has made up 20% of all sales in that time. As a result, shoppers are able to avoid much of the stress that come with in-store shopping.

In the customer service world, we’re unfortunately no strangers to long queues. Peak times and holiday seasons indicate spikes in call volume and demand, and while call center reps can do much to enhance the customer experience, customer effort can begin much before they are even connected. So, what are some creative ways for organizations to manage lengthy queues and mitigate the ensuing customer effort?

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CCC has partnered with Iconoculture to bring you the latest in global consumer trends.  Below is our bi-weekly update featuring the latest Iconoculture insights available now on the CCC site.

Mobile apps reach a new level of convenience for users, as Commonwealth bank now launches an app to allow customers to pay “anyone, anytime, anywhere.”

Named Kaching (like the sound of money), this app makes peer-to-peer payments instantly and remotely. Customers of the bank can send money to anyone’s email address, mobile number, or even Facebook account. The recipient then has to get a unique code to complete the transfer, and unclaimed funds will be refunded to the payer after two weeks.

This app is just the latest innovation in mobile, and as this technology evolves, consumers are looking to it more than ever for ways to save time and hassle. So of course we wonder– what does this mean for customer service? What implications will mobile technology have on for customer and companies? Here are some of our guesses:

For the customer:

Customers likely will rely on mobile for even more instant service. Instead of waiting to speak with a reps or logging onto a web’s chat service, customers might want to be able to use their mobile device to text and receive instant support. With companies like ChaCha responding to customer texts with live agents, the future of customer service might mean getting immediate support and assistance—all with a simple text.

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In a particularly humorous episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart joked that the best stimulus package for a struggling economy would be a program titled “Emergency Christmas.” Though obviously tongue-in-cheek, Mr. Stewart astutely observed and commented on some interesting holiday retail trends and sales behavior.

Of course, this observation is not lost on any retail organization, and the practice of cross-selling and up-selling (aka, service-to-sales) only helps to capitalize on this seasonal increase in consumption. So while we’ve blogged about sales pitfalls in the past, it’s especially important at this time of year to revisit one specific component of successful service-to-sales programs—the “sales culture” within the organization.

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We’ve probably all encountered a survey opportunity that came with an incentive…free sandwiches, a 10% discount on the next purchase, or special limited-time offer. All of these are different ways companies incentivize customer participation in surveys.

And this practice makes sense. Our research shows that average response rates today hover slightly above 10% for most transactional surveys. This figure, while previously sufficient, might not be quite the sample size companies are looking for today. As emphasis shifts away from traditional scorecard metrics like AHT and towards direct customer feedback, the amount (in addition to the quality) of survey data becomes increasingly valuable. For example, for companies that tie survey results back to pay for performance or scheduling preferences a bigger sample is required to safeguard against outlier data and accumulate enough responses on a rep-level consistently.

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Let’s talk about something that is familiar to all of us in the customer service world – Average Handle Time (AHT). Since the inception of the contact center, this metric has existed to help track productivity and ensure rep accountability. In the old world, where issues were (usually) simple and the primary goal was to maximize the number of calls handled, AHT was a wonderful tool that served a very good purpose. But as that world changed, we now find ourselves in a wholly different era of customer needs—and maybe it’s time to reevaluate some of these age-old practices.

This is a time in our industry that we at CCC have coined “customer service era 2.0.” In it, issues are increasingly complex and customer expectations are growing. While customers previously wanted fast resolution of simple issues, today there is a call for customized handling of any and all problems. What this means for the reps is a growing need for them to deliver valuable, personalized, and flexible service to their customers. Customer satisfaction is no longer dependent solely on the quickness of issue resolution, but on quality of that resolution as well.

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