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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Customer Service News

• Colleges make an effort to support students through Twitter, but is it working? [US News and World Report]
• Canon’s guide for improving customer support [PCWorld]
• Zappos’s service reputation tarnished by upgrade problems- how even a customer service leader is sometimes not perfect [Reuters]
• When—and when not— to use social media as a support channel [Unified Communications Strategies]
• Domino’s completely transparent service proposition improves company earnings [Bloomberg]
• Sears Holdings announces rollout of handheld devices for customer service [PR Newswire]

Here in the customer service world, we know that the voice of the customer is paramount. To understand the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, or improve frontline performance, it’s necessary to first understand what the customers are thinking. And the best way to do that is to simply ask. When customers visit a Web site, send them a pop-up survey invitation. If customers visit a store, give them a receipt survey. For customers who call frontline staff, follow up with a phone survey.

And while this constant mining for information is invaluable, is it possible that the customers are over-surveyed? In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this issue is specifically addressed. On college campuses today, students are bombarded by surveys from every direction, and as a result the response rate of students has fallen from 70% to 20% just within the last two decades. This interesting trend has brought about the concept of survey fatigue, the theory that too many invitations for surveys can overwhelm, or fatigue, a person and result in lower survey quality and decrease response rates.

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Search for the term “cloud” on the Internet, and the first obligatory Wikipedia page you’ll see won’t describe “a visible mass of liquid droplets,” but rather “the delivery of computing as a service.” It’s true—the cloud has descended upon us (pun intended). From TV commercials featuring “To the Cloud!” slogans to advertisements showing entire cityscapes floating in clouds, it seems like cloud computing is everywhere. But what do we actually know about the cloud? Keep reading to learn a little about the history of the technology, different types of clouds (no, not cumulus and stratus), some key offerings that make this technology different—and what the implications are for customer service.

Although cloud computing has just recently become the new buzz phrase, the concept dates back to the invention of computers. In the 1960s, computer scientists theorized the idea of cloud computing by envisioning online platforms with infinite and elastic supply. In the decades ensuing, technology has advanced from virtual private networks to enterprise applications, until the Web 2.0 era brought the browser-based cloud applications that exist today.

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In my twenty-minute morning commute to work, I encounter at least twenty advertisements by ten different banks. They’re pasted on the sides of the bus I take, splashed on the back of sidewalk benches, and interjected into the stream of my Internet radio.

And for good reason, too. According to research firm McKinsey, there has been a recorded 40% decline in loyalty among financial customers within the last four years. With so many banks touting such wide varieties of services—mobile banking, rewards points, free giveaways, and (most recently) top-notch security guarantees backed by ATMs with built-in lie detectors —there is more reason than ever to shop for the best bank.

However, while customers are becoming less loyal and more savvy in their decision-making process, they are not being swayed easily by advertisements. For example, research shows that urban adults in India are more like to follow the recommendations of friends and peers, evaluate banks for their specific service offerings, and consider the availability of the bank’s financial analysts. Read More »

I moved to DC a little more than a month ago, and I can’t even tell you how many different bars, restaurants, and salons I’ve tried. And who’s to blame me? With dozens of Groupon-like deals flooding my inbox every morning, my attention and loyalty are at an all-time low. But what happened to the idea of being a “regular” at an establishment? Has that gone out the door in this era of large data and choice, or am I alone in my unfaithfulness to stores and brands?

Interestingly, research conducted on customer loyalty shows that my behavior is a part of a larger trend: loyalty varies widely by demographic, and a person’s age and occupation can be a strong predictor of their purchasing behavior. Knowing this relationship—and more importantly, understanding its causes—can have important implications on how you engage with customers.

So here’s what the research said:

More mature age groups are significantly more loyal than younger counterparts.  When behavioral loyalty (as measured by the number of other like-service providers the customer visited in the past two years) and repurchase intention are considered among a diverse age group, those who are more mature (ages 35-54 and 55+) exhibit significantly more loyal behavior than those who are younger (18-24 and 25-34). This finding can be attributed to three age-dependent reasons.

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