Consumer behaviors have changed in many ways coming out of the recession and in today’s time of economic uncertainty.  Some say consumers are more price sensitive and less loyal to brands – others talk about customers who demand more for less.

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. Read More »

The latest trend in learning and development?  Incorporating videogame techniques into the workplace (i.e.,“gamification”) for training and other often menial tasks.

Companies like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte all have used gaming technology to better engage employees in training and data entry and make the tasks seem less tedious and more resonant.

What they have found is that winning virtual badges (indicating an advance to the next level) and interacting in entertaining landscapes and backgrounds (unsurprisingly) actually is far more engaging (for millennials and boomers) than sitting in a classroom for hours on end listening to someone.  And in some studies, videogames even yield better knowledge retention (some research finds that if learning is not put into action within 2 weeks, staff lose that knowledge).

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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 »

I’m not ashamed to admit it (although I probably should be!) — during my school-age years, whenever I was forced to read some piece of classic literature, my first thought was always, “Lemme see if there’s a movie based on this book, cause I’d rather watch THAT instead of reading some stupid book.”

While that may have seemed like a clever strategy at age 12, as I reflect back today at age (insert higher number here) it’s obvious that as Mrs. Bierbauer often said, it turns out “I was only cheating myself.”

And so, while I may never fully appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Madame Bovary and Pride and Prejudice I do at least remember one story from the movie version of Tom Sawyer that keeps coming back to me as a lesson we should all apply in managing big Customer Service teams:

The best ideas are the ones that people come up with themselves — although sometimes we have to create the occasion FOR them to come up with those ideas. Read More »

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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“You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success – or are they holding you back?”
~         W. Clement Stone

Do you want to work in an environment where your leadership trusts you to make decisions, where you have a clear vision of how your daily activity impacts the organization’s goals & where you’re encouraged to share ideas with your peers without a watchful eye peering down on your every move?  Of course you do!

And your frontline staff does, too.  Unfortunately though, as Mr. Stone poses in the quote above, many organizations are holding their frontline staff back because of the environmental conditions that are in place.  And these environmental conditions are creating an outcome that no one wants: employee disengagement. Read More »

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 »

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.

What if you found out your neighbor spends less money on his energy bill than you? Would you conserve?

OPower sure hopes so. The software company has partnered with several utilities to send homeowners a report card that tracks their home energy use and compares it with that of 100 nearby households. Colorful charts show customers how their energy use compares with the neighborhood’s average, as well as with its most efficient users.  Smiley faces are used as a success measure – so if you get two smiley faces, you know you’re the most energy savvy home on the block.

If you’re underperforming, the report card offers tips, adjusted for peak and off-peak seasons, on how to reduce energy consumption. By encouraging a neighborhood contest, customers have incentive to act on the advice.

Sure, the idea spurs competition and motivates energy conservation. But how does this impact the contact center? Read More »

Our parent company, the Corporate Executive Board, recently released some guidance about managing information and data.  Turns out, one out of three executives aren’t getting the insight they need to make good business decisions.  This ‘Insight Deficit’ can be turned around…but it’s not about more data.  It’s about combining data with judgment to make good decisions.

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. Read More »

When we released our Annual Operational Benchmarking Results last year, I wrote about trends we’ve seen over the past five years across our entire data set.  This year, rather than look at longitudinal differences, I’d like to feature some differences I noticed across different data segments.  Part of my motivation for doing this is to highlight the added functionality we have in this year’s version of our benchmarking tool, which now allows you to combine benchmarking categories to find the most applicable benchmarks. Read More »