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

Read More »

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 »

Have you ever been browsing the Internet for self-service answers or awaiting an e-mail response from customer support, when instead you decide to turn to your social media chat platform of choice (e.g., Facebook, Google Chat, AOL Instant Messenger) to find a real-time answer from (who else)—your online friends! With the technology’s popularity expected to grow to 1.7 billion users by 2013, companies too are exploring (and, in many cases, already trying out) web chat as a customer support channel to save on phone and e-mail costs while capitalizing on the customers’ growing comfort with online chat in general.

And while chat can be a great tool to interact with friends, does it truly fulfill its promise of cost-savings and improved online customer experience as a service and support channel? 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)

When it comes to segmentation, choosing the right scheme is just the beginning. You must then make it work.

Over the past four months, I spoke with service leaders across industries to understand their challenges to segmentation. Many were concerned about executing a chosen strategy:

Would it require extensive – sometimes impossible – resource investments?

Would they need complex CRM or routing technologies?

Is it even possible to deliver segmented service without rep specialists or tiered staffing models?

Much of the time, these concerns are valid. Segmentation can be expensive. Take, for example, a segmentation approach that tailors service to customers’ value to the company. High-value customers are often routed to better-skilled (or even dedicated) agents, offered personalized web features, and bumped to the front of call queues. To provide this level of high-touch service, resource investment is surely required.

So what happens if you’re constrained by budgets? Are you out of luck if you don’t have the time or money to put into a scheme like that? Read More »

My two girls are close in age to one another, and they often get invited to the same birthday parties.  But, there are those occasions where one gets invited and the other doesn’t, and what follows is usually something along the lines of:

Daughter: “I want to go to the party, too.”

Me: “I know you do, but you weren’t invited to this party.  You’ll get invited to other parties, though.”

Daughter:  “But I really want to go to this one.”

Me: “I understand, but we can’t just show up at the door and expect them to let us in with open arms.”

And strangely enough I’ve found myself having a similar conversation with a number of business-to-business (B2B) companies in recent months.  More and more B2B service organizations are trying to discover how to better partner with their colleagues (especially in Sales) and are finding that they haven’t been invited to the party.  How come?

Read More »

This is the second 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 part one here.

New Year’s observation: If there’s anything longer than the line at the (bar) (buffet line) (dessert table) in December…it’s the line at the (gym) (health club) (Weight Watchers’ meeting) in January.

‘Tis the season to resolve.

If your quest for the new year is to drop a few holiday-induced L-B-S’s…the best advice I’ve ever heard is, “Write down everything you eat during the course of the day.”  Turns out that simply training your brain to become hyper-aware of how many unnecessary calories we each consume every day is the “trigger” to kickstart a whole new mental process, that ultimately makes you eat less, and lose weight.  (BTW, 45 minutes a day on the treadmill ain’t gonna kill ya either, pal!)

But if your resolution for 2012 is to create an even greater customer experience at your company, here’s a small piece of friendly advice that will similarly trigger a new mental process for you and your entire team. It’s a matter of eliminating one simple phrase from your everyday vocabulary.  It’s not a phrase that sounds harmful at any level (in fact, when you use it, you probably think you’re doing something positive). But if you stop using it (although it’ll be hard at first), many amazing things will happen.

Stop saying, “the customer.”

I mean, we say that all the time.  We ALL do.  We all talk about how important it is to listen to the customer. To treat the customer with respect. To reduce the effort the customer has to put forth to resolve their issue.

But here’s where we need to re-wire our brains. ‘Cause there’s no such thing as THE customer. Read More »

IVRs are, in many ways, a necessary evil of the customer contact world.  No one is going to readily say that they love interacting with even the best of the IVRs.  After all, when customers call, they are typically ready to speak with someone.  So it is no surprise to us at CCC that so many member companies ask for advice on how to improve their current IVR structures.  And while every system is unique and our feedback can vary significantly from company to company, there are always a few common themes that pop up.  And in the spirit of avoiding the reinvention of the wheel, I wanted to share with you all some of the most common pointers we discuss with members.

1. Be Concise: This applies not only to your menu options, but also to things that I’ll call “filler language”.  Even by cutting out the “please” before each “please press X to do Y” will shave time off of the customer IVR experience.
2. Avoid “Our Menu Items Have Changed”: Unless a significant portion your customers call so frequently (I’m thinking weekly, maybe monthly) that they would absolutely notice a change, most customers will not know the difference.  Moreover, hearing that announcement will often times turn these customers off to the entire IVR experience, feeling as though they are being “tricked” into staying in the system. Read More »

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.

Read More »

Customer voice (VOC) is an extremely powerful tool.  It’s not just the raw customer voice, but the trends and data it can contain.  Anything from a break in a process flow to an emerging customer need for a new product could be just at your fingertips.

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. Read More »