You may recall Nick’s post in May about a new threshold recently crossed in the United States: cell phones were, for the first time, being used more for data exchange than for voice services. At the time, Nick pondered what the role of service should be in the increasingly data-heavy mobile world—what exactly IS our opportunity here?  Nick’s hypothesis, in essence, was that although a few companies have launched innovative service apps, executives should be prudent in their strategies: 

“While many companies don’t interact with customers on a frequent enough basis to warrant a dedicated app, increasing consideration should be given to mobile-friendly versions of self-service portals. Yes, it’s time for a bare-boned version featuring the most frequent transaction types. Conventional sites are simply too slow to load and cumbersome to navigate via smartphone.”

The story picks up steam with the recently published results of a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, which adds new clarity to Nick’s post.  Pew’s survey examined mobile app adoption among American adults, and based on the results, it seems that the recommendations Nick laid out in May were spot on.

How does this latest data confirm Nick’s advice to proceed with caution for service-dedicated apps?  I’d turn to two conclusions: Read More »

This is a guest post by Vanessa North of the  Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications leaders and their teams. While applicable to all employees in a company, it’s got some great tips for contact centers whose employees are contantly multi-tasking with technology as they work with customers.

I  just got back from a glorious ten days in Croatia (which by the way, I would HIGHLY recommend– totally beautiful and so far, unspoiled) and now that I’m back, I am noticing more than ever the constant bombardment of information, emails, & instant messages that distract me from doing any true thinking.  Matt Richtel has coined the term the “three-day effect” when you are away from all technology and distraction.  After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds.  This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to relaxing and then get pulled back to reality with a thump.

The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times per hour.  Think of what that means in terms of how much information that you are subjecting yourself to on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder we hear, “I haven’t had time to think” so often.  It is only when you actually stop reading and taking in new information that you can sit back and really think what it all means, and actually process it.  By constantly rushing from one idea to the next without giving ourselves the time to think, we aren’t giving ourselves time to know what we really think.  I’m probably not the only one who sits there and has revelations when I’m on holiday.  You realize opinions you never knew you had.  You make life-changing decisions (or at least come up with the ideas for them).  In short, you think.

So as companies are striving to add more channels to reach their employees from all angles– are we actually doing more harm than good?  Read More »

For those of us in the service industry, there are a few phrases that are so common we don’t even think twice about them.  When was the last time you pondered the meaning of “This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes”?  Or have you ever thought that the question “Have I fully resolved your issue today?” might not actually be customer-friendly?

Well, sometimes it’s a good idea to approach something familiar from a new angle.  In CCC’s most recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog, Matt Dixon and I explored a few common call center statements (including those mentioned above) through the lens of customer centricity.  Just how customer-centric are modern corporations?  We argue that you needn’t look beyond the call center for the answer.

Read the full HBR post

My favorite American football team, the Washington Redskins, is preparing to kick-off the 2010 season with a new coach, Mike Shanahan.  Mr. Shanahan was hired earlier this year to replace Jim Zorn, who was fired last year after coaching for only two seasons.  Mr. Zorn’s successful career as a player (he was a quarterback in the National Football League and threw for over 20,000 yards during his career), however, was not a very good predictor of his success as a coach: in two seasons as head coach the Redskins were an abysmal 12-20, including an embarrassing 4-12 last year.

How could a former player, someone who seemingly knows the game so well, fail miserably as a coach?  Well, like brokerage statements say: Past performance is not an indication of future success. Read More »

It’s a focus for every company: How to prevent customer churn?

Following the philosophy that customers are easier to retain than they are to convert, over the past decade, companies have created escalation “saves” desks manned by staff empowered to do almost anything (read: offer discounts, refunds, or other financial incentives) to retain a customer once the customer says the magic words, “I’m leaving your company.”

The only catch is the cost to run these “saves” operations.  Not to mention the looming question whether such moves actually drive long-term, quality relationships with customers (or merely set precedent for customers to argue for major discounts year after year).

So how to save customers without having to offer sweet monetary incentives?  Certainly many companies have built comprehensive, predictive models to identify potential customer churn.  Such models of course can be helpful, but these models are resource intensive, and many organizations fall short in how they execute on the intelligence—they’re often too late.

In fact, it’s not just about modeling customer proclivity for disloyalty but proactively reaching out to customers before they actually become disloyal.

Read More »

On my daily browse of the New York Times, I ran across an article listing the biggest pet peeves for consumers.  I had a sneaking suspicion that customer service would make it on this list, and as the title of this post infers, we did.  The comment on the service experience went as follows:

ENOUGH AFTER-CALL SURVEYS!
“You call, say, an airline for a reservation, and after navigating the monkey bars that stand between you and a human being, a recording asks if you can stay on the line once the call is completed and take a brief survey about the experience.  The answer is no. If the point is for Company X to improve its customer rep system, it is probably recording and “monitoring” those conversations, as we are often reminded by the same automated voice. So the company should eavesdrop on its own time without asking to take up any more of ours.”

The experience described above represents an unfortunate, but common, sentiment that could be dismissed as simply a rant.  But, what I find interesting about the complaint above is it shows how customers don’t always appreciate the different purposes and value between the IVR for routing vs. the IVR for surveys. Read More »

An article about remote reps caught my eye recently.  According to the article, remote reps amount to 7% of the total call center worker population in 2009, and the group is expected to grow by as much as 19% per year.  CCC’s data from its benchmarking database is strong as well, with about 13% of the companies surveyed using remote reps.

No doubt about it…and in case you’re still wondering…remote reps are here to stay.  Stories of “failed” programs are rare, and most companies have very positive experiences.  Commonly cited outcomes (when compared to brick and mortar operations) include:

• Better customer survey scores
• Higher productivity
• Lower turnover
• Environmentally friendly (This is a new one…we’ve recently heard some organizations publicize remote programs as a “green” initiative to cut the company’s carbon footprint—because fewer people are driving to work.)

CCC members, learn more about our remote rep research.

These benefits are great, but almost all of them are highly dependent on the reps you choose to staff the program.  If you hire the wrong type of rep, you’re investing time and resources into people likely to leave the job or, worse yet, stick around and be entirely unproductive.  When hiring remote reps, here are some things to consider: Read More »

A friend of mine, a librarian, just changed jobs.  At her old place of employment, she spent her last few weeks updating guidelines and refreshing handbooks, training her replacement so the transition would be seamless.  But, several weeks into her new job she still gets e-mails from her replacement asking questions (“What’s our inter-library book sharing policy for new books?” or “What if I get a request for a publication we don’t get?”)  She shared her frustrations with me, and wondered if there was anything she should have done differently to upskill her replacement before she left.

My answer? More or less, no.  The answer wasn’t a better transition plan, it’s a better knowledge management approach.  My biggest clue here was that she manually updated everything before she left – trying to cram all her tribal knowledge into the handbook after the fact, rather than updating the handbooks and guidelines in real time as things changed.  Of course she forgot to include things, especially if they weren’t everyday occurrences. 

The same can be said for the contact center.  There’s so much knowledge floating around about the latest product or the best way to handle a customer issue, but it’s not always in our frontline rep-facing knowledge base.  Or perhaps the information is in there, but is not up-to-date or is poorly written.

The answer for many service organization is to invest in the latest knowledge management technology.  And while technology plays an important role, I’ve come to believe the emphasis should be placed on the people and processes of knowledge management.  I’ve seen highly sophisticated knowledge management technologies fall short of their goals because the company had poor processes to support the technology. Read More »

Ever wonder how much of an impact “the little things” have on the customer experience?  Although many customer contact organizations are awash in data, most do not have the luxury of conducting scientific testing to find the answer to that question.  Until recently, CCC hadn’t conducted any tests either.  But, we had an opportunity this year to deploy a simple A/B test to test the impact of different rep behaviors on the customer experience.

In our experiments, both test groups received the same problem—and at the end of the day everyone got the same resolution outcome.  The only difference was the rep response. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Victoria Koval of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales  leaders and their teams. It builds on Jacob’s popular post that discusses ways to eliminate the word ‘no’ from your rep’s vocabulary.)

Think about how many times and ways a customer says “no”… There is the “matter-of-fact no” ( I am not interested in this offer); there is the “no-without-no” (I’ll contact you myself when I am ready to make a decision);   there is the “passing-the-buck no”  (The decision is out of my hands now); there is the “maybe-yes no” (I’ll have to check my calendar) and the “restraining-order no” (For the last time, no).

While searching for more examples (and for my own amusement), I Googled “how to say no.” As I looked through the more than 206,000,000 results, I learned how to say NO in over 520 languages and how to come up with 100 Excuses to Say No (my favorite one: “because my subconscious says no”).

The all-mighty Internet taught me how to say no to bosses, relatives, friends, co-workers and pushy sales people, but it had little to say about how to push back on customers.  Is that because we’ve been brainwashed that the customer is always right?

Maybe…But, unless you’re running a charitable foundation, saying no is a critical skill, especially now. In the current economy, customers feel entitled to more discounts, more customization and less risk, and they don’t hesitate to ask for more.     Read More »