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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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 »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »

It’s been a great 2011 at CCC as we teamed up with our members to help them address a year’s worth of challenges. We’ve already looked forward and shared our predictions for what 2012 will hold for service organizations, so here is a look back at our best research published in the past year. We’re hoping this list will help you refocus your priorities for the New Year and aid in your planning for a successful 2012!

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance—when we heard from our members that rep performance was stalling despite continued investments in talent, we decided to take a closer look at what drives performance in the service organization today. What did we find? While traditional skill sets are still important, most reps were missing a crucial piece of the rep performance puzzle—one that has more than twice the impact on performance as any other factor. We call this set of skills and behaviors the Control Quotient (CQ), which quantifies a rep’s ability to exercise ownership over their day-to-day work, as well as to remain in control over themselves in stressful situations. In today’s quality-driven world, CQ is the number one lever that companies can pull to boost performance in their frontline. Read More »

Note: this is the second post in a three-part blog series on business-to-consumer segmentation. In this post, we will address the importance of setting goals for segmentation. Read the previous post on common B2C segmentation schemes and stay tuned to learn how to resource against segment needs.

Effective customer segmentation helps B2C companies achieve a number of service goals, such as:

• Increase revenues by driving customer retention
• Improve the customer experience
• Reduce costs by reducing call volume and/or callbacks
• Strengthen customer relationships
• Identify and maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

Given all these potential benefits, it might be tempting to jump right into a segmentation scheme.  Sounds like it could only help an organization, right?

Not so fast.

Our latest research on B2C segmentation finds that many companies dive into segmentation without first defining the goal of their efforts. As a result, many fail to see the ROI of their programs – or worse, they segment customers incorrectly (and actually harm the customer experience) or increase their own costs to serve. Read More »

A recent blog post on Harvard Business Review titled, “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” was unfortunately very relatable.  The core of the article explored how business conversations have evolved into bits of nonsense (e.g., “synergy”, ”value-add”) that make understanding each other much more of a challenge than anything else.  For example, we all fall victim to the excessive use of acronyms from time to time.  And while I find myself a culprit in using a lot of acronyms, I could relate to something else in the piece as well, as its description ties perfectly to research we’ve produced here at CCC:

Another term that has lost its meaning is ‘Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.’ …Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a [hotel] a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, ‘Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.’  The best way to start would be to take down that sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do…”

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Rep scorecards.   Shortly after the creation of the service organization came the creation of the rep scorecard, and with good reason, too.  In an effort to boost frontline performance service executives measure and report everything from calls answered to quality scores to sales performance.  But how about issue resolution?  Do you report that on your reps’ scorecards, and more importantly, should you?  That’s the question my colleague and I aimed to answer when we renewed our friendly debate. 

Let it begin:

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When you rub elbows with customer service execs from 400 different companies every day you hear a lot of issues and challenges that group together into common themes.  Some of the most common:

• How can we reduce our costs, without damaging the customer experience?
• Is there a way to create a consistent customer experience across multiple channels?
• What’s the best way to create customer loyalty?

There are a few different ways to word these questions — i.e, loyalty, satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth. However, there’s one group of questions that inevitably start with the same exact words:

How can we get our employees…

(to create a better service experience?) (become more engaged?) (be more efficient?) (go the extra mile for customers?)

Of all those words, the one that jumps out is “get.” How can we GET our employees…?

Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing a lot of work this past year in the areas of human behavioral reinforcement and employee psychology, and what I’ve been learning is that…

…you…can’t. You (as a leader) can’t GET anyone to do anything that they don’t want to do. Read More »

Note: this is the first post in a three-part blog series on business-to-consumer segmentation. In this post, we will address the five most common B2C segmentation strategies. Stay tuned in the coming weeks to learn more about the importance of setting goals for segmentation and resourcing against segment needs.

This fall, we introduced you to CCC’s latest research initiative on business-to-consumer (B2C) customer segmentation strategies. CCC members, the wait is over—we’re happy to announce the publication of this new research on our website.

Though segmentation has traditionally been a sales and marketing tactic, we find that many customer service organizations also started to segment customers to differentiate support offerings. B2B service organizations led the way, but B2C companies are not far behind. 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.

Consumer review websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have made their names by providing a place for everyday consumers to play the role of the critic, and people seem to have few qualms when it comes to sharing their opinions about a recent vacation or night out on the town. But until recently, most of this peer-generated feedback has existed on third-party websites—with the reviews of a company’s products and services far removed from its corporate website.

Emerging Trends
That trend, however, is changing as more and more companies are looking at customer feedback—both positive and negative—in a new light and realizing the value that consumers place on peer reviews.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts, for example, has eliminated the need for customers to visit third-party websites by incorporating guest reviews right on its own website. Read More »