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 third 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 and two.

The ideal New Year’s resolution is meant to improve upon or fix a problem that existed for you the previous year.  On the surface, it can be easy to see what your organization needs to resolve to do, but there are often deeper issues at play.  The key is to identify and fix the root causes of your problems, rather than focusing on the outward symptoms of them.  The tools we’ve designed the perfect resource for jump-starting your year and finding targeted areas of improvement where your organization needs it most.  Here’s a short list of some of CCC’s top audit tools and assessments: Read More »

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 »

CCC’s Annual Operational Benchmarking Survey is one of the staples of our membership.  Many organizations participate year-over-year to better understand where their performance stack up to their industry peers.  Having a consistently measured set of benchmarks is the best way to obtain an accurate depiction of your performance.  Opening up again in January 2012, this survey will help you answer the most pressing questions you have on the three main dimensions tracked by typical service organizations: Read More »

Note: this is the first post in a two-part series on rep development. In this post, we’ll discuss the methods that leading organizations are using to upskill their reps; the next installment will address the key skills that drive performance in today’s service organizations.

With the holiday rush just around the corner and many organizations preparing to add seasonal staff, we’ve been hearing a lot from CCC members in recent weeks about a topic that’s familiar to just about everyone in the service organization: training.

Whether its finding the right hours to conduct training sessions or determining appropriate compensation for reps during onboarding training, creating an effective training program is important to be sure—but enhancing training effectiveness isn’t as easy as one might think. As service organizations prepare for the coming months and plan for 2012, we’re revisiting some of CCC’s best insights when it comes to training:

1)      Training Isn’t Good for Everything
While training can be used to quickly and effectively introduce staff to information related to new products, it’s not well suited for upskilling staff in most other areas—including call handling techniques, interpersonal skills, or knowledge management. In fact, training in these areas can actually have a negative impact on team performance. Read More »

The price of waiting for service– and why that matters now more than ever [USA Today]

Forrester’s Healthcare Online Survey reveals low customer satisfaction with the cross-channel service experience [1to1Media]

Social media study reveals large retailers are missing customer complaints [SFGate]

Whaleback Systems introduces cloud-based solution for small-to-medium enterprises [MarketWatch]

For companies, customer service could be a useful marketing tool [AdvertisingAge]

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.

Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

We all know the importance of good coaching—after all, unlike classroom training, coaching is one-on-one and needs to be tailored to who is being coached.

But, when filling these leadership roles, how can you predict if someone will be a good coach if you haven’t seen them do it first?

Most companies forecast a rep’s performance as a team leader based solely on their past experience, because it is concrete and quantifiable. The problem with this is that the skills required to be an effective leader differ significantly from the skills of successful reps—and the characteristics of a good leader are not clearly visible.

Avis Europe came up with a process to circumvent this problem by identifying those reps with the most coaching and leadership potential. The company builds a strong “bench” of reps by upskilling reps through a structured development program, and then certifying them as ready for leadership roles as the positions become available.  Avis’s three-stage strategy involves:

1. Promotion evaluation based on performance as a rep
2. An intensive coaching and leadership competency assessment
3. A year-long leader immersion program

CCC members, learn more about Avis Europe’s coach pre-certification program through this new summary of insights.

• Need even more proof to improve your self-service channels? Consumer spending on digital goods is approaching spending on equivalent physical goods. [Mobile Marketing Magazine]
• Social networking is beginning to reach the saturation point, according to a recent report. [eMarketer]
• Can you do meaningful market research on Twitter? According to this post, yes (but we’re skeptical) [SmartBrief]
• Dubai may require newly hired taxi drivers to have training in customer service. [The National]
• Culture should not be treated as a soft topic – it can be a powerful tool for governing an organization. [Harvard Business Review]
• High-profile failures might signify the end of “silly” social media. [AdAge]

Like many of the young professionals my age, I work in a cubicle.  This isn’t an ideal situation, but at least it gives me an incentive to work up to an office some day.  Given the limitations of working in a cubicle, I’ve been forced to make the most of the space I’ve been allotted.  I don’t take it completely for granted, though, because I likely have more space than most customer service representatives (reps, on average, have 40% less space than other functions provide).

It is thus important to make the most of what you’re provided, so here are some strategies I would recommend to improve the use of space within your organization and enable reps to perform their best: Read More »