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 »

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 »

In unstable economic times, it has become especially important for financial services companies to focus more attention on serving their customers.

Given the unique issues that customer service professionals in the Financial Services industry face – including customer privacy and financial risk regulations – it can be difficult to know what CCC resources would be most helpful.

Wondering what others in your industry are reading? Here is a list of the CCC resources that your industry peers are downloading most often.

Top 3 CCC Resources for Financial Services Customer Service Professionals

1. Engineering a Low-Effort Customer Experience

What it is: A popular CCC download, this research outlines the most effective, up-to-date strategies for customer effort reduction.  In today’s competitive banking landscape, differentiating the customer experience may be a great way to win and retain customers.

Why your peers use it:

• To understand the sources of customer effort.
• To identify ways to reduce both the objective and subjective sides of effort.
• To coach frontline reps to employ techniques to reduce “in-the-moment” customer effort.

You might also be interested in: The Customer Effort Score – a customer experience metric that accounts for ease of customer interaction during a service request. CCC research has found that this is the most accurate measure of loyalty in a service organization.  Read More »

With all of our available resources, it can be tough to know where to begin—so why not get started with some fan-favorites?

We compiled a list of the most downloaded CCC resources that your peers in the Utilities industry are using to help them excel at their jobs.

Here are a few must-reads to add to your list:

Top 3 CCC Resources for Utilities Customer Service Professionals

1. Coaching Starter Guide

What it is: CCC’s most popular download, this tool provides supervisors and coaching staff with detailed guidelines for conducting coaching interactions.

Why your peers use it: Read More »

If your workplace is anything like mine, then I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “my new year’s resolution this year is to…stop eating chocolate…stop drinking soda…start exercising more…”  It seems like everybody resolves to trim a few pounds off this year (and every year).  I started applying that idea to service organizations and thought of a few places where trimming a few pounds (note to readers in the UK: that pun was not intended) could yield some hefty cost savings.

The most strategic answer to lowering costs is to reduce call volume, because it also likely means customers are finding resolution with fewer calls or they’re simply using self-service.  On a more operational level, though, there are many gains to be had in daily efficiency, which are most evident by looks at the individual cost components for each call.  When I do cost analysis for our annual benchmarking survey, it’s always apparent that rep labor is the most costly component ($4.51 of the $7.67 cost per call is rep labor).  Knowing that, it’s important to break rep labor down even further to see exactly what you’re paying, so here are the four main components: Read More »

We’re now in full swing of that time of year when busy executives frantically try to cross items off of to do lists and hold last minute 2011 planning meetings.  All while maintaining solid end-of-quarter performance (and squeezing in time for a family vacation).

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships. Read More »

“What are the trends in customer service?”  If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that question, then I’d be a rich[er] man.  Joking aside, this question is constantly on the mind of contact center executives, and for good reason.  Keeping up with peers is important, especially when customer service is increasingly a feature of your brand.

We featured a webinar this summer on customer service trends, which includes things as adapting QA programs to better align with customers and incorporating VOC in a more actionable way.  These types of trends are what we hear through conversation over the years, but one resource I find interesting to use for surfacing trends is our benchmarking database (for CCC members), which is now five years old.  For its fifth birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to see what has changed since 2005. Read More »

I’m 35, balding & overweight.  So, I recently decided to get a grip on the one attribute over which I have considerable control (and, no, I didn’t get hair plugs).  I began exercising, and I hired a personal trainer to assist me through my “get-in-shape” journey.

My trainer is providing me with guidance on where I can get better (shed some unwanted weight), and how specifically to do that (which exercises to perform, along with a proper diet). 

And this kind of guidance is exactly the same sort of help many contact center leaders are looking for now that the 2011 planning season is under way.  Interestingly enough, though, few companies have an effective way to identify and narrow their list of potential initiatives for the coming year.   

Instead, often companies have “strategic” brainstorming sessions resulting in a laundry list of initiatives to tackle.  This list includes “pet projects” and well known opportunity areas, but often doesn’t reveal what to tackle first, and rarely uncovers previously unknown opportunity areas.  It’s similar to a person in my situation (wanting to get in better shape) going about it without a plan or a solid understanding of what to improve/how to make those improvements.  Read More »

As CCC’s resident benchmarking expert, I thoroughly enjoy looking at customer data.  I find it to be one of the most interesting parts of what we do in the service environment.  Of course, the challenge here is how to analyze the data and come up with conclusions that match with true customer needs.

I believe we have a tendency to look at individual data points in relative isolation (for example, tracking higher handle times or lower resolution rates) which can lead to a myopic point of view that doesn’t take into consideration the context of that data point, nor connect with what the customer is actually experiencing.

Instead, I’ve found that every data point has a rich story behind it – a story that better explains what customers actually need to have a positive customer experience (as opposed to what they may say at any singular time).

The key is to recognize the difference here – and to dig a little deeper to get a true understanding of the customer.
Read More »

By Dan Clay

“What level of cost savings can we expect after offshoring?”  It’s a question I get a lot.  The unsatisfying answer: “It depends.”  AT Kearney recently released a fascinating exploration into why.  In their Offshore Success Study, AT Kearney gathered data from 35 offshoring companies and analyzed what differences explain the drastic variability in performance across the high performers (who averaged 64% savings and often improved service quality) and the low performers (who only had an 18% average savings).

What’s responsible for this difference?  The Offshore Success Study finds that “execution strategy” – how you handle the transition – is more influential in determining success than variables like offshore location or process complexity.  In short, how you offshore matters more than where or what you offshore:

• Winners don’t focus on savings. The best performers emphasize improving operational performance rather than generating savings (and paradoxically achieve greater savings in the process!).
• Winners invest more to save more. Companies investing more in managing their offshore programs (bigger management teams, more internal on-site resources, strong cultural integration) achieve better performance and savings results.  The best performers had one onshore manager for 50 to 75 offshore FTEs (a ratio that may improve after the operation has stabilized).

So how do you become one of the ‘winners’ – one of those companies with the right execution strategy?  I would have three pieces of advice for someone transitioning to a new offshore location. Read More »