It is January 10, 2012, and hopefully by now you’ve been able to dig out of your inboxes.

To help you prepare for the year ahead, CCC’s research and advisory team is putting its heads together to give you some additional perspective on areas of opportunity we see across a variety of companies—fresh ideas on how to enhance the customer experience and improve operational performance.

The intent here is not to increase your workload, of course, but to give you additional perspective on continuing to improve your service and support operations in the year ahead.

So let me start here with the recommendation of a relatively simple tweak: Ensure that all staff know how to navigate your company’s website.

It is a basic idea, but conversations with numerous service and support organizations reveal that most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.

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 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 »

When I have a question about the best way to do something, more often than not my first step is to ask a peer for help. Not only are my peers the most likely people to know what I’m going through and have the right answer, but they’re also the most convenient, comfortable source of knowledge to which I have access.

Unlike me, though, the typical rep in today’s service organization doesn’t have too many opportunities to learn from his or her peers; in fact, given the time constraints and scheduled nature of the call center, peer-to-peer learning—when it happens at all—tends to occur in an informal, ad hoc fashion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it highlights an opportunity to introduce some more structure to the peer support that’s already taking place. And with more structured support, we can not only help avoid some of the potentially negative effects of unstructured peer support (for example, reps unknowingly sharing bad information with one another), but also:

1)      Decrease the burden on supervisors, who reps most frequently turn to for support in the absence of a helpful, accessible peer.

2)      Tap into an existing need for reps to connect with and support their peers.

3)      Develop coaching skills in reps, preparing them to fill future supervisor, coach, and leadership positions.

In short—there are some BIG benefits to be realized by creating the right conditions for effective peer-to-peer support in today’s service organization. Read More »

The latest trend in learning and development?  Incorporating videogame techniques into the workplace (i.e.,“gamification”) for training and other often menial tasks.

Companies like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte all have used gaming technology to better engage employees in training and data entry and make the tasks seem less tedious and more resonant.

What they have found is that winning virtual badges (indicating an advance to the next level) and interacting in entertaining landscapes and backgrounds (unsurprisingly) actually is far more engaging (for millennials and boomers) than sitting in a classroom for hours on end listening to someone.  And in some studies, videogames even yield better knowledge retention (some research finds that if learning is not put into action within 2 weeks, staff lose that knowledge).

Read More »

Across the last several years, CCC has published quite a few pieces of research that explore the ideas of customer loyalty and customer effort.  To put things into an extremely simple nutshell, here are a few points to bear in mind as you continue to read:

First, the best thing a service organization can do is to provide a low-effort customer experience

Second, there are two ways you can reduce customer effort:

1. What a customer does (repeat contacts, repeating information, getting transferred, filling out forms).  This is an area influenced by service leadership, and we’ve blogged about ideas on how to reduce effort previously.
2. How a customer feels (literally, a subjective perception of the effort involved in the customer experience).  Interestingly, there are specific skills—what we call experience engineering—that can actively manage, even influence, customer perception, and this is in the hands of your frontline staff.  More importantly, this is an area that is two-thirds the overall impact of customer effort, yet only a small portion of companies are thinking about how to reduce this softer side of effort.

So why don’t companies try to reduce the “feel” side of effort? Primarily because it sounds rather hard to do at first glance.  We are talking about influencing perceptions here…and while it’s not Jedi mind tricks, it is a far cry from basic soft skills (see comparison at right).  So this feels like a lot of work to not only teach, but to even come close to mastering on a consistent basis.

Here’s the good news: There are shortcuts…easy ways to teach your frontline how to reduce the “feel” side of effort.  In fact, we have just finished a new set of training materials that will help our member companies teach frontline staff the art of experience engineering.  Read More »

Ouch. That’s such a harsh word. STUPID. I apologize for using it. But while you’re reading this, there’s a chance that — right now — someone at your company is inadvertently saying something to a customer that sounds extremely stupid. Again, sorry.

And here’s the thing – that CS rep who’s saying this stupid thing is not stupid. And your company definitely is not. And that customer who’s on the other end of the line…they’re not stupid either.

In observing hundreds of companies, we’ve detected one technique that — while it certainly seems like a good idea (in theory) — just sounds dumb in real life: Trying to convey empathy through the use of “rote” phrases. Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, it inevitably backfires.  Some recent examples: 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 »

While you might be able to tell me who your most effective supervisors are, it’s probably much more difficult to say just what exactly makes them so good at what they do. Is it their personality? Communication skills? Their experience ? Something unique about the reps on their team? Is it their management style? The list of potential factors goes on and on…

When CCC set out to investigate what makes an effective supervisor, our first step was to try to make sense of all the above variables—and more. And while it’s true that no two supervisors are exactly alike, we’ve managed (with the aid of a few statistical tools) to simplify a seemingly infinite universe into five distinct supervisor personas based common characteristics. Here’s what we found: Read More »

Senior executives who are effective at talent management generate up to 7% more revenue than their less dedicated peers.  Unfortunately, more than 80% of executives are either uncommitted to talent management, ineffective at it, or worse—both. 

Talent management, though, is not a matter of skill (most executives have the business skills necessary) or time (effective executives and ineffective executives spend roughly the same amount of time on talent management): the issue is focus.  Executives should approach talent management strategically—managing key talent like a corporate asset that is developed and deployed in support of business objectives. 

Becoming a Talent Champion outlines five key activities executives should focus on in place of day-to-day staff management, including building the high potential bench, holding the senior team accountable for talent outcomes, and owning the organization’s talent strategy.  To learn more, download a complimentary copy of this new publication or order the eBook.

CCC Members, check out our best talent management tools and insights in our Talent Management Topic Center, including:

• Building the Next Generation of Contact Center Talent
• Rep Performance: The Next Performance Boost
• Frontline Staff Skills Survey