Customer Service Buzz

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.

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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 »

Review any service or support strategic plan from the past five years, and you’ll likely see the same priority repeat from year to year: Issue resolution.

No doubt about it, companies know issue resolution is important—CCC estimates that improving issue resolution can save millions of dollars each year and mitigate customer disloyalty by at least 219%.  But recent conversations with several companies suggest that when it comes to identifying first contact resolution (FCR) improvement opportunities, many companies are headed down the wrong path.

This is not due to poor data quality or improper data analysis; rather, many companies are merely scratching the surface when drilling into their FCR data, which is causing insufficient and even incorrect findings.  In fact, what typically comes to light as the primary obstacle to issue resolution is a laundry list of process and policy barriers. Read More »

Note: This posting is the blog Matt & Nick wrote for the Harvard Business Review this week, which is the first in a series of three and can be viewed by clicking here.

Next time you’re on the phone with a call center, listen carefully to what the rep says. Chances are you’ll hear your name several times, hear a tone of empathy, maybe an “I’m sorry.” It would be nice to think the rep really cares — but of course she’s probably just following a script. That can be a bad idea, we’ve found. In our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“, we explored how customer service drives loyalty, including the role of managing the emotional side of customer interactions. Here’s some further insight about that delicate dance.

Most companies still suffer from the checklist mentality when it comes to managing how their reps engage with customers. Use the standard greeting…check…say the customer’s name three times…check…show empathy…check…ask if you’ve fully resolved the issue…check, check, and check.

Most companies will tell you it’s all about consistency. But, let’s face it, consistency breeds robotic interactions which fail to result in a tailored, low-effort customer experience.

We’ve seen companies move away from this “one-size-fits-all” approach and creatively teach their reps to use simple word choice — and in some cases, approaches founded on behavioral economics —to radically shape how a customer perceives an interaction. Read More »

Niche branding and segmentation—differentiating customers based on distinctive characteristics—are, of course, the bread and butter of the marketing world.  But we’re increasingly seeing a greater focus on this in the service and support world as well.

Segmentation isn’t a new concept for many service and support organizations.  In fact, many organizations use a segmentation structure that often comes directly from the sales and marketing side of the company.  But in an environment where many companies are looking to service and support as a “competitive differentiator,” companies are rethinking their strategies, and in many cases, seeking to expand them.

The problem is that many companies are going about this typically based on visible customer characteristics or behaviors: like where the customer resides or how much the customer spends.

Such segmentation strategies can be helpful for other parts of the business, but they offer limited insight into where the best service and support opportunities lie.  Indeed, using a segmentation strategy based solely on visible customer characteristics can lead companies to misplace service investments specifically.

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I’m heading off on vacation shortly, and from the recent conversations I’ve had with members it sounds like I’m not alone in getting geared up for a summer getaway.  While I’m definitely taking a break from work (and away from my iPhone), I’m also planning on a lot of quality reading time on the beach. 

So, what’s in my beach bag?  I thought I’d share what I’m currently reading that’s related to customer service (some more directly than others, but all fuel my thinking in the space).  Read More »

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing leaders and their teams.)

Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer service tool has created a lot of buzz over the last year. We asked John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward, what makes it work behind the scenes. John is the Digital Product Line Manager and Social Media Steward at Best Buy. He develops digital products and tools for Best Buy employees and customers, while shepherding social media initiatives, such as Twelpforce.  He has worked at Best Buy since 2004, playing a variety of roles in marketing communications and marketing strategy. We spoke to him early last month. Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review.  If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy.  You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer. 

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. 

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer. Read More »

Pick up any business publication and you can’t miss the numerous articles on mission statements.  Books on the topic abound, consultants offer services—the economic downturn seems to have left many organizations soul searching, questioning their purpose, focus, and value.

Service and support organizations are not immune from this, and we’ve heard several companies thinking anew about customer bills of rights and service commitments.

CCC members recently debated the value of even creating a service commitment in the CCC Customer Experience Forum, and we see two camps emerge:

1. Those who are in favor of explicitly publishing high standards and expectations for both customers and staff.

2. Those who prefer action to statements—living the right philosophy, not spending time mincing words.

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It’s an interesting conundrum: Give staff time and focus to cultivate relationships and they still revert to their old transactional behavior.

What gives?

Recent conversations with B2B companies suggest that despite dedicated, top-tier account teams and lengthy training workshops on relationship building, companies still don’t see the quality of customer relationships improving.

Read More »