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 »

Among the most valuable resources at CCC are our Discussions forums, which provide an easy opportunity for members to ask and answer a wide range of questions of one another. Many times these questions are at a tactical level, and the answers that members provide help their peers to make quick, informed decisions about day-to-day operations.

Not surprisingly, one topic that remains popular in our Talent Management forum is training, and though we’ve done extensive research into contact center training at CCC, questions abound when it comes to the best way to train staff as organizations test new methods and leverage technology to assist in training sessions.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the recent trends and insights shared by our members via Discussions on the topic of training:

Training Environments

As technology enables organizations to experiment with new training programs and methods, questions arise about the best environment to maximize training effectiveness.

Though it may seem beneficial to train staff in a live production environment, when polled our members overwhelmingly preferred a separate environment used solely for training. Many cited concerns about privacy and confidentiality as their rationale for holding separating training sessions that are removed from the contact center floor. With today’s technology, they found that it is easier than ever before to create separate training environments that replicate real working scenarios that staff can be expected to handle in the course of their jobs. 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 »

I can’t believe 2011 is almost over.  Seems like just yesterday Lauren was blogging her predictions for 2011 customer service trends…and here we are again.

So, I polled the research team and chatted with a few members to get their perspective on what 2012 has in store for us.  I noticed a few topics that came up several times – some of which are ongoing over the past few years – and others that are newer, including:

• Investment in Technology (especially knowledge management, CRM, and workforce management (WFM))
• Organizational structure changes (primarily from B2B companies as they move from a service organization to center of excellence model)
• Expanding into new service channels (including mobile apps, Facebook, web chat, Twitter, and discussion boards)
• Sales (focused either on increasing cross/up-sell in the service organization or having a closer partnership with the sales team)

As I thought more about these things that service organizations are doing, I wondered to myself what could be driving all of these initiatives.  And I began to see some trends emerge that I think will be crucial in 2012.

So, in 2012 – I think that: Read More »

A flurry of articles have been published on organizational design of late, highlighting the importance of it today and recommending related best practices.

Senior executives in the service and support organization must be heeding the messages from these articles, as we are seeing renewed interest in our research and benchmarking related to organizational design.

This is particularly true for B2B support organizations that we work with, many of which are now reassessing the way their function has operated and organized for years.

A number of reasons for the renewed interest exist, but the most frequently verbalized is this: Faced with the realization that the days of basic order entry by humans are nearing a close as more and more customers prefer to self-serve and operating budgets shrink, more B2B organizations are seeking to innovate and optimize the service and order management function.

Interesting to note, however is that B2B organizations aren’t merely considering role and title changes, but in some cases actually shaking up the entire order management function and reorganizing to align differently to the business.

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 »

As we’ve continued to explore “The Next Frontier in Rep Performance” we’ve been asking customer service executives around the world that very tough question — straight up — do you trust the people who work for you?

But wait. Don’t answer. Not quite yet.

Cause it turns out that it’s not your answer that counts.

Yes, it’s true that according to a global CCC survey, 56% of companies say they “sometimes” trust their employees.  44% say they “always” do. Exactly 0% say they “never” trust their people.

But here’s the thing. You can say you trust your employees all you want (and we’re not suggesting for a moment that you don’t) but what matters far more is how your employees would respond. And there’s clear evidence that they don’t feel trusted.

And how can you blame them? If we’re being honest, the entire corporate world has been built on the general assumption that employees CAN’T be trusted: 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 »