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.

And this is becoming an acute problem as forecasts indicate that self-service increasingly is a preferred channel of resolution (CCC research historically has found that the preference for self-service is equal to live service, if not higher).  And we’re continuing to work on new research on customer expectations for self-service, in which I would be highly surprised to find the trends reversing.

This change among customers—but lack of change among service and support organizations—inevitably leads to a well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful customer interaction along the following:

Frontline Staff: “After next week you’ll be able to check your account online to make sure that the changes have been updated.”

Customer: “OK.  Thanks for the tip.  And where do I go online to find that?”

Frontline Staff: “You’ll need to log in and you’ll find it on your account page.”

Customer: “I’m looking at your web page now and don’t see that option.”

Frontline Staff: “Unfortunately I’m unable to pull the web page up, so I can’t give you any more information right now.”

Customer: “OK….  I guess I’ll just call back if I can’t find the information next week….”

So what can be done to avoid this all-too-common situation?  A few ideas, arranged from least investment required to most:

1. Ask supervisors to do a coaching session on website navigation—Put out a memo to supervisors and coaches and ask them to spend some time orienting frontline staff to your company’s website, particularly the service and support functionalities.  A general introduction can be helpful, but also navigate the site based on a few issues customers commonly call about.  At a minimum, supervisors should do this once a quarter either in team or 1:1 meetings.

2. Tweak new hire training to focus on navigation—An entirely new curriculum isn’t necessary, but even creating a short module orienting new hires (and tenured staff, too) to the website, basic navigation, and important functionality to know about is a good start.  Supervisors and coaches can supplement this on an ongoing basis.

3. Integrate self-service steps into the knowledge base—It is helpful to have training and coaching on discrete website functionalities, but to truly ensure frontline staff can effectively advise customers on what to do on the web, knowledge bases should incorporate this information.  CCC members, learn more about effective knowledge management design principles here.

4. If staff do not have access to the external Internet, at a minimum grant access to your organization’s website—All sorts of historical reasons exist why some frontline staff have no access to the Internet (if you missed it, CCC’s latest research explains why this isn’t such a wise idea from an employee performance and engagement perspective).  Given the trend toward more customers going online and the large number of customers calling because they can’t find information on the web, this would be a good issue to put on the agenda for your next leadership meeting.

In the coming weeks, stay tuned for additional 2012 Resolutions to consider from colleague Rick DeLisi on why using the term “THE CUSTOMER” is not a good idea, and from Brad Fager and Judy Wang as well.

Happy New Year.

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.

Training Hours

With many contact centers operating extended hours, there are practical questions concerning the most effective time to train staff—both new and existing. One concern is whether or not training sessions should align to the shifts that staff will eventually be working upon completion of their training.

Our member poll found that 65% of organizations do not align training sessions to shifts, often finding it more beneficial to hold training sessions during times when management can be present and involved. In addition, these members cited the their trainers’ availability as a primary concern in crafting training schedules.

In future installments, we’ll highlight more insights drawn from CCC’s Discussions Forums.

CCC Buzz readers—what other training secrets do you have?

• 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.
• Training Resources—as mentioned above, 2011 was a big year for upskilling staff and renewed efforts to drive performance across the service organization. To help members teach our ideas as easily as possible to their staffs, we’ve developed a full suite of ready-to-use training resources based on our best practice insights. These modules are designed to fully introduce and reinforce the concepts of experience engineering, personality-based service, and world-class coaching to frontline staff and supervisors.
• Managing Multichannel Contacts—continuing a trend we’ve observed across the last few years, our members today are serving customers in more channels than ever before. To help them strategize about the right channels to enter, as well as the best way to manage these diverse service channels, in 2011 we published new research on social media, customer communities, and e-mail, as well as proactive alerts to help our members stay one step ahead in serving their customers.
• Modernizing the Quality Assurance Function—as we looked across the CCC membership to gauge how companies are assessing quality today, two things were clear. One: delivering high-quality customer experiences is more important today than ever before. And two: for the most part, companies have yet to evolve their traditional QA processes to keep up with this increased focus on quality. We’ve learned how progressive organizations are taking a new approach to quality assurance and, in doing so, ensuring the best possible outcomes for staff and customers alike.

Here’s to a successful end to 2011 and a Happy New Year from CCC!

Customer Service Buzz Readers—what other topics were on your mind in 2011? What was your favorite CCC insight or blog?

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:

1. You’ll Have More ‘Competitors’ Than Ever Before: Your competitors (in the customer service realm) aren’t just your direct competitors anymore.  Now, your service is being compared to every other customer service interaction the customer has had.  And, many suspect that the customer is developing a ‘gold standard’ for customer service from their best interactions at some of the most progressive companies – and now expect all others to meet this new standard.
2. Your Customers Will Find Even More Advanced Ways to Game the System: Over the past year we have increasingly heard that customers do things like ask for pre-emptive escalations, using Twitter to simply get attention, expect near-instant response times, want to side-step regulations – the list goes on and on.  As customers get increasingly savvy, they’ll continue to find new ways to put you on the defensive when handling their requests.
3. You’ll Need to Proactively Get Ahead of Your Customers: Given these customer expectations, staying one step ahead of the customer will be crucial.  In calls, this means taking the lead to actively guide the customer to resolution – instead of simply reacting to customers.  It can also mean proactive alerts that can educate the customer or eliminate their need to call us.
4. You’ll See A Need for Transparency: As information is more readily available in general, customers will have access to all of the data and information – and they seem to like it.  So, they also want more of it.  Customer can now interact with companies in social media platforms and through other mediums, bringing the customer closer to the company.  And that often means that customers will be looking for transparency and information into your internal processes and workings too.
5. And…Your Reps Will Have the Key to Success: Besides your website, your reps (whether via the phone, web chat, e-mail, or social media) are your customer’s main touchpoint.  They not only need to have a different skill set for this more complex and demanding world, but they also have customer voice that is invaluable to success in the future.  Tap into what they have to say.

So, what does 2012 hold for you?  Share your thoughts!

CCC Related Resources:

1. The Next Frontier of Rep Performance
2. Voice of the Customer
3. Anatomy of a World-Class Contact Center
4. Keeping Pace with Today’s Demanding Customers

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.

Here’s a look at some of the most interesting trends we are seeing today:

1. Creating business excellence centers—This is primarily occurring in organizations that seek to create greater collaboration between service and sales, going so far as to collocate service and sales staff in a single location.  Typically these business excellence centers are central hubs in a single region and are organized by product, industry, customer, or other major segmentation scheme.  The benefit of this model is both the savings generated by consolidating a service organization footprint but primarily the collaboration and account information sharing that is facilitated.

2. Redefinition of staff roles—Many B2B organizations are going through role and skill clarifying exercises, meaning that companies are taking a second look at the skills staff need to effectively serve in their roles.  Organizations are not firing staff per se, but they are clearly laying out precisely what skills staff need to be effective in their roles, in many cases creating competencies for the benefit of staff and managers.  Interviewing staff to place them in the right role has become a focus, as is increasing training to upskill staff appropriately.

Of course time will tell how successful these long-term strategies are.  But those organizations in the middle of the journey report positive preliminary indicators.

Interested to learn more from companies in the process of reorganizing—where else are you focused today?

CCC Related Resources:

Field Support Organizational Structures

B2B Key Account Rep Activity Audit

Deepening the Customer Relationship (B2B)

Boosting Self-Service “Stickiness”

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.

2)      Training Doesn’t Equate to Mastery
Though staff may leave training having learned a wealth of new information, CCC research finds that up to 87% of material covered in training is forgotten in a matter of weeks. So while training may be effective at introducing a concept, additional steps—such as coaching—are required for staff to master it in most cases.

3)      More Time Isn’t the Answer
In fact, for the reasons discussed above, CCC recommends that companies minimize the amount of time spent on training and restrict it to those areas where its effectiveness has been proven. We profiled a best practice that allowed one UK insurance provider to shorten its new hire training by four weeks—and decrease the costs associated with training by 40%.

So how do the best companies get training right? For starters, they realize that training is just the first step in a longer rep development process—one that focuses on retention and reinforcement, as opposed to simply introducing new information. To this end, these organizations streamline their training sessions, emphasizing the essential areas of subject matter knowledge and customer service ethic. By using the old 80/20 rule, these organizations prepare seasonal and full-time staff to handle the large majority of customer issues while recognizing that some degree of learning must inevitably take place ‘on the job’. What’s more, they make use of this on-the-job learning by capturing it in the knowledge base and sharing it with other new hires—reducing the time needed to train reps on new products by over 50%.

Simply put, leading organizations realize that the key to training effectiveness is oftentimes to do less training.

But aside from their abbreviated training schedules, the best organizations also favor the more personalized, experiential type of learning that coaching provides. Not only is coaching a much more impactful development activity, it is also better suited for increasing retention and reinforcing the type of long-term behavior changes that training sessions alone cannot accomplish.

CCC Buzz readers—what other secrets to driving training effectiveness have you found?

Related CCC Resources

CCC Discussion Forums – Training
Identify the Right Opportunities for Training
Customer Demand-Driven Training (Friends Provident)

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:

• If you’ve ever worked in a retail store, you know that it’s SOP for Security to check employees’ personal bags to make sure they’re not stealing.
• Look at all those surveillance cameras in banks. You think those are just for catching bank robbers?
• And if you’ve ever been in a casino (I happen to be a degenerate gambler, myself) you can relate to the words of Robert DeNiro in the movie “Casino“: In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else. The dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I’m watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all.

In our world, the eye-in-the-sky isn’t a camera…it’s a concept. Micromanagement.

What we’ve discovered is that so many of the things we do in customer service management (things that seem logical and prudent), inadvertently come across to our employees as micromanagement and distrust:

• 100% call recording
• Constant monitoring of average handle time (AHT)
• Quality monitoring and quality assurance (QA) conducted secretly behind closed doors

Now, we’re not suggesting that you should stop managing your staff, or that you should promote anarchy by just letting employees do whatever they want. But what we’ve been learning is that when employees don’t feel like they’re trusted to do the right thing, their performance suffers. Which means your performance as a manager or leader suffers as well.

That’s why we’ve assembled a wide variety of ideas and suggestions for how you can promote trust by alleviating metric micromanagement. Things like eliminating the “check-the-box” format of QA. Greatly de-emphasizing any discussions of handle time with individual reps, and emphasizing the one and only thing that truly matters in customer service — creating the best possible experience for each individual customer.

When frontline staff are encouraged to take greater control over their work interactions, when they are not needlessly micromanaged and they are entrusted to take on expanded roles in the service organization, the customer experience is improved, and overall service performance increases.

Turns out that what’s best for your reps = what’s best for your customers = what’s best for you.

It’s a matter of trust.

HOW ABOUT YOU?  What does your company do to demonstrate that you DO or DON’T trust your reps to do what’s best for each customer?

Related CCC Resources:

• Demonstrating Trust in Frontline Reps (Study Chapter)
• Adaptable Quality Framework (National Australia Bank)
• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance

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. And there are certainly a number of ways it can be done, but one standout example we’ve come across is LoyaltyOne’s peer coaching initiative. This program gives high-performing reps the tools to become effective peer coaches, and then matches these coaches with the reps who need the most help when it comes to call handling techniques and other tactical questions—in short, the kinds of questions that aren’t likely to be found in a knowledgebase.

As you read this, you may be thinking “we’ve tried peer coaching before”, but chances are you haven’t tried it the way LoyaltyOne does it. That’s because they’ve struggled with—and overcome—the typical stumbling blocks that prevent peer coaching from being effective:

Problem #1: Reps aren’t receptive to peer coaching and view the sessions as punitive.

• Solution: Don’t limit peer coaching to just low performers; instead, schedule sessions to help all reps improve their tactical knowledge and share tips with one another.

Problem #2: There isn’t enough time for peer coaching sessions.

• Solution: Set aside dedicated time each week for peer coaching. This allows reps to take advantage of coaching sessions without neglecting their core duties.

Problem #3: Peer coaches deliver low-quality advice.

• Solution: Train peer coaches similarly to other coaches in the organization, and ensure collaboration between peer coaches and supervisors to coordinate development efforts.

By creating the conditions necessary for effective peer coaching to occur, LoyaltyOne is able to expand their program from an initial pilot and create an environment that actively encourages peers to support one another in everything they do.

CCC Buzz readers—what other keys to a successful peer coaching program do you think are important?

CCC Related Resources

Practice World-Class Coaching

High-Quality Peer Coaching Guidance

Disseminating Productivity Best-Practices to Staff

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).

Companies are both hiring external vendors and building new games internally, and the industry expectation is that work-related videogames will become far more prevalent over the next couple of years.

As companies make this transition, a couple of things to consider:

• Foster only a healthy dose of competition: A risk of “gamification” is that the competition can get out of hand.  Ultimately both training and maintaining a supportive team environment are critical to driving frontline staff performance.
• Don’t go overboard with the “gamification:” Some traditional classroom training (e.g., new hire training) is still valuable, as is ongoing one-on-one coaching.  While gaming is more scalable, particularly for global organizations, and can be helpful for certain topics, it is important to use a variety of development techniques.

For those companies who have created work-related videogames, what has the focus of the games been?  And what have you seen in terms of the impact on your staff?

CCC Related Resources:

CCC Research: Identify the Right Opportunities for Training

CCC Research: Practice World-Class Coaching

Peer Networking: CCC Talent Management Forum

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. 

Using a simple, memorable framework that focuses on the two sides of any conversation (the listening part and the talking part), we have broken down the skills needed to successfully practice experience engineering into manageable pieces.  Now available on our Web site, members can find out-of-the-box training materials including:

• Presentation pages for training attendees
• Moderator talking points and discussion questions
• Exercises for groups and individuals
• Support tools for coaches and QA staff to help sustain skills outside the classroom
• Sample training documents already in use to support these skills at member organizations

I hope you’ll take a moment to explore this new set of resources.

Related CCC Resources:

• Engineering the Low-Effort Customer Experience | Full Study
• Sustaining Skills After Experience Engineering Training
• Training Materials: Teaching Supervisors Best-in-Class Coaching