Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about service organization globalization – especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it’s questions about how to serve local markets, setting up new contact centers, working with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Serving global customers in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn’t especially anything brand new to us in the service organization.  We’ve seen our organizations become more global as our customers are become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues at CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while service organizations may be trying to serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what’s happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally.

The bottom line is that traditional corporate center functions will no longer be able to support global operations from a single, centralized geographic location – while there should be a common strategy clear to all stakeholders, the center must also be agile, manage risk, encourage global collaboration and trust, and think globally about talent. In essence, it becomes a global ‘corporate core’ – still the same corporate center functions – but now newly aligned with globally dispersed market-level operations.

If you want to read the full executive guidance (via hard copy or ebook) or assess the readiness of your company’s corporate functions, please take advantage of the tools on the Executive Guidance website.

CCC Related Resources:

• Providing Actionable VOC Insight to Business Partners
• Rep-Led Collaboration Forums (Fidelity Investments)
• Country Profile Resource Center

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”

Building strong cross-functional collaboration is one of those ever true key tenets of management literature.

In the past I have addressed how improved collaboration can help drive better customer insights and help organizations make better use of CRM investments, not to mention elevate the role of the service and support organization.  I want to continue the dialogue here by focusing on another, critical cross-functional collaboration opportunity whose impact is often underestimated: collections.

While it may seem that collaboration with collections is a lower priority, managing the collections process more closely can actually result in a win-win-win—better revenues, greater efficiency, and a better customer experience.  In fact, companies that do not make partnering with collections a priority risk operational inefficiencies, increasing delinquent account volume, and mitigating collections success.  In today’s hopefully recovering economic climate, that can translate to big revenue.So how to improve collaboration with collections in a scalable manner?  A couple of ideas:

1. Create incentives that foster collaboration—Too often individuals have little reason to collaborate as collections issues are a more distant occurrence.  Yet companies can foster greater collaboration by implementing metrics that align staff in different functions more closely with collections.

For example, to prevent sales staff from targeting customers that are risky, companies can mandate that if a customer terminates sales within the first six months, sales forfeits the sales-based incentive pay.

2. Communicate the interconnectedness of roles—Collections is often a siloed function within the service and support organization, and this can be exacerbated when the function is outsourced.  Given the many interconnections between service/support and collections, organizations should work to help frontline staff understand its impact on collections.

For example, if frontline staff fail to adequately solve customers’ issues with billing statements, accounts can become delinquent, resulting in a poor experience for customers.

Collections may not be the most glamorous of functions, but it is a critical component of doing business.  The more cross-functional collaboration that occurs, the more effective collections will be.

Stay tuned to CCC Buzz for the final installment of our series on debt collections, and be sure to review our research brief to learn more.

Fred Reichheld is among the more well-known researchers and consultants who have posited and proven this, but even if data did not exist to back it, I have no doubt that companies would still believe it.

CCC has conducted much research on loyalty, and while we know that the drivers of loyalty in a service and support environment are very different and more limited than those in other parts of the business, we also know that service and support is always trying to find more opportunities to contribute to loyalty.

One of the latest trends we are seeing is service and support’s role in driving product usage and retention.  Realizing that the product itself may be fine but the user experience poor, many companies are looking to service and support (or the organization is volunteering) to drive improved product “stickiness.”

The most common strategy to do this is typically outbound calls to the customer at strategic points during the customer relationship.  Yet while outbound contacts are certainly helpful, other opportunities exist that have the potential to be impact the business far more than one-off customer conversations.

A couple thoughts:

1. Identify ways to improve ease of product utilization.  Effort is the best predictor of customer disloyalty particularly in a service transaction, but effort exertion when using a product is also a good indicator of product “stickiness.”

In addition to capturing verbatim comments and troubleshooting issues, service and support is well positioned to implement customer learning programs akin to Intuit’s “Follow Me Home” program, to understand how customers install and use the product and see where customers fail or get confused, which can help advise which instructions to clarify and how to do so and surface potential product improvements.

2. Create clear instructions and tailor them based on customer type.  While technical writers are typically responsible for writing product manuals, service and support should make sure that directions and troubleshooting steps are written in customer language, not technical jargon.

Travelocity follows a top 10 list of principles to ensure customer-friendly design and easy-to-understand language.  In particular, it tests all language using a readability index to ensure the content is written for the appropriate audience.

Also consider writing instructions in multiple formats and for different customer audiences in the way each customer wants to consume information.  Standard instructions can be helpful, but different customers may consume information differently (e.g., tech-savvy customers have very different needs than customers with no technical background).

Companies could also consider identifying certain segments who are not of the Do-It-Yourself mindset and create some sort of up-sell opportunity for technicians to install the product for them.

In following either of these tactics, not only can service and support help drive product “stickiness,” but also prove its overall value to the company.

Just think about your reaction when someone tells you no.  You get defensive immediately, right?  No one likes to be told they can’t do something – and your likely response is to start an argument to prove you’re right (and the person who told you no is wrong).

In your world, there are lots of reasons your frontline reps have to say no to customers. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes it seems outside your reps’ control.  But, what if you could actually eliminate the negative reaction your customers have when they are told no – just by making a few tweaks to your current approach?

I’m not talking about tricking people. Most of the time, you are limited in what you can do for the customers . And at some level, “no” is “no.” You can, however, do some smart things to make the word ‘no’ an easier pill to swallow:

1) Eliminate the times when you have to say no which are avoidable.

Before you say no to customers, make sure it’s really necessary. Most companies have some policies and processes that impede the customer experience but are no longer truly required by the business. Maybe they are outdated, or were put in place without the customer in mind.  Luckily, there are easy ways to unearth and fix these:

• Use your frontline – You don’t need to pull together a special process improvement team to determine which processes or policies lead to no situations, just ask your frontline.  Since they are the ones who actually have to say no to customers – they have the best insight.
• Capture compelling data through a simple and clear campaign – If reps have to say no to customers due to a policy or internal process, simply have them make a note of which policy caused them to say no. Checking a box in a spreadsheet takes hardly any time and builds data for a strong business case for change.

CCC Members: See how Ameriprise Financial puts this practice to use to reduce overall complaints and fix 26 policies in its first year.

2) Reposition no’s using positive, not negative language

Once you’ve eliminated the unnecessary no’s, you’re left with unavoidable ones you just can’t change due to legal, regulatory, or just good business sense reasons. It’s really tough to find ways to position ‘no’ in positive light – especially when reps are put on the spot during a call. Most companies probably believe it requires a substantial investment in a language training or negotiations program. Actually, a simple shortcut does wonders:

• Give your reps language guidelines – Instead of a long training program, give your reps a simple tool that enables them to use positive language almost instantly.  How about picking the most frequent times you have to tell the customer no, and providing reps with revised language guidelines demonstrating how to use positive language for these scenarios?  It’s a simple and effective way to get your reps started. Looking at the top 10 scenarios alone can cover a majority of your no’s.
• Use positive language, not negative language – Instead of telling customers what they can’t have, tell them what they can have. Change negative language (can’t, don’t, won’t), into positive language (can, do, will). So instead of saying, “I can’t process your check until Monday,” you can say “What I can do is put your request in the initial batch so it will be processed on Monday morning.”

CCC Members: Check out how Osram Sylvania uses positive language guidelines to reduce escalation rates and customer effort.

So, what do you think about this one-two punch to reduce the impact of the no’s?

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And while the role of the service and support organization is primarily to be a communicator—and in fact many organizations we work with have upskilled staff on all sorts of tactics for improved interpersonal communication with customers—we’re apparently doing a poor job when it comes to communicating with cross-functional colleagues, particularly as it relates to cascading voice of the customer data.

Here are the facts from this CCC  research on sharing Voice of the Customer (VOC) with internal business partners:

• 76.6% of business partners are not satisfied with the current VOC insight provided by customer service
• 65.9% of business partners do not recommend VOC provided by customer service

All of this in spite of the fact that 58.5% of business partners believe that VOC is extremely important.  It looks like we have an opportunity here, but we simply aren’t taking advantage of it.

So how to ensure the resources we invest in customer insight reporting are worthwhile?  One (relatively) simple tactic: Align the information with what your colleagues actually need.

Too frequently the service and support organization sends thick data files over to colleagues on topics that simply miss the mark—data is too tactical, it comes two days too late, it’s not specific to a particular function, it’s not on a topic the business partner cares about, etc.  As a result, the majority of colleagues simply ignore the insights.

So what are the best companies doing to overcome this?

• Align insights with corporate strategy—This is a surefire way to ensure the data you collect resonates and is relevant.
• Ask business partners what they need—CCC has an assessment tool that can easily surface colleagues’ needs, but even establishing a basic understanding of a function’s strategic goals through a brief conversation is a good starting point.
• Translate insights into $—Data related to hold time is of little interest to colleagues outside the contact center, so help colleagues see the revenue and customer impact.  For example, a financial services company we work with logs every instance in which it says “no” to a customer; capturing the customer impact in this way resonates so well that the service organization is able to make the case for substantial process improvements.

The good news is if you do this well, not only will you resource more efficiently, but you’ll also increase the service and support organization’s relevance to the business.  And in this environment, I don’t know any service and support leaders who would pass up that opportunity.

Have we missed any tactics here?  We’d be keen to hear your thoughts.

CCC Members, Learn your business partners’ preferences for VOC data and insight by launching CCC’s VOC-Sharing Health Assessment.  And learn more about how to communicate customer impact by logging “no”s.