Customer Service Buzz

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 »

There is a simple governing fact that occurs during all service interactions: our companies are merely a means to an end for the customer. Customers don’t contact us to troubleshoot a television set – they call us so they can enjoy the latest sports event from home. They don’t log on to transfer funds, they log on to consolidate their down payment for their first home.

While this simple fact is often taken for granted during service interactions, acknowledging and understanding the customer’s situation and their end-goal presents a tremendous opportunity to improve the service experience.

For the past week, I’ve been working from our London office, and this morning I briefly visited with one of our European members. During that time, we discussed creative methods to make frontline reps’ jobs more fulfilling, engaging, and far less transactional. The conversation evolved into a discussion of the “customer puzzle” – the idea of determining the context, the situation, and the end-goal of the customer and tailoring the experience accordingly.

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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 »

As CCC’s resident benchmarking expert, I thoroughly enjoy looking at customer data.  I find it to be one of the most interesting parts of what we do in the service environment.  Of course, the challenge here is how to analyze the data and come up with conclusions that match with true customer needs.

I believe we have a tendency to look at individual data points in relative isolation (for example, tracking higher handle times or lower resolution rates) which can lead to a myopic point of view that doesn’t take into consideration the context of that data point, nor connect with what the customer is actually experiencing.

Instead, I’ve found that every data point has a rich story behind it – a story that better explains what customers actually need to have a positive customer experience (as opposed to what they may say at any singular time).

The key is to recognize the difference here – and to dig a little deeper to get a true understanding of the customer.
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I recently worked with a member to determine optimal service organizational structures and staff counts.  I began my research with our new benchmarking data for 2009, attempting to find relationships between center staff size and various productivity and quality metrics.

The most concerning relationship I found was a strong correlation between larger staff size and a higher average number of contacts to resolve issues.

While this was a quick-hit analysis, and not an intensive deep-dive, I believe it highlights one of the most difficult challenges larger centers face: decreased individual ownership of issues, leading to unnecessary repeat contacts.

While we don’t have a comprehensive model to understand why this relationship exists, my hypothesis is that larger operations, foster a “just a number” mentality among staff.  The outcome: reps believe if they don’t give 100% one day (but still passably handle calls, meet QA requirements, etc.) they’re doing their job, especially as it pertains to the thousands of customers who have issues.

I know you’re asking, “Brad, are you suggesting we get smaller?”  Let’s be realistic here – that’s not going to happen. But, I do think you should be asking, “How do I make my center feel smaller?” Read More »

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a financial services member after walking her through our work on the key service interaction attributes that drive customer loyalty.  She asked me, “Do you ever get a chance to revisit and update your past research?”  The question got me thinking – both about the ideal state and the reality.    

Being a true research geek at heart, I wish I could spend all my days digging deep to re-examine a past topic – but I know that our member’s immediate business needs often mean we need to press on to explore new, emerging topics too.  Luckily, sometimes – like with our customer loyalty work – there is a perfect storm which allows us to dig deeper on a topic that is also of high interest to our members.

What our loyalty work told us was clear.  Two points stand out to me in particular:

1. Service organizations should focus on preventing and reducing customer effort: A staggering 96% of customers who put forth high effort in a service interaction are more disloyal – and only 9% of customers with low effort are more disloyal.

2. The best way to measure the customer experience is through an effort measurement: Measuring effort with CCC’s Customer Effort Score (CES™) is far more predictive of repurchase, growth, and positive word of mouth as compared to typical experience measures.

Since we debuted this research back in 2008, we’ve seen countless members start to measure effort and find initial ways to eliminate sources of customer effort.  But the question soon became, “What can I do (next) to reduce customer effort?” Read More »

Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and Walgreens are all limiting customer choice in the grocery and drug store aisle.  Why aren’t their customer service and support organizations following suit?

In line with the economic downturn, many retailers and consumer product good firms have realized that limiting customer choice can actually help drive purchase decisions.

The “Paradox of Choice” movement has evangelized this idea.  But it seems the message hasn’t trickled down to service and support…yet.

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Last week a company asked me how much more first contact resolution (FCR) improvement it has left.  The company knows its FCR rates—the ability to resolve an issue on a single contact—aren’t perfect, but at 84%, it finds it increasingly difficult to move the dial.

As I shared some of our benchmarks, I couldn’t help but comment how inflated some of the figures are—95% and above in some industries in the phone channel, and even higher rates in the e-mail channel.

This wide benchmark variance results from highly diverse definitions and measurements of issue resolution, most of which are not terribly accurate or beneficial.

Most FCR metrics have a vital flaw–they track assumed issue resolution.  Customers typically believe that upon interacting with the service organization, the issue has been resolved.  And so asking the customer via a survey or frontline rep, “Was your issue resolved?”, as conventional wisdom dictates, inevitably leads to a “yes.”  Yet unbeknownst to the customer, he may have to call back for a related issue or obtain clarification. Read More »

Customer perception is a funny thing – I was reading a New York Times article that found consumers perceived a discount from US$3.00 to $2.33 as bigger than a discount from $3.00 to $2.22. Sounds crazy, right? $2.22 is a lower price than $2.33, but when consumers look at numbers they connect certain types of sounds (like “o”) with more and other sounds (like “ee”) with less.

Interesting theoretical information, but what does it mean for customer service? I am starting  to think these findings, along with books like the recently published “Priceless”, mean we can influence (or even change) customer expectations – not just on prices, but also in service transactions, especially when we have nothing but bad news for the customer. Read More »

A week ago I contacted my publishing company to request a new login and password because I deactivated my old e-mail address.  The bottom of the email submission form page listed some basic e-mail turnaround times and operating hours. Not a terrible wait time, I thought, and thanks for setting expectations.

Fast forward 24 hours, the response read: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”  Sounds good right?  But…my User ID was my old e-mail address. Strike #1.  So for round 2, I was more explicit in my request.

Fast forward another 24 hours to the second response: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”

Yep.  They sent me the same response (verbatim) two days in a row. And the worst part is that this type of email “resolution” is the norm in my experience, not the exception.

Call me the jaded contact center geek, but it seems that the usefulness of email as a service channel has expired.  I recognize some B2B interactions may be an exception to the rule – given more regular customer interactions – but for most service interactions, it’s a poor channel. Read More »