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 »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »

Rep scorecards.   Shortly after the creation of the service organization came the creation of the rep scorecard, and with good reason, too.  In an effort to boost frontline performance service executives measure and report everything from calls answered to quality scores to sales performance.  But how about issue resolution?  Do you report that on your reps’ scorecards, and more importantly, should you?  That’s the question my colleague and I aimed to answer when we renewed our friendly debate. 

Let it begin:

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CCC has partnered with Iconoculture to bring you the latest in global consumer trends.  Below is our bi-weekly update featuring the latest Iconoculture insights available now on the CCC site.

The rise of location-based daily deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial reflect an increasing customer focus on local products and services. According to Google, 20% of all PC-based internet searches are local in nature. On mobile phones, the number is as high as 33%.

And that’s not all. From local deals to local food, customers are increasingly using the web to interact with businesses right outside their doorsteps.

This is good news for retailers – many have started to capitalize on the shift to local consciousness. Walmart, for example, recently launched a “My Local Walmart” app that allows Facebook users to connect with local stores. Accessed through the store’s Facebook page, shoppers can input their zip code and “Like” their local store to get promotion details, event information, and region-specific product offers. Walmart is also working on a feature that will let shoppers use the app to interact with area sales associates. Read More »

A few recent events—such as the Yahoo Mail outage, a round of power outages following the earthquake in Japan, and a string of flight cancellations due the extreme winter in New Zealand—illustrate one thing in common: the need for companies to provide proactive information and service to affected customers.

Given the buzz around proactive service over the last few years, it’s easy to imagine that most companies proactively provide information and solutions to customers for critical issues as a minimum service standard. However, CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts indicates that 45% of companies do not leverage proactive contact, even for critical issues. But maintaining a strictly reactive service strategy can cause an influx of costly inbound calls, negative publicity, and customer effort.

So, if you’re trying to move away from reactive ‘firefighting’ to proactive service, what are the things that you need to keep in mind? Read More »

CCC has partnered with Iconoculture to bring you the latest in global consumer trends.  Below is our bi-weekly update featuring the latest Iconoculture insights available now on the CCC site.

What if you found out your neighbor spends less money on his energy bill than you? Would you conserve?

OPower sure hopes so. The software company has partnered with several utilities to send homeowners a report card that tracks their home energy use and compares it with that of 100 nearby households. Colorful charts show customers how their energy use compares with the neighborhood’s average, as well as with its most efficient users.  Smiley faces are used as a success measure – so if you get two smiley faces, you know you’re the most energy savvy home on the block.

If you’re underperforming, the report card offers tips, adjusted for peak and off-peak seasons, on how to reduce energy consumption. By encouraging a neighborhood contest, customers have incentive to act on the advice.

Sure, the idea spurs competition and motivates energy conservation. But how does this impact the contact center? Read More »

The buzz around proactive service has been increasing across the past few years. But….most companies focus on providing critical alerts – think flight cancellation messages or power outage alerts. Fewer companies extend proactive service beyond critical to value-added areas — such as helping customers forward resolve issues or educating customers on how to use products. We found that most companies are just not convinced that offering value-added contact is a viable business strategy.

However, our latest research indicates that, implemented correctly, value-added proactive contact can unlock substantial efficiency and effectiveness gains for the business, and also improve customer experience and lower customer effort.  That said, implementing value-added contact is complex, since customer preferences of the right contact reason, frequency, and channel can differ widely.  

Here’s how you can make value-added contact relevant to the customer and profitable for the business: Read More »

In the world of B2B order fulfillment and technical support, nothing matters more than issue resolution and case closure.  Quite literally, time is money—both for customers and for the company.

Now there are many ways to optimize issue resolution and case closure, something CCC has researched extensively: measuring resolution more effectively, improving the knowledge base, and even revising staff incentives, among other strategies.  Admittedly, though, all of these are difficult to change and require investment to optimize.

But we recently surfaced an opportunity we believe most companies have overlooked.  The idea comes from a U.S. operations of a global manufacturing conglomerate, which recently decreased time to resolution 33% and improved issue resolution 26% over one month.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

What the company realized is that it’s not that staff aren’t motivated to resolve issues, it’s that they don’t always know how to resolve issues.  And even with an effective knowledge base, sometimes it’s hard for staff to know where to start.

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This post was written by Neha Ahuja, an  Analyst with our broader Sales, Marketing, and Communications research team.

Last year, my colleague Lara Ponomareff talked about how knowledge management processes and people—not just the technology—lead to sustainable knowledge management. She followed up the post with a write up on failure points in knowledge management efforts. A quick recap is that there are four key failure points—

1. poor knowledge generation channels,
2. poor knowledge usability,
3. lack of knowledge-related feedback, and
4. unclear knowledge management priorities.

In today’s post, we’ll examine how Oracle addressed those failure points in their successful strategy to sustain and scale knowledge management efforts.

Historically, more than 80% of Oracle’s knowledge base was accessed on a monthly basis, creating high demands for quality knowledge. However, traditional centralized knowledge management processes didn’t scale well due to Oracle’s large number of products and increasing product complexity. This required the company to decentralize knowledge efforts and make knowledge management everyone’s responsibility. In doing so, Oracle: Read More »

Multi-channel investments remain a big focus for many service and support organizations as they balance changing customer needs and preferences and cost to serve.

But given limited investment resources, the question remains which channels should be prioritized.  Some colleagues recently discussed the value of social media as a channel, but here we want to discuss e-mail and chat specifically.  In question: If you had to choose just one, is e-mail or chat the better investment?

Read More »