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.

Read More »

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 »

I’ve talked to hundreds of customer service leaders around the world about their strategies and challenges.  One of the questions I’m often asked is about the big trends we see coming down the pike.

Before talking about where we’re going, I usually tell our members that they first need to think about where we’ve been. 

Without a doubt, the biggest single trend we’ve seen over the past five years has been the shift away from a rote focus on productivity to a much greater focus on the quality of the customer experience. 

Some suggest the “Great Recession” has prompted a return to productivity focus, but we think the rumors of quality’s demise are premature.  As a trend, it’s better to think of the shift toward quality as “global warming,” not simply a “warm summer.” Read More »