It’s been a great 2011 at CCC as we teamed up with our members to help them address a year’s worth of challenges. We’ve already looked forward and shared our predictions for what 2012 will hold for service organizations, so here is a look back at our best research published in the past year. We’re hoping this list will help you refocus your priorities for the New Year and aid in your planning for a successful 2012!

• 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. Read More »

By Corey Stout

The News of the World’s voice mail hacking scandal signifies not just the importance, but also the need for greater customer privacy in our increasingly exposed world.

The News of the World scandal showed the world that the personal information of both private and public figures was easily accessible. News of the World, a British tabloid owned by media magnate Rupert Mudoch, was accused of spying on celebrities, politicians, and victims of tragedy—including a murdered teen and families of dead soldiers.

With the rise of new, faster, and more sophisticated technology, companies have greater accessibility to information, as does the average consumer thanks to social media. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, even famously stated this year that he “doesn’t believe in privacy” and that privacy was no longer “a social norm.”

Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I beg to differ.

As information becomes increasingly accessible, customers want greater security over their private lives and personal information. And now it seems that The News of the World scandal is the icing on the cake (…or maybe pie to the face).

The reactions to Murdoch and News of the World are proof that customers want greater privacy. A flash mob occurred outside the House of Parliament when Murdoch testified. Protestors gathered in front of Murdoch’s New York City home. Even just shifting through the countless articles about Murdoch on the Web – Rupert Mudoch and Media Corruption: Silence No More, Rupert Mudoch: Stubborn, Stupid, or Greedy? You Be the Judge, Murdoch: Liar, Lair, Pants on Fire! – anti-Murdoch sentiment and the public’s demands for greater privacy are obvious.

The News of the World scandal made people misinformed, unaware, and betrayed, which I believe triggered most of the outrage and demands for greater privacy. In the end, I argue that it is not necessarily about the actions that companies take or the changes that companies implement, it is about how they prepare, protect, and communicate to customers. Greater transparency with customers makes them supported, protected, and secure.

Read More »

Service executives often say that they want their reps to focus on the customer experience, yet when we talk to reps they tell us that their focus is on something else: getting a good call score from QA. 

And while senior leaders view the QA scorecard as a guide to providing good quality service, reps see the scorecard as some sort of code that has to be cracked in order to achieve high performance marks.      

One organization’s reps actually referred to their QA process as “The da Vinci Code”.  Once a rep cracked the da Vinci code good QA scores were easy to earn.  The problem with this is that reps were optimizing to the scorecard instead of the customer and they needed to redirect that energy to where it belonged: the customer experience.

But how can you make this happen?  It’s simple:

Eliminate the scorecard. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Hindsight may be 20/20—but remembering a conversation verbatim is not. How many times have you heard he-said, she-said arguments between people who deny saying something that their opponent claims they did? We’re often told that the customer is always right. But in cases that they aren’t—especially if a disgruntled consumer is threatening legal action over misguided advice—it’s vital to have proof to back it up. Recording consumer calls can provide that word-for-word conversation history that memory can’t. They also present a valuable evaluative opportunity, as managers can review calls and score reps’ performances for internal purposes, and help them improve for future customer interactions.

But, what happens in the rare instance when a customer doesn’t want their call to be recorded? Do you make an exception? How should your company handle these calls?

An executive in our Customer Experience Forum recently asked a similar question, and we got a variety of responses from fellow members. Here are a few takeaways from the discussion: Read More »

We’re now in full swing of that time of year when busy executives frantically try to cross items off of to do lists and hold last minute 2011 planning meetings.  All while maintaining solid end-of-quarter performance (and squeezing in time for a family vacation).

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships. Read More »

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and within CCC we all have very distinct (and sometimes diverging) outlooks.  And while we can all agree on the basics (i.e., coaching is the best way to drive rep performance, focus should be on customer effort rather than customer delight), we often have spirited conversations about the particulars of implementation or more granular concepts. 

I thought it would be cool to bring these dialogues to our blog so you can get a peek behind the research curtain and see what really goes on in our research meetings. 

Let’s take the topic of experience engineering: once we found out two-thirds of customer effort (the leading indicator of customer loyalty in service transactions) is driven by how a customer ‘feels’ about their service experience, we looked for ways to manage the customer’s perception their effort levels.  Enter experience engineering, a way to actively guide the customer through an interaction designed to anticipate emotional responses and preemptively offer solutions that create mutually beneficial outcomes.

Not just being nicer or more polite when you tell the customer ‘no’, but actively choosing words and framing conversations to leave the customer feeling like it was easy, even if it was a complex transaction.

Sound like it could cross some ethical boundaries? Sure it could, so I asked two fellow researchers, Pete and Dalia, to answer the following question: Read More »

As I sat down to write this blog, I tried to brainstorm a few general corporate functions that everyone gripes about.  The list I came up with was rather short (and probably very unfair): HR, Payroll, IT support.  Maybe you could pile on here (feels good to vent, right?).  Well, here’s another function on the list that hits rather close to home: Quality Assurance (QA).

As the CCC team spoke with countless companies across our months of developing our new research on QA, there were some common themes that emerged in conversations—including the poor perception of the QA team within the service organization.  One member even told us that his QA team would probably feel better about meetings with other peers in the contact center if there were metal detectors at the door to the conference room…people were that upset with QA!

Now, let me set the record straight.  This has nothing to do with the individuals on the QA team.  Rather, this is a reputation problem for what this group stands for, day in and day out.  And that is…be the bad guy. Read More »

Back in June, Lauren wrote a blog post launching CCC’s most recent research initiative on quality assurance (QA).  Judging from the comments on her post, Lauren seems to have touched off a nerve that sparked widespread interest in the future of the QA function.

Just a few months later, CCC has finalized its research on QA – Modernizing Quality Assurance.  Given the huge amount of interest in the topic, we’re experimenting with a “Web first” release of our findings.  Don’t worry – we’ll have meetings on this topics in early 2011, but we wanted to get this material to you as quickly as possible so that you can start using it immediately.

What I like most about our findings is that it explores solutions to long-standing QA struggles not by pushing more and more resources to tackle the problem head-on, but by taking a step back and considering the larger causes of ineffective QA programs to identify new solutions that often side-step original problem altogether.

It’s a bit like having blinders on while searching for the exit to a hedge maze.  Keep the blinders on – and blindly push forward until the hedge stops you from going forward.  Take the blinders off – and sometimes the exit is right there on your left. Read More »

We recently received an interesting inquiry from a member curious to know if other companies use actual customers as mystery shoppers to provide feedback on service interactions.  Based on responses from the membership, companies tend to see the value of mystery shoppers to assess rep performance– but there is a lack of consensus on who should do the mystery shopping.  Some noted that using customers is an innovative twist on the standard practice of having internal or third parties conduct this type of assessment. 

CCC members: Catch the entire peer discussion on mystery shopping in the Customer Experience Forum.

But if the goal of mystery shopping is to measure the quality of the interaction – don’t all customers have the potential to provide the same insight as mystery shoppers? So what additional value does an official mystery shopper program bring? Read More »

The CCC research team is about a month into our upcoming research study on quality assurance (QA).  One of the biggest trends we hear companies talking about is a major shift from a checklist-based approach to a subjective QA scorecard.  In other words, moving away from a “did you do it, check yes or no” audit to a “how WELL did you do it” audit.  The reasons for this shift could become a separate blog posting…but that’s for another day, another time.   

Today I’m focusing a little downstream from this objective–>subjective shift to talk about one of the potential implications of a subjective QA approach. Read More »