Nearly all of my recent conversations and interactions of late have started with the same framing: The world has changed.

Admittedly, this is a relatively generic framing, but supplement it with data around rapidly increasing contact complexity, far more nuanced products and solutions, and complicated technology—not to mention customer expectations that now are dramatically heightened—and it quickly becomes apparent at how drastically different the service and support function of today is from that of even a year or two ago.

In fact, in some recent research, CCC highlights the function’s shift to what we call the “Quality 2.0 Era,” which is characterized by both complex issues and heightened customer expectations.  This is a long way from the “Productivity Era” of the late 1990s, early 2000s, when fast resolution of simple issues was sufficient.  As is it distant from the “Quality 1.0 Era” of the mid-2000s, where customers increasingly wanted successful resolution of more complicated issues.

Yet these changes have largely happened under the noses of most service and support organizations, many of which have not transformed their organizations to align to the changes in issue complexity and customer expectations.  In reality, many organizations have been caught offguard by how quickly customer demands and expectations changed.

Which begs the question: What does the next era of service and support hold?  And how should we prepare for it?

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A flurry of articles have been published on organizational design of late, highlighting the importance of it today and recommending related best practices.

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.

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This post was written by Tom Distantis, who leads the Advisory team for the Customer Contact Council and the Sales Executive Council (SEC).  It was originally published to SEC’s Sales Challenger blog.

J.C. Penny, the American retailer, is getting a new boss.  Ron Johnson will become their new CEO in November after having led Apple’s retail store operations for the last decade.  Mr. Johnson is credited with the success of Apple’s retail store operations – and the results speak for themselves.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

• More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year.
• Apple’s annual retail sales per square foot have soared to $4,406. Add in online sales, which include iTunes, and the number jumps to $5,914. That’s far higher than the sales per square foot and online sales of jeweler Tiffany & Co. ($3,070), luxury retailer Coach Inc. ($1,776), and electronics retailer Best Buy Co. ($880), according to estimates.
• Needham & Co. puts Apple stores’ profit margin at 26.9% in an industry that typically has profit margins hovering around 1%.

These results are impressive, but not surprising.  Why?

Because Apple, through their training and support, enable their retail staff to sell the way customers want to buy. Read More »

This is a guest post by Andrew Kent, who researches and writes for our sister program the Sales Executive Council.  This is the second in a two-part series about the coming revolution in energy sales (read part one here).  Both posts were originally published to the Sales Challenger blog.

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets. The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use.   (CCC note: We think the same goes for the B2C world…when a customer is only thinking about your product in a single dimension, the burden can fall with serivce and support to reframe that perception.) Read More »

A brief introduction from the CCC team:  While the decision to move forward with mobile payments will likely not rest squarely in the contact center organization, we’re willing to bet (even double down on that bet!) that contact center executives will certainly feel the impact of such a migration in the form of customer support calls.  So in the spirit of keeping up with ‘what’s new’ with our peers in marketing, here are some recent thoughts coming from our sister program the Marketing Leadership Council.

We know a number of our retail and consumer banking members are intensely interested in the mobile payments space, and with good reason: according to a study commissioned by MasterCard, 63% of the coveted 18-34 demographic feel comfortable using phones to make payments and about the same amount feel like their phones are more essential than their wallets. Mobile phones – particularly smartphones – are increasingly indispensable for any trips outside the home.

Given signs like these of increasing customer demand, it’s no wonder why folks are jumping in. But it seems like there are more questions than answers at the moment.  What does a successful mobile payment platform look like? What advantages does it confer relative to the status quo, a mix of cash and plastic? Six hypotheses we’ve thought of: Read More »

This is a guest post by Andrew Kent, who researches and writes for our sister program the Sales Executive Council.  This post was originally published to the Sales Challenger blog.

The utilities business faces a looming crisis—if not today, then in the decade or two to come.  Simply put, the industry’s current business model is set up such that smarter use of its product threatens its profits, and this tension between supplier and customer can’t go on forever.

But utilities companies need not view this as a threat.  On the contrary, leading utilities are already capitalizing on one of the biggest megatrends in Sales today: the need to make more money by selling less stuff.

The root of utilities’ problem is this: their ability to grow depends on selling more kilowatt-hours each year, but consumers and society have an urgent need to use less—and are waking up to the fact that they actually can.  Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

(This post was originally written for the Sales Challenger blog, which focuses on critical topics for sales professionals.  We think, however, that there is relevance here for our B2B customer support readers, particularly on the topic of segmentation strategy.)

It’s hard to get key account programs right. First, companies must figure out which customers to elevate to key account status (a challenging task in and of itself)—but most organizations stop there. Key account selection is often a ‘once-and-done’ event, and customers that have been designated as key accounts remain in that position for years.

Despite changing markets and performance, most companies treat key accounts as tenured positions. There are a variety of reasons for this—a fear of jeopardizing relationships and revenue. Account Manager loyalty that skews their relationship assessment. The feeling that they just can’t “give up.”

The reality is that keeping low-performing customers in your key account program wastes more time and profit than it brings in.

What’s the solution? Firing, or de-selecting key accounts.

Though it sounds like a risky strategy, there are ways to accomplish key account de-selection without putting revenue at risk. Read More »

As customer service leaders, we’re constantly interacting with internal business partners—coordinating support for new product launches and marketing campaigns, troubleshooting product issues, you name it.  But what’s the right way to engage the business?  Is it better to build relationships with them or challenge them?  What’s the right posture? 

While conventional wisdom would suggest that relationship building is the way to win over a customer, some recent research from our program for sales leaders, the Sales Executive Council, suggests that high-performing sales reps take a very different approach to engaging customers.

When we think about our interactions with business partners, it’s actually not that different from sales.  More often than not, we’re trying to sell a perspective, aren’t we?  For instance, maybe we’re getting flooded with calls on a particular issue and we need the business to fix the upstream problem so that customers don’t need to call in about it.  The business doesn’t have to listen.   They’ve got competing priorities of their own—different things that are vying for their time, attention, and budget—so we’ve got to sell them on taking action.  This is why the SEC findings are so interesting to us in CCC. Read More »

Wish your service and support organization could bring in an extra $8 Billion in service-to-sales revenue?  This isn’t so unattainable after all.

In fact, in 2010, U.S. airlines collected an additional $8 Billion, or 6% of revenue, outside of traditional plane tickets.

How did they do it?  Cross-sell/up-sell.

As it turns out, those $5 in-flight snacks, $50 airline lounge passes, and $47 early boarding/increased legroom upgrades add up to quite a lot.  (Collective groan noted here.)

Many of these upgrades and additional fees once  were relatively ad hoc—one could purchase such add ons at the airport but making arrangements in advance necessitated a phone call or complex navigation on the Web.  But recognizing that such secondary services are actually quite profitable, airlines are becoming serious about streamlining the ability to purchase such services.

Or as CCC would phrase it: Airlines are making it easy to for customers to buy more.

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If your organization is struggling with customer relationship management (CRM) implementation, adoption, or utilization, and ROI seems a distant reality—and odds are, all of the above—you are certainly not alone.

In fact, a recent Gartner analysis finds that despite a $225 billion investment in CRM over the past 10 years, companies have only seen customer satisfaction increase 3-5%.  And I would argue that the CSAT increase is probably not even related to CRM, but rather from an increased focus on process improvement and better frontline rep training.

The statistic is amazing, but as any service, sales, or marketing VP will tell you, not unsurprising.  Yet considering the multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment required to implement and optimize CRM, coordinate across multiple business units, and upskill staff and drive utilization, it’s worth a look at what best-in-class companies do to leverage CRM.

There are many root causes as to why companies struggle to truly leverage CRM—poor data quality, poor frontline staff usage of the tool key among them.  One of the biggest causes, however, is that attaining deep customer intelligence requires good people with good connections to truly bring the information to life.  Even the best, most detailed database entries do not approximate strong internal relationships where service and support staff can collaborate with each other and brainstorm service and sales opportunities, elaborating data points and offering additional perspective.

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