Across the last several years, CCC has published quite a few pieces of research that explore the ideas of customer loyalty and customer effort.  To put things into an extremely simple nutshell, here are a few points to bear in mind as you continue to read:

First, the best thing a service organization can do is to provide a low-effort customer experience

Second, there are two ways you can reduce customer effort:

1. What a customer does (repeat contacts, repeating information, getting transferred, filling out forms).  This is an area influenced by service leadership, and we’ve blogged about ideas on how to reduce effort previously.
2. How a customer feels (literally, a subjective perception of the effort involved in the customer experience).  Interestingly, there are specific skills—what we call experience engineering—that can actively manage, even influence, customer perception, and this is in the hands of your frontline staff.  More importantly, this is an area that is two-thirds the overall impact of customer effort, yet only a small portion of companies are thinking about how to reduce this softer side of effort.

So why don’t companies try to reduce the “feel” side of effort? Primarily because it sounds rather hard to do at first glance.  We are talking about influencing perceptions here…and while it’s not Jedi mind tricks, it is a far cry from basic soft skills (see comparison at right).  So this feels like a lot of work to not only teach, but to even come close to mastering on a consistent basis.

Here’s the good news: There are shortcuts…easy ways to teach your frontline how to reduce the “feel” side of effort.  In fact, we have just finished a new set of training materials that will help our member companies teach frontline staff the art of experience engineering.  Read More »

Ouch. That’s such a harsh word. STUPID. I apologize for using it. But while you’re reading this, there’s a chance that — right now — someone at your company is inadvertently saying something to a customer that sounds extremely stupid. Again, sorry.

And here’s the thing – that CS rep who’s saying this stupid thing is not stupid. And your company definitely is not. And that customer who’s on the other end of the line…they’re not stupid either.

In observing hundreds of companies, we’ve detected one technique that — while it certainly seems like a good idea (in theory) — just sounds dumb in real life: Trying to convey empathy through the use of “rote” phrases. Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, it inevitably backfires.  Some recent examples: Read More »

What profession(s) can help those of us in Customer Service learn the most about how to improve our performance?  Who should we be observing and modeling ourselves after?

Of course, we should always be looking at other people in customer service — in different fields and business models — and see how they do what they do.

(I worked in the airline business for many years, and was always astounded at how little interest there was in ever comparing our service model with other customer service industries like hospitality, food-and-beverage or retail — no wonder the airline business is in such horrible shape — most airlines only benchmark against other airlines!)

But is there anything can we learn from other professions?  I mean, if you’re not in the business of serving customers, then whadda we in CS care what you do?

That seems like a logical position.  Or at least I thought so, until CCC uncovered some surprising research as part of our new study, “The Next Frontier of Rep Performance.” What we’ve been learning is that one HUGE key to customer service performance is for reps to have the ability to bounce back from a negative or emotionally-challenging experience with one customer, and then be able to start fresh (just seconds later) with the next customer.

Most reps tend to carry the negative “baggage” of a bad experience with them — either right into the next call with the next customer, or for that baggage to eventually wear them down, creating a sense of burnout that degrades performance.

So, how could a rep learn to “fully engage” with one customer, but to cleanly “disengage” after a bad experience?  The answer lies by looking outside our own profession — and to learn from people who have to deal with VERY challenging emotional issues every day.

Nurses. Read More »

“I need a flight from Phoenix to Washington, DC on Monday morning.”

“I want to return this GPS unit.”

What do these customer requests have in common?  In both situations what the customer needs isn’t necessarily the flight or the product return.  In the first situation, the customer might need to fly to get to an important meeting…or to see his daughter’s dance recital.  And maybe the customer returning the electronic product needs something with more features – or international maps for an upcoming trip to Japan.

Either way, the customer isn’t just going to volunteer this additional info – which makes it hard for the rep to give the customer what they need if the Monday morning flight isn’t available or if the product is outside the window in which it can be returned with a full refund.

So, what to do?  When reps can’t give a customer what they want, they will often default to the first available alternative – or even present the customer with a variety of alternatives.  But, the customer always ends up feeling like the alternative is ‘second best’, often arguing and negotiating to get what they asked for because it is their ‘first choice’.

Fortunately, there is a way to make an alternative seem as good (or even better) as the customer’s ‘first choice.’ Read More »

By Corey Stout

Although customer complaints about call centers reach the hundreds of millions each year, it turns out that reps should be the ones complaining.

According to a recent study by The Academy of Management Journal, less than 1% of calls result in some form of customer mistreatment (e.g., putting customers on hold unnecessarily or intentionally misleading them), while a staggering 20% to 25% of reps are subjected to negative customers.  

Although it is important to have complaint resolution methods in place as an outlet for frustrated callers, organizations must also ensure that they effectively protect reps from customer mistreatment as well. Without strategies in place to deal with abusive callers, organizations will have difficulty retaining, engaging, and even hiring employees. Reps need to feel like leadership is watching out for their best interest too.  

Read More »

It’s some of the smartest advice I’ve ever heard for improving business performance. Shift the middle.

At CCC, we’ve been preaching the benefits of increasing customer loyalty by reducing customer effort, using our Customer Effort Score (CES — a 5-point scale based on the question, “How much effort did you personally put forth to handle your request?”).

The research points clearly to the fact that loyal customers have the lowest-effort experiences.  But today, let’s focus on YOUR effort.

When you’re thinking about how to create better results among the thousands (or even millions) of customers your company serves, don’t create a lot of unnecessary angst worrying about how to fix the experience of every single customer in every single situation every single day.  Worry about the ones you CAN do something to improve.

That’s not every.  That’s some.  The ones in the middle of the bell curve.  Shift the middle. Read More »

By Corey Stout

I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty, which showed that people who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

Rogers and Norton showed subjects three different videos of a political debate:

1. The first video showed a candidate directly answering the questions asked.
2. The second video showed the same candidate dodging the question by answering a similar question.
3. The third video showed the same candidate dodging the question by answering an entirely different question.

And the winner? Video #2 (in which the candidate answered a similar question) was most preferred by the subjects, even more than the candidate who answered the questions honestly.

As Robert McNamara once said, “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked.” 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 »

Ever wonder how much of an impact “the little things” have on the customer experience?  Although many customer contact organizations are awash in data, most do not have the luxury of conducting scientific testing to find the answer to that question.  Until recently, CCC hadn’t conducted any tests either.  But, we had an opportunity this year to deploy a simple A/B test to test the impact of different rep behaviors on the customer experience.

In our experiments, both test groups received the same problem—and at the end of the day everyone got the same resolution outcome.  The only difference was the rep response. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Victoria Koval of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales  leaders and their teams. It builds on Jacob’s popular post that discusses ways to eliminate the word ‘no’ from your rep’s vocabulary.)

Think about how many times and ways a customer says “no”… There is the “matter-of-fact no” ( I am not interested in this offer); there is the “no-without-no” (I’ll contact you myself when I am ready to make a decision);   there is the “passing-the-buck no”  (The decision is out of my hands now); there is the “maybe-yes no” (I’ll have to check my calendar) and the “restraining-order no” (For the last time, no).

While searching for more examples (and for my own amusement), I Googled “how to say no.” As I looked through the more than 206,000,000 results, I learned how to say NO in over 520 languages and how to come up with 100 Excuses to Say No (my favorite one: “because my subconscious says no”).

The all-mighty Internet taught me how to say no to bosses, relatives, friends, co-workers and pushy sales people, but it had little to say about how to push back on customers.  Is that because we’ve been brainwashed that the customer is always right?

Maybe…But, unless you’re running a charitable foundation, saying no is a critical skill, especially now. In the current economy, customers feel entitled to more discounts, more customization and less risk, and they don’t hesitate to ask for more.     Read More »