Customer Service Buzz

I’m 35, balding & overweight.  So, I recently decided to get a grip on the one attribute over which I have considerable control (and, no, I didn’t get hair plugs).  I began exercising, and I hired a personal trainer to assist me through my “get-in-shape” journey.

My trainer is providing me with guidance on where I can get better (shed some unwanted weight), and how specifically to do that (which exercises to perform, along with a proper diet). 

And this kind of guidance is exactly the same sort of help many contact center leaders are looking for now that the 2011 planning season is under way.  Interestingly enough, though, few companies have an effective way to identify and narrow their list of potential initiatives for the coming year.   

Instead, often companies have “strategic” brainstorming sessions resulting in a laundry list of initiatives to tackle.  This list includes “pet projects” and well known opportunity areas, but often doesn’t reveal what to tackle first, and rarely uncovers previously unknown opportunity areas.  It’s similar to a person in my situation (wanting to get in better shape) going about it without a plan or a solid understanding of what to improve/how to make those improvements.  Read More »

Having spoken recently with some of CCC’s European members (one from the Travel & Leisure industry and three from the Financial Services industries), one of the questions that invariably arise is: how should I use Twitter or Facebook or other types of Social Media for customer service? 

Photo: Andreas Praefcke

In my last post about Social Media, I didn’t address this specific question, only venturing as far as to say: 

Using Twitter [or Social Media in general] in the customer service realm is not about amassing the most number of followers or how many emails we send, it’s about measuring the number of customers we help and showing that to executives. Second, it’s using that customer feedback from Social Media to make real improvements, hopefully at the root-cause level, to our customer experience to boost satisfaction and loyalty.

That addresses what Social Media’s general goal/success measure should be, but that doesn’t address the question of how to take action in social media channels to achieve that goal. Read More »

Review any service or support strategic plan from the past five years, and you’ll likely see the same priority repeat from year to year: Issue resolution.

No doubt about it, companies know issue resolution is important—CCC estimates that improving issue resolution can save millions of dollars each year and mitigate customer disloyalty by at least 219%.  But recent conversations with several companies suggest that when it comes to identifying first contact resolution (FCR) improvement opportunities, many companies are headed down the wrong path.

This is not due to poor data quality or improper data analysis; rather, many companies are merely scratching the surface when drilling into their FCR data, which is causing insufficient and even incorrect findings.  In fact, what typically comes to light as the primary obstacle to issue resolution is a laundry list of process and policy barriers. Read More »

Note: This posting is the blog Matt & Nick wrote for the Harvard Business Review this week, which is the first in a series of three and can be viewed by clicking here.

Next time you’re on the phone with a call center, listen carefully to what the rep says. Chances are you’ll hear your name several times, hear a tone of empathy, maybe an “I’m sorry.” It would be nice to think the rep really cares — but of course she’s probably just following a script. That can be a bad idea, we’ve found. In our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“, we explored how customer service drives loyalty, including the role of managing the emotional side of customer interactions. Here’s some further insight about that delicate dance.

Most companies still suffer from the checklist mentality when it comes to managing how their reps engage with customers. Use the standard greeting…check…say the customer’s name three times…check…show empathy…check…ask if you’ve fully resolved the issue…check, check, and check.

Most companies will tell you it’s all about consistency. But, let’s face it, consistency breeds robotic interactions which fail to result in a tailored, low-effort customer experience.

We’ve seen companies move away from this “one-size-fits-all” approach and creatively teach their reps to use simple word choice — and in some cases, approaches founded on behavioral economics —to radically shape how a customer perceives an interaction. Read More »

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words.  The result was, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” 

Some say Hemingway called this his best work.  Others say the entire anecdote is literary folktale.  In either case, it gave birth to the six-word story, a gauntlet that’s been thrown down in literary circles for decades.  SMITH Magazine gave Hemingway’s form a new, personal twist by inventing the six-word memoir – and the submissions have been plentiful enough to fill five books. 

The memoirs can be tragic (“I still make coffee for two”), profound (“Never really finished anything.  Except cake.”), instructive (“Found great happiness in insignificant details”), funny (“Started off normal.  Things went awry.”), universal (“Not quite what I was planning”), and hopeful (“More than yesterday, less than tomorrow”).  Famous authors’ self-reflections are expectedly self-aware: “The miserable childhood leads to royalties” (Frank McCourt), “The only way out is in” (Junot Diaz).  Comediennes are predictably censor-worthy (You’ll have to buy the book to read the contributions from Joan Rivers and Sarah Silverman).  Celebrities also chime in, like chef Mario Batali (“Brought it to a boil.  Often.”)

So today, we at CCC give birth to a new six-word challenge: What’s your six-word customer service philosophy? Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review.  If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy.  You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer. 

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved. 

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer. Read More »

Pick up any business publication and you can’t miss the numerous articles on mission statements.  Books on the topic abound, consultants offer services—the economic downturn seems to have left many organizations soul searching, questioning their purpose, focus, and value.

Service and support organizations are not immune from this, and we’ve heard several companies thinking anew about customer bills of rights and service commitments.

CCC members recently debated the value of even creating a service commitment in the CCC Customer Experience Forum, and we see two camps emerge:

1. Those who are in favor of explicitly publishing high standards and expectations for both customers and staff.

2. Those who prefer action to statements—living the right philosophy, not spending time mincing words.

Read More »

It’s an interesting conundrum: Give staff time and focus to cultivate relationships and they still revert to their old transactional behavior.

What gives?

Recent conversations with B2B companies suggest that despite dedicated, top-tier account teams and lengthy training workshops on relationship building, companies still don’t see the quality of customer relationships improving.

Read More »

At a dinner party recently, a friend who is a high school English teacher lamented that his students often google answers to their English homework rather than take the time to read.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
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Despite my background in sociology, I was always a skeptic of online dating. It just seems that using some personal data points to let an algorithm play matchmaker was missing something – the human element. But several of my closest friends have proven me wrong and are now happily married, and the track record for such services speaks for itself. It seems data can indeed broker the most human of interactions. 

Two weeks ago IBM announced the launch of the Real-time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP) – essentially this is the next generation of skill-based routing systems. The basic idea is to route customers based on data such as purchase history, account information, even basic demographics, to representatives that have demonstrated the ability to best serve a given customer segment or type.

Yes, it’s kind of like a matchmaker for contact centers.

Read More »