We recently asked our members if they thought their customers were more demanding of customer service today than they were a few years ago. A whopping 80% said ‘Yes’.

So while there are many implications for these skyrocketing expectations, one opportunity as we see it includes moving beyond reactive-only contact.  But…our research on Proactive Contact and Alerts found that only 60% of companies offer proactive service to customers.

So, what are some of the barriers that prevent companies from offering proactive contact?

• Strategic barriers: Building the business case for proactive customer service can be challenging since returns appear ambiguous or delayed. Moreover, faced with innumerable options at which companies could send proactive information, they struggle to identify meaningful opportunities at which they should send proactive messages.   Read More »

A recent Iconoculture insight about a new “green” initiative underway at Starwood Sheraton Hotels caught my eye.  In a nutshell, Sheraton is offering rewards to guests who decline overnight maid service during multi-night stays.  In doing so, guests are enabling the hotel chain to be more “green” by saving water and electricity.  But this is more than a win for the environment: customers win with loyalty points and the hotel is certainly saving money, if nothing more than through lower utility consumption.  This is one of those unique win-win-win situations.

And the idea of making “green” strategies into win-win-win got me thinking about how customer service organizations can create similar opportunities within their daily operations.  So I asked the CCC team to brainstorm some ideas. Read More »

This post was originally published on the MLC Wide Angle blog.  MLC is our sister program for heads of marketing.

In the last few months, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media sites of the likes have all taken a back seat in popularity to the new kid on the block: Pinterest.  In fact, not only does the site attract an average of 11 million visits per week, but in January of this year, it officially became the fastest standalone site to reach 10 million unique visitors—not too shabby considering it launched its beta version in March 2010 (by comparison, the same feat took Facebook 852 days!)

What is Pinterest, exactly?  According to the company’s website, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that “let’s you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” With options built into the site that let you “repin” others’ items, subscribe to peoples’ or companies’ boards, and comment on specific pins, it is no wonder why the interactive site is attracting so many people.   It’s also attracting companies at an alarming rate, putting to rest the notion that this site is just another Internet fad. Read More »

Back in December, I blogged for the first time about our major 2012 research initiative: keeping pace with increasing customer expectations.  Over the past few months, we’ve talked with many of you and done some initial quantitative analysis on customer data to understand two things: what actually are customer expectations of service today – and – how can service organizations consistently meet these expectations in a low-cost way?

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?

Read More »

Just about a year and a half ago, we shared the Customer Effort concept through the publication of our article entitled, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” in the Harvard Business Review.

This is the third in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one and two.

The ideal New Year’s resolution is meant to improve upon or fix a problem that existed for you the previous year.  On the surface, it can be easy to see what your organization needs to resolve to do, but there are often deeper issues at play.  The key is to identify and fix the root causes of your problems, rather than focusing on the outward symptoms of them.  The tools we’ve designed the perfect resource for jump-starting your year and finding targeted areas of improvement where your organization needs it most.  Here’s a short list of some of CCC’s top audit tools and assessments: Read More »

My two girls are close in age to one another, and they often get invited to the same birthday parties.  But, there are those occasions where one gets invited and the other doesn’t, and what follows is usually something along the lines of:

Daughter: “I want to go to the party, too.”

Me: “I know you do, but you weren’t invited to this party.  You’ll get invited to other parties, though.”

Daughter:  “But I really want to go to this one.”

Me: “I understand, but we can’t just show up at the door and expect them to let us in with open arms.”

And strangely enough I’ve found myself having a similar conversation with a number of business-to-business (B2B) companies in recent months.  More and more B2B service organizations are trying to discover how to better partner with their colleagues (especially in Sales) and are finding that they haven’t been invited to the party.  How come?

Read More »

Customer voice (VOC) is an extremely powerful tool.  It’s not just the raw customer voice, but the trends and data it can contain.  Anything from a break in a process flow to an emerging customer need for a new product could be just at your fingertips.

And, as customer service moves away from purely an order-taking, transaction-completing, productivity-based role and grows into a function that adds value to customer experiences, the potential of VOC has only grown.  Because, what better way to add value than to supplement market research or R&D and bring customers the next, big thing?

But in reality, all of this can/could/potential business is just that – sure it could happen, but it rarely does. Read More »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »