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 »

I can’t believe 2011 is almost over.  Seems like just yesterday Lauren was blogging her predictions for 2011 customer service trends…and here we are again.

So, I polled the research team and chatted with a few members to get their perspective on what 2012 has in store for us.  I noticed a few topics that came up several times – some of which are ongoing over the past few years – and others that are newer, including:

• Investment in Technology (especially knowledge management, CRM, and workforce management (WFM))
• Organizational structure changes (primarily from B2B companies as they move from a service organization to center of excellence model)
• Expanding into new service channels (including mobile apps, Facebook, web chat, Twitter, and discussion boards)
• Sales (focused either on increasing cross/up-sell in the service organization or having a closer partnership with the sales team)

As I thought more about these things that service organizations are doing, I wondered to myself what could be driving all of these initiatives.  And I began to see some trends emerge that I think will be crucial in 2012.

So, in 2012 – I think that: Read More »

Anyone else curious to know what those squiggly box things are?  Yeah, me too.  Turns out they’re called QR codes (that’s, Quick Response) and they’re origin can be traced to the mid 90s Japan when they were used for internal tracking of materials.  Since then the QR code technology has been opened to the masses and is most commonly used today for marketing purposes.

But can QR codes effectively be used in service?

Read More »

One of the main benefits of working at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) – CCC’s parent company – is that Iget to learn what is going on in other corporate functions and keep pace with changing priorities and new challenges.

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about service organization globalization – especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it’s questions about how to serve local markets, setting up new contact centers, working with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Serving global customers in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn’t especially anything brand new to us in the service organization.  We’ve seen our organizations become more global as our customers are become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues at CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while service organizations may be trying to serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what’s happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally. Read More »

“What is the future of the customer experience?”

Seems like the $64,000 question, right?

Well, I had the pleasure of attending a summit on this topic a couple of weeks ago.  Sitting in with customer service executives from around the globe and across many industries – like financial services, retail, and telecommunications – it was a great couple of days away from the office to give me time to think about the answer to that question.

We talked about everything from big data to integrating service into the customer’s more mobile lifestyle to expanding into new channels to using VOC to, of course, social media.  We discussed customer expectations today, and how to drive change throughout the organization.

And at the end of the day, after having a chance to reflect on all the rich conversations – I had a few takeaway thoughts I wanted to share with you: Read More »