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?

A few hypotheses, informed by me and colleagues on the CCC research and advisory teams:

I. Service and support increasingly becomes a learning/teaching function.

As companies continue to work to make it easier to self-serve on simple issues, and the number of live or assisted contacts decreases, companies will increasingly look to help customers optimize their use and knowledge of products and services.  This could happen either on a 1:1 level or even 1:many level and could entail teaching about functionality and integration.

This is not to say that the service and support function will go away entirely, but it will have an altered mission.  This trend has immediate application to the business-to-business world but you could also imagine consumer customers engaging to learn more about products and services as well.  Self-service and multi-channel tools would be very relevant here.

II. Service and support will create greater focus on enabling customers to solve problems as opposed to the company always providing the answer.

In a world where issues are rapidly becoming even more complex, customer knowledge can actually outpace that of organizations, which means service and support cannot always give customers an answer (or the right one).  Furthermore, social media has in large part led to customers enjoying and desiring to connect directly with each other.

Social media, networking, and collective problem solving could well become not just another channel or nice to have, but really a philosophy and focus for the organization—and the olden days of staff solving problems will really give way to communities solving each other’s problems.  We’ve seen similar changes happen at technical support organizations where companies enable customers, and it’s quite probable that this could transcend to the service world as well.

III. Service and support becomes a very narrowly focused organization.

Too often today service and support ends up taking on one too many new responsibilities—generating revenue, differentiating the customer experience, collecting and analyzing voice of the customer—with the organization’s mission constantly expanding and often leading to “scope creep” and potentially hindering organizational performance.

As organizations gradually learn the “jack of all trades is the master of none” philosophy, there is a good possibility that the organization will shed some of its excess responsibilities, or at least start to prioritize its efforts (something that remarkably few organizations do).  My hunch is that revenue generation (not just cross- and up-sell, but also lead generation and qualification) and/or process improvement (largely through voice of the customer) will become the top priority.

What is your prediction about the next era of service and support?  Where are customers and the service and support function headed?

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:

• Self-Service Failures Audit
  If your organization is like any other, your self-service utilization is increasing but live call volume is not declining at the same rate. Why? CCC research finds that 58% of customers calling into the contact center have already been on the web for the same transaction. This data indicates a prime opportunity to eliminate some of the failure points, many of which are within the contact center’s immediate control. The Self-Service Failures Audit Tool enables companies to identify the greatest opportunity areas for web improvement to drive greater online self-service “stickiness.”  Note: This version of the tool is intended for contact centers servicing and selling products to individual consumers.  Members servicing business customers should consult the Business-to-Business Customer Service or Business-to-Business Technical Support versions of the Self-Service Failures Audit Tool.
  
• Customer Effort Audit
  Service organizations have a distinct role to play in driving customer loyalty — namely, reducing the amount of effort the customer experiences in the resolution process. The Customer Effort Audit Tool enables you to identify the channel(s) where customers are expending the greatest effort (e.g., web, IVR, e-mail, chat, phone), and directs to specific CCC resources that will help reduce that effort — and, therefore, reduce disloyalty. Note: This version of the tool is intended for contact centers servicing and selling products to individual consumers. Members servicing business customers should view the Business-to-Business Customer Service or Business-to-Business Technical Support versions of the Customer Effort Audit Tool.

• Employee Engagement Pulse Survey
  CCC’s 5-minute online staff survey acts as a quick “temperature check” for your staff’s overall commitment and effort level. This tool is designed to determine if an employee engagement problem exists at your organization. The questions in this survey were selected from our sister program that focuses on HR-related surveys and is comprised of over 110,000 employee responses as being key indicators for understanding engagement levels. Their research shows a distinct correlation between low levels of engagement, less productivity, and high turnover rates.
• Operational Benchmarking Assessment
  One of our most popular offerings, the annual operational benchmarking assessment plays an important role in driving your business objectives and setting service goals. This diagnostic enables you to benchmark yourself against your peers across a diverse set of more than 50 cost, productivity, and quality metrics that are integral to operating a world-class service and support organization.  Please note that since this survey is annual, we only offer participation for the first quarter of each year.

Unlike the standard personal resolutions to stop eating junk food or jogging more than once a month, a work related resolution would likely have more structure and incentive to accomplish.  If it’s work related, then you’re also more likely to call it project plan, rather than a resolution.  Ultimately, the key to achieving success with planning and implementing a project plan for the New Year is to have a solid action plan and root causes identified, which is what all of these tools will help do.  If you’ve already made your New Year’s resolutions, we’d like to hear how it’s going below!

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?

From CCC’s point of view, there are a couple of reasons for the lack of invites:

1)      Business partners aren’t sure what service can do to assist their needs;

2)      Business partners aren’t confident that service will be able to provide high-quality assistance; As one of my colleagues recently blogged regarding VOC, “… while over 96% of customer service’s internal partners say that customer service VOC is important, over 76% of them are not satisfied with the current quality of that VOC.”

And to overcome these challenges, service has to change the way they approach their business partners—instead of telling partners what service can do to assist, ask partners where they could use some assistance.  In other words, stop approaching business partners with a proposed solution and instead approach them with an offer to assist.

Sounds like a simple & subtle shift in approach, and it is, but it’s also highly effective.  A quick example that supports this notion of a subtle shift in approach:

A worldwide electronics company’s service organization found itself with loads of VOC to share, yet no one was interested in actually using the VOC.  So, they shifted their approach and began asking their partners what questions they had that could be answered by customer voice.  And with this subtle adjustment in approach the service organization a created strong partnership that generated product improvements, decreased costs, and increased revenue, too.

Win-win results not from a seismic, but subtle, shift.  Wouldn’t it be nice to make great gains from little changes?

What successes have you had partnering with others in your organization (sales, marketing, operations, etc.)?  And did you position service uniquely to get “invited to the party”?

CCC Member Resources:

1)      Quick Hit Customer Learning – This solution shows how one organization was able to re-position VOC to be of importance to their business partners – and drive action by those business partners, too.

2)      Discover “Rules of the Road” for identifying what insights your business partners may want in this blog post.

3)      Using Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope – This topic center provides great insight into better partnership with your business peers.

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.

In fact, while over 96% of customer service’s internal partners say that customer service VOC is important, over 76% of them are not satisfied with the current quality of that VOC.  In fact, one of our members likened his efforts to ‘throwing our VOC into a big black hole – no one is listening to us.’

Service organizations that are successful in their VOC efforts – whose internal partners are not only satisfied with the VOC provided but use it when making business decisions, do two things (and don’t do one thing):

• They do point to the root causes of a problem, not merely the symptoms: Internal partners don’t pay attention to VOC analysis when it lists a bunch of customer complaints or issues, but not the reason behind those issues.  That customers are calling to cancel their warranty on a product is not helpful – but find out why they are cancelling and you’ll have data that your business partners would probably pay you to have.
• They do focus on problems that are important to their internal business partners: Spending your time and resources convincing your business partners that something is a problem is an uphill battle.  Focus on what is within your control and the areas your internal partners care about the most first to get some momentum going.
• They don’t allow their VOC scope to creep outside their ‘sweet spot’: In order to have the time to dig into root causes, leading service organizations deliberately narrow the focus of their VOC efforts.  They use VOC for what it is best positioned for – fixing customer-stated problems (since customers are calling to talk about their problems on a daily basis), rather than chasing new product development.

On that last point – seems to me like we may be seeing a bit of scope creep as customer service’s role has inevitably changed (and grown) over the years.  We were asked to do more, so we did.  But, what actually should customer service to be responsible for – and what should be out of scope?  VOC is one potential example – and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

But, I’m wondering – do you think the roles and responsibilities of the service organization have changed?  And are these new responsibilities reasonable or not?  Do we need to re-define the scope of what service can/cannot do?

CCC Related Resources:

1. VOC-Health Sharing Assessment
2. Use Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope
3. Use Customer Exchanges to Gather Raw VOC
4. Implementing Speech Analytics

• 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.

1)      Cellular Operators’ International Roaming Notifications: Most Indian consumers travelling internationally tend to switch off their cellular data plans or don’t take calls on their local number since they’re wary of a hefty bill. To counter this trend, cellular operators in India are planning to offer real-time proactive alerts to customers providing updates on usage in terms of money, airtime, and bandwidth consumed while roaming internationally. Operators in other Asian markets such as China, Japan, and Korea have already started using this solution.

I like it because: Customers and business both win. The value-added usage alerts allow customers to use their local numbers but still remain in control of costs, while the businesses benefit through increased use of international roaming.

2)      HSBC India’s Proactive E-mail Messages:  HSBC India is increasingly focusing on driving Internet banking penetration and utilization. A component of the strategy includes using proactive notifications to turn dormant internet banking users into active users. HSBC sends targeted e-mails to those customers who have not used Internet banking in a defined time period. The e-mail—the subject of which is simply ‘We Miss You Online’—provides phone banking contact numbers to allow customers to retrieve forgotten usernames and passwords, as well as a convenient link to learn about Internet banking features and benefits.

I like it because: HSBC ensures that the value-added message is meaningful to customers using analytics. The bank sends the message only to identified customers whose Internet use is dormant, instead of sending the same message en masse. I also like the fact that the value-added message is not something ‘extra’ or ‘good-to-have’ but an important component of its strategy.

3)   Ferns N Petals’ Proactive Problem Solving Pre-empts Calls:  And finally, here’s a personal example that blew me away. A few days ago, I was placing an order for a bouquet of flowers to send to my mom on her birthday on the website Ferns N Petals, a popular flower retailer in India. I added my bouquet to the online shopping cart and filled in the details of when and where the flowers needed to be delivered. I was on the payments page, entering my credit card details, when my phone rang. The call was from Ferns N Petals: the lady on the other end of the line knew I was trying to place an order, but there was a problem with the payment gateway. Since the order wouldn’t go through online, could she take the order on the phone?

I like it because: Ferns N Petals stepped in to solve my problem — even before I knew I had an issue! Given my past purchasing experience, I know I’ll be logging on to the site for my future purchases too. The benefit to the company? Ferns N Petals created tangible value for itself by pre-empting inbound calls, and—at the very least—prevented lost business from abandoned shopping carts.

So, how are you leveraging value-added contact to create value for your customers?

Related CCC Resources

• Proactive Value-Added Contact
• Mechanics of Implementing Proactive Contact
• Proactive Contact to Pre-Empt Initial Calls and Callback

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:

1. You’ll Have More ‘Competitors’ Than Ever Before: Your competitors (in the customer service realm) aren’t just your direct competitors anymore.  Now, your service is being compared to every other customer service interaction the customer has had.  And, many suspect that the customer is developing a ‘gold standard’ for customer service from their best interactions at some of the most progressive companies – and now expect all others to meet this new standard.
2. Your Customers Will Find Even More Advanced Ways to Game the System: Over the past year we have increasingly heard that customers do things like ask for pre-emptive escalations, using Twitter to simply get attention, expect near-instant response times, want to side-step regulations – the list goes on and on.  As customers get increasingly savvy, they’ll continue to find new ways to put you on the defensive when handling their requests.
3. You’ll Need to Proactively Get Ahead of Your Customers: Given these customer expectations, staying one step ahead of the customer will be crucial.  In calls, this means taking the lead to actively guide the customer to resolution – instead of simply reacting to customers.  It can also mean proactive alerts that can educate the customer or eliminate their need to call us.
4. You’ll See A Need for Transparency: As information is more readily available in general, customers will have access to all of the data and information – and they seem to like it.  So, they also want more of it.  Customer can now interact with companies in social media platforms and through other mediums, bringing the customer closer to the company.  And that often means that customers will be looking for transparency and information into your internal processes and workings too.
5. And…Your Reps Will Have the Key to Success: Besides your website, your reps (whether via the phone, web chat, e-mail, or social media) are your customer’s main touchpoint.  They not only need to have a different skill set for this more complex and demanding world, but they also have customer voice that is invaluable to success in the future.  Tap into what they have to say.

So, what does 2012 hold for you?  Share your thoughts!

CCC Related Resources:

1. The Next Frontier of Rep Performance
2. Voice of the Customer
3. Anatomy of a World-Class Contact Center
4. Keeping Pace with Today’s Demanding Customers

But can QR codes effectively be used in service?

A service executive recently asked me this question, and to be perfectly honest I’d never considered it.  I always looked at those funny little black-and-white boxes as one more marketing tool to get me to read something or watch a video on a product that I may be interested in purchasing.  But this question prompted me to broaden my thinking a little and the more I considered it the more I realized that there may be some good service opportunities nestled in those tiny little boxes.

For instance:

1)      Push to Self-Service – the QR code is an easier way to communicate a link to a customer & can instantly place them in your Web self-service to resolve issues, answer questions and perform transactions.

2)      Offer an Up-Sell – if a customer is willing to scan the QR code to learn more why not offer them additional products and services while they’re on the site, too?

3)      Survey Customers – include the QR code at the bottom of a receipt and send the customer to a survey asking about overall experience and customer experience.

What’s your take?  Is there a future in service for QR codes?  Or should we say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to adding this functionality to our current offering?

CCC Resources:

1)      Create principled incentives to drive self-service adoption.

2)      In a live interaction, teach customers about the benefits of self-service.

3)      Read a recent discussion about migrating B2B customers to self-service.

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.

The bottom line is that traditional corporate center functions will no longer be able to support global operations from a single, centralized geographic location – while there should be a common strategy clear to all stakeholders, the center must also be agile, manage risk, encourage global collaboration and trust, and think globally about talent. In essence, it becomes a global ‘corporate core’ – still the same corporate center functions – but now newly aligned with globally dispersed market-level operations.

If you want to read the full executive guidance (via hard copy or ebook) or assess the readiness of your company’s corporate functions, please take advantage of the tools on the Executive Guidance website.

CCC Related Resources:

• Providing Actionable VOC Insight to Business Partners
• Rep-Led Collaboration Forums (Fidelity Investments)
• Country Profile Resource Center

“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:

Customer Expectations, Today

Seems like the relationship between customers and companies has changed in recent years.  Previously, customers were kept at arm’s length– and while we today likely don’t give full transparency into our internal processes, our investments in social media and our tailored conversations with customers had an impact.  The traditional walls between customer and company have been broken down – and as more data and information flows freely – customers can and do take advantage of that.

Customers get to see what it is like to get near instant gratification on Twitter, or receive a more complete and artfully framed explanation behind a policy from a frontline rep (as opposed to ‘it’s just the policy.’).  And – no surprise here – they like it.

But, do they need it?  Or are we setting customer expectations that we may not be able to consistently meet?

As one attendee put it – ‘are we the ones setting the expectations or is it the customer?’  I think it’s a worthy question to ask, because if we are – how do we know if we are creating a highly valuable experience or a bunch of costly ‘nice to haves’ that actually won’t matter to long-term customer loyalty at the end of the day?

So, that got me thinking about a few other topics –

1- Social Media: There is so much data to show the wide (and growing presence) of the world’s population on social media platforms.  But, it’s use for customer service?  Given the debate we had on this blog a few months ago – seems like the jury is still out.

2- Online Customer Experience: We know that the customer increasingly prefers to self-serve on the web rather than call.  But what kind of online experience do they expect and what ensures they can successfully resolve their issue on the web?  We’ve done a little work on this in the past, and will revisit this topic in more depth through our first half 2012 research initiative.

3- Customer Data and VOC: There is so much data and customer voice to collect, but it’s often like searching for a needle in a haystack to reap true insights.  We’ve discussed ways to prioritize and focus these efforts to yield more actionable data, and CCC’s latest venture – CCC Loyalty View – is a unique way to aggregate that data and provide both actionable insights and advisory services to target high-impact improvements.

4- The Frontline Rep Role: With the remaining live contact volume at higher complexity, seems like the frontline rep has to adjust.  No longer can they focus solely on issue resolution or soft skills, but also have to possess greater ownership over their customer interactions and use their knowledge to provide in-the-moment advice.  Most of you are familiar with our most recent work on the topic – looking at an emerging skill set that is increasingly important for reps to have in today’s world.

What about you, Customer Service Buzz readers?  What do you think the implications of customer expectations today are for your role and your organization over the next few years?

CCC Related Resources:

• Social Media Topic Center

• Boosting Web Self-Service Stickiness

• How to Narrow VOC Scope

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance executive summary | full study