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.

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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.

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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.

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They say that strong communication is the key to any healthy relationship.  The principle holds true, of course, for both home and work.

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And while the role of the service and support organization is primarily to be a communicator—and in fact many organizations we work with have upskilled staff on all sorts of tactics for improved interpersonal communication with customers—we’re apparently doing a poor job when it comes to communicating with cross-functional colleagues, particularly as it relates to cascading voice of the customer data.

Here are the facts from this CCC  research on sharing Voice of the Customer (VOC) with internal business partners: Read More »

Stop for a minute and ask yourself this – is “getting coached” a good thing in your organization? If you’re being honest, chances are it’s probably not.

Last week Pete and I spent an entire day running our latest workshop, teaching trainers to instill better coaching practices in their supervisor and team lead populations. We had 30 companies represented across nearly every major industry. It was a great crowd, with very energetic discussion.

The very first exercise of the day involved creating a goal for coaching. And while many participants jumped in an added their thoughts, two things were abundantly clear:

 1) Coaching is a misused word and concept. The outcomes, methods, and intent of coaching around the room couldn’t have been more diverse. Naturally, we assume when everyone nods their head in agreement at the word “coaching,” it’s universally understood. Well, you know what they say about assuming…

 2) Most organizations have not defined a true goal and purpose for coaching. We’re telling our leaders to “coach” without a sense of what that really means. Good coaching does not involve performance management, nor does it involve a conference room.

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Apple’s release of the new iPad has caused a stir well beyond the product itself. It seems several lessons are emerging based off this new launch:

• Marketing circles are reeling over how Apple created buzz without saying a word. 
• Revisited are lessons on researching customer segment reactions when naming a product.

But this release also highlights the continued emergence of the “Good Enough Revolution,” where feature-rich products are being replaced by lower-cost straightforward ones.

Compared to standard personal computers, there are a lot of things the iPad can’t do, and while it wasn’t intended to replace Macs or PCs, many are saying their next computer will be an iPad – it is good ‘nuff for what customers need.

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I’ve talked to hundreds of customer service leaders around the world about their strategies and challenges.  One of the questions I’m often asked is about the big trends we see coming down the pike.

Before talking about where we’re going, I usually tell our members that they first need to think about where we’ve been. 

Without a doubt, the biggest single trend we’ve seen over the past five years has been the shift away from a rote focus on productivity to a much greater focus on the quality of the customer experience. 

Some suggest the “Great Recession” has prompted a return to productivity focus, but we think the rumors of quality’s demise are premature.  As a trend, it’s better to think of the shift toward quality as “global warming,” not simply a “warm summer.” Read More »