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?

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.

To conduct successful post-contact surveys, companies need to do more than simply “ask questions.” From conversations with member companies, we’ve come across some common survey pitfalls and mistakes that detract from a successful survey. Accordingly, here is our compilation of things that you as a customer survey guru should avoid:

• Don’t ask too many questions. We’ve all unfortunately been stuck in surveys that seem to never end. When designing your survey, remain cognizant of the survey length and only ask questions that are necessary. Taking steps like setting a specific survey goal, defining a question limit, or rotating questions can be helpful for avoiding this faux pas.

• Remove jargon from surveys. Company lingo is good for boardroom meetings (or is it?), but your internal jargon is meaningless to the average customer. Including this type of language in surveys causes extra effort for customers and can lead to poor-quality responses. Before deploying your survey, make sure to fit your language to different audiences, and use the customer’s language, not yours.

• Don’t force customer participation. Surveys are completely optional for customers, and it is important to keep this tenet in mind. Using too many fields where answers are “required” can turn customers off or result in inaccurate responses. Customers are doing a service by participating, so allow them to decide which questions to answer whenever possible. Of course, always ensure that they have the opportunity to opt-in or opt-out of the survey itself as well.

• Avoid biasing your customers. Simply put, your survey should generate the most accurate and truthful responses. While most companies are careful to avoid leading questions, there are certain actions that may unwittingly impact the validity of customers’ answers. Ordering broad questions first and separating surveyor and rep responsibilities can help eliminate common sources of survey bias.CCC members, we have additional information about common survey pitfalls (and how to avoid them) for you.

What do you think? Are there other mistakes that companies should absolutely avoid?

For more guidance on survey writing and examples of customer experience surveys, visit our brand new topic center on “Measuring the Modern Customer Experience.”

Related CCC Resources:

• Customer Experience Improvement
• Collection of Post-Contact Surveys (understand what surveys look like at peer organizations)
• Voice of Customer (make VOC data actionable by focusing on fewer, but well-defined, projects)
• Customer Loyalty (unlock customer loyalty by reducing customer effort)

Our research is finished, resulting in a number of new tools and resources for CCC members.  And while surveys are not the most glamorous of research topics, there were a few interesting points that are, indeed, “need to know.”  So without further delay:

1. You need to know…traditional channels are still king.  Most companies (more than 80%) still survey through traditional phone, web, and IVR channels, despite the introduction of non-traditional channels such as social media and even web chat.  Within the traditional channels, however, we do see a shifting preference toward online channels.  This shift is due to two reasons—the change in the way customers use channels and the evolution of the channel itself.
2. You need to know…surveys are getting shorter.  The percentage of surveys with more than 10 questions fell by 24% in the last six years.  In fact, 75% of surveys are 10 questions or less.  While this may sound innocuous, I think that this is a remarkable achievement on the part of survey writers.  Knowing that there are many parties interested in gathering data via customer surveys and a seemingly infinite number of possible questions to ask, it is hard to limit oneself.  One way to make this task easier is to clearly define—and stick to—a survey goal at the onset (see below for how CCC can help you do that).
3. You need to know…surveys are becoming more immediate. Maybe this is a window into the on-demand, need-it-now nature of our modern society—the percentage of companies surveying customers immediately after the service interaction has increased by 153% in the last six years.
4. You need to know…CCC has a lot of new tools ready for you to use.  Specifically, I’d encourage you to take a look at our:
   1. Survey Goal Identification Guide—Leading companies don’t survey just for the sake of asking questions.  They establish a survey goal and proceed with a purpose.
   2. Post-Contact Customer Survey Audit—How does your current survey measure up?  And how well are you avoiding the most common survey pitfalls?
   3. Survey Channel Evaluation Table—Once your survey is written, how will you choose the best channel for its deployment?
   4. Sample Survey Compilation—We collected 28 surveys from our member companies to demonstrate current survey practices in use across the service industry.

Let us know which of these tools you like best…and how you plan to use them to effectively measure the customer experience in 2012!

Related CCC Resources:

• New Topic Center: Prepare Your Survey (including how to write it and which metrics to track)
• New Topic Center: Deploy Your Survey (including channel-selection tools and FAQs regarding survey frequency)
• New Topic Center: Benchmark Your Survey (including metric benchmarks from CCC’s customer loyalty research and our new survey compilation)

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

“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

While the idea of a word cloud is simple, it’s ingenious in its application.  Although tag clouds are frequently used (this site is an example), my colleague’s practical use of the idea really piqued my interested.  My next move was, of course, to figure out how to apply this idea to the service world.  Being a bit of a survey guru, the best idea I had was to analyze customer verbatim from the many customer surveys CCC has conducted over the years.

One of CCC’s more recent customer surveys has an open-ended question that I think would be helpful for all organizations to ask their customers: “In two sentences or less, please provide a bit more detail as to why you left the Web site.”  The answers to this question are an integral part of running a successful service organization, given the impact of channel-switching on loyalty and the huge cost benefits of Web self-service.  So without further ado, here is a word cloud composed of tens of thousands of customer responses to this one question:

This word cloud analysis is admittedly a low-tech method for analyzing customer voice, but it is well worth the mere 15 minutes I spent on making it.  I now have a rich composition of keywords related to actual customer self-service failures.  While many words hold little significance (of course “website” is the most often mentioned), it’s the actionable words that hold the value.  What sticks out to me is:

1. Find: The failure here is likely a site design issue.  The customers probably searched the site for quite some time before they decided to leave.  We see companies overcome this struggle in two different scenarios.  To help guide customers based on their issue resolution preferences, you can design a site that appeals to many different customer segments.  In addition, progressive companies help their customers resolve not just one issue, but several related issues, in a single visit to the site.
2. Information: It’s often that case that customers simply want to learn something when they contact you, which is an occurrence that is ripe for self-service.  The clarity with which you write information on your Web site can have a big impact on how well it prevents customer from eventually picking up the phone (you’ll notice that the word “understand” is also within the word cloud).  Try using Travelocity’s 10 rules for consumable FAQs to revamp your service pages to provide customers the information they need in a clear and concise way.

If you’re interested in finding out what’s most common within your own organization, you can create your own word cloud on the free service Wordle.net.  A more robust VOC program would eventually be necessary, but if you’re just looking to get your feet wet, or even just have a little fun, then a free word cloud service is a great option.  For CCC members, make sure to view our resources on how to develop voice of the customer programs within your organization.

What are your thoughts?  Have you used word clouds within your organization to highlight pain points in the customer experience or for something else entirely?  Please share!

And how does this impact customer service?  Well, I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had with customer service leaders where something like this comes up:  “Lara, we give the business all the voice of the customer (VOC) data they could possibly need, but we don’t know what they do/they do nothing with it.”  One member even compared it to a ‘big black hole’ where all the VOC got sucked into, never to be heard from again.

No wonder, when only 38% of staff use that data effectively.

To turn that trend around, companies must have high “Insight IQ”, which has three components outlined in the Overcoming the Insight Deficit brief:

1- Information must be attainable (i.e., the right information is available and easy to find)

2- Information must have usefulness (i.e., is of the right quality and in a usable format)

3- Employees must have capability (i.e., the ability and predisposition to analyze data effectively)

Organizations that do this on average perform 24% better than their peers across effectiveness, productivity, employee engagement, and market share growth.

The brief goes on with four solutions to increase Insight IQ, including: up-skilling employees to be more intelligent consumers of data, challenging the biases of the company and its employees, actively manage the data and information flow (at the same level as other core activities), and making information more usable through tools and presentation.

In customer service, we too can be part of this shift towards higher Insight IQ.  A fundamental customer touch point that gathers unique and potentially critical VOC (a topic we’ve written many posts on), we need to ensure our information is attainable and useful to our internal partners.

And I’d like to think that we can even help challenge biases of the company or more actively manage the flow of VOC we have – making that VOC more useable for our partners.

If the organization is going to focus on increasing their Insight IQ, we need to be on board too – and I bet it’s even a little relieving to know that people are getting serious about managing customer data and information to make better decisions.

In fact, our Voice of the Customer resources begin to tackle just that – ways for us to hone our VOC collection efforts to meet business needs, to use our frontline staff as a beacon for where to focus VOC projects, and ways to ensure VOC can help us get ahead of disloyal customers.

To learn more about Insight Deficit, or take a quiz to measure your Insight IQ – visit the Overcoming Insight Deficit resource page.

CCC Related Resources:

Using Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope

Use Customer Exchanges to Gather Raw VOC

Use VOC to Get Ahead of Disloyalty

“People seem to want everything these days, and if we can’t/won’t/shouldn’t give it to them, they go ballistic.”

“Some customers call us still angry from their last issue and what they’re seeking feels less like resolution, and more like revenge!”

“We’ve got customers who think they’re smarter than our reps. And I think some of them actually ARE!”

At CCC, we’ve detected a distinct shift in the landscape  – a page-turn to a new chapter in our relationship with customers.  They’re becoming more demanding, or worse, even unrealistic about what to expect from us.

It’s the dawning of a new era, and it’s one we’ve all seen coming for some time:

• The distant past (the 1990’s) was most notable for the move toward greater economic efficiency in customer service.  That was The Productivity Era. Whatever we could do to resolve issues more quickly (reducing AHT, increasing FCR) was the focus of a successful CS operation.
• Then, in the recent past (the 2000’s) we saw a move toward an increasing emphasis on greater quality in our interactions with customers – The Quality 1.0 Era.  As more and more simple issues were now able to be handled WITHOUT the need for a live rep (IVR, web self-service) then the remaining live calls we did take were, therefore, more complex and required a higher-quality personal interaction.
• Now, here we are in the 2010’s and AGAIN, something is different. But this shift isn’t so much about technology or the complexity of customer issues (although these are contributing factors). The biggest difference is the nature of our customers themselves. We’re in a new phase:  The Quality 2.0 Era.  Here are some examples we’ve heard lately that point to this shift:

Some customers have more experience in issue resolution than your reps.
Picture a well-educated customer (lawyer, doctor, professor) who has been an active consumer of your company’s products for 10+ years. What happens when that customer is having a (heated) dispute with a part-time hourly rep who has 6 months experience? It degenerates into a verbal mismatch that ultimately results in a victory for neither side.

Customers are much better at “playing the game.”
We’ve been hearing that some companies are reporting an alarming increase in “pre-escalations” — customers demanding to speak to a supervisor before they even begin to describe their issue to the frontline rep who answered their call. Clever…but annoying!

Customers are issuing threats and ultimatums (correct word is probably ultimata, but c’mon!).
I have a good friend who is — let’s just be kind and say — a VERY ACTIVE customer/consumer. She is definitely smart (-er than most reps) and she told me about a recent experience with a telecom company:  At the height of frustration over her latest unresolved issue, she boldly declared to the rep, “Stop telling me what you can’t do.  And please understand that the very next thing you say will determine whether I will ever be a customer of your company for the rest of my life.”

What do you think that rep said? Exactly what he was trained to say, “I’m sorry ma’am, that’s not something we handle — again, you’re gonna have to call our technical support number and see if they can help you.” Bottom line:  My friend is now counting the days to the end of her contract, and has a new provider all lined up to handle her entire family’s business from then on.

But there IS hope. We’d love to share some of the solutions we’ve seen to relieve these growing frustrations.  Join us for one of our live full-day seminars, or upcoming “virtual” events on the topic of “The Next Frontier of Rep Performance.” We’ll reveal clear evidence that the way you manage your reps — and the work environment you create — can have a significant impact on improving rep performance in this Quality 2.0 Era of customer service.

HOW ABOUT YOU:  What evidence are YOU seeing that customers are acting differently, and in some cases, unreasonbly?

The best part is that while this data was originally intended for marketers, their insights cover a wide-ranging set of topics also relevant to customer service executives and their teams.  Everything from why Spain is laying down the law on improving customer service to how the airline industry is currently embracing customer service to information on what today’s retiring generation expects from companies – all to help you better understand today’s consumer and what they want.

I’m also happy to report that Iconoculture often reports on data and trends from global markets, gathering data from around the world to better understand regional or cultural impacts.

Every two weeks, CCC will offer a complimentary sampling of the latest and most relevant Iconoculture insights.  We’ll be blogging about some of them, and always visit CCC’s new Iconoculture page for the latest insights.

For example, this week one of the insights touches on a new app that allows customers to record calls.  The insight describes the app – which is available for Apple products and transcribes phone conversations straight to text – and also its implications to businesses.  In this case, as many service organizations record calls – this puts the same power of call recording in the hands of customers.  The app could be used to present evidence in escalated conversations or even for litigation purposes.

Interesting stuff, right?  These insights can be a great way to stay ahead in a fast-paced world, and we look forward to building out our Iconoculture library in the months to come.

CCC ’s First Release of Iconoculture Insights:

Geek Pride on the Rise – Young consumer would rather be called a geek as opposed to a jock

India: SM to Complain – In India, customers turn to Facebook, Twitter for product complaints

Complaints in Spain – Spain lays down the law on improving customer service

Positive Service in Russia – “Commercial smile” is being adopted by Russian businesses