The following is a guest blog post by Tara Wildt, Manager of Content Marketing at Interactions. To learn more about Interactions, visit their website. 

In today’s customer-obsessed marketplace, customer service interactions are now some of the most critical touch points an organization has with its customers. Which means measurements like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are increasingly important — all while high scores are ever harder to come by.

Past research has shown that customers are frustrated with long hold times, confusing phone menu options, and difficulty reaching a live agent when needed. And in order to meet the needs of the always-connected consumer, companies are adding customer service channels.

Unfortunately, research shows that this fragmentation of customer service channels is only leading to decreased CSAT scores.

THIS IS WHY CUSTOMER EFFORT MATTERS

Customer effort is a fairly straightforward concept. It’s the amount of effort your customer has to put in to resolve a customer service issue. Companies take different approaches to how they measure customer effort, including:

– Analyzing post call or chat data

– Measuring emotions throughout the interaction

– Combining common customer service metrics such as CSAT and NPS

But regardless of how it’s measured, companies agree that reducing effort helps to improve the customer experience. Why? Interactions conducted a consumer study to uncover some of the reasons. Here’s a preview of what we found.

1. CUSTOMER FRUSTRATION LEVELS ARE INCREASING

It’s probably not a surprise that many customers reach out to your organization because they have a problem. But did you realize that as many 40% of them say they are frustrated before they even pick up a phone or open a chat window? What’s worse is that nearly half of the customers who were frustrated before the interaction remain that way even after the issue is resolved.

Why is this? Part of the reason may be that customers are increasingly well informed. In our research, 64% of respondents regularly use at least one method to research an issue before contacting a company (and the number rises to 80% for 18-34 year olds).  Which means they’ve already invested time trying to fix their problem — and are expecting you to provide a speedy resolution to what they couldn’t correct on their own.

2. AND THE TIME THEY ARE WILLING TO SPEND IS LESS THAN YOU THINK

Customer frustration with long hold times is nothing new. Their definition of what constitutes a ‘long wait’, however, may surprise you. The majority of consumers in our study were only willing to spend up to 10 minutes resolving an issue — including hold time. This included both simple (resetting a password) and moderate (making a return) issues. For more complex issues, an equal number of participants would also spend up to 20 minutes.

That being said, 10 minutes is not a lot of time if you have long hold queues or channels that don’t function efficiently.

3. BUT THERE ARE REAL BENEFITS TO DECREASING EFFORT

Understandably, consumers who felt they spent too much time or effort resolving a customer service issue were frustrated after the interaction was complete. More importantly, however, is the positive impact on customer satisfaction that occurs when customer effort is low. Nearly 90% of respondents who spent less time or effort than expected while resolving an issue were satisfied after the interaction.

For more on the topic, join us for our joint webinar with Interactions, “5 Things That Drive up Customer Effort (And How to Fix Them)”, on Thursday, June 22 at 1:00 P.M. ET. Learn more and register here. 

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Traditionally, user-focused activities have been conducted by specialists who either move from research to design directly themselves, or who pass the baton to others. This is partly a factor of history, but with UX now in the business mainstream it’s increasingly important to bring others closer to customers and their lives. Collaboration with stakeholders is king, but how do you do this smartly when we all have too much to do and too little time to do it in?

Why is collaboration so important?

Often product managers and those responsible for success are primarily understanding their customers via metrics such as CSAT and NPS. These are deliberately simple, but create a challenge in understanding the why behind the what, which is crucial for identifying low-level change that makes a difference.

Involving users is the key to overcoming this, but techniques for doing so owe a huge debt to an academia and rigour in experimental design. Anything involving real users or customers is moderated by specialists, with stakeholders disconnected behind a one-way mirror or getting their understanding from an after-the-fact synthesis. There are very good reasons for this, as anyone who has seen stressed product managers observe their ideas being casually dismissed in a user session can testify.

However as UX moves out of labs and into mainstream business, UX activities can’t be solely conducted on this basis. There are too few UX professionals, who are in evermore demand as it becomes a mainstream concern. Also, an increasingly multi-touchpoint world means that knowledge needed to make products more effective for their users becomes increasingly diffuse.

So why doesn’t it happen more?

Most product owners I’ve met are smart and keen to understand their audiences as much as possible, but commitment is variable. Making time is the key challenge. But there are a number of ways to bring them close to users and it’s important to offer options that are easy to access and calibrated to the time available.

Some suggested activities

Smart observation of user sessions

User research is often conducted in viewing facilities designed to make observation simple and comfortable. However, stakeholders often don’t have the time to watch them all.

You can help those dropping in by using post-it notes to construct a running analysis on the walls so anyone dipping in and out of sessions can get a concise understanding of what’s been happening.

If stakeholders can’t attend, sessions can be securely video-streamed live, or made available online afterwards. Time is always a pressure, so we’ve found its very useful to provide a one-two sentence summary of each session, pointing users towards key moments.

Attending ethnographic research

It’s becoming ever-more useful to understand user needs by observing them in their own environment. We’ve seen some revelatory moments for clients when they come with us. For example, the moment one client saw users find a helpdesk number via web search, rather than the Help Centre that had been built for them. They’d previously been mystified by CSAT complaints that the number was hard to find (it was on the Help Centre home page), until they saw in real time the many steps needed to reach that content.

Inviting stakeholders can give them a deeper understanding of user needs, but there are practicalities as observers meet them face-to-face. An effective observer briefing is very important in helping observers to attend without unduly influencing whats happening. We’ve also found it’s helpful to give observers a role and reason for being there (from the user perspective). Photos and video are immensely useful artefacts to gather, so giving observers the role of capturing these can be very helpful for all concerned.

Involving stakeholders in user diaries

Online user diaries are an immensely helpful way of capturing relevant user behavior over time. Diaries can be shared with stakeholders, to help them build their understanding, ideally in daily chunks. User photos taken by smartphones can be a particularly interesting and easily digested dip into user lives in unexpected ways. For example, on one project users supplied screenshots from an app which answered a design question we weren’t aware of – should they optimize for landscape or portrait views?

Stakeholders can also be encouraged to join diary studies as participants. While care is required in handling their results, diary participation can help even the most knowledgeable product owners reflect more on use.

Involving stakeholders and users in workshops

User needs and design workshops, synthesizing user experiences and identifying next steps are typically conducted without users being present. This is a missed opportunity. For example, in journey mapping workshops, we’ve seen stakeholders often able to identify customer touchpoints and possible issues, but have a much harder time understanding customer impact and so make changes that will really make a difference.

If you are trying to understand a user challenge, prioritize these, or design solutions, it can be immensely helpful to have real users participating in the exercise. We’ve seen vague design ideas discarded for internal reasons which triumphantly re-emerge and develop after working with customers. It requires careful briefing and facilitation, but it’s rare for participants to come away from these and not be genuinely stimulated by the event, particularly around emotive issues such as complaints handling or anything involving health.

Create informal programmes to understand users

Product managers, IT, Marketing and Operations staff may all be true professionals, but working on products they’ve not directly experienced themselves. Encouraging product use and particularly informally observing real use before a project starts can build invaluable empathy and knowledge.

A great example of informal product observation is the Follow Me Home programme run by Intuit, which has helped them to create industry-leading software. Staff members are encouraged to periodically visit real customers using their products.

Encourage a user-centred culture

Even periodic customer visits require a commitment and desire to understand the customer experience first-hand, so those involved need to perceive a value and make the customer experience the responsibility of all staff.

Internal training, mentoring and skills building workshops can be an important activity for a UX team. It increases commitment and also equips product teams with some basic skills to do some of their own research. While their time and capability to do so may be more limited, the more customer research, the better the product or service will be.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

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“Listening is one of our greatest gifts”

Get to know: Razia Richter, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Petco

We’ve all heard this at some point in our lives, right? “Listen more, listen actively or be in the moment.” I am grateful to my parents, teachers and mentors who have reminded me of this along my life journey.

In my role as a customer service leader, I find this skill to be so critical, one that must always be a priority in everything we do. I believe the best customer service starts with listening to what our customers are saying. Whether it’s from their feedback, behaviors, observations or a simple chat. Actively listening will generally lead to the best outcomes and relationships.

For the past 25 years, I have had the amazing opportunity to work for Petco, a leading national pet specialty retailer with more than 1,470 locations across the U.S., Puerto Rico and Mexico. Today, I am the Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer for the company. In this role, I lead companywide efforts to build customer loyalty and continually improve Petco’s customer experience.  I oversee the company’s ongoing work to routinely embed customer and market intelligence and practices into Petco’s strategic planning and daily work.

I was thrilled to take on this role several years ago. It began with the implementation of the Net Promoter Customer feedback process, which has now been expanded to all lines of business. It then expanded to being the central point of contact as it relates to customer insights, and then finally owning the front-line closed loop aspect of our contact centers.

When I first joined Petco in the accounting department my favorite project was to work in our stores to learn firsthand about the customer and store partners. I spent days listening and observing, with the goal of bringing what I learned back to the corporate office to make a difference for our store teams.  

After my first in-store experience, I helped create a system to automate the daily register opening/closing process so our partners could spend more time with customers. This inspired me to take on numerous roles in the company to lead changes in the areas of inventory management, store operations and supply chain, all with a focus on how to make the customer experience better.

When I am not working I enjoy spending time with family.  In fact, my best ideas come from listening to stories from my family as “shoppers.” I am always asking them about the latest things they’ve bought or places they’ve shopped. I listen for things like how and why they decided to go to a particular location or researched something online. Paying attention to this helps me to learn more about a customers’ path to purchase and, of course, more about my family (helps to make the gift list easier).

I love being part of the Execs In The Know Advisory Board. It’s a great group of leaders across different brands. We learn so much from each other through research and best practice sharing. With the rapidly increasing demands of customers and the speed in which digital has changed the ways people shop, being a part of this group helps us to keep focused on what’s most important.

I believe every customer interaction begins and ends with active listening. This is how we demonstrate we are engaged and learn about what’s important to them. Often times its simple things that you hear about and if you pay attention to them early on you can delight your customer and even exceed their expectations in the end.

The post Meet The Board – Razia Richter – The Importance of Active Listening appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog by Simon Herd, Director of Design Research at Sutherland Labs. For more information on Sutherland Labs, visit http://www.sutherlandlabs.com/. 

Many organizations have set up customer experience (CX) programs in the last 5 years, and they’re to be congratulated as it’s an important step to becoming an experience-led business.

CX programs don’t realize ultimate impact immediately, they have to prove themselves and earn trust within the organization and become true masters of their domain. Furthermore, the massive demand for talented CX professionals means that it can be difficult to get the right capability up and running quickly.

But once you have your team in place, how do you make sure resources are being directed in the right areas? Here are a few pointers for executives to watch for to help prioritize where CX capabilities should be directed to increase impact.

1. NPS/CSat scores but don’t have a clear sense of the why

NPS, CSat and other metrics are great as a warning signal of troubled waters, but they are limited in terms of understanding the ‘why’ – what’s motivating a positive or negative score? Engaging directly with customers to get to this ‘why’ – how people use services, when and where – gives context not only to negative scores, but also allows organizations to understand and build on positive experiences. Complementary activities such as social media analysis can add weight, but closer collaboration between CX and analytics teams is key to realizing a holistic view of the entire customer experience.

2. Journey maps that have been created without direct user engagement

Customer journey maps are an invaluable tool for aligning vision and road mapping the ideal customer experience. However, maps created only involving internal stakeholders, or using desk research and analytics can miss key insights and opportunities. If your organization has created maps in this way, they may not be in line with customer needs or priorities and there’s a need to get up close and personal with your customers.

3. Organization has too many customer journeys

If you have a journey map for your web experience, a journey map for your mobile experience, and yet another for your in-store experience you may be missing the bigger picture. It’s a common problem with internally focused CX teams and can be a symptom of being product (inside-out) rather than customer (outside-in) focused. Joining up all your customer experiences will help you frame your customer experience strategy and prioritize for impact.

4. Customer journeys are outdated

Remember that journey maps have a limited life span. Just as people’s behavior changes, and new products and services disrupt the competitive landscape, so too will your customer journeys. Journey maps don’t need to be constantly updated but setting realistic evaluation points will help capture the true current experience, and allow you to reframe and rethink your CX strategy.

5. CX teams lack staff who have a background in human behavior

New teams may be formed of members from product manager and marketing-related roles. These are great skills to have represented, but it’s crucial to go beyond this. The skills and mindset to understand human needs, motivations and behaviors are critical to identifying and prioritizing which design changes will have the biggest impact. For example, understanding ‘Motivation’ may not sound like it has a big business benefit, but motivation actually dictates how far customers will persist with a sub optimal product.

6. CX activity is focused at a product or channel level

Many months spent dedicating a team to developing an amazing mobile app can be severely undermined if the wider experience, such as phoning the contact center, is poor. Successful CX strategies seek to understand and optimize the entire customer journey.

7. Customer view based on demographics not needs, motivations and behavior

Behavior based personas based on real research insights provide the best way to understand what matters to your customer, and how to design for them. Traditional demographics are certainly an important element but more secondary when designing to improve customer experience.

8. No time spent observing customers use your products and services

Even the shortest period of time spent watching real use by real customers can provide a valuable reality check to all levels of stakeholders, from developer to CTO.

9. You and your teams don’t use your own products

Question why? This can be a telling indication of something that could be improved, and help align support for change. Aspire to inspire your teams.

10. International organization, but services haven’t adapted to local cultures

Small things can make or break you internationally and what’s acceptable in your culture may not be in others. For example, we recently observed cultural differences regarding privacy in Japan. Japanese customers were horrified if the last 4 digits of their credit card were shown online, whereas European audiences find it helpful.

For more information on customer journey mapping and where to start, join us November 2, 2016 for our webinar “Customer Journey Maps: A Tool When you Want Real Change.” Register now! 

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The following is a guest blog from Ted Hunting, Vice President, North America Marketing at Genesys. For more information about Genesys, visit their website. 

During the Customer Response Summit (CRS) last week in Austin, I shared my perspective on customer expectations of seamless, personalized omnichannel journeys with customer service executives from some of the world’s greatest brands. It was a rare opportunity to exchange ideas on digital innovation in customer experience (CX) with such a group.

To set the stage for brainstorming sessions on digital innovation, I talked about the prediction that by 2020, more than 90% of customer engagements will begin online, and what that means to CX innovation.

Currently in many customer service environments, organizational silos remain across channels, including web, voice, callback, mobile app, text, email, social, and video. In spite of initial interactions occurring on the web, customers nonetheless expect the effortless, personalized omnichannel journey that results from integrated communication channels. We explored some examples of businesses successfully integrating voice and digital channels to improve CX.

We looked at CX from the business perspective, examining aspects of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, including:

– An omnichannel desktop that displays every step in the customer journey, across every channel

– Enterprise-wide reporting and analytics dashboard for overall view of CX and NPS

What did this group identify as key future trends? The internet of things (IoT), personalization through big data, and emerging self-service models such as chat and voice bots, led to brainstorming on digital innovation in the CX world.

Here’s what this group of CX leaders expects to see emerging in digital innovation:

Personalized customer journeys

Customer journeys will be increasingly personalized, leveraging big data and business rules to predict customer needs and deliver better CX.

– Visibility into the customer journey will continue to evolve so companies can provide proactive recommendations and communications for front- and back-office functions across the company, not just for the contact center.

– We’ll improve on how we identify and measure journey success so that we can replicate the successful CX across the business.

– We’ll use customer journey analytics for predictive routing of customers.

– We’ll personalize routing based on business rules and customer data.

Customer preferences driving experience

Customers prefer to authenticate once, and effortlessly, in a journey. Adoption of verification methods like biometrics (voice biometrics or eye or fingerprint sensors on mobile phones) will grow, with verification becoming increasingly passive from the customer point of view, without reliance on interrogatory techniques.

– Customers will be better informed—proactively—using notifications tied to their channel preferences.

– Customers will choose channel preference based type of interaction. For example, they’ll be able to select a text message for doctor appointment reminder, but a personal call from their doctor for test results.

– With increased personalization, customers will need to supply personal information. To address privacy concerns, they’ll need to “opt-in” to such personalization efforts. Business will find ways to encourage participation, even if it’s only making sure the customer understands through clear communication that they’ll benefit from a better CX.

CX enhanced through collaborative business culture

– When CX leaders foster a culture of collaborative discussions across departments and the organization, they can uncover CX issues that persist in a siloed culture

Incorporating social channels into the customer journey

– Expect chat to be transformed with chat bots and other forms of artificial intelligence.

– Integrate social media into journey management to put agents with the right skills in place to respond through social channels.

– Peer networks in some industries can provide service. These can be enhanced by use of social media and “ambassadors” to assist customers.

– Agents can use information from social channels to assist customers. For example, they can use YouTube or other external content on how customers are using a product or solving a problem.

Taking steps to deliver omnichannel CX

– Serve customers better by arming agents with a unified omnichannel desktop.

– Use recording and speech and text analytics to discover gaps in agent knowledge, whether they’re participating in voice, chat, email. Use it to better train agents.

– Move to modern self-service options instead of old school, high-effort, impersonal IVR. Instead, offer the option to get wait times for channels from voice, text, email, web chat, to video chat and let customers choose self-service channels based on their preference. For example, give them the choice of chatting now or waiting 20 minutes for a call back.

CR Summit Austin was an opportunity to share information, and gratifying because I heard clearly that so much of what Genesys is working with partners and customers to achieve is of great interest to global leaders in CX.

Interested in where your company stand in CX innovation? Check out The Omnichannel Customer Engagement Playbook.

The post Leaders Speak on Digital Innovations for Customer Experience appeared first on Execs In The Know.

PHOENIX, AZ. April 15, 2016 – Chad McDaniel, President of Execs In The Know, and Leslie Joseph, Senior Director, Product Marketing at [24]7, will be hosting the webinar The Future of Enterprise Chat Wednesday, April 20^th, 2016 from 1:00-2:00 P.M. ET. The speakers will explain the importance of having an established chat channel for customer service, as well as potential future improvements, due in large part to consumer demand for intelligent, high quality experiences, regardless of channel.

The webinar will explore how big data, omnichannel technologies, and rich media are delivering improvements in chat experiences, for both customers and agents. Key takeaways include: the key elements of chat success in an omnichannel world; specific use cases to extend and enrich the chat channel; and the business case to transform your chat customer experience, improve sales conversions, save costs, and lift NPS.

“Customers want to be able to contact you when and where they want, in their preferred channel, and know that they’ll still have that same consistent experience with your brand,” said Chad McDaniel. “[24]7 has great insights to share on best practices and improvements for the future for this interactive channel, which is a top priority for many of our community members.”

To register for the webinar visit https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7449194949962566660.

About Execs In The Know

For over 15 years, Execs In The Know has built a reputation of excellence in the Customer Management Industry and a worldwide community of over 50,000 Customer Experience Professionals. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking, and industry employment opportunities. Examples of this can be seen at their Customer Response Summit events, roadshows, webinars, workshops, Blog Talk Radio segments, Industry Benchmarking Series, blogs, thought papers, and social communities.

To learn more about Execs In The Know, visit www.execsintheknow.com. For more information on their Customer Management Recruitment Solutions, visit www.justcareers.com.

About [24]7

[24]7 makes customer service and sales simple. We use big data and predictive analytics to understand customers and drive better service and sales results for the world’s leading companies. [24]7’s platform enables an omnichannel experience that connects customer interactions across web, mobile, chat, social, and phone channels in real-time and in the cloud to drive immediate business results by increasing revenues, reducing service and sales costs, and creating more satisfied customers. [24]7 serves the Global 1000 market leaders in Finance, Retail, Telecommunications, Technology, Travel and other industries.

For more information, visit: www.247-inc.com.

Media Contact

Alyssa Pitura
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The following is a guest blog written by Edward Kowalski, Associate Vice President, Retail Marketing, at Sutherland Global Services. To download a free white paper on the topic, visit  http://www.sutherlandglobal.com/Retail/WP-20160104/Default.aspx

Most retailers are missing a key opportunity. It’s a way to take what’s now an expense and instead use it to build awareness, create loyalty and even grow profits.

It’s customer care.

Companies should combine customer care with customer experience, big data and predictive analytics. It’s a transformation that requires retailers to break down silos and start sharing information that’s widely available.

Consider the constant signals customers provide, based on multiple experiences, with brands across multiple touchpoints. Retail marketers use the information to develop a customer journey that’s seamless, relevant, authentic and omni-channel.

But it’s a missing link that needs to be shared with the customer care team.

Retailers should develop a new system that arms customer care agents with intelligence that spurs personalized engagements. This helps resolve complaints, increase Net Promoter Scores, improve customer satisfaction, create loyalty and, yes, generate revenue.

Here are the steps we recommend:

– Share information – Marketers analyze data and analytics, creating a 360-degree view of customers. It allows them to create intelligent communications so customers receive the right message, at the right time, through the right channel.

That customer intelligence forms the blueprint that drives strategic marketing plans. But it’s rarely shared with customer care agents who routinely have direct 1:1 communications with customers. Without the analytics needed to guide a customer’s journey, customer care is typically limited to solving at-the-moment issues as quickly as possible.

We helped a fashion retailer give customer care agents the tools needed to become an integrated part of the customer experience. The agents saw each customer’s purchase history, for example, allowing them to customize product recommendations. The result? Sales conversion climbed from 15 percent to 25 percent, the basket size increased by 7 percent and the average handle time dropped by 23 percent.

– Make it personal – Retailers have long tried to “know thy customer,” which is why they now analyze and segment data. Once they acquire a better understanding of customers’ buying behaviors, their predictions alter their strategies.

Product-centric programs are out. The focus now is enhancing the customer experience. No matter the communication channel, when businesses personalize shopping effectively, it creates a brand loyalty with customers.

This happens on intelligent websites, for instance. They collect user data and, based on a customer’s preference, they dynamically present different retail offerings. Today, as omni-channel marketers and ecommerce leaders make this shift, it should also carry over to customer care.

The more customer care agents know about customers, the more they can create personalized experiences across channels and devices.

– Help customer care agents make real-time recommendations – After unlocking information, retailers should provide customer care agents with an automated set of intelligence that enables personalization. Now the customer experience journey gets extended through the customer care channel.

Customer care agents can deliver a consistent, relevant, authentic and timely experience if they have tools that provide information, intelligence and recommendations in real-time. It’s efficient and effective.

After breaking down silos and unlocking all of a company’s information about customers, retailers must integrate that intelligence with the dashboards customer care agents use. This is made possible through the integration of Customer Engagement Management Platforms. Dashboards powered by these platforms will showcase insightful data and analytics, providing a full view of the customer and automating customized recommendations (in the form of next best actions). In turn, this provides the highly valued, personalized customer experience.

In addition to unified customer views and real-time recommendations, these platforms also provide robust business intelligence tools to measure the outcomes of customer engagement. If retailers understand those outcomes, they can incorporate the customer voice into the customer experience design.

The platform’s tools should help customer care agents:

– Pick data from disparate sources

– Correlate the data and enrich individual customer profiles

– Provide cross-dimensional views from the customer’s viewpoint

– Interface and deliver relevant recommendations (Next Best Actions)

– Deliver these actions to the customers at their preferred touch point with context and relevance

This creates more relevant, more meaningful interactions between the customer and the agent. Eventually, it also means a seamless and desirable customer care experience that prompts more long-term customer loyalty and advocacy.

– A better way to measure success – Traditional customer satisfaction measures (C-SAT) become less helpful as the standard of retail customer care becomes more consistent and homogenous. Instead, consider Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measures the most powerful form of marketing: a customer’s willingness to promote a service or product to family and friends. Earning that loyalty shows the retailer’s brand commitment to its customers has been noticed and appreciated. That loyalty means customers shop – and purchase – more frequently.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, from Sutherland Global Services and our other subject matter experts, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23rd-25th, 2016.

The post The Missing Link Retailers Need to Turn a Cost Into a Revenue Generator appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Seattle. The Emerald City – best known for its coffee, rain, grunge and … customer experiences? From September 28^th through the 30^th, the Hyatt Olive 8 in Seattle became the hub for connecting customer service professionals with their peers, creating engaging discussions around the trends, challenges and best practices related to the customer service industry. There was much to be gained at the Customer Response Summit, from conversations in the hallways to soaking in expertise at the panels and presentations. We combed through our notes to share our most valuable bits of information gained.

#1: Digital and Traditional Channels Need to Integrate Seamlessly

A strong and reoccurring theme throughout the Customer Response Summit was the consensus that a robust customer service strategy must assume a holistic online-offline perspective. With the proliferation of communication channels and devices, customers expect to be able to start an interaction in one channel and complete it in another.

In 2015, the customer service industry continues to think about ways to create customer-centric, omni-channel experiences. The end goal is to focus on the user experience and create one-to-one relationships with customers integrated across all their favorite channels – email, SMS, video, chat, social media, and phone, in-store and on desktops, mobiles, and tablets. For example, if a customer has been browsing your how-to videos on your FAQ page on topic A, and then turns to Facebook and asks a different question on topic B, the company should be able to bring together all that data and respond promptly with a concise and useful answer.

The customer expects you to know who they are, what they want, and how they last interacted with your brand. To help seamlessly integrate the multi-channel experience, allowing your brand to truly understand the customer, the use of a CRM was discussed. A CRM that captures data of all interactions will allow your phone agents to see social and online data and your social customer service agents to see phone dispositions, giving all of your team members access to the most up-to-date customer data.

 #2: Effortless Experiences

From multiple call transfers to slow systems, there are numerous causes to an increase in customer effort.  These obstacles are not always easy to identify, making them difficult to remove. To begin to reduce customer effort, you need to understand the obstacles that get in the way of an effortless experience.

Start by being your own customer. Use your customer service line, visit the stores, secret shop, and use feedback from disgruntled customers. This firsthand insight will help you highlight the biggest problems and will allow you to start strategizing a plan to reduce customer effort. An example that I discovered while researching the topic a little more was a story on how Ameriprise Financial sought to reduce customer effort. They asked their customer service reps to capture every instance in which they were forced to tell a customer no. While auditing the “noes,” the company found many legacy policies that had been outmoded by regulatory changes or system or process improvements. During its first year of “capturing the noes,” Ameriprise modified or eliminated 26 policies. It has since expanded the program by asking frontline reps to come up with other process efficiencies, generating $1.2 million in savings as a result (1).

This strategy is similar to a comment received at the Customer Response Summit. An attendee told the story of their “Kill a Stupid Rule” campaign with the goal of calling out rules that hindered experiences, reduced employee happiness, or increased customer effort. You may find that reducing customer effort starts by simply reevaluating your company policies.

 #3: Customer Experience Metrics Are Not “One Size Fits All”

Traditional measures such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and First Contact Resolution (FCR) seem to be the common measures to understand the customer’s perception of the support they receive. Are these the right measures for your business? Maybe, maybe not. Most organizations are trying to solve for (or should be trying to solve for) reducing customer effort, increasing the customer experience and increasing brand loyalty, but we have operational needs to consider as well like cost, handle time, and adherence to schedule. How do you balance both without hindering the experience?

During the Customer Response Summit, Scott Shute from LinkedIn gave an example that I can picture over and over again in my head. Scott was traveling with his wife and three young children during the busy holiday travel season. Their first plane was delayed, creating an incredibly small window of time for his family to get to the gate of their connecting flight. Scott was determined to make the flight as it would be incredibly hard to reschedule.  After running like a track star to the gate, Scott told the airline attendant his story and asked if she would allow his family 90 seconds to catch up and get to the gate. The attendant heard his story, looked in his eyes, and then, slowly walked over to the boarding door. What did she do next? Nope, she did not escort the family personally onto the plane; she closed the door to the jetway!

Can you imagine traveling for the holidays with small children, running across the airport, and making it to the gate in time – all just to miss the plane? Why did the airline attendant have no empathy? Simply put, it’s because the metric that she was being evaluated on was “on-time” flights. A perfect example of how good metrics go bad. While this is a good metric operationally, it can backfire horribly on the customer experience. We learned at the Customer Response Summit that metrics should be based upon the customer, not the operations, if you want to truly create a brand built on the customer experience.

#4: Happy Employees Deliver Happy Customers

The customer experience is nothing without customer-oriented service, and customer- oriented service is impossible without people. Consumers 2020 reports that by the year 2020, the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. If this is true (and as customer service professionals, we are already seeing this upward trend), we need to treat our employees as we want them to treat our customers.

Some tips given at the Customer Response Summit to create a loyal employee experience include following a closed-loop process with your employees as you would your customers. Just like when addressing customer rage, when employees give you feedback, LISTEN! More importantly, it’s not enough to only listen;let them know that you hear them, and tell them what you are going to do about it!

One of my favorite tips I heard at the Summit was to not assume that your employees know how they affect the customer experience. You need to tell them! At Dialog Direct, we have a “WOW story” program:every week, we share a story about how one of our frontline employees created a “WOW” experience for a customer or even for another employee. This reminds the team that each and every day, they personally have the power to positively or negatively affect someone’s day. It’s exciting to see the lightbulb turn on in someone’s head and watch them get really excited to make someone’s day. By setting the stage and removing the roadblocks, you allow employees to create remarkable experiences and feel empowered and more satisfied with their work.

#5: Follow the Data

Customer engagement strategies are fueled by customer data. Understanding what customers have done, what channels they’ve used, what products they’ve purchased, and what service interactions they’ve had are all important data sources that can be used to build predictive models. Leverage cookie data and past-purchase data to help develop and train models. These models are critical in helping service teams understand which customers need your attention, which customers are about to churn, which customers are most likely to purchase again or buy more frequently, and which customers are likely to call in and check the status of an order, claim, or billing issue.

READ: Predictive Analytics in Action: Implementing Strategies for Dramatic Sales Lift

As companies gain a deeper understanding of customers through research and predictive analytics, they will use that information to develop more individualized customer experiences, such as reaching out to the right customer at the right time, using their preferred channel, and delivering a personalized offer pre- or post-purchase. Another example: service teams will leverage the power of predictive analytics to route callers to the phone agents who are “the most likely to help” based on the anticipated reason for the call. Similarly, predictive can assist in finding which type of agents can be paired to the right type of caller to improve the FCR. They will use learnings from these proactive engagements to improve operational performance and to predict future customer behavior.

#6: The Whip and Nae Nae Is Not as Hard as We Thought!

We came, we saw, we nae nae-ed.

What do you have to add to this list?

But, wait … There’s more! 

We enjoyed meeting everyone at the show and would like to share with you our 2015 “Customer Rage” study. This free, detailed study offers primary research on the issues Americans are experiencing with brands and examines customer-complaining behavior.

Get your free copy of the 2015 Customer Rage Study

For more information on how Dialog Direct can help you implement these these and other customer experience strategies into your call center, send me a note at sara.wright@dialog-direct.com 

Sources:

(1) https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers

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There will be 45 billion customer service calls in 2015 . That’s over 123 million calls every day! Having agents handling calls is not a scalable and sustainable model for delivering customer service in an increasingly digital world. Customers are expressing a strong preference for self-serve in digital channels, and companies today need to go the “last digital mile” to deliver optimum customer service.

What is the last mile in digital and why is it important? Typically, the “last mile” refers to the final leg of the telecommunications network which delivers connectivity to a retail customer. But, in today’s digital world where between 50-60 percent of customers prefer self-service solutions , the last digital mile now represents the coming together of customer-facing touch points with back-end infrastructure to provide a personalized and friction-less self-service experience for customers. Achieving this requires the integration of data, design, and experience to achieve superior business outcomes that enable you to thrive in the digital world.

The last mile in digital means transitioning from analog channels to deliver optimal digital self-service – and augmenting with assisted service – to deliver rich media interactions across devices and utilizing predictive analytics to anticipate the customer’s needs.

Another thing you can expect is that “incrementality” will become the new reality where end-to-end journeys drive incremental revenues and lifts in NPS. Companies won’t simply engage customers by offering random chats but rather we’ll engage intelligently, based on big data analysis, when the customer needs help to get the job done, and by managing and understanding their digital journey, we will focus on the engagements where value is added. You need to know who to target, when to intervene, how to engage, and what to recommend. Big data, combined with prediction and real-time decision making, make this possible.

In the digital world, designing the customers experience plays a key role. Not all chat offers, for example, are the same. Design elements, such as widget placement, colors, and fonts have a significant impact on acceptance rates. Using a design of experiments approach can help quickly identify the design that generates the best results and improve the customer’s experience.

The upside of delivering a solution that elegantly integrates data, design, and experience to achieve superior business outcomes is significant. Clients using this approach are seeing:

• 60% automation rates
• 90+% completion rates
• $2.5 billion in savings
• 200% increase in conversion rates
• 30 point increase in NPS

If you’d like to learn more about the last mile in digital and how it is benefiting leading finance, retail, telecom and travel companies, please join the webinar The Last Digital Mile: Orchestrating Channels, Data, & Design to Thrive in a Digital World on June 4, 2015 from 1-2 ET. You can register for the webinar here.

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LiveOps has certainly been on the move lately! Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to the 10th annual Customer Response Summit in the heart of the “Blues City” – Memphis, Tennessee. While there, I found myself mingling with some of the most remarkable thought leaders in this industry, sharing experiences and advice on how to ensure a positive customer experience for the connected consumer – a topic that is very near and dear to my heart.

It is well known that our customers are and should be at the center of everything we do. During my time at the Customer Response Summit I was fortunate to moderate a session with Martin Hand, Chief Customer Officer at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Alistair Firmin, Vice President of Customer Service at The Standard and John Jordan, Chief Customer Officer at Total Wine & More where we share our collective experiences and insights. Here are the 3 key takeaways from our session that are universally applicable to any brand looking to create exceptional customer experiences.

(1) Move from Reactive to Proactive Customer Experience Management

Instead of “driving by looking through the rear view mirror” and using historic metrics such as NPS, CSAT and DSAT to measure customer experience, brands are increasingly using real-time customer interaction patterns to prevent bad experiences from happening in the first place. Just like real-time fraud detection, we now have the right technology to aggregate customer experience data such as web visit, contact center interaction, transactional and social media activity data so that brand can detect negative customer experience patterns such as shopping cart abandonment, unsuccessful self-service journey and sub-SLA customer service in real time. Coupled with real-time contextual routing, brands can now react immediately to these negative CX patterns by triggering the next-best-action, utilizing concierge live service agents to “save” the customer journey before it escalates into complaints or worse yet, customer churn.

(2) Customer Experience Management Is Everybody’s Job

This was one of the hot topics during our panel discussion. In order to deliver exceptional customer experiences, it is critical for the entire organization to have equal participation, transparent reporting, common performance measurements and shared incentives. According to McKinsey, the customer journey has evolved from linear to circular. Brands no longer win customers just once; rather, they need to win their loyalty at every single touch point across the entire customer journey. This includes sales, marketing, services and back office interactions.

(3) Apply the “Curly Rule” and Prioritize Your Customer Journey Bottlenecks

There will always be many customer journey bottlenecks to fix. Find that “one thing” that has the biggest impact to your business and start there. For example, Bolt Insurance conducts research to determine a buyer’s purchase journey online, in-office and over the phone. With this information, they are able to find out where shoppers start their information gathering process, where they seek help and where they eventually make their final purchase. This provides invaluable insight into key journey bottlenecks that cause drop-offs and dissatisfaction so that Bolt can fix them accordingly to increase sales conversion.

The one thing that we all agreed on is that agents are not appropriately armed to service today’s multichannel, mobile, social customers. In order to deliver exceptional customer experiences, brands should look within and start with their own contact center agents for BAX=BCX=BCTLV.

Are you ready to listen, detect and engage with your customers in real time?

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