Is Your Company Meeting the Needs of Digital Natives?
by Chris O'Brien on April 25th, 2012
It’s no surprise that the mobile devices individuals use have a profound effect on how they consume information. Could these habits also have an impact on how they prefer to interact with customer service agents?
Recently, Time Inc., Innerscope Research, and M&RR conducted a study that monitored participants at various times of the day to determine how consumers from different generations engage with various media platforms. The report, “A biometric day in the life,” separated the sample into two types of users: Digital Natives are individuals who grew up around mobile devices and social media, while Digital Immigrants adopted these devices and channels as adults.
According to the report, Digital Immigrants are intuitively linear—that is, they want content to have a beginning, middle, and end. By contrast, because Digital Natives frequently switch between platforms, they tend to assemble the pieces of the story themselves. The study also found that Digital Natives switch between media platforms (magazines, tablets, smartphones, television) a whopping 27 times per hour. As a result, their emotional engagement with content was lower than that of Immigrants.
So what does this mean for the contact center? If you think of Digital Natives as the embodiment of the next-generation consumer, then companies need to become more agile, responsive, and multichannel. Indeed, more than half of Digital Natives would rather send a text than talk to someone; only 28 percent of Digital Immigrants felt the same.
Digital Natives are also more likely to embrace new modes of service such as social media and chat. With the rising adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices, the behavior of Digital Natives will soon become the standard for all consumers.
As we’ve discussed on this blog, rapid technological advances are transforming the consumer landscape—and by extension the customer contact dynamic—faster than companies can keep up. Now is the time for the enterprise to implement a platform that enables multichannel engagement and can evolve to meet emerging consumer needs.
Please Don’t Tell a Customer You “Can’t” Help
by Chris O'Brien on April 19th, 2012
Customer service is becoming a deciding factor in the customer satisfaction game. As someone who both works in the customer experience industry and is – like everyone reading this – also a consumer, this offers something of a unique perspective. I could recount a dozen best practices that would pretty much guarantee a satisfying experience, and I recognize good service when I see it. But what I’ve also discovered is that a company can guarantee that I will never do business with again just by relying on one little word: “can’t.”
Here’s an example. The other day, after spending hours online researching the perfect birthday gift for my husband (in case he’s reading, let’s just say it’s a “watch,”) comparing models, features, prices, packages, and styles, I decided to try and save a
few bucks by ordering the item from a company that promised free shipping. Several online reviews had mentioned this company’s questionable customer service, but I shrugged those off.
“I won’t need to worry about service for this,” I figured. What could go wrong? This was a quick transaction on an in-stock item. It should arrive within a few days without any complications.
Right.
Later that day, an email notified me that my item had been backordered and would now ship at the end of next month – about six weeks late, not even close to being on time for a birthday present.
Not only that, they had already charged my credit card!
I picked up the phone to call customer service and cancel the order. After being asked to repeat my order number and explain my request to two different agents, I finally reached the individual who promised to help me.
What I got from him wasn’t exactly “help.”
“I’m sorry,” he explained, “but the label has already been printed. I can try and cancel it. But worst case, the item will be shipped to you and you’ll need to pay the return shipping.”
I was a little bit dumbfounded. “I ordered this less than 24 hours ago based on the information that it was in stock,” I said. “If it’s not in stock, then it’s your error. Please just cancel the order and return my money.”
Again, I was given an apologetic line about the order already being in the system. “At this point,” he said, “there’s really nothing I can do.”
Wow. Really? Nothing he or anyone within his organization could do to salvage a customer relationship, keep my impression of their brand from being dragged through the mud, and ensure that I would invest future money with his company? There was not a supervisor he could speak with, a phone call he could make, a process that could be interrupted for the sake of continued customer loyalty?
Apparently not. He ended the call by promising to “try.” He let me know to watch for a cancellation email – one that I have to assume might or might not come.
Ten years ago, would I have felt as a customer that I had the “right” to flawless service? Maybe not. Expectations have changed. I fully anticipated that the agent I reached would resolve my problem immediately and to my complete satisfaction, at any cost. If a process stood in the way, I fully expected it to be worked around.
This is the reality of today’s consumer-driven environment. Organizations that continue to underestimate their expectations will be making a grave tactical error.
Chief Customer Officer: Enhancing Customer Experience
by Tim Dreyer on April 18th, 2012
Image courtesy of Curtis N. Bingham, CCO Council
Meeting the expectations of today’s consumer requires traditionally siloed functions such as sales, marketing, and the contact center work together more effectively. To support this business objective, an increasing number of companies are creating the position of chief customer officer (CCO) to break down these silos and ensure that the consumer is a top priority for the entire enterprise.
As Inc. Magazine notes in “Make room for the chief customer officer,” the scope of the CCO varies from company to company. Some organizations have made the position part of the executive management team, while at others the CCO is the head of a department, such as sales, but has the additional responsibility of promoting customer issues across the company. The degree of authority of departments and budgets also differs greatly among companies.
Similarly, last year Forrester conducted a survey of 155 CCOs to get a better idea of their responsibilities and impact. The survey found that the development of the CCO role is still in its infancy. Indeed, 82 percent of the sample has been in their positions less than two years, indicating that companies have recently recognized the need for an increased emphasis on customer experience but might still be grappling with how the CCO can have the greatest impact.
We have been vocal advocates for an enterprise-wide approach to customer experience, so it’s heartening to see companies embracing it. A critical element of this strategy is to ensure all of the departments that will collaborate on customer experience—sales, marketing, customer contact, IT, and public relations—have a unified communications platform to facilitate information sharing and decision making.
It’s both technological and cultural shift but one that best addresses the way consumers want to engage with the companies they do business with. What are the biggest silos in your organization that you’d like to take a hammer to?
New Data Bolster Business Case for Better Customer Service
by Chris O'Brien on April 2nd, 2012
If you doubt the growing importance of delivering excellent customer experience, three pieces of recent research drive home the benefits for companies that have been able to succeed in this area.
First, IBM conducted interviews with more than 1,700 chief marketing officers (CMOs) across 19 industries in 64 countries. Its report, From Stretched to Strengthened, found that participants cited delivering value to the customer as their top priority. CMOs acknowledged that this value consisted of not just products and services but also how the organization acts and responds. In addition, study participants recognized that the customer has now seized control of the company-customer relationship.
Second, the Temkin Group issued a report, The ROI of Customer Experience, that attempts to quantify the impact of customer service on a company’s bottom line. (Aspect’s Mike Sheridan tackled this topic last year.) Its analysis of 10,000 U.S. and 3,000 U.K. consumers found that U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in sales can increase their revenues by $384 million over three years by making incremental gains in the quality of service they deliver to customers.
Last, Forrester released its 2012 Customer Experience Index, which used responses from more than 7,600 U.S. consumers to gauge the performance of 160 top brands on customer engagement. The results: just 4 of the companies, or 3 percent of the sample, received an excellent rating. The rest were categorized as underperforming along key measures of customer experience.
So what can we conclude from these studies? A few things:
- Organizations are shifting their priorities to address the changing company-customer dynamic.
- There’s a growing recognition among executives of the value of customer experience.
- The majority of companies are falling well short—which translates to lost revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the average large company.
With companies focused on delivering a distinctive customer experience, understanding that there’s a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and revenues, why are so many businesses still failing? A couple of factors are responsible:
1. Delivering excellent customer service is difficult, and getting increasingly so.
We’ve discussed how consumer expectations have risen precipitously as a result of mobility and instant access to information. Customers want their issues to be resolved the first time and aren’t up for waiting on hold to accomplish it.
2. The functionality of most contact centers hasn’t kept pace with technological advances in the consumer arena.
The proliferation of communications channels has overwhelmed contact centers, and emergence of social media as a primary information source means that negative interactions increasingly result in a public airing of grievances. (It’s no longer reserved just for Festivus.)
These reports underscore the necessity for companies to take urgent action to empower their contact center agents with the tools and resources to engage more efficiently and productively with customers. The impact of such investments will be reflected not just in performance but also on the bottom line.
What is your company doing to improve its contact center operations?
Are You Really Engaging Your Customers?
by Kelly Burke on March 22nd, 2012
Just came back from the Gartner Customer 360 Summit and there are definitely a lot of great things happening within our industry that are going to help us deliver exceptional customer experiences! There were several key trends discussed that will shape business decisions and investments in the coming year. Self-Service and Customer Experience were cited as two of the top baseline trends. The customer is truly poised to have it their way… Self-service via mobile devices and the web that can easily transition to seamless live agent assisted experiences incorporating a wide range of interaction channels (voice, web, chat, video) are hot trends where the contact center is positioned to become even more pivotal. The contact center is becoming the customer engagement hub. 
You’re probably wondering why we still need contact centers if consumers are demanding more self-service options. Even while many interactions can be predictably automated or guided, there are just as many that are complicated and will have variable solutions depending on a customer’s specific situation. These are the interactions that will continue to be driven to the contact center. But the game has definitely changed. The same craving for social interaction that is driving the surge in social communities is shaping expectations for the next generation of consumers. Speaking of games… these consumers love games (if you have kids you know all about this), they love problem solving, and this is one of the sources of the energy and sense of ownership that will be instrumental in transforming the customer service experience.
We need to take a holistic view of every touch point where the customer engages our business and determine their intent for that interaction. We need to anticipate that customers will engage us at different points in our process and with different channels within the organization and be aware of that unique context to present intuitive processes (both self-service and agent assisted) to help them reach their destination. Using analytics to understand what’s really going on with the customer experience today is critical, but companies will also need to start using new forms of customer context information such as location, presence, intent, and social network relevance to determine customer value. Companies will be expected to be transparent in showing consumers how these evaluations affect the service they receive as well.
All of the speakers and participants at the conference acknowledged that these trends are simultaneously exciting and challenging and the next question, of course, is how will we get there? One of the first steps companies can take is to start adopting a customer-oriented culture by building a team focused on understanding and improving the customer experience. This team will need to undertake an honest analysis of customer interaction processes across all parts of the enterprise and start to build a new model for engaging the customer on their terms. It’s just as critical to think about the metrics you will use to measure success. Traditional measures such as contact volumes or cost per contact are relatively easy to measure but often don’t expose successes or issues until well after the events are past. To get in front of your processes and be more responsive you will need to measure new types of metrics such as net promoter scores, lifetime value, and customer sentiment. Traditional KPIs such as agent churn, escalations, and self-service success rates will provide important and measurable trends, as well. Investing in a unified communications solution that allows you to strengthen customer-company interactions while increasing customer satisfaction, improving contact center performance and reducing costs will be the springboard for gaining deeper customer insight and engagement.
Remember context is critical when you start to define your next generation customer contact experience. Mobile devices are already transforming consumer expectations for rich, yet simple user experience (use of location, social monitoring, and video are increasing). Your customer is social and that’s where we will find them in the future… in the community. Companies that harness the energy and collective expertise of social communities along with customer support are expected to reap the rewards in reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Stay tuned for more updates on these exciting developments and successes from within our own Aspect Community!
The Value of Listening to What Your Customers are Telling You
by Chris O'Brien on February 16th, 2012
Among the many classic episodes of Seinfeld, one of my favorites is when Kramer becomes the MoviePhone operator, though without any of the tools he needs to provide good customer service.
Once he exhausts his ability to provide the right answer, his fallback is to ask, “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
Many companies that are struggling with customer service are desperate for someone to just tell them how they can make their interactions with consumers more effective. It’s not hard to understand why. As fast as the customer experience landscape is evolving, it’s difficult for even the best organizations to keep pace. However, the information and answers to enable better customer service are often closer than you think.
At Aspect, we’re big advocates of harnessing the information that customers are already providing to improve their experience. On this blog, we’ve shared a number of approaches for optimizing customer experience.
Data analytics. As we’ve noted previously, companies are sitting on a wealth of insight in the form of data they capture through customer interactions in the contact center. So the key is to implement the capabilities and processes to extract the value from these data
Social media monitoring. As consumers have adopted social media channels to express their feelings about companies and products, business leaders are struggling to understand how to track and address issues from these sources. It’s clear, however, that social media and what it can tell companies are too valuable to ignore.
Expert voices. One of the most difficult challenges with customer experience is to take a step back and understand the larger trends shaping the industry. With the benefit of these perspectives, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of how to react to rising customer expectations in a strategic and sustainable way.
In an effort to practice what we preach, we’re holding the Aspect Customer Experience (ACE), on June 19-22. Over the past few years, we’ve found that part of what makes this event so valuable—to our executives as well as attendees—is that the agenda is developed in part based on feedback and surveys from our customers. So if you allow me to channel my inner Kramer, why don’t you tell us what you’d like to see?
With this information, we’re looking forward to a stimulating program that directly addresses some of the issues and challenges our customers face in delivering excellent customer service and improving the performance and effectiveness of their contact centers.
I’ll be sure to share the customer insights that emerge from ACE in a future blog.
Four Critical Components of a Next-Generation Contact Solution
by Doug Whitaker on December 26th, 2011
In previous posts, I discussed how a contact center can directly support business strategy as well as the workforce optimization tools that contact centers need to fulfill their potential. The next step for business leaders is to identify a solution that can empower the contact center—and the organization as a whole.
As the customer service environment has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past several years, what had been a straightforward exercise is now more complicated. Four forces have altered the landscape.
1) The customer-company dynamic has changed. One-way conversations, in which companies dictated the terms, have been replaced by an ongoing dialogue. What’s more, customers now expect a collaborative relationship with the companies they favor.
2) The availability of information about companies and products has exploded. Companies used to have control of the information that was available about products and services. Now customers can do their own research using forums, blogs, and reviews.
3) Technology has enabled greater connectivity. The mass adoption of mobile devices—Pew Research found that 83 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone—has given rise to consumers who are always on. The same study found that nearly one-third of adults preferred to be contacted via text message.
4) Consumer expectations have increased. As soon as one company integrates such channels as social media into their contact center operations, consumers not only become aware of it but also immediately expect the same capabilities from other companies.
The evolution of consumer behavior and technology will likely accelerate, presenting businesses with new challenges—as well as new tools to address them. Therefore, a next-generation solution must incorporate traditional applications while allowing the flexibility to accommodate near-term and future requirements. The components of the solution must include:
- Customer empowerment – To give customers the ability to interact and get information in the way they want, companies will have to offer a variety of options for live and self-service communications. This strategy will require new functionality to ensure that information and experience across channels are consistent.
- Enterprise engagement – Aspect CEO Jim Foy noted in an interview in May of this year that the contact center as we know it won’t exist in ten years. Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) have connected our enterprises so that physical, technological, and organizational barriers don’t inhibit a company’s ability to address customer requirements. Increased consumer expectations will compel companies to adopt UC&C so that back-office and knowledge workers can be included in the process.
- Social communications – New communications channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and even blogs have introduced exciting mediums for customers to share information and opinions on their consumer choices. What makes social media more complex is that the contacts are typically indirect rather than direct. Many companies are scrambling to address social media channels with their contact center operations. A key element of this strategy is the ability to monitor these communications, manage the interactions, and respond appropriately to the customer issues.
- Dynamic analytics – Contact centers have become the natural hub of customer data, but many companies haven’t adopted the tools and processes to use this information to shape business strategy and set priorities. Beyond the technology, executives must reorient their organization so that functions such as marketing, communications, and sales can all benefit from these insights.
Speaking in the general sense, companies must pursue workforce optimization to make the best use of their available internal resources. A comprehensive strategy to schedule staff, accommodate mobile agents, and right-size the physical contact center can increase efficiency and returns on investment.
In the coming year, Aspect will continue to share our vision for the future of the contact center and how companies can achieve the full potential of our customer experience efforts.
Social Shopping
by Amy Wagner on December 20th, 2011
The holiday season is again upon us, and many of us are in full-court-press holiday shopping mode. This phenomenon prompted me to examine the way we, as consumers, shop and select the retailers and vendors who we feel deserve our business.
In my youth, I remember dressing up and going “downtown” with my grandmother for special buying trips. We would visit the retailers available to us in the form of storefront shops. If we wanted something special ordered, we had no way of researching the item we desired unless we talked with friends and family or “heard it through the grapevine.”
Then, once we decided an item was worthy, we waited six to eight weeks for it to arrive. If it turned out to be less than expected, we hoped for a phone number or address to which we could address concerns, complaints and, if necessary, the return process. Honestly, we pretty much were at the mercy of the retailer or manufacturer. We played the customer service game according to their rules.
For example, in the 1960s, just how would you have returned or complained about a damaged lava lamp?
Of course, an alternative option when considering a purchase was to write the retailer (yes WRITE – through snail mail), receive a product description and possibly some testimonials. Seriously, how reliable are testimonials? If we wanted to know the customer service history of the retailer, we perhaps contacted the Better Business Bureau.
In my 20s, buying from catalogs such as LL Bean, J Crew, and Land’s End became easy and cost effective. According to Kevin Hillstrom, database marketing enabled companies to tailor catalogs to specific audiences, increasing profitability.
During the 1990s, retailers established e-commerce websites and used catalogs and e-mail to attract customers. However, it was mostly impossible to reach out to the customer community to compare such things as quality, order delivery history, and customer experience with the retailer, not to mention customers’ experiences with specific items.
Fast forward to today. As consumers, we can not only access the plethora of data on retailers themselves, their parent companies, and their vendors but also research their community, national and global activism, how they treat their employees and customers PLUS we can also, with very little effort, access most of their dirty laundry. Most important, we now can interact with their customer community and compare specific customer experiences, with the company or a single, specific item. The customer community actually is presented to the consumer with a few quick clicks of their keyboard.
Consumers are empowered and can decide if they want to do business with a particular company. It matters little whether it’s a $10 transaction or a $10,000 transaction; they are now able to make an informed choice with a few keystrokes.
If you flip this scenario around, think about what it means to retailers, vendors, and corporations: they must now serve their customer and their customer community. How do they do that? With technologies that allow them to reach out to customers, at the customers’ convenience, access data on their customers’ experiences in real time, analyze that data, and act upon it at the exact time the customer is choosing to interact with the company. WOW! That’s what I call Next Generation Customer Contact.
Watch for more about Next Generation Customer Contact coming in future blogs.
Recommended Reading: The Digital Innovation Playbook
by Chris O'Brien on November 2nd, 2011
Technology has such a familiar place in our daily lives that phrases like “the digital revolution” will get you an eye roll, if you’re lucky. It’s a little like showing up to a party six hours late and proclaiming that everyone may now get (this party) started. (Y’all.)
What I like about The Digital Innovation Playbook by Nicholas J. Webb is that he clearly arrived at the party some time ago, and yet he resists the urge to continually convince the rest of us that it is happening. Instead, he delves right into the conversation with a solid, new-order business perspective on how to effectively integrate Web-based applications and social media into a plan for greater operational success.
He does this by simplifying challenging concepts in a way that is engaging and readable. (What is innovation, after all? Webb defines it as “the process of creating exceptional customer value through active listening” – with an emphasis on exceptional, value, and listening.) Then he underscores concepts with real-world examples and case studies to demonstrate how digital strategies work and how they can be done well.
I was drawn in immediately by the word “playbook” in the title, imagining that I would find a step-by-step approach to innovation in the digital marketplace. But what I found was not a see-it, do-it book of recipe-style tactics. Webb’s approach proposes a shift in enterprise-wide thinking that is achievable for both large and small businesses and drives innovation from the inside-out. This approach effectively teaches the development and application of innovation.
While this seems like no small task, Aspect gives organizations a simple starting point for transforming the focus of customer contact—a next-generation contact center solution that adapts the existing, time-worn business practices to the digital world of today.
Those who are serious about creating exceptional value through active listening will want to pick up a copy of The Digital Innovation Playbook… and then consider the ways in which you can use digital media, next-generation technology, and innovation to enhance the customer experience.
For more Recommended Reading, click here.
What Southwest can teach other companies about customer service
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 7th, 2011
Most major corporations have developed customer engagement strategies that reach across a number of channels, from the contact center to social media. The market leaders often distinguish themselves by how they use each mode to differentiate themselves.
Take Southwest Airlines. Recently, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) released its 2011 rankings for a number of industries, and among major airlines Southwest was in the top spot by 17 points over its nearest competitor. As a low-cost carrier, Southwest’s lack of seating assignments and meal service might be deal breakers for many travelers, especially businesspeople. However, Southwest has built its reputation on the strength of its flight attendants and service staff, who not only seem to like what they do but also go the extra mile to create a great in-flight experience.
As the report notes, Southwest also seems to have developed a knack for understanding what their customers care about and will pay more for without affecting overall satisfaction. While other airlines made the move to charge for bags, for instance, Southwest made its “bags fly free” policy a centerpiece of its marketing campaign.
Interestingly, the report made no mention of Southwest’s embrace of social media and its multichannel approach in the contact center to drive loyalty and understand what customers want. Now, we’ve talked a lot about the contact center as the natural nexus of marketing, communications, customer service, and sales, and Southwest is the embodiment of how an integrated approach can pay off. By providing so many different options for customer interaction, Southwest not only speeds the resolution of issues but also ensures that it stays aware of customer feedback.
Its customer contact strategy features a multichannel approach to address how Consumer 2.0 wants to engage with companies. Customers can book tickets online or through a service agent and sign up for updates and notifications through e-mail, mobile, and text. The trick, however, is ensuring that all of these channels offer a consistent customer experience and provide easy access to information in the event of delays or cancellations.
To provide multiple consumer touchpoints, Southwest also maintains a robust presence on Facebook and Twitter. Southwest’s Facebook page, which has more than 1.6 million fans, is used to promote special deals and offer information. In addition, the company makes good use of self-service tools on its website and also maintains a blog that offers a variety of internal perspectives.
Companies that aspire to deliver outstanding customer service in this new consumer landscape can take away several lessons from Southwest.
1) Use different channels to achieve different strategic goals. Although Southwest states that it won’t address specific customer issues on Facebook, fans can still post questions and comments. The airline uses its Twitter account to monitor customer feedback and dispense pointers. While not every company has the resources to be active in all media channels, selecting the right channels to support strategy can still create an impact.
2) Recognize the value of customer contact in building loyalty. Because Southwest’s employees—from flight attendants to contact agents—are united by their commitment to customer experience, customers keep coming back even when fare prices jump. Once companies are able to forge this kind of emotional bond with their customer base, they can begin to redefine the company-customer relationship.
3) Understand what your customers value. The ASCI survey notes that when Southwest decided to begin charging for early check-in, customers weren’t bothered by having to pay for this perk. By engaging customers in a variety of ways and monitoring their feedback and trends, companies can identify new opportunities to market products and services and extract more value from existing ones.
4) Integrate emerging consumer technologies. As smartphones have become more popular, Southwest and other airlines have developed mobile apps to allow travelers to check in, monitor flight status, and change reservations. Such technologies serve to strengthen the bonds between the company and consumer, so executives should stay up to date on new trends and determine the right time to invest.
All of these efforts can complement the contact center, but to get the most value they must be integrated so that agents have transparency into the conversations taking place in different channels.
Let me know what approaches have worked for your company. I look forward to continuing this dialogue in future posts.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.