Want Next Generation Customer Experiences for Your Customers? Turn the Channel
by Mike Sheridan on May 15th, 2012
It’s no secret that the speed businesses and customers communicate in today’s hyper-accessible information age has brought noticeable challenges to the contact center and many companies are still grappling with how to adjust. Part of the problem lies in the lack of true departmental integration companies currently have to overcome to create a free-flowing customer information exchange. Companies must update and break down the silos in their operations, and more than ever, examine the state of their current company-customer relationships in order to stay competitive.
Reinventing company-customer relationships 
As communication channels expand to include the latest digital mediums, customers are raising their expectations of businesses and calling for more direct, intelligent interaction and easier, customized communication. There is a growing consumer demand for companies to establish a deeper knowledge about their habits and histories in order to better engage them at an individual level at specific points of interaction. Not only does this require companies to record preferences, habits, complaints and problems across multiple platforms, it also necessitates the consolidation and contextualization of that data into a comprehensive and usable customer profile.
Establish next-generation customer contact
Let’s get historical for a second. First generation call centers were a one-to-one model. A customer called and they got an agent. Through evolution, the contact center created an opportunity for a one-to-several solution where customers could be transferred to other agents in other parts of the enterprise. And now most recently, contact centers have added email and chat, maybe even SMS. But in order to achieve true next generation experiences, organizations need to evolve to create a one-to-all model that can reach the entire enterprise.
By connecting the customer and the company in multiple ways and more importantly the ways the customers want to connect and removing internal barriers and silos between the enterprise and the contact center, unified communications becomes a central pillar of the next-generation organization. By unifying multiple channels into a singular platform while maintaining and optimizing access to a database full of knowledge, businesses can incorporate things like social networking or self-service applications within and not ‘next to’ a customer-centric communications model.
As a result, the contact center, and the enterprise as a whole, experiences greater efficiency and real-time agility. This model streamlines the processing of unstructured data (e.g. social) that is acquired from interactions within the contact center. The large volumes of data are sorted and structured into business intelligence, providing the organization with critical knowledge in real time. The information will then be readily available to service customers beyond the contact center and throughout the entire organization.
Skype, Facebook, and the contact center
by Bill Gay on November 10th, 2011
A recent study noted that 23 percent of companies with revenue over $10 million use Facebook to support their customers. Twitter is used for this purpose by 12 percent of respondents. I’m not surprised by these statistics, but the long-term effects are interesting and it’s another proof point on how social media are changing the way people interact with companies and with each other concerning products and services.
People are already using mobile and other social channels to shop and review purchases, so it’s natural that they would want to get help using these same tools. In fact, social and mobile go hand in hand: 55 percent of traffic on Twitter and 33 percent on Facebook are from mobile devices.
I first discovered companies were using Facebook for customer support when I stumbled upon Nikon’s Ask & Answer Facebook page. The company and other users can answer questions, and it shifted my thinking to what support could be like. Of course, the “right” answer is sometimes lost in the mix and feedback, but the capability for everyone to participate is interesting and sometimes helpful.
When you add the power of Skype + Facebook to the mix of ways people can communicate, it’s not a stretch for people to want to be able to connect with companies through Facebook using these tools in real time via IM, voice, or even video calls―just as contact centers handle the multiple ways in which consumers want to communicate today from voice, Web or IM. I can easily see a day when Facebook is just another channel and support resource that companies offer to consumers.
Let’s not forget Twitter. Customers can easily provide real-time feedback that companies now have to manage in some way. I know of several companies who have employees monitoring Twitter feeds that can respond to this feedback. However, in most instances, it’s not managed like other communications channels and is often a function of the marketing department.
Companies have to be ahead or at least in step with consumers and their communications methods. Ensuring a consistent, managed response using the right resources at the right time is what the contact center has always been about.
Consumer 2.0 is here and change continues to be the constant. How will you create and build better company-consumer relationships?
Are your customer-avoidance strategies driving away profits?
by Aspect on May 3rd, 2011
I ran across an insightful article from Nathan McNeill focusing on the fact that you want customers to contact your contact center! What is ironic about the statement is that many enterprises are equating customer avoidance with customer service. Here are some of his key points:
- As bad as it may seem to have to solve problems all day, it’s much, much worse to not solve them, even though the support center will rarely or never see the consequences of such “call avoidance” except in decreased support costs and mediocre customer satisfaction scores (if one measures such things).
- A new mind-set is needed, one that actually attracts customer problems rather than repels them or deflects them. People should want to contact the support center when something goes wrong, even if the “something” that goes wrong is not associated with the “something” that the support center is normally responsible for.
In the age of consumer 2.0, if customers do not bring their issues to your contact center, they are using other sources, such as social media outlets, to solve their problems. So it’s more than wanting the customer to initiate the interaction with the contact center. It’s also a matter of helping the consumer in the channels where they are looking for service. It’s using the resources of the contact center to not only “wait” for the consumer to contact you but also going to where the consumer is troubleshooting their issues.
It’s critical to be able to provide service in all environments. Why? “Over time, customers will bring money to the same place they bring their problems,” notes McNeill. However, it’s not just about them coming to the contact center. It’s critical that the consumer experience is as close to perfect in their eyes as possible.
With the multitasking nature of today’s consumers, an enterprise has only one chance to solve their problems. This means knowing when a customer prefers self-service versus talking to an agent or when to use proactive contact versus waiting for that inbound phone call. Providing a world-class customer experience―both when the customer contacts you and when you need to find them―is paramount to retaining customer loyalty.
Next time your contact centers talk about contact avoidance strategies, be sure that they understand what it means in terms of customer retention. If the goal is to improve service (for example, proactive contact), then they’re on the right track. If it’s simply a way to cut costs, make sure the decision makers understand the long-term revenue implications of cutting customer service.
Are you ready for the next-generation consumer?
How companies should integrate social media into customer contact
by Aspect on February 25th, 2011
David Mastronardi with the social business design firm Dachis Group wrote an interesting blog on how Facebook and Twitter are operating as shadow customer support. He cites a recent experience where he was able to get his flight rebooked during a weather delay by using Twitter instead of calling customer service. This was due to the fact that different departments within the company handled social media and customer service. In fact, the social media team was in the Communication department, not customer service. Now, he was lucky in that the person who handled Twitter questions was able to somehow change his reservation on the fly.
What does this mean to enterprises? A few takeaways.
- Consumers will increasingly use social media as a way to obtain service. In fact, it’s happening already. Social tools are the first place many people, including myself, go to for service.
- By having a non-customer service organization handle service inquiries from consumers, companies run the risk of not giving consumers the service they need. Although in David’s example things turned out great, the company is rolling the dice in terms of support.
- Ultimately, the number of consumers who turn to social channels may become as prominent as those who call your contact center. …Read more >
An airline gets customer service right
by Aspect on January 20th, 2011
In “A blizzard brings customer experience front and center,” I shared a negative experience with an airline over the holidays. A colleague of mine recently faced a similar travel challenge but with vastly different results. In the interest of equal time, here’s his story of a positive customer experience with the airlines.
“The morning I was going to be traveling home from a trip, I was awakened early by my phone vibrating on the nightstand. A text from the airline alerted me that my flight had been canceled and directed me to its website to rebook the flight. The message also gave me the option to call customer service to reschedule my flight, but I opted for the website first. …Read more >
Collections Strategies to Tap Consumer 2.0
by Aspect on December 8th, 2010
Consumer 2.0. Much has been made about this new wave of customers, but what makes them different? Here are a few tell tale signs: These are your customers who have cell phones and no landline phone. They prefer to text versus talk on their mobile device. They are on social networks sites trying to gather information versus coming to your contact center for answers.
Many customer service centers are thinking about Consumer 2.0 and how to best provide service to them and improve the overall customer experience, but collections centers should also consider how to approach these consumers. Let’s turn the table on this a bit. What happens if these consumers are in a debt situation where you need to collect from them? We need to rethink the collections paradigm a bit. Today, it’s about dialing, dialing, dialing. Is a phone call the best way to collect from these next-generation consumers? Or is it best to first SMS text them, follow up with an email, and then make that phone call as a last step? Even better, you could use customer demographics to determine the right way to contact them. For example, a 25-year-old in debt may respond to a text versus a 40-year-old who may be more receptive to a phone call.
As you evaluate your collections processes during these rough economic times, consider the demographics of your customer base and the Consumer 2.0 paradigm to help improve the productivity of your collections processes.
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.