What the Rise of Mobile Payment Technology Means for the Contact Center
by Tim Dreyer on May 3rd, 2012
Some recent research will send a chill down the collective spine of all the companies whose contact centers are struggling to meet the expectations of today’s mobile consumers.
Pew issued a survey report, “The Future of Money in a Mobile Age,” that studied emerging trends in mobile payment technology. The prevalence of smart phones and mobile commerce offerings such as Google Wallet are enabling consumers to dispense with their cash and credit cards and make purchases with their phones. Anyone who’s been to Starbucks lately will recognize that mobile payments aren’t part of some wild-eyed science fiction. So mass adoption is more a matter of when, not if.
To that end, Pew’s survey asked respondents whether they agreed with the following statement: “By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards.” Nearly two-thirds believe that’s a realistic time frame.
While there are a number of factors that must be addressed—competing platforms, security, the role of banks and credit card companies, to name a few—don’t assume that these will slow progress significantly. One only needs to look to Kenya, where 18 million consumers use M-PESA, a mobile banking platform that went live in 2007, to make payments equal to 20 percent of the country’s GDP via text message.
So what should the contact center be doing in 2012 to prepare for the coming mobile storm? A few things jump to mind:
- Implement a robust platform that can evolve to accommodate changing technology
- Develop a multichannel customer experience strategy that emphasizes mobile
- Empower service agents with the tools and capabilities to resolve issues efficiently
With the accelerating pace of technology advances over the past couple of years—remember that the iPad was introduced in January 2010—eight years from now is a relative eternity. Companies that embrace this challenge and make moves now will be in a position to thrive in 2020; those that bury their heads in the sand are going to be in for a rude awakening.
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?
Recommended Reading: Steve Jobs
by Chris O'Brien on November 16th, 2011
As much as there is to admire about Steve Jobs for his accomplishments and contributions to today’s society, Jobs’ eccentricities also inevitably set him apart. His business success and drive to develop what Jobs called “insanely great” products, as much as his unique background and difficult personality, makes us yearn to know the details of who he was and how he lived.
Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography Steve Jobs is a broad history of one of the iconic, customer-facing corporate brands of our time, as well as a satisfyingly up-close and honest portrait of the man behind it. Though Jobs and his family and friends were interviewed extensively for this project, Jobs exerted no control over its development. As a result, Isaacson has created a no-holds-barred glimpse of a man who did as he set out to do – in Jobs’ words, “put a dent in the universe.”
The adopted son of a carpenter, Jobs was raised with a strong work ethic that planted the seeds of artistry in form and function into a mind driven by perfectionism. Jobs could no more tolerate sloppy wiring on a computer’s motherboard – something that would never be seen by the end-user – than his father would have permitted the rear of a cabinet to be finished with a substandard wood backing. Even though the customer might never see it, “we would know,” Jobs reasoned.
Burnout rates ran high at Apple, and those who worked for and with Jobs were known to describe him as rough, difficult, rude, and unkind in his interpersonal style. Yet, he built fiercely loyal teams of individuals who were capable of responding to Jobs with brutal honesty and were driven to innovation by his demand for perfection in the end result of the products they developed. The rounded corners we see on desktop windows, for example, were an early innovation at Apple that Jobs insisted on because he observed that the edges on whiteboards, door frames, office furniture, etc. were all rounded off for aesthetics and use. One of Apple’s engineers developed a shortcut for the rounded rectangle simply by not realizing it shouldn’t have been possible. The coding should have been too complex.
Today it could be argued that the Apple brand, from its packaging to its appearance to its user interface, represents the culmination of Jobs’ pursuit of the optimal customer experience – a factor that was continually top of mind for Jobs.
Organizations looking to model Apple’s success have much to draw from; in winning several recent customer experience awards, Apple was noted to have effectively connected with customers in a “deeply emotional, irrational way.” It would be worth considering what lessons can be learned from this.
- Customer first. Paying close attention to every detail of what the customer will experience is a hallmark of successful brands. The goal is to ensure a consistently positive experience at each interaction point, and to listen and respond to customer feedback on the experience.
- Sense of community. For many, owning a certain product or brand means belonging to a group of like-minded individuals. A strong brand identity is not something that can be drawn out in a marketing plan; it is a living, breathing entity that members of your target market help cultivate and shape by interacting with it on a daily basis.
- Creativity. At our core, we as human beings are creative. Brands that tap into this creativity by enabling us to feel inspired and empowered are those to which customers form an emotional connection and continually return.
Examining the successes of one CEO will not help us re-create the same successes. Instead, hopefully it will open up new ways of looking at the universe in order to make new “dents” in it.
Recommended Reading – Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier
by Chris O'Brien on October 19th, 2011
I’m already a fan of B. Joseph Pine II. His previous book, The Experience Economy, succeeded in defining a state of consumer behavior in the early 2000s that awoke many businesses to the fact that people were demanding memorable encounters, events―experiences―that personalized their relationship with an organization. Individual business transactions were no longer enough to guarantee customer loyalty. …Read more >
The Age of the Customer elevates the importance of the contact center
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 16th, 2011
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At Aspect, we’ve talked for some time about the potential of the contact center to tap the collective intelligence of the organization to serve the customer. Through this level of engagement, progressive companies have built a competitive advantage by being customer service champions. Others seem to be coming around to that notion as well.
Traditionally, the contact center was seen as the cost of doing business—a compulsory function that sought to resolve issues but wasn’t a source of competitive advantage. The evolution of industry, technology, and consumer behavior is changing how we collectively think about the relationship of business and the customer. The confluence of technologies such as unified communications and the more collaborative nature of today’s consumers are highlighting the contact center’s vital role in strengthening customer relationships.
A recent Forrester blog noted that we have entered the Age of the Customer. As analyst William Band puts it:
“The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance—brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships—and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing.”
Fundamentally, Band is saying that if companies don’t have strong customer relationships, efficient operations and savvy marketing won’t matter. That’s a bold statement: in effect, the focus on operational excellence should take a backseat to customer experience. So while I’m happy that executives want to join the customer experience party, I don’t believe companies should view it as an either-or proposition. Let me explain.
Many companies are already reassessing the traditional organizational functions and how they interact. I’ve written previously that the entire organization, led by the contact center, must work together to serve the customer. Greater collaboration and more effective information sharing are critical to support this evolution. Fortunately, unified communications provides the tools and capabilities to enable employees to reach across departments.
The contact center is emerging as the natural hub of interaction between the organization and the consumer. How critical is the contact center in the Age of the Customer? Let’s take a look at the four priority areas noted above:
Real-time customer intelligence. In the course of operations, contact center technologies can extract and analyze data from not just social media but also customer service conversations, providing companies invaluable customer insights
Customer experience and customer service. The next-generation contact center has the ability to engage with consumers on their terms—multiple channels in real time. Traditional metrics such as average call times have given way to a more holistic view of interaction and customer experience.
Sales channels that deliver customer intelligence. By integrating outbound dialing, text messaging, and social media, the contact center has become one of the most valuable sales channels. The contact center has the ability to capture insight from customer conversations and translate it into business intelligence that can then inform future customer encounters.
Useful content and interactive marketing. The contact center now has the ability to tap experts and offer content to enrich the customer interaction. FAQs, online self service, and content such as blogs and white papers are other powerful tools in the contact center arsenal.
Companies can reorient their customer service efforts so that every part of the organization—from executives and experts to frontline personnel—is supporting the same strategy. And by giving the contact center a more prominent role, executives will still be able to devote the necessary resources to operations.
The angry Little Monsters
by Aspect on May 31st, 2011
What does the next-generation consumer and Lady Gaga have to do with each other? Well…ask Amazon. Last week, Amazon offered a deep discount on the latest Lady Gaga album in an effort to entice consumers (“Little Monsters” in Lady Gaga terms) away from iTunes and over to Amazon. The Little Monsters were thrilled and went to the Amazon site to download the album. Apparently, the download took over 6 hours! That’s unacceptable in this day and age.
So what did the Little Monsters do? They went to the music review boards and complained. No, not about Lady Gaga. But about Amazon! Amazon, which has spent years building brand loyalty, had one instance that caused thousands of people to take to the message boards to complain.
What started out as a great opportunity for providing the next-generation consumer with something they want―a discount Lady Gaga album, an opportunity for top-notch customer service through a solid user interface, and speed for the download process―turned into a public relations nightmare for Amazon.
We’ve talked about the next-generation consumer: you have one and only one chance to satisfy them to obtain/maintain their loyalty. This truth was on full display this week with the Amazon situation. It is about much more than when a customer calls the enterprise to voice a question/issue/complaint. Its every part of the product/service offered. If it’s not what consumers want or if their expectations are not met, they may not give you a second chance, and they will probably hit the blogs to tell everyone about it.
Every part of the customer experience needs to meet the expectations of the consumer: from delivery (in this case, download) to product quality to customer service. You have one chance to be rock solid in each and every facet of product/service quality. If you fall down on one part of the experience, the next-generation consumer will hold you accountable and complain to the world.
Remember, each interaction is an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the consumer―even (or especially) if that consumer is a “Little Monster.”
What do Consumer 2.0 and Walt Disney have in common?
by Mike Butts on May 24th, 2011
Last week, nearly 500 contact center, IT and business leaders attended the “Customer Contact in a Consumer 2.0 World” online symposium to hear customer experience experts and a top Microsoft executive discuss how companies are leveraging today’s technology to close the gap between consumer experiences with social, mobile and Web 2.0 and their expectations for customer service interactions. Miss the symposium? You can catch any of the recorded videos or sessions free of charge here.
Much of the discussion focused on a creating the ultimate customer experience—one that meets or exceeds the service requirements of Consumer 2.0. Bruce Temkin, acclaimed customer experience expert and managing partner of the Temkin Group, shared a quote from Walt Disney that fits as well today for Consumer 2.0 as it did many decades earlier: “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” Bruce eloquently stated what Walt Disney understood many years ago: excellent customer experiences create loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth referrals are critical.
Temkin also shared the latest Consumer 2.0 research on social media, customer loyalty, and customer-centric plans. He closed the session by providing four key steps that contact centers need to take to meet the service requirements demanded by Consumer 2.0 and avoid extinction.
Ashima Singhal, Microsoft group product manager for unified communications, explained how unified communications, once considered an internal productivity improvement tool, is evolving into a vital customer experience platform because its flexible infrastructure can make the vital connection between the contact center and the rest of the enterprise.
This connection allows organizations to provide a higher level of service and resolve more first interactions by easily engaging subject matter experts throughout the organization. The key take-away from this presentation: unified communications is a critical customer contact platform, and no discussion about deploying unified communications should take place in any organization without the contact center being involved.
Mike Sheridan, Aspect’s executive vice president of worldwide sales, led “The Customer-Centric Enterprise—A Roundtable Discussion,” where executives from Newport City Homes, American Century Investments, American Home Mortgage Servicing, and Aspect shared best practices and lessons learned from migrating their contact center and enterprise to this new customer-centric model.
Nancy Dobrozdravic, Aspect’s VP of marketing solutions, and Serge Hyppolite, Aspect’s VP of product management, spoke about the importance of empowering consumers to access the contact center across multiple communications channels and engaging the enterprise in order to provide service that meets the requirements of Consumer 2.0.
I encourage all contact center, IT, and business leaders to watch the complimentary on-demand replays to learn how their companies can gain competitive differentiation by providing superior customer experience.
Til next time
Mike
Empowering the entire organization to serve the customer
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on May 13th, 2011
When buying my house, there was a hiccup on the day of closing (naturally), and the needed funds were not going to be available to me until hours after my appointment. So, I went to my bank and explained the situation to the poor teller.
He asked me to take a seat in the waiting area and told me that he would go find someone who could help me. I was not all that confident he would be successful…but two minutes later, the branch manager comes up to me saying that she understands my situation and will make some calls/arrangements on my behalf.
She told me to sit tight – I did, literally, foot nervously tapping – and 5 minutes later she returned with a certified check for the amount I needed for my closing. Needless to say, I will always be a customer of this bank.
That’s the power of providing customers with access to the person(s) within an organization that can actually help resolve their issue. Now, sometimes this seems to be difficult even when the consumer walks into a brick and mortar store – who hasn’t left an electronics store with the wrong cable or a home improvement store with ill-fitting hardware?
So how are organizations supposed to handle this when the consumer reaches out to the contact center agent – by phone or the Web? I’ve learned that yelling that you want to talk to the supervisor will not get you all that far when you encounter that initial roadblock to getting needed answers – 9 times out of 10, the supervisor doesn’t have the knowledge to handle the situation.
That’s why the contact center agent must be able to communicate and collaborate with knowledge workers throughout the enterprise when prepared reference materials do not supply the needed information to the agent. The ability to reach out to these knowledge workers is a good start, but agents need to know which experts are available when the customer is on the line (you can take that literally or figuratively).
Otherwise, the customer experience will deteriorate quickly as the consumer waits for the agent to fumble around in the hopes of finding a live body to come to the rescue. Organizations must open themselves up not only to the agent but directly to the customer – in essence, bring the processes, best practices, and discipline of the contact center to every functional area of the enterprise.
Even this is not enough – the inroads into the organization must be complemented by intelligent participation in social communities and knowledge exchanges (either consumer- or company-created) outside of the company. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but successful, customer-centric organizations figure out a way.
For more information on how your company can integrate the contact center into the enterprise to serve customers, be sure to attend Aspect and Microsoft’s online symposium, “Consumer contact in a Consumer 2.0 world” on Thursday, May 19.
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.