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?
Health Plan Questions: Is self-service the answer?
by Amy Wagner on March 23rd, 2012
When grocery chains began rolling out self-service checkout stations across the nation in the early 2000’s, consumer reaction was somewhat mixed. Some hailed the technology as an easier, speedier way for busy shoppers to pick up a few items on the way home after work, while others groused that this was clearly a big-business profit grab at the expense of much-needed human interaction and neighborhood jobs.
By the end of 2008, there were reportedly 92,600 self-checkout units worldwide, and at least a portion of shoppers appeared to be holding on to their angst. An excellent point by one blogger: “What’s the point of all of this technology if it only aggravates your customers and makes them unhappy?”
As technology improves, the percentage of those annoyed by self-service
technology seems to be shrinking at a steady pace – and in fact, today’s customers actually prefer to help themselves by as much as 85%.
Whether in the checkout lane, at the ATM, at a gas station, or on a company’s website, it would appear that offering self-service through multiple channels even has the potential to increase customer loyalty.
This is all very good news for businesses, particularly in the health plan industry.
Plans are facing a countdown to 2014, at which time the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will go into effect. This new legislation extends eligibility for healthcare insurance coverage to an estimated 45 million currently uninsured individuals, necessitating that these individuals will be seeking out information on plans and providers. Lots of information. And as newcomers to the insurance arena, you can bet they’ll have questions.
Think about that for a second. That’s a potential influx of 45 million new individuals reaching out for assistance and information from a group of agents already dedicated to full-time member service and fulfillment.
The only realistic response is to anticipate this workflow by implementing self-service channels. Fortunately, this the response most customers want.
And here’s more good news for business: Not only do customers prefer self-service, these channels are also vastly more cost-effective than contact center resolution. Self-service costs on average about ten cents per interaction, as opposed to $7 USD per call.
So in order to optimize your customer experience and efficiency, my recommendation would be to provide both intelligent, self-service options as well as the ability to engage with the right resource to improve first contact resolution and satisfaction. Offer individuals the ability to seamlessly transition from self-service to agent support without losing track of the interaction.
Aspect can help you develop this type of seamless interaction now, before PPACA goes into effect. The closer we get to 2014, the greater the risk of your agents’ workload slipping from “manageable” to “sort-of manageable” to “self-service as self-defense.” Just please… don’t wait until you’ve reached “zombie apocalypse” workload!
I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on this topic at 2 p.m. EST on April 12, 2012, Tackling the Business Impact of Healthcare Reform, together with fellow RN Sally Bleeks, recently retired from Blue Cross Blue Shield. Please join us!
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!
High Availability: A Must for Customer Contact
by Chris O'Brien on March 15th, 2012
Like a finely tuned symphony, the success of complex contact center operations depends upon the flawless performance of many moving parts – from the way calls are routed through your ACD, to the way each agent interacts with your customers. Every piece must function with precision and also adapt to changing conditions.
Regardless of how finely tuned your organization is, it only can only take one system outage or power failure to bring customer-facing operations to a halt. That’s when a next-generation, high-availability solution becomes vital.
The importance of high availability
We’ve talked in-depth before about how high availability is virtually synonymous with disaster recovery from an operational perspective, as well as a customer experience perspective. Particularly in industries such as finance, government, health care and other high-touch fields, the critical demand for continual uptime is an all-too-familiar refrain. Agents must maintain active, ongoing conversations with customers even in the event of an outage. Customers in the queue need notification of their status. And supervisors and agents need to be alerted to any changes in system functionality that could affect customer interactions.
As I said, lots of moving parts.
Unplanned network outages, power failures and unscheduled downtime all have the potential to impact your customers by limiting availability. While the terms reliability and high availability are sometimes used interchangeably, the difference between a so-called reliable system and one that meets high-availability standards is its ability to maintain operations and quickly recover normal functioning following a failure – limiting downtime to hours, or even minutes, over the course of a year.
Miercom Performance Verified
Recently, we asked Miercom to conduct a full evaluation of Aspect® Unified IP 7® to verify that it delivers the mission-critical high availability demanded for today’s customer contact environment. The critical factors for a highly available system that Miercom identified as part of its evaluation included:
- Maintaining active conversations between customers and agents
- Preserving contact statistics
- Continuing to initiate recordings
- Enabling supervisors to maintain management capabilities, such as viewing agent status and information
- Alerting supervisors and agents of any changes to the system status
In response to the battery of simulation-style tests Miercom conducted, Aspect Unified IP 7 earned Miercom Performance Verified certification. The solution proved to be resilient, providing the mission-critical high availability demanded for business telephony and customer interaction.You can view the complete summary of Miercom’s test report here.
Maintaining contact center uptime
On March 27, experts from Aspect and Miercom will be hosting an informational webinar on High Availability for the Contact Center: Ensuring Customer Service Continuity to share their insights on meeting evolving customer expectations, with advice to help you limit or eliminate the experience of downtime for customers interacting with your contact center.
Facebook and the Growing Impact of Social
by Tim Dreyer on March 9th, 2012
Social is here to stay. And now that the question of whether businesses should be using social media to engage with their customers has been answered, companies still face the vexing challenge of how to integrate social into their customer contact strategy.
A few statistics drive home the urgency of finding answers in the short term:
44 percent. That’s the percentage of global Web traffic that visits Facebook on a daily basis.
845 million. The current number of registered users on Facebook. It’s only a matter of time before it hits the one-billion mark; imagine having access to one-seventh of the world population through a single platform.
$4.27 billion. The total revenues for Facebook in 2011, of which $3.8 billion was generated from advertising. In advance of its impending IPO, Facebook is in the midst of revamping its advertising platform to give companies new ways to reach customers.
As companies spend more resources to engage with customers through Facebook, it’s fair to assume that customers will start to expect that the conversation should work both ways: that is, if companies can push products more aggressively on Facebook, then customers can use this same channel for customer service.
The main problem is that once one company figures out a way to interact effectively with customers through this channel, consumers will expect all companies to do so. It hardly seems fair, but welcome to the next-generation consumer.
As your business considers how to integrate Facebook into its customer experience strategy, you should assess your organization’s capabilities across three areas:
Current customer contact platform—If you have unified important call center functions to give agents the tools to interact with customers across a number of channels, then it’s an incremental step to add social. If not, you have to crawl before you walk, and that means enhancing your platform first.
Integration of internal functions—One of the challenges of social media is that it spans marketing, sales, communications, and the contact center. We’ve discussed the need to tear down the walls within your company to enable collaboration among these departments. If just one department takes ownership without involving the others, companies won’t capture the full value of social.
Customer experience strategy—The majority of customers will call the contact center as a last resort after exhausting other options. Facebook is set to become an even more dynamic source of company and product information as well as customer feedback. Understanding how Facebook can complement existing efforts can help companies prepare their contact center agents to deliver better service.
Since companies don’t have unlimited resources, how can they be effective across forums, self-service, FAQs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other emerging channels? The answer can vary significantly by industry and type of company. For instance, an airline — for which customer service is an integral part of business strategy and operations — is going to take a different approach than a professional services firm or hospital would. However, as customer service becomes an even more integral part of business strategy, it’s imperative to figure out the right mix for your company.
If you hear a rumble in the distance, it’s Facebook coming down the rails and picking up speed. The good news is that your company still has a little time to prepare so you can jump on for the ride and avoid getting steamrolled.
Golfbreaks.com Selects a Joint Solution from the New Aspect-Dell Relationship
by Tim Dreyer on February 23rd, 2012
We are excited today to announce a new strategic relationship with Dell Services aimed at enabling customers worldwide to acquire end-to-end next-generation unified communications solutions incorporating hardware, software, services and support from a single vendor. Centered on Microsoft® collaborative technologies, the relationship also gives customers the flexibility and scalability to tailor their private branch exchange (PBX) and contact center solution to best fit their needs. 
Many large organizations are viewing contact centers as a primary customer engagement point and increasingly as a revenue generation engine. However outdated telephony infrastructures or poorly connected contact centers can result in missed or dropped calls and negatively impact customer service. This can result in missed sales opportunities and potential damage to a company’s brand.
Golfbreaks.com, Europe’s leading golf tour operator, is one of the first joint customers of the Aspect-Dell relationship. Golfbreaks.com experienced the downside of an aging telephony platform that could no longer keep up with the service demands of their customers so the company sought out a contact center solution built upon an open, capable and affordable software platform. They are implementing a Microsoft-based unified communications solution including a full multimedia contact center infrastructure to replace its older PBX platform.
Due to increasing volume, which let’s face it, is a great problem to have, Golfbreaks.com required a way to meet the increased customer demand without increasing headcount and to basically do more with less. The lack of channel integration was putting a strain on their agents and systems, increasing administration time. With new support for SMS and email, as well as tight integration with their CRM system, Golfbreaks.com’s customer should find booking with them easier and quicker than ever.
So the point of the post, aside from announcing the adorable offspring of our new relationship, is this: your platform might be good enough for you, but is it good enough for your customers?
High Availability Helps the Contact Center Meet Consumer Expectations
by Chris O'Brien on February 22nd, 2012
There’s an old saying (or curse), “May you live in interesting times.” This is particularly apt for the world of customer experience. The pace of change virtually guarantees that things will be interesting for the foreseeable future.
Consumers are embracing new technologies and new ways to communicate, and the impact is far-reaching: with the world of information available to them, consumers have become much more proactive in finding answers for themselves—and much less patient when companies can’t resolve their issues.
As reaching out to the contact center becomes a last resort for customers, the stakes grow higher. Consider recent research by Datamonitor/Ovum, which surveyed 5,000 consumers across 16 countries on their attitudes and expectations for customer service. From the study:
“In virtually every country, customers ended at least one relationship per year due to poor service. Across all countries surveyed, about 7 in 10 consumers have ended a relationship.”
Clearly, it’s not hyperbole to regard every interaction with your customers as make or break. Without the right tools and functionality, the contact center is at a distinct disadvantage in addressing customer issues. Business continuity also takes on added importance: if the contact center platform isn’t robust enough to be dependable in all settings, the company is at risk of alienating customers at critical times.
In a given year, businesses may be susceptible to the impact of natural disasters or other events that threaten their operations. The tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011, reinforced the need for thorough disaster planning and recovery, and contact center operations are a critical function in such situations.
Against this backdrop, companies should ensure that their systems deliver dependability and availability in line with industry standards. What may have been an acceptable level of service even a few years ago might now be lagging behind the competition and consumer expectations. The failure of Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering in April of last year, which continued over a full business day, and the reaction by its customers and media demonstrated how dramatically expectations had changed.
Aspect has long understood the importance of business continuity to contact center operations, and our commitment to providing dependable solutions informs every phase of our development process. Recently, Aspect asked Miercom to conduct a full evaluation of its next-generation solution Aspect® Unified IP 7® to verify that it delivers the mission-critical high availability demanded for today’s customer contact environment. View the complete summary of Miercom’s test report to see how Unified IP 7 earned Miercom Performance Verified certification.
Find out more about how your business can enhance its contact center capabilities without disrupting existing operations, register for the March 27 webinar: High Availability for the Contact Center: Ensuring Customer Service Continuity. Experts from Miercom and Aspect will share their insights on meeting evolving customer expectations, with advice to help you limit or eliminate the experience of downtime for customers interacting with your contact center.
HarborOne Earns Award for Comprehensive Customer Service Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 21st, 2012
In the drive to deliver excellent customer experience, companies face two competing timelines. On one hand, emerging technologies and communications channels are raising customer expectations, requiring more coordinated, nimble efforts in the short term. On the other, companies need to lay a solid foundation that will also allow for flexibility as needs evolve in the coming years.
When companies are able to balance both priorities, the results can be truly impressive. Aspect client HarborOne, the largest state-chartered community credit union in New England and one of the top 100 in the country, offers a blueprint for how it can be done. On top of achieving substantial costs savings and improved performance, the company is
gaining recognition for its vision: Ventana Research, a business and IT research and advisory services firm, awarded HarborOne its 2011 Business Collaboration Leadership Award.
The accomplishments are the culmination of efforts that began several years ago. At the time, HarborOne’s executives evaluated their operations and identified the contact center as a priority for strengthening customer relationships and increasing revenues. The team developed a multiyear vision for how it could transform the company to deliver better customer service and support business growth.
As Wayne F. Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HarborOne, noted, “We knew we needed a future-proof platform that could take us there.” As a foundation, the company selected Microsoft Lync and SharePoint to enable collaboration. HarborOne then added solutions from Aspect to unify elemental contact center functions, give agents greater access to information and experts, and track interactions through enhanced transparency, metrics, and reporting.
HarborOne’s success offers four lessons for other companies seeking to achieve improved contact center performance.
Develop a long-term vision. Technological advances will only accelerate going forward, so companies must ensure that their investments in the contact center support flexibility and customization. Considering how the iPad has transformed the business environment in just two years, being able to adapt to changing conditions is imperative.
Take advantage of existing IT investments. Providing the contact center doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. In addition, companies that have already implemented in Microsoft unified communications solutions are already well positioned to tap products that can integrate seamlessly with their existing platforms.
Understand what customers expect. HarborOne recognized that its consumers were looking for a higher level of engagement across a number of channels, such as IM, social, and potentially video. Across industries, companies are recognizing that customer service can be not only a competitive advantage but also a revenue generator.
Empower management to optimize the workforce. Contact center managers and supervisors need the information and ability to respond to spikes in volume and emerging issues in real time. Enhanced metrics and reporting deliver the latest information, while the best solutions enable quick and easy alterations to business rules.
Most companies can achieve improvements by adding the right functionality to their contact center operations. But as HarborOne demonstrates, the benefits of a comprehensive strategy for customer service are substantial.
FIRST: A “Fair, Innovative, Respectful, Sincere and Trustworthy” Solution
by Chris O'Brien on February 17th, 2012
So rarely in business are we given the opportunity to build anything from scratch. In fact, the luxury of a blank slate is almost nonexistent in the IT world, where legacy systems are regularly retrofitted, adapted, and coaxed into to accepting new technologies. The far more likely scenario – you can call it a challenge, or an opportunity, depending on your outlook – is to be given a new strategy or business direction that must be met using existing systems and materials, with minimal additional outlay.
Leaders with the right creativity and vision will immediately seize upon the inspiration that no matter what systems exist within an organization, the opportunity is always there to restart and rebuild as long as there is a better, more effective way to approach it.
This was the climate of innovation we encountered when we began
consulting with Newport City Homes in 2009.
Now recognized as the UK’s leading not-for-profit Registered Social Landlord, Newport City Homes approached Aspect as a newly established government agency that was facing the difficult task of migrating existing systems and developing an entirely new technology infrastructure. Its Board, executives and staff were determined to introduce a culture of excellent resident services and to develop a solution that would conform to its organization’s FIRST values: “Fair, Innovative, Respectful, Sincere and Trustworthy.”
Microsoft® Infrastructure
At a network level, Newport City Homes adopted a 100MB meshed network to link its three main sites, with broadband serving smaller offices and other sites; while in the front and back office, it invested in a range of Microsoft solutions including Microsoft Office®, Service Manager, Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 and Windows 7 on the desktop. In order to improve the quality of customer interactions, it also developed a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system based on the Microsoft Dynamics® 4.0 platform. Microsoft OCS (Office Communication System) system, now known as Microsoft® Lync™, provided its high-quality VOIP telephony solution.
By December of 2010, with its contact center handling an increasing volume of customer calls, Newport City Homes began seeking a specialized contact center solution that could integrate with and complement its Lync and Microsoft Dynamics platforms. According to Nigel Ward, Newport City Homes’ Information Services Developer, Aspect Unified IP was the right choice:
“We looked at many different solutions, but Aspect was the only one that gave us confidence to integrate with our existing Microsoft infrastructure and enable us to fully execute our unified communications strategy. We anticipate the platform will play an important role in improving our contact center efficiency and effectiveness.”
Awards and Recognition
Without a doubt, the Newport City Homes implementation team had a clear vision for exceptional customer experience that helped Aspect develop and build their successful, next-generation solution.
Newport City Homes has since been recognized for its success in creating a world-class computing and communications infrastructure. At the 2010 UK IT Industry Awards, it was named “Small IT Department of the Year.” It also won the “Delivering Customer Driven Services” and “People’s Choice” awards at the 2010 Welsh Housing Awards.
Are there opportunities for rebuilding within your organization? What stands in your way? Were you successful in integrating new technology with legacy systems, applications or processes? We’d love to hear your story.
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.
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.