Measurable Results from a Customer-Centric Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 8th, 2012
The decision to refocus or restructure an organization in favor of a more customer-centric model is a bold move, but it’s one that is becoming more common as customers consistently demonstrate how much of the power they now wield in today’s social marketplace.
This was the goal of India’s largest paint company, Asian Paints. With customers
in more than 65 countries and a 25,000+ dealer network, most of Asian Paints’ direct interactions took place with its dealers. Therefore, the company not only needed to respond to evolving consumer demands and expectations for better service, responsiveness, consistency and knowledgeable consultancy, it needed to provide exceptional, convenient phone service to its dealers.
The only way to realistically achieve these goals was to focus on becoming a truly customer-centric organization. To do that, Asian Paints needed a next-generation customer contact platform capable of managing both customer and dealer communications, and optimizing agent productivity and responsiveness.
When selecting a solution provider, Asian Paints did its research. Mr. Deepak Bhosale, Chief Manager, Systems, explained the company’s decision:
While we were researching different vendors and getting references, the best remarks and kudos were given from customers using Aspect to organize its customer interactions. Since we wanted a cost-effective way to have several solutions in our contact center, Aspect was the right choice for us. We needed a little bit of everything, improved quality interactions, dealer interaction and high operational efficiency.
Working with Aspect to implement a next-generation customer response and dealer management system, Asian Paints made it easy and convenient for both dealers and customers to do business with the company – from placing quick and convenient orders, to consulting with an expert on paint color choices.
As a result, Asian Paints achieved measurable successes:
- 80% increase in dealer satisfaction, as well as improved customer satisfaction
- 40% drop in average call handle time, due to increased visibility into caller’s information and history
- Improved contact center agent productivity
- Reduced wait time resulting from access issues
- Increased service availability window, leading to an effective 40% reduction in workforce
By improving customer interactions and organizational productivity, Asian Paints hopes to reinstate customer confidence and build customer loyalty, particularly among customers who had moved to competing brands during periods of poor customer service.
Read the full Asian Paints case study.
Companies can no longer afford to think customer service doesn’t matter. In many markets, the customer experience is the competitive differentiator.
Have you found this to be the case in your industry? Tell us about it in the comments.
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.
Getting a Return on Listening in the Social Enterprise
by Tim Dreyer on December 9th, 2011
Last week, Forbes.com had an interesting piece on the social enterprise titled “When it Comes to Social Media, How Big Are Your Company’s Ears?” In the article, Dave Gardner points out that the social enterprise is not exclusively outbound communications. Rather, it’s really about employee collaboration through social media to listen, connect engage with customers and analyze the data for improvement.
Customers no longer solely rely on the old 800 number standby to voice frustration with a company. Socially advanced organizations know that customers view a tweet the same way they view an inbound call and expect nearly the same level of response.
Gardner cites the example of Dell who, back in 2007, created IdeaStorm as a way to listen to the ideas given by both their customers and non-customers. The concept resulted in over 400 externally generated ideas being implemented into packaging, product development and more. The initiative has inspired Dell to aim for a social enterprise that will connect social media, their customer database and CRM and create quality sales leads out of the information.
However, programs like Dell’s are not produced overnight by the social media fairy.
One of the keys to building a successful social enterprise is the infrastructure behind it. A customer contact solution that combines workforce optimization (WFO) with advanced enterprise technologies can help enable organizations to build a robust and intelligent social enterprise. WFO encompasses technologies and business practices that focus enterprise resources and efforts on customer contact. Organizations rely on WFO to plan, execute, measure and continuously improve customer engagement regardless of where or how customer interactions are initiated.
This capability increases visibility into customer interactions and connects departments across the enterprise and into the partner ecosystem and out into the socialsphere. For example, speech and desktop analytics, social monitoring, and other recording tools capture, evaluate and report customer feedback and workforce performance data in real time which in turn can help identify sales opportunities previously lost.
You can read more in the Aspect white paper, 5 Ways to Optimize Your Workforce for Customer Contact in a Social Marketplace to dive deeper into the subject.
You know your customers are talking. Where are you listening to them?
Social Media: A Two-Way Street
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on November 22nd, 2011
The vast majority of today’s top organizations will name social media as part of their marketing or customer communication efforts. However, the degree of coordination these efforts receive can vary widely depending on the enterprise.
For those seeking greater ROI in social media and evidence of improved customer engagement, a unified approach to social media may be the key.
The ongoing conversation
How can organizations elevate their responsiveness and enhance the customer experience? Consider channeling enterprise-wide social contact through a single workflow to take advantage of customer-facing processes that may already be in place within the organization.
The contact center is an ideal place to focus this activity. Here’s why:
- It is already established as the customer engagement “hub” within the enterprise.
- It possesses the technology backbone to support an engagement and response program.
- It has decades of experience at customer communication necessary for transforming the customer monologue into a productive, two-way dialogue.
Approaching social media response from a workflow – or workforce – perspective sheds new light on opportunities for workforce optimization. Social monitoring that most companies employ for the purposes of customer sentiment and market awareness may have the capability to send alerts, notifying agents of issues that need to be addressed at the social media level.
Solutions that enable alerts such as these to be channeled into the agent’s workflow have the advantage of further streamlining operational processes without disrupting traditional customer contact or customer service. Aspect Social Media Channel Integration, for example, provides this capability. In addition, Aspect offers advanced add-ons to its social media solution to develop and track social media KPIs, measure outcomes from interactions, and establish benchmarks for performance.
Mastering the social dialogue
As we see it, there are typically four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. In my next series of posts, I’ll show you how organizations operating at each stage can optimize social engagement, as well as harness new applications and tactics to advance the social dialogue to the next level.
Analytics unleashed
by Jane Hendricks on July 19th, 2011
It used to be that analytics were reserved for the lonely business analyst or statistician, sitting in a dark room next to the mimeograph machine, calculator in hand. Today, analytics are everywhere. Technology can capture pretty much anything humans and machines do, it can apply mathematics and statistics to that information automatically, and it can present the results in multiple ways―from providing reports that we can drill into to driving our day-to-day decisions without us being aware analytics are in play.
Traditionally, contact center performance is measured by hard statistics such as handle time, abandonment rate, and cost per contact. As Forrester’s Diane Clarkson found at the CXP (Customer Experience) Forum, those metrics are certainly not going away. But they are increasingly balanced by customer-centric indicators such as satisfaction and engagement. While the contact center may (and should) ensure its platform includes the ability to measure satisfaction sentiment through surveys and feedback, the richest source of satisfaction data is typically already sitting there, captured as a recording, just waiting for someone to unleash its potential.
You may be surprised at what your recordings can tell you about what you do well―and what you aren’t doing so well. We recently recorded a webinar where we talked about how companies from various industries, facing multiple challenges, were able to find solutions just by taking the time to look at what they already had.
Now to truly unleash analytics, you need to ensure that your system has the kind of integration that lets you put it all together. With an integrated platform that leverages multiple analytical approaches, you have:
- Speech analytics to make sense of words;
- Acoustics to assess the silence, tempo and agitation, and duration of recorded voice transactions;
- Survey data;
- Events captured through desktop analytics;
- Quality forms and assessments; and
- Traditional performance data.
These work together in reports and as part of work flows to inform the decisions you make, the actions your agents take, and sometimes the direction the enterprise chooses. Without this integration, you essentially have multiple lonely statisticians looking at their own numbers, each with his (or her) own calculator.
And while you are here, you may want to take a bit of time and register for the entire Insight On Workforce Optimization series of webinar events. It’s a great opportunity for you to see what we at Aspect―and your peers―are up to.
Turning customer insight into real business value
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on March 31st, 2011
When I was growing u,p my mother never had a shortage of advice for me on how to improve my behavior (“you’re going to wear that?”), with such helpful commentaries reaching a fever pitch in my teenage years. These memories come to mind as I think about today’s organizations struggling to absorb and figure out what to do with consumer feedback and opinions.
There have been online mechanisms for collecting customer feedback for quite a while now, with one of the earliest vehicles being surveys embedded in customer emails or popping up in a visit to a company’s website following a customer interaction of some sort.
Now there are countless ways for consumers to express their sentiments and relate experiences with vendor organizations on social-networking sites, blogs, tweets, etc. You can liken it to the rhythm of motherly advice of my teenage years – it’s continuous, and you never ever asked for it.
Even before this glut of consumer commentary, organizations struggled to do something with the input they received. I remember a survey from several years ago that showed 95 percent of commercial organizations actively collected customer feedback through surveys and the like – but only 10 percent of those same companies actually did anything differently based on the intelligence they received. It’s not that companies do not want to improve the way they do business and make their customers happier – it is just not all that easy to change business processes and people’s behavior to put those changes into action.
I witnessed this firsthand when I worked for a predictive analytics/data mining company several years ago. I would get frustrated that all the insights revealed (“these are your best repeat customers and cross/up-sell opportunities”) would rarely surface other than in an analyst’s report.
The breakthrough in getting those analytics to help improve sales and customer satisfaction levels was when we packaged up those predictive models and inserted them into the nerve center of customer-facing activity – call centers – and were able to make real-time recommendations available to the agents. This was successful since the call centers had the best defined, structured and repeatable business processes along with appropriately trained personnel.
What was true of call centers years ago is even more true for the modern contact center today – no matter where, when, or how a customer wants to be heard, contact centers are the best unifying force within the enterprise for productively handling those consumer conversations to everyone’s benefit.
I am slightly obsessed with how organizations can marry such operational efficiencies and expertise with the power of information. I have come to see the contact center as the defining piece of the customer-centric mosaic – and it is why I am at Aspect today.
All this is by way of letting you know where my focus will be in future blogs (although my mind will wander occasionally) – how do we take full advantage of the contact center, not only in uniting communications with customers across multiple channels (phone, Web, IM, email, etc.), but also in providing the enterprise the structural and procedural backbone for optimizing each and every interaction/transaction.
And remember: the customer – and your mother – are always right.
Superior customer service – Is it worth it?
by Michael Ely on December 13th, 2010
I’m always struck by how frequently justification for providing the best customer services is debated. Having a great product is foundational, but even products with just an on/off button become a paperweight as soon as the customer wants help and can’t get it. And in today’s social media–crazed environment, if a business relies on word-of-mouth advertising, a bad experience can go viral in minutes, killing not only repeat sales but new opportunities as well.
Recently, Forrester conducted a survey of North American consumers to gauge their customer service experiences. Forrester’s Andrew McInnes shared the following analysis:
“What’s really fascinating about this data is the degree to which consumers’ responses shift at the extreme ends of problem resolution quality. Consumers who rated problem resolution experiences as 4 out of 5 (with 5 being the best) reported very different intended behaviors than those who rated experiences as 5 out of 5. Consumers in the 5-out-of-5 group were much more likely to say that they would do business with the company again or tell someone about the experience.”
To get 5 out of 5, a business must do more than just direct calls to the first available agent. Capabilities that enable customers to provide their information once, agents to reach out to experts in the business to get the answer for the customer on the first contact, and contact center managers to optimize their workforce are no longer extras but table stakes in making sure your customer contact experience is memorable for the right reasons.
Cutting Costs While Keeping Customers Front and Center
by Serge Hyppolite on June 1st, 2009
As the recession continues to grip the global economy, companies in many parts of the world are still slashing their budgets to stay afloat. If your company is among them, I have an important question for you: have you been considering your customers’ needs while you’ve been making cuts? To survive the downturn in a healthy state, you’ll need to make reductions in the right places; almost anywhere but at the expense of your customers’ experiences. The moves you make now could make a huge difference to your business by helping you eliminate waste, preserve your customers in the short-term, and enable you to grow your business in the long term.
Here are a few ways you can cut costs while retaining your focus on customer satisfaction:
- Cut wastage - Examine customer facing and back office business areas and streamline all operations to cut wasted time. The time saved will equate to cost savings and better bottom line performance. It could also lead to improved service quality and more rapid time to answer.
- Eliminate unnecessary calls – Look at why customers are calling and try to eradicate the common root causes of unnecessary calls. Not only will call elimination benefit your bottom line but, if your customers are calling less, it could also boost customer satisfaction.
- Make the most of what you’ve got – Maximize opportunities with your existing (people and technology) resources. Sometimes you can be too close to your own operations to see what might be obvious to others. How about getting a trusted supplier to look at your business with a fresh pair of eyes?
- Deliver holistic customer management – Ensure that your customer care, telesales, collections and service departments look at customers in a coordinated way rather than using separate strategies and maintaining separate customer records. By bringing strategies and records together, companies can more effectively manage the ‘customer lifecycle’ – helping spot opportunities to upsell and cross sell, incentivize customers at particular points along the ‘customer journey’, and improve service levels.
- Check the financial stability of your partners – Especially during the current recessionary times, the consequences of being tied into a failing vendor for upgrades and support could have dire consequences. Working with stable partners frees you up to concentrate on what you do best – servicing your customers.
I’d love to hear your suggestions on other ways to reduce costs without negatively impacting customer service.
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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.