This is the second in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course.  Read part one here.

New Year’s observation: If there’s anything longer than the line at the (bar) (buffet line) (dessert table) in December…it’s the line at the (gym) (health club) (Weight Watchers’ meeting) in January.

‘Tis the season to resolve.

If your quest for the new year is to drop a few holiday-induced L-B-S’s…the best advice I’ve ever heard is, “Write down everything you eat during the course of the day.”  Turns out that simply training your brain to become hyper-aware of how many unnecessary calories we each consume every day is the “trigger” to kickstart a whole new mental process, that ultimately makes you eat less, and lose weight.  (BTW, 45 minutes a day on the treadmill ain’t gonna kill ya either, pal!)

But if your resolution for 2012 is to create an even greater customer experience at your company, here’s a small piece of friendly advice that will similarly trigger a new mental process for you and your entire team. It’s a matter of eliminating one simple phrase from your everyday vocabulary.  It’s not a phrase that sounds harmful at any level (in fact, when you use it, you probably think you’re doing something positive). But if you stop using it (although it’ll be hard at first), many amazing things will happen.

Stop saying, “the customer.”

I mean, we say that all the time.  We ALL do.  We all talk about how important it is to listen to the customer. To treat the customer with respect. To reduce the effort the customer has to put forth to resolve their issue.

But here’s where we need to re-wire our brains. ‘Cause there’s no such thing as THE customer. Read More »

While watching your favorite TV shows, do you ever find yourself admiring that leather briefcase or those trendy ballet flats you see on the screen? Well, now thanks to a latest feature by eBay, you not only can find out exactly what those hot items are, but buy them online for yourself.

Aptly titled “Watch with eBay,” this new iPad app allows users to combine their television viewing and shopping experience into one. Users simply enter their program information (zip code, cable provider, and channel), and out comes all relevant program-related products in eBay’s current inventory. Want to look like a certain cast member? Just search their name and receive star-specific recommendations.

What this Means for Customer Service and Support

More than just efficient multitasking, this feature serves as an example of extremely smart segmentation. Instead of advertising all product lines to all customers, eBay provides highly personalized recommendations to customers based on their precise interests. The same strategy can be applied to the world of service—similar to differentiated tastes and values, customer service preferences now come in a variety of flavors. As a result, service industries can design segmentation schemes that target the needs of different customer groups and provide personalized service in a scalable fashion. From our research on segmentation, here are some steps to consider:

• Evaluate potential benefits of segmentation for your organization. Segmenting to customer needs can certainly provide a multitude of benefits, but before you jump into a strategy, it’s important to first do the necessary prep work. Understand your customers and products, and really assess if segmentation if right for your organization. Once determined, evaluate why you are segmentation and what you hope to gain. Use CCC’s goal-setting tool to choose SMART goals for your segmentation scheme.

Read More »

IVRs are, in many ways, a necessary evil of the customer contact world.  No one is going to readily say that they love interacting with even the best of the IVRs.  After all, when customers call, they are typically ready to speak with someone.  So it is no surprise to us at CCC that so many member companies ask for advice on how to improve their current IVR structures.  And while every system is unique and our feedback can vary significantly from company to company, there are always a few common themes that pop up.  And in the spirit of avoiding the reinvention of the wheel, I wanted to share with you all some of the most common pointers we discuss with members.

1. Be Concise: This applies not only to your menu options, but also to things that I’ll call “filler language”.  Even by cutting out the “please” before each “please press X to do Y” will shave time off of the customer IVR experience.
2. Avoid “Our Menu Items Have Changed”: Unless a significant portion your customers call so frequently (I’m thinking weekly, maybe monthly) that they would absolutely notice a change, most customers will not know the difference.  Moreover, hearing that announcement will often times turn these customers off to the entire IVR experience, feeling as though they are being “tricked” into staying in the system. Read More »

As fashion experts Stacy London and Clint Kelly would tell you, sometimes folks simply need a little advice to make a big difference. So in borrowing from the TLC show “What Not to Wear,” we as customer service experts want to bring you our own, “What Not to Do” advice as it relates to customer surveys.

To conduct successful post-contact surveys, companies need to do more than simply “ask questions.” From conversations with member companies, we’ve come across some common survey pitfalls and mistakes that detract from a successful survey. Accordingly, here is our compilation of things that you as a customer survey guru should avoid:

• Don’t ask too many questions. We’ve all unfortunately been stuck in surveys that seem to never end. When designing your survey, remain cognizant of the survey length and only ask questions that are necessary. Taking steps like setting a specific survey goal, defining a question limit, or rotating questions can be helpful for avoiding this faux pas.

• Remove jargon from surveys. Company lingo is good for boardroom meetings (or is it?), but your internal jargon is meaningless to the average customer. Including this type of language in surveys causes extra effort for customers and can lead to poor-quality responses. Before deploying your survey, make sure to fit your language to different audiences, and use the customer’s language, not yours.

Read More »

For those of you who read this blog consistently, you already know that we were hard at work in the fourth quarter of 2011 compiling new research on measuring the customer experience.  And with a no-nonsense title like the one I’ve chosen here (“what you need to know”), I’ll cut to the chase. 

Our research is finished, resulting in a number of new tools and resources for CCC members.  And while surveys are not the most glamorous of research topics, there were a few interesting points that are, indeed, “need to know.”  So without further delay:

Read More »

Among the most valuable resources at CCC are our Discussions forums, which provide an easy opportunity for members to ask and answer a wide range of questions of one another. Many times these questions are at a tactical level, and the answers that members provide help their peers to make quick, informed decisions about day-to-day operations.

Not surprisingly, one topic that remains popular in our Talent Management forum is training, and though we’ve done extensive research into contact center training at CCC, questions abound when it comes to the best way to train staff as organizations test new methods and leverage technology to assist in training sessions.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the recent trends and insights shared by our members via Discussions on the topic of training:

Training Environments

As technology enables organizations to experiment with new training programs and methods, questions arise about the best environment to maximize training effectiveness.

Though it may seem beneficial to train staff in a live production environment, when polled our members overwhelmingly preferred a separate environment used solely for training. Many cited concerns about privacy and confidentiality as their rationale for holding separating training sessions that are removed from the contact center floor. With today’s technology, they found that it is easier than ever before to create separate training environments that replicate real working scenarios that staff can be expected to handle in the course of their jobs. Read More »

Customer voice (VOC) is an extremely powerful tool.  It’s not just the raw customer voice, but the trends and data it can contain.  Anything from a break in a process flow to an emerging customer need for a new product could be just at your fingertips.

And, as customer service moves away from purely an order-taking, transaction-completing, productivity-based role and grows into a function that adds value to customer experiences, the potential of VOC has only grown.  Because, what better way to add value than to supplement market research or R&D and bring customers the next, big thing?

But in reality, all of this can/could/potential business is just that – sure it could happen, but it rarely does. Read More »

CCC’s Annual Operational Benchmarking Survey is one of the staples of our membership.  Many organizations participate year-over-year to better understand where their performance stack up to their industry peers.  Having a consistently measured set of benchmarks is the best way to obtain an accurate depiction of your performance.  Opening up again in January 2012, this survey will help you answer the most pressing questions you have on the three main dimensions tracked by typical service organizations: Read More »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »

It’s been a great 2011 at CCC as we teamed up with our members to help them address a year’s worth of challenges. We’ve already looked forward and shared our predictions for what 2012 will hold for service organizations, so here is a look back at our best research published in the past year. We’re hoping this list will help you refocus your priorities for the New Year and aid in your planning for a successful 2012!

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance—when we heard from our members that rep performance was stalling despite continued investments in talent, we decided to take a closer look at what drives performance in the service organization today. What did we find? While traditional skill sets are still important, most reps were missing a crucial piece of the rep performance puzzle—one that has more than twice the impact on performance as any other factor. We call this set of skills and behaviors the Control Quotient (CQ), which quantifies a rep’s ability to exercise ownership over their day-to-day work, as well as to remain in control over themselves in stressful situations. In today’s quality-driven world, CQ is the number one lever that companies can pull to boost performance in their frontline. Read More »