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Culture, Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Work

Creating Customer Heroes: How Your Agents Can Become Customer Storytellers

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Let’s imagine, for one moment, that you’re casting your agents and customers in a movie.

What roles would they play?

Would your agents make their screen debut as wise sages, imparting knowledge and truth to help spur your customers to a glorious conclusion in their customer service journey?

Or would your agents be more like sword-wielding fighters, battling to defeat angry customer ogres before they burn your contact center to the ground?

Fantastical tales aside, stories about our businesses carry a lot of meaning. The narratives weaved by ourselves, our agents and our customers can communicate common values, elicit emotion, develop trust and understanding, and communicate knowledge and wisdom that can allow us all to grow.

The exercise above might seem silly. But thinking about your agents and customers as people in a story often paints a more vibrant picture of the type of service your business gives than a lot of the ‘hard’ information we calculate, classify and analyze in our contact centers.

Stories are a great way to make communicating complex information simpler, they provoke thought and learning, and they can often guide our actions in a way that’s clearer than cold NPS or CSat figures.

Some stories have persisted for thousands of years – and many people have produced theories that help to explain why storytelling is still such a useful form of information transfer. Communication scholar Walter Fisher argues that storytelling is one of the most persuasive forms of communication.

And in Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Made to Stick”, they argue that storytelling is a key ingredient of ideas that are compelling and produce action.

I certainly agree with them – as a professional trainer, I can confirm a story told during training sessions often gives people a lot more to analyze than a basic “show and tell” type of learning.

Given that storytelling can be such a powerful way to share learning, what does that mean for your contact center?

In this article, I’ll explore some of the ways you can help your agents to become “Customer Storytellers” to help everyone in your organization benefit from the stories your customers tell, and to learn from the ways that your agents helped them.

Agents as Listeners

Every day, your agents are in the privileged position of being let into the stories and lives of your customers. Agents act as the ‘ears’ of an organization, and it’s listening and perspective-taking that allows successful agents to understand and find meaning in the stories your customers tell.

It’s been said that the contact center is one of the most data-rich departments within an organization, and that’s true. What’s also true is it’s the department most rich in narrative!

Given all of the information that flows through your center, why should we pay extra attention to trying to capture customer stories in particular?

Well, we all know that customer expectations are on the rise. The stories your customers tell every day are an authentic and real-time source of information to allow you to keep meeting those expectations.

While customers might not have the time or want to go to the effort of providing feedback via formal channels, your agents can help to fill that gap.

While we’re all used to capturing CSat data and the like to measure how we’re doing, few organizations consider how best to capture the customer stories that your agents hear every day.

Because stories come to life when we tell them, asking your agents to listen carefully to customer stories with a view to sharing and understanding them is a pretext for helping them become true customer storytellers.

Agents as Storytellers

Listening to customer stories is just the first step, as it’s the sharing of stories that holds the most potential for growth and change in our organizations.

Ask any of your agents for stories about their customers, and the tales they tell will say a lot about the roles that customers and agents play in the big story of your organization.

Do they talk about customers so angry that they threatened to call every newspaper or politician that they thought might be able to swing things their way?

Or do they talk about those stories where they laughed or cried with customers, and connected with them in a way that goes beyond a simple phone call?

The morals and learnings we can gain from those stories are significant, and whether they’re good or bad, it’s through sharing them that we can start all to understand and to do better.

Your contact center staff have the potential to be the ‘voice’ of your organization just as much as they’re also the ‘ears.’ 

Customer advocacy can start within your agent team, and encouraging them to communicate stories allows more people access to information that’s rich with learning opportunities.

Developing processes for agents to share customer stories (with the rest of your team, or even with your entire organization) helps us not just to better understand our customers, but also to better appreciate the personalities of our agent team.

And it’s through a better understanding of each other that we can begin to affect significant changes in our work.

While we will never all agree all of the time, if we can approach more interactions with our customers and each other with a view to hear and consider different perspectives, it opens up possibilities for reasoning and action that would have never been there had we simply viewed situations from our point of view.

When teams can use a variety of perspectives to develop a fair and balanced comprehension of what’s important and what they should strive for, this allows them to be better equipped to deliver a service that provides fair and balanced experiences for customers.

Not to mention that encouraging the telling of stories, whether good or bad, makes for workplaces where we can be more comfortable with telling our own stories – the ones that help others to understand more about our authentic selves.

Agents as Heroes

A danger inherent in customer storytelling is asking your agents to tell stories about situations they’re powerless to control, making them little more than a bit-part character in the tales of others. Often, this results in stories that show the frustration of agents who want to do the right thing, but are consistently unable to.

If you’re interested in using storytelling within your organization, think about how you can empower your agents to become the heroes in your customer’s stories – the characters that save the day, subvert expectations, and provide hope.

It’s a lot easier for agents to ensure your customers’ stories have happy endings if they can themselves initiate the ‘plot twists’ that turn negative situations around. The ability to act autonomously in deciding the outcomes of customer stories means that the roles agents play, of the attentive listener or the customer advocate, can become genuinely lived rather than just acted out.

Being able to affect change in the lives and stories of your customers has profound benefits. Autonomy in work has been shown to lead to increased levels of well-being and job satisfaction, and many of us should be able to recognize that when agents can affect change in their work, it turns it from being something that’s done to them, to something that they participate in.

If you’re wondering how you can give your agents more autonomy, just ask your agents themselves. They should be able to provide you with examples of an abundance of situations where they wished they could do more, but weren’t able to – and sometimes something as simple as a change in access permissions can open up new possibilities for issue resolution.

While agents won’t always be able to give customers everything they ask for, combining sensitivity to the stories of customers with the ability to turn situations around makes for better issue resolution that’s full of possibilities and fairer for all parties involved.

Not to mention, the bonus of giving your agents more freedom to become customer heroes is that it increases the chance of positive customer experiences occurring.

And for most of us in customer service, it’s those positive customer stories which are much of the reason we’re in this industry in the first place – stories which show that we all have the capacity to listen, to understand, and to do even small things that can mean the world to others.

Originally published at CX Accelerator.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Work

10 Educational, Funny & Thought-Provoking Customer Service Training Videos You Won’t Have Seen Before

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Have you ever experienced that feeling when you encounter a new piece of information that completely shifts your understanding of the world around you? Whether it’s a great book, an enlightening movie or a blog post with a fresh perspective you’d never considered, those moments are at the core of all great learning experiences.

As a manager or trainer of a customer service team, you’ll know that excellent customer service teams aren’t born that way. Learning and training are at the heart of teams who are united in vision, strive for excellence and deliver the best customer experiences. And when training your team to become the best, excellent training materials are essential to help your team experience those paradigm shifts that fuel greater understanding of your customer.

As a seasoned customer service trainer of more than ten years, videos are an essential part of my ‘training toolkit’ that help me to achieve powerful learning outcomes. Why is that?

Firstly, people learn in different ways. The VAK Learning Model says that people typically have a preference for learning in one of three different ways – visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Adding video to your training sessions helps cater to visual learning preferences and creates an approach to learning that blends different types of media to create effective learning experiences. Secondly, Pictorial Superiority Effect means that using pictures and words together promotes greater information recall – helping you to get maximum retention and engagement through your learning content.

We’re all lucky to live in an age where video is accessible and easy to implement in a learning setting. YouTube is a fantastic resource, with so many different videos that can be used to demonstrate customer service concepts. But it can be challenging to find genuinely great videos that give ‘mic drop’ moments in training sessions, and don’t come across as patronizing or irrelevant.

I’ve created this blog post to share some customer service training videos I’ve used to create “wow” learning moments. You’ll notice I’ve steered away from using videos from industry greats and thought leaders, and have stuck to videos that are accessible and relatable to everyone. I’ve also avoided using the same customer service training videos that are shared by a ton of other blogs, and have used just videos from my experience that I have found personally effective.

So without further ado, let’s jump in!

Context & Assumptions with the Two Ronnies – Fork Handles

As a Brit, I grew up with the comedy of the Two Ronnies on TV, and this is a classic clip to demonstrate the impact of context on customer service communications. In this video, the customer and shopkeeper grapple with one misunderstanding after another when the shopkeeper assumed he knows what the customer wants. Mistaking “Four candles” for “Fork handles” is just one error in a conversation rife with confusion and misunderstanding.

Successful communication relies on ensuring that you share the same context and understanding as the customer, and checking this where you’re not sure – avoiding assumptions that make communication difficult. This is an especially great video for teams who struggle with translating corporate jargon to customers, and it’s an excellent reminder for all of the importance of checking and questioning in customer service communications.

Deceptive Intuition with the Monkey Business Illusion

This video is a great way to demonstrate the results of a well-known study on selective attention. Ask your team to watch the video and count how many times the ball is passed from one participant to the next. At the end of the video, ask the team for their answers. Then, ask if they noticed the gorilla. About 50% of the time, individuals will miss the gorilla entirely. Rewind the video to show them that it was there all along!

Intuition can be a fantastic thing to help us troubleshoot issues and get to the root of problems quickly. But what happens when your intuition is faulty? Customer service agents need to be aware that when they assume they know what the answer to a customer’s problem is, they could be incorrect – and the right answer might have been staring them in the face all along.

Content in Communication – Sounding Smart with Will Stephen

This fantastic video features TEDx Talk presenter, Will Stephen, saying absolutely nothing. He uses presentation skills to sound eloquent and persuasive without actually imparting anything useful on any topic.

There’s a lot of different reasons why you might want to show this to your team. It might be that you want to show how Will uses tone, body language, and visual aids to create particular impressions – demonstrating the power of these facets of communication. Or, you might want to warn your team of the dangers of saying an awful lot when that speech doesn’t contain much that’s useful to your customer. Either way, this video gives a great insight into how the way you present your message impacts on its persuasiveness, and should be a required watch for all customer service teams.

Empathy with the Cleveland Clinic

I was on the fence about including this video. It’s very emotive – so much so that you might find training participants are moved to tears while watching. Because of this, it’s your call to decide whether it’s appropriate to show your team this video. I’ve used this with teams I know well, with a warning that the video is a tear-jerker, because it’s so useful for demonstrating what empathy is and creating great discussion about how to handle empathy in a professional setting.

This video, created by the Cleveland Clinic in the US, shows different hospital patients grappling with different life events. It’s a powerful reminder that everyone has their issues, whether they’re hidden or visible – and that goes for us, as well as for our customers.

You can shape post-video discussion in a few ways, asking your group questions like: How can we ensure we’re reacting to customers empathetically without reacting emotionally? When is an affective or cognitive empathy response most effective? How can an empathetic mindset improve interactions with customers who are upset or angry?

Sympathy and Empathy with Brené Brown

This video is terrific to demonstrate the differences between sympathy and empathy, and it’s another one that provides a lot of thought-provoking ideas for your group to explore when discussing appropriate empathetic responses to customers.

Brené Brown shows the differences between empathetic responses – which are rooted in true perspective-taking – versus sympathetic responses, which usually don’t put the sympathizer in the other person’s shoes. It’s an excellent video to begin discussing the differences between sympathy, empathy (and apathy), and exploring what responses are appropriate in your business setting. This isn’t such a heavy-hitting video as the last, so I’ve used this before for teams I don’t know so well to provide a more comfortable way to explore the concept of empathy.

Body Language, Facial Expression and Nonverbal Cues with “Friends”

Although this video is perfect for teams who deal face to face with customers, it’s also really useful for digital teams. In this video, the cast of “Friends” demonstrate how much of the impact of communication is carried in nonverbal expression, to hilarious effect. Relevant questions to ask your group after viewing include: How can we modulate and control our nonverbal communication to ensure our messages are received clearly and unambiguously? How can teams who rely purely on text strengthen their responses to ensure the right message is communicated?

Plus, it’s a fun video for multigenerational teams to watch – from those who knew and loved Friends when it was originally on TV, to your younger staff who might not know it was ever a ‘thing.’

Fun in the Workplace with WGN-TV Anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange

Happy, engaged employees create better customer experiences. However, many initiatives aimed at encouraging positive attitudes at work can fall flat. Videos featuring attitudinal initiatives such as the Fish! Philosophy sound great, but can come across as arrogant or even lacking in understanding of employees with mental health issues.

As a manager or trainer, though, you can encourage the kind of playfulness that keeps work enjoyable. This video from WGN-TV Anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange shows their ‘commercial break handshake’ in action and is a nice way to promote having fun at work.

Email Faux Pas with Tripp and Tyler

Email is a brilliant medium for customer communications, as long as it’s done right. Comedy sketch duo Tripp and Tyler show how actions over email would play out in a face to face context, taking email norms such as auto-responses, CC’ing in the entire office, caps lock and email signatures, and putting them in a real-life context.

This is a great video to start a discussion about proper email etiquette, whether in interactions with customers or with each other. It also brings up questions about the appropriateness of particular communication methods.

Listening Skills with The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon

Sheldon from Big Bang Theory isn’t the best or most empathetic communicator. Here, you can show your group some of the hallmarks of bad listening and ask some questions to help the group explore what that looks like. What did Sheldon do? What didn’t he do? What caused this? What was the impact? Where in work do we see these behaviors (or lack of them)?

This video is ideally finished off by exploring the Five Levels of Listening. You can then use the model to ask the group to define what levels of listening Sheldon uses, what we tend to use, and how we can ensure we listen at higher levels.

Communicating Instructions with Origami Frogs

On its own, this video doesn’t seem to have any clear link to customer service principles. But used as part of a fun training activity, it’s a great way to explore how to clearly communicate instructions and troubleshooting steps to customers.

Divide your group into three and give all participants a sheet of origami paper. For the first group, show them this video and ask them to replicate the frog. For the second group, give them a copy of these diagrammatic instructions and ask them to do the same. For the last group, verbally walk them through how to create a frog, giving verbal instructions like “fold the paper down the middle” – however, don’t actually show them what to do.

At the end, ask the group about their experiences with each method. What problems did they encounter? What type of visuals helped the most? What parallels are there in our troubleshooting processes? How can we use what we’ve learned from this experience to ensure customers can clearly understand the steps we guide them through?

Once you’re finished, the group will also have some fun jumping frogs to play with throughout the rest of training!

I hope you enjoy looking at these videos and thinking how they could benefit your team. Do you have any other videos that you’ve used to successfully illustrate particular customer service concepts? I’d love to hear about them – let me know in the comments below!

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

How Blockchain Could Transform The Customer Experience

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Blockchain. Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency.

It’s likely you’ve heard these terms mentioned in the news recently, but unless you work in banking, these terms probably don’t factor much into your day-to-day work. Let’s face it – customer experience doesn’t often overlap with the world of financial technology.

But blockchain is a technology that holds the potential to revolutionize the way we all do business, far beyond its potential to change financial transactions. Enterprises everywhere seem to think so too:

  • 90% of North American and European banks are exploring blockchain technology [Source]
  • Nasdaq is piloting a blockchain-powered private market exchange [Source]
  • IBM and Comcast Ventures are backing a fund for blockchain startups [Source]
  • Kodak share prices recently leapt 117% after announcing a new blockchain initiative [Source]
  • Gartner predicts the total business value-add of blockchain to reach $3.1 trillion by 2030 [Source]

If your business has anything to do with customers, the processes it follows to sell to them, market to them or share information with them could be radically transformed by blockchain.

That might sound intimidating. But blockchain has enormous potential to change customer experience for the better – improving access for disadvantaged customers, making businesses more accountable, and increasing security in all kinds of business-customer interactions. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through some examples of how blockchain could change the customer experience, and the firms that are pioneering those changes. But first, you’ll need to know a little about how blockchain works – not an easy feat for something so technical. I spoke to Andy Spence, Workforce Advisor and faculty member of Blockchain Research Institute, who gave me a crash course on what blockchain is about and how it’s being used.

Andy says there are two main things to consider when learning about blockchain. Firstly – blockchain and bitcoin (or cryptocurrency) are totally different concepts. Although bitcoin is built on blockchain technology, bitcoin represents just one example of how blockchain technology can be applied. Blockchain technology itself can be applied in many different ways, far beyond just cryptocurrency.

Secondly, blockchain isn’t just used in financial settings. There are a lot of examples of blockchain technology being used in a wealth of industries for different applications. For example, blockchain technology is already being used for charity donations, voting systems, HR processes and more – far outside of the scope of finance. And there’s a lot of potential CX uses for blockchain too, which I’ll explain in a moment.

So how exactly does Blockchain work? I’ll explain (although if my explanation is too simplistic for you, I recommend this excellent primer from Blockgeeks.)

Imagine you have to send some money to a friend. To do this, you contact your bank and ask them to send the money to your friend’s account. The bank has a ledger of transactions. To perform the transfer, it removes the funds from your account, adds them to your friend’s account, and records it all on their central ledger.

The process is reliant on a single authority – the bank – to perform the transaction and keep accurate records on their ledger. As a consumer, you have to trust that the bank will do this accurately and without corruption. Sadly, this isn’t always something that banks are capable of doing.

Blockchain allows for transactions to occur without a single authority to oversee them. It does this by recording transactions on an electronic ‘ledger’ that everyone can access. Computers all over the world hold copies of this ledger and continuously work to verify transactions registered on it.

Transactions made on the blockchain are stored forever, and it’s impossible to tamper with them or alter them once they’re made. Sensitive information relating to each transaction can be cryptographically secured, meaning that it is only accessible by those with the right keys to unlock it. That information can be disclosed at will by the parties involved in the transaction.

At the moment, blockchain is being used most notably by Bitcoin to provide decentralized payments – that is, payments that don’t need to occur through a bank. And while the example above uses banking as an example of a transaction, blockchain technology could be used for all sorts of information that moves from one person to another, not just financial transactions.

In short – Blockchain democratizes and secures transactions, taking transactional ledgers from the hands of authorities and putting them into the hands of everyone.

Businesses of every kind hold ledgers which record the moving of things from one place to another, whether it’s money, products or services that are changing hands. For example, CRMs exist to record details of customers’ identities and their ownership of products and services.

Now imagine if all of the transactional information your company holds wasn’t located inside of your business – imagine it existed in an external, decentralized way, on the blockchain. Suddenly, there’s a whole lot of extra possibilities for customers, and enormous implications for businesses.

Here are some conventional processes that customer service functions perform now, and how blockchain could transform them in the future.

Sending and Receiving Payments

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the blockchain to send money from one person to another. It’s a secure yet transparent system that operates with no need for a central bank, allowing strangers to transact without needing a third party to oversee the transaction.

Our modern banking systems are not perfect. Clearing and identity checking takes time. International payments can take a long time and usually come with high fees. Customers who are disadvantaged or disabled may not have a bank account or be able to get to a bank.

Payments made through blockchain technology could cut out these banking-related issues, letting money move freely between businesses and their customers, with no banks or payment processors needing to act as middleman. It could cut payment processing times to minutes (in some cases, from days or weeks), and completely revolutionize processes such as clearing. In fact, change is already underway – Mastercard is even opening up its own blockchain as an alternative payment method.

Sending or Receiving Products

The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting bigger, and this technology combined with blockchain could allow for massive improvements in how customers pay for and receive products.

Customers commonly complain when they have paid for a product or service that they haven’t received. Those complaining customers are the tip of the iceberg of problems with dispatch and receipt of products – for every customer who complains, 26 remain silent. Those 26 customers are opportunities lost for businesses, as rather than highlighting service problems and giving companies a chance to improve on them, those customers just walk away.

IBM’s Watson IoT blockchain offerings allow for goods to be tracked along each point of a supply chain, with information about the status of a package updating via GPS as it moves, and payments being released when each section of a transaction is verified as having been completed smoothly. Holding this information in the blockchain means that neither party needs to prove the delivery status of a package if it goes astray – the transaction’s status is an objective truth held within the blockchain.

As well as allowing companies to act proactively upon service issues, this means that businesses can gain increased visibility into their supply chain since they would no longer need to rely on customer feedback as an indicator that a process hasn’t worked correctly. This new insight into service failures could open up the potential for service improvement of a kind never seen before.

In future, businesses could even have the capability to take customer funds only when a product has been verified on the blockchain as received by the customer. This type of blockchain-facilitated process change could be used by companies as a strategic differentiator, helping to reassure customers that they won’t be at risk of losing out if a package goes astray.

Smart Contracts

In the same way that IoT and blockchain could revolutionize the transaction of physical goods, there’s potential for non-physical exchanges to be changed too. One way this can be done is through smart contracts, facilitated through the blockchain.

Using the blockchain, contractual obligations can be tied to specific actions through an “If/Then” model. These actions can trigger when contractual conditions are verified through the blockchain as having been met or not met.

For example, imagine that a customer signs a contract with a cable firm. The cable firm agrees to have service available by a specific date. The transaction is held in a smart contract and recorded on the blockchain. If service is not delivered by the specified date, the customer gets a refund. Or if service is set up on or before the specified date, payment is taken from the customer, and the service begins.

Because the transaction is verified publicly and cannot be altered or tampered with, all parties are held to their contractual obligations and action can automatically be taken if they are not met.

Real distress can be caused to customers when companies don’t keep to their side of a bargain. The burden of proof often rests on the customer to chase, discuss, persuade and fight for compensation. When things go seriously wrong, cases often get referred to third parties such as complaints teams (or even consumer affairs regulators) who are needed to verify claims of contractual wrongdoing and put situations right – a layer of operations that’s often resource-heavy and complicated to administer.

But with smart contracts automating the consequences of contractual non-compliance, third parties and complex processes become unnecessary. The time and effort required to put situations right can be reduced, while leveling the power imbalance between customers and businesses. It also helps companies with great processes gain competitive advantage, especially when compared to companies who seem to only stay in business from making it prohibitively difficult for their customers to complain.

You might have heard about smart contracts having the ability to revolutionize our voting systems, which is exciting in itself. But in the world of everyday business, smart contracts are already being used by Barclays Corporate Bank to verify ownership and release funds between banks, and there’s vast potential for contracts of all kinds to switch to a smart model too.

Customer Record Keeping

We’ve all heard horror stories of companies who have failed to keep customer data safe. Whether it’s personally identifiable information, passwords, sensitive health records or even information that reveals political preferences, businesses and customers everywhere are rightfully concerned about the security of customer data.

As it stands, customers have to trust that companies only hold information about them that’s reasonable and proportionate when in reality, that might not always be the case. Not to mention that each time customers hand over their personal information to businesses, it puts them at risk of identity theft.

Companies like Civic are working on systems to store customer identity information on the blockchain, with that data secured in an encrypted form that customers can disclose as they choose. While the specifics of this are beyond the scope of this blog post, ultimately this could mean that in future, businesses wouldn’t need to hold the personal information necessary for customers to pass data security checks. Companies wouldn’t have to worry about keeping that data safe, clean or compliant as it won’t be held internally, and customers won’t have to worry about excessive or unsafe personal information being held by companies.

Beyond the treatment of customer identity information, there are possibilities for other types of blockchain-based record keeping too – for example, in healthcare. Factom intends to use blockchain to store healthcare records such as medical bills and patient-physician communications. The nature of blockchain-based records means that this information can be simultaneously secured through cryptography while ensuring that records made can never be tampered with.

(On a related note, compliance processes are also an area ripe for massive disruption by blockchain – as the backbone of compliance rests in rigorous record keeping. With a recent Accenture report showing that 23% of financial services firms spend as much as 5% of their annual net income on compliance every year, there’s the potential for substantial cost savings through moving internal records to the blockchain. Here’s an excellent article that explains more on this, if you’re interested.)

The Future of Blockchain?

“We should think about the blockchain as another class of thing like the Internet… But the blockchain concept is even more; it is a new organizing paradigm for the discovery, valuation, and transfer of all quanta (discrete units) of anything, and potentially for the coordination of all human activity at a much larger scale than has been possible before.”


– Blockchain, Blueprint for a New Economy – Melanie Swan

Blockchain technology is a fantastic concept to explore for anyone who loves ethical business, who loves exploring new ways of working, or who wants to make business better for customers.

This new technology gives us all the opportunity to reconsider traditional business processes from their foundations. It’s not far-fetched to consider that in the future, companies like yours and mine could employ blockchain specialists not just to remove liability from businesses, but to make all kinds of processes fairer for customers too.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has caused customers everywhere to question who holds their data, and why. We’re all living in a new age of data insecurity and mistrust. Blockchain technology could act as the antidote to this consumer skepticism, as the decentralization of customer data could usher in radically open, more transparent customer relationships – which could even be the next big differentiator for businesses.

Blockchain adoption could allow our businesses to demonstrate this increased transparency and enable us to build a new type of relationship with our customer – one built upon core values of security, fairness, and equality. Blockchain could even usher in an entirely new era of customer expectation: the expectation that customers should be treated fairly by the businesses they spend their money with, and what’s more, that the blockchain itself can act as a guarantee for that fair treatment.

That’s why customer experience professionals everywhere need to be aware of the potential of this new technology. Of course, nobody knows to what extent blockchain will be adopted. But with publications like Forbes and Fortune predicting blockchain will, quite literally, change the world – along with blockchain ventures launching from some of the world’s most prominent and influential businesses – we all need to watch how this technology develops.

Is your business getting ready for blockchain? I’d love to hear more about how firms are understanding and preparing for its potential applications – feel free to drop me a note in the comments below.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Work

[Webinar] Stop the CSat Nosedive with Chat

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I had a fantastic time discussing how live chat can protect against CSat falls with CCW‘s Brian Cantor and Michael Dejager.

A great conversation covering technology, best practices, and how top companies are using chat to not only gain competitive advantage but also secure happy and satisfied customers, both now and in the future.

Register for the recording here.

Customer Experience, Work

Cutting-Edge Customer Experience Ideas from Call Center Week 2017

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Customer service is in a huge state of flux. From Chatbots to culture shifts making their mark on the industry, there were a lot of new and important topics for speakers to talk about at this year’s Call Center Week Conference.

The conference certainly gave the Comm100 team some food for thought, so we wanted to share these ideas with you. Here’s our top selection of thoughts and ideas from the speakers at this year’s event, to help you get up to date with everything happening in the customer service field right now. We’ve also included some tweetable quotes for you to share these ideas with your network.

Opening Remarks from the CCW Team

The CCW Team opened the conference with a host of facts and stats, with several hot topics discussed including Live Chat and AI.

80% of customer service managers say improving Live chat is a priority this year. And 68% plan to implement AI this year, too. However, don’t think about getting rid of your agent team yet – only 5% think AI will replace humans.

“AI should be to complement – never to replace – your existing customer service team.”

CCW

Headliner Keynote: A Proven Model for Creating a Winning Culture – Disney Style

Jeff James, Vice President and General Manager at the Disney Institute, headed up the first keynote.

Jeff shared how the team at Disney have a “maniacal focus on world class customer experiences” and how he felt that customer experience for many businesses in recent years has been in decline, fueled by a focus on improving the efficiency of processes.

Jeff noted that “Customer loyalty is earned by delivering on brand promise time and time again.” But how do you make sure your employees deliver on brand promise?

The answer, says Jeff, is employee engagement. And at the source of that is strong leadership.

call center week 2017

Jeff had some insightful things to say about great leadership, noting that:

  • Every leader is telling a story about what he or she values.
  • We judge ourselves based on our intentions, others judge us based on our behaviors.
  • Great leaders do not allow themselves to become separated from our occurrences on the front line.

Disney’s common purpose, throughout all their staff from the CEO to the street sweeper, is to create happiness. Jeff described a culture where employees are not afraid to deliver great customer experiences even if they don’t fit exactly with their job title, emphasizing that creating happiness is everyone’s job.

It was fantastic to hear how Disney’s culture empowers everyone to create great guest experiences, every day. Jeff closed with some fantastic stories around their staff creating fantastic, above-and-beyond guest experiences, and shared how important this behavior, and the recognition of it, is to create the culture Disney needs.We search for people doing it right. Go out and find that. Then reward them. Reverse the model of managers looking to bust ass. They’re looking for opportunities to recognize and reward great behavior. To reward, we almost never use money – it’s ‘Nice job!’ or sharing success in a meeting with peers. When you catch somebody doing something right – that’s great for not just cast members but customers too.

“Every leader is telling a story about what he or she values.”


Jeff James @DisneyInstitute

Game Changer Keynote: Move Your Ideas into Action Through Emotional Transportation

The second keynote was given by Peter Guber – Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment.

call center week 2017

Peter started by describing how businesses need to be able to create purposeful stories that move their audiences. Successes need to be able to be packaged into a narrative to allow customers to evangelize, and this narrative forms what is emotional transportation.

Peter explained that businesses need to focus on creating narratives through sharing benefits, not just features. The whole time you’re treating the customer in a transactional way, you’re moving the customer away from sharing the message you want with them. That’s why emotionalizing messages help – this is what moves people and builds relationships.

“Relationships trump transactions, all the time.”

Peter Guber

“State of the art technology has to be in service to state of the heart technology.”

Peter Guber

Panel Discussion

This panel was hosted by Gary E Barnett – Senior VP & GM Engagement Solutions at Avaya. The panel itself consisted of Gail L Smith – Chief Customer Officer at Metroplus Health Plan, Jon Robertson – Chief Customer Officer at Desk Yogi, and Darren Toohey – Head of Global Sales & Customer Retention at Carlson Wagonlit Travel.

call center week 2017

Gary opened by noting that the industry is “right in the middle of a tornado today” regarding how quickly change is happening.

Darren opened the panel discussion, noting that his industry has changed significantly with the advent of Generation X, Y and Millennials demanding more self-service and live chat options, with less telephone conversation.

Gail introduced herself and her background in healthcare, noting that the Affordable Care Act of 2014 changed healthcare service dramatically, exposing healthcare providers to a wider customer base with different demands from what Metroplus were used to.

Jon explained that changing customer expectations had impacted the fabric of his business dramatically. Where previously companies used to dictate how customers interacted with them, now the tables have turned, with legacy systems and silos causing problems in adapting to this new standpoint.

Gail echoed the idea that breaking down silos is critical to building great customer journeys, noting that communications between different teams can be critical in creating appropriate responses to tricky customer service situations.

The discussion turned to data, with Jon drawing attention to the close relationships needed with developers for data to be scaled and unified as organizations grow. Gary highlights that conversations have shifted from businesses asking for reports, to businesses asking what data they can access, and the benefits inherent within organically interrogating this data.

Discussion around customer expectations was the focus towards the end of this panel discussion, with Gary noting that customers are becoming more demanding. Jon shared that he feels customer expectations are increasingly influenced by companies like Amazon, who have the ability to get a parcel on a customer’s doorstep with just a few hours of the order being placed. Gail mentioned that other industries do certainly influence customer expectations, with the satisfaction of healthcare customers often being met through above-and-beyond customer experience initiatives.

“Regardless of how advanced technology becomes, you still have to know, help & value your customer.”

Darren Toohey

Keynote: The Journey to Customer Centricity – People Powered, Customer Driven Strategy

Tim Spencer, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Safelite Group, opened this keynote by discussing the transformation of Safelite’s business through a focused customer service agenda. Later, Tim was joined by Troy Mills, former VP of Customer Care at Walgreens, now CEO of Customer Card Advisory.

Tim shared how any transformation starts with purpose – that unless everyone within an organization is aligned, it’s vital to establish a purpose that helps their people, or Associates, understand not just what they do, but why they do it.

Safelite’s business is in repairing windshields. For them, many customer interactions start with a situation of distress for their customer – nobody expects that they’ll need to repair their windshield, and it’s often a time of stress while it’s being repaired. Safelite recognized that turning a distress situation into one where Associates show care, no hassle occurs in getting the issue sorted, and customers can get on with their daily lives, is crucial to building a company that people love.

Like Jeff James at Disney, Tim also linked exceptional experiences to employee happiness, created through outstanding leadership. Tim noted that in this sense, CX always starts with AX (the Associate Experience) and that his organization does some key things in building a great culture where Associates genuinely want to create the best customer experiences:

  • Build an environment where people are empowered to act and have autonomy
  • Make it personal
  • Engage closely and understand what’s going on in your people’s lives
  • Recognize performance

Authenticity was also a hot topic here, with Tim recognizing that authentic leaders who engage with their staff helped Safelite’s leaders “make it real.”

Tim discussed ways Safelite’s infrastructure, innovation, and KPIs have shifted to accommodate their new customer focus – with CSat being phased out in favor of customer ease of business scores, new technology such as Chatbots being explored, and HR departments being replaced with People & Leadership Development teams.

“It’s essential to focus on words: these have to align with what we do and what we say we do.”

Tim Spencer
call center week 2017

Keynote: Customer Management Practice Executive Report: Three Bold Predictions

This keynote was headed by Mario Matulich, Executive Director of the Customer Management Practice at IQPC. Additionally, Mario was joined by Troy Mills, former VP of Customer Care at Walgreens and current Chief Academic Officer at CCW University.

Mario opened by stating that the stakes are real. It’s time to be bold! 77% of people talk to friends about poor customer experience. 78% of the same people make decisions based off word of mouth feedback. 62% of customers change brands if they have just one poor experience – and 61% of those will tell you they’ll move even to an inferior product or priced higher if they’re getting a poor experience.

  • Prediction number 1 was that speed becomes a number 1 priority for customers. Hold time was found to be twice as important as personalization, with the understanding that while personalization is great – if you waste a customer’s time, they can never get that back. Wait time was found to be the number 1 reason why customers complain.
  • Prediction number 2 was that disintegrated technology must go. Making customers repeat themselves through disintegrated solutions frustrates customers, which then puts staff on the back foot. Because 68% of customers say agent demeanor is a critical part of their service experience, ensuring that solutions are integrated and help form linear, easy customer experiences are critical to help your agents do the best work they can.
  • Prediction number 3 was that today’s Contact Center agent will become obsolete in the next 24 months. But this idea isn’t about the steady march of automation taking jobs – rather, that the traditional contact center skill set is changing drastically with the advent of omnichannel and the increasing complexity of agent interactions. This issue doesn’t just concern agent training, though – it’s also about future leadership development.

Troy opened on this topic by discussing that at many big companies, training is one of the things that gets left behind when service levels decrease. But that’s not how to develop leaders. Ultimately, Troy said that getting better predictions about the future, sharing them with staff, and developing time for their development is key to lead staff to become true leaders.

Troy also commented on leaders needing to present revenue drivers rather than cost sinks to company strategists, in order to see change. The stakes are certainly high for these future leaders, and Troy commented that many businesses have knowledge gaps when trying to develop leaders who have people and financial leadership skills, ability with communications and technology, as well as an understanding of where businesses operate in a global environment. In this sense, it’s even more vital for businesses to ringfence time to ensure their leaders are up to scratch on these points.

“63% of customers would pay more for a better experience; 87% then share great experiences!”

Mario Matulich

Keynote: Customer-Centric Transformer – Customer Obsession at Amazon

This keynote was presented by Tom Weiland, President of Worldwide Customer Service at Amazon.

Tom started by discussing good intentions versus mechanisms. A common problem in many businesses is that good intentions aren’t enough – they don’t cause change, in and of themselves. What works for Tom’s team is what he calls mechanisms – which consist of good tools, adoption of those tools, and inspection, working together to form positive change.

Mechanism 1 Tom discussed was working backwards. Tom described the process of starting with a press release, to solidify everything expectations and requirements when releasing a new feature at the planning stage.

Mechanism 2 was creating a customer connections program. One a year, each employee is invited to come to the contact center, listen to customers, get customer feedback, and improve processes as a result.

Mechanism 3 was the Andon Cord. The Andon Cord is a decades-old idea from the manufacturer, Toyota – that if anyone on the assembly line spotted a defect, they could pull the Andon Cord which stopped the production line until it was fixed. At the time, this idea was revolutionary – the idea that anyone on the line could stop it was seen as a major shift in power. Tom used this idea at Amazon by enabling employees to make an item temporarily unavailable if they were getting complaints about its quality. This kind of process is deeply empowering for staff and means that quality issues are dealt with, not glossed over.

Mechanism 4 was Tenets. Tenets at Amazon are principles and beliefs held by staff – Tom described them as “like a north star for a team.” Each team has a few tenets covering their purpose, what they’re working towards, and guiding them in how to act.

call center week 2017

“Good intentions aren’t enough – because you’re not asking for a change.”

Tom Weiland

Keynote: Training Innovation – The Revolution of Training: VOC is Just a Click Away

Davy M Roach, Vice President Customer Care PMO at Frontier Communications, gave this training-focused keynote.

Davy argued that the traditional method of training is broken:

  • It’s expensive, both developing training and taking staff offline to train them.
  • It’s slow. Processes within a company can be bad, and increase training time. It also takes many employees to deliver the curriculum.
  • It’s ineffective. As employees, we’re human – we listen for positives, and ignore or bias the negatives. We have selective memory. Feedback through coaching is hard to do – hard to deliver, hard to receive.

Davy shared that social and self-discovery are emerging training models, and discussed some of the differences between these newer and older models.

call center week 2017

Davy discussed what this looks like at Frontier. In a self-discovery training session, employees talk informally and discuss what they could be doing better. Learning here is peer to peer, and much more effective than coming from a supervisor.

Regarding timing training, it used to be that scheduled sessions were timetabled and then delivered, often some weeks after the event that precipitated the training need. Now, Frontier uses VOC data to drive employee training, with reviews of customer feedback being delivered in real time. This VOC feedback allows employees to discover what they did well, what they could improve, and look out for patterns that need addressing.

“Traditional training mechanisms are ripe for disruption.”

Davy Roach

Conclusion

Call Center Week saw some big themes emerge across several of the keynotes as well as the smaller discussions. Culture, employee engagement, AI and omnichannel were topics that most leading industry figures engaged with, regardless of business size or industry.

The customer service field is now growing far beyond recognizing the need for great customer service processes, and instead, embracing these factors outside of the call center that contribute to amazing customer experiences. These are challenging, yet exciting times for anyone working to improve the experiences of their customers.

Were you at Call Center Week? What did you think? Or do you have a different point of view to the speakers we’ve shown here? Add your comment in the section below.

Originally published here.

Culture, Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Work

More Than Just Lip Service: How To Turn Corporate Values into Lived Behaviors in Your Contact Center

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Communication – We have an obligation to communicate.
Respect – We treat others as we would like to be treated.
Integrity – We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.
Excellence – We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do.

Do these corporate values sound familiar to you? Given that some 89% of companies have core values of some kind, it’s likely that you’re accustomed to these types of statements, which many companies all over the world proudly align themselves to.

The difference with this list of values is that they’re pulled from the 2000 Annual Report of what would become one of the most unethical companies of all time – Enron. In the wake of Enron’s 2001 accounting scandal, it quickly became clear to shareholders and customers alike that these values meant nothing, in a corporate culture where greed reigned supreme.

While Enron is an extreme example of values fallen by the wayside, sadly it’s all too often that company value statements are pinned up on the wall and forgotten about, while lived culture brews all practices and tactics which make for disempowering, politically-charged or unethical working environments.

It’s a sad thing that the contact center is so often a place where these practices are often seen and publicized. From KPIs that cause role conflict and stress, to high-pressure sales tactics employed by desperate staff at the expense of vulnerable customers, there are companies everywhere who pay lip service to great culture while allowing awful business practices to impact on customers and agents alike.

Corporate value statements are meant to prevent this, but they’re problematic for any professional who looks for results in any business initiative – and corporate values are as much of a business initiative as any other practice to fuel organizational change. How can values be measured? What even are we measuring here? While corporate values are often seen as too disputed or illusory to get to consensus on and measure, it can be done. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from helping contact centers to embed their corporate values.

Make Values Visible

Your values shouldn’t be hidden in a corporate handbook. Make it clear how much they influence your working culture by putting them front and center. Print them on coffee mugs, engrave them into meeting room windows, hang them on posters.

Making values visible is much more than physically marking their presence. Your leadership team have a huge role to play in setting the standard for values-driven business, too. To put it simply – if they’re not talking about values, your teams aren’t going to either.

Work Towards Shared Definitions

Some values are really difficult to define. Ask your average person what integrity is, for example, and you’ll likely get an answer along the lines of “Doing the right thing”. That’s all well and good, but Enron’s executives probably thought they were doing the right thing for their lifestyle and family the whole time they were secretly lining their pockets with the organization’s money.

Values mean different things to different people, so it’s essential to get your team agreed on what a particular value actually means in order for them to see how it can be applied to their work. Get your teams thinking about what your corporate values really mean to them by way of a brainstorming session – and be prepared for some deep discussions that range into the realms of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and more.

All of this makes for some seriously interesting debate that will help you understand your teams in new ways, as well as helping them towards a deeper understanding of what values really are, and how they apply within your organization.

Define What Values Look Like – And What They Don’t Look Like

Many of us would say we are principled people who act according to certain standards. You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t say that they don’t take accountability for their actions, or that they don’t treat people with respect. But ask how values can be shown in an everyday working environment, and some might struggle to come up with some concrete examples of what certain values actually look like. What do accountable people actually do to show that? What behaviours do you need to show to demonstrate excellence?

What’s more, the nature of modern work often presents some interesting ethical dilemmas that value statements alone don’t resolve. Is it a violation of integrity to book a doctor’s appointment on work time when you’re not feeling well? Is Ken’s bordering-on-xenophobic nature to be expected given his upbringing and culture, or does that signify a problematic absence of respect? Identifying behaviors linked to value statements is a great way to give clarity to these moral grey areas.

Create some clear examples of specific behaviors to give your teams that clarity. Work with them to brainstorm what each value looks like, and also what acting with an absence of that value looks like. These behaviors should cover both interactions with customers, as well as interactions with each other.

With some encouragement, many people can come up with some real-life behaviors that act as a solid guideline for value-driven working practices, and help make value statements more concrete than a list of well-meaning but vague phrases. Document them for future reference and be clear that your list should rightly be always up for debate.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is – Measure & Assess Values

It’s rare for organizations to measure and assess standards for behavior against corporate values, but turning values into a KPI sends a seriously strong message about how important values are to you as an organization.

What’s more, when staff know there are expectations for value-driven conduct, values transform from being statements that are talked about on induction day and then forgotten, to becoming a reliable standard which defines how work occurs within your business.

You can implement a value-based KPI into your annual review process by asking staff to come prepared with examples of times they’ve shown behaviors that signify a particular value. You can decide how in-depth and granular you want this process to be – it might be enough for you to ask your teams to evidence one or two things that show they’ve acted with a certain value at each review, and give them a tick in the box that demonstrates they have thought and acted in accordance with that value. Or, you might choose a more lengthy process that incorporates coaching and 360-degree feedback to develop a rating.

With sensitivity to the practicalities of this process, it’s possible to develop a new KPI that helps your corporate values to become truly lived.

Why Values Matter In The Contact Center

Few business areas have seen as much transformation in the last few decades as the contact center. Back in the 80s, as the telephone enabled the offshoring of customer communications, the call center was born as an opportunity for business cost reduction. The draw of call centers was the ability to cheaply process high-volume customer inquiries – inquiries which were often low quality, and the targets and practices within them tended to disadvantage agents and customers alike.

Only in the last ten years has CX become a strategic priority, and now, our agents are much more than low-skill, scripted triage staff – they’re fully-fledged knowledge workers, with valuable and transferable professional skills, creating clear business advantage for the organizations they work within.

Despite this incredible change, contact centers still suffer from the image problems of the past – viewed as places where ‘professional’ work and ethics are often absent. Agents still try to minimize aspects of their role from their friends or relatives, who still commonly see contact centers as unskilled, low-value places to work. And many customers still dread contacting customer service, expecting to talk to agents with no ability or desire to truly help. These are big issues which affect the potential success of the work that we all do, as demonstrating the worth of our centers is especially hard against this backdrop.

With that in mind, it’s important for anyone who hopes to advance contact center working practices to reject the perceptions of the past, through ensuring that their centers are staffed by agents who aren’t disadvantaged by their jobs, and who serve customers who are treated fairly. Values can be a strong driver to set a clear standard for conduct, communication, and behavior in our centers so that this hope becomes more than just an aspiration.

The promotion of value-driven business practices, then, is essential to actually change the problematic perceptions of contact center work and to help us raise the bar of best practice throughout our industry.

It’s on all of us to situate values strongly in our workplaces, helping us to create contact centers which are recognized as operating fairly, upholding exceptional standards of practice, and allowing for empowering work to take place – for agents, businesses and customers alike.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Work

Why Are Customers So Rude, Stupid, Entitled? (Or Important!)

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Many of you will be familiar with Google’s autocomplete feature – the suggested phrases which pop up when you start to type in a word or phrase, based on phrases other people have searched for.

Google’s autocomplete suggestions can be pretty telling in what people around the world are thinking about their customers – and as well as Google itself, there’s some great tools out there to help curious customer service professionals see all of the questions people are asking about customers all around the internet.

So, what are some of the top questions being asked about customers? Typing in “Why are customers” into Google brings up four top search terms… with some telling results for everyone working within customer service.

Read more at the Comm100 Blog.

Customer Experience, Work

How To Lose 680k Fans In 4 Paragraphs: Customer Experience Lessons from EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 Disaster

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This week, EA made a splash on Reddit by posting what would become the least popular comment in the site’s history—with over 680,000 users downvoting EA’s reply to a Reddit thread about the role of microtransactions in the upcoming video game Star Wars Battlefront 2.

A thread entitled “Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?” ignited a fierce outcry from users who were unhappy that some of the game’s core heroes, like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, were locked to play from the start of the game. These players were only unlockable through more than 40 hours of game time or by paying extra money for in-game credits to buy the characters.

EA’s PR team were quick to respond, noting that “the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”

This response evidently rang hollow for players, with over half a million fans downvoting and commenting to express their dissatisfaction with EA.

While the realm of gaming might seem far removed from the day to day work of our contact centers and marketing teams, EA’s handling of the crisis provides timely lessons for any customer experience professionals seeking to understand, and deliver, what their customers truly want.

Don’t Make Customers Grind To Get Core Functionality

The concept of ‘grind’ is a common one in the gaming community. Grinding is the act of performing repetitive in-game tasks purely to unlock a particular reward or feature, and it’s implemented unintentionally by game developers. It’s a mechanic that frequently causes frustration for gamers when the rewards given often don’t end up feeling rewarding enough, given the grind it’s taken to get them.

In Battlefront 2, it would have taken more than 40 hours of play to unlock a single character. With matches lasting 15 minutes, that’s a tremendous amount of grind to get what many players considered to be a core feature of the game – the ability to play as a key character in the Star Wars universe.

The mechanic might seem fairer if the game was free to play. But having already shelled out a significant amount of money for the base game, many gamers had expected that they would be getting full access to the product they thought they’d paid for.

Companies of all kinds can learn from this. If you’re releasing a feature that will only bring rewards after hours of configuration, that’s subjecting your customers to an amount of grind that they likely won’t have perceived when they signed up in the first place.

Or if your product or service only operates correctly once the customer has invested a lot of time or extra money into it, be upfront about that to ensure that customer expectations match the reality of your product – or risk the wrath of your fan base.

If 680,000 People Tell You That Your Feature Sucks – It Probably Does

Do you listen to your customers? Most businesses would say that they do, and in their response to the Reddit thread EA certainly set out to convince players that they were being listened to.

But despite EA’s stated commitment to their fan base, part of the reason why their comment was so universally panned was because they maintained that the purpose of locking characters was to provide players with a sense of accomplishment and pride – presumably once they had played enough to unlock them. But many players saw no accomplishment and pride to be gained through dedicated gameplay when rich players can just open their wallets.

Reddit users were quick to jump on EA’s PR-crafted response, which didn’t offer any solutions to players who were so angry about the issue. Instead, many perceived it as an attempt to deflect criticism to cover what many players saw as ruthless money-grabbing.

If a majority of your customers are unhappy about a feature of your product or service, no amount of PR-speak is going to pacify them – honesty and action will. In cases like these, companies need to recognize when customer complaints represent a real – not perceived – product flaw, and act appropriately.

In EA’s case, a sincere apology coupled with a plan of action could have saved the situation from becoming a PR disaster – although paying attention to user feedback in the beta test stage would have prevented the problem from occurring in the first place.

Your Competitors Love Your Failures. Don’t Let Them Take Advantage

Shortly after EA’s response, Blizzard was quick to react by posting a video and tweet which underlined their commitment to free-to-play gaming in their upcoming game, Starcraft II.

All of us tend to craft narratives to better understand the world around us. In this case, it was easy for customers to seize on EA’s response, portraying them as a corporate, money-grabbing machine, far removed from the concerns of average gamers. And this narrative spread like wildfire on social media.

Blizzard has taken advantage of EA’s crisis to paint a picture of themselves as a company who care about their players, and who incorporate product features which people like – in this place, free-to-play games with no hidden costs. Gamers were quick to like and retweet Blizzard’s feisty response to the outcry, putting Blizzard into the happy position of looking like a far more customer-focused company.

Even if your company isn’t engaged in tweet wars with other companies, you can be sure that your competitors are assessing how to craft narratives that convince your customers that they’re the better company. In this case, Blizzard saw the evident customer pain in this community, and took advantage of the outcry to create a straightforward narrative which provided answers to that pain.

Carefully consider what narratives you need to weave that speak to the problems your customer is experiencing. It’s those narratives that will get you traction in the hearts and minds of your customers, and prevent your competitors from harnessing your flaws for their gain.

 

Time For A Change

EA later acknowledged fan’s opinions and announced they would lower the cost of buying heroes by 75%. But for many players, this response was only a sticking-plaster fix to a broader issue – that game developers are too quick to demand hours of a player’s time for far too meager a reward.

In EA’s case, they’d hugely overestimated the amount of time players were willing to spend to play as generic stormtroopers to get to play the franchise’s most iconic characters. This failure was enough to lose them 680k fans in a matter of days and become the biggest PR disaster in Reddit’s history.

And EA’s failure highlights a significant issue within the customer experience field. Too often, customers get tied up in navigating convoluted processes or waiting for support responses, only to find they’re chasing an outcome which feels barely satisfactory. Just like in EA’s case, the ratio of time versus reward is seriously off.

In the world of customer experience today, we all need to consider how much time we’re asking of our customers – and whether the rewards they get from our products or services justify the time they spend obtaining and using them.

Time is finite. You can never get it back. And you can’t give it back to a customer if you waste theirs. But ensuring that your customers feel positively about the time and effort they’ve made to buy into your product or service will always be a winning CX strategy – whether you’re a giant gaming company, a tiny mom and pop firm, or any other type of business.