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.
I had a lot of fun breaking the ice with the wonderful Jenny Dempsey and Jeremy Watkin last week!
Watch the video to find out our top ways to reduce customer friction, plus find out whether I prefer beaches or lakes…
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.
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
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.
Jeff had some insightful things to say about great leadership, noting that:
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
The second keynote was given by Peter Guber – Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment.
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
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.
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
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:
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
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.
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
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.
“Good intentions aren’t enough – because you’re not asking for a change.”
Tom Weiland
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:
Davy shared that social and self-discovery are emerging training models, and discussed some of the differences between these newer and older models.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh my – I’m beyond pleased to have been included in ICMI’s Top 50 Thought Leaders of 2017!
I’m amongst people who have influenced and inspired me for years – so I’m thrilled and humbled to have made the cut. Thanks to ICMI for the recognition!
View the full list on the ICMI Blog.
“Today is all about getting to know each other, building relationships, and finding out even more about the people you already know. It’s icebreaker time!”
As my colleague announced the aims for the day to our newly hired team, the atmosphere in the room turned suddenly frosty. People shuffled in their seats and looked at their shoes. Our team was made up of mostly younger staff, working in an industry that’s not known for its extraversion. At the word “icebreaker”, they visibly melted.
Several years earlier, I was a member of a team tasked with onboarding around 25 people, brand new to the company, and who would all be working closely together. As a training team, we knew we needed to help everyone get to know each other.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys are a familiar concept to everyone working in customer service – in their simplest form, at the end of an interaction with a business, customers rate the quality of the service they received. This data is a goldmine of insight. Voice of the Customer (VoC) information is arguably the most important information there is in assessing the effectiveness of the service you provide. It’s as close to impartial, objective, and honest feedback as many businesses can often get. But could asking customers for feedback actually be damaging your business? It sounds impossible, right? But let me explain.
I was talking to a friend last weekend about the problems she’s been having with her internet provider. Melissa was moving house, and she had called her old internet provider to arrange for her service to switch to her new address. She’d clearly confirmed the move date to the rep she spoke to – only to find that as move day approached, her internet service got cut off without warning. Moving house is a tricky time requiring a lot of communication with different companies, so this was disastrous for her. After many complaints, she’d finally managed to get the issue resolved – although not without having to complain on several channels – before finally getting a dongle to tide her over until she moved. I sympathized with her situation as she vented. “Honestly, even though I got my issue sorted in the end, it was so, so stressful and such a waste of time. They’re useless – from the rep who couldn’t even take down my move date correctly, to the annoying text messages they send me after every call asking if I’m happy. I’ve expressed very clearly that I am not at all happy!”
Many post-transaction customer satisfaction survey processes aren’t clever. A server somewhere simply gets customer data, and pings off an email or a text message in response. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already expressed to a rep that you would rather get your toenails pulled out than have to repeat business with their company. Most processes automating CSat simply fire off requests for feedback quite indiscriminately.
And for some customers, that’s incredibly annoying. Many companies don’t make it clear whether feedback given in a survey is actioned in the same way as it would be while talking to a rep.
I’ve known customers work themselves up into a frenzy on automated post-call surveys, as they feel they’ve had to repeat themselves – once on the call to an agent, once to a faceless system. For these customers, lack of clarity around the aims of survey process results in suspicion. Many aren’t sure if a human being looks into post-call survey results at all. Other customers suspect that soliciting feedback is simply a way to put a PR-friendly, benevolent mask onto an uncaring corporate monster. All this can be prevented: Customers shouldn’t be asked to give feedback via an automated system when they’ve already told a human rep how they feel.
In this age of omnichannel where customers expect service across phone, chat and social to be joined up – shouldn’t our surveys be the same?
Love them or hate them, Amazon has changed the face of eCommerce, if you still have any doubts check out the recent us trade data. I’m quite firmly in the ‘love’ camp. Since I moved to Canada I’ve missed eBay, widely used by Brits like me to get items they need shipped right to their door. eBay doesn’t seem to be ‘a thing’ here in Canada, so Amazon has stepped in to fill the gap for me. I end up talking to customer support a reasonable amount, from asking about pricing to delivery options to postage queries.
After my contacts with them, I always get an email in my inbox from them asking if I’d like to rate the transaction. And honestly, they’re burning me out. Getting a survey after every single interaction feels overkill – as a customer, it feels transactional, not relational. I’m a regular customer, and Amazon already know I’m happy, so I shouldn’t need to tell them again.
As the customer service improvement trend boomed, it was difficult to consider how a harmless request for customer feedback could result in negative situations.
But times have changed.
In the same way that omnichannel is making customer service smarter, AI is making technology smarter. And as a technological process largely untouched by AI, post-transaction customer satisfaction surveys are ripe for disruption. AI can help us weed out those customers who are frequent purchasers and will get annoyed at being sent a survey every time. It can help us identify customers who are happy and have little reason not to be unhappy. It could even stop surveys being sent to customers who’ve spent very low values and who simply won’t see any personal benefit in completing a survey.
And one day, CSat surveys could be obsolete. AIs will rate and score customer sentiment from conversational cues, to provide an objective look at customer satisfaction without even needing to ask the customer.
Until then, companies shouldn’t believe that customer satisfaction surveys are the savior of customer experience, able to do no wrong. The devil is in the details. Like any customer experience initiative, you’ve got to consider the customer’s entire journey with you, not just a series of touchpoints.
So what changes can you implement now to prevent your customers getting burnt out on surveys?
Maximize the value of your feedback – for you and for your customer – by asking for feedback from infrequent visitors and purchasers, and customers less familiar with your brand. Do this by tracking survey history alongside regular wrap up metrics, and determining a ‘sweet spot’ where feedback surveys sent are less likely to be perceived negatively, and more likely to yield truly helpful data.
Imagine if your partner were to text you constantly asking you to tell them whether you still love them. You’ve already told them how much they mean to you, but still, they keep asking. You’d almost certainly perceive them as needy and insecure – they shouldn’t need this to be constantly and repeatedly reaffirmed.
Well, a lot in good customer service isn’t that different from holding down a good relationship. It’s not necessary to ask for feedback if your partner (the customer) has already clearly told you how they feel. And you shouldn’t be risking driving away your customer by annoying them with repeated feedback requests.
Don’t risk becoming the needy partner in the eyes of your customers. Try out some smarter survey processes and see your customers reap the benefit.
Call centers have a dark history. From being labeled “Electronic Sweatshops” to being compared to sophisticated prisons, call centers have suffered from stigma for decades – and some may argue, rightly so.
Development of technology through the 1960s and 70s meant call centers were transformed into places where managers could see, hear, and control every aspect of their staff’s work. Calls were recorded, handle times were reduced, bathroom breaks were timed. Literature from early monitoring systems describes “Total control made easy” as the goal for centers which were, quite literally, brutally efficient – often at the expense of their customers, not to mention their employees.
Around the end of the 80s, Jan Carlzon, then-CEO of Scandinavia Airlines published his book, Moments of Truth. It’s an account of how the airline changed its customer service model by paying close attention to the times their customers had contact with them, with the recognition that the thoughts and feelings of the customer in that ‘moment of truth’ can influence their buying behavior throughout their entire lifecycle with that company.
Moments of Truth was revolutionary as it promoted optimizing the quality of customer interactions, not their quantity, and accelerated the shift which placed quality customer service at the center of business operations – not as an inconvenient resource drain at the periphery of ‘real business’.
Thankfully, we’re now in a brave new world where the customer’s experience is regarded as a critical competitive differentiator for companies who have already maximized the quality, speed, and price of their product as much as they can. What’s more, companies are realizing that to stand out from the pack, improving employee experience and building a culture everyone wants to be a part of helps them to run businesses that are not just profitable and sustainable but ethical too.
But there are a lot of people – from call center managers, all the way up to the CEO – who are still operating working practices from the dark days of call center management, without recognizing the harm that these practices cause to modern day employees, customers, and even their own businesses. Read on to see if you recognize any of these.
It might sound like a no-brainer that when a customer has an issue with your product or service, you need to fix it for them – to keep their custom and to maintain your reputation.
But many 80s business practices took a myopic view of customer contact, treating it as a cost sink and a burden. Even today, some businesses seem to deliberately avoid contact with their customers, leaving their customers screaming for help with no way for them to be heard.
Larger companies especially are guilty of burying their contact number deep within their website, forcing customers to navigate through a myriad of FAQs and knowledge base articles before they can finally get to a phone number – if they can find it at all.
Lauren Freedman, e-commerce expert and president of market research firm the E-tailing Group, is outspoken in her criticism of this practice. “You should not have to kill yourself to find the number, it should be right there on the home page. It’s an opportunity for a company to say, ‘We believe in service.’”
Consider also that statistics from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs show that for every customer who complains, 26 will stay silent. So on top of this already worrying statistic, companies who try to deflect customer contact are robbing themselves of a goldmine of feedback from their customers. This feedback gives companies opportunity to improve their service and build trust with their customers, instead of damaging relationships with them and eventually driving them away.
You wouldn’t ignore your house if it was on fire. So if your customers are shouting for help – ignoring them isn’t going to solve the problem.
After escaping the depths of the recession of 1982, the USA bounced back and straight into the arms of consumerism. People wanted to spend money, and companies wanted to give them the products they needed. Sales became a big deal, and call centers sprang up to meet the demand.
Although salespeople have made economies thrive since the beginning of time, problems start occurring when sales targets become a company’s sole concern, pressuring their staff to sell things to people who don’t need them – or even worse, where selling to them could be actively harmful to their health and wellbeing.
A recent report from CBC demonstrated this all too well. It highlighted the pressures on Canadian contact center staff to sell at any cost – putting uninformed, vulnerable customers into debt, and forcing customers who don’t want to buy to repetitively say ‘no’ to reps who are scripted to challenge them several times.
A response from one of the banks in the report states that these employees are encouraged to act in a responsible way and that where concerns arise, an ethics hotline is available for any employees with concerns. Another bank stated that they take seriously “any suggestion of behavior not aligned with our values.”
And many companies, like this bank, tend to think that establishing a clear statement of values is enough in demonstrating what value-driven work looks like. But even one of the most unethical companies in the world, Enron, had a core values statement which sounds remarkably similar to that of many companies today:
Corporate values didn’t work for Enron – and they’re still not working today. It’s just not enough for companies to develop values statements or codes of conduct, stick them up on posters around the office and assume that’s all the work that needs to be done. Corporate values and ethical thinking need to be worked into actual business processes and truly lived by everyone within an organization.
I once knew of a company who had this down to a T. The CEO and heads of departments talked about values alongside everything they did and it set the standard for making ethical work a part of every decision that was made.
What’s more, in every annual review cycle, staff were set goals not just in terms of the work they performed, but also measured in how much they embodied the behavioral traits that each value encompassed.
It’s not easy to pin down specific behaviors as evidence of holding certain values, but because of this a lot of great discussions were had around what ethical working really looked and sounded like – causing corporate values to transform from abstract ideas of ‘good work’ to agreed, concrete working practices.
In the same way that technology in the 1980s fueled the ability for call center managers to mercilessly monitor their staff, IVR technology was snapped up too by companies wanting to get rid of traditional switchboard operators and transition to an automated model.
We’ve all been marooned on a terrible IVR with seemingly no way to speak to an actual human. And, on the whole, it’s safe to say that confusing options and having to press a bunch of buttons tends to make customers more angry than enamored with your company.
As a Brit, I dread any time I need to call the tax office, as I’m sure they break the record for highest number of complex layers of IVRs to get through. At my last count, they had eight. (I’d be interested, if slightly horrified, to hear of any more record-breaking IVR experiences you might have!) But layers upon layers of IVRs aren’t exactly unusual – in fact, one in five companies report having 5 or more layers in their IVR.
Speech recognition software built into IVRs can make matters even worse, leaving some customers (especially those with regional accents) wondering if the wildly off-the-mark responses they receive from them are a big joke that’s being played on them by a prank call show.
And those designing IVRs can be spectacularly insensitive to the needs of callers. I know of one company who designed an IVR with a few different options for callers with queries about their pension. One of the menu options was “Press three if you’d like to report someone who has died.” Several grieving relatives commented how cold and final it felt to navigate through an automated system and press a button to report that their husband, wife, mother or father had passed away.
IVRs are just one example of where companies implement automation to improve the customer experience but end up missing the mark. And as the march of technology continues, more companies will surely fall foul of implementing systems that hinder, rather than help their customers.
Although some might say that chatbots are becoming a big deal, automated systems, from bots to IVRs, will never completely replace real, human contact. No matter how much automated systems are dressed up to look like humans, it’s still very clear to customers that the majority of them tend to only be there for one purpose – to save money, because actual human staff are just plain expensive.
Of course, it would be amazing if we all lived in a world where great staff were plentiful and cheap and we didn’t have to worry about balancing efficiency and quality. But it’s not impossible to implement automated systems which enhance the customer experience by assessing individual process efficiency and use automation as a considered solution. Technology should always be used as an appropriate spot-treatment to drive process improvement, rather than applied with a wide brush for the sake of cost savings.
So get rid of all of those layers in your IVRs. If you want to use bots, fine, but don’t use them to totally replace the human touch that some customers really need. Human contact should always be a choice for companies who care about the customer experience.
If you asked your average person on the street whether they would like to work in a call center, chances are that they would say no. The stigma attached to call center work is well-documented and sadly, persists even today – even though the nature of much of this work has significantly changed since the dark days of the 70s and 80s when contact center work was at its most cut-throat.
Now, around 75% of businesses view service as a competitive differentiator and, as a result, have transformed their strategies from quantity- to quality-focused models of call center provision, with benefits not only for customers but for contact center agents too.
Job design for these agents has become increasingly complex and workers in these roles need to employ an increasing amount of professional skills – from technological fluency, to pressured decision-making, to emotional intelligence, the demands on contact center agents are only increasing.
And when I talk about professional skills, I do mean skills like those in the traditional professions. Consider that in technical support roles, contact center staff often need to have the same in-depth knowledge of a product or piece of software as the engineers and programmers working behind the scenes. The emotional labor demands on other contact center roles are akin to those experienced by nurses and social workers.
Looking at nursing, regulators all over the world work to ensure that nurses are protected from the negative personal impacts of emotional work. And engineers go through rigorous training and certification to ensure they’re equipped with the skills they need to do their job well. But all too often in the contact center, staff aren’t given the time or consideration they need to adequately handle demanding or difficult interactions, become fluent with the latest technology, or develop awareness of the industry outside of their company. Continuous Professional Development isn’t part of typical contact center terminology, but it absolutely should be if you want the best and brightest to continue to support and develop your business for years to come.
It’s vital that in the face of changing contact center skillsets, managers are deeply attuned to the shifting needs of their agents and recognize them as skilled professionals with the same needs as any other professional worker. Just as customer service has been placed at the epicenter of modern business strategy, contact center agent development and wellbeing deserve to be placed at the epicenter of business concerns.
Contact center professionals aren’t deserving of the same low status as fast food workers any more. The world has long since changed. And today, we have not just the imperative, but the obligation – to them and to our businesses – to start treating them as legitimate professionals.
Over the last 50 years, contact center thought leaders, strategists and managers have slowly shaped contact centers into better places for our customers, agents, and businesses. Sure, there’s still a way to go – but all of the evidence shows that we’re getting there.
Now, with technology offering us new transformative options in customer service, we’re in a place of great opportunity and new challenges.
It’s up to us whether we use technology to make contact center interactions easier, timelier and more efficient for our customers and our agents, or whether we return to the dark days of contact center provision and push new innovations primarily as a cost reduction opportunity for businesses.
It’s clear though that all the changes which occurred in the last few decades happened because businesses started truly listening to their stakeholders and thinking more deeply about the impact of their actions – looking beyond business outcomes to consider the role of the contact center in the lives of their customers, the wellbeing of their employees, and their impact on society.
This ethical consideration will be a vital management skill in years to come to help us all to provide customer service which comes from a place that aims to truly do good – rather than just aiming to do the right thing because it’s good for business.
And the more we can deeply and objectively assess the good or the harm we have the potential to cause, the more we can be sure we’ll be steering our contact centers away from their darker days to become places which truly benefit everyone involved with our businesses.
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