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Holistic medicine is a big picture view – the emotional, physical, psychological and environmental factors that contribute to a patient’s overall health. Without considering all of these factors, a doctor may only solve part of the affliction without completely healing the patient. In your call center, the agents lacking a holistic view of a customer’s history may only solve part of the customer’s problem but not rectify the entire issue.
Think about how information in your company is heavily siloed by department which dictates that your call center agents have access to some of the customer’s history and information but not a holistic view of their entire interaction/relationship with the company. As we discussed last week, when Big Data is put to work in the right way it greatly benefits your customers and your brand. But when marketing, sales, online and other departments generate, collect and evaluate customer data but do not share it with the call center, the power of Big Data is undermined.
Your customers already think you are the master of Big Data, right? How often do you hear, ‘why can’t you see that on your screen? ’ Customers get frustrated and call center agents fail when the customer intelligence data available is incomplete or not readily accessible to them during a call. It’s also easier to misdiagnose a customer problem, miss an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, or even lose a customer if the agents are limited to a single view of that customer. Think about the times you’ve called about a product or service issue and how much better your customer experience would have been had they offered to upgrade your service because they could see your contract was about to expire. Or gave you a discount on a related product because they had access to your spending patterns. Or could see that you spend most of your time shopping online through their web site and then tweeting about your purchases, so you were informed about their Twitter service handle to use the next time. Continue reading “Holistic medicine for your call center; look at the whole customer experience.” »
Companies are afraid of losing ‘control’ of their brand message. There are two parts to their fear. One, customers have the freedom to say whatever they want; and, two, that is only that message in the marketplace. You can see that in part two you as a person responsible for the brand message or customer communications (yes you!) can jump in and be a part of shaping what’s presented in social media.
We already know that #1 is happening. Putting your head in the sand won’t stop it. Don’t let your fear of what customers are saying stifle your willingness to work on part #2. This is where you can become the hero of your customers and business value – offering helpful messages and bringing balance to what is being presented. Plus, you can gain ideas that can help shape your business direction and focus.
The best way to overcome this fear is to engage with customers in a dialogue via social media. Leaving negative comments alone doesn’t make them better, but engaging and solving problems and responding really can. Continue reading “Don’t lose brand control in social media.” »
Social Media Customer Service (or Social Media Customer Care) is not customer service that supports how to use Social Media or answers what is Social Media. Social Media Customer Service is about customers being served and supported on social media platforms. To help clear up some of the confusion many will just shorten it to Social Customer Service (or Social Customer Care) when they are addressing this specific area of Social Media.
The recent Social Media Customer Service Report conducted by TNS, surveyed more than 1,000 UK consumers and found that 57% of consumers preferred to search online to solve their customer issues, and then interact with customer service on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, blogs and forums over any other method.
Yet, recent statistics from the Genesys Social Media and Customer Services Summit found that a massive 72% of attendees (attended by companies with customers that use social media platforms) hadn’t yet integrated social media into their business customer service operations.
According to a recent IBM report on social media, the top social media challenge for companies is “establishing an ROI strategy.” This quest to quantify by CFOs is apparently preventing many from making the necessary investment in social media strategies and solutions.
One driving force may be because there are numerous functional groups involved with the social media decision. Who is going to own it is creating a modern-day political warfare opportunity. Social media is big, I mean billions of people and dollars big, and everyone wants to own it (internally) because their power and influence in an organization will skyrocket overnight. Continue reading “What is Social Media Customer Service?” »
Everyone is abuzz over the ‘new’ Big Data trend and while most companies are floundering to analyze the data they already have, not to mention the data they have yet to capture, some big brands are setting the bar of customer analytics excellence pretty high.
So what are these brands doing right? Have they identified the proper analytics people to exploit their data in a useful way instead of falling prey to the skills-gap issues that plague other companies? Is it the data itself – what they are analyzing, when and how much? Or are they just internally and departmentally sound and settled thus allowing them to look at the big picture of Big Data?
When companies can look at their data and deduce the relationships between the data sets, it’s the customers that are reaping the immense benefits. To take a big data for marketing example, I’ve been a card holder at a particular clothing store since 2004. Because I’m spending money with their credit card they are easily able to track my purchase frequency, what departments I shop in, and can predict what I am likely to buy in the future. What this means for me is tailor-made marketing including rewards and discounts I’ll actually use. It’s not just the credit card data; they are looking at my social media habits too. I ‘like’ their page on Facebook and by pairing my profile information with my city, and crossing that with my credit card billing information and spending, they sent me an email that my local mall was having a sale on sweaters and gave me a discount if I want to take advantage of the sale. Result – they are getting more of my business than before. Continue reading “Big Data done right can benefit brands and customers.” »
Customers don’t really want to pick up the phone to call you. They would rather not deal with you at all. And if they have to deal with you, the first instinct is to go online to do so. In response to this social customer service trend, some companies dedicate specific handles or pages for social customer service, as well as the resources to quickly and efficiently respond to customers. The companies that understand their customers’ service channel preferences and effectively serve through those channels will create the customer experience to enhance the brand.
Many customers want social customer service and if you’re a company that values its customers, you are working on an effective social customer service strategy now. The strategy requires more than just reacting and solving the customer’s problem promptly. What are you doing to proactively push out social customer service solutions? How are you preventing product and service problems before they start?
Which of your favorite brands are dedicating service handles to deal with customer service issues directly versus their marketing people pushing out promotions, offers and product news? A few stores have service handles where they ask what projects you are working on and how they can help. The social service agents are identified by name and respond quickly with ideas and suggestions. But on the whole, many of my brands had channels within the brand unrelated to service – one for style ideas, one for sales, one for featured designers, but NONE for service. It leaves one to wonder what are they waiting for? Continue reading “Customers take their service needs online – how is your social customer service?” »
Here’s a hint: it’s not your company’s web site.
We’ve all been there. Frustration after a poor IVR or call center agent experience makes it seem simpler to go online to see if you can solve your product or service questions yourself. Studies show that frustrated customers turn to social media channels to look for help. From swapping unregulated home fix-its or publicly venting about frustrations, more often than not customers are going online – and not to your web site.
Now here you are tracking, monitoring and responding to social media attacks. Where is all of this negative sentiment coming from that is making you chase smoke? Few companies take an inside-out approach about the customer experience and social media so they get the negative social media chatter to chase. Your dial-to-disconnect call analytics should be telling you what is causing the failed IVR experiences or the failed interactions with your agents so you can deal with these internal issues (like being wrongfully disconnected, routed to an agent ill-equipped to answer the questions, unable to trouble shoot, etc.). Social media venting is not a customer-focused service channel.
We talk a lot about dial-to-disconnect call analytics as an effective means to proactively direct an organization and that is even more important now. Pay attention to how you will handle the trend that has emerged – when callers fail to get the answers needed through the IVR or the call center, they go online. And, when using social media as a self-service channel the result is often erroneous information that lands them further down the rabbit hole of customer dissatisfaction.
Where do you think these customers went next? Twitter? Facebook?
“I don’t understand the point of speaking my selections to your automated service if it gets me nowhere but disconnected. Twice I dialed your service line, spoke my selections and was met with, ‘Thank you, good-bye’. What a waste of time.”
“I called my car insurance agent directly to speak to him about my pending claim only to be continually re-routed back to the main customer service line. Not sure what the point of having a ‘dedicated agent’ is, if I can never reach them.”
“You have an apparent problem with your dryers overheating and burning clothing, as stated by many forums on the internet. I will never buy your product again and I will spend more time reading reviews online before I buy anything over $200”.
“I was simply trying to return an item I purchased online but every time I called to get information on where to send it back to, I could never reach a live agent and was continually disconnected by your automated service. I finally went online to do a search for my nearest store location and had to return it in person.”
Happy Wednesday!
A friend of mine works for a prominent university where one of his primary responsibilities is actively engaging with the alumni and athletic boosters, both directly and through social media channels, to garner large donations. Recently his department compiled a tribute video for one of their most prominent alumnae (and donor) using recorded messages from some of their past outstanding football players. It was a great idea in theory but tracking down this old player data proved to be rather difficult.
The life in academia is very much like our corporate lives. We have TONS of data about past and present customers (students) but it’s not easily accessible, not well organized and definitely not easily analyzed. My friend’s task sounded easy – track down football players that played for the university between 1974 and 2010, contact them, and get them to agree to appear in the tribute video that would air during this year’s homecoming celebration. What seemed like a straightforward request, turned into nothing short of a Big Data nightmare. You must be thinking, ‘I can get past customer addresses – what’s the big deal?’
The big deal is that my friend’s problem goes far beyond getting addresses. What kind of analytics are they using to determine who are the most valuable alumni (customers)? The university likely picks the person(s) who have given large amounts in the past (bought more) but who in their population is not connected, is not giving, has not been engaged with the university. There are invaluable relationships among the data that will increase donations (purchases) but you cannot just “eyeball” the answer. Continue reading “Mo’ big data, mo’ big problems.” »
Last week I told you about my alarm vs. phone company customer experience drama and raised the question of what part of each dollar spent on your products and services is needed to fund your company’s dysfunction. I bet it’s more than you thought.
To last week’s point, I just received my phone bill. I usually skim my bills and just pay what’s required. This time my paranoia of dysfunction got the best of me and I started reading the bill line by line. The bill was littered with this fee and that fee. Hard line fee? Gross receipts surcharge? Fees that I’m now convinced are disguised to cover the phone company’s dysfunction because they cannot just raise the base monthly cost without everyone noticing. Then I study the alarm monitoring company’s invoice and try to calculate what the monthly fee SHOULD be – I think I have to pay the fully loaded dysfunction fee of $39 when it should be more like $29 without the dysfunction subsidy.
Is your company so heavily process-reliant that you’ve squashed common sense? Common sense that’s needed to solve simple customer issues? Is one department setting up another to fail because of lack of communication or information that then leads to bouncing your call-in customers around without a clear path to call resolution? Are your analysts running around creating reports that no one is reading when they should be reviewing the company’s speech analytics to uncover the real customer pain? Continue reading “Just how much customer experience dysfunction am I paying for here?” »
Mining and analyzing customer comments to understand sentiment is no longer a wish. It’s a must. Based on years of experience, I suspect many of you are like the business partners I work with: you understand the value of the activity, would love to be able to get your hands on the insight, but don’t have the resources to do the work.
But there is good news. Using basic business intelligence approaches, it is possible to get a quick start on sentiment and text analysis to better understand what your customers think and say about your business. This information can then be leveraged to better serve customers and ultimately, improve the bottom line.
The rate at which customers provide commentary in customer experience surveys in itself can be very telling. Below are examples of insights that can be gained simply by examining the relationship between key real-time survey metrics and the propensity of customers to provide verbal feedback.
For the business partner depicted in the chart below, customer comments and real time alert rates were highly correlated. The more likely a customer was to comment, the more likely alert rates were to increase, and vice versa. This suggests that dissatisfied customers who required a follow up call from a manager were more likely to leave negative comments than positive ones.
While this may seem troublesome at first blush, understanding customer complaints is often an untapped gold mine. Reading and mining these comments could offer significant intelligence and gains for this business partner which can then be woven back into continuous improvement initiatives. Continue reading “Your quick start to the customer experience gold mine.” »
Every year around this time I find myself reflecting on the months that have passed and what I wish I would have done, not done, done better or done differently. At the risk of appearing like a new-year’s-resolution-gym-rat that is rarely seen past February, I’ll share my list of 2012 professional resolutions to include dumping reports that aren’t used, carving out creative time, looking for best practices in other industries that I can apply, and focusing on preventing the damage caused by not leveraging customer sentiment.
1. To focus on the things that matter. We all have a “to do” list that we likely dread looking at because of its sheer volume / length. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as scratching an item off the list, even if you know it’s not the most important item, or even a value-add item, right? In 2012, I resolve to minimize the number of tasks on my to do list by only including the items that offer insights into the business, add value to my customers or provide direct benefit my organization. The things which are likely to fall off the list in 2012 as a result? Reports that no one looks at, reports that people look at yet do nothing with, and presentation decks that are so repetitive month to month that even I get bored creating them, etc, etc, etc.
2. To be even more militant about customer sentiment. The business partners that I work with often hear me use the phrase “the quantitative data tells you what is happening, the qualitative (customer comments) tell you why.” Customer sentiment cannot be ignored without foregoing the value that is needed for an organization to differentiate itself from competitors. Everyone has customer conversations but they are not analyzed. Many have customer feedback programs that do not include explanations from the customer about the numeric score given. And still more have customer explanations that are not analyzed. Customer Sentiment Analytics is on my list again for 2012, but with an even higher point of focus. This one should definitely be on your list! Continue reading “2012 resolutions for a better working me (take any that you need for your list!)” »
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