Voice of the Customer; a catch phrase commonly uttered in offices around the globe. But what does it mean exactly? Where does it come from? How does a business decipher constructive (and valuable) feedback from noise? It is not uncommon to hear a manager say that you need to listen to the voice of the customer (VOC), but often that’s where the initiative stops. Proclaiming the need to listen and actually listening are two very different things. So is acting on the information heard.
One of our clients focused on turning such a proclamation into action and made some changes to the internal processes causing customer dissatisfaction. The External Quality Monitoring program using a post-call survey methodology revealed that only 51.6% of their callers stated that their question or problem had been resolved on the first call. With barely more than one out of every two calls yielding a resolution, FCR was obviously an extremely costly issue for them because repeat calls have direct and indirect costs. It was definitely time to take action.
Customer experience analytics clarified a common theme from the callers who reported that their issue had not been resolved on the call. Callers frequently stated that they had to call back to check on the status of the application because the agent they had spoken with did not have a way to check. “Wait and see and call back” is not a good answer for these callers. How can this information about an issue that increases the customer effort be alleviated within the internal process(es)? After taking a hard look at the outcome of this internal process from the customers’ perspective, a strategy was developed to dedicate a specific team of representatives to support the call center agents behind the scenes. Frontline agents could not have access to the needed information but this support team had the resources to review a caller’s application, claim and status. The agent can now provide the information needed to the caller upon request and eliminate the need for many customer repeat calls. Continue reading “All you have to do is listen to your customers.” »
We’ve talked a lot lately about our advisory and managed analytic service solutions that look at external sources of data, like social media and customer conversations. But just as important are those internal sources that are often overlooked. Today, we announced the availability of Desktop Activity BI (Business Intelligence), a service solution that delivers targeted recommendations to improve the customer experience and reduce costs by analyzing and interpreting data that has been collected at the contact center agent desktop.
Taking a closer look at what applications are being used the most (or not at all), how and why workflows are being interrupted, where duplicated actions are needed, etc., can help Customer Relations Metrics’ analysts provide what CRM software can’t and inform companies as to what changes need to be made to improve customer relationships. And as we said in our press release on Desktop Activity BI, “By addressing these problems, companies can often increase efficiency, lower costs, and reduce the need for training, while at the same time making the experience better for both employees and customers.”
Check out the full press release below, and let us know if you have any questions.
Continue reading “Agent desktop analytics delivers what CRM can’t” »
Does your organization have customers with different expectations than they should? How does that happen when your company should be setting proper expectations? But, as you know, there are often gaps between what they think and what we think they should think. The gaps often yield dissatisfied customers, high customer effort and more customer complaints than you’d like to get.
Recently I had the experience of being in one of these “gaps” when I needed some pest prevention work done to my home. I jumped through several hoops, both financially (large upfront sum) and physically (items in my yard had to be removed prior to the work starting). I had prepared myself for the money and the preparation to my yard and reasonably expected the work to start promptly. I did not expect there to be further complications once the work got underway. After all, my expectations were formed by the contract we signed.
I knew I was deep into an aforementioned gap when I was met with harassing phone calls from the billing department asking for payment – yes, the payment that had been made upfront. Then, my property was damaged (they knocked the fence down completely) and the necessary repairs were to be paid by me. How is that fair? I did research, partnered with a reputable company, and specifically outlined the payment and the work order upfront only to be met with continued frustration and costs.
Your business and your products vary from this example but the impact of misaligned customer expectations is universal. Expectations are often set at the point of sale and you are left to best manage the gap between your customer and the company. The outcome is the key because negative customer sentiment only serves to damage your brand. Continue reading “Do your customers fall into the ‘expectations gap’?” »
I recently wrote a blog post focused on how companies are using social CRM. Everyone seems to be using social customer service to gauge customer sentiment, manage product and service issues, and follow up with customer service complaints. The focus on social media strategies is overwhelming to many organizations but of even more significant is the lack of Social Media Business Intelligence. Why are you monitoring and gathering all of that consumer data if you cannot do anything valuable with it? For any business project don’t you need to prove the value of the effort and investment?
Along with your consumer data gathering, consider text analytics to help you organize unstructured text-based data in your CRM systems (and in social media), survey and emails into a form that can be analyzed to uncover patterns or trends. Do you notice a spike in online customer complaints about the lifespan of one of your new products? What do you do to prove the need for action? Text analytics supports, for example, the need for the manufacturing department to reevaluate the intended use for the product and the Warranty/Finance Department to alter the current product warranty.
Many companies may offer the complaining customers a quick refund or replacement to stop further brand badgering. Dealing with one vocal and hostile customer at a time is not harnessing the power of the customer intelligence available. Digging deeper into the mountains of information with text analytics or text BI uncovers the larger issues and builds a business case for a successful remedy, instead of putting a band-aid on one customer at a time. Continue reading “Text analytics makes the most of consumer data.” »
Last week we formally announced Text BI™, our latest managed service offering. In advance of the announcement, I spent some time talking with Denise Deveau from E-Commerce Times about this news, as well as the general challenge of harnessing unstructured data. In a story that she published based on our conversation, Denise explained the basics of Text BI:
“Text BI enables companies to take unstructured text-based data from surveys, emails, social media, CRM systems and other applications, and organize it into a format that makes it easier to analyze.”
She also included some of my thoughts about the human element of the big data equation, and the lack of skilled analyst talent that is making it extremely difficult for some companies to truly take advantage of the data at their fingertips.
For more information from our interview, check out Denise’s full story, “Customer Relationship Metrics Takes on the Unstructured Data Challenge.” And for additional details on our Text BI offering, check out the full press release below.
When people find out what I do for a living they inevitably tell me about some awful customer experience they’ve had and ask if I can ‘fix that company’. From my perspective as a consumer, I can certainly empathize with their bad customer experience, but as a call center professional I understand the common missteps call centers make that unknowingly lead to these negative customer experiences.
Imagine that you want to purchase a home theater projector online. You review the choices, pick it out, put everything you need into your cart and when you try to place the order, your credit card is declined. Now you call customer service hoping to save all of the work you just invested. The big help is that declines are usually due to daily credit card spending limitations, and to call the issuing bank. After clearing up the confusion with the bank and calling customer service again to place the order, the operator tells you all the sales reps are busy, and you need to call back to process the order. When you ask the operator why she can’t place the order for you, you are told that she does not have access to the necessary screens to key in the order. Insert your screaming or crying here because we consumers can only take so much frustration. Do they win when they break our spirit?
These common problems are painful to both sides. Customer effort shoots through the roof they are forced to jump through hoop after hoop just to spend their money with you. It’s too easy to abandon the sale. You know what’s next: jilted customers voice their frustrations through social media and publicly share their negative customer experience with your brand, swaying potential customers to your competitors. On the other side, the agents are heavily rooted in siloed call center processes and are incapable of resolving simple customer issues because of lack of access to necessary knowledge or software. Guess what? The agents leave you too. Continue reading “Are your siloed call center processes increasing customer effort?” »
This month, I had the opportunity to write an article for 1to1 Magazine about the top issues that CRM professionals will come up against this year. I focused on five points:
- Short-term cost-cutting hurts long-term growth.
- New technologies making new skills necessary for call center employees.
- Corporate arrogance hampering growth.
- Unnecessarily difficult relationships with vendors and partners.
- Challenges in translating big data to usable information.
The good news is, all of these issues can be overcome. To see how your organization measures up, check out the full article, “5 Landmines for CRM Professionals to Avoid in 2012.”
Let me know if you’ve encountered any of these issues, or if you think I missed any!
It’s time to get a new TV so I went to my local electronics store see the choices. I wanted to compare the options and then select which model, brand and type would best suit my needs. I found a store salesperson that walked me through the choices and we focused on several models that would be ‘perfect’ for me. We talked for about 15 minutes and I was left to make my decision. It was only a minute before another customer came up to me and told me the exact opposite of what the salesperson had said. The customer told me the model the salesperson recommended was about to be discontinued because of a quick bulb burnout, surmising that the salesperson ‘was probably just trying to move excess product’.
Delaying my purchase so I could do more research, I located a whole slew of communities and customer comments talking about the bulb problems with warnings to future customers that ‘they’d be disappointed’. I also found suggestions of like brands and models that had better bulb life. I was able to post my own question and get several rapid responses.
I’d say that my TV purchasing experience was influenced by crowdsourcing, both online and off. I was able to get a straight answer from those using the products themselves instead of only relying on a salesperson that had a stock pile of about-to-be-discontinued TVs. In the store, a helpful customer steered me in the right direction and online I found confirmation with literally hundreds of customers in the ‘crowd’ confirming the issue with the bulb. Continue reading “Are customers using crowdsourcing to find your products?” »
What do you do when one of your best selling products, your cash cow, your go-to, has decreasing sales revenue and can no longer be counted on to save the sales figures? Worse, what if most of the ones being sold are quickly returned? The call center has the answers, and they lie within the call logging and coding data, and the metrics from social customer service. Companies can mine their ‘big data’ by using text analytics and uncover the root issue of this terrible trend.
The company Twitter feed and Facebook page supports the discovery that customers perceive the product to not be as fast as the competition, and lacks some additional functions they know are possible now. When the CRM records are analyzed the hypothesis is confirmed, as each return highlights the product speed as the main reason for the return.
While the problem may not be a quick fix, the answer was found significantly faster through text analytics than waiting until the Annual Report or The Street, reports the loss of earnings. The business intelligence through text analytics can lead to the creation of a new process for the product development group, a new product roll out, and before you know it that cash cow product is back on top in the market place. Continue reading “Text analytics adds the ‘why’ behind the numbers.” »
But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get —— a high amount customer effort and a lot of headaches. I continue to be shocked about the customer experience dysfunction I witness in my everyday life. I have no doubt that you know what I’m talking about. We see the repetitive communication and process execution breakdowns that occur during the purchase of a product or service. To the receiver, customer experience dysfunction feels like the company does not care about its customers and couldn’t care less if they develop (and keep) the relationship.
You can feel the customer experience dysfunction when I refer to a recent purchase where I was sidelined by backorders, late product deliveries, damaged goods, returns, and faulty replacements. After two months and several attempts, the company could never get my order right. I spent countless hours calling customer service, venting my issues through social CRM, rescheduling deliveries and pick-ups, only to ultimately end up back at square one, where I had to start over with a new company. Continue reading “You can’t always get the customer experience you want.” »
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