Too many customers are gaining fame by attacking companies because their unrealistic customer expectations were not met. The fires are fueled by our unquenchable thirst for sensational news stories so these irate customers show up on our TVs lamenting about how they’ve been wronged (in their minds) and how the big, bad company should pay. Don’t we all take pause and listen? Facebook campaigns sprout up overnight calling for the ousting of the company head in question, and tens of thousands of uninformed folks hop on the bandwagon. Before you know it, a single disgruntled customer making a fuss about a return policy is quickly splashed across all the major news stations, papers and Internet.
Does anyone stop to think that maybe this one customer is totally full of it? Do they consider that these company policies and rules are in place for a reason whether or not you feel like following them? The media sure does make it more difficult for brands and companies because they want ratings. When the media makes customers famous by sensationalizing their situations, it makes it impossible for good companies to not give in to the unreasonable demands. The media is holding businesses hostage. Continue reading “When customer service terrorists strike!” »
Anyone that’s successful in business can tell you that what sets them apart from their competition is excellent customer service. We all know this but the challenge is execution. I recently made a purchase from what I thought was a small, local business only to find out they are the biggest distributor in my state. I thought they were small because someone always answered the phone when I called and my orders were filled and delivered next day. I had no idea how big the company is because I always feel like I was their only customer. Guess what? There are hundreds of stores with similar products, but I will continue to purchase from and be a brand advocate for this particular company because of their stellar customer service.
Part of this company’s success comes from listening to the voice of their customers (VOC). Customers across all industries want value and knowledgeable, caring sales people, and companies that stand behind and service the products they sell. The companies that fall by the wayside are those that talk about listening to their customers rather than acting on the information.
My clients know their customers better than the competition knows their customers. The analysis is applied, the effect measured, re-evaluated and so on. They are driven to delicately balance what their customers want with the company’s profitability. They work to tailor their messaging and products to specific customer needs so they lead in overall customer satisfaction and brand recognition. You have seen it – those that fail to listen to the voice of the customer are quickly forgotten. Continue reading “Excellent customer service wins brand advocacy.” »
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’?” »
If your company is in denial of the importance of social media, beware the consequences. “If you aren’t at the table, you are on the menu,” says Alex Schott, the manager of social media and multimedia communications at Entergy, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in New Orleans, LA.
He’s not wrong. If you aren’t participating in online dialogue about your company, you’re only encouraging more negative comments and more misperceptions.
Serving up customer service on Twitter may sound daunting, but it’s an important and growing customer venue. The demand for customer service via social media channels will only continue to grow. Now is the time to start making a plan for how and what you can do to provide service to customers via social media. If you choose not to delay you can create a BIG competitive advantage.
Continue reading “Entergy and TELUS serve up social media customer service.” »
Unless you’ve been actively hiding from all forms of media for the past year, you’ve heard about business intelligence. A Google search of the term yields 108 million results. So what is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence is the practice of using Big Data to gain insight and drive change within an organization. A pretty broad definition, right? How do we do Business Intelligence at Customer Relationship Metrics?
Much of the work we do with/for our business partners is based in call centers. Call centers have been dubbed “the center of your universe” for very good reasons. Terabytes of data on the customer experience are collected each year, from customer email addresses to compliments, product quality issues, questions, wish list items, consumer behavior, online presence and preferences, etc. There’s not a better place in an organization to be if your slice of heaven is data, data and more data! But much of the data collected in call centers is “raw”, unstructured, in a hard-to-use format, and/or disconnected from other key data points.
What Customer Relationship Metrics does in Business Intelligence engagements is use a completely hosted reporting and data aggregation tools to bring disparate and largely unrelated data sources together into a platform where analytics are then possible. Analytics provide business partners with a means to identify relationships and to prioritize metrics in terms of capture and analysis, in what manner existing data can be best leveraged, and in many cases conducts the analysis that reveals opportunities, bottle-necks and risks within the organization that when rectified, result in top-line growth and bottom-line savings by improving the customer experience.
The organization depicted below is falling below their Call Resolution goal for the year. An analysis of resolution performance (from a customer perspective) revealed that the second largest department (in terms of call volume) is performing 15% below goal. This department accounts for approximately 33% of all calls and therefore represents the largest opportunity for improving the organization’s call resolution performance. This department is also lagging on the KPIs first call resolution, repeat call resolution, service level, and average handle time. This additional insight reveals that this department is experiencing failure in delivering resolution not only on initial contact but on any further contacts customers deem necessary to attain resolution. The repeat call problem, combined with above average handle time makes the issue of non-resolution a very costly one.
An analysis of customer comments about non-resolution revealed the following:
- 22% of customers complained that agents did not seem to care about the customer’s problem or expressed no desire to help the customer.
- 11% of customers indicated dissatisfaction with the amount of time they had to wait to reach an agent.
- 40% of customers perceived that a specific line of company products were lemons (requiring multiple repairs for the same / a recurring problem due to product quality).
- 27% of customers reported dissatisfaction with the company’s resolution to lemons Continue reading “What is Business Intelligence?” »
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.” »
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.” »
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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