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?” »
The CRM business has matured beyond simply gathering contact data to a more sophisticated approach to understanding customer needs, business issues, opportunities and competitive threats, said FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher. “What is happening in your customers’ ecosystems could affect your strategy in selling to them.”
Yet many companies are running scared due to social media. This is why Customer Relationship Metrics has launched Social Media BI, a solution for building effective social media strategies to improve relationships with customers and identify operational improvements. We want to bring a rational and responsible approach to creating social media strategies. While many attempt to insight fear and promote boiling the ocean through social media monitoring, we don’t.
With Social Media BI, customer-centric organizations can gain greater control of what customers are saying about their brand by methodically (and scientifically) identifying the issues that are most impacting customers. Based on this analysis, they can take specific actions that will spread positive sentiment, while fixing those problems that damage their brand, the company said.
Social Media BI starts with identification of those issues that lead to the greatest number of customer complaints. That data is then cross-referenced with a targeted analysis of online sentiment and chatter to correlate the issues that negatively impact customer relationships and corporate reputation. Armed with this information, Customer Relationship Metrics then creates a social media road map to help the client execute a cohesive and proactive social media strategy.
The service also includes analysis of the company’s current social media strategies and suggests targeted new approaches designed to enable the it to quickly respond to online detractors, while filtering social media data points to identify best practices and areas of concern.
Excerpts of this article were written by Denise J. Deveau for E-Commerce Times. We have re-posted a portion of the article about Customer Relationship Metrics and our services.
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.” »
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.” »
What are your callers thinking about when they spend minute after minute on hold to speak to an agent? Probably among the thoughts would be ‘what’s taking so long’? Studies show that up to half of all customer service calls are unnecessarily placed due to high organizational dysfunction. A communication misstep within the customer service chain inevitably triggers a customer call to figure out what has happened with their order or shipment, for example. These unnecessary calls tie up valuable agent time, run up call center operation costs, increase customer effort and create an overall negative customer experience.
I recently placed an order online but never received an order confirmation. Usually I get a prompt confirmation email that includes the order number and an estimated ship date, but this time I didn’t. Of course, my credit card was charged but without my order number or my confirmation I had to call customer service to ensure my order was actually placed. My not-so-helpful customer service agent said I had two options: wait to see if the order arrives or to reverse my credit card charges with my bank and place the order a second time. Something as simple as a missing order confirmation email had increased my customer effort score through the roof. Continue reading “Are unneccessary calls hiking up customer experience dysfunction?” »
There’s something so interesting (and addictive) about social media. It makes even luddites feel tech-savvy; it’s hip and new, and, according to some customer experience experts, anyone who matters is doing it. And consumers’ social media activities extend well beyond updating their Facebook page or tweeting about their most recent customer service disaster. Customer service is going social – big time!! According to Zendesk, 62% of consumers have looked to social media channels for customer service issues.
But before you begin logging onto your company’s Facebook page a dozen times a day to see how many “likes” you have, and endlessly searching tweets containing your company’s name, step away from your keyboard. Social Media Monitoring is not the place to start your Social Customer Service efforts. Responding to the noise on social media platforms is like chasing smoke – frustrating, time-consuming and ultimately futile if your aim is to effectively improve the customer experience. If you take this approach you are incapable of controlling what people put out there in the social sphere about your organization.
Instead, think about taking the inside-out approach. Social Media Business Intelligence, is so much more sexier than Social Media Monitoring, as it is far more effective in driving long-term service improvements within an organization which ultimately reduces the number of complaints customer voice through all channels, social media included. The interactions organizations have with their customers are increasing in their complexity. Where in the past all issues were funneled through the call center, today customers are more likely to address an issue through self-serve. Failure in that arena leads customers to community chat (filled with an equal mix of knowledgeable gurus and misinformation) and finally the call center. Dial-to-disconnect speech analytics can help organizations gain insight into these complex interactions and more importantly, their failure points. Continue reading “Social media monitoring is like chasing smoke” »
With Facebook pages and Twitter handles and this, that and the other, is anyone even picking up the phone anymore to be served by one of your agents? You bet they are and what callers experience has been affected by your Social CRM.
Recently, I had to deal with a return and some customer service issues of my own so I called into the call center. After nearly 10 minutes on hold I was finally connected with a call center agent that immediately made it clear that he didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t know how to assist me. I was given a scripted, mediocre response and directed to the web site, but not before he made an insulting comment that I should have started there in the first place. Seriously!
Social CRM has its place and certainly is a fast-growing service channel, but that doesn’t mean that we diminish the focus on customer service. If you have ill-equipped, sassy agents answering calls to quickly direct people to serve themselves online, it’s likely that you are pushing disgruntled customers to voice themselves publicly on your Facebook and Twitter pages. The result makes them a customer service nightmare for your agents monitoring your Social CRM. Continue reading “How is Social CRM impacting your traditional customer service channels?” »
As you may have noticed, we’ve been talking a lot this month about social media, and how it fits in with business intelligence and customer service. And that’s for good reason — more and more companies are trying to figure out how to navigate and take advantage of these (still relatively new) channels.
In response to that demand, we’ve just announced a new service offering, Social Media BI™, which is now available to our customers. Social Media BI is intended to help organizations move beyond just responding to individual complaints via social networks, and instead use these channels to identify and analyze issues that are creating the most problems for their customers. From there, we can help companies create proactive strategies for managing their social media efforts — and avoid the dreaded reactive approach.
Check out the announcement that we made this week for more information on Social Media BI, and let us know if you have any questions!
Continue reading “Social Media Business Intelligence is now available” »
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?” »
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