Customer Voice

Customer Service and Technology

Tue, 15 May 2012 01:57:00 GMT

Last week Fifth Quadrant released the 2012 Australia & New Zealand Customer Service Industry Technology Report. In contrast to my beloved boss Dr Wallace, this is my favourite report, and next week my second favourite report will be released, Performance Management.

I wanted to pull out a couple of key stats relating to customer service and technology......

The top five planned technology investment areas (including purchases, upgrades and replacements) for contact centres in Australia for the next 12 months are:

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) (35%)
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) (34%)
Virtual Hold / Automated Call Back (33%)
Voice & data recording & quality monitoring tools (29%)
Workforce Management tools (29%).

In relation to technology, the top three challenges faced by contact centres in Australia in the last 12 months were:

Stability of systems (38%)
Technology lacking functionality (36%)
Budget restrictions on technology spend (28%).

The top three technology strategies for contact centres in Australia for the next 12 months are:

Implement new technology (27%)
Review future technology requirements (23%)
Upgrading existing technology (16%).

Personal highlight.....it is great to see virtual hold and automatic call back as a top three investment area. Our data shows that consumers love this technology. Who really wants to wait on hold anymore?

If you are interested in ordering this report please drop an email to Jules at jtrajkovski@fifthquadrant.com.au.

Customer Experience Measurement

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:42:00 GMT

I believe that customer experience measurement is a key activity all organisations should be undertaking. Our latest contact centre benchmarking results reveal some very interesting findings regarding current customer experience research practices.

To my surprise, traditional data collection methods such as call back surveys still appear to be a favourite data collection method, this is followed by online. What was surprising is that the take up of IVR remains very low as just about every organisation that I am a customer of seems to be asking me to complete a survey at the end whilst in the call cue. I am secretly (well not anymore) happy about this as I am not the biggest fan of IVR. However I will caveat that in certain situations it is ideal and I would be more than happy to recommend IVR at the appropriate times. Personally I like to get into understanding the why’s and this tends to involve more detailed questioning which IVR is not suitable for.

The other interesting area covered in the benchmarking study is the measures organisations use to assess customer experience performance. Customer Sat is the favourite by far. One that caught my eye though was Customer Effort. This has been widely talked about in customer experience research circles yet only 9% of organisations currently use Customer Effort.

Now back onto my soap box. At Fifth Quadrant we are passionate about Emotion. Customers have an emotional response to an interaction and this emotional response is much more powerful than any level of satisfaction. However, only 10% of organisations currently use Emotion as a measure of customer experience. To change this is now my mission!!!

I Just Called to Say I Love You

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:12:00 GMT

Last week Fifth Quadrant officially launched its Customer Service Industry Analyst Practice. Within this practice we have significantly expanded the range of Customer Service and Contact Centre Industry reports.

One of the first reports that will be published will be on the topic of Enterprise Feedback Management. Enterprise Feedback Management is defined as 'the process of systematically collecting, storing and using customer feedback data that covers all customer interaction channels at the customer level to enhance business objectives and overall profitability'.

What this study seeks to measure is the extent to which organisations currently embrace truly enterprise-wide customer feedback management practices. I have been out and about in Sydney over the last two weeks speaking to Senior Executives from across the Finance, Telco and Utility industries, responsible for customer feedback / satisfaction research in their organisation.

So far I haven't found one organisation that would be classified as having an Enterprise Feedback Management programme in place in line with the definition given above. What is evident is that across all of the organisations I have spoken to so far all are collecting some form of customer feedback data (a good start). However, many differences exist regarding the level of integration, coordination and general sharing of information across the business. In many cases the customer feedback studies sit within different business units and in many cases results are not shared across other parts of the organisation.

These are only preliminary results. Therefore I would really like to hear what you have to say. Fifth Quadrant is expanding the programme and is recruiting organisations to participate in this study. If you are interested in participating please drop me an email ckirby@fifthquaudrant.com.au. We will be happy to share a copy of the report when it is complete as a thank you.

Understanding the Ideal Customer Experience

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:36:00 GMT

"How do I improve my CSAT scores?" I saw this question on a conversation thread on LinkedIn. There was some great discussion that focussed more on the finer technicalities of conducting research. I won't bore you with the details but it made me think about a piece of work we have completed called 'The Ideal Customer Experience'. The theory being that if customer service operations can deliver this 'Ideal Customer Experience' then ipso facto (sorry that makes me sound like Kevin Rudd) CSAT scores will increase.

So what constitutes 'The Ideal Customer Experience'? Before exploring that let's start with defining what we mean by Customer Experience. There are many books, journal articles and industry leaders that argue their definition of Customer Experience, particularly around what should and shouldn’t be included within it. The Cambridge dictionary for example, defines it as;

'The way someone feels at all stages of doing business with a company or organisation'.

Typically, organisations view Customer Experience with a focus on rational responses to interactions (e.g. level of satisfaction, recommendation) whilst neglecting emotional responses.

Fifth Quadrant goes beyond the rational and defines Customer Experience as:

'A holistic assessment of the rational and emotional response of a customer to an interaction with an organisation. It should be seen as an all encompassing reflection of a customer's relationship and level of engagement with an organisation'.

Why is understanding Customer Experience so important?

Human behaviour dictates that we constantly assess and re-evaluate our relationships. When we do, we generally ask ourselves three key questions:

What do I think about it?
What do I feel about it?
How much effort do I have to put into it?

If Customer Experience is seen as the 'reflection of the relationship and level of engagement with an organisation', then it is critical for any organisation to understand what that level of engagement is and how their customers may be re-evaluating their relationships with them on an on-going basis.

By constantly measuring and understanding these factors an organisation is able to identify any existing problems that customers may encounter while trying to interact with them. Additionally it will help identify any potential pain points that may cause the customer to terminate their relationship in the future. Once these areas have been identified then the organisation has an opportunity to implement service improvement initiatives that lead to:

Significantly improved customer experience, value, engagement and loyalty
Increased revenue
Reduced costs
Increased profitability per customer.

We often get asked how this translates to front line staff behaviours. Research shows that when service experience focuses on delivering a benefit to the customer such as 'Responsiveness', 'Low effort' or 'Easy to do business with', this leads to higher levels of customer engagement and ultimately better business performance.

Our statistical modelling of Customer Experience over the last 15 years has identified core attributes that organisations need to perform well on in order to deliver great service. These are:

First contact query resolution
Quick query resolution
Ability to speak/engage with someone quickly.

And in terms of best practice we recognise the following service attributes as key drivers of positive customer service:

Knowledgeable staff
Staff that are able to listen to the customer effectively
Staff that are personable
Staff taking ownership of the query to ensure resolution
Timeliness.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:22:00 GMT

What do you consider to be a good, bad or ugly rating for customer satisfaction? We conduct a lot of customer research and when it comes to reporting back the results, 9 times out of 10 we will be asked, 'is that a good satisfaction score?' So today I wanted to shed some light on what we, as researchers and analysts, believe to be a good score as well as what we consider to be best in class

Now the complication in all of this is that organisations do not universally use the same scale to rate satisfaction, recommendation or other key indices. Some organisations use a 5-point scale and others a 10-point scale. Our preference is the 7-point scale. Why? I'll save that topic for another time. Whatever the scale used, we apply a simple calculation that creates an index score out of 100. We are than able use this index to compare results across all organisations.

So back to my original question. What is a good score?

From analysing all the data across our studies we have found the following:

For satisfaction the average rating index in Australia is 68/100. This equates to a mean score of roughly 5.0 based on a 7-point satisfaction rating scale or a mean score of 3.7 based on a 5-point scale.
We would consider 85/100 and above to be 'Best in Class' performance. At the other end of the scale we would consider scores of 60/100 or less to be very poor indeed.
Based on Global benchmarks the highest average satisfaction rating is recorded in Canada, with an average index rating of 74/100 followed by New Zealand where the average satisfaction rating is 73/100. The average satisfaction rating is lowest in Brazil at 65/100.

These results are based purely on satisfaction ratings. So what about other measures?

In many of the studies we conduct, we also often ask customers to rate the performance of the agent who handled their enquiry, across a range of attributes often linked to the organisation's Service Charter. This typically includes performance ratings on attributes such as 'Agent knowledge', 'Agent responsiveness', 'Agent politeness' and so on. Again it is worth knowing what a 'good, bad or ugly' score is to help interpret your results. Looking back over the studies we have conducted we would consider an indexed attribute performance score of 72/100 as 'Average'. Again 85/100 and above is considered 'Best in Class' performance.

So there you have it, 'Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo'.

Unsatisfied with Customer Satisfaction Measures

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:50:00 GMT

A Happy New Year to everyone!!!! I trust that everyone have a lovely break.

Just to prove the importance of how a great experience can lead to positive word of mouth that potentially drives business success……….I can totally recommend a trip to Vietnam. Having holidayed there over Christmas, I would certainly encourage you to visit.

However, Advocacy and Recommendation is not this week's topic. The role of measuring customer feedback for assessing the performance of a contact centre operation is. The reason why? Because I am very upset!!!!

In a recent study conducted by DMG Consulting, organisations were asked to indicate which KPI's they used to manage their contact centre operations. Out of the 20 attributes mentioned, Customer Satisfaction measures didn't even make it into the top 10. In fact it came 12th with only 49% of organisations claiming they used customer satisfaction measurement within their KPI reporting.

Even our own benchmarking data confirms the same result for the Australian market. The Australian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report published in 2011 indicates that 79% of organisations surveyed were assessing customer experience. Pleasantly, this was up from 65% in 2008. However, digging a little deeper shows the frequency that organisations are capturing customer feedback is low with two-thirds of organisations assessing customer experience less often than monthly.

Being a customer research advocate I would want to see Customer Experience as the number one measure used by all organisations to measure the performance of its service operations.

Organisations cannot effectively manage their customer service operations if performance assessments are based purely on operational KPI's such as average talk time, abandonment rates and speed of answer. By not understanding how operational based attributes impact a customer's level of satisfaction and engagement, organisations cannot successfully plan and identify service and process areas that require improvement. Analysing the relationship between operational measures and customer satisfaction and engagement not only delivers a more holistic view of performance, it also helps identify and prioritise service and process initiatives that will lead to better customer experience outcomes.

In a number of studies conducted by Fifth Quadrant, we have investigated the relationship between customer satisfaction and engagement with contact centre KPI's such as Number of Transfers, Query Resolution, On Hold Time and Speed of Answer. We have consistently proven that Query Resolution is the most significant driver of customer satisfaction and engagement. But what about the other measures? A quick poll. Between Number of Transfers, On Hold Time and Speed of Answer, which do think has the biggest impact on customer engagement? In a recent case study, we found that satisfaction with time spent on hold had the greatest impact on overall customer satisfaction and engagement. This was followed by satisfaction with speed of answer. The relationship with number of transfers was interesting. We found that there was not a significant difference in the level of satisfaction and engagement between customers who had not been transferred and customers who had been transferred once. However, a significant drop in satisfaction and engagement occurred amongst customers who had been transferred multiple times.

This type of analysis is really straight forward so long as one is able to directly link operational performance measures to individual customers who have completed a customer satisfaction and engagement survey.

Just to conclude my little rant. I am not sure what is worse, the fact that customer satisfaction was ranked 12th or that Query Resolution rates and Customer Complaint Monitoring didn't even make to the top 20.

What's the best way to collect customer feedback?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:19:00 GMT

What's the best way to collect customer feedback?

Answer as always....it depends.....Part 3.

In my last two blogs I highlighted the merits and drawbacks of both telephone and SMS based methodologies for collecting customer feedback data.

What about using email or online platforms?

Personally, I am a big fan of email and online solutions. Distributing feedback surveys using email can be a far less expensive exercise compared to other research methodologies, particularly telephone. This means that a much greater volume of data can be collected for a similar budget. The ability to collect more data means that analysis can be much more sophisticated and rich.

From a respondent perspective the task is a lot less intrusive and more engaging. Respondents will typically have between 24-48 hours to complete the survey and can therefore decide when they want to do so. What I particularly like about email/online is the ability to use visual and auditory stimulus as well as being able to implement more complex survey techniques such as conjoint and choice modelling which can't be delivered through other methodologies.

Finally, at the back end, the time taken to process and deliver the data is relatively quick meaning that information can be made available as close to real time as possible.

There are of course a few things to bear in mind when considering the use of email/online. The main factor is the quality of the customer database. Some key questions to ask include; how up to date are my customer email addresses? What proportion of my customers have provided an email address? I think you would be surprised to know that in many organisations, the current quality of customer information with regards to email addresses is so poor that email is just not a viable option (except for maybe ISP organisations and online retailers. You would hope they stand out as best practise right?).

The other factor is the response rate. Sending out an unsolicited email may end up in spam, junk or just go unanswered. To help drive participation we have often used an incentive, however this can drive up data collection costs.

Finally, the main drawback is controlling for the recentness of response. In customer experience research it is important to collect information as close to the interaction experience as possible. With online, customers can respond to the survey at their own leisure which may lead to the survey being completed 3-4 days after the experience. This potentially introduces bias into the data as not all customers would have completed the survey within the same timeframe, post their interaction.

Each methodology that I have reviewed is a viable option for conducting customer engagement research. Hopefully the last few blogs have been helpful in terms of pointing out some of the elements that require careful consideration.

This is my last blog for 2011. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a most excellent New Year and I look forward to 2012.

What's the best way to collect customer feedback? Part 2

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:48:00 GMT

Answer as always…….it depends.

In my last blog I extolled the virtues of using outbound agent surveys. Now, if you don’t have the budget and you don’t need to ask a lot of questions you might want to consider using SMS as a means of reaching your target customers.

SMS is increasingly being used by organisations in Australia to communicate with customers. However, it is a methodology often used to most effect as either as an outbound reminder service or as part of a wider “holistic-type” marketing programme rather than for research or a sophisticated customer feedback programme.

That said, it can in some cases be used as a research tool or a recruitment tool for research, but its limitations for this purpose need to be understood. As a research or recruitment tool, SMS could be used in one of the following ways:

Customers complete a short 2-3 question survey via their mobile phone, or
Customers reply to the SMS with an email address – an automatic reply containing a link to a survey would then be sent to that email address, or
Customers would reply to the SMS with a home telephone number – an interviewer would then contact the customer by phone to complete the survey.

The main advantage of SMS is it is a very cost effective methodology for collecting data from large customer populations. Mobile devices are also widely used by the majority of consumers and fully integrated into their everyday lives. Therefore respondents won’t need extensive training on how to complete an exercise. SMS also allows for information to be captured and reported quickly and close to a service interaction.

The main drawback of SMS is that in order to achieve an adequate response rate, the length of the survey needs to be restricted to 2-3 questions. In many of the programmes that we run for clients 2-3 questions is just not sufficient enough to provide anything really useful. On a practical level, it is extremely difficult to control data quality (resulting in data skews) and to control quotas / sample requirements. Another consideration is that not all customers would have a mobile phone number attached to their customer record. Finally as the survey can only be administered one question at a time, the format of the interaction can become very frustrating for respondents as they have to engage in series of send and receive tasks. This process does not generally reflect the way that consumers use SMS and would therefore potentially cause customer frustration. SMS also has the potential to cost the respondent between 80c and $1 to complete the survey as they would be liable to cover the cost of outgoing SMS responses.

Verdict: I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

I would be really interested to find out if anyone else has experience of using SMS and be willing to provide feedback on how effective it is. Feel free to add a comment.

What is the best way to collect customer feedback?

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 06:04:00 GMT

Answer as always……it depends.

It depends on your customer and their relationship with your organisation. It depends on what type of service interaction you are looking to evaluate. It depends on the scale of the programme you are looking to develop in terms of volume of surveys. It depends on the depth and frequency of reporting the organisation requires. And so on and so on……oh yes and what budget you have.

But what are the options?

Post: send out a paper based self-completion questionnaire to customers.

Email: send out an email to customers that directs them to an online based survey.

SMS: send out questions and invitations to take part in research via SMS.

Outbound IVR: contact customers using an automated dialling and IVR system.

Post call IVR: direct customers to an IVR based survey immediately after a customer service interaction.

Outbound agent telephone survey (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews - CATI): market research interviewers contact customers to complete a telephone based survey.

There is also any number of multi-methodological solutions too. For example, phone based agents inviting customers to complete an online survey or sending customers an invitation to an online survey via SMS.

At the end of the day each of these approaches should be considered for any customer feedback programme. Fifth Quadrant uses more than one of these approaches but it is always the client’s objectives and situation that drives our recommendation. To help you navigate this challenge, over the next few blogs I will go into a bit more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of each. Starting with outbound agent telephone surveys.

Using this approach ensures high quality and standards throughout the interviewing process. This methodology promotes quality data collection and ensures that data is safely and effectively stored for immediate analysis and future reference. I will admit I am a bit bias towards this methodology as we do run our own customer satisfaction outbound call centre in house and we have used this methodology quite extensively.

One of the big advantages of a CATI methodology is that it can deliver very high response rates, often in the 30%-40% range which is much higher than other methodologies. From a data quality and quota management perspective it is much easy to maintain control. For example, if a survey is of poor quality, that survey can be immediately flagged and replaced. With other methods you have to wait until the fieldwork is complete before reviewing the data quality. In addition if you have skilled interviewers you can often gather a much greater depth of understanding from open ended questions.

From a negative perspective, the biggest issue is cost. CATI can be more expensive than other methodologies and hence may result in a lower sample size given a particular budget or higher costs for a similar sample size. As a CATI methodology may be based on a smaller sample, the depth and frequency of reporting may be less when compared to other methodologies.

One of the most important elements to take into consideration when choosing an appropriate methodology is the scope, breadth and depth of the information that is required. CATI is great for collecting a much more detailed level of information compared to some of the automated approaches. With a CATI survey you can probably keep the customer involved for up to 15 minutes which allows for much more information to be collected. The key trade off here is volume of data versus depth of data.

Next time……..SMS.

One thing I would like to know is what method, if any, are you currently using? Feel free to answer through the comments box below.

Driving Customer Commitment Part 2

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:16:00 GMT

Following on from my previous blog, in which I discussed the impact that customer service has on driving customer commitment, I wanted to share some additional analysis that we have recently conducted that further validates the importance of customer service.

Given the slow growth that most mature economies are currently experiencing, and as organisations look for ways to differentiate themselves, the role of customer service as a key business lever is set to become more and more important. There is much analysis and commentary that predicts that the impact of traditional marketing levers will soften.

In light of this trend, we set out to further understand and measure the impact customer service has on driving customer commitment. Earlier this year we conducted a global Customer Engagement study in which we asked consumers to rate a recent customer service experience. The study covered five industry verticals (Finance & Business, Telco, Retail, Travel & Tourism and Healthcare) and over ten channels including, agent phone, auto phone, email and online. In this study we asked consumers to rate their service experience based on three measures, Satisfaction, Emotion (Happiness) and Effort. We also asked their likelihood to recommend the organisation they had interacted with as a measure of commitment.

Using linear regression analysis we were able to measure the level of influence the customer service measures (Satisfaction, Happiness and Effort) had on explaining the variance observed with (Recommendation).

The results of this analysis amongst Australian consumers are shown below:

Click to enlarge

Overall, customer service explains between 44% and 67% of customer commitment (Recommendation). Customer service experience has the biggest impact within the Finance and Business sector and a lower level of influence (but still significant) in the Hospitality / Tourism industry. So why would this be? Within the Finance and Business industry the role of product, interest rates and brand as a means of differentiation is potentially becoming less and less important. A home loan, is a home loan is a home loan. So how do customers decide which provider to go with? Through their interactions and experiences in dealing with the organisation. In comparison within the Hospitality / Tourism category, the role of the product, in this case say the destination, plays a bigger role in driving commitment.

It is again made clear through this analysis that customer service is a significant driver of customer commitment. What organisations need to better understand is how this relationship between customer service and commitment manifests itself within their own ecosystem as each organisation will use different activities to drive commitment.

Look out for more analysis in future blogs as we delve into differences by country as well as demographic.

Driving Customer Commitment

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:04:00 GMT

Which has the biggest impact on customer commitment? A) brand image B) customer service experience C) offering good value products and services.

As customer service professionals this is an important question to know the answer to to ensure the ongoing support from senior Board level executives for the work being carried out at the front line in the contact centre.

So here’s the answer…….

Across a number of studies conducted by Fifth Quadrant we have found that customer service experience is consistently identified as either the most important or the second most important driver of customer commitment.

This has been validated through using both direct questions as well as more sophisticated regression modelling techniques.
In a recent global study we asked, "Please indicate the top three reasons that would cause you to move your business away from one company to another company." At a global level, 37% of respondents indicated that the attribute, 'the company no longer offering good value for their products and services' was the main reason why they would move their business. This was followed by 21% of consumers who indicated that ‘poor customer service experience’ was the main reason.

In many other studies we often use driver analysis (Multiple Regression) to understand the strength of relationship between a range of business based attributes with brand commitment or advocacy (NPS). These attributes have often included statements such as; ‘Having a range of products that cater to all my needs’, ‘Offering the best deals’, ‘Having great quality customer service’, ‘Being flexible in meeting my needs’, ‘Being easy to do business with’ and ‘Being familiar and well-known’. Across these studies we have repeatedly found that it is the customer service attributes that have the strongest relationship with brand advocacy measures. In one particular analysis we quantified that customer service performance was responsible for driving over 45% of the Recommendation (NPS) performance. This was followed by ‘Product’ related attributes at just over 40%.

A study conducted by Intelligent Dialogue found that amongst consumers that had stopped dealing with an organisation, 54% had done so because they had a problem that wasn’t dealt with satisfactorily. Similarly, a blog posed by Forrester’s Kerry Bodine, highlights the same relationship, that a positive customer service experience in a contact centre is strongly correlated to stronger levels of brand consideration and advocacy (NPS).

Whilst the focus of this blog is customer retention and commitment, we have also found that, for some customers, a good customer service experience can be a significant acquisition driver too.

So what does the mean from a customer experience measurement perspective? Most organisations are happy to monitor and track customer satisfaction or NPS, often collected thorough short automated online or IVR based surveys. But this basic data has significant limitations with respect to understanding and quantifying the link between good customer service experience and business performance measures. For customer service to be taken seriously by the Board, demonstrating this relationship empirically is key.

"I can't get no satisfaction"

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:17:00 GMT

Having attended Salesforce.com's annual conference, Dreamforce, last week I return to sunny Sydney thinking, what were the genuine highlights? Now, being a huge Metallica fan makes this a fairly easy decision: check out the video here. To be honest a lot of things stood out and a more detailed analysis of Dreamforce will follow, but for the purpose of this week’s blog I wanted to focus on one of the breakout sessions, 'Key KPI’s for Customer Service and Support'.

This session stood out for me because of a comment made by one of the presenters. Vala Afshar, Chief Customer Officer at Enterasys, said, in the context of the presentation, and I paraphrase here a little, "We are committed to Salesforce.com". That is a hugely powerful endorsement from a customer in front of over 200 people. This comment highlighted to me that much of the current industry discussion about customer experience measurement KPI's misses the point. Much of the current debate centres on Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Recommendation (NPS) and more recently the Customer Effort Score (CES). There is, however, very little debate about measuring the likely future behaviour or the strength of the customer's relationship with the organisation as a result of their experience.

Satisfaction is, "the fulfilment of one's wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this." Compare this to Loyalty. Loyalty is, "giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution." So what would you rather have, satisfied or loyal customers? Loyal customers right? But what about commitment? Commitment is, 'the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause'. Powerful stuff, and much more powerful that loyalty.

So what does this mean from a customer experience measurement perspective? Having spent over 15 years researching customer experience and brand relationships, I would argue that high satisfaction does not always lead to higher customer loyalty or commitment. Therefore, organisations need to make sure that in addition to CSAT, NPS or CES, a customer experience measurement programme should also include relevant future behaviour measures such as consideration, share of wallet or likelihood to increase spend to better link customer service experiences to positive commercial outcomes. In summary, the most important information a customer experience measurement programme should deliver is identifying which aspects of the customer interaction process drive customer future behaviour not just satisfaction.

Tips to improve the customer experience

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 23:23:00 GMT

Last week I presented a paper at the AIST Superannuation Symposium in Melbourne. The theme of the presentation was ‘Member Engagement Opportunities through the Call Centre.’

The focus of the presentation was on understanding the fast evolving world of the Multi-Channel contact centre. I won’t go through the details of the paper but want really stood out for me was a question raised by one of the delegates (ironically asked through a live text feed). The question was, “What three tips would you give in order to improve the experience of our Members?”

After thinking about this further, I would stand by the three points I highlighted at the time;

Service Strategy needs to be enterprise-wide. In addition, the best Service Strategies are Board-driven and are directly linked to organisational performance goals.
Develop a Multi-Channel service strategy. The current convergence and integration of customer service channels and the increasing sophistication and use of multi-media channels and devices by customers means the contact centre landscape is changing rapidly as well as dramatically. Our own research tells us that the customer service experience accounts for at least 30% of total Advocacy and Loyalty ratings by consumers. The availability to customers of channel options, access, speed and convenience are becoming key drivers for these Loyalty metrics.

Today, organisations which are seeking to gain competitive advantage, create a continually improving customer experience, improve loyalty and potentially reduce operational costs, are investigating Multi-Channel Service Strategy.
Any Service Strategy must be customer centric.

Of the three points I would argue that ensuring the Service Strategy is customer centric and grounded in customer insights is the most important. Understanding how customers want to engage with you as an organisation and what their service needs are should sit at the heart of any Service Strategy. If organisations do not understand what the customer wants in terms of being able to engage with organisations, managers will effectively be chasing their tails not knowing where to invest and how much. Do I invest in social media or do I focus on improving my email channel? Do my customers prefer to use email or social media? All of these questions need to be asked from a customer’s perspective. The most successful organisations put the ‘customer’ at the heart of everything. Becoming a truly customer centric organisation can be a very challenging process, but one of the first steps must be to get out there and start asking your customers, ‘what do you want and what can we do to improve our service?’.

Measuring Emotion and Happiness in Service Interactions

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:13:00 GMT

Many clients often ask for advice with regards to setting KPI's for measuring customer service performance. Often discussions focus on Satisfaction, Advocacy (NPS), Effort and Query Resolution. Whilst these measures are very relevant, measuring the customer's emotional response to a service interaction is generally not top of mind. Research often explores the emotional responses consumers have to brand, marketing and advertising programmes, but less often focuses on the measurement of consumers' emotions prior, during and as a result of a service experience with an organisation. Traditional measures of service experience tend to focus on the cognitive response (level of satisfaction) whilst neglecting the emotional response and its impact on customer future behaviour.

It has been proven that the measure of customer satisfaction, as the primary surrogate of the customer experience and its usefulness in predicting customer behaviour is limited. Satisfaction is a mental assessment of expectations minus service received and does not pick up feelings or emotions. Service interactions can involve up to 75% emotional processing and, as such, it is essential that an assessment of customer experience encompasses both cognitive and emotional measures that can be used to predict how a customer will respond or act in the future.

Leading academics, marketing theorists and practitioners now prefer to model the customer experience on both a customer's psychological or cognitive response (satisfaction) to a service experience as well as their emotional reactions (connection). A combination of both cognitive and emotional response provides a measure of a customer's engagement with an organisation. Engagement has been demonstrated to be an excellent surrogate for the customer's overall experience and a significant predictor of a customer's future behaviour with an organisation.

At Fifth Quadrant we have demonstrated the importance of measuring and understanding emotion and have proven the link between emotion and future behaviour in every customer engagement research study it has conducted over the last 5 years. More specifically the measure of 'happiness' has been statistically proven, both by Fifth Quadrant's own research and from studies in the literature (e.g. The DNA of Customer Experience by Colin Shaw), to be the primary emotion that drives positive future customer behaviour i.e. future purchase/usage and advocacy. Whilst other emotions are important to the service experience (e.g. pleased, calm, stressed), happiness has been proven to be the strongest single emotional predictor of future behaviour and therefore why Fifth Quadrant places such importance on including 'happiness' within any measure of service experience.

Multi-Channel Navigation

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:40:00 GMT

Sticking to the multi-channel theme for this week's blog, I wanted to spend a bit more time and expand further on how organisations can navigate through the complex world of developing a Multi-channel Strategy.

In the last blog I talked about the need to understand the level of engagement and effort associated with each channel to help prioritise where to invest your channel $$$'s. This is all well and good as a starting point, however in order to deliver a truly customer driven Multi-Channel Strategy one must dive deeper and understand the how’', the why's and the who's of the multi-channel world.

Let me explain. Let's take Sandra who is 25, single and a heavy mobile phone user. On Monday she contacts her mobile service provider to make a complaint about an error on her bill. Her instinct is to phone the call centre as she wants to speak to an agent who can rectify her issue there and then. Makes sense right. However on Wednesday she contacts the same mobile provider via the online self-service portal to update her personal details. Same customer, same company, but now a different transaction has led to a different channel being used.

Now let's take Ken who is 55 years old and lives in a regional area. Ken is also a customer of the same mobile phone company as Sandra. Like Sandra, Ken calls the call centre to make a complaint about an error on a bill. Later that same week he calls the call centre again, but this time it’s to update his billing address. Now we have the same customer, calling the same company on the same channel but for different reasons.

Now multiply this by 2 million customers, 25 channels, 20 different types of transactions and you can start to see how planning the right channel mix and agent skills to deliver an effective Multi-Channel Strategy can easily become very complex. To navigate this challenge one needs to develop a systematic way of digging into the data.

An effective Multi-Channel Strategy must put the customer at the heart of everything. These two questions are a good starting point:

What channels are they using most often?
What queries are they using each channel for?

By answering these questions organisations will be able to identify which channels to invest in, but also identify the right level of resourcing and the agent skills required to effectually meet customer needs.

For more information on the Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index 2011 – Australia and New Zealand, contact Sarah Husbands shusbands@avaya.com