Updates from Kate Leggett RSS
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04:08:11 am on November 18, 2009 |
Thoughts on Choosing Customer Service Software
The most important thing to remember when selecting Customer Service software is to choose an offering that supports your company’s brand perception. It is not the goal for all companies to offer the most ideal customer experience that vendors try to sell you. For example, the expectations of users of a discount airline is not “over-the-top” service, but service that is streamlined, and heavily reliant on web self-service and email. On the other hand, a luxury retailer’s service offering is very different – It should be white-gloved service, reliant on personal contact that is tailored for a particular customer.
In evaluating Customer Service software you must also understand your customer’s demographics, and their communication channel requirements as baby boomers for example, have very different communication needs that the more tech savvy Generation Xers and Y’s. Finally, you need to understand the communication channel requirements that your company can afford as channel costs differ widely. Web-self service and email costs are typically a fraction of those for the “live assist” channels of chat and phone. Irrespective of the communication channels that you can support now, you must architect your offering so that channels are not siloed, that corporate knowledge is shared and that alternate channels can be added at a later time as the need arises.
Once your Customer Service system is implemented, you need to measure its efficacy and tune it using a balanced scorecard approach. You need to measure key performance indicators – for example, the cost of delivering customer service against the satisfaction of your customer base, the compliance of agents to company policy and generated revenue. These measures then need to be mapped to the overall customer perception of your company to ensure that the chosen Customer Service systems are supporting and not eroding your brand image. And finally, you need to be agile enough to change your service offering based on customer feedback and the gathered metrics.
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10:52:27 pm on October 27, 2009 |
Email Done Right
Customers don’t trust email as a reliable communication channel with a service organization. How many times have you sent in an email to a company, and received no response? Or received only a partial answer after waiting for days?
Poor performance of email tools can usually be traced to their implementation history – email systems were typically deployed years ago with little tuning to maximize their productivity.
Even with history working against you, here are some basic steps to follow in setting up your customer service email.
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Make email part of your multichannel strategy – Don’t think of email as a siloed channel. Provide seamless escalation between your web self-service offering and email, and be sure to have a single source of knowledge that is used across all your communication channels.
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Keep your customers in the loop from the time they send an email into you, to the time that they get an answer to their questions. Always send them an auto-acknowledgement letting them know you got their email. Tell them how long it will take to answer their email. And provide them with alternate contact channels if the SLA you have communicated to them sounds too long to them.
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Manage your email flow so that you can meet your SLAs. Set up your rules and queues to ensure that emails get sent to the right skillset of agents. And staffing each email queue with the appropriate number of email agents to ensure that your SLAs are met
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Use automation tools – like auto-responses, auto-suggestions to take the load off your agents. Use text matching algorithms to read the intent of incoming emails in order to route them to the right email queue.
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Teach your agents to properly answer email – like answering all the questions that are contained in an incoming email, and answering all questions that are asked, and ones that are implied.
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Monitor, measure and optimize your email performance. And be flexible enough to change if you find yourself falling behind in your SLAs or quality of customer care.
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11:03:41 pm on October 15, 2009 |
New Contributors Joining Our Blog
KANA historically has had two blogs: this one, and Speak Out .
Evolved Thinking’s charter has been to provide a forum for Practice Leaders to share their perspectives on customer service and support trends, self-service best practices, Web 2.0, knowledge management and other topics central to improving customer service delivery.
Our other blog, Speak Out, provided KANA’s executive management with an outlet for sharing their insights regarding the emerging technology category of Service Experience Management.
Next week we will be folding the Speak Out blog into this one. This means that you will see more posts and a broader variety of contributor voices, like those of KANA’s CEO Mike Fields and CTO Mark Angel. The focus of this blog will remain unchanged, and we encourage you to keep reading and commenting.
What topics are you interested in hearing our point of view? Please let us know and we will consider them as our charter evolves.
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11:37:25 pm on October 9, 2009 |
Customer Support Myths…are They Really Myths?
Managing a call center is more of an art than a science. Some service managers use a set of pigeon-holed metrics to manage their business to – like average hold times, number of emails processed per agent, and in some cases customer satisfaction ratings on their service. Others apply established best practices to their organizations, without thought of what works for their company size, their product or service set and their customer demographic. Some jump on the current trend bandwagon without an analysis of what this means stragecially for the company.
I have been compiling a list of “half truths and total nonsense” about management philosophies and technologies in Support. Which ones resonate with you? Which ones do you believe are not myths and work for you?
Kate’s List of Common Services and Support Myths
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Social CRM is giving customers control of your brand
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Established best practice apply to my call center
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Longer calls are not good web self-service candidates
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Discussion forums cut call volumes
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Good web self service cut call volumes
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Front-line support agents don’t know anything
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When you measure operational activities, you measure business outcomes
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Support can act independently of brand –Support can have a different brand identity than marketing and sales
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Customers can’t create reliable knowledge
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Complex interactions are not repeatable / process-oriented
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Better search means that I can find everything
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Email doesn’t work as a support medium
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Chat won’t work for tech support.
What is your favorite myth?
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07:23:55 pm on September 28, 2009 |
Evidence Based Service – The How is harder than the Why
Service organizations would perform better if leaders applied the best evidence. I’ve dedicated several posts to this subject. It’s a great concept and it’s another thing to do it.
Some experimentation is easy – for example like what Yahoo! does on its homepage where they typically run over 20 experiments at a time, changing things like colors, placement of ads and location of text or buttons. Outcomes of these experiments can have a huge effect – like moving the search box from the side to center of the home page generated enough click-throughs to bring in about $20M more revenue a year.
But this requires a mind-set shift–instead of debating which screen design or content works better, you gotta try it, and analyze the results to see what works.
#1–Treat your service offering as an unfinished prototype. Baseline your performance. Then try to vary something and measure how you do – trying something half baked quickly with the data at hand is often much better than just waiting until you have all the data you need as the urgency to react may have passed.
#2-Don’t get blindsided by corporate mantra, and organizational half-truths. Many service organizations are managed based on industry best practices, and historical precedence. Base your decisions on just data. Understand what works for you and your customers and do a root cause analysis to understand why changes you have made work or don’t.
#3-Look at yourself using your customer’s eyes. Do a mystery shopping exercise on your site, and document your strengths and weaknesses. Look at your competitors and see what they do. Do it in a systematic, scientific way, not based on emotion.
You can apply evidence based service at a micro or macro level-to a simple installation and tuning of a product–for example a new ERMS system. And, you can apply it to optimize a particular service offering, or transform your complete service offering to the next level of operational maturity
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05:57:09 am on September 22, 2009 |
Shopping, with a little help from my friends
Even in this down economy, Forrester Research projects that holiday sales will reach more than $33 billion this season. That’s a lot of dough, and here are some guiding principles to help shape a successful online shopping experience.
#1 – Make shopping fun. Entice users even before they are customers by using a consistent UI on all your site. Offer a variety of self-service methods, like visual decision trees that use pictures of products help orient users to their correct product, and guide them down a particular discovery path. Let them search by price range, color or even by personality like gadget geek, mom-to-be or fashionista.
Interactive sites relying on technologies like AJAX work. You can drag and drop content on a page to where you want to interact with it. Use rollovers, sliders for price range pickers, or a color palette to search for items of a single color to make sites fun.
Let peer pressure help you out by listing top searches or hot buys are – both which serve as good indicators of current trends..
#2 – Let Users use their own words. Users don’t always think in the context of company-generated navigational topics. Let users tag content and browse tag clouds.
#3 – Information on the User’s Terms. Push relevant service alerts or policy changes out. Let users create watchlists so that they can be alerted when an item goes on sale, or falls below a target price.
#4 – Use the wisdom of crowds. You trust peer advice over company recommendations. Kaboodle, for example, touts “shopping is more fun with friends”. Append feedback forms and ratings to content and act on it.
You will be more successful if you can streamline the shopping experience, and use community input to validate purchase decisions.
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11:40:27 pm on September 4, 2009 |
Can you monitor your service experience in real time?
We know that:
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Not all companies need to provide exceptional customer service – just good enough service that is in-line with their brand.
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This service offering must work for the customer and work for the company.
We illustrate this outward-inward tension using a balanced scorecard of (1) cost of service, (2) customer satisfaction with the service experience, (3) ability to comply to company policy (and in heavily regulated industries this becomes very important – think HIPAA standards for healthcare) and (4) the ability to generate more sales.
These balanced scorecard metrics are hard to measure, and if they are measured, it is done after the service interaction has unfolded. But why can’t we measure them during the service interaction?
- Cost of service – You should know the average cost of a process flow used to answer a customer’s question. What about measuring the cost of a single interaction as it unfolds and comparing it to this average? You could display this to the agent so that he knows how he is doing. And, if the cost of an interaction greatly exceeds the average, you could proactively route it to a Tier 2 agent or SME to ensure a good customer experience and a low cost interaction for you.
- Customer satisfaction – We use enterprise feedback management to survey customers after the fact, but what about surveying them during an interaction?
- Compliance – What about implementing programmatic ways for agents to follow company policy – for example applying BPM flows to customer service interactions, and not allowing an agent to proceed through the flow unless compliance steps are done?
There are new technology solutions that help with these real-time measurement activities which would allow you to be more proactive in the way that you deliver service. Do any of you do this already?
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04:24:19 pm on August 24, 2009 |
Service = Brand, Part 2
Customer service. We know that it is not one size fits all – it is the art of aligning your service with your brand. It’s the consistency of experience that a customer feels every time they interact with you. And what is brand? It’s what you stand for, it is how you differentiate yourself. Bruce Temkin from Forrester blogs a lot about this.
We seem to agree that not all companies need to provide exceptional customer service – just good enough service that is in-line with their brand. Think back to the IKEA and Apple examples in my last blog.
But what about industries where there is little differentiation between products and services? Like banks or telecom providers? Is there any true difference between the banking products and services at Wells Fargo, Citibank, or Bank of America, just to name a few? They also offer an undifferentiated customer service experience that makes it hard to for you, as a customer, to individualize them.
One deviator in the banking space is ING Direct. They are a non-traditional, internet bank where all business is done via web self service, ATM or email. They have no branches, and you cannot visit a live agent. Even without this traditional personal touch, they know who their customers are, what they want, and deliver what they need. Everything about the banking experience is slick, comprehensive and targeted to a good customer service experience. However, they only target the tech savvy customer with relatively straightforward banking needs – they are known to fire “high maintenance customers” who do not fit into their service mold.
ING Direct, in a sector of undifferentiated products and services, differentiates themselves by their exceptional service experience. This experience is aligned with the bank’s business model. And this service differentiation becomes their brand. Once again, service = brand.
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04:56:44 pm on August 21, 2009 |
Its going to be a recovery that only a statistician can love”. Mark Vitner, Wells Fargo Senior Economist cautions us against upbeat economic news. Most of us are still living the realities of the recession –being out of work, basic household budgets, and trying to save.
Malls are empty. Discount same-store sales are down about 7% from a year ago. Teen clothing sales have given way to hand-me-downs (Abercrombie reports a 28% drop in sales!!). Macy and JCPenny’s sales are down over 10% from last year, even with their big sales.
E-tailers are asking us how to do more with less and still preserve the customer experience that shoppers are used to. Here is my nuts-and-bolts top 10 list of to-dos:
- Design a successful shopping experience:
- Structure your website with consistent navigation, theme, and use breadcrumbs to orient the shopper
- Go beyond search – give shoppers alternate ways to find information (ex:browse, guided discovery)
- Extend these principles to your self-help offering ( both to help with the shopping experience, and for customer service)
- Place chat links strategic points in the shopping experience
- Focus on converting browsers into buyers
- Use proactive chat to help browsers buy (this channel has a real ROI!)
- Use co-browse to help shoppers with checking-out
- Use website monitoring to keep track of activities of your high value customers
- Target campaigns based on customer profiling and past purchase history – and send them from a customer service email address as they are more likely to get opened
- Make it easy for a shopper to ask a question- and get a useful answer
- Consistently publish the communication channels that are offered to your customer base
- De-escalate inquiries by tying chat, email and knowledge channels together
- Guide customers to use the right communication channel for their inquiry
- Maximize agent productivity using automation capabilities built into eService tools (example: auto-responses, auto-suggestions, auto-classification)
- Make sure that agents have all the knowledge that they need to answer a customer’s question
- Boost the effectiveness of temporary agents – give them the collaboration tools to reach out to subject matter experts and get the answers they need
- Keep a pulse on your business and your customer’s satisfaction (by using real time statistics, reports and enterprise feedback)
- If you are not doing as well as you should, be flexible enough to change.
Any other additions to this list? Thoughts?
- Design a successful shopping experience:
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10:02:58 pm on August 13, 2009 |
Simon and Garfunkel sang “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”. Isn’t that how most contact centers run their operations? By service managers using a set of pigeon-holed metrics to manage their business to – like average hold times, number of emails processed per agent, and in some cases customer satisfaction ratings on their service.
Being a good manager is a craft that is learnt through practice and experience, and some contact centers are very successful as serving their customers well at a cost that makes sense to the business. However, I believe that managers can practice their craft more effectively if they are guided by the best logic and evidence.
No contact center that I have been in uses a process akin to the scientific method to optimize their service experience. This would involve designing an end-to-end service process, testing it on customers, measuring the outcome, changing the service process, re-testing and re-measuring. The optimal service is then derived by hard data to guide decisions. That is Evidence Based Service.
Why don’t contact centers use the universally accepted scientific method to tune their offerings? Mainly, because it’s hard. First, there are few companies that have extended the rigor of business process management to customer service. That is, most agents hunt and peck through back end data and knowledge sources to try to find the information that they need to solve a customer’s issue with no real consistency of process. And secondly, our customer service tools are un-integrated, don’t work together cohesively, and are so hard wired to one another that it takes a ton of energy to change the way that they work together.
There are now tools and technologies on the market that allow you to make your IT wiring easier – think SOA, webservices, cloud computing. There are also many BPM vendors moving into the customer service space that allow you to change service processes easily and quickly.
Whatever solution you do use, wouldn’t it be a very interesting exercise to extend the rigor of test and measurement to customer service? Your service offering could then be data driven instead of being based on strategic snake oil or outdated management philosophies.
