Evidence Based Support

I’ve been pretty quiet for a while …mostly listening and reading with interest to ongoing discussion about KM, web 2.0 and more. . Usually I have a lot to say. But recently I just can’t get rid of the feeling that I’m simply responding to cleaver rhetoric, smart arguments, and appealing ideas with no clear evidence to support them. I continually wonder if we really do know whether any of our ideas work. Where is the evidence? I don’t mean anecdotal data. I mean real evidence, intended to prove a theory is wrong or demonstrate that a program is working.

With this in mind, I came across an HBR series called “To make the best decisions, demand the best data”. Specifically, a paper called “Evidence bases Management” caught my attention. The paper makes an analogy between the evidence based medicine movement, (providing medical care based on clear and convincing evidence for treatments that work), with management, develop and deploying programs and strategies based on evidence for their efficacy. In medicine, the evidence based movement has had dramatic and positive effects on treatment success. But in management, the movement is nascent. Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

“Executives routinely dose their organizations with strategic snake oil, discredited nostrums, partial remedies, or untested management miracle cures. In many cases, the faces about what works are out there – so why don’t managers use them?” (HBR, Business Decision Making, January, 2006)

Maybe this quote is extreme. But there is truth to it and we need to change. We are responsible for significant costs in our organizations and have the ability to drive world class customer experience. So many programs in support either have mixed results or results that cannot be interpreted we rarely know what contribution we are making to our organizations bottom line. If we really want to lead our companies, to drive world class customer experiences, we need to manage based on evidence and gather data to tell us how well we are doing. We need to develop measurement programs that model our businesses and operations and tie them to business outcomes. Toyota revolutionized manufacturing by modeling errors in productions lines and developing strategies to address them. The support business is different, for sure. But is the need for clear evidence for or against what we purport to be good any less important?

how to make sure your customer service is the best, and your customers remain yours

First, the acknowledgment… I wrote this for a presentation I am doing next week at the DestinationCRM conference.  Yes, it is my original material but it is not just for this blog… then again, we’ll see if I get more readers here or people at the conference next week.

As I started getting my presentation ready for the conference, I got to the same point where creativity begins: reading the abstract that was submitted, trying to understand what possessed me to write that, and wondering how am I going to deliver on that promise.  Then I started thinking… I promised to talk about service experiences - how breaking down customer experience management projects into “chunks” makes it more manageable.  Since I am not sure I can cover an entire presentation on that yet, I decided to instead focus on service experiences… but come to it from a Top-10 approach.  Yes, I have taken tons of poetic license from David Letterman’s approach to the Top-10 - not even close.  So, without much further - here are my “ten killer ways to make sure you service experiences are the best and your customers remain yours” (the official title):

1. right channel, right time - always ensure you are offering to your customers all channels they want to use, how they want to use them, and when they want to use them

2. right person, right time - use workforce management to manage your people, their skills, their training, and their careers – ensuring that each inquiry is answered by the best person to do it

3. right answer, right time (yes, there is a pattern) - optimize your knowledge management and repositories to ensure that each agent, client, and system interacting with clients automatically always have the right, and similar, answer

4. right experience, right? - implement an efm initiative to manage feedback from customers and agents, geared to improving and presenting the right experience, all the time to all customers

5. improve, reduce, discard - use analytics across all interactions, to make sure your processes are working properly, optimize them by improving poor performance, reducing unnecessary steps, and discarding non-working ones

6. constant monitoring, continuous improvement - manage by KPI - no, not Key Performance Indicators.  Instead focus on Knowledge, People, and Inquiries - focus on them and your experiences will be superb

7. metrics, choose wisely - don’t use old and tired efficiency metrics (satisfaction, loyalty, handle time, hold time, total calls, response time, etc) instead use the new effectiveness-based metrics to ensure great experiences (did you get what you needed? did we do a good job delivering?)

8. evaluate new, don’t implement… yet - unless you are in an industry where competitive advantage is a mandate (not many), implementing brand new technologies will only cost you money and resources.  Implement in the second wave and you will reap more benefits (this has a killer graph to go with it, email me for a copy of the slides)

9. know expectations, surpass expectations - use feedback tools and events to capture and understand your customer expectations; modify your processes to accommodate them; write SLAs to make sure you surpass them

10. MAKE MONEY - sales is a dish best served piping hot — you are in the hottest moment to recommend, offer, and sell to your customers… right when they need it!  Leverage it.  You’ll be surprised to see how many other problems disappear when you make money for the organization.

So, what do you think?  Did I miss any?  Do you agree or disagree?  What do you think of Service Experiences? let me know… and remember to email me if you want a copy of the slides…

Mind The Gap, Would You?

Continuing my one-man crusade to end the use of customer satisfaction as a metric in corporations, I want to bring attention today to one more problem: The Gap.

What gap you ask?  Well, the gap that exists between customer satisfaction and customer churn - that gap.

There are two  KPI (key performance indicators) for organizations dealing with customers.  One is customer satisfaction (are you satisfied, did we meet your expectations, etc.).  The other is customer churn - or the rate at which customers leave you and go to the competition.  Customer churn is trickier to measure (after all, a customer could have no need for your product or service, or they could be passive users and not interact for quite some time) but it is measured usually as a percentage of closed accounts.

As the logic goes, an increase in customer satisfaction should mean a decrease in customer churn - and the other way around should be also true.  After all, a satisfied customer is not likely to leave - right?

Well, this is the part where customer satisfaction (the metric) does not reflect reality. According to lots and lots of recent research - although customers say that customer service is their number one reason for changing providers, further analysis details that price is a more important driver than satisfaction.  Actually, satisfaction comes up between fifth and tenth in the different studies. I wrote a blog about this not too long ago, you can read it here.  If you insist in using customer satisfaction as a metric, fine - but please do it together with customer churn and… mind the gap.

Let’s look at an example.  Let’s say your customer satisfaction is 80%, and your customer churn is 30% (that means you loose 30% of your customer base every year).  That leaves a ratio of 10 - 80% satisfaction, 70% of “satisfied” customers per the churn metric - deduct satisfaction from churn and you get the ratio.

if you have a negative ratio it means your churn is greater than your dissatisfied customers and there are more people leaving you that telling you they are not happy.  Implement better feedback management tools, ensure that all complaints are handled effectively, and advertise (heavily) your commitment to customer care and to make customers happy.  Look at your prices, products, features and functions and make sure they are aligned with your competitors.  Advertise that as well. Find out, via surveys, why customers left recently and use that to improve your processes, offerings and services. If you are honest and good about it, you shall see more customers trusting you to solve their issues and wanting to stay - thus decreasing your churn and turning the ratio positive.

If you have a positive ratio it means either you are doing things well, or you are not measuring properly.  The larger the ratio, the more likely one of your metrics is not accurate.  Ideally your churn and your dissatisfied number will be the same — but very unlikely.  You want them to be within one or two points to account for all errors in computing and measuring. So if you have a large positive ratio either your customer satisfaction metric is too high, or your customer churn too low.  You should revise the metrics, what they measure, how the data is captured and the methodology behind each.  You are more likely to find problems measuring customer churn than satisfaction - but both are possible.  Fix your measuring problems and then try again.

What do you think?  Interesting enough to try? Let me know whaty you think… and please, mind the gap - would you.

We all understand the benefits of integrating community content into a customer service offering – It helps you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. It helps you with product support by letting customers to help one another via customer generated knowledgebase content. It helps you in your sales cycle by letting you identify enthusiastic customers and having them persuade prospects in purchasing your product. It can also yield a real return on investment. Check out my last blog post to find out how to measure this.

Here are two sites that I think do a really good job with community content.

http://www.dellideastorm.com/ - This is a great forum for gathering product insights. Look in the top corner to see the size of the online community – its really big! They also use a reputation model for top participants “idea makers”. You can see and post product suggestions, vote or comment on them. What is beautiful is that you see that Dell is listening to their customer voice. Many of these suggestions are tagged as under consideration by their product management.

Dell brands itself on user customization. This is a great way for them to understand what customers really want and tailor their offering for their customers. This ultimately translates into profits for Dell as if customers get the features that they are most passionate about, they will buy, and buy more….

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideas/ideaList.apexp - Starbucks also uses a discussion forum to gather product and service ideas from their customer base. You can see their popular, top of all time and recent ideas. You can vote and comment on ideas. There are almost as many comments from baristas (coffee servers) as there are from customers – ideas about recycling, environmental friendliness, product and service improvements, cost cutting measures. Starbucks listens and responds to these comments. And every time they take action on any of these ideas, they make their coffee, pastries and service experience more appealing to their customers.

It doesn’t stop there. Community content also allows you to understand the demographics of who uses your products and this information can give you cross-sell or upsell ideas. You may even be able to glean actionable information about your competitors.

So don’t underestimate community content. What are your plans to use it? If you don’t have any plans, you gotta start thinking about it….

Not My Job

One very interesting thing about we few and proud in the customer service and support industry is that we all lead a double life.  Not only are we analysts or directors or designers or engineers or marketers of customer service software solutions; we are also customers, the beneficiaries (or victims as the case may be) of our own efforts to improve customer service.  As such we have an almost limitless supply of experience and anecdotes, based on being a customer, to draw from for inspiration and insight.

Just yesterday, I was attempting to fill my car with gasoline at a self-service pump.  No matter what I did with the nozzle and its associated pump mechanism the pump refused to dispense fuel.  Instead, the display just kept flashing the message, “Lift Pump Handle to begin Pumping Gas”.  After several attempts to convince the machine that I had already lifted the indicated pump handle it decided that I wasn’t really serious about my intention to get gas and cancelled my transaction.  Time to escalate (using the terminology of our industry) and get assistance from the kind and eager attendant inside.  Noting the number stenciled on the side of the obstinate device, I set off on my quest for help.

Now I wish I had video of what occurred next because at least as much, if not more, was communicated in facial expression and tone of voice but the brief conversation went something like this:

attendant: “Yes? May I help you?”

me: ”I just wanted to let you know that pump #9 isn’t working; it seems to be broken.”

attendant: (rolling eyes and sighing as if explaining something completely obvious) “You could move to a different pump.”

me: ”Well, yes, of course I’ll do that. But I thought you might like to know that it’s broken.”

attendant:  (Doesn’t say anything but stares back at me, blinking, with a look of bewilderment that clearly says that she thinks this is probably the stupidest thing she’s heard all week.)

me: ”Maybe you could call someone to fix it. Or at least put a sign up so no one else wastes their time on it.”

attendant:  (Now a look of concern like maybe she should call someone - like 911)  “Ooookay.” (She had decided to humor me and hope I went away.)

I went away, filled my car at a working pump and left, pondering on what the world was coming to.

How could the concept of taking some action seem so totally alien to this attendant?  Later I started thinking about the similarities this scenario had to other experiences I’ve had and heard about in other customer service situations.  How much additional aggravation - and cost - could be avoided if agents had the ability and the direction to post a notice when they discover something isn’t working?  The concept is at the core of Knowledge Centered Support’s (KCS) “flag it or fix it” doctrine.  Most agents want to be as helpful as possible or they wouldn’t have sought a job in customer service in the first place.  But too often they’re working under pressure to just get to the next call.  They may have even been trained that it’s someone else’s job to fix unanticipated issues and that they are only to handle items for which they have scripts ready made.  Call guides and scripts have their place but the bottom line is that customer service organizations won’t consistently see customer satisfaction rise and costs of repeatedly fielding the same issues go down until that most basic of KCS methodologies is adopted and agents can take a few seconds to alert their peers when they run into something new and, ideally, what they tried to resolve it.

Once upon a time there was a support agent, who worked very hard to keep his customers happy. He answered all their questions as best he could, but he just couldn’t keep up with the demand. So he launched a self-service site. At first he was happy to have his customers ask their questions online, but they began to call in even more - “give us more online answers” they said. It was no different than before: he needed to keep up with demand!

As he was fishing through the Internet looking for ideas a fishbowl icon appeared onscreen. He couldn’t help but click on it, and up popped a magical fish. “How can I help you?” asked the fish in the bowl. “My customers need more information”, said the agent. “Go back to your website, the content will be there”, said the magical fish. And sure enough, all the content he’d ever need was there - accurate, up to date, and easy to read! ‘Now I’m set!’, thought the agent.

No sooner had he the thought than the phone was ringing off the hook. “We can’t find anything!”, the customers cried. Sure enough, there was now so much content, even though it was good nobody could figure out which to use when. The agent clicked again on the fishbowl. “How can I help you?” asked the fish. “My customers can’t FIND anything!” said the agent. “Go back to your website, the information is now properly structured for findability”. Sure enough, now there were consistent headers, sub-sections, metadata and keywords for all his information. “NOW we’re cooking” he thought.

But soon the calls came pouring in again: “We don’t know HOW to find the right information” the customers cried. Back to the icon he went to supplicate the fish - “go to your website, you now have the proper tools”. And now the agent had great web pages, search features, browse trees, troubleshooting scripts and all manner of interactive tools. “THIS is the best!” he thought. And for a while, it was. Slowly the calls began to rise again: “This content’s getting out of date!” “I have new questions I need answered!” “Can’t you put more info for MY products online?” With a sigh the agent clicked for the fish once more. “I can’t keep up - even with the best content, great structure and perfect tools!” “Go to your website, your reporting now shows you your latest issues, gaps and most important information to add”. “Thank you, oh wise fish!” said the agent.

FINALLY the agent had it all: the right information, proper structure to put it into context, powerful tools to deliver a great customer experience, and measures to make sure he was constantly in synch. How much wiser he felt than when he had only thought one or two little things would satisfy his customers! From then on he never forgot what the fish (and his customers) had taught him: knowledge management is a rose of many petals…

First, apologies to Mel Brooks for partially stealing the line from his movie “Blazing Saddles“.

That is the truth - organizations that focused on customer loyalty are taking the wrong path to customer retention.  Mea culpa, I was one of those people who saw Customer Loyalty as the end-all for customer service.  If you could just achieve high levels of loyalty, the idea goes, you won’t have to worry about customer retention.  I have since learned through work I have done with several clients, that loyalty carries no reward with it.  There is no higher wallet-share, there is no higher likelihood of repeat purchases — there is nothing that foretells that Customer Loyalty helps an organization, and plenty to show otherwise.

Maria Palma wrote in her blog (Customers Are Always) a couple of days ago that Bargains and Deals may just trump customer loyalty.  I commented in that blog that loyalty only brings up your cost of customer maintenance, and it does not provide you with the benefits you expect.  Let me expand on that.  Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction are similar concepts: they rely on feelings that are not easy to manage or control, are expensive and cumbersome to measure appropriately, and they have not really shown any correlation between what they cost and the benefits they bring.  It is just another way to look at a customer feeling about a company, instead of a product or experience, that cannot be used to predict future behavior.

In the movie “Nothing in Common” Jackie Gleason plays an older salesperson who prides himself in having the best relationships with his clients.  They all admire him, respect him, and have great loyalty towards him.  Early in the movie, a brash young new VP of sales calls him into his office to discuss his performance.  He is truly impressed by the relationship he has with his clients, but when he looks at the performance he is dismayed.  Abysmal sales numbers have been trickling in for the last few years.  Turns out all his clients are now buying from the competition because they have better shipping policies and cheaper prices.  So much for loyalty, and for Jackie’s job.

I said it before, and I will say it again.  Don’t focus your metrics on your customer’s feelings.  Instead, focus on what matters. There are three things you can do to ignore customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and come out ahead:

1.  Build a solid infrastructure (technologies and processes) to deliver great customer experiences across channels.

2.  Extend it to include feedback, sales, marketing, operations, and to create end-to-end commendable customer experiences

3.  Ensure that the delivery of your experiences meet customer expectations, and use expectations to improve your delivery

Then, you won’t have to worry about loyalty, satisfaction, or anything like that.  Then you will be able to simply focus on doing the best possible job for your customers - and get rewarded for it.

Are you focusing on the right metrics? Are you doing the right thing?

Have we found what we’re looking for?  It’s similar to the well-known question, “Are we there yet?”.  You can’t answer the latter until you know where you’re going and you can’t answer the former until you know what it was you were searching for in the first place.  Of course I’m talking about knowledge management, specifically as it relates to customer support, in this case and not the meaning of life or a lost TV remote (by the way, if anyone has a tip on either of those please let me know).

What I’ve seen in my 13+ years of experience working with knowledge management tools is that there has been  a lot of attention given to search - the “search engine”, indexing, processing of queries and rendering search results - but very little if any thought to what is being searched for.  At this point you may very well be thinking or even poised over the keyboard to write the comment, “It’s obvious what we’re searching for - the answer to a question, the solution to a problem.”  Really?  That is, I agree, usually the goal of the search but it is not, can not be, literally what we’re searching for, the query that’s entered into the search field.  After all, if we knew the answer or solution well enough to search for it effectively in the first place, we wouldn’t be going to the support site or calling the support center in the first place except for the special case of just needing the details to an already identified solution.

Now I’m not attacking search or trying to downplay its importance in knowledge management and customer support.  But the best search engine imaginable will be of little use unless it is guided and targeted by consistent structure in the content.  This structure must go beyond “tagging” content with topics.  It’s not enough to say an article is “about Product X” or “about Installation”.  The particular questions that an article answers or the particular problems that a solution addresses must be explicitly listed.  Those lists must be given priority when searching because a match in such a list to a customer’s question or problem description will have the highest value.  Then the features and capabilities of a great search engine - for example, the ability to give a correct match to a query even when an alternate way of stating a concept is used - will have the most positive effect on the outcome of the search.

Think about how search is usually tested and evaluated.  The tester typically starts with knowledge of the content and has in mind a particular item that they want to try to retrieve.  Then they enter a variety of searches that more or less specificly match that item’s title or some text in its description.  If the item is ranked with a high score when the search is more specific, lower as the queries grow less specific and the item disappears from the search results list when there are no matching terms in the query then search is considered to be working properly.  Instead, think about testing search strictly from the perspective of the customer - What questions are they likely to ask?  What problems are they likely to describe?  Search should be considered successful only if items directly addressing the problem or specifically answering the question are ranked highest or are the only results returned.  Items that merely mention the query terms, even if they do so exactly - but do not specifically address the customer’s issue should be ranked lower if an item that does specifically address the issue is available.

It’s a higher standard of success and, yes, it takes more effort to markup articles for this approach but it is the only way to get better customer support results from a good search engine.

Lots have been said about customer satisfaction see at the end of this entry for entries on this blog about customer satisfaction).  Organizations struggle to get their customer satisfaction scores under control, they “need” or want to get them to a certain number (for some reason, 76% seems to be the magical number most of them are trying to reach today, slightly lower than the 80% we saw couple of years ago).

Tons of money, time, and resources are piled into these projects.  None of them realize the poor value of customer satisfaction as a stand-alone score.  I have been saying for quite some time that customer satisfaction does not rank very high in the list of metrics you should follow — yet, I get more and more requests everyday on how to calculate it and use it.  As a Public Service I am going to give you four secrets on how to score higher in customer satisfaction surveys:

1. Know who to survey. what happens if you ask someone who is disgruntled or unhappy? there goes your customer satisfaction score down the drain. Know your customers, segment them, and pick the segment that is likely to return higher scores.  Survey them.  In any customer base there is always a 8-10% that would give you high scores regardless of what you do, another 10-15% or so will never like you no matter what.  There is also 20-30% that don’t like to give low scores in surveys.  Find out who the first and last group are and try to survey them and not the others.

2. Select the words for your questions carefully. There are many books written on how to ask questions for surveys, comparing the different words you use and the results you get.  You see this being used in political surveys all the time: using support vs. agree, think vs. feel, and many more.  Truth is, how you write the question will bias the answer you get.  People react different when you use “think” instead of “feel”.  Psychologically, they feel that feelings are more private and their reaction is to guard their feelings by lowering scores so you don’t know how they feel.  They tend to give you higher scores when you ask for their thoughts.

3. Change the scale for your metrics. Feedback “experts” will tell you that using smaller scales (e.g. from one through five)  will give you less granularity into your answers.  It will also give you higher scores.  Customers are not inherently out to give you poor scores, but the more choices they have the more likely they are to split hairs.  In smaller scales it is easier to get to an 80% of satisfaction, since that is only 2 out of 5 scores, than in a larger scale where it is 3 out of 10.  Using numbers instead of words (such as agree or disagree with their different variations) will give you higher scores; call it human nature, but we don’t like to agree.

4. Coerce higher scores. If you offer a prize or a drawing as a result of the feedback your customers provide, you are bound to have higher scores.  Respondents have the feeling that if they are “nicer” to you they have a higher chance of winning.  They believe that if they give you lower scores you will throw away their entry and they won’t qualify for the contest or drawing.  This is mostly because they don’t understand the value of the feedback they provide, and the benefit for them of being honest: they are after the money.

What is that? Manipulation?  Absolutely, no questions about it.  See why you should not use this metric? It is not going to improve your relationships with your customer, guide your customer service changes appropriately, or make you more liked by your customers.  Actually, if you rely on this metric to guide your operations you are likely to loose more customers this way.  Use with caution, good measure, and within a metrics program that looks at other metrics to make sure you don’t over-rely on it.

Are you still using customer satisfaction as a metric? Did I convince you otherwise?

Links to Customer Satisfaction Entries

http://evergance.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/the-one-two-combo-to-end-customer-satisfaction/

http://evergance.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/the-end-of-customer-satisfaction/

Corporations must embrace community content. Your customers are talking about you right now, and you need to be part of this conversation. If you don’t, you won’t understand what is going on and this lack of knowledge will hurt you. You will also be surprised to see a quantifiable return for investing in community content

What does this community content do for you?

• It will help you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. Your customers can vote on product enhancements, suggest pervasive issues to fix, and in this way influence your roadmap. The result is a product that is more in-line with your customer’s requirements
• It can help you with product support by allowing customers to help one another via customer-generated content for knowledgebases, wikis and discussion boards. Jupiter reported in 2006 that “Customer report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail”
• It can help you during a sales cycle. Communities allow you to identify enthusiastic customers and you can use them to persuade prospects in purchasing your product
• It can help you in your marketing efforts. You can use the online buzz and conversations with customers to promote your brand or products

More importantly, community content has a real return on investment (ROI)

• It reduces the cost of creating content for your corporate knowledgebase – and in translating it into all the languages that your customer base requires. You should calculate the internal documentation, and localization costs for generating this content and compare it to the costs of harvesting community generated content
• It reduces the need for customers to call in for answers, shifting them to cheaper channels
• It ensures that the majority or product questions that customers have are addressed. What is the opportunity cost of an unhappy customer who repeatedly doesn’t find the answer that he is looking for in renewal or repurchase revenue?
• It ensures more satisfied customers. Compare your scores on customer satisfaction surveys before and after leveraging community generated content. Look at answers to questions like “would you recommend the products”, “would you repurchase products”, “how satisfied are you with support”, “what is your impression of our image or brand”
• It ensures that pervasive product defects are addressed, lowering the cost of support calls and patches. Calculate the number of patches before and after leveraging community advice on product direction and issues to be addressed

Are you thinking about the ROI of community content? How are you calculating its impact to your business?