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  Kate Leggett 02:21:50 pm on July 2, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Customer Experience, experience management, Web 2.0

  Breaking down the walls – a new approach to customer service

  This week, KANA announced its new ‘Service Experience Management’ platform, and so far the early reviews have been really positive (see here and here and here). What’s exciting about KANA 10 is that it lets customer service managers take control of the service experience by putting tools in their hands for them to be able to craft and deploy the service experience that they want their agents (or customers) to follow. Magic huh? Not really! KANA gives the service managers WYSIWYG tools to assemble a customer service process flow. The building blocks include, for example, standard customer service actions like “send email”, “search knowledgebase”, “open a case”, as well as customer specific steps such as “look up order history” or “track a package.”

  The magic of this tool is that as the service manager is building the process flow, the desktop for every process step is being created automatically with no IT involvement. Each process step presents to the agent the exact contextual information that they need at that particular point in servicing the customer. It’s not a mashup of say 30 different customer service applications – it’s targeted information pushed to the agent to give him the exact tools that he needs to help the customer out.

  The underlying technology is a co-mingling of KANA’s customer service product history in the ERMS, case management and knowledge space with IBM’s service oriented architecture and BPM know-how and even some cool Web development tools from WaveMaker.

  What this product does, is break down the walls between interaction-centric customer service and BPM that is typically found in the back office – it’s for the first time bringing process and governance to the front office. Judging by how customers are looking to use KANA 10, it’s also going to break down many of the traditional barriers between service and sales and even marketing as well. We think the advantages to this approach are numerous. For example, it cuts down on agent training time as agents are guided through the right process, instead of being left to ALT-Tab through all the applications they have open on their desktop. It helps with compliance to company policy (think about the cost of not following SOX or HIPAA regulations). It helps streamline the service experience, cutting costs and improving satisfaction. And it certainly will help boost up-sell and drive loyaly as customers get answers faster, and are treated consistently regardless of which channel or department they initially contact.

  And there’s much more to the product, like predictive analytics that help monitor SLAs in real time and built-in middleware to easily link in existing customer data stores and applications. Email me to organize a demo, or learn more about it. Or click here for a flash introduction to KANA 10 for more details.

  Happy 4th of July!

   
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  Esteban Kolsky 07:00:40 am on April 13, 2009 | 5 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer first, customer loyalty, customer service, experience management, loyalty, Voice of the Customer

  Customer First? or Customer Only?

  Been reading a lot lately, trying to get caught up after spending so much time in the trenches doing some real work.  Almost everywhere I turn I read about “Customer First”.  Putting the customer first, or ahead of everything else you do.  Why, there is even an entity in the UK that is called Customer First to ensure UK organizations remain true to their customers.  Closer to home, Continental Airlines has been talking about the great results of their Customer First initiative, as well as Northwest Airlines (which merged with Delta recently, another Customer First organization) and even an organization as distinct as the City of San Antonio has gotten on board.

  With all these people you’d think that customer first is all it takes to succeed – but I would like to bring up a more interesting point: it is not about putting the customer first, it is about making the customer the ONLY reason for your existence.  Putting the customer first means that there are other things to distract you from your commitment to your customer.  Making the customer the only thing means that their needs will supersede all others.  It may seem a trivial difference, and hair-splitting semantically speaking, but think about it for a second…

  Do you want to commit all your resources to making your customers happy – or just the ones you can spare?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 02:04:52 am on January 25, 2009 | 5 | # |
  Tags: customer service, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer experience management, enterprise feedback management, surveys, feedback, Voice of the Customer, Experience, Customer Experience, customer satisfaction surveys, customers

  Surveys Done Right – Part 2 – Customer Satisfaction

  I have been dreading writing this entry since I came up with the idea for the series (have you read part 1 yet?).  It is not that I don’t know what to say, or that I don’t want to do it.  It is simply that my fear of providing “sample” survey that will later become “real surveys” for all people without customization or personalization really, really takes hold in this arena.  I mean, who has not had to write a customer satisfaction survey in the past?  It is probably the most used, misunderstood, and poorly implemented of all surveys out there.

  If we go by the surveys that I have seen, customer satisfaction surveys should only have one question since that is what most people care about anyways: “overall, how satisfied are you with us?”.  It seems that if the customer says they are overall satisfied then there are no problems.  Further, as long as we get a sufficient number of customers to say they are satisfied (somewhere in the mid-70s to mid-80s), and the number remains consistent or (gasp) even grows a little  we are perfectly set from the customer experience, loyalty, and satisfaction point of view.  After all, if 80% of people are satisfied – isn’t that good?  Well, yes and no.  I wrote about how you can ensure you will get a 90% of more in customer satisfaction surveys in the past (second most popular post in this site).  It is possible to score high – even increase your scores, and not be doing a good job.

  So, before we jump into the description of the survey and the sample questions (and before I beg you again to personalize and customize them), let’s make sure we understand one thing about this survey.  This “sample” survey is not intended to tell you how many people like you.  It is intended to, historically, provide a trending line of your customer satisfaction overall – but more important it is intended to give you real answers to partial satisfaction questions (e.g. were satisfied with the speed of the answer?) in accordance to your strategy (you do have one of those right?).  Finally, consider that I used these questions for customers that have customer satisfaction as a key metric and part of the insight.  I still believe that customer satisfaction is too flawed as a metric to be used reliably (also read this one), but a trending report cannot hurt – as it wouldn’t with any other metric.

  Too many words to get here, so here are the the essentials of a customer satisfaction survey (part 3 of this series, best practices for writing surveys – stay tuned!):

  • First, the most important part – KISS (keep it short and simple).  I use the rule of 5+/-2 (five, plus or minus two), with five being the magic number, and three and seven the limits.
  • Second, you MUST personalize the questions to the specific items you want to measure satisfaction on – which is why there are some questions below to use, but they may not fit what you are looking for.  Tie your questions to your strategy
  • Third, send them out every business cycle (varies by industry and function), and make sure you use panel management tools so you won’t keep sending them to the same person over and over (we know what they think – no one should get more than one a year), and that you don’t send them to people who won’t respond.
  • Fourth, statistical significance is great for market research or election day polls, not so much on customer satisfaction.  Make sure you get a large enough number to make it varied (I suggest at least between 3-4% of the population) and I am talking responses – not invitations.
  • Fifth, make sure you use the same questions the next time you send them out (yes, exactly the same wording) so you can keep historical trends.  Remember, customer satisfaction is an OK metric to keep as long as you use it as a historical trending metric, not a KPI

  Those are the basic rules for these surveys, but more will arise as you begin to implement them.  Of course, best practices for EFM and Surveys apply, so those are to be considered as well.  Now, without further ado, the list of questions I’d like to propose for your consideration:

  1. Overall, what is your satisfaction with Company XYZ? (hate this question, but it is an easy one to answer)

  Now, this question is to be answered in a numerical scale, I favor a scale of 1-4, you can use whatever works for your objectives.  A scale of 1-10 is popular with people who endorse NPS (Net Promoter Score), but I don’t buy into that.  A different way to ask this questions, which I prefer, is:

  1. Overall, would you say you are satisfied with Company XYZ?

  This question is answered with a simple YES-NO.  Why do I like this question? Two things, first the wording predisposes the respondent to say yes (which is a positive score).  Second, you can setup your scripts to react in the case of a negative answer – and since the question predisposes the respondent to say yes, when someone says NO they really mean it.

  From the following questions, pick some of the ones that reflect your objectives, vision, strategy, and purpose for this survey.  Remember, personalization and customization are highly encouraged – so if these don’t fit your needs go ahead and change them accordingly.

  2.1.  What is your satisfaction with Company XYZ web site / self-service solution?

  2.2. What is your satisfaction with Company XYZ representatives on the phone?

  2.3. What is your satisfaction with Product ABC from Company XYZ?

  2.4. What is your satisfaction with Company XYZ return policies?

  2.5. What is your satisfaction with Company XYZ use of email for customer service?

  Well, you get the idea.  Keep in mind that how you ask the question is going to depend on the answer, and see Q1 above to see some examples of different ways to write the questions.  Needless to say, again, the questions you chose for the second part are related to your specific, strategic goals and are bound to change for your survey.

  This is the longest post I wrote since we started this blog, but I wanted to make sure it was clear and explicit.  There is, of course, lots more to read and write about customer feedback, customer service, customer satisfaction… well, anything dealing with customers.  You will read more and we move along – but how do you like this post?  Interesting? Are you using it?  Please let me know your thoughts and experiences… and thanks for reading!

   

• Esteban Kolsky 01:16:29 am on December 24, 2008 | 1 | # |
  Tags: 2009, customer centric, Customer Experience, LinkedIn, predictions, process, process improvement, process management, social media

  I Spy, I Spy with my Little Eye… a Very Interesting 2009

  I have been feeling odd, weird the last couple of months.  Was not sure why, until I finally realized – I had not written my predictions for 2009!  Seven years writing predictions, year after year, it becomes second nature.  You have to figure out what will happen next year, write it down, publish it, and then become thoroughly humiliated 12 months later when you review your predictions.  Or, in my case, become satisfied of the wonderful job you did predicting the year 12 months before (yeah, right).

  This is going to be a very interesting year.  There are three major forces converging:

  1. Despite what you think or believe, we are deep in the middle of a global recession and no one knows when we will come out of this one.  The effect that this recession will have on all our lives, and our jobs, is not quite clear.  One thing is for sure – there is a financial consideration that will rule most of the decisions you will make in 2009 – regardless of other considerations.
  2. The role of IT in the organization has changed dramatically in the last few years.  While ten and 15 years ago you would have been very hard pressed to find any organization willing to place their IT above any other necessary function – or even call it a necessary function – we are now facing a world run by geeks (pardon the expression, run by technologists).  In addition, the value of IT in the organization has been proven time and time again (even if you choose not to ignore those 5-year, 50-million dollar CRM implementations to nowhere) as critical for the better working of the organization.  Finally, as the amount of data that needs to be processed increased by leaps and bounds with the complexity of the operations of most organizations, IT is not the place where you are likely to see cuts.
  3. Customers are driving decisions. Yes, we have said this many times in the past, almost to make it meaningless… but the social revolution is changing things.  Customers are in control, and they are realizing that.  They know they can make changes happen by blogging, tweetering, and expressing their views.  And they are keen on taking that forward.

  So, where does a business turn in 2009 when it has to use less money, rely on IT, and bow to customers?  There are two things that will happen in my opinion, and both make for a great and interesting year.

  The Corralling of Social Media. Ah social media, the last frontier.  The place where new technologies, at least these days, seem to go.  This is a conglomerate of many things (blogs, tweeter, social networks) and most organizations have taken the blind approach to it.  Either they ignore it or they try something without a real strategy or purpose.  The idea is that it will somehow profile itself better as time goes by, and more organizations will be able to figure it out.  After all, that is the way it has happened so far – right?  Well, this time is different.  See, in all those previous technologies we saw time being an aid since the organization had to discover the technology, figure out how to use it, and then make decisions about implementation.  This time, it is the users who are driving the progress.  Your customers have already adopted blogs, and communities, and social networks, and tweeter and all those technologies – they are now waiting for you to join them.  See, this about truly working with your users – not just saying it.  You dive into the social ether and take charge – and there are rewards.  All you have to do is have a purpose and a strategy.  This is what is going to happen in 2009 – a very large majority of organizations will figure out their purpose and create a strategy for social media.

  The Real Improvement.Really, we are going to change for the better – and that is not just another promise!  I promise (no pun intended, but well achieved).  See, we are getting to the point where we are constantly telling clients how we will change for the better – yet, we never get around to it.  The focus on the organization above the customer (away from customer-centric and customer-driven) means that we will only push so far in improvements, but they tend not to cause a change in either the corporation’s behavior or the customer experience.  And that is not real change, it is lip service.  Smart organizations are beginning to see that delivering on promises to customers, monitoring their needs and providing for them truly pays off by making customers more loyal and resilient to competitors.  The return on not having to regain customers (read my previous blog series), or get new ones to replace exiting ones is invaluable.   Now, in 2009 we will see more and more organizations become smarter about their processes, about their customers’ needs, and about their execution — they will become smarter, flexible, and will truly improve their processes to match their customers’ needs.

  And one more thing.  I keep getting asked whether 2009 will bring drastic cuts across IT, how deep they will be, whether they will be equal to the ones following the Internet bubble explosion.  I truly, honestly don’t know.  However, I know what I learned in seven years at Gartner – two make a pattern, three make a trend.  That means that if any data item is repeated three times or more, then it is likely to be the answer.  Why am I bringing this up?  One of the most valuable services Gartner offers their clients is as a repository of information.  By talking to vendors, providers, consultants, and end-users we get the truth about the market.  Alas, if my conversations with customers, colleagues, and my research through the last few months proves true (and I am way past three similar data items by n0w), then projects with true return on investment (that means, impacting the bottom line directly) will continue to be funded for as long as possible – regardless of the department or process they support.

  What did we learn in the last downturn that is proving valuable this time? That life continues and you have to continue funding your mission-critical processes.  In other words, make sure the projects you undertake next year have an impact on the bottom line and document (through continuous improvement, measurement and metrics) before, during, and after.  I know that is sounds simple and basic – but are you doing it?

  What do you think?  Am I wrong?  Of course, I don’t think so… but would love to hear what you have to say… did I miss something?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 12:11:17 am on November 14, 2008 | 5 | # |
  Tags: customer service, CRM, customer experience management, Web 2.0, Communities, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Voice of the Customer, Customer Experience, CEM, community

  Customer Service is Dead — Long Live Community Service!

  I have had lots of requests lately dealing with social media, and how to make good use of this for Customer Service and CRM – even broadening the scope into the entire enterprise.  Of course, this is related to the “explosion” in twitter, plurk, Facebook, blogging and related tools.  But, is there something else there? is there value in implementing communities?

  Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  This is the future of customer service.

  I have been working with communities, back then called collaborative customer service or forums, for some eight years.  Of course, back then we had little to go on – some forums, communities were nascent at best -  and we could not see how it would work best.  I wrote about it as the intermediate step between Customer Interaction Hub and Secret Customer Service.  Got some interest, did some strategy work, small lab-based deployments but almost no one at that time even attempted to take on it fully.

  Fast forward to today: communities are the rage – an integral part of Web 2.0. We still don’t have a clear path or a well defined purpose, but lots more is happening.  Now if the perfect time to get started – once the concept of community service becomes mainstream (12-18 months from now) it will move very, very fast for you to play catch up.  You can do this now and be prepared.

  The benefits of implementing community service are astronomical.  There are plenty of case studies (Mercury Interactive, Cisco, Microsoft, and more) that have moved either part or their entire support structure to communities or forums and have increased their customer satisfaction, reduced their costs of customer maintenance – even found new ways to increase revenue!  All this by switching from traditional customer service models to community service.  So, how do you make the move?  Three things to get started:

  1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people.  If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed.  This is independent of topic, theme, method of operation or anything else.  Plenty of failures exist of communities launched without checking with customers first. Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure.  Advertise it. Make it attractive. Populate it with good content. Commit time and resources to grow it.  then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice.  Sounds simple; it is simple.

  2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them.  If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you.  If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

  3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free.  Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go.  Think Wikipedia and self-regulating content.  It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom.  Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized.  Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

  Final word of advice.  If you read my blog on customer experience management you know that I will advise you to integrate your community into your CEM strategy.  Yet, I will also advice you to make sure that you treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways.

  Are you working with communities? How is it going?  Do you see yoursefl replacing customer service with community service?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 07:43:59 am on November 7, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: CEM, customer acquisition costs, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, experiences, interactions

  It is All About the Experience, You Know?

  While I was at Gartner I wrote a lot about Customer Experience Management (CEM).  I mean a whole lot.  I co-wrote a guide to doing CEM with Ed Thompson (if you have a Gartner account, you just have to read what he writes – and if you can make it to one of his presentations, you will be a better professional for it – promise).  I wrote lots of individual research notes, presentations, case studies, lots and lots and lots.  I spent a very long time talking to vendors and end-users about it, making sure they understood what it was, how to approach it, and how to succeed at it.  You see, the little secret that few people know is that Enterprise Feedback Management, Surveys, Analytics and all that other stuff is not more than a sub-set of CEM.  Without Feedback, there would be no CEM – alas, without CEM Feedback would be as dull as… well, an air sandwich (come on, don’t make me explain it — two slices of bread, nothing in between… i was raised in Argentina, what do you want?).

  Because everything you do with feedback, actually let me take that back.  Everything you do with your customers is about the experience.  There is no other way around it.  I was reminded of that this week, as I was doing some research into Social Media, SOA, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 (yes, we already have that), and Web 4.0 (that one is mine, not yet defined formally – working on it).  All these wonderful technologies will do absolutely nothing to improve your relationships with your customers if you don’t put them to good use – that is, use them to build a better experience.  After all, it is all about the experience – you know?

  So, how do you get started in the world of CEM? First, repeat after me: CEM is not a technology (pause for you to repeat), CEM is not a tool (pause), there are no CEM Vendors.  Go back and repeat it again.  Good.  That is the secret of your success (no, not like Michale J Fox).  You will, as you embark in CEM, receive no help from software, hardware, or vendors despite their promises.  You can, if you want, ask for assistance from your friendly consultant (say, me), or do some research (work with Gartner – trust me on this, Ed Thompson and Jim Davies are superb).  You can try some of the “vendors” and “software” available for CEM (Google lists 2.9 MM entries for software, 250K for vendors) but trust me – there is nothing there for you.

  Second, focus on the three Ps of CEM. Yes, the famous People, Process, and Politics.  As you develop your strategy for CEM (you already knew this was coming, it is not software or hardware, it has to be an enterprise-wide strategy – right?) remember that you will have to change your processes, train your people, and affect your politics.  The principles of Change Management will be your best friend, and prior experience with enterprise-wide projects your best ally.  If you don’t have any of these, don’t start – failure is at hand.  Make sure you know what you are getting into as you start working towards your goal.

  Third, remember that CEM is an iterative process.  There is no end to it, just steps towards an improved experience.  Once you conquered the first set of processes, the first level of complex integration between interactions you will begin to receive feedback from your customers – that is how you know it is iterative.  Once you get this responses, you get to start again and continue to improve your (now better) experience.

  Of course, I’d be remiss if I did not mention ROI for this investment.  Because, as you work improving your experiences you will need to show the return on the investment.  There may be no vendors or software associated with it, but it still require changes to process, training, potentially some EFM software if you don’t already have it, same with analytics and business processes software and systems.  There is a cost associated with it — and your CFO wants to see the return on the investment.  So, how do you prove the return in your investment?

  Well, that is left for the next entry… but until then, do some homework and read my previous series on cost of customer acquisition and cost of customer maintenance.  Trust me, you will need them to go through the ROI of CEM.

  Are you ready to get into CEM? What are you doing right now with it?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 07:00:49 am on October 27, 2008 | 13 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer acquisition, Customer Experience, customer relationship management, customer retention, customer satisfaction, LinkedIn, loyalty

  Is it Really More Expensive to Get New Customers?

  I don’t have the answer to this question mostly because it changes from industry to industry and organization to organization.  However, the question is valid.  As long as I have been in business (including time in college) I’ve heard a statement that goes something like “it costs [insert favorite number here] more times to get a new customer as it does to retain one”.  I have repeated it, as well as probably every one else in the world, as an unchangeable mantra of business. There have been studies that have confirmed this for different organizations or industries.

  Yet, in all the work I have done in the last few years with plenty of organizations, no one has taken the time to make sure this did apply to their business model.  I can probably count in two hands the number of organizations that have used accurate customer acquisition costs and customer maintenance cost when making decisions on CRM, CEM, and Loyalty programs.  I prefer not to tell you how many of those calculations were updated periodically as business changed.

  Even though we prefer to say it is cheaper to retain customers, it may not be.  A few things to consider.

  Customer Acquisition Costs.  No matter how much you try, you won’t have a single acquisition cost model for your organization.  Each time you generate new business, you will have incurred different expenses. Where did the leads come from and how much did they cost? How did we reach out to prospects? What were the costs of the campaign? How much did we really spend internally – including training, systems alterations and customization – attempting to get new customers?  Each time you run a campaign the assumptions will change, and the calculations will change.  What if the prospects were already part of another campaign — are your going to add the costs for both campaigns??  It gets messy and complicated really fast, and without those calculations you don’t have a real cost of acquisition per customer.

  Customer Maintenance Costs.   I have never met anyone who did a good job of calculating customer maintenance costs.  There are so many variables for each customer – even for each segment – that most organizations take a more “democratic” approach: the total cost of customer service operations divided  by the total number of customers.  Calculations should be done at the individual level, and consider each interaction, request, inquiry and final disposition for each interaction in relation to each customer.  While it is true that some customers will be virtually maintenance free, there are many others that are not.  Each time a new channel or service program is added, each time a customer contacts the organization for service or support the calculation should change. You cannot assign an average cost for all customers or you will miss the diamonds in the rough.

  Finally, once you have your customer acquisition and maintenance cost for each customer you must use them to make your on service plans.  How?  We will talk about that in more detail in future blog entries… stay tuned!

  Let me ask you first… what do you think of individual customer calculations? Are they worth doing?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 03:28:55 am on August 15, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer relationship management, customer service, Experience, feedback, Feedback Management, voice, Voice of the Customer

  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…

   

• Esteban Kolsky 06:57:02 am on July 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: automation, cost control, cost savings, CRM, Customer Experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, satisfaction, service

  Customer demand more – more features, more service, more representatives.  You look at what you can do within your budgeting constraints and probably want to start crying.  Not much more you can do, or afford to do; least of all, bring in more people.  Certainly, other corporations are doing better than you – right?

  Well, No. Everyone is asking the same question: how can we grow the number of customers without increasing the number of representatives or the cost for customer maintenance.  Alas, leading corporations began to realize in the last 12 months what it takes to achieve this difficult balance.  Hire more customer service representatives.  Lots more,,, like millions of them.

  That’s right.  You can get as many more customer service representatives as you want – for free.  Yes, FREE.  Impossible you say?  Unlikely you express? (OK, I ran out of synonyms without checking the thesaurus).  Nay.  Easier than you think.  The answer is simple: empower your customers to become customer service representatives.  There are three steps to get there:

  First, find the right interactions.  Comb your logs, ask your agents.  What is the largest number of interactions that your customers could solve on their own? Changing an address? Establishing new service? Getting a refund?  In the early days of web self-service, AT&T Wireless (the old one, not this one) leaped ahead of their competitors by offering the ability to claim credits for dropped calls automatically through a web interface.  The saved lots of time and money and (more important) lots of CSRs time to take on other tasks.  No interaction is too complex or too simple if you can figure out how to automate it.

  Which brings us to step two. Automate, entirely and completely, the chosen interactions.  That means there is no human check at the end of the process to ensure it is correct.  You write all the business rules and exceptions for processing, feed them into a rules server, test them.  Then flip the switch.  The computer will now handle those interactions for you – and kick out the exceptions you want or need.  Your only job is to monitor the results periodically and tighten the rules and exceptions as you go along.  Can you imagine the savings if you deflect all those interactions from the phone?

  Right about now your question is – will people use it?  Well, here is where it depends on you – our third step. Advertise, advertise, advertise.  “Force” customers to use the system (that means make it simple, available, and advertise it all over).  Make it a service differentiator.  Make it part of your brand.  Let them know the benefits, incentivize them to use it.  Make sure it performs flawlessly each time – and that necessary handling of exceptions is above average for speed and satisfaction (i.r. err on the side of the customer).

  Guess what?  You just hired millions of new CSRs towork for FREE.  What do you think?

   
• 

  jchmaj 08:00:51 am on July 8, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, Customer Support, Experience, KM, knowledge, Knowledge Management, support

  Most support organizations have resources related to knowledge management: webmaster, KB administrator, and content manager among others.  They are the ingredients of a well managed program, not the recipe for success.  Ask yourself a few simple questions to expose where you may need to improve:

  • Who OWNS all the content on internal and external knowledge bases?
  • Who UPDATES all that content? (Not necessarily the same!)
  • What is the process for communicating new product information forward to support, both prior to major launches and during the ongoing support life cycle?
  • Who owns the schema (metadata, keywords, etc.) for all content? Is there someone responsible that it all fits together when it hits the search and browse websites?
  • Who ensures all the content available is relevant, up to date, and consumable?
  • What is the agreed-upon mechanism for resolving conflicts between new and old content?

  If the answer to any of these is “no”, “I’m not sure” or “we figure that out on a case by case basis” then you’re probably spending too much time managing your KM initiative without really managing your program!  Count up the number of meetings, disconnects, customization and one-off projects you need to keep things in line.  You will see that coordinating content, schema and tools REQUIRES time even if your organization chooses to manage these areas as separate functions.  The results of not managing your program are at best incremental, time-consuming improvements, at worst a continual stream of errors, adjustments and just plain bad user experience for your sites.

  Developing an effective KM Program starts by thinking about the WHOLE objective: a great user experience, driven by an intuitive UI, effective user interactions, and quality content.  With that as your guiding goal, consider organizing around the core processes, including:

  • Identifying, prioritizing and normalizing content from across the organization to a common, high-quality user experience
  • Managing policies and communications from the ‘front’ (websites & tools) to the ‘back’ (product and content groups), and all constituents in between, to achieve a common set of rules and standards around how information is developed and organized.
  • Establishing a Steering Committee or Center of Excellence that can serve as a clearinghouse for all ongoing questions and issues around content ownership, commitments, policy and deadlines
  • Developing a ‘product life cycle’ view of information, that engages everyone from products, support, and IT to commit to a common process for evolving KM tools and capabilities

  A KM Program is not a ‘nice to have’ – you have one already, the question is:  do you know it?  And if you don’t, what is it costing your business in time, effort, money and customers?  There IS a better way, just commit to KM as a critical business process and the approach becomes clear.

  Are you committed?

   

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