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  Mark Angel 10:25:08 am on October 22, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer service, experience management

  The Ants Go Marching

  If ants have to choose between two unequal length paths from a source of food back to their colony, they ultimately always choose the shortest, easiest one. Here’s how it works:

  1. Ants run around the colony, more or less randomly, looking for food.

  2. If an ant finds food, it returns back to the colony, and leaves on the ground a scent trail.

  3. This scent trail attract nearby ants, which will follow this path and strengthen the scent of the trail, attracting more ants, strengthening the trail…

  Ant colony optimization can be analogous to customer service. Think of how customer service agents answer customers’ questions. They each have their own style of interacting with the information at hand. Typically, they hunt and peck through disparate, unintegrated data, knowledge and back-end systems in a way that is unique to each of them. This often results in inconsistent, inefficient or, worse, incorrect service.

  To avoid such consequences, companies must leverage technology to create process flows that guide agents through the same method of discovery. Think back to how ants find food – no single ant finds the best route back to the colony alone, yet a collection of ants are successful in doing so. And positive (stronger scent trail) and negative (weaker scent trail) feedback throughout this quest is used to guide this optimization.

  Imagine if you had the ability to design not only a single customer service process that led agents to the correct answer to a customer question, but several variations of this process. Take, for example, varying the step in a service process in which the identity of a customer is verified, or when a specific knowledge article is presented to the agent.

  Ideally, companies measure KPIs at each leg of this process. These steps are akin to the resistance that ants experience at each leg of their journey. By uncovering the strongest segments of each process, companies essentially rely on basic ant colony optimization techniques to determine the best customer service processes.

   
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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 03:22:06 pm on April 7, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CEM, CRM, customer experience management, customer service, experience management, Self-Service, Technology of Business

  How is that “new” customer service going?

  Some time ago I wrote about this “new” customer service brought on by the economic downturn.  I said back then that these moves were not based on core, sound principles and thus they would not last long.  It takes three weeks for people, and between six and eight weeks for corporations, to make a habit stick (think new years resolutions and the time when they affirmed or broken – or rather, how your gym seems to be more empty in Februay than it was in January).  We are a little bit past that time now — how is that new customer service working?

  My perspective? I started seeing some complains come across twitter for customer service problems that had gone away and are now coming back, and I began to hear again from our customers about overloading their systems, how they can reduce the costs of supporting clients with longer handle times, and whether it is a good idea to have those automated and electronic systems put back into action.  In other words, we are going back to normal.  Just as Will Smith said in “I, Robot” when they learned that the robots that were supposed to serve are actually trying to take over the world — “Somehow I told you so just doesn’t say it”.

  Remember, to make changes stick you need to change the core – not just the surface… What are you seeing out there? Am I wrong?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 06:52:12 am on February 19, 2009 | 3 | # |
  Tags: CRM, culture, customer service, enterprise feedback management, Experience, experience management, feedback, global surveys, satisfaction, surveys, Voice of the Customer

  Writing Global Surveys for Success, Not Failure

  Interesting title, don’t you think?

  Most companies that take on writing global surveys have failed at it.  Some of them did it once and the never again.  Others are still doing it wrong but since the results they get are what they want, they won’t change for fear of actually finding what their customers think of them.

  This is a touchy topic since it is very easy to fall into stereotypes and make generalizations about entire countries or regions, and end up looking like a bigot.  Which, I am not.  Thus, I am not going to point to any specific country or region around the world and say “these people do this” or “those people don’t understand that”.  Instead I am going to point at the more general problems and trends, and we can later work together if you are interested in a specific country or region.

  Four key things to remember when doing global surveys:

  1. Some people are polite.  Some cultures are too polite to really tell you what you want to know.  The best you will get is a polite response saying things are fine, when they are not.  This means you will learn to write the questions in different ways for those groups, and you will use different scales.  I know of at least one case where a client of mine with a 90% satisfaction score had an attrition ration in excess of 26%!  How did we solve it?  We figured out what questions to ask and what were the best scales to find out what customers really meant.  Trial and error works great in these situations.

  2. Some people are brutal.  On the other hand, some people are brutal.  You ask for feedback? no problem, you stink and your product is so bad it hurts me to use it… just like everybody else and all their products!  The key in this situation is to put things in proper perspective.  Sure, the brutal criticism may, just may, be well warranted – but chances are that everybody is getting similar feedback.  So, take the time to put it into perspective.  Try to benchmark your performance against your competitors or even your partners.  Work with a local service provider that can help you understand how your ratings rank in comparison, and work to improve your processes and products, not your scores so much.

  3. Languages are all different, literal translations are bad.  Asking someone if they are satisfied with the bad behavior they received from the last interaction is not a good question to lead off a survey.  Alas, I have seen it.  When you construct questions in one language, literal translations sometimes change the meaning of the question in a different language.  The more diverse the languages and differing their grammars and syntax rules, the worse it is.  Do it right, craft new questions with similar meaning in different questions.  However, they don’t have to ranked or rated the same way, nor be the exact same question – why?  See point 4.

  4. Reporting should be detailed, not generalized. Here is the biggest thing about doing global surveys, which I hope you gather from what i said before: each survey should target specifics for each region or country, and as such should be reported separately.  So, even if you use the same questions and scales, do not mix the results of two different locales in the reporting.  Let me say it again – do not mix results.  You probably already knew that, or probably figured out from the earlier points I made – so I won’t preach it again.  OK, just one more time – don’t mix results from different places.  Why? two words: skewed results.

  Bottom Line: write your surveys for each region or country in the region or country, using local resources.  Don’t cross-tabulate as scores don’t mean the same in different parts of this world. And make sure you report for each region or country, not across all of them in a single, global score.

  Need more? Got something to add?  That is what comments are for… feel free to let me know what you think.

   

• Esteban Kolsky 08:12:24 pm on November 20, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CEM, CRM, customer acquisition, customer acquisition costs, customer experience management, customer service, Experience, experience management, financials, roi

  ROI for CEM? NWJ (No Way Jose)!

  First things first: I don’t have a set formula for calculating a ROI on CEM.  Are you still with me?  Good… because what I do have is better than a formula – I have a method.  A method we used several times before, and it has proven to be successful.  So, if you are interested in knowing what you can get out of adopting CEM, read on.

  First, want to make sure you did your homework.  In my previous post on experience management I told you to read the three notes I wrote on Customer Acquisition and Maintenance costs (just in case, #1, #2, and #3 here for your enjoyment).  I am going to assume that you did read them going forward.

  The reason I am referring to those posts is that the formula you created for your customer acquisition and customer maintenance are going to be critical for your ROI calculation for CEM.  Two caveats: first, it is not possible to quantify quality – which means if you improve your experience you cannot put a number to it (as in saying “I am going to improve my experience by 10%”, or “I will improve my interactions with customers by 20%”).  Second, your mileage will vary – what works for one of you may not work for someone else.  That is why I have a method, not a formula for this.

  Now, let’s focus on the ROI of from adopting a CEM strategy for your organization (you do remember this is an enterprise-wide implementation of a strategy – right?).  By creating better experiences you stand to get three benefits: reduced number of interactions (happy customers that have what they need don’t use customer service), shorter interactions (if they put off calling because they don’t like the experience, they may have 3-4 complex problems instead of a simple one), and reduced costs for training (the same systems that have better information for your customers will be used by your agents – greatly enhancing their powers with less training).

  How do you decide which ones of these benefits apply to you?  Well, this is part where it depends.  If you are going to improve your customers’ experiences by offering more channels and more automation, you will have a reduced number of interactions (you may have some in other channels, but they would probably be cheaper).  If you are shortening the processing time, you are more likely to get easier and shorter interactions as well as fewer of them (customers won’t call just to “check” status).  If you are implementing more automation, better knowledge management or better access to back-office systems, then your training costs and interaction times should be greatly reduced.  You have to determine what makes sense for the actions you’d be taking.

  Then, there is also the issue of increased revenues.  Depending on how you improve you experience, part of it may be offer management for specific situations, or the ability to increase revenue recognition, or even the ability to create new services and revenue sources.  All those should also be considered – and you are probably tired of me saying this – but they cannot be identified until you design your new experiences.

  One final point on return on investment: if you make customer experience management part of your branding, as it should be, you will see that your customer acquisition costs (again, your calculation as detailed in my previous post) are going to be lower.  No, I am serious.  If your brand of excellent experiences becomes part of your overall brand, then customers will need less convincing to sign up, which will aid converting customers, thus reducing the cots of acquiring them.  And, if you think that I am saying that you cannot calculate your ROI until after you implement your experiences — no, I am not.  I am saying, your ROI will be based on assumptions and expectations of what that CEM implementation will be.

  So, what do you think?  Does this method makes sense?  Let me know what you think..

   

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