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  Kate Leggett 10:13:37 pm on April 15, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: BPM, call center, contact center, CRM

  Call for Heroes — or Not

  
  Who are your heroes in your customer service organization? Can you name them? Are they the ones who get the most difficult problems to troubleshoot, or who know everything about your business? Are they the ones that you route troublesome customers to?

  It is not a good thing to be able to identify your heroes. Because, it means that your agents offer a different service experience based on the agent – probably ranging from less than adequate to heroic.

  
  What a contact center needs to be able to offer the same experience across all customer touch points which is independent of agent, seniority level, or method of communication (think phone, email, chat). Bruce Temkin from Forrester says it like this: “It’s not about Disneyesque moments of truth – Its about consistently delivering on brand promises that resonate with customers”

  If you break this down further, you need (1) consistency of process and (2) consistency of information that your agents use.

  You need agents to be guided through discovery processes, and be pushed the right data and knowledge at the right point in the service interaction. That way all agents are doing and saying the same thing. We need to take the BPM tools that made the back office so efficient, and bring them to the front office. Meld multichannel customer service best practices with BPM, and we would no longer need heroes.

  
  Is anyone actually doing this in their contact centers?
   

• Kate Leggett 11:40:27 pm on September 4, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: BPM, CRM, customer service, scorecard, service experience

  Can you monitor your service experience in real time?

  We know that:

  • Not all companies need to provide exceptional customer service – just good enough service that is in-line with their brand.
  • 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?

  
   

• Kate Leggett 10:02:58 pm on August 13, 2009 | 3 | # |
  Tags: BPM, CRM, customer service

  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.

   

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