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  Kate Leggett 06:50:59 pm on June 3, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, sCRM, service, social crm, Voice of the Customer

  Aligning your social service strategy with your traditional one

  Many of you say you need a “social CRM” strategy. However, much like the evolution of eService as just another way of doing customer service, to be successful in the long run, you should look at social channels as part of your overall service strategy, and make sure that your brand remains consistent across all the communication that you have with your customers. This means that you should look to provide similar experiences on Twitter, as you do on the phone.

  How do you go about determining what social channels you want to engage in? It’s best to take a two-pronged approach that involves both monitoring and moderating.
  

  From company to company, the social channels to monitor vary. Loosely defined, these should be any communities where your customers express emotions and opinions about brands, products and their service experiences – like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter; rating and review sites like Amazon and Yelp; open source communities; and/or popular industry publications and blogs that solicit reader input. Ask your customers where they engage on-line. You can learn a lot about customer perception of your brand, products and services from monitoring these communities. And, you can translate these learnings into, for example product/service capabilities that are better aligned with your customer base or organizational changes to better service your customers. Monitoring activities do have a real ROI.
  

  In addition to monitoring activities, you should also decide what social channels you want to moderate in order to engage with your customer base – like company-sponored forums/blogs. Successes include ComcastCares Twitter profile as a viable customer service channel. Dell’s Idea Storm discussion board helps the company gauge which product ideas are most important and most relevant to their customers. After registering, users are able to add, promote, demote and comment on product innovation ideas.

  Whichever route you choose, you will need to realign your people, processes and technology to ensure that the experience across all your touchpoints – traditional or social, remain consistent and in alignment with your brand.
  
   
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  Vikas 04:29:06 am on May 20, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, Service Experience Management

  Questions for all customer Service Managers to think about:

  What if your every agent, could be your best agent?

  What if your agents didn’t need to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on the desktop?

  What if your agents didn’t have to “copy and paste” between applications?

  What if any agent could handle any call?

  What if your agents did no need to search for answers?

  What if quality and compliance was a natural part of agents work and not an afterthought?

  What if your agents could follow the right process, just as you had envisioned it?

  What if you could translate your ideas, adapt to change, in a short period of time?

  What if you could measure and achieve your Cost, Satisfaction and Revenue goals?

  What if you didn’t have to spend months and months on agent training?

  After every answer, ask:

  Why Not?
   
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  Kate Leggett 03:22:26 am on April 22, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: benchmark, CRM, maturity model

   Benchmarking your Service Offering

  The crocodile Dundee school of management says that you just have to move fast enough to outrun your competitors.

  How do you know how you and your competitors are doing in offering a good service experience? One easy way is use a customer service maturity model, and benchmark you and your adversaries against it.

  Maturity models are industry-standard models that focus on organizational and process maturity instead of actual technology used.

  They let you rank your service offering on many different dimensions which include the efficacy of communication channels used, the self-service experience, the agent experience, the management of content across channels, and governance programs in place that allow you to coordinate and roll out new initiatives. Each of these dimensions has a list of capabilities that you use to benchmark yourself against a scale of 1 (ad-hoc capabilities) to 5 (mature, adaptive).

  Here’s a snapshot of part of a maturity model. The green boxes indicate the maturity of the customer service organization.

  

   

  If you benchmark yourself against this maturity model, you will see your points of failure, and will give you a very clear list of projects that will help you improve your service experience

  You should also do this with your competitors. You will only be able to benchmark them on visible dimensions (for example their self service offering vs their agent experience). Yet, you will be able to easily see if and how you are outrunning your competition.

   

   

   

• 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 08:16:40 pm on December 14, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, service experience, social crm, web-self service

  Provide a Service Experience, Not just Customer Service

  We all know that the voice of the customer has disrupted the tight control that companies have on their brand. Bad experiences are easily amplified and heard round the customer community. Think of stories like Dell Hell and Yours is a very bad hotel . The fallout is that 55% of customer don’t want to talk to customer service reps anymore (Forrester, 2008) and 90% of shoppers trust community input more than your company’s input (Neilsen 2009).

  So, what does that mean for customer service? You now need to engage your customers in a collaborative environment, which melds community and company recommendations, and is as transparent as possible to your customer base who demand honesty as they ultimately control the conversation with you.

  It also means that customer service has become increasingly important compared to the sales and marketing pillars of traditional CRM. Customer service has morphed into providing a service experience. Your job now is to do better than to solve customer problems, as they can do this with community input – it is to provide them with an end-to-end experience that keeps them coming back for more. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos defines the customer experience as: “ it includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so you don’t have to contact anyone. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations.”

  This means that you need to provide your support agents a new set of tools focused on providing a customer experience. Here’s a short-list some of what is needed in this new world

  • Your customer-facing web self-service site must include community content as well as corporate content, and your user base must be able to express their voice on your site.
  • Your search results are social – You let the community dictate important content on your web-self service site.
  • If a user chooses to interact with a customer service agent, your agents must have all the data and knowledge that they need to solve their issue pushed to them at the right point in the resolution cycle.
  • You must extend business process management to customer service so that agents solve issues in a consistent, reproducible way that doesn’t vary from agent to agent.
  • Your agents need to be cognizant of your customer’s emotion and satisfaction with the service process, and react appropriately so that the service experience keeps them loyal.
  • You need to monitor, measure how you do, and use data, including customer feedback to tune your service experience to be aligned with customer demands.

  In what other ways can you evolve customer service  offering into providing an experience?

   

• Kate Leggett 04:08:11 am on November 18, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: brand alignment, CRM, customer service

  Thoughts on Choosing Customer Service Software

  The most important thing to remember when selecting Customer Service software is to choose an offering that supports your company’s brand perception. It is not the goal for all companies to offer the most ideal customer experience that vendors try to sell you. For example, the expectations of users of a discount airline is not “over-the-top” service, but service that is streamlined, and heavily reliant on web self-service and email. On the other hand, a luxury retailer’s service offering is very different – It should be white-gloved service, reliant on personal contact that is tailored for a particular customer.

  In evaluating Customer Service software you must also understand your customer’s demographics, and their communication channel requirements as baby boomers for example, have very different communication needs that the more tech savvy Generation Xers and Y’s. Finally, you need to understand the communication channel requirements that your company can afford as channel costs differ widely. Web-self service and email costs are typically a fraction of those for the “live assist” channels of chat and phone. Irrespective of the communication channels that you can support now, you must architect your offering so that channels are not siloed, that corporate knowledge is shared and that alternate channels can be added at a later time as the need arises.

  Once your Customer Service system is implemented, you need to measure its efficacy and tune it using a balanced scorecard approach. You need to measure key performance indicators – for example, the cost of delivering customer service against the satisfaction of your customer base, the compliance of agents to company policy and generated revenue. These measures then need to be mapped to the overall customer perception of your company to ensure that the chosen Customer Service systems are supporting and not eroding your brand image. And finally, you need to be agile enough to change your service offering based on customer feedback and the gathered metrics.

   

• Kate Leggett 11:03:41 pm on October 15, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Industry News, Service Experience Management

  New Contributors Joining Our Blog

  KANA historically has had two blogs: this one, and Speak Out .

  Evolved Thinking’s charter  has been to provide a forum for Practice Leaders to share their perspectives on customer service and support trends, self-service best practices, Web 2.0, knowledge management and other topics central to improving customer service delivery.

  Our other blog, Speak Out, provided KANA’s executive management with an outlet for sharing their insights regarding the emerging technology category of Service Experience Management.

  Next week we will be folding the Speak Out blog into this one. This means that you will see more posts and a broader variety of contributor voices, like those of KANA’s CEO Mike Fields and CTO Mark Angel. The focus of this blog will remain unchanged, and we encourage you to keep reading and commenting.

  What topics are you interested in hearing our point of view? Please let us know and we will consider them as our charter evolves.

   

• Kate Leggett 05:57:09 am on September 22, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communities, CRM, Customer Experience, customer relationship management, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Shopping, with a little help from my friends

  Even in this down economy, Forrester Research projects that holiday sales will reach more than $33 billion this season. That’s a lot of dough, and here are some guiding principles to help shape a successful online shopping experience.

  #1 – Make shopping fun. Entice users even before they are customers by using a consistent UI on all your site. Offer a variety of self-service methods, like visual decision trees that use pictures of products help orient users to their correct product, and guide them down a particular discovery path. Let them search by price range, color or even by personality like gadget geek, mom-to-be or fashionista.

  Interactive sites relying on technologies like AJAX work. You can drag and drop content on a page to where you want to interact with it. Use rollovers, sliders for price range pickers, or a color palette to search for items of a single color to make sites fun.

  Let peer pressure help you out by listing top searches or hot buys are – both which serve as good indicators of current trends..

  #2 – Let Users use their own words. Users don’t always think in the context of company-generated navigational topics. Let users tag content and browse tag clouds.

  #3 – Information on the User’s Terms. Push relevant service alerts or policy changes out. Let users create watchlists so that they can be alerted when an item goes on sale, or falls below a target price.

  #4 – Use the wisdom of crowds. You trust peer advice over company recommendations. Kaboodle, for example, touts “shopping is more fun with friends”. Append feedback forms and ratings to content and act on it.

  You will be more successful if you can streamline the shopping experience, and use community input to validate purchase decisions.

   

• 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 04:24:19 pm on August 24, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service

  Service = Brand, Part 2

  Customer service. We know that it is not one size fits all – it is the art of aligning your service with your brand. It’s the consistency of experience that a customer feels every time they interact with you. And what is brand? It’s what you stand for, it is how you differentiate yourself. Bruce Temkin from Forrester blogs a lot about this.

  We seem to agree that not all companies need to provide exceptional customer service – just good enough service that is in-line with their brand. Think back to the IKEA and Apple examples in my last blog.

  But what about industries where there is little differentiation between products and services? Like banks or telecom providers? Is there any true difference between the banking products and services at Wells Fargo, Citibank, or Bank of America, just to name a few? They also offer an undifferentiated customer service experience that makes it hard to for you, as a customer, to individualize them.

  One deviator in the banking space is ING Direct. They are a non-traditional, internet bank where all business is done via web self service, ATM or email. They have no branches, and you cannot visit a live agent. Even without this traditional personal touch, they know who their customers are, what they want, and deliver what they need. Everything about the banking experience is slick, comprehensive and targeted to a good customer service experience. However, they only target the tech savvy customer with relatively straightforward banking needs – they are known to fire “high maintenance customers” who do not fit into their service mold.

  ING Direct, in a sector of undifferentiated products and services, differentiates themselves by their exceptional service experience. This experience is aligned with the bank’s business model. And this service differentiation becomes their brand. Once again, service = brand.

   

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