Latest Updates: customer satisfaction RSS

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  Mark Angel 10:36:40 am on January 29, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: cross sell, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, predictive analytics

  Predictive Analytics Part 2: Apply Models to Your Service Processes

  To effectively optimize your decisions, you first need to define your customer service processes and ensure that your agents are following them. Next, you need to add a decision step in your service processes that allow the agent to offer a cross-sell. Then you must carefully measure the success of each cross-sell with individual customers and correlate their relative success with the data that you have gathered about these particular individuals. With this information, you’re better equipped to recognize new situations where a cross-sell will work and those where it won’t.

  All this may sound difficult, but mathematical models do exist that make this data collection and analysis easy. They’re part of a scientific area of study known as symbolic regression. Symbolic regression allows you to build models based on lots of data and lots of variables whose correlation to the decision may be unknown initially. For more info about building models, check out Evolved Analytics.
  

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• Mark Angel 02:04:09 am on November 24, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, Knowledge Management, Service Experience Management, service-oriented architecture, SOA, strategy

  Top 5 Problems with Service Today

  We’ve all been the victims of bad service. We have to repeat ourselves to agents; we get different answers depending on whether we use email or we call a service rep; or worse, we don’t even receive a response. We have a tendency to blame the agents.

  But it’s not their fault. They want to do a good job. They just don’t have the tools they need to meet customers’ expectations of personalized, consistent, accurate and fast service. They don’t have the tools because their technology isn’t working.

  Thus, I trace bad service to 5 root causes:

  – IT organizations have not solved the integration problem. Agents need dozens or often hundreds of un-integrated tools and applications to perform their jobs. Agents must toggle through many applications in the span of a service call, resulting in long hold times.

  – IT organizations have not solved the change problem. Agent tools are typically hardwired together. When procedures change in a company, IT organizations cannot quickly respond to the changes in order to give the agents the new tools that they need.

  – Knowledge management vendors have not solved the knowledge problem. Corporate knowledge exists on an island; it does not fit into the context in which agents are searching for content. This means that agents need to wade through many solutions in order to find the one that is right for a particular customer.

  – Case management vendors have not solved the business process management problem. Today, business or call center leaders can’t drive agents through clear processes. This means that they put the responsibility of following the right resolution processes in the hands of agents, which are not all equally competent.

  – Organizations have not solved the agent training and turnover problem. Businesses know how they want service delivered, but they can’t have their best, most highly trained agents handle every interaction.

  How do we start solving these problems? We start with technology. We implement service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to begin integrating systems in a flexible way so that information is no longer siloed. This means that when processes change, IT systems can be rewired easily, without a tremendous amount of overhead. We ensure knowledge is it’s shared and applied appropriately. We present in a way that makes sense to agents, and we use it to inform our decisions about what’s working and what’s not working in our service processes. We provide agents with stepped procedures for each and every service interaction that allows them to provide the consistent service that we desire. If we are able to achieve these goals, and provide agents with the tools they need to succeed, then we’re solved our final dilemma. Because every agent becomes as good as our best, most highly trained agent.
   
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  Esteban Kolsky 02:04:52 am on January 25, 2009 | 6 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer satisfaction, customer satisfaction surveys, customer service, customers, enterprise feedback management, Experience, feedback, surveys, Voice of the Customer

  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 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 07:00:38 am on September 12, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer centric, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Feedback Management, Voice of the Customer

  How About Feedback From Passive Customers? Huh?

  I have been working on some research this week, trying to improve my three-layer model for feedback management which relies on point-of-delivery, customer-satisfaction, and planning feedback events.  See, for the most part I have been using it with clients to help them deploy feedback management strategies, mostly for support scenarios (it can be adapted to many situations, more on that another day).  We have been assuming all this time that if we survey the people who interacted with us, we actually have a very good representation of the issues and feelings from our customers.

  Now, this has worked very well in the past for lots of clients I helped.  Their improvements in retention, delivery effectiveness, and (gulp) loyalty have been impressive (I did not recommend the loyalty measurement – sorta snack in).  However, I could not stop from thinking in the back of my mind I was missing something.  Well, today as I was reading several articles, blogs, and journals about satisfaction, loyalty, feedback management, etc. when I had THE epiphany — I have been ignoring passive customers.

  What are passive customers? Glad you asked In all customer populations there is a small group (between 5-10 percent usually) that you almost don’t know you have.  These are the companies (B2B scenarios), or customers (B2C) that bought your product or service, use it all the time, and never require service (or self-support themselves through your self-service initiative).  These are the non-squeaky wheels – the ones no one pays attention to.  In words of loyalty and satisfaction, these are satisfied, loyal, long-term customers that we have no risk of losing unless we totally screw up — and even then, they are likely to call and get their problem fixed, since they never called before.  These are your safe customers.

  Since you know me, you also know I am going to say something different.  Something like “these are not safe customers”, or “you cannot take them for granted just because they don’t interact directly”.  Alas, I wont’ say anything like that.  What I will do is ask you a question: what is the value of these passive customers to you?  What?!?!?? You don’t know?  Tsk-tsk-tsk… shame on you.

  See, these passive customers for the most part don’t matter much to your organization.  They tend to be content with the product or service, they will upgrade or make incremental purchase decisions mostly on their own, and they just want to have a peaceful existence with what you offer.  In other words, they do tend to be safe,  Hard to lose them – unless you are trying.  However, their value to you is what you really need to know.  One by one, you need to know whether they are a top-tier customer or not, and what would their departure mean to you.  Then, you need to get their feedback – find out what makes them stay, what would make them go, and what you need to do to keep them where they are.  It is easier than you think, all you have to do is ask — we will cover in my next entry how to ask.

  Are you taking care of your passive customers? Huh?

  PS: don’t forget to request the EFM resource guide!

   

• Esteban Kolsky 01:48:28 am on August 13, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer experience management, customer satisfaction, customer service, feedback, loyalty, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  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.

   

• Esteban Kolsky 06:44:10 pm on July 24, 2008 | 17 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, LinkedIn, loyalty, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  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?
  

   

• Esteban Kolsky 02:37:46 pm on July 17, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, feedback, Feedback Management, LinkedIn, metrics, satisfaction, Voice of the Customer

  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

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

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

   

• 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?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 03:08:50 pm on June 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: contact center, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email, erms, satisfaction

  I would like to add some wood to the “email use in customer service” fire. If you have been following the blogs last week, we have a little of a controversy going on about whether email should be used for support – or sent to sleep with the fishes. Personally, I believe that email is an essential support tool in certain situations, and when done properly. For medium-complexity scenarios, with lots of data necessary to exchange hands, and where accuracy is paramount (like something you can cut and paste from a screen or log), email cannot be beat. The process of reading an error message via telephone is usually cumbersome at best. I know that organizations that implement email for support situations such as the above, when they answer promptly (read before 2 hours for 80% of emails, 4 hours for 100%) and they get good results.

  Of course, these “good results” don’t usually translate into easily quantifiable cost savings, or return-on-investment models. That would be too easy, now wouldn’t it? I have been working lately with some clients that are trying to come up with Justification models for their ERMS (email response management system) deployments, and we are struggling. I will be very honest, each case is different and we can only use tested-and-proven ROI models as a basis to start the discussion, then we deviate into the different variables that affect each business. At the end, we can always justify implementing an ERMS on financial terms — as long as we are willing to make certain assumptions about growth and support, very often the largest unknown components. Worse, when we create TCO models, over three years, it is hard to find cost savings over using the telephone, and little over a chat implementation. Most of the benefits come from two areas:

  Experience Management and Customer Loyalty

  Reduction in manual process when automation is implemented

  So – what should you use to justify your ERMS implementation? Glad you asked…

  This is where your Customer Experience Management, or a similar initiative, comes into place. Use your customer’s demands to justify your ERMS initiative. Yep, use them to service them… corny, huh? Let me explain.

  1) Prepare a survey for the purpose of understanding your customer’s needs and demands, if you have not already done it (even if you did it already, read on… chances are it was not the best survey you ever done). The survey should have just 3-4 questions related to your planning of customer service for the next 2-3 years, and what customers would like to see in it. Don’t sneak questions on satisfaction, loyalty, or anything like that in there. Simply planning questions.

  2) Ask the following : “We are considering implementing one more technology for service and support. Please rank from 1 through 5 your choice of the following technologies to submit service and support requests”. Then, it would feature three, four, or five technologies like chat, SMS, email, etc. Pick the ones you would seriously consider implementing.

  3) Your customers will then tell you, if they want email, that you should implement email for support. Depending on the ranking and your plans, you can justify your ERMS on Customer Experience Management reasons: customers want it, we will give it to them. You will find that the costs of implementing ERMS, or virtually any other technology you can imagine, will not drastically reduce the existing costs… but, customers want to have it.

  Would you willing to take the chance to have your customers say “no, please don’t implement that”? What would you do then? Let me know…

   

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