Latest Updates: customer service RSS

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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?
   
• 

  Kate Leggett 05:17:16 am on May 15, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Brand, Customer Experience, customer service

  Customer Experience vs Customer Service Experience

  Jeff Bezos says that Amazon’s customer experience is to deliver goods at the lowest price, fastest delivery, in a self-service mode that is simple and easy. Save customer service for when things go wrong.

  
  And, in times when customer service is needed, it needs to be fast, simple, easy – that is aligned with the experience that customers have when using Amazon, and reinforcing its brand.

  The reverse also applies. Bruce Temkin says that “Good customer experience management is about consistently delivering on brand promises that resonate with customers. You can’t rate a firm’s customer experience management efforts without fully understanding its brand strategy.”

  If your brand is low-cost self-service, then your customer service offering can reflect that with simple, self-help Web service and limited assisted-channel support. If you brand is expensive products delivered with the utmost care, then your service offering will likely require multiple high-touch channels including the phone and live chat.

  What is your customer experience? Is it aligned with your customer service experience? 
   
• 

  Vikas 04:06:53 am on March 4, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer service, Customer Support, Knowledge Management, service experience, Service Experience Management, voice navigation system

  Call Center Agents Need a Voice Navigation System!

  Today’s voice navigation systems help you get to where you need to be and let you focus your attention on what’s important: driving.

  Think back to life in the old days, before GPS. You’re lost with a map open on your lap, looking for the right street to turn into and driving more slowly than rest of the traffic. Angry are drivers honking loudly behind you!

  This can’t be too different than how call center agents feel about their current tools and technology. Their typical desktop applications open up to reveal an ALT-TAB nightmare — 20 tabs with 10 tabs under each of those tabs. It’s not uncommon for an agent to have 15 of these applications open at once. Their desktop search function, if it works, returns a long list of possible solutions. Their knowledge solutions, if available, come in the form of long documents. And, they’re expected to figure how to navigate all this while trying to help a customer on the phone. Pretty grim environment to work in, eh?!

  Now imagine the equivalent of a voice navigation system for call center agents. A  system that presents the agents with an intuitive and interactive experience to lead them to the right resolutions quickly. By delivering the ideal blend of process, screens, and contextual knowledge, a service experience management system can act just like voice navigation system, letting agents focus on what’s important: the customer.

   
• 

  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.
  

  (More …)

   
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  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?

   
• 

  Vikas 12:23:33 pm on December 2, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer loyalty, customer service, customer value, evidence-based service, predictive analytics, service experience

  What Are Your Customers Worth?

  I’m a frequent business traveler who’s likely to rack up $30,000 in airline, car rental and hotel expenses each year. And, I take vacation with my family twice per year, which offers a potential value of $15,000 annually. That means over the next three years my value as a customer is approximately $150,000. I’d say I’m pretty valuable.

  So, while I’m navigating a travel vendor’s site (one that I use frequently) – looking at available fares and the cost of car rentals and hotels in the area – does that vendor know my value as a customer? It does not seem so. Do they offer me a service experience that’s tailored to my needs, based on my preferences or previous buying patterns? Nope. My experience is likely similar to all other customers, irrespective of my potential value.

  I’d love for this vendor to offer me SMS updates informing me of flight delays. When my flights are delayed, it’d be great if one of the vendor’s reps called me before I called them and offered to book an alternate route. These simple examples of a personalized service experience amount to what I refer to as delivering “WOW” through customer service. Consistently delivering this WOW-worthy service would certainly earn my loyalty as longtime customer.

  Speaking of loyalty – and by inference, the travel vendor’s marketing programs – I receive an email once a week offering me a deal for a trip that, without fail, I have no interest in taking. In fact, I have never clicked on any of their offers. My unresponsive behavior should serve as a clue. It offers ample evidence that cookie cutter offers are not working on me.

  The travel vendor should use this type of evidence, or predictive analytics, to make me a more relevant offer. For example, say I have been travelling to a particular city every three weeks for the last three months. It’s natural to assume that I’m going to continue this travel pattern in the future. So, why not use the evidence to offer me a package deal for that city?

  Few businesses truly understand just how much a particular customer is worth! And even if they are able to recognize different customer values, they fail to tailor the experience to suit the diverse needs of these customers. When it comes to courting customers, this one-size-fits-all just strategy doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time we being asking the right questions, gathering customer data and applying the evidence intelligently. In doing this, we’ll be able to better quantify the value of our customers, offer personalized service experiences and launch more informed, effective marketing campaigns.

   
• 

  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.

   
• 

  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.

   
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  mifields 10:22:14 am on November 13, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Accel-KKR, customer service, Kana, KANA 10, Service Experience Management, Yankees

  KANA: Change Redux

  Earlier this year, in a previous post, I noted that change is the one constant in business and in life. Change is good as long as it ultimately carries a person and a business forward with new insight, knowledge and skills. Without change, a person can stagnate and an organization can lose its edge.

  Look at the Yankees. Over the past 15 years, the team has changed managers, stadiums, and nearly every position player on the field. These changes might have been too much for another team. But the DNA of champions is deeply embedded within the Yankees organization. Ultimately, it was a combination of their winning DNA and the changes made during rebuilding years that lead the team back to the top – after nearly a decade without a Series ring.

  Like the Yankees, KANA’s got winning DNA. The changes we’ve made at KANA to date this year are intended to have the same end game: getting us back on top. While these changes haven’t been easy and much hard work remains ahead of us, we continue making steady progress on all fronts.

  Just last month, on the business side, we announced Accel-KKR’s plans to acquire our company and take it private. KANA has been a strong leader in customer service for more than a decade. This is attributed to the depth of our customer base, the talent of our employees, and the investment in innovation technology, like KANA 10. Accel-KKR recognized these winning attributes, and they played a significant role in bringing about this corporate shift.

  Accel-KKR’s financial strength and expertise make it the ideal partner to help us fortify our operation – from providing strong, responsive customer support to ongoing product enhancements to adding to the innovation of our new service experience management (SEM) solution, to which we just integrated new social capabilities.

  This month, we’re making yet another change, on the communications front. We are folding KANA’s executive management blog, Speak Out, into the Company’s Evolved Thinking blog, which was established years ago by our service division and has built a strong following. KANA’s Speak Out contributors (myself included) will now post on Evolved Thinking.

  As many of you may know, Evolved Thinking is a place for KANA’s thought leaders to share their perspectives on trends in customer service and support, self-service, knowledge management, social CRM and other topics central to improving the service experience. This focus won’t change. Rather, we’ll be posting more often and offering a broader spectrum of contributor voices to sound off on these pertinent topics, share best practices and, of course, to continue providing insight into changes in our industry and at KANA.

   
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  Vikas 09:51:54 am on November 10, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer relationship management, customer service, evidence-based service, social crm, Vikas Nehru

  Hype or Hyper-Measurement?

  Recently, Seth Godin posted on how we are moving into an era of “hyper-measurement.” As he explains, a journalist being fired because his or her web content isn’t drawing a lot of traffic is not going to be a newsroom novelty for much longer. In a world where, more and more, success can be measured in quantifiable metrics, why wouldn’t a publisher base business decisions on newly available evidence? It just makes sense.

  The customer service industry is no different. As my fellow blogger, Kate Leggett, points out, to truly maximize the value of their contact centers, customer service mangers must take an experimental approach towards service processes.

  For every end-to-end service process they design and deploy, managers must define a testing period during which they play around with different aspects of it and measure results against business objectives. These metrics can then be used to determine the relative effectiveness of the process – what worked and what didn’t – and update the service process, or eliminate it entirely. To ensuring ongoing optimization, no process should ever be viewed as final. Rather, managers must consider each and every service process as a prototype and resign themselves to always retesting and tweaking them.

  Delivering “evidence-based service” in this manner will help consumer-facing companies break bad habits, discover new tricks and cope with the constant shifts going on in their marketplace.

  For instance, a business introduces a new tool that captures and analyzes customer interactions in various community forums – essentially, pooling the collective input of the crowd at given time. The customer service manager applies that insight in real time to change, reprioritize and improve information presented to a customer on the self-help portion of a website or educate agents on a shift in incoming questions (depending on the level of service the company provides). Over time, they begin to see patterns in terms of what information is just chatter and what type of information is important to meeting their business objectives and their customers’ brand expectations. And, the way they use the tool – and incorporate the customer voice – becomes a highly sophisticated and beneficial to their service processes.

  The “hyper-measurement” trend, as Mr. Godin puts it, shouldn’t be ignored. It should be embraced. It offers a way for service departments, as well as publishers, to be more precise and pragmatic with their decision-making – to remain in control and one step ahead of the customer.<

   

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