Senior Management Involvement — The best businesses understand the value to be had from regular engagement between senior management and customer-facing staff. In practice, many businesses insist that their senior management team spend at least one day a month embedded in a customer-facing environment (retail, contact centre, etc.). Those who take it to the next level demand that management spend half a day directly dealing with customers. Typically, the insight is invaluable, and the benefits of bonding between those in the boardroom and those on the coalface are not to be underestimated. For example, all newly hired employees at Zappos, even executives, are required to undergo a four-week customer-loyalty training course, which includes at least two weeks of talking on the phone with customers in the call centre.
Skills/Value-Based Routing — A necessity in any remote customer-facing environment, skills-based routing ensures that customers get their enquiry dealt with as efficiently as possible. When utilised effectively, clever routing also provides an opportunity to ensure that highly valued customers can be prioritised. However, the advent of social customer care, and the inherently more public nature of this channel, means that routing becomes more visible. Customers, particularly those using social channels, don’t like to be aware that they could be perceived as not as high a priority to the business as some of their peers.
Empowerment — Understand and keep abreast of the reasons for customer care interactions, and as best as you can, empower your agents to deal with these actions effectively and meet a first-time resolution as frequently as possible. Of course, this is easier said than done. Increasing first-time resolutions and agent knowledge/responsibility needs investment in training. As a result, agents often end up with increased commercial responsibilities (issuing offers, discounts, etc.), so trust and forgiveness from the employers’ perspectives are also required. A great quote from Richard Murray, chief customer officer at Jagex Ltd.: “Everyone is empowered to profitably delight a customer; the only time you need signoff is if you think you’re about to disappoint someone.” John Lewis trained this in from day one, calling it “Showing Enterprise.”
Bottom-Up Feedback — Victoria Simpson, development manager for customer service at John Lewis, recommends talking to customer-facing staff regularly and getting them involved in improving the way things are done. “They have insights no one else can form,” Simpson said.
It remains uncommon to tap into the latent insight held by front-line advisors whose daily interactions rapidly build into a valuable resource. But to work, it typically requires only small investments in motivating and rewarding participation. Indeed, once this is initiated, the recognition of being listened to and seeing ideas acted upon can provide the ongoing momentum for these processes.
Customer Satisfaction — Customer-care metrics are not just about first-response resolution or average handling time. Ultimately, these metrics are more about the businesses’ internal requirements than they are about customer experience, and can make agents feel pressured to deliver a service within targets, but not necessarily to the customer’s satisfaction. Customer experience can and should be measured, typically through customer-satisfaction scoring. This brings you much closer to understanding the true feelings of customers in relation to recent experiences and to brand values. Coupling efficiency metrics with satisfaction metrics is much more useful.
Mystery Shopping — The other key measurement tool in defining customer-care success, mystery shopping can ensure that real-life scenarios can be played out to ensure that service-level agreements are achieved, brand guidelines are followed and customer experiences are consistent.
Hire for Attitude First, Ability Second; You Can Train the Skills — Zappos applicants, for example, must go through two equally important interviews: one for their professional aptitude and one for their personality. In the personality interview, they are asked questions to see if they would fit in with Zappos culturally, like, “How weird are you on a scale from 1 to 10?” and “What is your theme song?”
Reposition the Value of Customer Service as a Strategic Asset Versus a Cost Centre — One way is to proactively offer customer-insight services to other functions. This is a massive opportunity when effectively executed. Eliminating failure demand in customer service remains a huge and mainly untapped opportunity to reduce budget waste — particularly when the source of failure comes from other teams and needs verifiable proof to overcome inertia.
The Single Customer View — A market-leading customer database with a simple and flexible user interface may not be a prerequisite for all successful customer-facing businesses. For example, anecdotal feedback is not hugely positive about the systems in place at first direct. However, it could be argued that they are the exception that proves the rule. Many big businesses have grown over several generations of customers. Others have grown rapidly through acquisition. In both cases, they may typically struggle with legacy systems, integrating customer databases, or both. A single customer-view database, showing customer history, interactions across multiple channels, recent communications, etc., gives the best opportunity for agents to fully understand the individual’s experience and ensure that they are offered a tailored service.
Build a Community; Connect Your Customers with Each Other — Similar to the customer-generated feedback noted above, successful businesses are also using the experiences of their own customers to effectively manage their wider base. Blogs, forums and social media allow customers to connect with one another, mostly within a controlled environment. As a result, your customers can be your support team if you let them answer the questions of other users. This becomes a cost-free means of beefing up customer-care resources with little or no additional workload.
“Quite often, customers self-regulate. Someone might start a conversation and then someone else will disagree. The talk might look like it’s going down a negative path, but then someone will say they’ve had a different experience.” — Natalie Cowen, first direct.
Build a Scalable, Defined and Traceable Definition of Success — You can’t be successful if you don’t agree internally what success looks like. Equally, a business must find a means of effectively measuring their progress. Put these two factors together and the journey can start.
Bottom-Line Value — A Few Notes on Online Customer Satisfaction
Shoppers who are highly satisfied with online experiences are:
65% more likely to be committed to the brand (89% vs. 54%)
71% more likely to purchase from the retailer online (89% vs. 52%) and 56% more likely to purchase from the retailer offline (76% vs. 48%)
67% more likely to purchase from the retailer the next time they buy similar items (90% vs. 54%)
69% more likely to recommend the company (92% vs. 54%)
61% more likely to display satisfaction with the company overall (92% vs. 57%)
61% more likely to return to the website (92% vs. 57%)
Source: 2012 ForeSee E-Retailing Satisfaction Index