One Agenda for Customer Engagement. By Martin Hill-Wilson for NewVoiceMedia

Transcription

1 One Agenda for Customer Engagement By Martin Hill-Wilson for NewVoiceMedia

2 Are We Ready? Sales, Marketing and Service are major organisational touch points for customers. It is obvious that the level and quality of customer engagement is largely determined through their actions. Yet most organisations still allow these competencies to operate in silos, making them blind to opportunity and ignorant of their combined impact. Ever since Seibel popularised the notion of blending Sales, Marketing and Service on one software platform, the market has been simultaneously intrigued and disappointed. That was a decade ago. Happily, even slow moving markets have managed some progress since then. Fast forward to 2012 and there are plenty of reasons to believe that this agenda is worth revisiting since some of the inhibitors are now gone. For the sake of this whitepaper, I m making a core assumption. Namely, that a cloud based combination such as NewVoiceMedia and Salesforce provide all the routing, workflow and data management required to make your customer engagement strategy sing. In other words it s now game on as far as integrated customer management is concerned. At least from a platform perspective. By the way, my use of customer engagement in this context refers to the sum total of interaction and participation between an organisation and their customers. Current Reports Suggest Must Try Harder However does being ready mean happiness and wealth are now just around the corner? Maybe. If you are a small organisation or a very tightly integrated one then the walls between Sales, Marketing and Service probably remain semipermeable. Thus the necessary co-operation amongst those teams is readily facilitated. However as a rule of thumb, the larger an business gets, the more it relies on business structure to scale. With that approach comes the seeding and generation of petty kingdoms. And before long, the sense of belonging to a company is only what s printed on a business card. Instead the individual experience is of pledging allegiance first to function, then to brand, because that is where the dynamics of personal careers are played out. If you want proof, ask the head hunters. What do they look for in a Salesperson, a Marketer or a great Customer Service person? They know candidates for these roles are quite different in competencies, aspiration, values and most certainly dress code! So in summary, we know there are different tribes in each of the main customer facing functions. And tribes suggest unique cultures. Layered on top of this natural instinct to see things differently and prioritise accordingly, are the carrot and stick of siloed organisational targets and incentives. As you goal them, so they behave. Add all this together and it is no surprise that alignment, a sense of being on the same team, a readiness to collaborate are not front of mind intentions within these functions. Even when their diplomatic representatives meet at executive level, it is often like national ministers mingling at an EU session. Conclusion? Unless you are blessed with pre-existing tendencies for front line collaboration, a unified interaction platform probably needs some extra help to catalyse a smarter level of customer engagement between these functions. Why One Agenda? Before that though, let s just check this discussion is going in the right direction. Some might say it begs a question of relevance. So what! Does this even matter? Why try to rub out natural dividing lines? Just let Sales, Marketing and Service continue as they have for the last half century. What s so broken that merits such tinkering? The simple answer is the new politics of socially connected, mobile customers. They have moved on. Here are a few examples of the changed balance of power. 1. Customers can easily share any gaps in front line behaviour. Discrepancies on price and returns policy are common examples 2. Customers dependency on learning from organisations is now much reduced. Online reviews, comparison web sites, self publishing experts are preferred sources of information. 3. Customers self sufficiency grows by the day. For example Research then Purchase by smart phone is one of the reasons retail giants such as Best Buy are having a tough time rediscovering their value add/need to exist In short, organisations are scrambling to catch up and learn how to matter once again.

3 The speed with which these macro behavioural changes flow into individual market sectors varies according to factors such as the mix of customers. The expert consensus though is that it looks destined to affect all sectors in a remarkably short space of time. Remember B2B is just as affected by the informed customer syndrome as consumer markets. Here are two recent insights from different research authorities that pinpoint the urgent need for change in how organisations plan to engage and interact with their customers. Let s start looking at how traditional Customer Service is being impacted. According to an October 2011 survey of 7,638 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 88 called Understanding Customer Service Satisfaction to Inform Your 2012 E-business Strategy, Forrester discovered that: 41% of Generation X and 39% of Gen Y consumers turned to online communities for help with customer service issues That figure still averaged 27% for the overall population. Moreover my own client sources tell me this self sufficiency is translating into a 10-20% call deflection benefit for the Customer Service organisation. This offers an interesting choice. How might that spare capacity be used? Reduce operating costs. Or re-invest in higher value customer engagement? Let s move onto a Marketing insight. Here we can see how the issue of trust has become central to the way in which brands must think about where they place their promotional spend. According to Nielsen s Global Trust in Advertising & Brand Messages report (Q3 2011), which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries, 92% of consumers around the world say they trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. An increase of 18% since Unsurprisingly, trust in online reviews comes in at 70%. Whereas trust in traditional TV and print advertising languishes in the mid forties by comparison. This is another stunning example of how rapidly customers have weaned themselves off brand information as credible sources of product information. The final piece of evidence is more anecdotal but just as telling. It concerns the future role of sales organisations. John Ragsdale s well regarded blog Eye On Service, keeps close tabs on changes in the Help desk/technical support industry. As an ex Forrester top analyst, he knows what to be looking out for as signs of market change. He recently interviewed Christine Crandell of New Business Strategies who had just delivered a webinar titled Buyer 3.0: The Buyer s Journey. Her experience was that 70% of the buy cycle is complete before the buyers contact you, giving the traditional sales rep less influence. Her comment raises a key question. What is the new role of the sales team? Clearly not the same as before. To what extent do you trust the following forms of advertising? Global Average Recommendations from people I know Consumer opinions posted online Editorial content such as newspaper articles Branded websites s I signed up for Ads on TV Brand sponsorships Ads in magazines Billboards and other outdoor advertising Ads in newspapers Ads on radio Ads before movies TV program product placement Ads served in a search engine results Online video ads Ads on social networks Online banner ads Display ads on mobile devices Text ads on mobile phones Trust Completely/ Somewhat Don t Trust Much/ At All 92% 8% 70% 30% 58% 42% 58% 42% 50% 50% 46% 54% 42% 58% 41% 59% 40% 60% 40% 60% 36% 64% 36% 64% 33% 67% 33% 67% 29% 71% Source: Nielson Global Trust in Advertising Survey, Q3 2011

4 Incidentally she also mentioned that Today s buyers are putting as much emphasis on the buying experience as they are the product features.so what can we learn from all this? We have just reviewed three insights, each impacting a customer facing function at a transformational level. As customers have changed, so too have the demands on front line functions. Increasingly customers are proving themselves able to complete pre- and post-purchase tasks without their help. Can we continue to work in silos with all the inherent inefficiencies and blind spots this creates? The medium to long term answer has to be no. So a new mission emerges. To provide a much more closely orchestrated level of valued engagement so that the customer will rediscover reasons to choose one brand over another. But what does closer orchestration actually imply? Maybe an end to separate functions, replaced by a single Customer department? That certainly would be radical! In the fullness of time something like that might come into existence in some form or another. Think about all the current experimentation with internal collaboration that the social enterprise model is encouraging. But most organisations understandably prefer evolution over revolution. And this is where the notion of One Agenda comes in. It is a milestone. Someway down the line of convergence. It is rooted in a simple observation that the best way to get different tribes to work together is to unify their focus under a common agenda. It also has the virtue of being an easy idea to get across and get busy with. Assuming you buy the logic that got us to this point, here are some suggestions to get your own version of One Agenda up and running. Items For Your Own One Agenda All the following suggestions are intended to prevent further duplication of effort between front line teams. Then secondly begin an ongoing process of spotting opportunities to pool resources and co-ordinate activity. These are not initially assumed to be substitutes for existing functional plans. That level of co-operation would probably take at least twelve months to reach in most SMEs and possibly twice as long in enterprise sized organisations. Instead this is all about giant sized baby steps. 1. Develop A Common View Of Customers Each function is likely to have their preferred way of categorising customers. For instance, how do marketing segments fit with sales funnel categories? These are two very different ways of describing the same customer for different purposes. Can they be linked in any meaningful way? Getting teams to recognise this is point one. Thereafter it s a question of pooling creativity and coming up with a common way to recognise different customer categories such as: n Valuable customers n Customers at risk n Customers with high levels of relevant influence Another point well worth discussing is how customer experience is mapped and tracked by each function. Sometimes the customer journey or lifecycle will have been defined: maybe at the level of the key moments of truth. What would happen if everything was pooled and turned into a single, commonly understood version? Suddenly we have a language that can be shared between teams with descriptions of the overall customer state that everyone can use and start tracking.

5 2. Do Joint Business Planning One of the root causes of the disconnection between front line functions is the business planning process. Budgets and targets are typically handed down centrally. Yet commentary is then written to support their realisation in isolation. This can result in absurdities. Marketing achieves lead generation targets while the Sales team fall short of theirs. Equally Customer Service can suffer the consequences of over inflated marketing messages and over promising sales people. If nothing else it remains true that Marketing retains a knack of launching campaigns to coincide with particularly busy periods in the call centre. 3. Merge Customer Analytics This is a slightly tougher assignment than the previous two in so far that analytic solutions are scoped by outside vendors. But just being aware of the issue and sharing each other s outputs can go a long way to generating a set of common insights and action points. For instance pooling Marketing and Sales analytics should produce a better view of what does and does not work in terms of finding and winning customers. Equally speech analytics owned by the call centre could be compared with social analytics owned by Marketing to see how customer behaviour aligns or changes across different channels. Moreover jointly owned and resourced improvement plans, a key output of analytics, is always more likely to succeed when universally backed. In Conclusion Cloud based interaction services are now easily provisioned and shared amongst those who interact with customers. Although we have discussed the big three teams, in fact this interaction capability can be stretched to others such as Accounts, even R&D if they fancy tapping into customers for a bit of crowd sourcing. The mere fact that anyone can be up and running so easily, naturally encourages inter-functional collaboration. A single interface and access to a common view of the customer are ideas that have been discussed for over a decade and finally are now here. So here is a simple set of suggestions to augment the annual planning process. Teams get together in order to share their own plans and see where they overlap, where they can be synergised and even when new joint aims can be created. Certainly the description provided earlier about the new type of customer behaviour suggests that the whole way in which brands spend their resources to engage needs a radical rethink. Annual planning is a perfect time to start that. Once done, it might make sense then to generate joint dashboards to give some form of common insight into the state of the customer experience. NPS has been very successful in becoming a universally understood metric. Are others needed? Beyond dashboards, let s think about other ways to shake things up. What about inviting outsiders into functional progress meetings and brainstorm sessions. Traditionally these always run the risk on staying within tramlines and working from a set agenda. Fresh eyes from another customer facing department should bring fresh thinking and thus innovation. Expand the agendas, think more broadly. Learn about the practical issues facing other related teams. Best way to understand another culture is to visit! This enabling foundation thus makes it worthwhile taking a more strategic view of the way that front line teams work together. The aim should be to jointly evolve their competency, engaging customers in a way that resonates with current expectations. The suggestions made here are intended as a challenging but achievable milestone in a much larger journey towards what some are calling the Social Enterprise. Martin Hill-Wilson: Brain Food Consulting Martin Hill-Wilson is a long standing member of the UK customer service community. He currently works as an independent under the Brainfood brand with a range of clients focussing on customer related strategy assignments. He also participates as conference speaker, workshop facilitator and blogger in his role of passing on best practice and next generation thinking. Current topics include social customer service and the broader issues involved in becoming a social business.

6 About NewVoiceMedia NewVoiceMedia introduced the ContactWorld Platform in 2006 to bring Cloud technology to the contact centre market, and radically change the way that businesses receive and deliver their calls. ContactWorld is an enterprise class contact centre, delivered via a true cloud model. It is rapidly scalable, end-user configurable and provides powerful functionality to deliver the technology and information that drives effective contact centres. Our customers benefit from fast, flexible and cost effective access to contact centre capabilities that would normally be very complicated, expensive and slow to acquire, integrate and use. Rather than having to buy expensive software from multiple vendors, spend months integrating everything, and then being locked into that solution for years, we provide the whole solution as a service that customers access for a monthly fee per agent per month. The ContactWorld platform provides a market leading % service availability SLA, and processes hundreds of millions of calls, for thousands of agents working across the globe. We have customers in 14 countries on 5 continents, including Berry Bros & Rudd, Long Tall Sally, QlikTech, Royal Mail, SHL Group and Parcelforce. NewVoiceMedia Services All NewVoiceMedia customers have access to comprehensive training and support. The Professional Services team works closely with all customers to design call plans and agree rules to be configured when they go live. Training the Trainer is a key part of the approach, ensuring that all customers have the ability to configure the system to meet their specific needs. In addition, all customers have access to free Customer Support from the NewVoiceMedia Service Desk. The team is available 24/7 to answer queries and requests. ContactWorld users can also log cases via the support portal and view the solutions resource for answers. NewVoiceMedia Products ContactWorld offers customers an incredibly rich suite of integrated contact centre technologies. We leverage a company s customer data to provide complex data driven routing of their calls on a real time basis to deliver enquiries to the most appropriate agents. Customers can select from different modules to build a plan that will handle their calls most effectively. The solution can be implemented in days not months, additional users can be added in minutes, and home agents activated instantly, in response to demand fluctuations. ContactWorld for Salesforce is a fully certified solution providing seamless CTI integration into Salesforce CRM. All users benefit from a single, easy to use interface to manage their calls, and view all contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities and cases. Calls can be prioritised and routed accurately, based upon the data stored within a business s Salesforce CRM records and agents are presented with a link to the caller s details for a full history of contact with the company. ContactWorld for Salesforce requires no adaptors or APIs to transform how contacts and customers are handled when they interact with an organisation, and works effectively on Mac or PC. All merchants who accept payment by cards over the phone are required to be PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) compliant to ensure their customers card details are not compromised. ContactWorld PCI is a fully PCI DSS compliant interactive voice response (IVR) solution to securely process credit card transactions over the telephone. The technology removes the agent from the payment transaction by automating the process to meet data security standards, and reduce the risk of fraud. 04/12 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd. contact us US International sales@newvoicemedia.com