Why Customer Insight Matters to Every Customer Service Leader. A Whitepaper for NewVoiceMedia by Martin Hill-Wilson

Transcription

1 Why Customer Insight Matters to Every Customer Service Leader A Whitepaper for NewVoiceMedia by Martin Hill-Wilson

2 Introduction Call centres, or contact centres if you prefer, have been forced onto the back foot during most of their relatively short history. They have fallen into the trap of inheriting the sins of the organisation without the ability to robustly prove that the source of an issue lies elsewhere. Thus call centres remain cost centres rather than strategic assets. Prey to off-shoring, automation and anything else that reduces the apparent cost to serve. Even at the expense of the customer experience and that of the advisor community. At least that is the heritage from which the industry is trying to recover. Customer Services Should Aspire To Strategic Status When I m discussing Next Generation Customer Service with leadership teams, I often tell them the following story to illustrate where they ideally want to be positioned within their organisation s network of influence. Imagine how the enlightened boss of the future sets themselves up to win as they arrive in their new post as CEO. They make a bee-line for the person running Customer Service and do a deal. In return for financing a customer interaction analytics solution, the CEO gets to have a live dashboard on their office desk than real time will provide the motivation to learn more about this all important branch of analytics. Not only that, but reducing silos (see previous One Agenda whitepaper) and using embedded CRM systems like Salesforce with all your customer data, telephony data and analytics capability in one place, brings everything onto your desktop. No more manicured reports: The information is at your fingertips. It s A Question Of Mindset The other main barrier comes from Customer Service leadership teams. Decades of operational fire-fighting have left them blind to anything outside the habit of running things via the rear view mirror. My cartoon version of this culture is to define a good day for these type of folk as one in which most of the scheduled bums on seats actually appear on the day, the technology doesn t have a seizure and the best friend of the chairman s wife has not just suffered a service experience that provokes her to pull rank. If none of that happens by the end of the shift then a good day has just been experienced. In other words, the current generation of leadership teams have neither headroom nor motivation to defy the gravitational pull of events that has put them on the back foot for so long. It seems beyond them to use customer insight to change the function and value that their Customer Service organisation can offer to both external and internal customers. Why is that a smart move? This CEO knows that between the choice of being presented with internally orientated reports, carefully manicured for executive presentation and a live feed of the customers voice, she knows which one will give her the better view of issues and priorities. Thus Customer Services becomes elevated to a position of strategic importance. Of course there are many barriers standing in the way of that becoming commonplace. How many CEOs get both the value of real time insight and know about the power of customer interaction analytics? Not many I would guess at this point in time. But let s hope that all the C-suite hype around Big Data and the notion of faster I know I ve exaggerated my description and that there are organisations that are learning to rebalance onto the front foot. But from the UK perspective, it remains personally frustrating just how slow this transition actually is. Is the rest of the world much different?

3 Why Analytics Is A Game Changer Analytics is big. Just Google it and most organisational functions can now choose their own flavour. Within the next decade, I m sure many organisations will have brought these together into some overall context of business analytics. But for now it s best to be specific. So, within the spectrum of Customer Analytics, (a subset of Business Analytics), Interaction Analytics is what Customer Services needs to focus on. Even within that slice, we are still looking at an evolving market. There are vendors who have specialised in speech. Others who focus on making sense of text based interactions. More recently social analytics (aka social media monitoring) has become more visible to Customer Service teams. Whatever the version or the vendor, the impact of analytics on a first time organisation puts clear blue water between it and those without any headlights. To my mind it s the story of the Pony Express versus the Telegraph all over again: simply transformative in terms of its potential. I should of course add that potential and realised benefits are different and not inevitably linked. But that is an issue of timing, circumstance and the right leadership. Not that the old way of doing things is now anything other than redundant. If you are interested in sourcing some real world UK examples, then bookmark this resource from the 2012 Professional Planning Forum conference which showcased four interaction analytics case histories. The downloadable presentations are mid-way down the page. Making It Happen Needs Method However the ability to listen and then sift through the haystack is only the start of the journey. Maybe that is why we so often hear the term actionable insight. Sounds great, but how many teams have actually operationalised that capability? A few decades back, the quality movement turned up big time to drive down failure demand in organisations that made stuff (yes I know there was a time when we still did that stuff on-shore!). What I liked was the completeness of their approach: 1. Improvement opportunities were initially subjected to proper evaluation. No surprise that low hanging/low risk fruit made it to the top of the list. 2. Cross functional teams then looked at the issues involved in realising the benefits. In other words, they assessed the culture, the politics and the timing of things. 3. They provided costed solutions. This might involve getting the solution socialised at the right level, provide an effective orientation to people who are impacted, change a workflow, invest in a new system capability. Whatever the mix of tricks demanded. 4. Improvements were then tracked, tweaked and optimised. Some even had phase two iterations to keep the momentum if the transformation was chunky. 5. Best practice was captured and shared so everyone got smarter the next time around. That description might be slightly rose tinted, but I personally witnessed a few, and it remains a surprise that the service sector has been so slow to copy that success, particularly when there are solutions which are fast to implement and see a return on investment from. By the way, before you make the point, six sigma black belts are only one type of team member needed to make this happen!

4 Why A Voice Of The Customer Program Gives Focus While it can be useful to look back for inspiration, we also need to recognise that the world today has moved on. One key characteristic is the sheer volume and diversity of customer feedback. At almost every point in any interaction or transaction cycle, brands now ask us for our opinion or experience. However failure demand and overall Customer Service productivity/ effectiveness is only part of the value. The other thread of gold that should be searched for is innovation. What are customers telling us about their needs and thus untapped opportunity? And I m not just talking about the next killer product they are indirectly hinting at. But how is that used to generate insight? It s still an outstanding issue. Put the unsolicited volume of social chatter on top of that and many feel they are drowning. I m a big fan of Voice of The Customer (VoC) initiatives. For the recently promoted SVP of Customer Experience, they provide a welcome and practical first milestone to get their teeth into. By the way if your organisation doesn t invest in such roles, VoCs can be sponsored directly by Customer Services. Equally you might find that the ownership issue of social customer service between Marketing, PR and Customer Services provokes a broader debate about collaboration using the rich mix of customer insight that social channels throws up. A VoC can provide both focus and organisation to these customer facing teams when looking for new post-silo models of working together. Think about the typical sales process in B2B. In today s world, prospects will have completed 70% of the sales cycle via online search, WOM and recommendation before needing to directly interact. That puts a radical spin on what value the fully loaded costs of a field sales force can now deliver. I don t pretend to know the answer to that. However if I were an SVP of Sales and received regular analysis from the VoC team on this evolving customer behaviour, I would no doubt become indebted to them helping me figure out my next generation sales strategy. Parting Thoughts There is a second part to that story of the smart CEO. Whatever the motivation, VoCs are groovy! They encourage cross functional sharing. They are inclusive of data sources and recognise this is a strength once organised. I always recommend a diversity of sources for customer feedback in order to generate a broader and more realistic perspective. For instance how does customer insight vary by channel? Voice customers and social customers can come across very different. What does that reveal? Personally I m always more convinced about the validity of insights when issues show up consistently on more than one media. Reducing Failure Demand Is Great. Innovation Is Even More Valuable Assuming you invest in interaction analytics capabilities, then this is the route by which Customer Service can ascend the greasy pole of corporate hierarchy into the Strategic Club. How so? At the beginning of this whitepaper, I said that Customer Services had inherited the sins of the rest of the organisation. By which I meant they were unable to prove their root cause analysis around failure demand. Well-run analytics enables that. Numbers talk and others have to listen at the very least. After a few executive sessions, in which departmental reports are reduced to one minute verbal updates in favour of lengthy debate around what the customer insight dashboards are throwing up, our wily CEO ups the stakes. She introduces the cross charging game. If the source of an issue that Customer Service deals with comes from another team, then they get charged for causing it! For instance who owns the cost of educating customers in how to use the product? Marketing, Manufacturing, R&D? Maybe even L&D. Let the debate begin! I guess you can imagine how those with functional based incentives then react when they get charged. In theory, running Customer Service becomes close to a zero cost operation. Failure demand is now actioned at source. There is much on-going debate as to what a customer centric organisation really looks like. For my money, I ve just described how it sets out on that journey in a radical fashion.

5 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. 01/13 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd. contact us US International sales@newvoicemedia.com