Spoken Communications

How Siri is making your call center look bad

It's not easy running a contact center in the age of Siri. Customer expectations of speech recognition are more complex and higher than ever, and traditional speech rec IVRs can't keep up. What is a call center to do?

If you think that smartphone usage doesn't affect the contact center, think again. Gartner reported that worldwide fourth quarter sales of smartphones in 2011 were estimated at 149 million. A Pew Internet survey found that as of May 2011, 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. JP Morgan predicted that 657 smartphones will leave stores in 2012. And the GSMA reported that second only to SMS messaging, native apps comprise the highest level of smartphone activity usage, capturing more than 20 minutes of average daily on-screen time.

And many of those apps are voice-controlled apps, Siri being the most popular among voice recognition tools.

The smartphone experience with speech recognition technology has already changed user expectations of interactions with automation in the contact center. Your callers might be wondering, "If Siri can understand me, why can't you?" The Siri Effect is hitting call centers hard, and all IVRs and call flow designs should be under scrutiny.

The truth is that in the age of Siri, DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency signaling, or touch tone response such as "Push 1 for sales, 2 for billing," etc.) doesn't cut it anymore. And customer care facilities should see this trend in user sophistication with respect to speech recognition as an opportunity rather than a curse.

The smackdown: IVR vs. Siri

While user expectations might be the same for a call center IVR as for a mobile speech-enabled app, the two have until now been vastly different in their goals and structures. Take a look at the structure, context and business expectation for each:

And due to changing user expectations, the contact center is experiencing a major shift in perceived value. This goes beyond asking callers to rate their satisfaction with a particular agent or a single call; these shifted expectations in terms of speech recognition interactions affect the entire corporate culture and the contact center's reason for being.

Paradigm shift: from cost center to loyalty engine

In the call center world, the old paradigm was to see the contact center exclusively as a cost center. This drove the quality metric of Average Handle Time, because the less amount of time spent on the phone with the customer, the lower the cost, right? This also drove organizations to create DTMF menu trees: who cares if the caller has to listen to three levels of menus and make six menu choices, as long as the forced-choice DTMF menu is easy for the organization to create? The organization didn't hesitate to make the caller do the work of navigating the DTMF IVR menu, because this is a cost center, anyway, right?

The paradigm that contact centers must adopt is the one that users have now come to expect: the contact center is a customer loyalty engine, not a cost center. Average Handle Time must be replaced by First Call Resolution, which is what the customer (not the organization) truly cares about. Users now expect accurate speech recognition, which is a little more work for the organization to create compared to a forced-choice DTMF menu, but it is much easier and more natural for the user to navigate. And speech recognition makes the technology do the work, not the caller. This is the new benchmark created by Siri: use technology to focus on a friction-free customer experience.

Why IVR speech recognition doesn't match the Siri experience

Let's take a look at how the Automated Speech Recognition engines (ASR) work in a typical speech recognition IVR call flow within the contact center. Let's say that Acme Widgets, Inc. has a speech recognition IVR for call routing, and the first prompt asks the caller "How may I help you?" The caller makes some sort of speech utterance as the Reason for Call (RFC), which the engine then parses compares to a language model of dynamic data based on hundreds or thousands of caller response utterances and converts to text for reference and improvement.

Based on the comparison of the converted utterance to the language knowledge base, the RFC is categorized into one of a series of buckets, such as sales, billing, customer service or tech support. Then the call is routed to the correct agent skill.

Where most contact center ASRs fail in comparison to Siri is between the language model and categorization. Because call center grammars are traditionally narrow, it's common for any unexpected utterance to fail because the developers didn't anticipate exactly what the caller might say. In this highly structured environment, one unclear syllable can make the difference between a smooth caller experience and a frustrating one.

How to match the Siri experience in the contact center

I'm not sure how other speech technologists have dealt with the rise in speech recognition expectations in the wake of Siri, but I'll share with you Spoken's solution to the issue. Since understanding the reason for call and identifying the caller are keys to accurate call routing, it's of vital importance that the speech recognition engine capture and interpret those caller utterances with near 100% accuracy.

However, within the structure of the contact center environment, even the very best ASRs out there only return about 50% accuracy for any one customer utterance. That means that even if the ASR understands nine digits of the phone number the caller utters, the system will still fail for lack of the tenth digit, and the caller will have a bad experience.

The Spoken approach is to support the technology with a hybrid solution: provide human Silent Guides that work in the background to correct those utterances that would otherwise fail. (If you're curious, find out more about how this works.) The Guides supplement the automation and bring the speech recognition accuracy level closer to 90%. If you're curious about the cost comparison, the quick answer is that because the Guides handles up to 10 simultaneous calls and reduce agent load, most customers experience a cost savings of about 15% over ASR alone.

What's really valuable is that the human safety net provides what pure ASRs can't: an additional layer of accuracy that improves speech recognition and keeps the experience closer to that of Siri.

Sophisticated speech automation for the win

Whatever approach organizations take to addressing the contact center in the age of Siri, the more sophisticated expectations of their customers can't be ignored. And while sites like GetHuman would suggest that what callers really want is a human agent, both Siri and studies have shown that users prefer automation over a live agent for simple tasks. And while 80% of callers will attempt to opt out or game the system when presented with a DTMF menu tree, over 90% will respond when asked an open-ended question such as, "How may I help you?"

Users are expecting more from speech-enabled IVRs than ever before. How is your organization addressing those heightened expectations?

Gartner: the personal cloud will replace the PC by 2014

In an announcement that was shocking to some and shrugworthy to others, yesterday Gartner predicted the post-PC era by 2014, stating that most consumer tasks will be performed virtually, in the cloud.

Citing five consumer megatrends in personal computing, independent research firm Gartner is predicting that "the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users' digital lives"--in two short years, by 2014. The prediction is shocking not in its content but in the anticipated alacrity of adoption. Consumers are already relying heavily on smartphones and tablets for everyday tasks from banking to entertainment consumption to document creation. So where does that leave customer care?

A quick summary of the five megatrends cited by Gartner as driving this evolution in consumer usage:

1. Consumerization: "Users have become innovators, and through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them."
2. Virtualization: Rampant virtualization has made applications device-agnostic and more accessible than ever through broadband connectivity.
3. App-ification: Applications are now designed with consumers and their myriad devices in mind.
4. The ever-available service cloud: Every consumer now has access to a plethora of online solutions and applications to answer any question or solve any problem, which "encourages a culture of self-service that users expect in all aspects of their digital experience."
5. The mobility shift--access whenever and wherever the consumer wants: Any given device now has the flexibility to be the user's main device, not just the desktop.

Is the PC really going to die?

GigaOm was quick to qualify Gartner's bold statement with a few words of caution. While many consumers do rely on a variety of devices for access, reliable broadband access is not yet universal. If you've ever paid $12.95 for two hours of Gogo inflight internet access, you can probably attest to this. The need for offline interaction still exists.

The article quotes Gartner analyst Steve Kleynhans as clarifying not the absolute death of the PC but the shift to multiple devices, including tablets and smartphones:

“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” said Kleynhans. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

What is a post-PC world?

Are we already in a post-PC world? Yeah, kinda, but it depends on how you define "post-PC world." We are also in a post-radio world in the sense that while radio still exists, it is no longer the sole delivery point for communications as it was in the 30s and 40s. Consumer communications tools and content consumption shifted from radio to television and then to the internet, but each medium still exists and adapted to the change.

The PC will continue to exist as a tool for content creation and collaboration, but it will be one of many, as opposed to the primary tool, suggests Wired magazine:

Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie made recently, saying, “People argue about, ‘Are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,” Ozzie is is reported to have said at a GeekWire-sponsored conference last week. ”That doesn’t mean the PC dies; that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.”

Stop assuming that all online interaction will be PC-based. Take Gartner's prediction to mean that the PC is going the way of radio and television: still very much in our lives, but no longer the be-all and end-all of consumer computing. Rather, it is becoming a smaller part of a diverse system consumers use to access information and engage in communication. Consider the smartphone and the tablet in terms of customer service just as readily as the PC.

What does the personal cloud mean for customer care?

If the evolution of communication to the personal cloud occurs by 2014 as Gartner predicts, there will be two key areas of evolution for customer service:

1. The contact center must adapt to all forms of customer communication. Gone are the days when organizations can assume that customers will use a voice channel to communicate service issues. While many organizations have embraced web chat, texting, smartphone apps and social media monitoring for customer care, these are often tacked on slapdash, while the call center is still considered the primary focus of customer service. Contact centers will need to proactively strategize infrastructure and staffing needs based on the assumption that consumers prefer smartphone and tablet interactions to phone and PC.
2. The contact center will take advantage of the cloud for its own infrastructure needs. With fast-changing consumer expectations, the contact center can't afford to be stuck in the 90s with aging legacy infrastructure, and purchasing complex telephony systems that will be outdated before installation will not meet the needs of the modern contact center. Contact centers need to make the shift to cloud infrastructure themselves in order to accommodate changing customer needs. Sure, smartphones and tablets are all the rage right now, but what will 2015 bring? Cloud virtual contact centers are flexible and scalable, far more so than on-premise infrastructure. And  one day your agents may be working exclusively from an iPad or other tablet device, with no PC to be found.

In short, take into consideration the consumer need for self-service through a variety of devices, not just the phone and PC. And while you're at it, update your own infrastructure to a cloud platform so you'll be ready for the next wave of customer service trends.

Good robots vs bad robots: two cases of customer service automation

Good robots versus bad robots: in customer service automation, there are winners and losers. There is good customer service, and there is bad customer service. What makes for a good automated experience versus an evil one?

Cross-posted to Talk It Up

I write a lot about customer service here, especially as it relates to the call center. And I get a little tired of the all-too-fluffy blog posts on customer service that give vapid advice (Smile when you talk!) or simply recount a bad experience to illustrate the fact that, in fact, bad customer service exists.

We're aware that bad customer service exists and that good customer service isn't as easy as it looks. And one of the controversial aspects of customer service is the trend toward automation. Some users proclaim their hatred loudly and flock to sites such as GetHuman. Others... well, no one really sings the praises of a well-designed IVR or email 'bot, because when they are beautifully designed, they simply work as promised and let the user move on to focusing on more important tasks.

Over the last week, I had two experiences with automation in customer service. With one, the automation was evil: involuntary to begin with, and the organization prevaricated, blamed the user and required several inquiries and escalations to complete a basic process. With the other, the automation was so simple as to be practically invisible, anticipating the user's every need. What can we learn from each one?

Automation #1: Email list auto-add (Evil)

With the first experience, I was added to an email list for night club events taking place in the D.C. area. I'm unsure as to how I got on the list, since I didn't subscribe and the email in question is used almost exclusively for listener feedback from a podcast I produce. It's not even really my email; it's the show's email address. At any rate, I sought an unsubscribe button, since (a) I live 3,000 miles from D.C. (b) I don't frequent nightclubs and (c) I generally don't drink cocktails or spirits.

The first thing I did was seek an unsubscribe option on the offending emails. No such luck. But I was given the prominent option to forward to a friend.

So, grumpy at the extra effort, I was forced to email the organization to report the spam and to ask to be taken off the organization's list. What followed was a series of ill-mannered prevarications designed to make it extremely difficult for the user to be removed from the list. The organization responded, insisting that I use a nonexistant unsubscribe button. When I pointed out their newsletters not only do not have an unsubscribe button but that I'd never signed up in the first place, they insisted I had signed up for the list (!!)  and that they were unable to remove me. Only robots can add and remove customers? Evil!

My response pointing out the lack of an Unsubscribe option:

Their response - blame the customer for the automation mistake:

I reported the behavior to the organization's email service, as most services have regulations regarding spam and automated subscriptions. Also, it's unlikely that the organization was unable to manage its user list and delete users on request, and it did turn out to be untrue, as the representative at iContact was kind enough to point out: "As for adding and removing contacts, the sender does have those capabilities. If an iContact customer is claiming they are unable to perform this task please let us know so we can look into the situation."

After some discussion about the lack of an Unsubscribe button, the issue was resolved by the email service provider--but never by the organization itself.

What went wrong:

• Automating without consent. It is absolutely best practices not to subscribe a user to a list without explicit consent. Even if I had attended an event once, that does not equate to consenting to being added to an email list. Likewise, every email list message must provide a clear unsubscribe option; hiding behind "Update Email Address" is no excuse or substitute. And let's face it; it's a little sleazy.
• Arguing with the customer. I'm not a believer that the customer is always right; we're wrong all the time. But arguing is fruitless, especially with regards to simple transactions that occur every day. Best to make a polite apology and remedy the situation.
• Blaming the customer. Claiming that the customer's situation is her own fault is rarely helpful, even on the occasions when it is true. (Although in this case, it wasn't.) The best customer service agents err on the side of compassion in instances in which automation has failed. What most likely happened in this case is the organization either purchased or "borrowed" a list from some event organizer I had attended during my lst trip to D.C. and automatically added all the emails from it. In any case, moving toward a solution is better than placing blame on either side.
• Not solving the issue. I'm unsure why the organization insisted it was unable to resolve the issue even after its provider confirmed that it could, but I'm reminded that in the world of automated emails, one human being taking just a few minutes to provide service is all it really takes for a user to have a good customer experience.

Automation #2: Ordering delivery (Good)

In sharp contrast to the above experience, last weekend I had a seamless experience ordering a delivery dinner via the internet.

When I found myself too exhausted after a full day at TEDx Rainier '11 to make or seek food, a friend suggested 24hour delivery. I'm sure others use this site daily, but I almost never order food to be delivered, so I wasn't sure where to start! But the site made it effortless, seamless and simple, just as every customer experience should be.

First, I did a search for restaurants that delivered at that time of night near my location. Then, I checked the ratings and selected an Indian restaurant that had good vegetarian reviews. As it turned out, clicking on the restaurant name brought up an interactive menu, on which the user can click on items to instantly add them to an immediate order. Likewise, each item has the option to include special instructions, such as "extra ketchup" or "medium spicy."

Even better, after the order is complete, there is the option to review, opt to pay in cash in person or via credit card; there is even a spot for a credit card or cash tip and for instructions on getting in to the user's residence. In short, the automation on the site considered all possibilities, absolutely everything the user might want and the driver might need to ensure a smooth transaction.

And smooth it was! A receipt was delivered via email for recordkeeping, and the site has a humor-filled page of FAQs should something go amiss. In short, every need the customer might have was already addressed, so only the most bizarre of situations would merit contacting the company.

What went right:

• Anticipated customer needs. The automation worked because every aspect of the search, order and delivery process had been designed as if it were a science.
• Gave more information, not less. Instead of making it difficult to report issues or assuming the customers would call if they were upset, the site proactively listed the most common questions in a friendly, laid-back manner, undoubtedly reducing the number of complaints both to the retaurants and to the site.
• Provided the opportunity to give positive feedback. The site allows users to rate the restaurants and create a community feel rather than a top-down situation.

Two examples of automation: one email automation that banks on users being too lazy to notice the involuntary robotic subscription to complain and one e-commerce automation that anticipates and delivers users' needs to complete a transaction.

Customer service automation isn't evil; well-designed self-service experiences can be incredibly easy, stress-free and provide a better customer experience than even an interaction with a live agent. It's in the way the organization chooses to address customer needs that makes the difference.

The Next Wave in Customer Service Technology

This morning, Spoken's CEO Howard Lee spoke on the Next Wave in Customer Service Technology at the Support and Service Management Breakfast. If you missed it, below are his key insights into call center and customer service trends and how call centers should react to both.

The challenges faced in customer experience are different today from even just a year ago. Customer expectations are lower than ever, but the satisfaction threshold is higher than ever. And with interactions spreading out over multiple modalities, including voice, chat, email Twitter and Facebook, customer service teams are becoming more fragmented. Howard Lee presents a technical exploration of how to keep pace with the trends in call center technology.

The Next Wave in Customer Service Technology

View more presentations from Spoken Communications

Howard Lee is a customer service industry expert with 25 years of experience focused on call center technology and profitability. Lee is the CEO of Spoken Communications a speech recognition technology company providing virtual call center solutions. Formerly the CEO of PhotoWorks, a NASDAQ traded company and Senior VP of Disney Direct, Lee has been responsible for profit and loss, call center technology operations and marketing of several large call center operations.

How to build loyalty in the face of customer expectations

by Heidi Miller, Chief Conversation Officer

Every week, we monitor the best of the web to spot trends in the customer service space. This week, the buzz is all about customer expectations and customer loyalty. What is the relationship between the two, and how do you match expectations while creating loyalty?

The news and trends on customer expectations and loyalty this week:

• Customers expect less and less. The good news is that customers seem to expect less from call centers. Customer Service Zone reported on dwindling customer expectations and the odd paradox that while customers want more from companies, they have actually come to expect less in terms of customer service.
• Loyalty is not the opposite of dissatisfaction. Bruce Temkin in Customer Experience Matters posits that eliminating dissatisfaction results in a neutral feeling towards your brand, not necessarily a positive one. Identifying both drivers of satisfaction and of dissatisfaction is key if you want to create loyalty, not just neutralize a negative experience.
• It's not enough to please customers; you need to get them. Inc.com reports on the value of empathy marketing in customer loyalty: "The goal of empathy marketing is to establish an emotional connection with the “brand” and embed the message in the mind of the consumer.  Neuroscientific studies show that humans are hard wired for empathy and consumer behavior is determined by the emotional stimuli that a marketing message delivers."
• Call Centers hold enormous potential for brands. While this may not sound like news at all, Forrester reports that customer satisfaction scores have flattened since 2007. All the investments being put into call centers aren't yielding higher customer satisfaction. The article reports: "My recent research found one thing that contributes to a customer-centric call center culture more than anything else: the agents’ passion for delivering outstanding customer service."
• Don't call us; we're not here to help. Juxtapose that with Sprint Nextel's recent action of cutting off customers who call too often to the customer service call center. In a bold move, Sprint has taken action to cut off contracts with customers who call the contact center over 25 times a month. While I don't criticize the action--if customers are calling hundreds of times per month, one wonders why they themselves don't switch service--I do wonder about the message this sends to consumers.

Consumer expectations: how slow is too slow for online support?

How long is too long to wait for a response from customer service? Does it matter whether the inquiry is over the phone, through email or web chat?

Fuze Digital teamed up with GetHuman to survey 978 consumers seeking to communicate with 800 different companies. The focus of the survey was to gauge how long consumers would wait for a response to a chat message or email request before picking up the phone, getting a negative perception of the responding organization, or taking their business elsewhere.

The results were fascinating.

Customers do know what they expect and will quickly turn to other support channels, or worse yet to other companies, if their expectations are not met.

Key insights:

• Speed of response was the key factor in choosing a communication channel. The vast majority of survey respondents want to know what the service level will be before contacting customer support. That is, they want to know how long they will have to wait for a response before committing to a communication channel. The majority of people of all ages rated the desire to know what service level was beforehand as 9 or 10 and on average 90% of all respondents rated it at 7 or higher. This is a remarkable insight, showing that speed of response by channel outweighs other factors in communication, including channel preference.
• Urgency was the second factor in choosing a communication channel. Phone customers have the most urgent requests and are seeking immediate resolution. Conclusion: if companies speed up the response rate for email, from say 24 hours to 4 hours, they can decrease the dependency on the call center. Even so, 60% of all respondents indicated that they expect to have an email response to a support incident within 4 business hours and only 22% will accept more than one business day. Translation: answer now, or the customer will walk.
• Expectations for level of service didn't vary by age. The old and the young had the same expectations for immediate responses via phone, email and chat. "Expectations remain pretty consistent regardless of Web usage."
•   Consumer expectations are greatest for support-related inquiries, pre-sales comes in next and responses to feedback have the lowest expectations. This seems to run counter to basic call center operation, which tends to overfund the sales functionality and seek cost-cutting measures for the support functionality. It turns out that a speedy response to an urgent support question is a high expectation of consumers and a big factor in customer loyalty.
• Consumers expect a quick response if they engage in an online chat channel with a company. Although expectations do vary some by the age of the consumer, on average 40% of consumers expect to get a response within 30 seconds and 70% within 1 minute.

The survey is quite useful in providing service level expectations for customers. A few tips and takeaways from the study:

1. Respond to email inquiries within four hours.
2. Respond to online chat inquiries within 30 seconds, 60 seconds at the latest.
3. Instead of using vague terms such as "faster," specify your standard response times online. Commit publicly to average response times (barring natural disasters and outages, of course).

McDonald's McNugget Violence: Are customer expectations too high?

On August 10, a video of Ohio woman Melodi Dushane angrily assaulting a McDonald's drive through customer service representative surfaced and quickly spread through a series of YouTube embeds.

In the video, Dushane leaps through the window to assault the representative, who has informed her that she can't be served McNuggets because it is too early. After the representative fends off the attack, Dushane throws a bottle at the window, breaking it.

So I'm inclined to ask: are our expectations of customer service too high? Do we as consumers have an unrealistically high sense of entitlement? Do we expect that any representative of any company should bow to our will in the name of "the customer is always right," no matter how unreasonable our request?

Customers aren't always right. So what should we in the service industry do about it? How far do our responsibilities go in terms of making the customer happy? As Christophe Van Bael has recently pointed out, maybe before we start trying to delight our customers with exceptional customer service and the "extra mile," we should just focus on trying to get the basics right first.

OK, so we can probably all agree that in this case, McDonald's did provide the basics, and the customer was a tad unreasonable. (And, as she admitted in court, drunk at the time). So maybe Dushane doesn't represent the public at large in terms of customer expectations. But it seems to be she is only a step or two beyond some other perfectly sober customers who feel the need to embrace "the customer is always right" in order to bend the rules to fit their situation.

So... what about the customer who arrives at 10:59 a.m. before the lunch menu begins at 11:00 and is told the same thing? Does that customer have an unreasonable sense of entitlement? Or is the customer service rep being a jerk and applying the rules too stringently? I look at this video and wonder, on my very worst day, could I ever get that worked up about a bad customer service interaction? I'll admit that I've been the customer in some situations in which my expectations were high and my fuse was short.

I suppose it comes down to this: if both the customer and the representative have the presence of mind to ask the questions, "were my expectations too high?" and "was I being unreasonable?", there is hope for the industry. It's when one side or the other ceases asking the question that interactions go awry.

The Huffington Post reported that Dushane was intoxicated at the time and has been sentenced to 60 days in jail as well as paying damages.

Top 5 Contact Center links: the customer experience battleground

These days, it seems that the phrase "customer experience" has become so diluted as to be meaningless. It is just customer service with a bit more weight attached to it so as to sound more self-important? What factors truly affect and direct the customer experience? And what do companies need to consider to improve their customer experience arc?

From this week, the top five links on demystifying customer experience:

• From the Customer Experience Matter studies, more companies are taking a cohesive approach to customer experience
• If the call center is the front line in the customer experience battleground, what metrics should managers consider: Average Handle Time, Average Wait Time, First Call Resolution. What about the newest metric: zero call resolution?
• 5 customer experience management myths is a brilliant piece that cuts through the buzzwords and fluff articles. My favorite: Myth #5: CRM Software = Customer Experience Solution
• Quick IVR tip: improve the customer experience by saving the sales for selling
• And to bring it all home, why your company's mission and your customers' experience don't match--breaking down the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk

Brand loyalty in the age of universal access

This post on preparing for the economic upturn popped up in the Google Alert for "customer service," and my first reaction was positive: what a great idea to look to the future and prepare for a positive upswing instead of more gloom and doom.

And so it is, but I do have a quick bone to pick before agreeing with Gershenson outright: once more, an expert comes forth and warns skittish business owners that in the age of social media, your disgruntled customers might be out to get you: 

Not everything with social networking is positive. All it takes is one disgruntled customer to post a video on Facebook. The video could knock your company and you might lose business.

First of all, creating a catchy video interesting enough to go viral takes a tremendous amount of work. It's more likely that a disgruntled customer will Twitter something negative about your company. (And that Tweet is very easy to respond to and turn around.) Remember, Dave Carroll fought with United for nearly a year before creating the infamous United Breaks Guitars video, now with over eight million views. So before we go too terribly alarmist, in order for a customer to make a video about your company's awful customer service, your service must be consistently awful and endemic to the organization. Very few consumers will bother to go to the trouble to make a video if you get their latte wrong once.

Second, despite what high-priced "gurus" may tell you, not every video or blog post does go viral. Most videos receive views by the customer's friends and through a few searches, but it takes something special, something that hits a cultural nerve, for a video to go viral and "knock your company" enough that you would lose business.

Brand loyalty in the age of universal access

Social media bone-pickings aside, however, Gershenson has a point. It's true that 68% of consumers have reported changing brands because of ONE poor customer service experience. That would make poor customer service the number one reason for a lack of customer loyalty. More than price. More than quality. More than what the ads say or what brand the neighbor has.

Fickle? Perhaps. But is your brand giving your customers a reason, a really great reason, not to be fickle?

Gershenson suggests giving the customer more freedom by giving choices, such as a two-tiered pricing system in which one tier provides direct access to customer service. That's a great first step. But why not turn all that great universal access that social media can provide into your very own brand loyalty think tank? Use the channels available to:

• Find out how your customers prefer their service. Do a survey. Do they prefer web chat? Web FAQ? Phone service? Email? For which tasks? Web chat for easy, routine tasks and phone service for complicated issues? Or vice versa?
  
• Find out what "customer service" means to your customers. What's more important--a quick response? A response via their preferred medium? A "real person"? Twenty-four hour access that fits their schedule? Knowing the when and where of customer service can help you determine where to allot resources.
  
• Find out what defines a "great" customer experience versus an "average" versus a "bad" one. Again, is it speed? Accuracy? First-call resolution? Friendliness? Availability? Sometimes, customers just want to get in, get the answer, and get out, without all the fluff. For other tasks, they might expect personal attention. Know the difference.
  

Listen to the anecdotes as well. Gershenson does have a point with respect to social media--your customers might be singing your praises or complaining about your service in any one of a number of venues, and there is no excuse for not tracking mentions of your brand in order to determine a strategy for interacting with those customers where they are. So take advantage of the conversations already going on in those channels to ask questions, listen and get information to adapt your customer service strategy based on what your customers actually want and need.

Airline baggage fees: revenue fail

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Everyone hates airline baggage fees, right?

So why do some airlines insist on charging them? Theoretically, it's to make up for flagging revenues. However, leave it to the insightful Jackie Huba to dispel that myth. Amongst reports that airlines have collected hundreds of millions of dollars in baggage fees and that these new fees are a goldmine for carriers, boasting $670 million dollars in the second quarter alone for U.S. carriers, Jackie Huba points out the obvious: everyone hates them. And they hate the airlines that charge them.

What's more, she backs her finding up with facts. In her recent post, Fees are penalties, always, she cites figures for actual miles that passengers are traveling on certain airlines. Southwest and JetBlue reported substantial increases in passenger miles (8.8% and 9.8% respectively), while Delta, American, US Airways and United all reported decreasing passenger miles.

What's the difference? JetBlue and Southwest don't charge for bags. The others do. As a result, JetBlue and Southwest get more customers flying more miles because they provide a better customer experience. And the others brag about revenue from checked bags, all while their customers fly fewer miles or simply take their business elsewhere. Wonder how those baggage fee revenues will look when all the customers have switched to Southwest, JetBlue or just decided to take the train?

And in an age where customer service trumps price for consumer choices and retail stock prices reflect customer satisfaction levels, that simply won't fly.

Cross-posted to Talk it up! blog