Spoken Communications

Social Customer Service in Action

At the GartnerCRM summit, an enlightening session using real customer case studies and data to show the trends and techniques for winning customer service on social media

[cross-posted at www.heidi-miller.com]

Jenny Sussin, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner with a primary focus on social for CRM, gave this informative session on not only what is happening in terms of social customer management but also how to start initiatives and what to expect when you do. A brief summary of her presentation follows, with some of my own editorial comments thrown in.

Approaching Social

Considering that 340 million Tweets are exchanged every day and that a company like Disney gets as many as 111,000 mentions in one day, it might not be possible to read and respond to every social media mention. However, keep in mind that consumers tend to expect fairly immediate responses from social engagement; some expect responses within a few minutes, and 25% expect a response within 24 hours.

Quantifying the value

So what is the value? It's important to realize that a lot of these interactions will be handled offline. And other results are harder to quantify. For example, a positive interaction by Sussin on Facebook with Eggo waffles may not be tied to a specific increase in sales, but several of her friends noted they hadn't had waffles in a while and would be toasting up more Eggos this week!

However, Sussin reports that 75% of social media projects that don't show a definitive result will be cut off this year. And we can measure elements such as call deflection or speed of response. For example, one retailer quantified their savings in terms of call deflection, calculating that they saved $8 million by responding on social media rather than answering calls in their call center. Another company, Husqvarna, experienced a 24% decrease in call volume due to their social media engagement. Another organization, Odeon, experienced a 61% reduction in negative sentiment in one year with a social customer relationship strategy.

Social Customer Service guidelines

• Keep in mind that unlike other customer service, this is public. Don't ask participants to post private personal information publicly.
• Never delete a post. The community will notice and punish you.
• It's OK not to respond to every comment or post.
• Be strategic in dealing with negative sentiment. Remember the Applebee's kerfuffle? The error was in the organization posting the response as a comment in the long thread, which got buried. Make sure key information is in a new post.
• Don't use templated responses. While this works great in private email or chat, keep in mind that followers can see everything you post. A string of copy-and-pasted boilerplate responses makes the organization look robotic and disinegnuous.

How do we implement?

Sussin shared three key initiatives:

1. Peer-to-peer communities These are communities that replace technical support with fans and other users. Keep in mind that 75%-90% of users will be lurkers and never interact actively in any way: no Likes, no posts, no comments, nothing. Another segment, usually 9%-23%, might engage minimally with a Like or a comment but will not post original content. These are the users to target for more active engagement. And in any community, 1%-2% of users will create the original content; these are the super users. Reward them with badges and other social capital.
2. Social media engagement for customer service Tips for social customer service include avoiding automation, identifying your internal subject matter experts, developing an escalation policy, establishing workflow and creating customized agent desktops to facilitate tracking and analysis. Get started by observing analytics dashboards and determining the proper workload by agent. Identify trending issues and develop FAQs. Determine best practices of high performing agents.
3. Enterprise social networks These are real-time, employee-to-employee collaboration tools, such as Chatter or Yammer. These are best used for a case or a specific issue and are linear and historical. Make sure that the information and case records are searchable for future use.

How to get started

On Monday Find out what your organization is already doing for social. Decide what customer service business value you seek to extract from social: without a goal, you will not be able to measure success or direct your new initiative.

In 90 days Decide who leads the initiative and monitor brand-related feeds to budget resources for social customer service.

In 12 months Select your technology partner and create a standard of service document.

Customer service vs. customer experience: what's the difference?

What is the difference between customer service and the customer experience, and why does it matter?

An interesting discussion on the LinkedIn Customer Experience Professionals group centers around the distinction between two terms all too often used interchangeably: "customer service" and "customer experience." What is the difference between the two? And more importantly, why does either one matter?

While some group members weighed in to say that there is no difference or that one is a subset of the other, I put together a quick summary of some of the thoughts on the topic to see how customer service experts tend to view the differentiation:

Point of service vs. sum total of experience

For a less subjective definition, I turned to Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines "customer service" as the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase, while "customer experience" is  defined as the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.

From that definition alone, the point/line analogy is an accurate one. Customer service is limited to specific, measurable sale-related instances, while the customer experience is, well, everything the customer has ever experienced, believed, thought, loved or hated about the brand. By these definitions, customer service is indeed related to transactions and customer experience is related to transactions and a lot more, over time.

And from the differentiation proposed by various experts, those definitions are fairly accurate.  Perhaps the most informative comment was by Ian Williams, who pointed out two key differences from a marketing point of view as well as a timeline point of view:

 

Customer Service is part of Customer Experience. From a marketing perspective Customer Experience covers all 7Ps (product, price, distribution, promotion, people, physical evidence & process) whereas Customer Service only covers the last 3Ps above.

The other discernible difference is time. CS focuses predominantly on one particular point in time, whereas CE focuses on the customer lifetime. CE can, of course, focus on a particular point in time too, whereas CS almost certainly isn't focused on the lifetime.

Customer experience: depth and breadth of experience

When we talk about the sum total of all experiences that a customer has feeding into the customer experience, we are talking about a myriad of experiences over time. And those experiences might not relate to customer service, as Williams has pointed out. They might relate to promotion or distribution, such as the impression that a commercial, billboard or charity sponsorship made on a customer. They might include meeting a CEO at a golf tournament, a shared story from a friend or a piece they read in the New York Times rating customer service for banks in which no brands were mentioned at all.

No transaction is involved, but those passive or indirect experiences do influence the overall customer experience.

Have you heard the story of the people who gave Nordstrom's the highest marks in customer service, even though they had no Nordstrom's store within hundreds of miles and indeed had never had any experience with Nordstrom's at all? The reputational gossip they heard about the level of customer service was part of their customer experience, even though they were never actually customers.

So I posit that the customer service/customer experience definition looks something like this, with the number and volume of circles constantly growing and shrinking over time:

In short, customer service is one element of the customer experience, which encompasses the sum total of a customer's active and passive interaction with a brand over time.

What do you think? Would you change or alter this definition? Do you use these two terms interchangeably?

 

This week in customer service

The best links on customer service this week

Every week brings new studies, information and even good, old-fashioned books on the call center and how it can be used to improve customer service. We curate the content and bring you the best links on customer service for this first week of May:

• The role of first call resolution in customer satisfaction It's a metric, but how do we use it and why? Impact Learning breaks it down with some great stats: 12% of cus­tomers leave if it takes 2 or more calls to resolve their issue, and for every 1% improve­ment in FCR, you get a 1% improve­ment in cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.
• And speaking of measurement: Why customer experience needs to balance qualitative, quantitative approaches A thoughtful essay on the value of both quantitative metrics and the distinctly un-quantitative customer happiness that they represent
• An interesting formula for determining the ROI of social media customer service: by measuring the call deflection rate from the traditional call center
• And speaking of social media customer service, Brian Solis wrote this tongue-in-cheek foreword for the new book written by the king of social media customer service, Frank Eliason, who ran the Comcast Twitter team and is now making waves at Citibank.

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?

Boring is good: Using Big Data to Enhance the Customer Experience

Thanks to Altamont for the opportunity to speak in front of such an amazing group this afternoon! The theme of the talk was that current customer experience metrics aren't necessarily accurately measuring what the customer wants, which is:

• Did you hear me?
• Did you solve my issue?
• Was it easy?

 

Boring is Good: Using Analytics to Enhance the Customer Experience

View more presentations from Spoken Communications.

Call Center Links: News from the front

Worried you missed something big last week in the world of call center news and innovation because you were busy on the front lines? Here's the quick Monday roundup of last week's headlines:

• Goodbye, thin clients; hello, system on a chip. Last week Citrix announced its new HDX System on a Chip technology, a system that is in fact a full computing system delivered as a single chip to   device manufacturers. Imagine the possibilities--and commenters to the post have. Read the comments for a healthy dose of skepticism and criticism as well as some practical applications for the new tech.
• Working from home is the new green. This OneEarth article makes the argument for the remote agent work from home model helping to prevent climate change.
• Seven deadly sins of call scripting Good advice on what works for basic scripting as well as some of the pitfalls that make both agents and customers miserable
• Changing the concept of First Call Resolution. This post points out Forrester data that 74% of customers use three or more support channels to resolve an issue. If the IVR is the third channel called and the agent resolves the issue, it may be FCR to the call center, but not to the customer.

Customer Service roundup: will your customers or employees take a bullet for you?

What you missed in Customer Service thought leadership this week

You've got a lot on your plate, and that one client kept you up troubleshooting until 3:00 AM (turned out they unplugged a cable). So maybe you didn't catch all the customer service news and thought-provoking insights this week. No worries; we did. Here's what you missed:

• Thoughts on customer loyalty and how much of it a rewards program really returns. Our favorite former blogger Kathy Sierra gives a nice rant on Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void blog, arguing that Your Customer Won't Take a Bullet for You and bluntly states, "If we have to pay to get it, it's not loyalty."
• Following our own post that employee satisfaction comes before customer satisfaction, funny man Greg Levin spews hilarious yet useful advice on Seven Ways to Elevate Agent Engagement and Retention in the call center. My favorite tidbit? "Covet community service as much as customer service. People are inspired by and want to work for companies that care about all human beings – not just customers and employees." Amen to that. Creating a company mission to give back to the community creates a sense of involvement and well-being that can't be duplicated.
• John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing is always brilliant. Lately, he's been writing about the customer experience, something near and dear to my own heart. In this post, he advocates beginning product development with the customer experience in mind: ask what action you want your customers to take 30, 60 and 180 days after purchase and build the product offering based on those desired experiences.
• Forbes shares a way to put it customer service in perspective: what's a lifetime customer worth? Have you calculated the value of a lifetime customer? Knowing that figure will help you and your employees make decisions today, even when the customer is dead wrong.

Top Three Customer Service Complaints and How to Address Them

Customer service doesn't have to be complicated or annoying

In this recent video from Consumer Reports, the top three customer complaints relating to customer service are profiled:

1. Waiting too long on hold
2. Can't reach a human
3. Navigating convoluted menus

Interestingly, most of these complaints are unique to IVRs. When describing human interactions at a brick and mortar store, for example, there may be complaints about wait times, but no one ever complains that he can't reach a human in a store or that the menus are too difficult to navigate. Humans are all around in real life--but can they solve your customer service problem?

The truth is that a well-designed IVR solution can actually address all three of these common customer service complaints and provide an extremely effective customer service experience. Let's address each issue individually:

Waiting too long on hold. Hold time is the bane of call centers and contact centers everywhere, and the balance of qualified staff to quantity of callers can be a difficult one to maintain. And yet, there are easy alternatives to forcing your callers to suffer through endless hold music.

• First, consider offering self-service options, either in the IVR or online. For any industry call center, there is a list of the most commonly asked agent questions along with a procedural list highlighting how to correct them. If the issue has a common, standard solution with a proven success rate, there is no need to make callers wait on hold. Offer them the chance to self-serve, either in the IVR or online. Like the self-serve checkout lane at the grocery store, sometimes it's just faster and less frustrating if the customer does it herself.
• Second, offer a callback. Within a well-designed IVR, when wait times pass a certain threshhold, the option to receive a callback is available. The process is simple: callers select the option for a callback and enter their phone number through DTMF or speech recognition while retaining their priority in the queue. The caller hangs up, goes about his life, and receives a call back from an agent when the queue clears.
• Third, offer chat support. Chat support offers the immediacy of phone interaction with a built-in lag time that allows agents to multitask. Currently, chat queues tend to be shorter than phone queues, and customers can get near-immediate answers. While some still may prefer the IVR channel, deflecting those comfortable with chat support to that channel will ease the burden on the call center queue and reduce hold times for everyone.

Can't reach a human. We've written about this issue before. The issue isn't that the caller can't reach a human; the issue is that the robots aren't well-designed. A well-designed IVR will quickly collect enough information to identify the caller and promptly route the caller to a human agent. What is frustrating for callers is an IVR designed by engineers rather than customer service experts; what is logical to a technician may not be a logical call flow to a real human caller. Tip: if you want to know where your IVR isn't working, ask your front line agents. They will tell you exactly where the IVR is failing callers.

Navigating convoluted menus. There is no excuse for this one; IVR menus should be simple, direct and reflect the most common customer needs. A few basic rules:

• No more than five choices. Humans can remember three or four choices easily, five with some difficulty. Giving more than that will frustrate callers.
• No more than two choices on a submenu. If your submenu has more than two choices, you need to redesign your IVR.
• More than one submenu. Having to navigate past even one submenu creates a barrier between the caller and the agent. Throwing two or three submenus in the call flow makes the experience more mazelike and less customer-friendly.
• Use speech recognition. Pushing 1, 2 or 3 is fine for simple tasks, but it makes for a much better and more personal caller experience when the caller can simply say "I need help with billing" or "I'm having a problem with my printer."

When designing a customer response system, designers should keep in mind the most basic of human needs: callers simply want to be understood, helped and sent on their way. In many cases, this can be achieved with well-designed automation. In fact, studies have shown that for many routine tasks, customers prefer self-service to engaging in small talk with a live agent. Activating an effective speech recognition solution, designing and IVR with intuitive menu choices and offering callers callback and chat options address these common customer service issues as well as the human needs behind them.

Supermarkets: to self-serve or not to self-serve?

A lesson in IVR automation from the grocery store

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that supermarkets, the first to embrace self-service at point of service, are taking two very different paths. The Journal reports that while 200 Albertsons stores in the Southern and Western U.S. are phasing out the self-checkout systems and replacing them with human cashiers, the Kroger supermarket chain is continuing to embrace self-service, even to expanding to trials of a new scan-tunnel system that would automatically scan items from a conveyor belt.

To self-serve or not to self-serve, that is the question. And store owners seemed to have whittled the question down to a much simpler one: do supermarket patrons really prefer the personal touch or quick anonymity?

As with the answer to every other business questions, the answer is "it depends." On how well you know your customers and track their actual behavior. In this case, it depends on the type of supermarket patron and the type of shopping excursion are involved.

The basket excursion  I don't know about you, but on most of my trips, I have no desire to bond with my supermarket checkout clerk. Several times a week, I am invariably grabbing one of those small baskets and squeezing the errand in between other activities that I actually enjoy doing and tend to approach the chore with a stoic pragmatism: get in, get the items on the list, and get out. I don't want to have a conversation with the butcher; I don't want to converse with other patrons; I don't even want to have an Excellent Customer Experience. I just want to buy my 10-15 items and then spend time doing something I actually value in life: interacting with my friends and family.

The shopping cart excursion  However, that is only one kind of shopper one one type of shopping excursion. I'll admit that when I'm doing a monthly stocking-up trip, one that requires actually getting a shopping cart, filling to the brim and inevitably brings a three-digit total, the self-service checkout is not my first choice. In that case, the human checker saves considerable time and effort.Then again, that trip occurs once a month for me; the other, weekly or bi-weekly trips are all much better candidates for self-service.

Basket or shopping cart?  One would hope that both Albertsons and Kroger's did studies to determine which type of shopper and excursion were more common, brought more income and inspired more brand loyalty before making their respective decisions to phase out and increase the level of self-service in their stores.

The lesson for IVR design

And we can learn a lesson here when designing IVRs. Most annoying IVRs do not fail because of the technology; they fail because of a flaw in the design logic. Just as a supermarket needs to consider its basket-versus-cart shoppers and their needs and values, companies should consider the following business logic before attempting to automate any process in the IVR:

• What is the task most frequently requested by your customers?
• What is the task your agents find the most boring and routine?
• What are the top three reasons customers call your company?
• What routine task are agents tired of repeating?
• When your customers call after hours, what are they requesting?
• When your customers call first thing in the morning, what are they requesting?

Understanding which tasks are vital to your customers and which are simply routine can and should direct your IVR design. It's the same as understanding which shoppers on which excursions want to simply get in and out and on with their lives versus which truly want that human touch. Remember that not all tasks fare well in automation: you must analyze your current customer actions in order to determine which tasks they will sing your praises for automating and which they will be grateful to speak to a human being over.

Why even rats hate your customer service

Trust the comics to put the customer experience in such a bold light:

So how could Diogerat find an honest man?

1. By calling Zappos
2. By Twittering about Comcast
3. By flying Southwest
4. By having an IVR that never asks a question twice or says "I'm sorry; I didn't catch that."
5. What would you add?