The relationship with customers is like any relationship, it’s built on trust and on promises. 10 years ago I worked for a UK company who at that time saw its key differentiator being the customer experience that it delivered and the customer care that it offered as ‘part of the deal’.

As soon as I joined the organization I was inducted into this ‘brand culture’ and one of the key messages that has stuck with me ever since is that Brand is a promise delivered .

We all hate it when promises are broken, it’s often why personal relationships breakdown and it’s also why our relationship with organizations breakdown.

We all know that it’s easy to make promises but so often in business we fail to deliver and that ruins the reputation of the Brand.

In business, promises are made in many different ways:

The products and services we develop The marketing messages we creat... read more >

You know how it is, it’s Monday morning, more calls are coming in than were expected, not all of the staff have arrived or logged on yet and your customer service goals are already unachievable...

For the customers calling its equally as bad – they’ve worried about their problems and issues over the weekend, they’ve called you as soon as they could and now they are waiting in a queue with no idea when they’ll be answered and if that person will be able to assist them.

On top of all of this, the telephony technology supporting the call center is ageing, antiquated, inflexible and costly to keep updated and running.

You are in the contact center ‘Perfect Storm’!

The Customer Experience When the contact center is in a storm it’s normally the customer who suffers the most. Long wait times that lead customers to try other routes that lead to more transfers. Repeat calls that lea... read more >

Contact centers very frequently start small and evolve leading to silod operations that are built around lines of business or geographic areas.

As businesses grow additional centers are often added or outsource partners brought-in to gain ‘speed-to-market’ or create extra capacity at a lower cost. This brings higher levels of complexity and increasing potential for customer and employee frustration.

In order to keep the contact centers ‘focused’ on answering customers any work that cannot be handled there is then passed off to other administration teams; the Back Office.

With so many silos there are many opportunities for a break down in service which again can lead to customer frustration and lowered staff morale, a vicious circle that will ultimately drive customers and your best contact center resources away.

Here are four steps for moving from this unfortunate cycle.

Step 1 – Break u... read more >

In the classic Disney film trilogy Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear uses the now iconic catch phrase, “to infinity and beyond” as his ‘clarion call’.

In today’s customer experience driven world this phrase should be our clarion call too, why? Because the worlds of customer service and Employee Engagement can no longer be seen as separate domains they have become inextricably linked in ways that mean that decisions in one area can have an infinite number of consequences on the experience in the other.

Back in the ‘90s the concept of ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ circles was a popular concept in ‘Total Quality Management’ (TQM) circles. The idea was that one bad ‘process’ or ‘action’ will drive behaviours that would further worsen the situation driving a ‘vicious’ cycle but that one good ‘process’ or ‘action’ would do the opposite.  I be... read more >

Want to improve customer satisfaction with your service? The first thing to do is to look at your routing strategies.

According to research by Convergys, the top three reasons people are unhappy with customer service are:

Having to make multiple attempts to resolve a problem Resolutions that take too long Having to repeat themselves You can significantly reduce all of these problems through the smart application of contact center routing strategies. Connecting people with the right person the first time accelerates resolutions and makes for happier customers.

The problem: Variable demand, finite resources

The trick to providing good customer service is lining up your resources with customer needs to deliver a consistent customer experience.

At first glance, consistency seems to be mathematically impossible:

On the one hand, you have fixed resources: a fixed number of agents, limited skill sets, and a limited ... read more >

For many many years customer service operations have been using external resources or outsourcers to get additional capacity for their customer service operation. For the customer this means that the customer experience may be different from one outsourcer to another.

For whatever reason this ‘hybrid’ model has become very common, but for many organizations, this model has made the service offering far more complex to manage. It has not always delivered the standard of customer service that many top brands would expect and has not necessarily delivered the business benefits that were originally thought would be delivered.

The provision of the outsource service and its infrastructure to support it is usually separated from the main contact center environment meaning that it is isolated in its own silo.

Let’s look at the three key models generally used by organizations.

1.  Network Delivered Outsourcing This has been... read more >

Part 2 – Understanding the symptoms…

In the hit US TV series ‘House’, Dr Gregory House M.D. (portrayed by the great English actor Hugh Laurie) and his oft times harassed team are usually faced with a set of symptoms that seem to point at one diagnosis but ultimately (and after much drama and humour) turn out to be something quite different and usually far more obscure! Getting to the reasons for ‘customer dissatisfaction and satisfaction’ often seems to be a similar experience…

The Customer Effort Audit (CEA) is that ‘diagnostic’ process to understand the symptoms. For me it is vital that customers and staff are knowingly engaged in the process. Customers and staff will need to be aware that they are participating in a process that will require the organisation to know who they are but that it is aiming to make life easier.

The first step is for customers to be engaged to Customer Effort Sc... read more >