Customer Service News (21-28 September 2014)

Here's a collection of interesting Customer Service News from around the web (21-28 September 2014).

The Apple Store Guide to Insanely Great Customer Service

From Shopify, By Humayun Khan

Apple takes pride in their highly-trained staff and this article outlines the ultimate crash course to great customer service.

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5 Ways to Dazzle and Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

From Entrepreneur, By Sujan Patel

Do you feel the weather changing? Your customers can feel that too, and to them it’s a great signal to go shopping! With the holiday season coming in, every entrepreneur has to figure out how to get the most out of it. Sujan gives us important tips on creating awareness and to improve sales for every kind of business out there!

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5 Reasons Companies Fail at Customer Service

From Hyken.com, By Shep Hyken

It seems like every business out there boasts highly of their customer service procedures. Yes, some can execute it to perfection but not all can do it right. Maybe it’s not the employee, or the procedure itself, maybe it’s just the lack of, as Shep puts it, common sense. It’s true that most companies know what it takes to provide great customer service - they just have a hard time executing.

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Why Are Emotional Connections the Key to Exceptional Customer Service?

From Disney Institute, By Bruce Jones

It’s never enough to complete a transaction with a seemingly robotic conversation trend, what it takes is a simple engagement that’s both sincere and genuine. Bruce puts it in a very fitting quote, “Aim for your customers’ hearts, not just their heads.” Great relationships will eventually prolong a customer’s engagement and will give you nothing but positive feedback, which is ultimately the goal of any organization.

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Comcast’s Infamously Bad Customer Service Isn’t Incompetence –It’s a Choice

From BGR, By Brad Reed

Is Comcast really bad at customer service? Another incident surfaced highlighting Comcast’s infamous customer service. However, this time, it’s all about dropping calls and no response. Is Comcast really bad at delivering customer service? Or is it a choice?

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Customer Service News (14-20 September 2014)

Here's a collection of interesting Customer Service News from around the web (14-20 September 2014).

Handling Dissatisfied Customers Successfully, To Win Them Back

From Small Business Trends, By Annie Pilon

It's never a fun moment when customers tell you that they're not satisfied. The most pivotal moment of this conversation is whether you can get them back.

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Tech Has Raised the Bar on Customer Experience Higher than Ever; Here’s Why You Should Care

From VentureBeat, By PV Kannan

The current generation undoubtedly demands a certain level of customer experience to reciprocate the advancement in technology. Business ought to be concerned now, more than ever, on providing nothing but the best customer service.

Tech Executives Alfred Lin, Micheal Moritz, and George Shaheen discuss the issue and share insights on what enterprises should aim for when setting customer service goals.

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How to Fix Your Service Experience for Customers with Disabilities — What Kanye Should Have Learned

From Forbes, By Micah Solomon

Kanye West, being the man that he is, got caught up in another scandalous outrage. He allegedly stopped his concert in Sydney to insist two disabled audience to get up from their wheelchairs. There are certain people with specific needs, and people with disabilities should be treated accordingly. 

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Good Customer Service Really Isn’t That Hard!

By Jan Osmond

What is the secret sauce to good customer service? Stay connected to the customers and provide great customer experience all throughout. Point taken, customer service isn’t that hard!

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What Great Social Customer Service LOOKS Like

From Business2Community, By Theresa Mills

Customer service is really engaging in real conversations with real people in real time. This article gives us an example of great customer service, brought to you by Nordstrom.

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Key Account Manager Basics

A Key Account Manager is an interesting role as you get the opportunity to wear many hats including consultant, adviser, project manager, sales executive, colleague, team member, and friend.  Many companies split account management responsibilities into different specialty roles such as Account Director, Account Manager, Solutions Architect, and Inside Sales Executive. However, based on my experience, a GOOD account manager is a special type of person with a varied skill set;  they need to be excellent at building relationships, communicating, problem solving and personal selling. 

To be a successful Key Account Manager, I recommend the following:

1. Be Customer Oriented: It’s all about the customer’s business and industry. Understand your customer’s business drivers, structure, and strategies to ensure your propose the appropriate solutions with the maximum business impact. You need to establish trust and create meaningful value for your client.  

2.  Be Knowledgeable:  You need to be knowledgeable and understand the goals and priorities of your client. Know the industry and the company’s products or services. Understand the competition, as well as their strengths, weakness, and vulnerabilities. Be a subject matter expert and provide advise and insight  to help your client differentiate its products / services, increase revenue, and improve their overall customer experience. 

3. Be a Strong Communicator: Effective communication is crucial for making professional presentations to a group, establishing one-on-one rapport, writing detailed reports, and communicating via email and phone conversations. A good account manager clearly articulates the company’s products or services and explains the advantages to clients in a way that is persuasive without being pushy.

4. Be Results Oriented: A good account manager that understands their client's needs, builds trust, and establishes a rapport and build loyalty and maintain a profitable account. You should always look for opportunities to add value; monitor sales activity and actively seek ways to upsell products and services. If you're honest, trustworthy, and perceived as adding "value", you can foster a successful client retention strategy and generate referrals from existing clients.

5. Have Good Business Judgment: Account growth comes from business growth and helping your client win. Provide meaningful business insight, leadership, and solutions from the client's perspective.  

6. Build Relationships: Continuously build and foster relationships with key stakeholders. Know your client's as a person - not just a work colleague. By understanding the individual you're better able to understand their thought process, motivators, concerns, ambitions, etc. Try and have a monthly "informal" meeting out of the office in a more relaxed setting. I suggest you not only build rapport with your project counterpart but as many of the project team members as possible Your objective is to be viewed as a "colleague" - not an external consultant.

7. Build Collaboration: A successful Key Account Manager creates a relationship that moves up the value chain away from a basic transactional relationship to an interdependent relationship. You want to build the relationship to the point where it's difficult for the client to switch suppliers because you have a strategic, high-value relationship.  Your objective should be to build a partnership relationship.

To be an effective Key Account Manager, you need to have the following:

Personal Traits

• Trustworthy
• Tact
• Integrity
• Responsibility
• Creativity
• Self-Motivation

Skills

• Relationship Building
• Negotiation
• Communication
• Leadership
• Coordination
• Presentation Skills
• Conflict Resolution

Customer Service Metrics

I always equate a company's customer service department with that of a "heart". It's the function through which customer communication flows - both inbound and outbound and across channels. Collecting disposition codes for example, can help you focus on meaningful improvements related to the product, service, communication, service standards, or sales channels. 

Selecting the appropriate set of metrics for your company depends on your industry and stakeholders. For example,

• If you provide inbound sales support then you need to track revenue generated.
• Senior Management needs KPIs compared to line mangers that need real-time operational data.

Select meaningful KPIs and metrics that you can easily measure and track over time. Your support systems should preferably automate the logging and tracing of such metrics. Based on experience, however, some manual calculations may be necessary which is perfectly acceptable as long as the data is captured and available in your database.

common inbound contact center metrics

• Calls Offered: (1) Total calls offered to a queue; (2)the total number of callers seeking service or contact (before reaching an IVR or recorded message); (3) the total number of calls that were available to be answered by the queue (post-IVR selection and recording). It's important to differentiate exactly when you count a call as "offered." It can be measured at the network level, but is usually measured at the switch. Thus, blocked calls ("busies") can be missed.
• Average Speed of Answer: Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk. 
• Average Handling Time: Measures the average duration of one transaction, typically measured from the customer's initiation of the call and including any hold time, talk time and related tasks that follow the transaction.
• Average Talk Time: The average amount of time the agent spends communicating with the customer. ATT is included in your Average Handling Time calculation.
• Average Wrap Time: The time required by an ACD agent after a conversation is ended, to complete work that is directly associated with the calls just completed. Does not include time for any other activities such as meetings, breaks, correspondence, etc. AWT is included in your Average Handling Time calculation.
• Abandonment Rate: Measures the percentage of callers who select a destination but hang up before the destination is reached. It can be a measure of the percentage of callers  who enter an automated attendant or IVR menu, but who hang up before the IVR delivers the call to an agent queue. But most often it is used to measure the percentage of callers who enter an agent queue but hang up before reaching an agent.
• First Call Resolution: First call resolution is properly addressing the customer's need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. FCR is notoriously difficult to track but there are a few methods you can use in combination: (1) Repeat-call tracking technology – tracks whether or not a customer calls the contact center a second (or third or fourth…) time regarding an issue they previously called about; (2) Post-call customer surveys – conducted (via IVR, live surveyor, or email) immediately or very soon after a call and asking the customer whether or not the their issue or inquiry was taken care of completely; (3) Quality monitoring – entails having internal quality monitoring staff listen to and rate the call as “resolved” or “unresolved” (as well as to confirm that it was the caller’s first contact with the contact center on the issue in question). 
• Response Time: Measured as the total period between when a customer makes a request and a response is given. Setting an appropriate response time depends on the contact channel used by the customer, your industry, customer expectations, and available resources. As a general rule of thumb:
• Resolution Time: Measured as the total amount of time between receiving the customer's initial request and providing the correct answer/fix. 
• Schedule Adherence: Determines whether or not agents are working the amount of time they are scheduled to work. It’s measured by taking the total time a call center agent is available for call work and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work, expressed as a percentage. Call center schedule adherence can take into account time spent on breaks or doing other, non-call related work (this is called "compliance"). Most call centers define a target schedule adherence percentage that allows for some cushion time beyond the known scheduled lunch and break times.
• Agent Attrition: Your attrition rate measures how many agents left the Customer Service department over a given period of time. The best way to calculate your agent attrition rate is:

{ The total number of resign (voluntary and non-voluntary) / Average number of employees in the month ((# of full time employees on 1st + last day of month) / 2 } x 100%

social media metrics

Customers are increasingly using social media to interact with customer service in addition to traditional contact channels. Your social media metrics should includes:

• Inbound Volume: The number of messages your receive by channel.
• Volumes by Categories: Try and group inbound contacts by disposition code. For example, billing, cancellation, technical support. This information will help you refine and optimize your online FAQs and/or collateral materials.
• Response Time: This is still measured as the total amount of time you reply to the customer's initial request. Nearly half of all customers that use social media to lodge a complaint, typically expect a response within 1 hour. 
• Average Handling Time: Measures the average duration of one transaction, typically measured from the customer's initial social media initiation to the time the interaction concludes. 
• Deflection Rate: Deflection refers to the percentage of issues moved to another channel rather than being resolved directly within social.

So You're Thinking About Outsourcing Your Customer Service

You're a new internet startup and have no idea how to provide customer service support for your growing user base. You know you need to provide some level of support in addition to online FAQs but you have no idea where do start or what to do.

Start with understanding the different types of "outsourcing" options available:

• Onshore Outsourcing: Outsourcing operations of the company to another company located in the home country or region. Companies can reduce labor costs somewhat and benefit from highly skilled labor with little or no language or cultural barrier, but the cost of such operations is high compared to offshore or near shore locations.
• Offshore Outsourcing: Outsourcing the operations of the company to other companies that are located in a foreign country, and most likely have a different language and culture. Offshore outsourcing offers benefits like higher cost savings and access to highly skilled labor. 
• Near Shore Outsourcing: Outsourcing the operations of the company to an adjacent or nearby country having similar culture and language skills.  Near shore outsourcing offers some cost savings over onshore and has the added benefit of proximity for more frequent site visits, while retaining a highly skilled labor pool.

Weather or not you decide to outsource onshore or offshore, I suggest you evaluate your BPO partner against the following:

• Do they have an Internationally recognized certification - such as COPC?
• How many years have they been in business?
• What is the background and experience of the management team?
• What is the Account Manager's background and experience?
• What reporting tool  do they use? Do you have access to real time stats?
• How does the call center / office environment look and feel?
• What are agent attrition rates?
• What is the agent training program?
• Are there any customer testimonials?
• What is the pricing structure - contract flexibility?

There's one outsource provider, for example, that's been around for a few short years and positions itself as a new "startup" serving "startups". How ridiculous. The company is basically "learning" on the job with very little operations experience. Don't believe the hype. My advice: stick with an established player that has well defined processes, procedures, culture, management team, and recognized certification.