Firstly I would like to announce I am joining the witness protection group and will be living in my Toyota 4Runner at La Quinta Inn’s in the Midwest USA for the next 12 months so the 3 million or so North American call center agents and their bosses cannot find me.
A Short History Of Customer Service Technologies And Customer Satisfaction
How is call center agent based customer service working for you? Really ? No Honestly ? Would you like a better way?
Truth be told it isn’t optimal for anybody although it could be a lot worse. Agent based customer service is expensive and hard to manage well. I have been in the sales and service improvement industry for 27 years and we have spent much of that time fighting to meet the demands of ever increasing customer service requirements combined with increasing corporate demands to reduce costs and increasing contact channel option demands from customers.
The history of technology enabled customer service has been pretty straightforward over the past 27 years.
- We started (well I started) by centralizing customer service personnel / agents in call centers through ACD implementations and injecting sales and service improvement devices in the business model such as ticket machines at airports, ATM’s at banks and better Point of Sales (POS) systems in retail operations during the 80’s
- Then we injected IVR’s in the 90’s to help with routing (press 1 for sales etc) and ultimately realized we could reduce the number of call center agent handled calls with self service IVR’s integrated into the enterprise applications (press 2 to hear your balance and 3 to automatically pay your bill) and also by grouping and locating call center agents by skills and costs. This was combined with the rise of off the shelf enterprise applications starting with ERP and then addressing sales and customer services (Siebel, SAP and by 2000 Salesforce.com)
- Ultimately this trend led to near/offshoring of agents plus the start of the mobility revolution during the mid to late 90’s.
- In the very late 1990’s and through the 2000’s all of this accelerated plus we saw the widespread adoption of eCommerce and the Internet in business to consumer and business to business interactions and the growth of email as a customer interaction tool and by the mid 2000’s the injection of web chat, the, the rise of SMS Text and the start of knowledge bases as a self service tool.
- Lately as we leave the 2000’s and enter the 2010’s we have seen the widespread proliferation of Mobility solutions (iPad and iPhone anyone) , Video interactions and just to make it all fun we have recently added Social Media to te business interaction world.
Social media has a number of impacts but the most profund is that every other interaction method has centered around a controlled inbound and/or outbound interaction management usually heavily focused on a transaction (getting to one or servicing one). Social Media has brought the concept of conversations the business does not control including customer to customer, partner to partner, employee to employee and all the mixtures. The industry gurus call these “unstructured conversations” and they whole dynamic is part of the ever more Distributed, Mobile, Collaborative, Connected world and enterprise.
It Often Takes 12 Interaction Channels To Service The Customer Today
As a result the average enterprise (even the smaller ones today) are now interacting with their customers through 12 “interaction channels” including:
- Field agents
- Channel partners
- Inbound Agent Voice
- Outbound Agent Voice Contact Center
- Self Service IVR (with or without speech interpretation)
- Retail stores / branches
- Email (inbound and outbound, manually generated or automatic)
- Outbound Internet / web / ecommerce messaging
- Interactive internet / web / ecommerce (including frequently asked questions access to the other tools listed here)
- Instant messaging (with or without video chat or video conferencing)
- SMS Text
- Social Media (ie communities whether private, facebook, blogs or whatever)
Customers increasingly use multiple channels and demand to use the channel they prefer when they prefer it. For example I may want to talk to a sales person in a store at 2pm on a Saturday and a contact center agent at 6pm on a Friday (when I am in my car in traffic) but I would rather Instant Message my bank while watching American Idol at 8.30pm on a Wednesday.
It goes without saying (I hope) that customer satisfaction and success requires ensuring you have the right performance monitoring and analytics tools, capabilities and staff across these channels and the right customer data strategy and platforms underpinning the channels.
It is also becoming apparent that no matter how good your tools and people it is almost impossible to completely track customer journeys as they move between and across channels and environments. Anyone who says they can do this in the offline world needs to tell me how they know when a customer conducts “offline research” by staring at a product in a display window at an airport while looking at a Google search on their Android phone of comparable items and pricing!
Mobility And Community Based Self Service Trends Are Changing The World
But two trends are combining to rapidly driving an even faster revolution with the uniquely proven ability to significantly reduce service costs while improving customer satisfaction, community based self service and mobility.
This is especially notable in the developing economies of Asia and Latin America where entire new, economically advantaged populations have skipped landline voice communications to adopt mobile voice and data and have skipped traditional voice based call center interactions to go straight to the new world of text based interactions leveraging community capabilities (on their mobile devices). Many USA companies are seeing much of their current growth in these emerging markets and starting to realize that the same trends are happening in North America.
A few recent market statistics that may be helpful to show how the world is changing rapidly and how complex it all is:
- Facebook pages drive 80% of new newsletter signups in the mobile world (even major brands like CocaCola and Starbucks are now seeing more mobile Facebook interactions than mobile web interactions and significantly greater mobile growth than regular online growth and moving marketing spend to social media)
- 68% of users use a mobile device to perform research while inside retail store (this could be an internet search, texting or calling a friend or engaging in a social network or “opinion / review site”)
- In a recent UK survey 44% of people named eMail as their interaction channel of preference (while consistently naming eMail as the most frustrating channel)
And we at Customer Results are seeing this dynamic accelerate across all industries. One of my favorite mobility conversations recently was with a 46 year old financial controller (who happens to be the company IT leader) of a $100m Southeast USA based parts manufacturing and distribution company trying to figure out how best to respond to 3 of his best customers (who are 52 – 58 year old Production VP / Directors) who have suddenly complained they cannot SMS Text or Instant Message support questions direct to his people on their iPhones. When the “complaint calls” first came in during November 2011 he thought someone was playing a joke on him because his company has been working with these people for 25+ years and he didn’t think these particular customers owned iPhones let alone had any desire to SMS text on them for business purposes.
The other key capability that has gained rapid strength over the past 2-3 years has been the community based, self-service knowledge base. This is basically a place (website, Facebook or whatever) where you go to type in questions and get automated answers based on text analysis and interpretation of your question you type in, are given selected answers based on similar questions (the intelligent FAQ concept), can gain exposure to other community members who will answer your questions based on their own experience (whether they are qualified to or not) and even have “click to chat” or “click to talk” access to a customer service rep if you want it. Customer satisfaction form these channels is massively higher than other channels and the percentage of interactions completed without any agent interaction is many multiples of IVR self-service or even regular websites.
The most extreme versions of this are where multiple companies (even competitors) get together to create a branded self-service experience which draws large volumes of customers with high levels of trust.
The steadily improving quality of these technologies combined with a growing level of customer dissatisfaction with call center based conversations is having a massive impact. Dissatisfaction with call center conversations are usually caused by poorly educated agents, poor linguistic skills, poor enterprise application and information availability, long hold times or agents more focused on or paid to deliver the company message rather than what the customer perceives as the truth (stand outside a Marriott and a Hilton hotel in any city and call 1-800-Hilton and ask which is the better of the two .. what do you expect to hear?)
Put mobile devices together with community enabled self-service tools and you have a dramatic reduction in people handled customer service enquiries (and therefore associated call center agents and costs) and a significant uptick in customer satisfaction. Customer Results is seeing companies with a 50% reduction in voice calls as a result of these trends and a 20% improvement in customer service scores.
This impact is bigger and faster than anything I have seen in the past 27 years and where it is especially important is in the midsized companies who may not be able to afford the world’s best contact center agents but can create highly personalized, mobile, community based service experiences that rival the largest corporations.
7 Questions To Help You Move Forwards
So ask yourself these seven questions about your customer service strategy and join the revolution:
- Are there areas where your customers would get better service if they served themselves or they got their service from other customers? (note – the important element is whether they feel they get better service?)
- Are you providing the interaction channels your customers want and need? (note – do you know what they want and need?)
- Are you seeing changes in voice call volumes and text (email. SMS text, social media DM) interactions? (note – do you have the historic tools and data to know and someone responsible for tracking this?)
- Are your desires to adopt new channels and capabilities constrained by your current spend on current capabilities including your call center agents? (note – this can be a political more than an economic question)
- Is there an opportunity for you to create a branded community service experience, maybe with other companies and even competitors, where customers can go to get their service needs and questions answered by other customers and/or your business partners?
- Do you have the multichannel reporting and analytics capabilities in place to monitor and analyze these interactions and conversations to learn about what your customers are doing, thinking and interested in?
- Do you know what tools are available to allow you to do this which are compatible with your current infrastructure investments?
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