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Phone Satisfaction Snapshot: USAA And The Hartford Top The List February 19, 2008

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Call center customer experience, Customer experience.
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We asked nearly 5,000 US consumers about their satisfaction with experiences across nine different industries: banks, credit card providers, health plans, insurance firms, Internet service providers, investment firms, retailers, TV service providers, and wireless carriers. Our analysis looked at phone, store/branch, and Web interactions. I’ll take a look at each channel over the next three days.

Satisfaction With Phone Interactions

I’ll start with some highlights of consumer feedback on phone interactions:

  • Investment firms (84%) and insurers (83%) had the highest satisfaction rates
  • TV service providers (66%), health plans (67%), and Internet service providers (67%) had the lowest satisfaction rates
  • USAA, The Hartford, and Charles Schwab led the pack with satisfaction rates of 90% or more
  • Charter Communications, Medicaid, and Sprint fell to the bottom with satisfaction rates of 60% or less
  • More than one-third of the firms had satisfaction rates less than 70%

The bottom line: What’s it like on the other end of your 1-800 number?

NetFlix Ends Email Support; Tries Another Disruptive Strategy August 19, 2007

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Call center customer experience, Customer experience, Disruptive customer experience strategies.
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NetFlix decided to stop its email customer service and, instead, beef-up its phone support. According to an article in the New York Times:

Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day.  

My take: Wow! Gutsy move. Okay, now for a more analytical discussion…

NetFlix probably recognizes the realities of handling customer service emails — it’s incredibly difficult to do right. Here are some datapoints to think about:

  • Most emails deliver a poor customer experience. In a recent Forrester research report called Best And Worst Of Email Interaction Design, 2007, we evaluated the email service experience delivered by 16 large firms. None of the 16 firms passed our reviews — although Circuit City came closest. The biggest problem: Emails lacked essential content.  
  • Consumers aren’t thrilled with email. We asked about 5,000 consumers how satisfied they were in handling customer service through different channels. Here are the satisfaction numbers for different channels: in-person (44%), phone (29%), Web (15%), and email (13%). (Forrester Research clients can read: Match Channel Capabilities To Customer Goals).

So NetFlix is just focusing on an area that it can deliver better experiences. And the firm isn’t outsourcing its call center overseas to save money, it’s investing in its Hillsboro, Oregon facility. NetFlix thinks that it can staff that location with empathetic phone reps.

In a previous post, I defined Five Disruptive Customer Experience Strategies:

  1. Ultrasimplicity: stripping away features to better meet the needs of customers.
  2. Online infusion: integrating online features into core offerings.
  3. Service infusion: integrating service features into core offerings.
  4. Service amplification: investing in distinctly high levels of service.
  5. Value repositioning: offering a radically different value proposition.

NetFlix has been one of the examples that I use to explain online infusion — it integrates a robust set of online features to deliver value well beyond just DVDs by mail (for another great example of this strategy, check out WebKinz). With this move to enhance its phone support, the company is adopting another one of the disruptive strategies: service amplification. While most companies are looking at phone service as a cost center, NetFlix is investing in it as an experience differentiator.

My advice to NetFlix: Augment this strategy with a strong online chat capability. That will provide a solid option for customers that really want to complete the interaction online.

The bottom line: If customer service drives a key portion of NetFlix customers’ overall experience, then this disruptive strategy could be a great move. If it’s not, then they’re likely to move the call center offshore within 24 months. In any case, there are three disruptive strategies left for them to try!

USAA: A Positive Example Of Customer Experience June 18, 2007

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Call center customer experience, Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Online strategy.
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I was recently giving a speech to a group of executives at a large financial services firm; talking about my favorite topic: Experience-Based Differentiation. After I was done, one of the attendees came up to me and shared a recent experience that she had with USAA. (Note: USAA was not the organization that I was speaking to at the time).

She told me that she was looking for an auto loan and had called around to get a number of different quotes. Before she picked one, she thought she’d give USAA a call (she’s a member of USAA). While she was on the phone, the USAA phone agent asked her a few questions and then said that she could beat the lowest rate that the woman had received by a point. That’s right – one full percentage point lower than any other provider. The phone agent asked her how much she needed for the loan, but she wasn’t sure. So the phone agent said that they’d send her a blank check and that she could fill in the amount up to a specific amount (well above what she needed for the car). The phone agent told her that all she had to do was to go to the Website and answer 5 questions to finish the process.

Well, the woman went to the Website and answered 5 questions and received a blank check the next day.

Let’s disect what went right.

  1. It was a great sales process. All large financial institutions want to cross-sell products, but not many make it quite as easy as this. The combination of a low rate and a no-nonsense process immediately closed the sale.  
  2. USAA acted like it knew her. How was USAA able to offer such a great rate? She was a member of USAA, so they have  a lot of information about her. They used the information to deliver a rate that reflected what they already knew about her. 
  3. The phone agent was empowered to solve problems... How many financial institutions allow phone reps to send blank checks to customers overnight? Probably not too many. But that’s part of what was needed to meet the customer’s needs.
  4. … And the agent knew the online process. In many organizations, phone agents aren’t very familiar with what happens when a customer goes online. In this case, the agent clearly understood (and communicated) the process that the customer needed to go through online
  5. The online process was simplified. The only way that USAA can cut the online process down to 5 questions is by limiting their questions to things that they don’t know about the person. Since the loan applicant was a member, USAA didn’t make her input information that it already knew about her.
  6. USAA did what it said that it would do. When a company doesn’t live up to its promises, you can say goodbye to customer goodwill. But that’s wasn’t an issue here. USAA set clear expectations with the customer — and delivered exactly what itpromissed.

This type of experience is not a random occurance for USAA — they have very high levels of member loyalty. As a matter of fact, USAA has been at the top of Forrester’s Customer Advocacy rankings for the last three years. It wouldn’t hurt if other financial institutions (and companies from other industries) learned a thing or two from USAA.