Social Media Meets Good Old-Fashioned Service June 3, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Social computing, Voice of the customer, customer service.Tags: RightNow Technologies
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In a recent briefing from RightNow Technologies, the SaaS (Software as a Service) CRM provider showcased it’s new functionality called Cloud Monitor. The vendor can now search social networking sites for comments about a company, identify the sentiment of the comment (very negative to very positive), and enable reps to respond to the comments using their normal CRM tools.
Here’s a screen shot (courtesy of RightNow) showing how the tool can be used to respond to tweets:
RightNow Technologies' Cloud Monitor Functionality
My take: This new offering from RightNow is a great example of an important voice of the customer (VoC) trend: The integration of social media monitoring into broader VoC efforts. There’s no reason for social media efforts to look substantially different from how companies handle other forms of feedback.
And this becomes even more important when companies decide to respond. Why should reps have different (and less integrated) tools for responding to Tweets than they do when responding to emails? They shouldn’t. RightNow’s type of solution allows companies to utilize existing knowledge bases, efficiently deal with correspondences, and maintain a centralized record of customer contacts.
While this initial functionality from RightNow is a good starting point, it certainly needs some more enhancements before it matches up with pure brand monitoring tools. Here are some of the areas where it should (and likely will) make improvements: A broader set of sites that it monitors, classification (and agent routing) of comments by topic, identification of the influence level of the commenter, inference of customer details (like is it a customer or not), and tailored text mining tools.
So, for the time being, companies need to make a trade-off between comprehensive brand monitoring tools and integration with CRM applications. But it won’t be long until social media is just another channel that companies interact with through their existing CRM applications.
The bottom line: Everything new that survives becomes mainstream.
Customer Service Trumps Price May 17, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.15 comments
In a recently published research report called “Customer Service Trumps Price,” we asked nearly 4,600 US consumers how they choose the companies they do business with across 12 industries: airlines, banks, cell phone service providers, credit card providers, hotels, insurance firms, Internet service providers, investment firms, medical insurance companies, PC manufacturers, retailers, and TV service providers.
In particular, we asked consumers to rate the importance of two criteria: good customer service and low prices. Here’s some of what we found when we analyzed the data across five generations of consumers:
- Across all 12 industries (and every generation of consumers), good customer service was selected more frequently than low prices as being important.
- Good customer service was most important for banks and insurers, where it was selected by 89% and 87% of the respondents respectively.
- Low prices was most important for retailers, credit card providers and airlines, where it was selected by 78%, 75%, and 75% of the respondents respectively.
- When it comes to the gap between good customer service and low prices, seven industries have double-digit spreads, led by banks (31%), investment firms (26%), and health insurance plans (18%).
- Across all 12 industries, Younger Boomers (43 to 52 year-olds) were the group that most frequently viewed low prices as being important.
- Across all 12 industries, Gen Yers (18 to 28 year-olds) were the group that least frequently viewed good customer service as being important.
The bottom line: Good customer service is a critical component of customer experience.
Don’t Confuse Customer Service With Customer Experience February 24, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.Tags: Jeff Bezos
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I often get asked to describe the difference between customer service and customer experience. To me, it comes down to this picture:
Customer service is an organizational function, like marketing and sales, that manages a subset of interactions with customers. Customer experience, on the other hand, is the connection that companies make with their customers across all functions and touchpoints. Here’s a definition for customer experience:
The perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization
I also like what Amazon.com’s CEO Jeff Bezos had to say on this topic:
Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience. Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations. You know, I got my book and it’s missing pages 47 through 58
For most companies, customer service deals with some key “moments of truth” for customers. So that function is an important participant in most efforts to improve customer experience. But firms can’t just focus on customer service interactions or offload responsibility for customer experience to the customer service organization. That’s why the 3rd principle of Experience-Based Differentiation is: Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.
The bottom line: Customer service is an important component of customer experience
Customer Service Champs From BusinessWeek February 21, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.Tags: Ace Hardware, Amazon.com, BusinessWeek, Hewlett-Packard, Jaguar, Lexus, Publix Super Markets, T. Rowe Price, The Ritz-Carlton, USAA, Zappos.com
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In its current issue “Extreme Customer Service,“ BusinessWeek published it’s annual report on customer service which ranks the “Customer Service Champs.” Here are the top 10 on the list:
- AMAZON.COM
- USAA
- JAGUAR
- LEXUS
- THE RITZ-CARLTON
- PUBLIX SUPER MARKETS
- ZAPPOS.COM
- HEWLETT-PACKARD
- T. ROWE PRICE
- ACE HARDWARE
While we didn’t evaluate the same group of companies, there’s an overlap between this list and Forrester’s customer experience rankings. In our rankings, Amazon.com came in 4th and USAA came in 2nd. That’s not a surprise; customer service is often a key component of an overall customer experience strategy (look for an upcoming post that explores the difference between customer service and customer experience).
I’m quoted in the article “Customer Service in a Shrinking Economy” which discusses customer service in this economic environment (note: take a look at my posts about managing in a recession). It’s an execellent article; full of examples from companies like Zappos, Four Seasons, USAA, and Schwab.
While we’re discussing customer service, don’t forget my ”CARES” model:
- Communication (clearly communicate the process and set expectations)
- Accountability (take responsibility for fixing the problem or getting an answer)
- Responsiveness (don’t make the customer wait for your communication or a solution)
- Empathy (acknowledge the impact that the situation has on the customer)
- Solution (at the end of the day, make sure to solve the issue or answer the question)
The bottom line: Congratulations to the customer service champs!
The “Problem” Of Call Waiting Times January 15, 2009
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Call center customer experience, Customer experience, customer service.Tags: Kano Model
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A McKinsey Quarterly article called Maintaining the customer experience caught my eye. It discusses scenarios where companies were trying to figure out the design point for a couple of customer experiences, one of which was the call waiting time for a call center. Here’s how the article sets up the problem:
Consider service levels, specifically average time-to-answer, which is one of the most common metrics used in call centers. Service levels-often based on regulation or historical precedent-are set by call-center managers and then used to calculate staffing requirements. But service levels are challenging to maintain and costly to improve: raising them by 10 percent requires much more than a 10 percent increase in staff
My take: This is an area where companies can make a lot of costly mistakes if they don’t understand what drives customer satisfaction. So I sent the following comment to the McKinsey Quarterly editors…
Conceptually, the Kano Model does a good job of helping dissect thinking in this area. In particular the model’s focus on three types of attributes: Must-be, One-dimensional, and Attractive.
Must-be attributes need to deliver a minimum threshold of value or the customer will be extremely dissatisfied. But the customer does not notice if that threshold is exceeded. Think about the brakes on a car; you expect them to work, but don’t notice much more than that.
One-dimensional attributes are those that continue to increase the value to customers. Think about price; the lower the better.
Attractive attributes are unexpected aspects of the experience that dramatically increase the value perceived by a customer. Since they don’t expect them, there aren’t any negative consequences if they are not there. Think about a call from the CEO of an airline after you’ve had a service problem; wow, that could make a significantly positive impression.
Using this model, we can better understand the mistake that companies often make about attributes like call waiting times. In most cases, I’d classify call waiting times as a must-be attribute. It’s a problem if the waits are too long, but there’s no lasting perceived value by customers if you shorten them under that threshold. So companies shouldn’t invest in dramatically shortening waiting times, but should figure out how to minimize the number (or impact) of people that experience a wait that goes beyond the threshold.
You may have noticed that offered up the option of either solving the problem (customer who have a wait time above the threshold) or lessening the impact. It may be very expensive to eliminate all customer waiting times that go beyond their must-be threshold. So companies may be better served to try another approach: like an apology from the call center rep or some more substantial service recovery option (maybe even some “attractive” options).
By understanding these differences, companies can focus their energy and investments in the right areas to drive up customer satisfaction. This is particularly important in these times when companies are cutting back; they need to make every investment count.
The bottom line: Figure out what’s must-have, attractive, and one-dimensional.
Verizon Wireless Customer Service Let Me Down September 4, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in 6 laws of customer experience, Customer experience, customer service.Tags: Verizon Wireless
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I just had an interesting interaction with Verizon Wireless. After a long phone discussion with the firm’s customer service department, the rep told us that we needed to go into a store to show some documentation. When we got to the store, the agent didn’t understand why we were there.
After we explained the situation to him, he looked at our account and told us that he couldn’t do anything because our account was overdue. Well, we were shocked; we had paid our bill. After several minutes of trying to explain this to the rep, we finally got him to call the customer service center — and they confirmed that our bill was NOT overdue. The problem was that we had been issued a credit that did not show up on his system.
It seems like I should be transitioning into the happy ending of the story. But I’m not. Even though everyone now knew that our payments were completely up to date, the store and phone agents couldn’t help us; the system wouldn’t let them.
Here’s how I’d grade the experience using my CARES model:
- Communication: D
(clearly communicate the process and set expectations) - Accountability: C-
(take responsibility for fixing the problem or getting an answer) - Responsiveness: C-
(don’t make the customer wait for your communication or a solution) - Empathy: C+
(acknowledge the impact that the situation has on the customer) - Solution: D-
(at the end of the day, make sure to solve the issue or answer the question)
How can Verizon Wireless avoid these problems in the future?
- Empower employees. The total amount getting in our way was $26. Yet no-one at Verizon was able to do what was right and override the system.
- Synchronize systems. Don’t let systems show that someone is past due when they’re not. At a minimum, give in-store agents access to the same information as the phone reps.
- Use customer experience metrics. The Verizon Wireless store did not have any customer service reps, everyone was in sales. So our agent was not anxious to spend time on our problem, since it was taking time away from his selling. That’s why the employees need more of their incentives tied to customer experience measurements.
The bottom line: This situation is consistent with the 6 laws of customer experience, especially CxP Law #4 (unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers) and CxP Law #5 (employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated).
What Consumers Want From Insurers August 5, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.2 comments
I recently published a research report called What Consumers Want From Insurers that examined what consumers cared about the most when it came to their insurance providers. In our analysis of survey responses from nearly 5,000 US consumers, we found that consumers most want:
- a good reputation from life insurers
- low prices from auto/home insurers
- high quality coverage from health insurers
We took the analysis one step further and looked at how responses differed across five generations of consumers: Gen Y (18 to 27), Gen X (28 to 41), Younger Boomers (42 to 51), Older Boomers (52 to 62), and Seniors (63 and older). It turns out that Younger Boomers care the most about the actual coverage. Here are some other interesting factoids that we found:
- Life insurers: Gen X wants low prices, Younger Boomers want good coverage, and older consumers want a good reputation.
- Auto/home insurers: Young consumers want low prices, Younger Boomers want good coverage, and older consumers want good service.
- Health insurers: Gen Y and Seniors wants good service, Gen X wants low prices, and Boomers want good coverage.
The bottom line: Insurers need generational-specific strategies.
Customer Experience Gaffs From Dick’s And Comcast June 29, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.Tags: Comcast, Dick's Sporting Goods
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I try not to use this blog as a sounding board for the customer experience blunders that I run into. Periodically, however, it makes sense to share some of those experiences as a source of insight (and a bit of humor). It turns out that my wife recently had a couple of interactions that were particularly noteworthy…
Dick’s is not Dick’s. My wife found a tennis racquet that she wanted on the Dick’s Sporting Goods Website but wanted to get it immediately so she went to the Dick’s store to buy it. She found the raquet, but it was priced nearly $30 more than it was on the Website. When she showed the customer service person the price online (she had printed out the page from Dick’s Website), the person said he could not honor that price because: “We have nothing to do with Dick’s Website, it’s a completely separate business.”
- My take: Don’t let your internal organizational structure cripple your customer experience. If you portray yourself as a single brand, then act like it.
Comcast turns solutions into problems. Comcast has been regularly eliminating our email addresses for no reason; so we need to keep calling them (I’m on the edge of ranting, but I’ll hold it in). When they recently restored the email, they did not notify us that 1) the server problem was fixed or 2) that they had changed the password. So my wife called Comcast and they gave her the new password. It ended up working only once. Why? They hadn’t told her that she needed to go to Comcast.net and change the password. It took three calls and most of a day to restore our email that Comcast eliminated for no reason.
- My take: Comcast continues to earn its position on the Customer Service Hall Of Shame and near the bottom of Forrester’s Customer Experience Index. The company needs to make sure that it CARES (Communication, Accountability, Responsiveness, Empathy, Solution) for its customers. A bit more communication and accountability and this ridiculously bad experience would have been much better.
The bottom line: Don’t forget to look at experiences through the eyes of your customer.
AOL, Comcast Headline Customer Service Hall of Shame May 31, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in customer service.Tags: Abercrombie & Fitch, Amazon.com, AOL, Bank Of America, Capital One, Comcast, Cox Communications, Google, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Holiday Inn, HSBC Finance, Marriott, Nordstrom, Qwest, Sheraton, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods Market
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I ran across a MSN Money-Zogby survey that lists “the 10 companies Americans love to hate.” Based on an online survey of 7,000 consumers who rated 140 firms in March, the article anoints the following 10 ”winners” to its 2008 customer service hall of shame:
At the other end of the spectrum, the 10 firms that scored the best in the survey were: Marriott, Sheraton, Amazon.com, Hilton, Trader Joe’s, Google, Hampton Inn, Nordstrom, Whole Foods Market, and Holiday Inn.
The bottom line: Each of the firms on the hall of shame need to improve how it C.A.R.E.S!
Dial 1-800 For Customer Service May 20, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.1 comment so far
In my research report called How Consumers Research, Buy, And Get Service, we looked at which channels US consumers prefer to use for getting customer service support. Here’s what we found:
- Speaking to a rep over the phone (45%)
- Going to a store/branch (36%)
- Sending an email (6%)
- Using a Web site (5%)
- Online chatting with a rep (3%)
- Using an automated phone app (2%)
As you can see, consumers overwhelmingly prefer in-person interactions; 81% chose either a phone rep or a store employee for customer service support. That’s why I said in a post that we won’t see self-service replace customer service anytime soon.
I also analyzed customer service preferences by generation and found that:
- For every generation except Seniors (63+ years old), the phone is the most popular option. Seniors are most interested in going to a store.
- Gen Xers (28 to 41) are the group most enamored with using email and have the lowest interest in going into a store.
- Gen Yers (18 to 27) are the group most interested in the Web and online chatting.
- Younger Boomers (42 to 51) are the group most interested in using phone self-service applications.
The bottom line: Great customer service is often just a phone call away.
