Customer Service Blog

4 Customer Experience Tips for Contact Centers

Omar Zaibak — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:00:27 +0000

Organizations are spending more time and money to improve the customer experience in 2011. Here are 4 ways to improve the contact center experience for customers.

Avoid Offshoring If Possible

Offshoring has its benefits and drawbacks. A key drawback is its impact on the customer experience. There is an inherent distrust of a representative outside of the caller’s country handling a customer service issue. In addition, offshoring and outsourcing typically results in a loss of control over the experience itself. Offshoring may be less expensive, but a hidden cost is the impact on your customer satisfaction.

CTI and Screenpops

A computer telephony interface that displays information about a telephone caller on an agent’s screen lowers the average call handle time and reduces the number of questions required to identify the caller. As a result the customer gets their issue handled quicker while providing fewer or no verification details, improving their experience.

One View of the Customer

There is no better way to kill the customer experience than having customer information silos in a contact center. A customer’s information and interaction history across channels should be available to each department in the contact center. Otherwise you risk making the customer repeat information he / she has already provided which is very frustrating. From the customer’s perspective, their interaction across the contact center is one experience… ensure it is not broken up when they navigate across channels.

Invest in Your Agents

There is no getting around it, your contact center agents ultimately have the biggest impact on the customer experience. After all, they are the actual point of contact between the caller and your organization. Customers are quick to pick up on unhappy and unmotivated agents, which provides a negative impression of your company and can translate into a poor experience.

Ensure your agents are happy, motivated, and well-trained. This starts by hiring the best quality agents you can from the start, and investing in their career development and training. Too often in contact centers, agents are unmotivated and poorly trained because of low payment and an unclear career path. This typically stems from a tight contact center budget. Provide them with performance-based bonuses and incentives. Treat them like humans, not machines or numbers. You may be surprised with the results.

14 LEADING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGIES FOR 2011

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Leading North American Retailer Drives Agent Productivity with Customer1

Omar Zaibak — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:31:21 +0000

TORONTO, ON – January 20, 2011 – Customer1, a leading provider of customer support solutions for large contact centers, announced today the results of its support center initiative with a leading North American retailer.

With over 1,100 stores in North America, the retailer was overwhelmed with service requests and high average handle times. To compound this problem, they were planning significant store expansions and needed to minimize incremental support costs and improve their quality of service.

Customer1 worked with the retailer to streamline their support operations, allowing the organization to reduce their average handle time by 15% while significantly improving post-call resolution. The company leveraged the improved productivity to add an additional 200 retail locations with minimal incremental support costs.

“We’ve seen dramatic improvements in our service levels. Agents are able to handle issues with greater speed and we can now track assets based on a number of criteria, empowering us to manage the business better,” said the company’s Manager of Call Center Operations.

Download the full case study.

About Customer1

Customer1 is a provider of customer service and support solutions that help organizations deliver great support experiences to customers, partners, and employees. Customer1 drives increased agent productivity, operational efficiency, and lower overall support costs for contact centers, shared services centers, and support organizations across a range of industries. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Customer1 has deployments in 10 countries and 8 languages around the world serving enterprise clients such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Bed Bath & Beyond. For more information, visit www.customer1.com.

Media Contact:
Omar Zaibak
+1 416-572-2512
ozaibak@customer1.com

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AB-InBev Business Shared Services

admin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:50:10 +0000

A leading consumer products company, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) was in the midst of a multi-year SAP implementation. Growing increasingly frustrated with the lengthy, complex and expensive project that was crippling their ability to service their customers, they realized they needed a support solution that was easy to use, quick to deploy, and more cost effective than SAP.

They chose Customer1.

Download Full Case Study

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Leading Retailer Drives Agent Productivity

Omar Zaibak — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:48:45 +0000

A leading North American retailer was facing productivity challenges in its support operations spanning over 1,100 stores in the USA and Canada. The stores where overwhelmed with service requests resulting in declining service levels. With plans for rapid expansion, they needed a solution that could provide productivity gains with minimal increases in headcount and support costs.

Read the case study to learn how they increased agent productivity while expanding their operations, while reducing their overall costs.

Download The Case Study

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7 Steps to Lower Call Center Turnover Rates

Omar Zaibak — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:00:59 +0000

Average annual agent turnover rates around 30% burden call centers with significant costs. Here are 10 strategies to reduce agent attrition to generate substantial cost savings.

The Right Incentives

Determine what motivates your agents, and come up with relevant and matching incentives. Ensure that the incentives available and criteria for achieving them are clearly laid out and communicated.

Survey your agents to determine what incentives would motivate them the most, and provide a variety of incentives as each agent has their own preferences.

Some agents may prefer monetary rewards, others formal recognition, and others more skill development. A well thought-out and executed incentive program gives agents goals to aim for and improves motivation. This develops a more enjoyable contact center, reducing turnover rates.

Optimize Hiring Process

Improving the hiring process is one of the most effective ways at lowering agent turnover. This starts with an understanding of the criteria that makes the optimal call center agent. It continues with a targeted hiring process that filters out agents that are not a fit.

Ensuring your call center has a strong orientation program helps newly-hired service representatives adapt to the company’s culture and values, and create good relationships with other employees.

A very cost-effective and popular hiring practice is employee referrals. Give your best agents incentives to refer their friends for job openings, and you will find quality agents for a fraction of the price of traditional hiring practices.

Responsibilities and Career Development

Clearly setting and communicating job responsibilities and expectations is vital to lowering turnover rates. Employees have a right to know what is expected of them, and what they are measured against. Not communicating this clearly and up front can lead to confrontations and tension down the road.

Devise a clearly laid-out career development path, as agents are always thinking about their future. If you do not paint a picture of what career progression looks like at your call center, agents can feel there is no long-term future for them and will eventually look to other call centers for change and career advancement.

Streamline Processes

In most call centers, agents have to deal with and toggle between multiple desktop applications and windows. Furthermore, they have to deal with repetitive and manual processes that could be automated. This inevitably leads to frustration, stress, and lower efficiency.

Integrating desktop systems and applications into a unified screen is a wise investment that will improve the effectiveness of your agents and reduce stress levels.

Examine your current call center workflows, and identify areas that can be automated. Workflow automation reduces the manual steps agents are required to take, improving efficiency and giving agents time to work on more meaningful tasks.

Coaching

There is a positive correlation between coaching time and agent retention. Unfortunately, many supervisors are so overwhelmed with gathering and making sense of data, listening to calls, and solving issues that they are not able to dedicate enough time for coaching.

Coaching develops an agent’s skills and provides them with personal attention, important factors in deciding whether to stay in a call center.

If you have time constraints coaching your agents, hire full-time supervisors dedicated to coaching. The investment should far outweigh the costs associated with agent turnover because of lack of coaching.

Eliminate Stress at the Root

Ask any call center agent what the most difficult part of their job is, and high stress levels will be the most likely response. Call centers are inherently stressful environments, but there is always room to improve.

The first task is identifying what is causing stress. Formal surveys, focus groups, and employee exit interviews are the most direct and best way to get honest feedback. Ensure these are done anonymously to get the most accurate results. Stress can be caused by management, fellow employees, policies, processes, or other conditions.

The next step is to prioritize these causes of stress in terms of their impact and importance, and develop a plan to deal with them.

This increases your level of engagement with agents and shows that you are thinking about them and trying to improve the environment in which they work. This makes them feel more appreciated, and combined with lowering their stress, should lower turnover rates.

Constructive Personalized Feedback

Most call centers provide the same feedback and training to all agents based on averages. This can be ineffective since there will still be many agents where such feedback and training are not relevant. This unnecessary training can lead to boredom and turnover.

Providing constructive feedback on a one-to-one basis may be more costly initially, but it will provide the personal attention your agents desire, while improving their skills and effectiveness faster. The extra investment in personalized feedback should pay off with improved call center efficiency, and reduced agent turnover.

TOP 10 CUSTOMER SERVICE TRENDS FOR 2011

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12 Customer Experience Trends for 2011

Omar Zaibak — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:00:19 +0000

Customer experience as a business strategy and competitive differentiator continues to gain traction with corporations around the globe. Here are 12 customer experience trends to look out for heading into 2011.

Mobile Customer Experience Matures

The mobile channel continues its explosive growth in adoption, with more than 96% of US consumers owning a mobile phone and almost half with a smart phone according to a recent study conducted by Sterling Commerce and Demandware. The study shows 15% of consumers have used mobile to make a purchase, and almost a quarter to compare prices or products.

As mobile adoption grows, organizations are reacting to improve the mobile experience. A successful mobile channel places intuitiveness, simplicity, and usefulness as core guiding principles. In many ways, the necessity of such principles in mobile experience design can help ensure a smoother experience than other channels.

Mobile adoption in the retail and financial sectors is helping drive more streamlined and targeted experiences for users. I took the dive into mobile banking this year and must say I enjoy it more than the web experience. Why? Less clutter, simpler, and fewer steps to accomplish my objectives.

Customer Expectations Impact the Experience

The impact of a customer’s expectations on their experience cannot be stressed enough. It is vital that you set their expectations as early and clearly as possible. Otherwise they will set their own expectations, and react negatively if they are not delivered. This drives up support costs while negatively impacting customer satisfaction, a deadly combination.

Ensure all your customers are provided with clear expectations that you exceed. The perception of over-delivering on your promises goes a long way in establishing customer trust and loyalty.

Voice of the Customer Adoption

Emotions account for over 50% of an experience, as Colin Shaw points out in The DNA of Customer Experience. Because a customer experience is inherently emotional, qualitative data is the best way to capture and understand it.

This has led to increasing adoption in Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, which aim to capture customer expectations, preferences, and satisfaction. Bruce Temkin describes VOC as “A systematic approach for incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences.”

Successful voice of the customer programs provide organizations with the feedback they require to continually develop a better customer experience. Think of them as the data that drives the customer experience modeling process. The necessity of optimizing the customer experience is leading to more of these programs being adopted and embraced.

Revenue VS Cost

Organizations that sacrifice customer experience quality in order to save costs are all too common. However, more and more organizations realize that consistently delivering great customer experiences increases revenues AND decreases support costs at the same time.

As a result, smart organizations do not view customer experience and cost as a balancing act where one must be sacrificed at the expense of another. As customer experience maturity grows, these organizations realize that an investment in customer experience can actually lower costs more than budget cutting in the medium and long-term.

Interaction Channel Growth

New customer interaction channels are created and evolve each year. This creates both an opportunity and challenge for organizations. Customers have more and more control over how they would like to interact. The more channels an organization offers, the more likely the customer can choose their preferred channel, inherently creating a better experience.

Cross-Channel Experience Still a Challenge

The rate of new channels being created and adopted by customers creates a significant challenge for organizations. How to create a consistent, seamless experience across rapidly growing channels? Unfortunately many organizations are plagued by channel silos, each with their own processes and customer data sets. This makes creating an enjoyable, cross-channel experience difficult if not impossible. Organizations must learn to break down these silos and model the experience across them. Channels should share one view of the customer, be modeled on one set of guiding customer experience principles, and allow easy escalation between channels. Only the most advanced customer experience organizations do this presently, as it remains a formidable challenge.

Social Media Impacts Experience

Social media continues to disrupt and change the fabric of customer experience. The experience is no longer driven by just the organization and the customer. Because of social media, expectations and experiences are rapidly shared and distributed between peers. This increases the importance and impact of each customer experience.

Power Shift: Companies VS Customers

The customer experience is increasingly being shaped by communities and peers. Technologies like peer reviews and ratings are influencing the customer experience. Customer communities now more than ever are positively influencing the experience in many cases. These communities frequently deliver faster and more accurate responses than could have been delivered by the organization alone, contributing to a much greater experience, even if it was not directly delivered by a company’s representative.

Retailers and Hotels Provide the Best Experiences

The leading industries in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index 2010 were retailers and hotels, receiving scores of 82% and 80% respectively. Customer experience has long been a key differentiator in these industries, and as a result it is an area they continue to invest very heavily in. Years of experience has led to significant customer experience maturity in these industries, and we expect them to continue to lead the pack in 2011.

Health Insurers and Service Providers Deliver the Worst Experiences

For one reason or another, health insurance companies and service providers deliver the worst average customer experiences out of any industry based on Forrester’s Customer Experience Index. Here are some theories why:

1. Customer experience is viewed strictly as a cost that would cut into profits
2. Competition’s customer experience is no better, resulting in less pressure to improve it
3. Poor customer experience is not impacting high profit margins

It seems like poor experiences are the status quo in this industry. Until poor customer experience has a more significant impact on the bottom line for these organizations, I expect them to stay on the bottom of the list.

Customers Co-Create the Experience

Savvy organizations realize the value strong customer experiences bring. What better way to design an optimal customer experience, than having your own customers contribute to its design? This reduces the level of optimization and tweaking of the experience organizations would have to do later on. Most of the leading customer experience organizations embrace this method today, and as other companies become more mature, look for this trend to increase.

A Vovici Customer Experience IQ study performed in 2009 reveals some of the key benefits companies are getting out of customer experience management programs:

1. Increase customer loyalty
2. Increased customer satisfaction
3. Greater positive word of mouth
4. Excellence in customer service
5. Increase revenue
6. Increased profits
7. Increased staff satisfaction

Getting customers involved in the design of the customer experience is an encouraging trend growing in 2011.

Customer Experience A Bigger Priority

As outlined in Bruce Temkin’s “The State of the Customer Experience, 2010″ 90% of North American companies with revenues of $500 million or more view customer experience as critical or very important to their company’s strategy. Organizations are increasingly realizing the benefits of improving the experience they provide, so look for customer experience to grow as a priority for more organizations.

Want to read about all 10 trends? Download the full report below!

TOP 10 CUSTOMER SERVICE TRENDS FOR 2011

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3 Major Trends in Shared Services

Omar Zaibak — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 14:00:24 +0000

The shared service center market continues to evolve, driven by an increasingly global business environment. Here are three of the leading trends in shared services heading into 2011.

1. Global Adoption and Growth

Organizations are increasingly adopting shared services centers in multiple locations around the globe. Latin American centers continue to rise as more US businesses and multinationals establish operations in the region. The lower operational costs of central and eastern Europe have also lead a steady rise in shared service center (SSC) activity there. Furthermore, individual SSC’s are serving wider and more diverse geographies.

According to a recent global shared services survey conducted by Deloitte, the United States and India have the greatest percentage of shared service centers serving four or more continents, followed by the United Kingdom and China.

The majority (60%) of companies surveyed by Deloitte have more than one SSC. This global growth and adoption is driven by the benefits shared services have consistently demonstrated. The most cited positive impacts among respondents of the survey are:

Process efficiency
Cost reduction
Process quality
Data visibility
Improved service levels

It is clear that the shared services industry is maturing, and that the shared services business model is growing in popularity and adoption.

2. Public Sector Adoption

Historically the public sector has lagged the private sector in its adoption and successes achieved with shared services. With private businesses, it is not uncommon to find cost savings of over 20%. The same cannot yet be said for the public sector, but this is changing.

The recession has put significant pressure on public organizations to provide better service with a reduced budget. Better services are required in areas such as education, taxation, welfare, and citizen support. This has helped the shared services model become much more widely accepted in the public sector than in the past.

Although public sector adoption has grown, the results achieved still do not approach those in the private sector. This is mainly due to the fact that the private sector has more experience and expertise in this model, which has been implemented for decades. The public sector is by comparison relatively new to shared services and not as mature.

However, the public sector is well positioned to adopt the best practices and strategies from the private sector. As the public sector’s expertise on shared services develops, look for both the penetration of this model and its results achieved in governments and public organizations to grow.

3. Shared Customer Service Centers

Shared services has traditionally been deployed most often for the following business functions:

Finance
Human Resources
Information Technology
Legal
Purchasing

While not as prevalent historically, the numbers and breadth of customer shared service centers is on the rise. The benefits of the shared services model lends itself nicely to pressures on customer support organizations to improve service levels under tighter budgets. The increasing importance of customer service as a differentiator has also resulted in global organizations putting more attention into this business function.

In fact, ‘Increase customer satisfaction’ was the third most cited priority for driving incremental SSC value in the global shared services survey conducted by Deloitte in 2009 titled “Shared services shines in challenging times.” 43% of respondents cited customer satisfaction as a top priority, right after reducing costs and improving processes. As demand for better and more efficient customer service grows, we expect a significant rise in this number in the near and long term.

For further reading on how shared services can positively impact customer support functions, be sure to check out How Business Shared Services Improve The Customer Experience.

Business Shared Services: A Model for Streamlined Support

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99 Legendary Customer Service Quotes

Omar Zaibak — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:00:29 +0000

Customer service is growing in importance as a competitive business differentiator heading into the new year. Here is a collection of 99 inspiring and useful customer service quotes to keep in mind:

The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.
Henry Ford

Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin

Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.
Ross Perot

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos are truly endless.
Mother Teresa

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organisation. She or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.
Giorgio Armani

The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.
Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers

Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
Jeffrey Gitomer

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.
Peter Drucker

To understand the man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasin.
North American Indian Proverb

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

Good service is good business.
Siebel Ad

There is a spiritual aspect to our lives – when we give we receive – when a business does something good for somebody, that somebody feels good about them!
Ben Cohen, Ben & Jerry’s

The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.
John Russell, President, Harley Davidson

One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.
Lewis Carol

Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.
Tony Allesandra

You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied.
Jerry Fritz

Every great business is built on friendship.
JC Penney

If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams

Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.
Stew Leonard, CEO Stew Leonard’s

If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.
Jan Carlzon, ex-CEO SAP Group

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Booker T. Washington

In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.
Doug Warner

Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.
Kevin Stirtz

Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.
Chip Bell, Founder Chip Bell Group

Make a customer, not a sale.
Katherine Barchetti

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous

Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Dale Carnegie

Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
Mark Cuban

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don’t design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don’t really care, as long as we’re selling the one the customer wants.
Michael Dell

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi

When people talk about successful retailers and those that are not so successful, the customer determines at the end of the day who is successful and for what reason.
Jerry Harvey

It’s a very, very tough market. So unless you do a really good job, you buy the right products from the manufacturers, you service the customer, they keep coming back, they bring their friends in, it’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.
John Ilhan

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs

If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.
Ray Krock

For us, our most important stakeholder is not our stockholders, it is our customers. We’re in business to serve the needs and desires of our core customer base.
John Mackey

The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’.
Bernie Madoff…

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.
Rupert Murdoch

In our way of working, we attach a great deal of importance to humility and honesty; With respect for human values, we promise to serve our customers with integrity.
Azim Premji

Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call “the third place”.. a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.
Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO Starbucks

Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!
Gene Buckley, President Sikorsky Aircraft

The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.
Kerry Stokes

I won’t complain. I just won’t come back
Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad

Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.
Leon Gorman, CEO L.L.Bean

Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
Michael LeBoeuf, Author of: How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
Tom Peters

Friendly makes sales – and friendly generates repeat business.
Jeffrey Gitomer

Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions
Betsy Sanders

Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them.
Kevin Stirtz

Here is a simple but powerful rule: always give people more than what they expect to get.
Nelson Boswell

Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.
Brian Tracy

It helps a ton when you learn people’s names and don’t butcher them when trying to pronounce them.
Jerry Yang

Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
Zig Ziglar

I don’t do business with those who don’t make a profit because they can’t give the best service.
Richard Bach

If you don’t genuinely like your customers, chances are they won’t buy.
Thomas Watson, former CEO IBM

Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution.
Rick Tate

Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.
Elbert Hubbard

Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.
Howard Schultz, CEO Starbucks Coffee

People expect good service but few are willing to give it.
Robert Gateley

Revolve your world around the customer and more customers will revolve around you.
Heather Williams

The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie, Author of: Customer Service Excellence: How to Deliver Value to Today’s Busy Customer

Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney

He profits, most who serves best.
Arthur F. Sheldon

The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.
William H. Davidow

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Peter Drucker

When the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Robert Half

Right or wrong, the customer is always right.
Marshall Field

Under promise and over deliver.
Toby Bloomberg

Profit in business comes from repeat customers; customers that boast about your product and service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards

Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.
Nigel Sanders

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends
Jeff Bezos

The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers
Shiv Singh

It’s much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realised. It’s much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
David Yu, Chief Operating Officer, Betfair

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living.
Albert Einstein

Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.
Sally Gronow, Welsh Water

Whether you are big or small, you cannot give good customer service if your employees don’t feel good about coming to work.
Martin Oliver, MD Kwik-Fit Financial Services

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.
Stephen Covey

Everyone in an organisation should be involved with customer service, not only are they feeling the customer but they are getting a feeling for what’s not working.
Penny Handscomb

There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach

Good leaders must first become good servants.
Robert Greenleaf

We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
Laura Ashley

A shoe without sex appeal is like a tree without leaves. Service without emotion is like a shoe without sex appeal.
Anonymous

A little experience often upsets a lot of theory.
S. Parkes Cadman

Whatever your business is, talk to your customers and provide them with what they want. It makes sense.
Robert Bowman, CEO Major League Baseball Advanced Media

You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.
Laurie McIntosh

Your best customers leave quite an impression. Do the same, and they won’t leave at all.
SAP Ad

Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction…you must improve.
Horst Schulz

It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.
Doug Smith

An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
Elbert Hubbard

Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.
Anonymous

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

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Top Customer Service Challenges of 2011

Omar Zaibak — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:00:46 +0000

Contact centers and support organizations are struggling to keep pace with rapidly increasing consumer expectations. High agent turnover, new communication channels, and budget cuts make it increasingly difficult to satisfy the customer. Here are the leading customer service challenges in the contact center today.

1. Agent Turnover

Contact centers have always struggled with high agent turnover rates, with many in North America reaching over 30% annually. The cost of frequently hiring and training new agents strains budgets that are already tight. It also limits the amount of highly experienced agents in the contact center which can impact service levels.

Research by customer service agent recruiting expert Hays Contact Centres reveals 67% of contact center managers say retention will be more difficult in the coming years.

According to another report by Sodexo Motivation Solutions, there is a negative perception of contact centers with only 5% of Generation Y considering it as an exciting place to work and 55% viewing it negatively overall. A third of those surveyed currently seeking work would rather claim unemployment than work in a contact center. The appeal of working in a contact center is on the decline for younger demographics, making it harder to find great support staff in the years to come.

2. Budget Cuts

Not being viewed as a cost center has always been a challenge for customer service organizations and contact centers. When companies are looking to cut costs, customer support and contact centers are usually one of the first areas on the chopping block.

A survey by analyst firm Ovum shows that only 20% of North American, Western European, Australian, and New Zealand contact center managers say their budget has grown in the last year. As a result contact centers must be more efficient and productive just to maintain current customer service levels, let alone improve them.

3. Rising Customer Expectations

According to results released by Accenture, companies are not keeping pace with rising consumer expectations for service. The major driver of this change is the increased competition between organizations on the quality of service provided. Another factor is the increased online connectivity of consumers, according to a study published by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by DHL.

Customer expectations will continue to rise, and only the most customer-centric organizations will be able to keep pace with the growth.

4. Multichannel Communications

New communication channels for customer service are constantly appearing and evolving. According to an Ovum survey of consumers in 16 countries, consumers are adopting these channels faster than companies can react. “Less than 10 percent of companies are prepared today for cross channel conversations,” stated Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction at Ovum.

A seamless customer experience across multiple communication channels is a standard customer expectation that few companies get right. One of the biggest challenges is bridging and aligning silos within an organization to produce one view of the customer across all channels. Getting corporate buy in and implementing such an initiative can be a time consuming and difficult process.

5. Finding Quality Customer Service Representatives

Customer service agents are the most critical asset to a support organization. Despite whatever technology and processes are put in place, they ultimately have the biggest impact on the customer experience.

Hiring qualified support representatives has become more difficult. Combining this with budget cuts for employee salaries and a high agent attrition rate makes filling a contact center with highly skilled agents a significant hurdle.

6. Shared Services – Distributed and Virtual Environments

Globalization and changing dynamics in the market are changing corporate structures. The expansion of shared service centers means more customer support operations and processes are distributed across multiple locations and environments.

Although shared service centers can increase productivity and reduce operating costs, several challenges are apparent. With the advent of virtual environments, it is harder to manage staff that cannot be physically seen. Establishing consistent processes and rolling up reports across all various contact center locations and cultures is another challenge facing the support organization.

Strong change management, key performance indicator selection, and a culture of iterative measurement and optimization can help alleviate these issues.

In the meantime, feel free to read the Top Customer Service Trends in 2011 report below.

TOP 10 CUSTOMER SERVICE TRENDS FOR 2011

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Customer Experience Strategies for 2011

Omar Zaibak — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:00:09 +0000

Customer experience spending and adoption continues to rise in 2010, with most companies that offer better customer experience levels outperforming their competitors. Here is a summary of effective customer experience strategies heading into 2011.

1. The Voice of the Customer

Emotions account for over 50% of an experience, as Colin Shaw points out in The DNA of Customer Experience. Emotions can only be captured qualitatively, and voice of the customer programs are the way to do it.

Encourage and measure feedback from customers across all channels and touch points. Customer perceptions of the company and experience should be measured, analyzed, and acted upon to drive the customer experience forward.

2. Key Performance Indicator Benchmarking

In addition to qualitative feedback gathered above, quantitative key performance indicators (KPI’s) that measure progress towards customer experience goals should be established. These may vary from organization to organization, but it is important to ensure the KPI’s selected have a significant impact on the customer experience, are measured accurately, and can be acted upon.

3. Diverse Communication Channels

Customers have unique and diverse preferences on how they would like to interact with companies. The more communication channels you provide, the more likely it is that you cover their desired channel.

Emerging channels such as chat, online communities / forums, and social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc…) are popular among younger demographics, whereas the telephone is still the method of choice for older customers.

4. One View of the Customer

Nothing destroys a customer experience better than a broken / incomplete view of the customer across different departments or channels. Provide a complete view of the customer and interaction history across all channels and touch-points in the organization to ensure this does not happen. Customers should experience little to no disruption when being transferred between channels for support.

5. Engage Your Employees

Employee engagement has a positive impact on customer engagement. Aligning employee incentive programs such as bonuses to customer metrics is a great way to improve the experience.

As an example, information infrastructure provider EMC’s online community lets employees connect and engage through blogs, social networking tools, and RSS feeds. Employees are now well connected to the company strategy and culture, with a positive impact on customer service.

6. Create A Knowledge Foundation

Understand what your customers want and need, and continually model this information into a knowledge base. Provide your agents and employees with rapid access to this knowledge to ensure consistent experiences and the right support is provided to your customers with each interaction.

7. Customer-Focused Business Decisions

With each business decision your organization makes, you should ask one question: what is the impact on the customer experience? This impact should be a key factor in your decision-making if improving the experience is a core objective of your business.

Want to read about all 14 customer experience strategies? Download the full report below!

14 LEADING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGIES FOR 2011

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