In today’s world of cloud technology and apps, changing or upgrading systems has never been easier.  Whether you are changing from on-premise to cloud solution or providing your customers with a native app for their mobile device, much of the change is a simple as pointing your data to a new end point.  So why is it so hard sometimes for those changes to be readily adopted?  Why are you customers not acting or receiving your changes as you anticipated? Why doesn’t it just work?

Because your customers are usually human.

Change is difficult.  Change has different impacts on different segments of your associates or your customers.  Some adopt or acclimate right away and start realizing the benefits of your product or service.  We love these customers or associates; they make things so easy.  But we usually have folks who only realize some of the benefits, or have a hard time with the change.  They become your squeaky wheel, your biggest challenger, or worse your apple that tries to spoil the entire bunch.

What you may be missing from your service project is Change Management.

Are your organization’s leaders skilled in the arts and sciences of change management?

Do you have a Change Management plan or methodology?

Is Change Management part of your project plan? 

In my past 6 years as a consultant for some of the biggest brands in Financial Services, Tech, and Retail, strong Change Management has been the difference between extraordinary adoption and just a completed project, or even success or project failure.

I am a supporter of using a Change Management methodology called ADKAR.

Awareness:
Most successful changes start with the impacted stakeholders being made aware of the changes.  This is just an introduction to the changes that will be coming.  This information may have a positive, neutral or negative impact on your associates morale, job satisfaction, workload, role, and/or position within the organization.  Prior to making your associates aware of the change, I recommend completing a Change Management Assessment.  See below for an example:

Steps to complete a Change Management Assessment:
1.    Identify changes or workstream
2.    Provide a brief description
3.    Identify a SINGLE Owner
4.    Judge the impact to the stakeholders
5.    Is it a positive, negative or neutral change?
6.    Is training required?
7.    Is a communication plan or strategy required?
8.    Are there organizational changes associated with this change?
9.    How aware is the organization that this change is coming?
10.   Identify all stakeholders associated with the change

Desire:
Often the building of Desire coincides with the communication associated with Awareness.  This is your “Why”.  Having a strong understanding of the possible outcomes, consequences and ripple effects is critical to be able to build the Desire for change.  While creating your plan to build Desire, a great idea is to bring in 2-4 influential associates to understand what their concerns are, questions they have, and their thoughts on what the general populous reactions will be to the changes.

Knowledge:
This is where your training or continuous learning plans come into play.  In general, most people recognize this phase of change management best.  This is where you develop and execute training, or providing the Knowledge, for your associates.

Ability:
If Knowledge was the training or learning, Ability is the opportunity to put what has been made aware and trained into practice.  You will also want to make sure you are quality monitoring in this phase, and be available to provide coaching and support.

Reinforcement:
Sometimes the most forgotten area of change management, Reinforcement is your opportunity to implement incentives (and consequences if necessary) to help your associates keep/adopt the change.  The most important part of this phase is credibility.  Are you walking your talk?  Is this a fly-by-night , flavor of the month initiative?  Identify multiple ways so your changes can be internalized by your teams.

The more impactful the change, the greater the need is for change management.  If you are discussing culture or major technical system change, there are few changes more impactful.  By investing early in the change timeline and a change management methodology will help ensure you execute even more excellently.  This model can also be used for external customers, and I would even suggest just trying it for your next customer impacting initiative.

Have you used change management methodologies before? If so, how did it differ?
If you fear process, does this sound like too much process?
Are you considering a change on the magnitude of a culture shift?
I would love to hear your thoughts.

For more on the specifics on ADKAR provided, please visit PROSCI’s Change Management Learning Center.

Main image credit: http://a-golden-opportunity.com

What do my customers ………

Want

Need

Wish

Crave

Demand

Desire

Yearn For

Require

Fancy

Hunger

Have a hankering for    ?

Simple questions with difficult answers.  Where do you get the answers?  Most would suggest going to the source, your customers, and I agree.  Many companies today utilize Voice of the Customer [VoC] programs to help them “listen” to their customers.  And they should, as companies with top 20% VoC programs report (Aberdeen Group)

• 10X YoY increase in company revenue compared to all others
• 55% greater customer retention rates
• Spend 23% less on customer service
• Have 292% better employee engagement rates

If you have a VoC program or are interesting in building one, where are all the places you should “listen” to their voice?  It is much more than just surveys.

1. But let’s start with Surveys – At a minimum, companies should be surveying their customers at some point pre and post purchase. The most common and prolific survey are Net Promoter Surveys “How likely would you be to recommend our product/service to a friend, family member, or colleague?”.  Usually companies will ask more than just NPS questions within that same survey, such Customer Satisfaction [CSat] or level of effort from a customer [CES}, and collect verbatims.

Marketing Research Surveys (Qualtrics recommended types)

• Market Description Surveys
• Market Profiling-Segmentation Surveys
• Stage in Purchase Process Surveys
• Customer Intention Surveys
• Attitudes and Expectations Surveys
• Customer Trust
• New Product

Incident or Transaction Surveys – After customer service interactions, whether it be with a human or through self service, transaction or incident surveys attempt to capture the customer’s experience while trying to solve a problem, answer a question, or request service from a company.  Incident surveys can collect information that explains where customer’s pain points are and sample volume of a particular issue.

2. Phone trees, Agent Dispositioning, Email and Chat Reason Codes – By contacting your service departments, customers are screaming:
   • “This is a pain point!”
   • “I cannot do this on my own!”
   • “I have no idea what is going on!”
   • Much, much more

Phone trees, agents entering in disposition codes, and customers entering in email and chat boxes their reason for contacting you are easy to calculate and specific behavioral feedback, your customers are providing you about their experience.

3. Search, Self Service, and Knowledge Bases – another fantastic customer behavioral example of what they are interested in (learning, solving for, or possibly purchasing). Understanding what your customers are using your search box for is direct insight into your minds and hearts.  Your self service tools and knowledge bases not only indicate what they are trying to solve for, but also can provide you with a relative idea of how they would like to solve their specific need.  Also pay specific attention to issues that customers feel comfortable self solving versus issues that customers feel they need to reach out to a human directly.

4. Agent Feedback/Quality Monitoring Programs/Side by Sides – For many companies, this is the most direct source of customer information. While you may run into the sample size issue, VoC collectors will most certainly get the most flavor or feeling during these types of interactions.  Recorded calls, tagged for specific issues, can provide on-demand color to executives, product managers, and technology specialists.  Side by sides give key stakeholders the opportunity to hear/see customer interactions and usually allow for interactions with agents to fully understand more about situations.

5. Social Media – Probably the most real time, unbiased opportunity to capture and correspond with customers regarding their experience. Social media comments can collect information from anywhere in the customer journey – marketing, sales, purchase, service, loyalty, and advocacy.  Social media listening tools can capture sentiment, topics, location, impressions, volatility, device preferences, circumstance, and many other critical to quality moments.

6. Messaging Response rates – Which emails/texts/outbound calls are being opened or answered? By whom?  At what time? On what platform or device?

7. Website User Experience Analysis – How do customers interact with your website? Where are their eyes and cursors point to?  How many pages do they view?  How many clicks does it take to take action? What is the typical flow?

Other critical notes to consider for your Voice of the Customer Program:

• A great VoC program is not siloed. It should be made up a everyone within the value chain, including HR, to be able to listen and also provide perspective.  Cross functional teams that meet and act with a regular cadence “hear” best.
• Every VoC program needs an Executive Champion. VoC programs can be expensive (even just the people hours alone could be hundreds of thousands of dollars), a lengthy process, and process oriented, all of which can end a program quickly.  Executive Championship provides security and assistance with a vision/direction.
• VoC programs have multiple data sources and types. Not all of your data sources will fit nicely with each other or exist in similar locations. Prepare to understand how to manage your data.
• Process Mapping can assist in common language usage and understanding. It can also assist in understanding cycle times, frequency, and identify all the impacted stakeholders of a customer’s experience.  Whether you journey map or develop internal process flows, process management can make Voice of the Customer Programs take shape faster and with better results.

Every management book will tell you that you need to empower your associates.  In many ways, it does make perfect sense; the more your associates can do the right thing for customers on their own, everyone wins.

• Customers get their issue resolved or the product they want with limited hassle.
• Your associates are more fulfilled and their overall engagement and morale increases.
• And you, as the leader, get the opportunity cost of focusing on more strategic priorities

But you are doing it wrong (maybe).

Somehow the word empowerment turned into something that you can give to another person, like a magical gift. Or I can bop you on head, like a holy man, and now you are empowered (dusts hands off in a proud manner of achievement). Or you have been hypnotized by my mystical words of leadership.

Empowerment is like energy, I cannot physically give you mine; it is already resides in your associates.  If you believe you can actually pass it along, you may be essentially passing over nothing.  However, if we believe empowerment is something that I (your manager) can help unlock within you (associate), we can take the appropriate steps unleash it.  So instead of talking about empowerment, I talk with my reports about how I can help them exercise their responsible freedom, and how they can help their reports exercise theirs.

I discovered the phrase in a book by Chip R. Bell & Ron Zemke called Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service.  It’s a great book for the Customer Service Leader who looking for direction that spans both strategic and tactical, combined with real life stories.  Exercising Responsible Freedom is simply knowing the right thing to do, understanding the risk, recognizing your proverbial guardrails, having solid rationale, and most importantly doing something.   Sounds a lot like empowerment, but with some real power.

How do you do it?

1. R-E-S-P-E-C-T:Have the respect for your associates to treat them like adults.  Far too often, I encounter people leaders who act more like parents than business leaders.  Your associates typically have mortgages, rents, insurance, bills, children, and a whole host of other responsibilities, they can handle more than you think.  If they can’t, you probably need to reassess their future and the time you invest in them.
2. Paint the Vision: You cannot expect people to know and do the right thing if they do not know what direction you are going.  Describe to your associates what the realistic future looks like, and have conversations (two way) about what it means to them.
3. Provide the Flexible Guardrails:Talk about what would be going too far, and talk about what is too safe.  Use examples of what is in scope and what should remain out of scope.  In regulated industries, providing this detailed information is critical for wary associates.
4. Discuss Possible Outcomes:Have a discussion about if something did go wrong.  Develop operating agreements that provide a safe zone for both you and the associate to review lessons learned.  I find myself often saying to people, if you had a good rationale for actions, you will never been in trouble.  But if I asked “why”, and their answer is “I don’t know” or “I just did it”, we will need to talk more.  And don’t forget to talk about the incredible things that can happen if they take the appropriate leap.
5. Let them know you TRUST them:Just overtly saying to associates, “I trust you to ….”  is amazingly powerful confidence builder.  It reaches them on both a professional and personal level.  See prior post on Trust for more info.

It is evident that service and relationship building are key differentiators between similar businesses.  Customer’s expectations are pacing with the speed of technology and process innovation.  If you provide scripted and/or automated responses to customers, they will repay you with the equal amount of passion.  If your social support team is tweeting right out of the traditional public relations handbook, you will most likely anger or disenfranchise your customers.  Same goes for customer service representatives who must use the caller’s full name 3 times in a call.

We need to hire, develop and foster our associates (and our associates’ associates) to think critically, do what they believe is the right thing for the customer, and not feel they have done something wrong by erring on the side of the customer.  When they exercise their responsible freedom, they engage customers on a human level, they build strong relationships, and they have the true opportunity to “WOW” a customer.

Image Credit: http://www.simpsonsworld.com

In the first part of this post, Defining a Great Customer Experience – Starting at the Top, we talked about the difficulties in defining a great customer experience, how its more than just “Delivery > Expectations”, and how a great experience starts at the top of the companies funnel.  The expectations provided during the Awareness, Consideration, and Intent [to purchase] phases of the sales funnel process set the stage for Purchase/Conversion and bottom of the funnel interactions.  But when most people think of Customer Experiences, both from the business and the end consumer perspective, they relate to the Purchase through Support portion of the funnel.

A startling statistic:

So are you part of the 80% or the 8% (or both or neither)?  Odds are you are a part of the 92% that doesn’t deliver as great as you or the company believes.  If that is the case, and it probably is, how do we move the proverbial needle to become part of the 8%?  For the last 12+ years, I have been studying the most recognized service organizations, and have determined 6 traits of the Greatest Customer Experience Providers.

Great Customer Experience Trait #1: Clear Priorities

When you look at companies with great customer experiences, it is crystal clear to the end consumer and to the associates working for the organization that the quality of the experience is the company’s first priority.  Note, the quality of experience may be end consumer’s experience (ex: Apple or Nordstrom) or the internal associates experience (Southwest Airlines).  Apple’s clear priority is end user design, Nordstrom is focused on consumer courtesy, and Southwest drives end consumer experience by ensuring their associates are treated as the most important priority.  Every company, and for that matter every initiative, has consciously or unconsciously ranked how quality of experience, cost and flexibility, time, and risk management are prioritized.  Great experiences make it clear that quality of experience is the most important.

Great Customer Experience Trait #2: Culture, Vision, and Standards

There is an ancient proverb, “A fish rots from the head down.”  More often than not, this phrase is used when something horrible happens with an organization, and it’s found leadership is absent (United Airlines).  But it also applies to a lesser degree if leadership has not provided a definitive culture supporting the customer, a vision with the end customer’s experience in mind, and a set of values or standards that enable associates to act on behalf of the best interests of a customer.  No company has articulated these standards better than the Ritz Carlton. For years, the Ritz Carlton has engrained their “Gold Standards”  (Credo, Motto, Steps of Service, Service Values, and Employee Promise) into the daily processes of their associates.  These types of values create a powerful trust bond from leadership to associate that enables them to continuously do the right thing.

Great Customer Experience Trait #3: Value Defined from the Customer’s View

Of all the 6 common traits the best customer experience providers exhibit that has become more generally demonstrated by more companies of late, Value Defined from the Customer’s View, has been discussed and attempted most often.  You may hear it as “Work backward from the customer” or even the generic “delivering a great customer experience”.  Over the past 10 years, the popular trend has been to move away from driving company value first, and to delivering value as defined by the customer.  The most visible example is the difference customer experience providers place on metrics such as AHT (Average Handle Time).  Years ago, driving this metric down, whether through outsourcing or internally, was the key to supporting the business.  Eventually, realizing that customers wanted their issues solved fast correctly the first time was more important that quick, transactional solutions.  Companies like USAA and LL Bean understood that by delivering value based on the customer was more valuable in the long run to company success.  One of the first things I do in every consult is to look at the organization’s metric dashboard.  The second is to ask managers (not executives) what metrics their managers ask about the most.  The talk around the broader organization may be that you are there to provide a great customer experience, but “the walk”, shown through metrics and feedback, is often cost related metrics.  Unless, your customer experience is based on an extremely low price point, your customers do not care about your costs.  Customers, in general regardless of the industry, care about five things when it comes to customer service:

• Friendly, supportive service
• Efficiency with incremental value
• Accuracy
• Product and customer knowledge
• Compliance (whether they know they want it) 

Does your dashboard and senior leaders demonstrate that these types of customer centric metrics are what is most important?  Or is your dashboard showing the value you are attempting to deliver back to the company?

Great Customer Experience Trait #4: Reinforce Beliefs Through Associates

The great customer experience traits really start compounding at this point.  Yes, customer centric metrics needs to start with the right priorities and strong standards, however, you cannot reach the fourth trait without having a solid understanding of the first three traits of a great experience.  You need to understand where a customer experience fits in priorities; you need to understand and internalize values, and you need to focus on the right things to be able to reinforce your beliefs through your associates.  There is a reason why the United Airlines experience is different from Jet Blue’s or Southwest’s.  Jet Blue and Southwest take the knowledge of the first three traits and continuously reinforce their customer experience beliefs through all of their associates, from executive to baggage handler.  Values and standards on a wall are good, but their real power exists when an associate uses the same decision making criteria as their executive.  If your values are real, internalized and reinforced, associates can act with the priorities and vision in mind.  How are your priorities, vision, standards, values, and customer centric metrics driven through to the associates?  Are they a part of your performance management program?  Are your incentives related to your standards?  Is the trade off scenario frequently posed to associates in a safe environment?  Wells Fargo now understands what happens when it is not.

Great Customer Experience Trait #5: Infrastructure Supports Priorities, Vision, Goals, and Beliefs

Again, its all well and good if you have the right mindset, goals, and beliefs, but you need the right infrastructure to deliver the experience.  I am not saying you need the best or newest in technology to deliver, but it may help.  Infrastructure is much, much more than technology.  Infrastructure is how your People, Process, and Technology work together.  You cannot say you are going to deliver a great customer experience, then only do quality monitoring on 3 random calls of each of your agents.  You cannot ensure you are going have successful associates if you your manager to associate ratio is 25:1.  You cannot deliver a great experience if your processes do not support customer centric metrics first.  If your associates are consistently uncomfortable in your environment, they will never stay or be happy or be there to happily help a customer. If your dashboard, doesn’t contain your people metrics (morale, engagement, transitions), you really don’t care about them in your success. If you IVR has 15 menus, and exists to deflect calls, you cannot deliver a great experience.  If social media is only handled by Marketing, you will very likely not provide a great customer experience.

You need to build your infrastructure from the foundation built in the first four traits.  USAA probably does this better than almost anyone, and why they consistently have the highest NPS of any financial organization.  Their infrastructure has been created and constantly improved to deliver for the customer.  An example is that every time a marketing campaign is sent to a customer, the same campaign is sent to the customer’s account in their customer support system.  So if a customer contacts USAA about a mailer, the agent knows exactly which one of a hundred different mailer this customer received, can talk to the mailer appropriately, and can let the customer know they understand their viewpoint.

Great Customer Experience Trait #6: Great Experiences are Marketed

It took me a much longer time to understand this is one of the 6 traits that great customer experience companies have in common.  For a long time, I believed there were only the first five.  But as I worked with many really good experience companies, I wasn’t exactly sure why they were never considered (by others) as great.  Why is Zappos considered the beacon of a great experience?  Many companies exhibit the same values in service.  Many companies are as friendly, have a great customer first mindset, and deliver consistently.  The difference is Marketing; whether the marketing is owned, earned or paid for.  Now, Zappos has definitely earned many of their accolades, but how did the story of the 10 hour customer service call get out to the masses.  It may have happened naturally, but I am sure someone in Public Relations or Marketing realized this supported their greater value proposition, and helped the story travel.  If you truly want to be considered a great customer experience company, people need to know you are one.  If you want to see this trait in real time, think about every Comcast/Xfinity commercial and marketing piece has created in the last 2 years.  Comcast, like most of the cable and media companies, has a horrible reputation and consistently low customer satisfaction and net promoter scores.  In actuality, Comcast service for the past few years is pretty good.  They now arrive on time, service rarely goes down, and have a very comprehensive customer access strategy and tools.  Their push is to improve their perception.

The 6 traits of great customer experience providers is not checklist, but it is what many of the top providers have in common.  The traits do provide a great start towards building a great experience.  These traits will also survive tests of time, as long as the companies maintain their priorities, values, and focus.  The companies that demonstrate consistently great amazing virtuous cycles with their customers.  With each experience, their value is reinforced.  With each interaction, they ensure the customer will WANT to experience this again.  Even small mistakes are forgiven, and are given a chance to amaze the customer again.  How many of the 6 traits does your company demonstrate? How do you move to the 8% that customers actually think provide a great experience?

• Meal Kit Industry worth over $1.5 billion; Blue Apron Holding recently went public
• Top 5 SaaS companies – Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, Box, Amazon Web Services
• Ford, Porsche, Volvo, BMW, and Cadillac are offering drivers options to subscribe instead of lease
• Stitch Fix’s market cap is north of $2 billion
• Birchbox’s subscriber list has grown 1777% in the last 2.5 years
• Wikibon is predicting enterprise cloud spending is growing at 16% Compound Annual Growth run rate between 2016 and 2026
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) grew 36.8% in 2017
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) adoption is predicted to be the fastest-growing sector of cloud platforms according to KPMG, growing from 32% in 2017 to 56% adoption in 2020
• Netflix – enough said

Whether you subscribe to Netflix, receive your weekly meals in a kit, have someone style your clothes, use Salesforce at work, or your company keeps its data on Amazon Web Services, the world is moving towards borrowing, leasing, renting, delivering your work and lifestyle via subscription services.  The primary rationale for customers to move forward with any kind of subscription services is the accessibility and convenience. Subscription services offer customers access to products on demand usually in a monthly or annual renewal period.  These products or services are easy to upgrade and can provide more value for limited periods of time or access to larger versions that would not make sense to buy outright.   For example, if you are ordering weekly meals, you might be saving time shopping, planning out meals, or your time to chop vegetables. You are usually also saving on buying large quantities of a product you will not use that often, like saffron or bay leaves.  The same is true for client-based subscription services (like SaaS or PaaS) which save on implementation time and the larger infrastructure and management to support.  All of this convenience leads to lower costs of customer acquisition and shorter return of customer lifetime value investments.  It also makes it easier for these customers to leave, attrite, or churn.

It is relatively easy to cancel Blue Apron or Netflix subscription.  Or your company can move from one on-premise or SaaS tool to another within a matter of weeks.  Historically, a change to your phone system or CRM could take months or years, now it is a matter of pointing data to a new location over the internet. Churn is the nemesis of subscription services.  Let’s use a simple example:

Company A:

• At end of the year has 1000 customers
• Has a monthly attrition rate of only 3%
• Therefore, has an annual attrition rate of 36%
• Company A’s acquisition teams need to add 46% more customers than last year so that the company can grow 10% the following year (1100 customers)
• If the churn rate was reduced to 2%, acquisition would need to add 34% for 10% growth
• If the churn rate was reduced to 1.5%, acquisition would need to add only 25% for 10% growth

In other words, reducing churn has exponential value to an organization, and more organizations are moving to subscription models, therefore service organizations need to better understand how subscription models operate and how to reduce churn. Reducing churn is a key component of Customer Success.

Mikael Blaisdell, Executive Director of The Customer Success Association, defines Customer Success as “Customer Success Management is an integration of functions and activities of Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Training and Support into a new profession to meet the needs of recurring revenue model companies.”

Never in the history of commerce has the complete view of the customers (360-degree view) or the link between the top and bottom of the funnel been more important.

The critical period of Customer Success starts when the customer is finalizing their decision to make a purchase when the expectations are firmly cemented with the client or consumer.  As soon as the customer makes the purchase, the most important aspect of Customer Success must be delivered – Value at Velocity.  For long-term success or customer lifetime value, the company must show the customer substantial results early in their lifecycle.

An example I like to use when explaining Value at Velocity is an iPhone or Android app.  Have you ever downloaded a cool app, opened it up and found it was way too complicated?  Or wasn’t fun right away?  How do you feel if you paid for the app?

In contrast, what happens when you like an app?  It is easy to use.  You advance levels quickly. You achieve results quickly.  You are getting Value at Velocity.

Your first selections from companies like Stitch Fix need to be easy to order, conveniently delivered, styled well, returnable, and seamlessly paid for.  SaaS companies like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, who offer email creation and send subscriptions, need their customers to create that first email and be able to see the results within 24 hours.  Larger PaaS companies need to have simple or easy implementation steps, visible reporting, and the ability to add or upgrade within short time periods.

As you can see in the top and bottom funnel picture, much of the Critical Customer Success Period is during the Support Phase of the customer lifecycle.  There usually needs to be some kind of hand-off between the Sales activities or purchase period and the customer support/service functions.  Sometimes this is a separate Customer Success team, sometimes Sales remains to assist the customers, and sometimes there is a direct hand-off to Customer Service so that Sales can continue hunt/acquire new customers.  But at some point, Customer Support/Service will need to own a large part of the relationship.  And at this point, Customer Support/Service will need to understand more than just how to handle individual transactions, they will need to understand how to support the relationship.

• Where is the “member” in their lifecycle?
• What is the cost to acquire this customer?
• What is the customer’s ARPU – Average Revenue per Unit (time)
• How long does it take to break even or profit from this relationship?
• Importance of referrals
• How easy it for them to cancel their subscription?
• How can support/service coach members to get the most out of the products or services (possible upsell opportunities)?
• How should your phone trees change? Are some members more important?
• How should your case management system change?
• How should your teams be organized?

Now even if you are not working at a SaaS, PaaS, or a subscription-based business, you actually may be in need of Customer Success strategies.  Never has it been easier to switch banks.  Traditional brick and mortar retail companies are starting to offer personal styling services.  Many pay for “Information as a Service”, think Forrester or Gartner or even your news.

The future of Customer Service is Customer Success.

References:

http://cloud-collaboration.kahootz.com/saas-statistics-2017

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2017/08/10/subscription-businesses-are-exploding-with-growth/#6a70cce46678

https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/heres-data-showing-the-crazy-growth-of-subscription-box-services-infographic.html

https://stackify.com/top-paas-providers/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/04/29/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-2017/#1fc5c48831e8

What are you building? I’m building a [Customer Service] cathedral.

Consider the story of two stonemasons.  You walk up to the first stonemason and ask, “Do you like your job?”  He looks up at you and replies, “I’ve been building this wall for as long as I can remember.  The work is monotonous.  I work in the scorching hot sun all day.  The stones are heavy and lifting them day after day can be backbreaking.  I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime.  But it’s a job.  It pays the bills.”  You thank him for his time and walk on.

About thirty feet away you walk up to a second stonemason.  You ask him the same question, “Do you like your job?”  He looks up and replies, “I love my job.  I’m building a cathedral.  Sure, I’ve been working on this wall for as long as I can remember and yes, the work is sometimes monotonous.  I work in the scorching hot sun all day.  The stones are heavy and lifting them day after day can be backbreaking.  I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime.  But I’m building a cathedral.”

– Original author Unknown, retold by Simon Sinek in Start With Why

Most service leaders long for creating an experience that is lasting and memorable.  We see the potential of our company or organization, and believe we can build an inspiring experience for our customers and our associates.  But where do you start?

About 10 years ago, I was obsessed with understanding how the best customer service organizations accomplished and continued to create a culture of awe inspiring experiences.  Were there common strategies or building blocks that I could bring to my company? Is there a repeatable design or architecture?  And could I create these experiences, even though my industry was so much different (or so I thought)?

There was, and I could (and did).

Every company I researched had what I considered a common foundation.

The Core Foundation:

1. Articulated & Internalized Culture – The most important and foundational aspect of every amazing service organization. This is WHY your organization strives to provide an incredible experience.  Just to be clear, your WHY are not the end results like NPS and CSat, but what you are actually delivering for/to a customer.  For more on the importance of Why “Your Why” Means Everything in Customer Service. Culture needs to be based on strong Values, needs to be clear, and needs to be spelled out or articulated.  These should be discussed frequently and be part of your performance management. This culture should allow your associates to empower themselves to understand the best way to care for your customer.  Remember: Attitude is not driven by policies, its driven by culture.
2. Best Talent – “Make sure to get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go.” – Good to Great.
   • Acquire, develop, and reward top talent
   • Find culture “fits”, and be open to diversity of thought and cultures
   • Create an engaging learning environment
   • Let feedback be your ticket to grow (Personally and Organizationally)
3. Process Management – Process Management gets a bad name; people think of red tape and hassle. But Process Management, when used correctly, should reduce micromanagement, and empower others to provide awe-inspiring service.  Process, based on strong articulated values, provides the guidance, steps, and governance for agents and supervisors to deliver service autonomously.  This autonomy delivers great service at the point of interaction or moment that matters and creates efficiency in the organization.
4. Right Technology – One of the biggest mistakes customer service and experience leaders make is letting technology project become the objective versus the tool that solves for the objective. Most technology projects are people or process projects in hiding.  The reason why technology is so high on the foundation is you need to understand your culture and service values, have the right organization in place to support, and the appropriate process management to build and govern around.  Technology can help provide service more efficiently and easier, but should not be the objective.  An example for a luxury retailer:
   • WHY – Make special occasions special memories
   • How – By Making Connections with Clients
   • What – using a technology that facilitates the connection and memory building
5. Data Insights – In our current environment of AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning, bots, and personalization, data collection and delivery of insight is already becoming more important than most of the customer service technology. Ensuring that you are capturing the customer’s emotional and behavioral voices.  Emotional voices include NPS surveys, CSat surveys, social sentiment, and direct feedback. Behavioral voice data comes from what IVR selections are made to UX/UI information, to MarCom email responses, and shopping/buying habits.  Creating a rich data environment is difficult; you need to understand what is critical for today and what will be important in the future.  Other important tips are getting into the discipline of periodic dashboards and communicating results to broader audiences.

A strong foundation enables your traditional customer service strategic imperatives surrounding quality of the experience, cost/scale/flexibility, people and engagement, and your risk management to deliver you to Awe-Inspiring Experiences.  Awe-Inspiring like the Pantheon in Rome or Notre Dame in Paris, I am building a cathedral.

Remember a time you fell head over heels for someone.  Now, if I asked to define the experience, you would know the feeling intrinsically, but may have a hard time explaining it.  You might comment how they made you laugh or how they dressed or became suddenly shy ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  You might be able to describe the peripheral aspects, but defining is hard.  Also, I am sure there are plenty of people who can make you laugh, or dress a certain way, or even lose all their confidence in front of a barista.  It’s a gut feeling, and articulating that emotional experience is difficult at best.

While a great customer experience probably shouldn’t compare to falling in love, but answering a question such as “What is a great customer experience?” has similar difficulties.  It is a hard and difficult question.  It is as independent and personal as “Why did you fall for <insert person>?”.  Similarly, when your career is listed as a Customer Experience Consultant (like mine) or Chief Customer Officer or Contact Center Manager or even Customer Service Representative, defining a great customer experience is almost never easy.

The simple answer to “What is a great customer experience” is Delivery > Expectations.  While true, like other simple definitions, there is a lot baked into those two words and a symbol.  I am going to assume, if your love asked you why you fell for them, and you stated Delivery > Expectations, this would not be a great experience for either of you.

In terms of customer experience (for this post), let’s start with expectations. Great experiences and customer journeys should always start at the top of the funnel, Awareness, Consideration, and Intent of [buying] a product or service; in other words, your first impressions and the origin of expectation setting.  For most companies, top of the funnel expectation setting is the marketing, advertising, social media, and email marketing.  Marketing teams may consciously or unconsciously refer to promoting the Four P’s:

• Product – what the product looks like, how it performs or outperforms competitors, what it accomplishes
• Price – how much does it cost me, how much does it save me, how much less than other competitors, special deals running currently
• Place – where can a consumer get the product or service (in store, online, IoT device, etc…)
• Promotion – usually the dissemination of virtues of the product, price, and place via a variety of mediums (TV, online, social, billboards, business cards, flyers, etc…)

This process of expectation setting can put Marketing and Sales teams in a difficult position, how do we make the product or service sound outstanding without overpromising?  If you go back to the Delivery > Expectation equation, Marketing can make the Expectation so high, that greater Delivery is near impossible to obtain.  Here are a few ways that Marketing and Sales can help ensure a great experience.

1. End to End Funnel Communication and Delivery

Having great end to end funnel communication and delivery is a fantastic step in creating a great customer experience.  USAA is a fantastic example where their marketing and fulfillment communications flow down to the agent level to ensure a seamless experience.  Once marketing media or customer fulfillment documentation is created, the information is also loaded into USAA’s customer service system or CRM.  So when a customer calls and asks about an offer received in the mail, the customer service agent can retrieve that exact document to understand what the customer is referencing.

2. Start With Why

Some great experiences start with providing a “why” this product/service is right for you or your community. Apple is great example here. Their product isn’t that much better, and their service is near poor (try calling Apple for customer support), but through design and marketed culture, they are considered a great experience by many and one of the most valuable companies in the world.  For more on Apple’s magical top of the funnel experience delivery, I highly recommend Simon Sinek’s Start With Why.

3. Marketing the Service

The least discussed way top of the funnel Marketing teams can help deliver a great customer experience is by marketing the service.  Whether by paid, earned, or created media, Marketing teams can curate and showcase the care the consumer can expect when they buy or enroll in a company’s service.  Here are two examples.  Zappos’ experience is very good, but there are plenty of very good experiences. One reason why Zappos is known as such a great experience is great marketing of their customer experience.  The stories of magical 10 hour customer service calls and agents ordering pizza for customers don’t just leak out of companies.  Much of their customer service fame came before social media stories of great and poor service arrived.  It is a great example of company leveraging an earned media experience, but probably a little created or paid media at the same time.  Another company, who has identified the value of marketing their service, is Comcast.  While Comcast’s service is typically not mentioned in the Zappos realm of customer service giants, they realized by better marketing their services and their service promises, they can reset customer’s expectations of possibly being provided a great experience.

Understanding the importance of expectation setting and how it impacts delivery, is critical in developing a customer experience that customers can fall in love with.  Many service organizations forget that the expectations were set well before the customer fell into their hands.  When you look at your customer journey, be sure to start where the customer actually starts, at the top of the funnel.

This post originally appeared on Bright Pattern blog site as a guest post.

We were all a little excited, done being on a plane for four hours, and ready to get to vacationing.  My son, girlfriend, and I finally had a chance to get away to Orlando for a short, long weekend. As a Customer Experience Consultant, my schedule can run hot or cold depending upon my client’s needs and projects, so being able to plan a time to get away with the people I love can be difficult. I am sure it is difficult for most people now-a-days with work, kid’s sports, family obligations, and everything else.

After landing, we made our way over to the car rental area. As we approached the car rental corridor, we were buzzing about going to Universal and wondering what the river pool at the hotel was all about. The rental area was fairly clear of crowds, except for a couple of families in our rental agency’s line.

The Process Manager in me realized quickly that there was probably room here for some improvement in efficiency, but I was not working, right? There are four agents, three of which were not assisting any customers, and one is helping a customer who appeared to come from the car lot with an issue. 10 minutes go by. 20 minutes go by. A half hour in, and the two families in front of us are still there. A sizable line had started to form behind us. The other agencies were shuffling families off to their car to begin their vacations. Blood pressures started rising. We checked online to see what the cancelalation policy said, and it required a loss of deposit, so we decided to stick it out.

At the 45 minute mark, we were next in line, but I was well past aggravated. At the 50 minute mark, a man who was not helping anyone for the last 45 minutes, called us up. We got our car, and everything was fine with the transaction, but I was still fuming over the experience. As much as I wanted to let it go (even with my car mates singing Let It Go), the experience marred the beginning of my vacation. The vacation that took a bunch of planning, sacrifice, and dollars began with this impression.

So what went wrong? Probably a lot of things, but I think the most important part that went wrong was the car rental service forgot “Their Why”. I’m sure they collect Net Promoter Scores, measure some form of retention, and manage a number of service metrics and SLA’s. But those are results, not why it is important to service their customers well. “Your Why” is never a result, it’s a reason that means something substantial to your customer or WHY your company exist. Examples of possible why’s this rental agency (especially at a tourist town like Orlando):

·       Your vacation (or memories) starts with us

·       We know we are the last thing standing between you and your vacation, let us get you moving

·       We’re your first ride of your vacation (but the line is nothing like Space Mountain)

Your Why should be the foundation of your Customer Service culture, strategy, tactics, and metrics. It is part of a clear and articulated culture, upon which your talent, technology choices, process management, and data metrics should be looking to accomplish.

I am a huge fan of Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why, and creator of the most valuable 15 minutes on YouTube.

Let’s look at an example from my consultancy of when a Why was clearly articulated, and the power of understanding it.

In the first official meeting with a luxury jewelry company’s Director of Customer Service, I asked her the question “Why is it important to create a great customer experience?” After a moment, her answers sounded like:

·       Strong C-Sat or NPS scores

·       Retention

·       Advocacy

·       Customer Lifetime Value

·       Loyalty

After each answer, I said no that is a result. Tell me why it is important to your customers to deliver an amazing experience. Finally, we started hitting on the real why’s:

·       Celebrating life moments (like weddings, anniversaries, special occasions, etc…)

·       Making memories

·       Retail Therapy (yes, it is a real thing)

·       Making a connection

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it.” – Simon Sinek

We articulated our culture around our why’s. Yes, you need to write it down. We used our why’s to recruit incredible talent. We didn’t recruit based on call center experience, but recruited people who could make instant or fast connections with our customers. We selected and leveraged technology that made it easy to make a connection and relate to customers. Our processes centered around making a connection, finding places to celebrate life moments, and budgeting for making memories.

The result was amazing and immediate. We launched their new customer service, and after the first month Stella Services rated them as the #2 eCommerce customer experience in the world. Not just other luxury brands, but we beat the Zappos, Amazons, LL Beans of the world. In our second month, we became the #1 brand among all brands. Since my project ended, they have remained in Stella Services top 10.

My rental car company forgot, lost, or never understood their WHY. They lost my business forever. My client who lives their WHY has beat their own high expectation eCommerce expectations every quarter since.  Find Your Why.

“Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.” – Warren Buffett

This article originally appeared in ICMI’s Social Media Resources.

It is such a perfect simile. We’ve all had those moments, for good or for not-so-good, when our actions build upon the previous, and create either a gloriously round snowman body or a boulder blocking our driveway.  Hopefully, you are having more of the positive experiences.  I love the simile because it conjures such a clear visual example of creating virtuous cycles.  They are not always perfectly linear, grow based on the force/momentum, conditions, and the overall landscape, and need time to mature.  As I approach developing customer service experiences, I am always trying to identify the opportunities for virtuous cycles.

What is a virtuous cycle?  Dictionary.com describes it as “a beneficial cycle of events or incidents, each having a positive effect on the next”.  Usually in the business world, this is expressed by a boring PowerPoint Smart Art of arrows going in a continuous circle.  We have all seen it, nobody is impressed.  In actuality, virtuous cycles are really like snowballs; with each revolution the circle grows and compounds for the next revolution.  While this appears to be a great post on how to build a snowman, let me bring us back to how virtuous cycles great amazing and profitable customer experiences.  Let’s start with a digital example:

Moment 1: Customer tweets to your handle or mentions your brand with a question.

Moment 2: Customer Service responds to the tweet, with a link to Knowledge Base.

Moment 3: Since this a fairly frequent question, you post the tweet and response on your blog or community site.

Moment 4: Customer Service “proactive” tweet with a link to your support blog and/or community site, “Wondering how to do XXXXXX, so was one of our customers, see how <link>”.

Now, what just happened with this example?

1.  Customer is acknowledged on Twitter, hopefully within a beyond customer expectation turnaround time (2-10 minutes).  Both acknowledgement and response time are as important as providing the correct answer in social customer service.
2. Customer is provided an answer linked to your Customer Knowledge Base.  Not only does this provide an answer to your customer’s question, it builds awareness that answers are available in another digital format. If this is a public tweet, not a Direct Message (DM) or began with the “@” symbol, any follower can learn from your other customer.
3. Believe it or not, you are now in possession of valuable content.  You have a customer’s voice, an answer to the question, and awareness to alternate forums.  By posting this content to your community or blog site, you have created “searchable” customer support content.
4. By posting the community or blog site link, you now have created proactive content for customers who may search for their answer via a search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc…) and provided help content on your site.

Even if just steps 1 and 2 occurred, you still created a bigger snowball or virtuous cycle of customer support between your Twitter community and your Knowledge Base.  If moving to steps 3 and 4 produce a sense of fear or out of your current scope of work, you are correct.  But I believe it’s the role of Customer Service and the tools they use that is changing, and so should Customer Service leaders.

This may sound similar to previous Customer Service tactics, such as while your customers are on hold waiting for a service representative, you let them know they can also get answers from your website.  The intention in this message is to reduce or deflect call volume by creating awareness of your website. People and customers all hate this.  They probably called for a reason.  This tactic actually creates a vicious cycle, where the message angers callers on hold, and typically creates a longer call.  Virtuous cycles create value for all parties involved.  Virtuous cycles do not interrupt.  In the example above, the customer received their answer in the forum, format, or medium the customer chose.

If you wanted to introduce them to your website, use a follow up email post or even during the interaction with the customer on the phone.  Let the customer know you will be sending them a link if they ever need this information again, a quick simple place they can find it.

Other examples where virtuous cycles can be created:

• Providing your Twitter or other social links on your mobile app
• Including Knowledge Base information or search functionality on your mobile app
• Using company blogs or SHORT whitepapers to educate or coach your customer post a transaction, but only if it is relevant to the conversation
• Invite customers to your communities (in person, via email, over the phone, etc…) – only after the transaction has been completed
• Using Chat functionality to link to your Knowledge Base (but also provide a in simple written form while in the chat
• If you have a Customer Success program, make sure you have virtuous cycles imbedded in your processes

Virtuous cycles create exponential value for both your company and the customer.  If done well, you may also begin helping customers who you will never hear from, because they have helped themselves.  And if done really well, those customers will also share their new insights.  Then the snowball starts getting bigger and faster.  Your infrastructure and processes are the hill, and your helping the customer is the first small ball.  Find your virtuous cycles, create momentum, and get rolling.

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I’m not a huge fan of Net Promoter Scoring (NPS).

Nope.

I am sure this sounds like blasphemy from a Customer Service professional.

Too bad.

I would not recommend a family member, friend, or colleague to blindly use Net Promoter Scoring to understand or forecast the retention of their customers.

I’d give NPS a Net Promoter Score of 7 (Passive).

Take a second and answer these questions about Net Promoter Scoring:

• What do you do with the score?  Individually and in aggregate?
• What are you really trying to understand by collecting this information?
• If last month you scored a 27, and this month scored a 28, what does that mean?
• Is the verbatim on the general survey more important than the scores?
• Should or do you alter retention or net add forecasts if your scores change?
• What is the action if the score drops?
• Do your customers know the difference between a 6, 7, or a 9?
• How often do you ask yourself if this is a waste of time, energy and money?

Net Promoter Scoring is a good system.  It’s better to collect NPS than to not at all.  Since it’s relatively generic, it allows you to benchmark your industry and others.  It will provide a sense of your customers’ emotional connection to your company.

Why does “Ultimate Question” ask if you would recommend someone who is near and/or dear to you?  It is clearly looking for an emotional relationship versus a behavioral relationship because you would not recommend a commodity company.  I know the end goal is to get the recommendation or referral, but the real underlying question is quite different, and may be more powerful.

What Net Promoter Score is really asking is:

Do you trust <company X>?

Answers should be simple: Yes, No, or Sometimes

If a participant answers “Yes”, theoretically you are recommendable.  I say theoretically, because many companies make it difficult or complex to recommend.

If the answer is “No” or “Sometimes”, the likelihood of achieving a recommendation is low.  Would you recommend a company you do not trust or only sometimes trust?  Why do you think Financial Services, Healthcare providers and cable companies have such low scores?  – No Trust.

How might things be different if you asked, “Do you trust <company X>?”?

(For the score freaks out there, let’s pretend a “Yes” is +1, while “No” and “Sometimes” are -1)

• How would your CEO respond to a low Trust score versus NPS?
• Would you find more companies in the negative?
• There is no question of whether a 7 is a 9 in another person’s opinion. It’s clearer to the participant.

Again, you will still need more context of the answer.  Regardless, if you ask NPS or Trust, this is always harder for participants to explain.  The areas of the brain that handle limbic functions such as liking, loving, referring, emotion, and trusting are not “connected” to the area that handles speech (Broca’s area).  That is why it is hard to describe why you love someone.  However, with help, participants can break down why they do or do not trust <company X>.

I believe trust is a combination of three factors:

• Sincerity
• Competence
• Reliability

If someone does not trust you or a company, you are falling short on 1, 2 or all of the 3 factors above.  Follow up questions, should gather their feelings on your sincerity, competence, and reliability.  By understanding where you are weak in trust, you can take corrective action.  I am sure my cable company means well (sincere) and know how to do their jobs (competent), but their reliability or at least the perception of their reliability is poor.  People love Zappos and USAA because we believe they care about us or service, provide valuable advice, and deliver consistently.

There are many ways to skin a cat, and other ways to determine the likelihood your customers will stay and even recommend.

More on Trust & Net Promoter Scoring