What role will customer experience - how your company interacts with customers - play in your company's strategy in 2009? Increasingly, companies are starting to see customer care/customer experience as a "critical" part of business strategy. In a report released last February, Forrester stated that of the 287 leaders surveyed, 91% said that customer experience would be either very important or critical to their 2008 efforts — a significant jump over results in a similar survey last year.  I wonder how/if economy shifted that at all this year?  Truth is - customer care is not just an operational expediture, but an opportunity to also drive profit and you should think of it that way - moving into the planning season. 

Many companies don't think of their call center as a channel for growth.  But with customer acquisition costs on the rise, leading companies are finding a hidden source of revenue already in their organization - existing customers.  The call center is the hub of ongoing customer activity.  It is central to creating customer lifetime value which drives increased growth and profit.  The fact is that best-in-class call center service (Aberdeen 2009 Transforming Contact Center into Profit Center Report) can deliver up to 34% more revenue per customer and nearly half of today's companies include contact center goals in top-line performance goals. 

Leverage outbound messaging (not annoying predictive dialing) to deliver courtesy reminders that also include a promotional message (can reduce inbound call center traffic while driving possible incremental revenue.) 

Think about it. Put "profit" next to "efficiencies" in your '09 plan.  Those of you already doing that, share your thoughts.  Is it realistic? how are you doing it?

You may have seen "virtual assistant" demos before.  I have never been impressed by them -- they are usually clumsy and childlike, and plagued by frequent "I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean" responses when you manage to say something they're not expecting.

Jenn at Alaska Airlines changed all that for me.

I was first turned on to Jenn by a colleague who noticed this excellent article in the New York Times highlighting Jenn.  Disbelieving, I tried it out.  "What are your hub cities?"  "What's the best vacation spot?" "Do you connect to Boston?"  "How can I fly from Boston to Las Vegas?"  "What meals are served on your flights?"  "How long has Alaska Air been in business?"  "Who is Tim the Moose?"  "Can I get miles credit with another airline?"  For all of these, she either provided a direct answer, or guided me to a related page on the site... often with alternative choices in case she didn't quite get it right.

And my brain lit up on all sorts of levels.  From a technical standpoint, there's so much to love.  The way her window hangs out unobtrusively to the side, taking up minimal space.  The way it takes you around the Alaska Air website automatically to answer your questions but also lets you choose links.  Meanwhile, the responses are very pleasantly worded -- it almost sounds like synthesized speech but my guess is that a real person recorded all the responses.  And the natural language technology is top notch!  It is as helpful and pleasant as a human without trying too hard to impersonate one -- no Turing test candidate here, but who cares? 

But forget the geek side of my brain... is it helpful?  Does it add to the customer experience on the site?  Or is it just a cool widget that serves no purpose.  After my brief experience, I'd say there's no question of its value.  I want a Jenn on every site!  I want Jenn to take me to my portfolio on my online trading site without me wading through 10 tabs and 5 subtabs, 90% of which are irrelevant to me.  I want Jenn on my health insurance site to show me what's covered and what's not, to let me look up old EOB's and claims, and to explain what I need to do to handle disputes.  I need a general purpose Jenn that will let me find out the weather forecast, look up stocks, answer dumb questions, and parse information for me, so that I don't need to rely on Google, a carefully constructed search, and reviews of five different web pages to find the right information.

My second reaction was to realize that this feat is probably a lot more difficult to duplicate outside of the travel industry.  I'm sure the folks at NextIT would disagree, but certainly limiting the domain of questions made for more accurate answers -- my guess is that she's got quite a knowledge base behind her that can relate each website page to her responses.

My final reaction, however, was that since 90% of most company's interactions come over the phone, this sort of investment is probably a mostly wasted piece of customer service.  Certainly they've invested even more in their phone reservations service, right?  I called their number and was so disappointed to find a typical boring, inefficient automated system.  It had all the classic stereotypical annoyances: "To ensure quality service your call may be recorded."  "Lower fares may be found online."  Follow that with a confusing arrangement of options all squished into 5 touchtone options, plus another number to write down and call, and one last dirty trick: the final option was "press 0 to repeat this menu."  I never did find a way to speak to an agent.  An automation solution that forces people to your website and hides your customer service reps is simply not an acceptable answer in this day and age.  I wonder how many people have clicked on Jenn... and how many have hung up in frustration trying to figure out how to navigate that phone menu maze.  And I wonder how much the company has invested in their website innovations as opposed to cleaning up the basics of their phone interface!

Catchy song. But before we start wondering what unlikely crime will be solved in an unlikely way by the unlikely forensic bods in unlikely CSI, let us turn to the less glamorous and all too real world of petty fraud and pernicious identity theft. This has already become a burning consumer issue: according to this blog, 45% of consumers will switch banks in search of better identity protection.

Are banks worried? In a word: youbetcha. They're worried because of the risk of consumers abandoning them, the financial risk, the brand risk...all caused by the alarming alacrity with which fraudsters seem to be able scoop up the personal data that's used in conventional security techniques (mother's maiden name, date of birth, last four digits of the social security number, etc).

A lot has been spent on increasing security in online banking. But for users to cope with truly secure passwords, a lot of education is needed. And all this online focus might distract us from that other heavily used customer service channel: the phone. There are literally billions of phone calls each year from consumers to their banks for all sorts of tasks. Some of them are low risk(What's my balance?) and others rather more meaningful (Transfer $1000 from account X to account Y). 

When you add to the mix the new regulations hitting both Europe and the US, securing phone calls has become a high priority for all sorts of organizations, but especially FI's. This has led many to look once again at the merits of speaker verification, a technology that tests callers' voice patterns against previously captured voice prints and decides whether they're a good match or not. It works in a similar way - but not quite the same - to how fingerprints are matched against a database of candidate fingerprints. Well-designed caller authentication systems using the right technology are very secure indeed, and they're garnering a lot of interest 

 A group of companies and solutions providers are getting together to discuss all this fun stuff in New York in May. This will be the third of the excellent conferences organized by Dan Miller and his team at Opus Research, after successful events in Washington, D.C and London. We always have fun there, and it's a great place to keep up to speed on what financial institutions are doing and what's going on in the space. And with this kind of thing happening, it's not surprising industries outside of financial services are beginning to come along too.
 

Earlier this week Dan and I had a generally awful travel experience on a major airline.  One of those "everything that can go wrong will" type of affairs, where you know it from the moment the first delay is posted that this flight is doomed.  A 5:45 departure became 6:15, 6:40, then 7:00, before the slow boarding and general mayhem got us off the ground around 7:15.  Even worse, the plane itself had tiny overhead baggage compartments, such that even without anything resembling a full flight, about 20 people had to check their carry-ons with the flight attendants.  I sat in an unreclinable seat with a shortened seat belt that barely fit around my waist.  When we landed, we discovered that our bags didn't make it, and would be on the next flight, and would we wait in this line with everyone else to talk to the baggage department to report our lost luggage and make arrangements to have it delivered to us.  And none of any of this was reported by the notification system that I signed up for that week to tell me about these things when they happened.

Part of me says, hey, what can you do, these things happen, and there are worse ways to be crapped on by the airline industry.  The part of me that is still angry had to stop and think.... who to be angry with?  The gate agents tried their best to update the departure delays as they knew.  The flight attendants dutifully reported that overhead space was running out, then helpfully checked our bags, even bringing back the baggage tickets to us in our seats.  The baggage handlers couldn't get all the bags on in time for our departure so they did the next best thing by getting the bags on the next plane.  The pilot made up some of the time in the air.  The baggage claim people knew exactly where our bags were when we gave them the ticket and provided a tracking number for us.  And my (slightly soggy) bag was sitting on my side porch the next morning.  Everyone did their job, right?

Except... the flight attendants KNEW from the start that there wouldn't be enough space on the plane... one of them mentioned to me that this was a model that hadn't had its overhead compartments refurbished yet.  The baggage guy who took our bags must have suspected that he wasn't going to have time to get all those on the plane.  The baggage claim people were practically expecting us when we walked into the office... they knew some bags didn't make it.  And I bet someone, somewhere had a pretty good idea that the flight wasn't going to be only 20 minutes late.  In other words, there was a lot of pretty strong knowledge and evidence lurking in the spaces between roles... stuff that, if communicated, could have either made the experience better for the customers, or possibly resulted in process changes that would address these problems for the next set of customers.

How can a customer service organization see these trees falling in the forest? 

I can imagine that there are on-time reports, lost baggage statistics, and other metrics that airlines can use to monitor performance.  None of those would suggest how to correct these specific problems.  These metrics are TOO big a picture... they're the entire forest, and you can't see how the trees inside are falling.

An organization truly devoted to customer service would find a way to ferret out these problems and fix them.  To provide a more accurate forecasting time for when a plane will actually arrive.  To recognize that this model of airplane is inevitably going to have to check carry-ons and should allow some time to do that.  To proactively notify passengers that they shouldn't wait around 20 minutes to learn that their bags didn't make it.  To verify that automated notification systems are working properly.  In other words, looking like you know what you're doing, and never leaving a customer guessing as to what's gone wrong now. 

This is not just a question of customer service... it affects the bottom line as well.  I can't imagine that waiting 10 more minutes to get the bags loaded was less expensive than personal delivery of those bags to 20 different homes in the Boston area.

By now you see the obvious parallels with a contact center, and the importance of tuning and analyzing a customer care experience to identify any problems.  The 800 number in the agent's script that's been disconnected.  The touchtone option that accidentally disconnects the caller.  The discrepancy between the website's FAQ and the canned answer given by the agent.  The escalations that don't actually escalate.  No doubt there are contact center agents who know that such-and-such doesn't work, and complain about it to other agents or even their supervisor, but how do these get fixed?  In our flight case, many individuals along the way knew that there would be a problem.  But they had no way to communicate it to anyone in charge of the whole process.  You need someone in charge of the customer experience, who is armed with the people and tools responsible for analyzing the entire customer experience.  Then you can find out not just what the problems are but to suggest how to fix them.

Sometimes it's not enough to look at individual trees, nor is it helpful to step back and see the whole forest from afar.  Sometimes you have to actually walk through the forest yourself, so you can see exactly where and how those service interruption trees fall.

Well I can't vote and nor can my wife - neither of us are US citizens. But we are legal, so I think that means we're not topical. However, none of that stopped Hillary Clinton from calling us more than twice to let us know that she was counting on our votes in the primaries (sorry to disappoint Mrs C, but rules are rules).

• The first call was mildly annoying...didn't they realize we weren't registered voters?
  
• Second time round was really tedious...after we'd hung up after 5 seconds of the first message did they really need to call us again? (Hey...they hung up!! Must have dropped the phone. Let's call 'em back!)
  
• Third time definitely wasn't the charm from either a personal or constitutional perspective.

And I don't remember opting in to inviting pre-recorded political blurbs into my house. Hey...and we're on the do-not-call list! Still, I guess it's pretty easy to hang up. And our local primaries are all over, so we're safe til The Big One begins.

So why am I still irritated when I think of that experience? Well some say I'm just an irritable person, but my wife is calm and patient and when I repeatedly bait her about the whole thing she seems irritated too. You can't argue with that kind of scientific rigor.

So here's the question: we get calls all the time these days from some organization or another. Why do I descend into furor at the off-shored dinner-time call urging me to accept some literature for credit card travel insurance that I can try for 30 days for free (free!) and simply cancel within 17 days by calling between the hours of 11:00 and 11:15 Central European time Monday to Tuesday?

And why do I love the call from the same credit card company to confirm that I really did just purchase that new mp3 player online?

Well, in the first case, I didn't ask for the credit card travel insurance. I'm not traveling on vacation soon anyway. I'm having something I don't want forced on me by someone I don't know. It's intrusive. It's a hassle to get out of. The caller is pushy. In other words, it's a stressful, unsolicited experience from someone to whom I'm paying good money. It makes me want to take my business somewhere else.

In the second case...my credit card company (bless 'em) is looking out for me. They contacted me to let me know that someone might be abusing my credit. I didn't have to wait to find out that someone else might be living it up on my dime (as it happens they weren't). The call was automated but interactive, so I pressed 1 on my keypad to confirm that I'd made the purchase. I guess my credit card company was happy because they don't have to block my card; I was happy because I wasn't being defrauded; and I'm still happy because out of all their millions of customers, they proved to me that they were looking out for me. The system called me by name, and it knew what was going on with the storied life of my credit card. That was a nice feeling. Plus, the call was short and no-one tried to sell me anything.

Companies should feel that they can call their customers rather than waiting for customers to call them. But there are some ifs. You can call me...

• If you call me with something that matters to me
• If you know me by name
• If you call me at a reasonable time
• If I should take immediate action based on the information you're telling me (if not, send me a letter)
• If it's something I've told you I really want to know (e.g. you've just mailed my prescription refill)
  
• If you let me opt out whenever I want to
  

These calls save time, and they improve customer service. We don't want to have to call their airline to re-book after we arrive at the airport to discover the flight has been canceled. We'd much rather receive a message before we leave, letting us re-book from home, keep watching back-to-back election coverage and trying to figure out all these super-delegate shenanigans.

At today's "customer service is the new marketing conference" http://csitnm.com/ at the beautiful Golden Gate club in San Francisco, Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos http://www.zappos.com/welcome.zhtml was clear that the way to drive a business' success, was not about looking at the care operation as an expense item, but as an investment. At this conference, focused on a new way of viewing customer service, Tony was one of the headliners whose passion was catching as he positioned care as one of the most important branding opportunities.  Each interaction  - he shared - is an opportunity to create an impression. The company's 5 week training  in Las Vegas for new employees is more about the culture and role of the customer's experience in their interactions than it is about any employee's specific role.  The call center staff isn't measured by # of transactions handled, upselling or time spent per call - rather it is completely about how the customer feels at the end of the interaction.  To create that "right" interaction - their team is empowered to make decisions on the fly.  More often than not - they encourage their staff to be more generous in terms of making a problematic situation right  - when they provide feedback on a call.  And - he emphasized - their goal is to allow people to start at the $13 an hour job, and work themselves up to the lead in a department.  Retraining people who have already learned bad customer care habits (like getting a customer off a call fast) can be very difficult.  Getting someone with no experience, is often a better fit for the Zappos culture. This culture of "care for the customer" is captured by employees (everyone contributes and it is organized by department)  in an annual "culture" book Zappos publishes for new employees, vendors and individuals interviewing at the company.

 

This great customer service btw - isn't just for the customer.  Zappos' focus on interactions transcends to employees, vendors...investors.....

 

He walked thru their 10 core values.......my favorite was "create fun and a little weirdness." Tony confirmed that not everyone is comfortable with this, but to drive change, requires a little adventure, creativity and open-mindedness. 

I came across a great example of poor customer service that I just had to share here: an experience flying to the Grand Caymans with the low-budget Spirit Airlines.  It has it all: poor service from poor policies.  Clueless employees.  A terrible phone service (not even automated... no one available to take the call, and one number for both reservations and service inquiries.)  And the end result that's quite indicative of today's Care 2.0 world -- a blog post that will be passed along multiple times to many more readers to serve as excellent negative PR against ever flying Spirit anywhere.

In fact, all it took was a google on Spirit Airlines to unearth several other sob stories.  The guy whose Spirit flight was cancelled and his attempts to rebook involved the 800 number hanging up on him.  His blog includes links to three other complaint stories, finally leading to one unbelievable slip-up by the CEO which eventually got more prominent coverage.  Even the folks at the top don't care about customer service.  If you don't care about how you care, it shows throughout the organization.

You can't hide from a bad experience!

I had an interesting (if unfortunate) experience yesterday.  I called my bank because my credit card was charging me an annual fee.  I was pretty sure that I had signed up for one of those 0% interest rate promotion.  Admittedly, I remembered that I had missed a payment when I first signed up for the card and switched to automatic payments, but I clearly remembered calling the contact center and asking if this was going to be a problem.  At least, I think I did.  And I thought that they had credited me the fee and reset the interest rate to 0%.  And that's where things get interesting.

 

A look at a recent statement showed me that I was actually being charged the full interest rate of 14% for the last three months or so.  What the heck?!  I called up the contact center and explained my case to an agent.  He listened to my story, checked my account, but eventually told me that there was nothing he could do.  I missed a payment, the rate had gone up.  He had no record of me calling in and apologizing for the late payment and getting my rate reset (though the automatic payments were in place, which is why I had never noticed the change).  It simply never happened in his world. And that's the way it worked.

 

Needless to say, I was pretty upset.  After I hung up from the call, though, I had a few interesting observations.

 

1) I didn't deal extensively with an IVR system.  Instead, I went almost straight to an agent, after being prompted to speak the last four digits of my credit card number.  I assume there was some sort of ANI detection.  What's notable about this is that I've called that number before and dealt with a more complex IVR system.  I can only assume that I was singled out to be a "high value" customer because I have accounts with the bank's credit card, home equity line, and checking and savings accounts.  Hey, neat.

 

2) When I got off the call, I realize that I was mad -- but I could only be mad at myself.  The customer service agent was excellent.  He spent a long time researching my account and talking with a manager somewhere (either that, or laughing at me while I was on hold, I guess I couldn’t know for sure).  He told me that their system tracks every call that comes into the call center, and he was able to demonstrate that by naming times before and after when I supposedly called -- such as for an ATM card replacement.  It was hard to argue.  The onus was on me for not checking my statement after I supposedly got a credit and got my rate reset to 0%.  Frankly, I didn't really have anyone to complain to except myself.

 

Of course, the first thing I did after I hung up was grabbed one of the perpetually appearing 0% intro APR offers that hit the mail every week or so and transfer the remaining money over to that.  So in a sense, they lost my business.  But they didn't lose my respect.  And you know what?  That means something, in this day and age.

 

Only one thing would've made it better.  Every other channel interaction with any financial situation (Web, IM, e-mail, fax back, ATM machine, talking to a teller) involves getting some sort of receipt.  An e-mail confirmation.  A piece of paper.  Maybe a letter in the mail.  Boy, it sure would make sense to have a receipt for every call into a contact center.  Something to help my poor memory so that it's not making up stories -- or to prove that their system was down and that the agent I had talked to back a few months ago didn't do his job.  I'm thinking like an outbound SMS to the mobile phone that I was calling from.  Or an e-mail back to my address on record to show that I talked to someone.  Sure, the onus is still on me to look for that sort of receipt but -- I would sure feel better now if I knew that I'd had that, or knew that I didn't get one.  I certainly would have called back in a few days if I had not seen a response.  Without that sort of confirmation, how do you know that the trucks are on their way to your house when you report a problem with your phone line?  That the transfer you just put through in order to pay a bill has actually gone through?  I'm convinced that this sort of outbound interaction with customers is the next step in improving customer service.  After all, we're entitled to it!