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Let's Turn Today's Customer Service Model on its Head!

Let’s turn the customer service model on its head.

Let’s not relegate service standards to numbers (so 1990's). Numbers are tools to show trends and areas of improvements not the end-all-be-all measurement of poor, good, great or world class service. #fact

Let’s STOP with the frustrating IVR’s that think every customer has the intelligence of a gnat.

Let’s STOP the wait message infomercials that we think are great marketing tools to a captive audience and realize we are just adding to a customer’s frustration.

Let’s not measure a good IVR platform as one that eliminates calls to a live agent as we think the COST factor is too much, but one that provides a great service to those who CHOOSE it.

Let’s train our agents on not being robots saying FAKE “I certainly understand your concern” or fake “I’m Sorry’s” and think that checks the block for empathy.

Let's not hide our customer service number to force customers to use frustrating online self service platforms...YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
While we are at it let’s not say “train” agents at all, let’s educate them. You train animals, you educate people.

Let’s not gouge or trick our customers with fees and “penalty's” because someone in finance saw a way to make a quick buck. Let’s see the bigger picture.

ON THE OTHER HAND...


Let’s think differently about how we service our customers.

Let's allow customer to interact the way they want(voice, email, chat, self-service, social media.....), not the way we want to force them to.

Let's get ready for video chat.
Let’s educate associates to not just know what buttons to push on a computer screen but more importantly to recognize what buttons a customer needs pushed to truly delight them.

Let’s make sure we fully help a customer with any need they have, try to develop a relationship and engage BEFORE we upsell a product.

Let’s understand that talking to our customer is an opportunity to strengthen brand loyalty. It is truly a gift and opportunity if handled properly.

Let’s pay associates a reasonable wage, educate them fully, have a truly fun working environment and allow for advancement. Don’t gouge the customer service staff.

Let’s understand that anyone can fire a person but a true leader works to make stars.

Let’s be visionary and not do what everyone else is when it comes to queues. Let’s rethink wait times and hold music (Pandora anyone?), give real self-service options that save time for a customer, not frustrate them.

Let’s realize that true service is only truly measured by one number. How many customers are actually evangelists for your brand after the experience they just had. That is true brand loyalty which can’t be defined by SLA, FCR, TT…think about it.

Let’s realize we are in a different era, an era of social media so we must offer true service that is not measured by money saved but on money earned from loyal customers who talk and talk and talk….

Let’s be different. Lets be Expivia

Embrace the NPS Culture

As those that follow me know I am not a very big fan of educating and measuring customer service to metrics. I do not think that you should base a world class customer experience on metrics that companies seem to be constantly changing to try to “fix” service issues. These metrics are also constantly being argued over to which one is of the most "importance". Not a great way to define service.

The companies that measure this way are ignoring the two main groups that decide a great experience, the customer and the associate, and put all the time in money into the measurements that are in between them. This makes little sense to me.

The process (notice I did not say metric) that I believe truly can show great service is using a Net Promoter Score process. Net Promoter programs are not traditional customer satisfaction programs, and simply measuring your NPS does not lead to success. Companies must follow an associated discipline to actually drive improvements in customer loyalty and enable profitable growth.

WOW! A program that does not just depend just on First call resolution, SLA, Average Talk Time or hold times to tell a company they are offering great service. As I have been saying for many years, these metrics should be used to diagnose and put service issues and techniques under the microscope, not be the goal.

Net Promoter Scoring programs basically ask one simple question and work from there— How likely is it that your customer would recommend your company or product to a friend or colleague? To get this score you survey your customers with the "Would You Recommend” question. The actual process can be found everywhere online if you are really interested in a more in-depth take on it.
What I am here to stress today is that:

WORKING TO GET YOUR NPS SCORE IS NOT AS IMPORTANT AS EMBRACING THE PROCESS!

Embrace the Net Promoter Scoring Process…How? Remember, the goal is to get your customers to recommend you. Let's look at some basic recommendations that would include:

• Look at the whole call process. Are their wait times, annoying IVR prompts, bad self-service processes?
• Are you are utilizing multi-channel (voice, email, chat, self-service APPS/IVR’s, social CRM) interactions with your customers. Are you letting your customer interact on their terms or is it the other way around?
• Are your associates trained not just on how to navigate screens but on treating your customers like family? Delight, empathy, not fake “I’m so sorrys” but true engagement with a customer? Too many service centers just assume associates will do this even though it is trained very poorly.
• Is your call center the “fun” place to work in your company or is it the “corrective action” place. Show me a quiet call center and I will show you one with poor quality and high turnover.
• Do you have an organized monitoring platform that gives instant feedback? Do you educate poor calls and CELEBRATE great calls or do you punish the poor calls and ignore the good ones?
• Are you using metrics such as FCR and SLA’s as the measure of great service? If you are its time to realize they are a tool and a tool only.
• Stop the annoying wait “infomercial” and belittling self-service “tips” that we think will lessen calls to the Center and costs. Embrace the chance to talk to a customer. Don’t waste the opportunity by being petty.
• Most importantly, BE DIFFERENT. Since when did the standard for service become bad self-service, infomercial wait messages and typical service?

Net Promoter Scoring makes your company develop a culture of service. In the era of social media your customer can be year greatest ally or your biggest headache. Don’t just look at numbers and metrics; develop a culture where your customers become your evangelists and their loyalty grants you more customers.
Lets celebrate the proper things!

Seismic Changes are Happening to Customer Service

We are at a crossroads when it comes to how organizations are beginning to handle customer interactions and service. I will go so far as to say that the way we handle these interactions now (chat, email, texting and voice) will actually start to be the old way in about a year from now... that's right I said a year. This scares a lot of companies as well whom have done customer service one way for decades. Companies that embrace these changes will thrive when it comes to customer interaction and engagement.

The Real Shift is in the Consumer
Looking out one to five years we have to look at what customers will be doing and what technology will they be using. Smartphones and tablet sales are taking over the desktop and laptop. Right now about 45% Americans own a tablet. As competition grows, prices recede and the use of tablets grows in the workplace this number will skyrocket. You will begin to see most companies move away from 1800 numbers and to more internet friendly types of communications like social media, click-to-call and video chatting face to face with new technologies like WebRTC. All driven by the wants of the consumer
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The Contact Center Shift
The contact center leaders of progressive firms are beginning to experiment with agents having their own tablet at their desktop. They have a keyboard to type but are able to take this tablet with then when they go to training or have the tablet as a backup from home if they are using mobile or at home agents or for overflow.
Soon there will be "studios" where video associates will be taking video calls. At first agents will be a booths or cubicles but I see many forward thinking companies, including my own, will try making the video call an experience. We are experimenting with different backgrounds and "stages"
Desktops are going away. PBX's are going away; certain cloud based technologies (even though they are relatively new) will be going away.
Real Time communication through the browser with APP's on tablets will be the new form of communication. Routing calls in your call center through cookie based internet data will be the way "calls" will become routed. It’s the call center meets video, meets big data all in one.

Please Put Your IVR's Away!
IVRs as we know them will also go the way of the dinosaur in the next five years. Why do I say that?
From a customer service standpoint APP's are taking the place of IVR's. If you want information without talking to an agent you will pull up an APP and get that information on your phone or tablet. If you want an account balance, how many points you have, basic questions like this, APP's are quickly taking the place of the IVR. When the traditional IVR is still needed and wanted, the IVR experience is expanded by providing visually guided menus on your website or on your customer’s Smartphone. This provides your customers with a convenient menu driven interface to your IVR. Screaming at a machine though your phone will become an activity you will do less and less.

Get the Make Up Out
For some companies which are still hiding their 1800 numbers deep on their web site (why are you doing that) there is another channel that they really need to start to pay attention to, that of Social Media. To be forced to use some online help screen or IVR that tells me to unplug something, wait 10 seconds and plug it back in is extremely frustrating. With more and more consumers moving to social media to vent these frustrations these will be begin to become a thing of the past.
Social Media will be taking on a much bigger scale and a larger % of most companies CRM budget as well. With more and more customers using this channel you will see many voice agents being cross trained to handle these types of interactions. It will become vital to have your antenna always listening to the pulse of your customers to make sure that when issues arise you are there to handle that opportunity. This is a HUGE shift in how things are done now. Now longer will it be good enough to be reactive to a customer service call that comes in, you now will need to be proactive and take care of these opportunities as early as possible in what I call "the viral cycle".

WebRTC Yellow Pages
I predict that you will see, whether Facebook or another unknown company steps into the realm of becoming the "phone book" of the next generation of the internet. A one stop site where you will be able to video chat with a person, restaurant, company.... directly from their "page" on the site. Not only will you be able to view them but through WebRTC technology, you will be able to be routed to the correct person as well. This site will provide the portal for this to happen. Video chat will become a mainstream channel in the next five years.

Companies Need to Get Back to the Future!
The companies that will be successful are the ones who will embrace these new techniques.
The minimal move for many centers of now must be to allow your customers to have a multi-channel approach in communicating with you. As more and more companies move to this approach customers will be getting "trained" in communicating in multiple ways. If customer service is not being offering through different channels, that company will be in for a rude awakening in a couple years when customers will be clamoring for these new technologies/techniques.

REALLY NO CHOICE HERE!!! Organizations must change the way they handle service or customers will move to a company who is!

Thomas Laird is a customer service and contact center consultant and operations professional with over 25 year of experience. Thomas is currently the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, Inc. A 100% onshore multichannel contact center.

Don't Let Fear Run You! Channel Your Inner 2yr Old

Do you remember when you first started to become afraid or nervous of things? What was the age when innocence left and the "real world" started to creep in? Everyone is apprehensive of something; the business world pushes that fear on you constantly. When did this start? This question jumped at me in the oddest of settings.

I was having lunch with my wife Cara, my mother-in-law, and my beautiful 19 month old daughter London. As any parent of a young child knows, when you go out to eat the clock is always ticking. You don’t know when your child is going to get bored and want to run around the restaurant but you know at some point…it’s going to happen! Well London decided to wait just until the time all our food was being brought out. Feeling ready for the challenge I volunteered for the first shift to allow everyone else to eat.

I picked London up and we proceeded to the lobster tank in the front lobby. She was fascinated. London loved the water, the bubbles, and the little red light on the side of the tank but even more she loved all the people giving her attention. When London saw all the people who were waiting for tables laughing, saying HI! to her, giving her high fives she was elated. My daughter, in front of about 20 total strangers worked the room! She danced, said hi/bye, laughed and pulled out all her cute tricks to get a rise out of her audience. She had no fear. She felt as though it was the right thing to do and her innocence allowed her to go through with it.

As I was smiling and laughing along with everyone else a thought crept into my mind. When did we lose this unabashed sense of “just do it”? When did fear start to tip-toe in to say, noooo you can’t do that, people will laugh at you, you’ll embarrass yourself and just a plain old STOP!

Now I am not naïve enough to believe that we all should be dancing and high fiving strangers in the lobby of a Red Lobster. What I am saying is that everyone needs to remember that unabashed adrenaline rush that happens when you put fear aside and go after something. So many people become paralyzed with fear that it dictates what they do in life and business. We cant let this happen!

In starting our new company Expivia Interaction Marketing, I was very nervous and fearful at the VERY beginning. While I have worked for and managed a company I had never started one. Fear ran though me every day (and still does to a certain extent), who will I get to believe in us and invest, what hardware and software platforms should we use, who should we hire first, where should we be located! A small list of things that I went to sleep thinking about ...if at times I even slept.

I promised myself though, after it was decided that this is what we were going to do, that I would not let fear have any say in the company's success or failure, especially in the beginning. I was going to be all in. If it did or did not happen it would not be because I was fearful of making, or just as importantly, NOT making a decision.

I came across a saying that you may have heard that states “Success is on the other side of FEAR”. That quote resonates with me on a very deep level. That quote got me though many uncomfortable lunches and phone conversations when I was trying to find investors. That quote got me thorough making tough decisions on the future of the company (which is still relatively young).

What I realized is that if you start to get through your fear it becomes a mindset. You will never fully conquer fear but you can get through it and in my case, I like to say I try to dominate it every day. The other feeling that drives me and those that I work with that relates to this is REGRET. Regret is a much more terrifying feeling that any type of fear. Embarrassment or failure go away as you continue on, regret lasts a lifetime.

Don’t let fear run your personal or business life, try different things, talk to different people, do things people tell you that you can’t, prove people wrong who put you down but most importantly prove to yourself that you will not run your life by being afraid.

So the next time fear starts to slow your progress and cloud what you want, think of London dancing around the lobby of Red Lobster. That brazen child is still in all of us! You just need to make him or her come out.

I was going end by saying that I hope this helps a little but that's not true...I hope this helps a lot!! I would love to hear stories on how some of you kept going when you were scared or fearful of doing something. Every great accomplishment happened because someone had the courage to fight through their fear!

If you need a little more motivation check this out. I read it every time someone tells me I can’t do something, laughs at an idea or wants to criticize.

MAN IN THE ARENA

Customer Service with WebRTC for Dummies!

WebRTC is a new communication technology being headed up by Google. It also has some really big players on board as well such as Avaya and Cisco. While that is all fine and well, the question remains... WHAT IS WebRTC??!! We will try to answer that question in this short article.

Simply put WebRTC deals with a very specific problem, voice and video communications to and from the browser without the use of any downloads or plug-ins.
That seems pretty straight forward and not that amazing until we think of the uses from the contact center and customer service point of view.
Currently if you want to talk to another person/organization though your PC/tablet/smartphone both parties need to download a program or a plugin (think skype) or have the same equipment (like Face Time on an iphone or ipad). That can be time consuming and with so many options for communications there is no unanimity. WebRTC makes that a thing of the past. If you want to video chat, chat, or have a browser to browser session all you would have to do is click with your browser.
With consumers moving away from land lines and into smartphones and tablets, I believe this will be the new way to interact with customers who prefer to still use voice for service.

On the most basic front it is an advanced Click-to-Call method without the awkward transition from computer to phone. On the more advanced platform we can take information from the customer computer (ie cookies) and route calls not though a PBX but through the web to an agent waiting to assist that is connected Internet Explorer to Chrome or Mozilla or any combination of browsers you can think of. One uniform platform.

Companies are driving more and more of their customers to their website for self-service. If the customer must talk to an agent, instead of running up telecom costs or going through a frustrating IVR, going over the web with a direct browser to browser connection will be the cheapest/easiest way to actually have a human interaction with a customer.

When added to social media interfaces, your customers are just a click away from your organization at all times with a truly cost beneficial way to interact.

97% of purchasers research their purchase on the web (study by BIA Kelsey). Why not make it as easy as possible for the potential customer to then contact your organization, especially for a service type businesses where there really cannot be a purchase over the internet? WebRTC makes a seamless and easy transition from website to agent to sale/service.

The main benefits of WebRTC:
1) Ease of use for customer. No downloading, no need to pick up a phone or dial. Easy browser to browser click communication.
2) Cost Savings. No longer does your company have to employ a herd of 1800 numbers. This is all done for just the cost of the agent they are taking to. Telecom is zero.
3) Elimination for those using an IVR for routing purposes. We can route using the customers browser.
4) Awesome new routing capabilities
5) Its the future of customer service and will allow your organization to truly be on the cutting edge.

WebRTC is not a technology of the future but is here now. These are exciting times in the CRM world.

For more information on WebRTC or for help on implementation please visit http://www.expivia.net
Contact us at tlaird@expivia.net

We are reshaping the customer experience. This is Expivia

The Power of Monitoring Social Media Channels

All businesses large and small need to start to harness the power of monitoring social media channels.
Take a quick look at this link from the Today Show that I have placed near the bottom of this article on how Charmin monitored social media channels and found a blog from a mother who was writing how her son with Autism was infatuated with the Charmin Teddy Bear. No other bear captivated the child like the Charmin Bear. Charmin found this blog by monitoring social media and was so touched by the story that they sent the family some stuffed bears so that the child could have the real thing.
This all then turns to positive PR from just the small token of sending a stuffed animal to a child that really would enjoy it.

This is just one small example of how monitoring social media channels can boost your corporate reputation by showing how proactive you can be. Just by me writing this article is continuing to push the Charmin story in a positive light. Powerful. This is what can happen to all organizations who are proactive with their social media.

How do you do this?
If you are a small or medium organization there are many outsourced companies that will do it for you. They can watch sales opportunities by certain keywords or they can monitor your company name or AD campaign. Anytime that these names come up on a monitored forum, Facebook page, blog or internet search you then get the opportunity to respond quickly to shape a sales or customer service opportunity.

These organizations normally charge by the amount of time you want them to respond to "hits". You can have outsourcers check your social media hits on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis depending on your budget and social media need. If you are say a small car dealer you could probably get away with looking more for sales and customer service opportunities a little less than a larger organization would. These organizations likely would benefit from a wider search for both with longer response periods.

Large organizations with Social CRM budgets can purchase software that can do this for them. These "scrubbers",as I call them, constantly are looking for key words for organizations to capitalize on.
Major telecommunications companies like Avaya and Cisco are now moving to add these features right to their contact center software. They are treating social media contacts or hits as important as an inbound customer service or sales opportunity. Representatives in these new "Interaction Centers" now take Inbound, Outbound, Chat, Email and Social media interactions all at the same station and treat all with the same about of importance.

http://www.today.com/moms/charmin-bear-charms-autistic-boy-1C9882786
Take a queue form Charmin, all organizations need to "bear" down on these new social marketing techniques for the benefit of all organizations!

If your organization needs help in monitoring social media channels or is looking to develop a full Social CRM plan, Expivia Interaction Marking can help.

Take a look at our social crm capabilities at www.expivia.net

Also check us out on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c443sR_Z3os

We are reshaping customer interaction. This is Expivia