Customer Communications Check-Up

Performing a Customer Communications Check-Up

There is a customer-power revolution taking place. The pervasive use of the Internet has created a smarter, more buying-savvy customer. For example, J. D. Power reports that 70% of automobile buyers enter the dealer showroom already armed with specifications, invoice prices, and information on dealer margins and promotions. Travelers can go to the Web for travel deals from Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity, competing directly with the traditional travel agents and providers. Even healthcare information has resulted in better informed patients asking their physicians for specific treatments and prescriptions.

This customer revolution has a significant impact on the contact center’s role in the business. It’s time for businesses to begin to listen closer to their customers -- what they want, what they like and don’t like about your products or process, how your products affect them, and what the competition is offering. And since the contact center interacts with more customers than any other part of the enterprise, what better place to find out what customers are thinking?

As customers take a more powerful role in the sales process, the role of the contact center is also changing. It is not just the team that handles billing questions, solves product problems, or takes orders from customers. The contact center must gather customer information essential to the company’s success and make it available to the rest of the enterprise in a form to guide product development, process changes, pricing, and marketing decisions.

While better demographic information can help to segment customers for more targeted marketing, there is more to it than that. It is not enough to just mollify the complaining customer or fix a billing error. Issues that affect multiple customers must be quickly identified and communicated to the departments that can make a difference. This puts the contact center in the role of interpreter between the customer and the company, serving as a conduit to enable the voice of the customer to be heard.

When customers truly believe that a company listens and acts upon what it hears, trust is earned, loyalty is built, and retention increases. For these actions to occur there must be an efficient and effective flow of information from the contact center point of entry to the rest of the enterprise, with all corporate functions working together. This flow of information and resulting actions are easier said than done, however, for most organizations.

Customer communications checkup
To ensure your organization makes the most of customer information; you will want to continually review all points of contacts and processes along the way. The customer communications checkup is a practical ten-step process to review and improve the way the contact center interacts with customers and gathers and passes the vital customer input to the rest of the enterprise. This process enables you to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with customers that will ensure retention and referrals, maximize current revenues and repeat business, and minimize the cost of service. It is a process that focuses on both efficiency and effectiveness.

This supports a measured and continuously developing improvement process rather that a massive reengineering that may be too complex and revolutionary to be successful. This practical approach will enable the contact center to take on this Voice of the Customer role in a way the enterprise can assimilate effectively.

The 10-step process can include any combination of the following tasks. The tasks fall into two main areas: effective listening and data gathering, followed by acting upon the information.

1. Review contact center goals to ensure alignment with enterprise mission and goals.

In this vital first step, it is essential for the contact center to take a look at the enterprise mission and vision and make sure that the goals in the contact center are aligned. For example, if the company has a mission/vision that states it wants to be the low-cost provider in its market, the contact center must focus on listening for opportunities to drive costs lower. Any information about the customer’s view of the competitive offerings will be important to both marketing and product development managers.

On the other hand, if the company’s mission/vision is to be the innovative leader, cost may be a secondary factor. Now the contact center needs to listen closely for any information the customer provides that would guide new product features and competitive capabilities that need to be addressed. Traditional service level goals may have some relevance in the process, but they are simply subsets of larger goals. Pressing for lower handle time may be counter-productive to gathering quality input from customers, but first call resolution may be more vital than ever to gaining customer trust. Every contact center goal should support the mission of the company and be clearly tied to its achievement.

2. Review or establish a performance measurement system.

When the contact center’s mission, vision, and goals are clear, specific measures of performance can be established that gauge progress toward those goals. Larger measures such as quality or profitability will need to be broken down into the components that can be measured. The measures need to address overall contact center performance, as well as performance of the staff at all levels within the center that roll up to the overall goals.

3. Review or establish reporting strategies that focus on the established goals.

The reports that are provided to all levels of the organization must be relevant to the recipients and provide them with data that aids in decision making. Establishing a comprehensive strategy for what information to provide, what sources will be used, what calculations applied, what format the report will take, who is to receive it, and how often to communicate will give a solid foundation to the reporting functions.

4. Review options for structured and unstructured data analysis.

It is common for there to be an overall company customer satisfaction survey process, but less common for the survey to specifically address customers’ interactions with the contact center specifically. The contact center needs a survey mechanism that gives it specific and actionable data quickly. Receiving a semi-annual report that scores the contact center for overall satisfaction with a 3.8 on a scale of 5 doesn’t give the managers much to work with to make changes for improvement. There are a number of tools available today to provide quick and specific information that can guide coaching of personnel, process change, and resolve customer issues before they become major challenges.

Much of the communications with customers via calls or email is unstructured. There is no format to guide the analysis in the same way as a structured customer satisfaction survey. But this is where the bulk of the useful information will be, with answers to important questions like:

What did the customer really love about that new feature?

Why did the customer pick this product over the competitive ones?

How likely is the customer to take his business elsewhere?

This is the data that must be gathered, mined, and acted upon to maximize competitive position and gain customer trust. There are a number of techniques for turning the unstructured data into useful information, including new analytics technologies and processes as simple as a customer suggestion box.

5. Establish effective processes for sharing customer feedback with the enterprise.

When the customer data has been gathered, it must be shared with the appropriate departments within the enterprise who can use it effectively. The call center must establish communications methodologies that provide the data in the form most useful for the receiving department. Overcoming the appearance of “finger-pointing” by the contact center is critical to the effectiveness of the process and will require of the development of common goals and cooperation among all of the affected departments.

6) Review or implement agent training and supervisor coaching on customer relationship building and selling skills.

The frontline staff is the primary team responsible for listening to the customer and gathering the input to share with the enterprise. This may be a new focus for a contact center that has been focused primarily on efficiency and minimizing handle time. Agents must be trained on effective techniques for customer relationship building and selling skills where appropriate. Supervisors must know how to monitor and coach the staff on these techniques and skills to ensure long-term effectiveness.

7) Review quality monitoring and coaching process for customer focus.

Much of the typical quality monitoring process focuses on ensuring that the agent follows prescribed processes in the manner that the training suggests. Did the agent use the customer’s name? Was the data entry on the order done correctly? To maximize each customer interaction and establish trust, the quality monitoring needs to also look for opportunities to gather relevant customer data and make it available to the enterprise. Did the agent ask appropriate probing questions about the customer’s comment regarding the new product feature? Was information provided by the customer about a competitor’s offering captured? Since it is true that “you get what you measure,” the process of monitoring and coaching must reinforce the efforts to gather and use customer input as well as the typical efficiency measures.

8) Review knowledge base or reference materials to ensure agents have the information needed for complete and accurate answers to inquiries.

Much of new-hire orientation is typically spent teaching agents all they need to know about the products and services the company offers. But it is often woefully inadequate in training agents how to interact effectively with customers to maximize the revenue, retention, and willingness to recommend the company to others. There typically isn’t enough time in the orientation to teach everything, but if much of the company product and service information is available in reference materials and online knowledge bases, training on how to use these tools can be much shorter than trying to teach the agent everything that needs to be remembered. The time can more effectively be used to train them on effective communications, gathering information, and ensuring customer delight.

9) Review IVR and/or speech recognition strategies and menus.

Many interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition systems are designed to minimize calls into the center that require human interaction, thus saving on staffing expense. But many customers complain about being forced through such systems and the complexity and confusion they create. There is actually a subset of the customer base that prefers a self-service option, as long as it’s easy to understand, quick, and functional. For the rest, it is important to determine if the company is being “penny wise and pound foolish” by forcing customers into the self-service mode. After all, it is difficult to get input from a customer to whom nobody ever speaks. A review of these systems to ensure that they are functional from the customer’s perspective will ensure not only maximum utilization by those who prefer them, but also offer alternatives to those customers who might be pushed away by requirements to interact only in this way. Where essential customer input would be lost through self-service, the enterprise needs to evaluate the trade-offs of efficiency vs. effectiveness.

10) Review e-mail management/Web interaction strategies and processes.

More and more contact centers are interacting with customers via e-mail and Web chats. These communications are just as important as the phone calls, and in some ways, even more so since they are conducted in writing. The processes of maximizing these interactions and ensuring that the appropriate data is being mined and shared throughout the enterprise need to be applied to these communications channels just as they are for the phone calls, but the processes will require different techniques and tools.

Conducting a comprehensive review of the many ways that customer information is provided, gathered, analyzed, and shared is critical to success in a world where the customer is king. There’s a wealth of data in everyday customer communications and the smart company will take time to listen and respond.