SATSE: Part 2: Customer Experience Management

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories - those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. - Russell Baker

Regardless of the purpose of a contact centre project, be it selling subscriptions, helping patients to diagnose an illness and potentially escalate to hospital, increasing credit card balance or checking if a vehicle is ready to collect after a service, the customer experience is paramount. A poor experience for the customer usually results in poor outcomes for the organisation. Poor outcomes can be longer call durations, lower sales, more complaints, higher levels of re-calls, whatever. It's often a vicious circle - poor service delivery leads to inefficiency which leads to lost calls & recalls which leads to more load which leads to even lower service. This leads to frustration for both customers and advisors. On the other hand, if the experience is good, outcomes tend to follow. This improves the experience for customers and advisors and the metrics just keep getting better. How do you ensure your centre does more of the latter and less of the former?

Chapter 4: Serving for Success

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat - P J O'Rourke

All contact centres provide a service. It may not always be smooth, but service is at the heart of all operations. Success in service delivery means different things to different people. For example, in the case study that follows, success for a Redundancy Helpline is not about "average handle times", "first call resolution" or other efficiency based metrics, it's about high level customer outcomes - number of customers re-employed within 90 days. In that kind of environment the government agency sponsoring the activity is more interested in the contact centre's contribution to higher goals and success depends on the extent to which the contact centre meets those goals. For another application, say in a busy travel agency or holiday company, at certain times of the year, there will be large peaks in call traffic and managing the scare resource (advisor time) is paramount - delivering the very best advice as efficiently as possible. A key metric here might be what percentage of customers can be persuaded to "self-care" on an extranet during busy times without impacting average order values, for example. Success, therefore, is a factor of your situation and this chapter will look at practical steps that can be taken for success, however you measure it.

• Complaint handling


• Stultifying standards-based approach - if it says 72 hours, we're bloody well going to take 72 hours - that's NOT service


• Customer Selection - why it's right to deliver different service levels to different customers


• Staff rewards


• Self service augmentation and promotion to customers

Chapter 5: Content Personalisation

Sometimes it can be hard to just keep things running smoothly (see chapter eight for the challenges of Keeping the Show on the Road) but in today's marketplace, personalisation is one of the keys to service differetiation (along with service excellence and innovation). Serving out the same experience to each customer is simply not good enough any more. Customers are different. Each one has differing needs of your business (and contact centre) and represent different levels of value to your brand. Treating everyone the same is a poor marketing decision and a poor commercial decision. Without knowing in advance what will cause individual customers will call, how do you personalise the service? If ten customers are waiting in a queue, who should you serve first? The answers to these questions can be surprising and customer insight can allow quicker service delivery whilst improving customisation.

• Personalisation as a source of differentiation


• Commercial rationalisation


• Using one channel's results to feed another channel's activity


• What to personalise?

Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting

In God we trust, all others bring data, W. Edwards Deming

A key facet of any direct marketing strategy is segmenting customers into discrete groups that can be separately identified. For example, in a mobile phone company, one group might be contract consumers who spend more than £100 per month, or pre-pay customers who send more than 400 texts per month and have more than 12 people in their calling circle (number of discrete people they call regularly). You can attribute customers to groups (or segments) simply, by taking one dimension of customer data say, average monthly spend and ranking from low to high, then, split into ten groups, either by volume or value (deciles) to give ten segments that can be tracked and measured. Perhaps a more useful (but more complex) tool is clustering to identify a series of variables (spend, length of tenure, location, age, acquisition source, for example) and determine customers who are alike across a basket of different attributes. Whichever method is chosen (and we will discuss segmentation in more detail later) it gives a basis for starting to target different groups of customers with different offers or routing different customers into different service streams.

Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?

One of the great delusions in marketing, in fact probably the absolute greatest delusion in corporate communications, is Customer Relationship Marketing. CRM has been used to justify all kinds of nonsense in the past and to delude marketing managers across the world that they have a "relationship" with their customers. Bollocks. Unless you run a corner shop in a small rural village and you know every customer by name, you don't have a relationship with customers, you have a series of transactions. Customers just don't think of a series of transactions as a relationship. A relationship is two-way mutually giving - mother to daughter, friend to friend, but what we have with brands is one-way service delivery. For a very small number of brands, think Nike or Playstation, for instance, some consumers may value the brand association as something special and worthy and valuable and cool. If Harley Davidson can create an image for a community of customers that is powerful enough for these people to revere the brand and even carry the brand logo onto items of clothing that didn't originally carry the brand, or even tattoo the brand onto themselves, they have achieved a status to their community that few brands can match. Anyone seen a customer proudly showing an MBNA tattoo or sewing a Persil logo onto a favourite t-shirt? No, thought not. CRM needs to be handled very carefully and the advice of this author is to remove the troublesome work "relationship" and label the task honestly for what it is, Customer Management.

With Relationship out of the way, we can start to discuss honestly some of the weird facts around managing customers - your most loyal customers are likely to be either the lowest spending, or spend an equal or higher amount with a category competitor. Later in this chapter we will look at how achieving your service objectives can be efficiently accomplished whilst providing a great service to the majority of customers. Note, the last sentance particularly does not say "all" customers. I will return to this later.

For not-for-profit contact centres, CRM was always a strange word to use (although the components - databases, analytics, communications management, customer modeling, and others have real value) as their outcomes are measured in very different terms to commercial contact centres. Health care authorities, for instance use a concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which essentially is a way of allocating scarce resources (money for hospital beds, drugs, surgical interventions, extended term care, etc) to cases that are most deserving with certain minimum limits on provision. Or take charities, where fundraising is important and aspects of a commercial approach will be present - you want to raise as much money for the minimum outlay - however, the dynamics might be different, for instance if your centre is staffed with volunteers.

This chapter is not about me railing against CRM vendors, far from it, CRM applications and technology can be tremendously helpful in delivering great service. This chapter is about what really works in a live environment and how customers just don't view their transactions as a relationship. And as contact centre or marketing processionals, neither should we.

Consider your personal dealings with your bank. Is that a relationship? It's certainly not like a relationship with a friend or family member. Try this test: Dear Bank, I have banked with you for four years and never gone over my overdraft limit, now I've lost my job and I'm sure I'll get a new one in two months or so, please lend me £10,000 to cover my expenses till then. What response will your loyalty get you? No way, that's the response you'll get and fool if you think you'll get anything else! The bank's not here to support you, to protect you, they exist purely and simply to profit from you whilst they deliver a service. They are not interested in taking a risk on you getting a job. And why would they! For sure banks can improve their customer handling and realise that they are merely shops for money, but they are still shops - you wouldn't go to Tesco and ask for two months of groceries and I'll pay you back when I get a job. Similarly, don't expect that from your bank. Your "loyalty" in the past is not a factor in their decision making. The sooner we all realise this, the better. Banks absolutely correctly will lay out the terms under which they wish to do business - we may not like it, but hey, deal with it. Just, don't call it a relationship.

At These Prices, Everyone Needs Toner

In the late 19th century Evanston, Illinois, nicknamed "Heavenston" by Frances Willard, was a Methodist-minded town, so pious that the town fathers, resenting the dissipating influence of the soda fountain, passed an ordinance forbidding the sale of ice cream sodas on Sunday. Some ingenious confectioners, obeying the law, served ice cream with syrup but no soda. This sodaless soda was the Sunday soda, and became so popular that orders for "Sundays" crossed the counter everyday of the week. When objection was raised to christening the dish after the Sabbath, the spelling was changed to Sundae, and so developed one of America's most characteristic dishes. - William Lyon Phelps

In many converstations with customers, the advisor has an objective that involves extracting something from a customer - usually money, information or a committment. Sometimes the customer will comply directly. Other times not. A key influencer is: Does the customer accept the basis for the call? If not, success is a long way away.

Not all objections are created equally. Often an objection is actually a delaying tactic or a way of not dealing with the truth. Example: Advisor:"Would like to buy one of our widgets?", response: "I don't use the widget anymore". This may be the case, but for the customer it's an easy way to close off this line of questioning (or so they think)

In an episode of Friends, Pfeobe takes a job as a tele-marketer selling Toner to office supply managers. On her first call she gets an objection to her offer of Toner - "I don't need any Toner" comes the reply. "At these prices, everyone needs Toner", says Pfeobe. The customer then responds "I don't need any because I'm going to kill myself today". To great comic effect, Pfeobe then looks in her script for the "overcoming the sucicide excuse" section. Clearly none exists, but this is not unlike how sales calls proceed.

Designing responses to objections

Rebuttals is the term sometimes used for a response to a customer objection. "It's too expensive" - "ah but we have an easy payment installment plan". The skill in designing rebuttals is to understand the buy process and how customers typically experience the product. Usually the 80:20 rule applies, where 80% of objections will be clustered into 20% of the reasons, so you get some that come up time and again and some that are uncommon. Price is often a big objection. The manner of the advisor is key to gaining customer committment and overcoming objections.

• The Idea Behind CRM


• What Relationships mean to Customers


• Customers never see themselves in a relationship with a bank


• Customers might see themselves in a relationship with Harley Davidson, but few other brands qualify - test #1 How many customers have Capital One tattooed on their shoulder?


• Sensibly using CRM to make the operation effective and commercially viable


• Sensibly using CRM to delivery a customer experience that encourages more of the outcomes you want


• Understand exactly who you are set up to deliver a great service to

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes