A Look At Interactive SMS Messaging

telephoneMarketing direct to consumers’ phones has long been viewed as a Pot of Gold for businesses. Both large and small companies can now have an instant connection with their customers, offering them the right message at the right time increases brand loyalty and also greatly impacts sales.

SMS Market Snapshot

  • In Q4 2011, 100.9million smartphones were shipped
  • One-third of Irish homes are mobile only (with no fixed landline), 15% of UK homes are mobile only
  • 3billion text messages are sent in Ireland annually, 129billion text messages are sent annually in the UK
  • 95% of messages are read within five minutes of being received with a response rate of 5- 25%

* figures from both ComReg (IE) and Ofcom (UK) figures 2011

Why Use SMS?

Perhaps the most obvious advantage to companies adopting SMS messaging strategies is that SMS can be implemented into every stage of the customer lifecycle. At every point in the process, contact can be made with the customer to tailor to their needs and help them should they need it. With a single low- cost messaging campaign likely to get at least a 5% response, text messaging is increasingly the way forward for communication.

Customer Lifecycle

The Customer Lifecycle

Reach:

Reach is defined as the likelihood of gaining someone’s attention. With everyone in your target market bombarded daily with competitors’ offers, how do you make sure that it’s your company, your brand that reaches them at the right time to encourage them to invest in you?

Adding the additional channel of mobile messaging as part of your marketing and communications strategy can prove useful. SMS messaging puts you in your customers hand and by providing you with their number it’s already an indication that they’d like to know more- all you have to do is use the opportunity to rein them in. SMS messaging allows you to personalise each message with various details specific to the customer, making them feel less “automated” and more personal. This in turn is more likely to result in a response than a robotic, generic text received.

Reach can sometimes be difficult to measure, the number of people who actually read and think about your marketing message is always inaccurate at best, however when sending an SMS message our system can provide full and real- time information to tell you when the message was sent, if it was received, if it was read and then track the responses to allow you to alter your campaigns as needed.

example: After gathering and cleaning your data for new customers you wish to attract, you can quickly send a text message to them offering a discount off their first purchase. The message can be tracked and measured, the promotional code can then be measured to calculate the acquisition rate. Real-time feedback allows you to test response rates, and constantly tweak to get the best results.

Grow:

Once you have garnered some attention and acquired some new customers, an alternative SMS messaging campaign can then be implemented to strengthen the connection. Messaging is also increasingly used as a powerful promotional medium, ideal for turning once-off purchasers into long-time, loyal customers.

Text messaging in this phase of the lifecycle can be used to remind or “nudge” the customer of your offers, a subtle reminder of why they chose to trade with you. The message can include personalised promotional offers, or simply update information on the  product range, or use it to prompt customers to check back in with your website to get the latest (this last idea can be tracked and measured to provide statistics to feed into your online marketing campaign.)

Manage:

You’ve tested and retested your messaging campaigns and sales are starting to hopefully appear in your pipeline. How now do you use messaging to manage those customers?

If we take one specific area like debt collection- managing and keeping control of customers debt is crucial. In this role, messaging can be used to notify of account arrears, remind the customer a payment is due or inform them of how to make their next payment easier. A simple solution, yet it ensures customers are aware of their account status, and it ensures the risk of a late payment is reduced and tackled pro-actively instead of reacting harshly prior to the default on payment.

Retain:

So now you have your growing customer base all organised and under control, how do you go about keeping them active and purchasing from you?

Text messaging can be used in this phase somewhat similar to the Growth phase.. subtle reminders of your offers, nudges to use you again or tailor the message offer to provide them with an offer that’s inline with their previous purchases with you.

example: Messages can be sent as a reminder their account is up for renewal, offer a discount code via text to prompt the customer to renew and that they can do it immediately, over the phone with no hassle. Our system allows the response to notify an agent in your call centre to establish a call-back to the customer to finish payment in their own time.

 

So, at a quick glance text messaging is a highly useful and profitable tool in your marketing and sales arsenal. Does your company use some of the strategies mentioned? Or are there other ways you implement the messaging into your customer lifecycle stages?

Lean Service: Hospital Appointments


The 8 Wastes In Lean

The 8 Wastes In Lean Methodology

In yesterdays blog post (part one of this topic) we took a brief look at the role of failure demand in driving inbound calls. These calls are zero value-add even if you handle them very well. A great example of failure demand is when people don’t show up for appointments. “No Shows” or “Did Not Attends” are one point in the entire patient journey, but even this one area has the ability to return significant improvements through applying some lean principles.

Appointments occur in the “flow of time” and if they are missed they are gone forever. In lean manufacturing this loss of time might be called “muda“- a wasteful activity. Delayed appointments also shift out a whole range of resource queues and care managers have to readjust on the go leading to multiple bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Let’s take the example of a typical hospital appointment:

How Much Does A Missed Appointment Cost?

In the UK missed appointments cost around £600m ($930M) per year. In 2007/2008 around 6.8m appointments were missed and hospitals lost average revenue per appointment of circa £100.

Cost of Missed Appointments Distribution UK

Outpatient appointment no-shows cost hospitals £600m a year

In a detailed multi-year study conducted by VoiceSage partner HealthCom at Portsmouth Hospital Trust it was found that out of 43,000 outpatients per year Did Not Attend (DNA’s) ran to 3,300 and through a combination of missed appointments, lost capacity, and lost or delayed, cost them £4m ($6.1m) annually.

Cost of Missed Appointments at Portsmouth Hospital Trust

Cost of Missed Appointments at Portsmouth Hospital Trust

What you will notice from these results is that interventions to control variation at the root cause surfaces dramatic improvements in cost outcomes. A planned, automated and pro-active communications strategy that reaches out to patients at the right time, with the right message and re-communicates their appointment details, or attempts to reconfirm their intention to attend, removes some of the variation in attendance.

Portsmouth NHS Trust

Portsmouth NHS Trust - Impacts of Proactive Confirmation Cycles

Why Do People Miss Their Appointments?

We know that missed appointments happen but if they are so important to everyone, why do they happen and why did proactive communications make a difference?

A 2005 Study of General Practice Doctors Appointments in the UK cited the reason of ” I simply forgot” by 40% of respondents, and “rescheduling difficulty” (i.e. tried to cancel but could not/ appointment was at an inconvenient time) by 20% of respondents. These, coupled with practice specific factors were significant drivers of missed appointments. In general the younger you are, and the more socially disadvantaged your background, the more likely you are to miss an appointment.

Although there are a number of studies into appointment keeping, a 2004 Study cited three main drivers as to why people missed appointments without notifying the clinic staff:

  1. Emotions – Fear and anxiety about procedures or of getting bad news
  2. Disrespect – Patients feel that the system/ provider does not respect them
  3. Understanding – Did not understand the scheduling system itself

Rather than leave these drivers unaddressed a decent case can be made for looking at the actions, behaviors and processes that propagate them.

  1. In the case of Emotion of Fear cited above how much more care could be taken around all the communications which we send to patients?
  • If we send letters could we take more care with the language used?
  • Could we follow up the letter with a simple phone call to give assurance?
  • Could we better match patient and customer care staff to encourage communications with nervous patients?

Many sectors that VoiceSage is working with have realised significant improvements through personalising messages and tailoring them to customer types or personae and matching these to each stage on the customer-patient journey. This is where the power of flexibility and iteration shows up clearly in results and outcomes.

2. To take the second point for Mutual Respect, proactively reminding people might be seen to show you care about the appointment and that it happens. It creates a sense of being in a managed process, that you are being cared for, and progressed.

However this should be seen in the wider context that when a person shows up for an appointment that they are seen to within a reasonable amount of time. When you do not account for the financial and social costs to the patient of being in a long queue at the clinic you run the risk of being seen to disrespect the value of their time and them as individuals. It stands to reason that just getting someone to keep their initial appointment time and then keep them waiting does not encourage them to show up on time next time. Indeed it’s likely that they will tell others not to worry about arriving on time. This would be a classic example of where you get one point in the process right, only to have it’s beneficial effects dissipated elsewhere.

This “disrespect factor” showed up strongly in a recent “Cost of Waiting Report” produced by TOA Technologies with regards why such long waiting windows were experienced in general appointments and deliveries. In general when dealing with larger companies and organisations many people find that their time isn’t being respected.

TOA Cost of Waiting Report 2011 - Why The Long Wait Windows

TOA Cost of Waiting Report 2011 - Why The Long Wait Windows

Of course waiting times at the clinic are not the only driver of feelings of disrespect. Overall levels of patient care and quality of overall interaction will also drive “Did Not Attends” that have their source in this feeling of disrespect. Perhaps this is one reason why the Care Quality Commission uses these missed appointment measures as a proxy measure for overall Quality of Care evaluations, particularly in the interface with community based care and the quality of the referrals process. I should give an absolutely shameless plug to the VoiceSage Survey product here because this is an ideal example of where you can conduct a post-interaction survey to gather a Net Promoter Score (NPS) measure and tie it back to specific factors underpinning that opinion (VoiceSage won European Call Center and Customer Service Product of the Year 2011 for this).

3. Not Understanding The Scheduling System – while I expect that much user experience of computer and online systems have improved over the last few years there are still gains to be made from addressing the usability of systems. By giving patients simple interfaces online, and clear plain language communications via SMS and Interactive Voice you can present patients with clear choices and clear actions. Although it is expected that smartphones will account for nearly 10% of all phones in the very near future, higher level impacts can still be attained today through simple, well thought out communications strategies that use SMS and simple Voice Interfaces.

The Point Of Interaction In The Patient Journey

Missed appointments can be mitigated by deploying proactive contact strategies that are simple, thoughtful, and caring. People do forget to make arrangements so that they can make agreed appointment times. People do get frightened and avoid going to the appointment. People don’t always feel they are respected by their service providers in healthcare and in other sectors. As we have seen above reducing missed appointments has meaningful cost implications. What I think is worth exploring further is how these appointment confirmation events tie into a more holistic appointment experience measure and how in turn these show up in overall customer care and quality of service evaluations.

 

Lean Service

Have you ever doubled your investment in capacity only to find it eaten up by an unexpected increase in demand? Customer service and call center managers have this happen all the time. More equipment, more agents, more capacity don’t seem to show up in better customer experience performance.

Why does this happen? Over the next few blog posts we take a look at the use of “lean philosophy” within the customer service environment.
A friend of mine made a simple point: “if you want to reduce traffic jams don’t build bigger roads”. He explained that it actually encouraged more people onto the road and it quickly filled up with more cars.The supply in turn created more demand. Adding more capacity does not automatically give you the ability to do more.

Lean Start-Ups

Right now everyone is abuzz with the term “Lean Start-Up”, a phrase popularized by Eric Reiss based on some of the early work of Steve Blank. The breakthrough thought was that although agile development principles had been adapted by technical teams for some time, projects continued to fail because they had not defined the customer problem correctly. Companies don’t fail because of IT problems they fail because of customer acquisition problems. Steve Blank knew that:

  • The best place to test a product is in the marketplace with real, paying, target customers
  • Seeing the interaction between the customer and the product leads to faster feedback loops, which are then integrated into the product
  • When you have a number of target customers who want this product as it is now delivered, you achieve “product-market fit”, i.e. an addressable market.

The job of the development team in a lean start-up is to launch a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) of product features, functions, and properties that are barely acceptable to a new customer. Then you iterate, iterate, iterate until you have a real addressable problem that the customer cares about, and that your product solves better than anyone else. They key is that you have good interactions with the users of the product and that your platform is built for iteration.

Lean Service – Lean Communications

lean service

John Seddon of Vanguard uses the example of a local authority that was building endless call centers but making very little impact on the customer’s experience of their services.
The problem was that an agent would take the call and then a field service person would turn up at the property, and often, would leave the premises without the problem being fully fixed. Every call after that, every reschedule is termed “failure demand”. Failure demand adds no new value.

By looking at what it takes to get the job done first time the entire flow of activities takes on a different character. Imagine John says “if the customer called you and you let them pick a time that suited them? Imagine if you turned up at this time? If you fixed the whole job when you were there? Then customer service results would go through the roof wouldn’t they? Yes they would. If you are not examining the customer context and looking at the problem in terms of flows, you are missing the real drivers of both cost and customer satisfaction.

It also meant that the field service personnel had to be able to pull on the right resources when they were on-site; those plumbers, carpenters and other tradespeople would have to be available to assist. As a system “The Jobs To Be Done” were getting done, getting done for a lower total cost, and actual customer experience of the repairs and maintenance service had been vastly improved.

Some Thoughts

  1. Getting to the root cause of a problem is essential for resolving issues early and cheaply
  2. Companies don’t always count the down stream costs of not getting it right first time
  3. When you don’t manage the interaction points for outcomes you will drive more inbound calls, and this is failure demand
  4. You cannot deliver Customer Experience if your systems are designed to deliver internal efficiencies
  5. Achieving a change of orientation from “stocks of people” to “flows of people” is a key change in your organisation culture

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll take a look at how we did this at Portsmouth Hospital, and the day after we’ll take a look at some lean service principles.

Communications Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT) & CEBP: Some Thoughts

(Again, these are my own thoughts and reflections and do not necessarily reflect those of the company I work for).

All the new thinking is about loss. In this, it resembles all the old thinking” (Robert Hass).

Cisco came out with some very simple, deceptively simple, thoughts on what CEBP is and what their concept of Communications Enabled Business Transformation is. In short CEBP is about taking latencies out of business processes and increasing the process and business velocity. At VoiceSage we have been calling this “removing the lags and drags”.  CEBT has a wider frame and includes more “Collaboration frameworks”.

“Integrating communications and collaboration with business processes offers opportunities for hard and soft benefits, savings and business improvements. The methods for modeling and developing these applications have matured along with unified-communications solutions”.
—Bob Hafner, Gartner, “Driving Communications Efficiency Into Your Business and Processes,” October 2010

Cisco say that they are looking to extend the Cisco CEBT cloud with other Cloud Service Providers through Cisco’s Secure Network Interconnections, essentially forming an extended service delivery hub. At the moment Cisco extends the business processes with Collaboration solutions such as Webex, and soon with it’s next generation enterprise architecture Quad. But the key phrase above is “Service Delivery Hub”, a place where you can combine Cisco and non Cisco systems and processes “to get something done”.

This Service Hub theme was really brought home yesterday when Cisco announced the availability of AppHQ, where all Cisco partners will be able to publish applications that can be used through the new Cisco tablet the Cius (as in “see us” one would presume). I haven’t been a big fan of the very idea of the Cius because I have a bias against hardware solutions to software problems, and trying to solve problems outside the browser. Cisco want’s to offer a totally secure, policy driven, regulatory compliant solution set from server to screen. They want to be Apple for the Enterprise. To achieve this they want to control the device and presentation layer. In fairness, it is an Android Operating System which means it may end up being very useful for Google Enterprise Apps an can co-opt the growing Android ecosystem. If they make that ‘easy to use”, I could be interested.

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Now, this is where a different theme emerges. Writing over the last few weeks JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com is putting some thoughts together on what the role of “Chatter”, an “enterprise conversation platform”  might be in creating more context for people’s decision making through unstructured, informal communications. I think there is something fundamental going on here and it involves how we communicate in order to get things done.

We all operate in organizational environments where formal processes “proscribe” how things should be decided upon, and completed. But very often “the real” decisions are made informally, maybe even emotionally, and are then encoded as “formal decisions”. How we come to understand what information, what situations, what changes are important to us is a refining process that often boils down to “that’s how we do things around here” and “it’s common sense”. But it is also down to an enterprise version of the “personal internet bubble”, i.e. we only experience the news through our personalized content access, and who we interact with.

The simple implication of this understanding is that there are many “formal sign offs” and “informal touch points” that go into getting a process completed in reality. Even in the formal sign off process, getting a simple document emailed to the next person in line in order to get “sign off’ can suffer significant delays as your email gets stuck in folders, stuck in spam, or just buried in the flow of what has to be done.  Thus the growing popularity of such systems as Sharepoint from Microsoft, and Google Docs. You don’t share the object, you share the conversation around the object.

Document Management Systems, Content Management Systems, Corporate Intranets all struggle to understand how better to manage the flow between People, Processes, and Things (things being real physical objects & social objects). But really we often only need to know what’s changed from their previous state.  We need to understand when the system that connects people, processes and things changes its state in a way that is meaningful to us, and to the job to be done (JTBD). Let’s be honest here, how much of our day is dictated to us by what comes through our email tray? It is the interruptions, and the interruptions in our interruptions, that create havoc with our planning and our scheduling. It effects what we all actually get done during the day. This is not an insignificant point. No matter how good your task planning is, the pattern of interruptions is significant dark matter.

How Do We Know The Change State of a Process?

I may be varying slightly from the intention’s behind the model quoted by Cisco, but this is how I see these issues “showing up” in everyday business.

Data Latency : do you capture data, the right data, and is the data real time, accurate, and relevant? Can you “get at this data” or is it trapped in other enterprise systems, or worse, in a partners enterprise systems?

Insight Latency: can you see the connections between various factors that influence “the jobs to be done”; do you have the people, skills, and tools on hand to generate these insights?

Decision Latency: do you know who the right people to connect with are in order to get a decision made and can you connect them effectively; as an organization can you literally “decide on things quickly”?

Action Latency: can you move decisions into actions coherently and quickly. In another life, we used to call this “mobilization”: sequencing actions in a coherent manner.

If you can imagine any supply chain in terms of these kinds of latency you begin to understand that for even the very well codified, formalized and well managed supply chain system, it is responding to the changes in the plans that matters, and collaboration modes are the way we bridge these latencies.

I imagine that the following situations are familiar to many of our clients:

- You have been performing Net Promoter Score questions all day long, and at the end of the week presenting the reports to senior management. You only question a few hundred people from hundreds of thousands and often with no accurate measure as to how long it was since the original customer service interaction occurred. Your collecting narrow, biased, and late data.

- You have undertaken a series of training programs, invested in new work systems, and yet the customer satisfaction levels just don’t seem to be going up. Are you capable of generating actionable insights into why this might be occurring? In short can you find “new levers”? In one client example, VoiceSage was able to trace customer satisfaction measures back down to specific customer-agent Interactions. The increased granularity and the fact that someone “ran the experiment” generated the insight that certain agents would not nominate a customer for a NPS survey if the interaction just ended wasn’t positive. The Net Promoter Score was thus ‘artificially high” and thus its effect was not coming through in other metrics.

- You receive a call telling you that you will be required to run a new contact campaign but you have not got enough agents to adequately service it; (mismatch of demand and supply). Where can you pull on these additional resources and will it be worth it given the value of the new campaign? Do you have all the details you need to make this decision and are you authorized to you make it? If you can’t make this decision within an adequate time frame, the decision latency becomes crippling.

- You are not receiving the planned level of confirmations that customers will be present on premises to receive and sign for a product delivery. Given calculations, everyone in the last 90 minutes of the day now has a 50% chance of not being properly serviced.  Now that you know this what do you do? Now that you know that there is a 50% chance that a few hundred customers are going to be badly left down you need to cancel some deliveries, apologize and compensate customers, and find new ways to go “that extra mile”. You know what the policies are, what the implications of each decision are, so how long does it take to organize and implement?

Conclusions

So what has Cisco and Salesforce.com got to do with all this “process stuff”.

Communications and Co-ordination need to occur around structured processes in a planned way, with approved processes that are policy compliant (security, compliance, legal, customer service policy based, etc.). You have to know in detail how these processes should work, how processes are inter-related, and how automate within this domain (By the way, this means that processes should be visible, searchable, and in some way “interrogatable”). To pull on the right resources at the right time, to get the right outcome, takes a lot of organization. This thinking has found an early example in Tibbr 3.0 (worth clicking on to read more).

But technology alone is probably less than 20% of your total success factors. The rest is down to management, culture and people. In an utterly simple example you know it when you meet someone that is genuinely happy to help you out.  That’s down to the person, and the culture, and the management that creates and maintains that culture. In nearly every ‘bad customer experience” I’ve had it was the technical and business systems that locked both the employee and the customer out of a happy and successful outcome. Where I’ve had really happy interactions I haven’t had cause to comment on the technology or the business rules. They had become invisible. The interaction did what it was supposed to do, usually no more than that, and I had as little work as possible to do myself close out that interaction.

I think this is going to be how we experience very many organizational processes. Processes have to be easy to interact with, demand ‘less work” on our part to complete within the interaction (i.e. no follow up calls, no hand overs, no you need to sign in on the portal when you’ve called customer service). Interesting to note that recent research in HBR “Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers” July/ Aug 2010,  points to the fact that customer failures loose you customers, but great service doesn’t create customer loyalty. So one way of looking at the cost of process fails is to look at the cost of customer churn.

I am beginning to think that maybe the manner and the degree with which companies embrace such “conversations around business processes” will be driven by culture. In another recent HBR Article The CEO of Salesforce.com explains that when their internal teams were trying out chatter pre-launch he was intrigued and realized that the many of the people that were actually knowledgeable and important were not known to management, and many of these people had no idea as to what senior management were thinking about. Mark Benioff thus broke open the “internal conversation” at Salesforce, and a $10bn company was re-connected to its mission and objectives with everyone moving in the one direction. That’s a little bit of the T in CEBT. Not every company will have a CEO like Mr. Benioff.

The openness of the conversational platform reconnected people because the formal organization and formal rules had not captured the true influence channels. This is one promise of “social enterprise”. How people connect to information, processes, and each other.  I think a long tail of Enterprise Apps will be able to reach those places that big procurement can’t reach, and make these connections happen in a fluid manner, but within an overall “policy container”.

Cisco and Salesforce.com are on the same continuum just coming at it from different ends. And to add a final twist, Cisco UC is available as a hosted solution within Salesforce.com. If you are a Verizon Enterprise customer, you can get Cisco UC as a Verizon hosted solution, and access your Salesforce.com as a hosted solution, through the one secure infrastructure. Things are getting pretty cloudy (sic). The technical challenges at the enterprise level are disappearing very quickly leaving the higher level issues of Latencies, Culture, and Business Transformation. We believe that these trends will inevitably foreground an engagement approach based on delivery of business outcomes, which you’ve guessed it, we’re passionate about here at VoiceSage.

Product Returns In Retail

It doesn’t sound like a very interesting problem. Unless of course you are the person responsible for managing this process. What has tipped my interest in this subject is the association with the question of Deliveries and looking at all the elements around a delivery process, and of course other processes that are impacted by your desire to create a great delivery experience.

So what happens when you get this great product to the consumer, and then they decide they don’t really want it any more? Well, they get to return it that’s what.

How often do people return products? Turns out quite a lot. A reasonable sized retailer would have to call up to 100,000 a month to say “Hey, we have your stuff. It’s in the warehouse now. Your account is being credited over the next 3-5 days“. Let’s say that even this short message from a call centre agent would cost you around £1.50. So for an average sized retailer you are now spending £150,000 a month on telling customers “we’ve got the stuff you returned”.

It was with some interest that I then read that in Internet Retailer this week that a new consumer rights directive aimed at changing some elements of returns policy could cost retailers £8.8bn in 2012.

  • Change of mind period increased to 14 days
  • Refunds to be made in under 14 days not 30 days

Returns across the EU currently cost etailers about €5.7bn (£5bn) a year, based on a premise that 90% of retailers are domestic and 10% are cross border in the EU.

I have to say, I knew it was a big problem, but not how big.

And so too where there are large numbers, there is fraud. In the USA would you believe that a figure of around 8% of all returns or 1% of the retailers turnover? Stunning figures here from the National Retail Federation of over $17bn cost of returns and abuse of returns:

“NRF estimates for return fraud dollars are up 45.4% over 2009, while total return dollars are only up 4.5%, meaning that return fraud is increasing at a rate almost 10 times faster than returns as a whole”

VoiceSage is helping a range of retailing organisation communications enable processes that deliver great customer experiences around these questions.