CRMChump Reports An Accenture Customer Service for Technology Companies Study:

● 81 percent of customers surveyed who rated their service satisfaction as “below average” said they will purchase from a different supplier the next time.

● Although 75 percent of executives said their companies’ provide “above average” customer care, 58 percent of consumers rated their satisfaction with customer service as average or below average.

● When consumers rate their service satisfaction as merely “average,” the likelihood of their buying again from that same company falls by almost half from 51 percent to 27 percent.

● 48 percent of consumers surveyed said they share their negative customer-service experiences with friends and family.

● 42 percent of customers surveyed said they had to access customer-service channels multiple times to resolve their problems.

● 61 percent of consumers surveyed said they believe that technology has not improved customer service.

● And as for that 78 percent mentioned above, here it is: That 78 percent surveyed said the service they receive is “at or below” the level competitors offer.

When you look at what customers actually want, its straight forward:

69% completeness in solving my problem

65% solving my problem

46% solving my problem with one agent

38% using a logical process to solve my problem

35% enable me to quickly and easily reach a live customer service agent

12 ability to solve the problem myself with online tools.

So,

(1) Solve my problem, completely, at a single touch-point

(2) Engage with me and my problem with logical and efficient process

(3) Enable me to speak with customer service very easily.

By placing strategic “Click to Call” buttons around your FAQ’s or on your “Contact Us” areas, or by dynamically publishing “Click to Call” capability when your website sees that someone is in trouble (taking too long to get through the check out process during a purchase), you can increase the ease with which customers can engage with you. Of course, when they do engage with you, you still have to provide outstanding customer service by knowing how to close out that call first time, with that agent. Having done that, you can begin to think about your upselling and cross selling capability.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

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Interruptions, and interruption management are going to be key in the new attention, and intention economies. Colleagues, friends, family are all vying for attention time, and we, collectively need to get things done, and agreed, in “intention-time”. Creating Passionate Users are making some fun of a service called Twitter, that enables people to send simultaneous sms messages to people on a list. Somebody pointed out that this was a bit like micro-blogging (hey, why upload this stuff, when I can just Twitter). There are a few services like this including www.swarm-it.com.

I was following a conversation over at www.bubblegeneration.com on the future of social networks like Linked-in, and the key issues seems to be “make your service messy at the edges so that people can invent their own uses for the service”.

It would seem that people believe that Twitter is so easy to see going big, because it allows for this customer based innovation.

Question remains: if its the customer’s time, it will be the customer to determine how and when they want to interact with you. As a service provider, its your job to figure out what the “intention-interactions” are, and what the subsequent “attention interactions” have to be.

My two pence.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: attention economy, Customer Interaction Report, intention economy, swarm-it, twitter, voicesage

Here at VoiceSage we think about how, when and where people would like to be “interrupted”, and what they would want to do “in that particular context”. The thing is that every customer company relationship has its own context, and every person will have different psychological thresholds. In a way, how we interrupt our customers is a corollary of how much attention they want to give us. Let me illustrate with a personal experience.

I was in Abraham’s tailors (Little Ann Street, Dublin) and having had a wonderful buying experience I hand over my credit card. As I’ve said before I think the “checkout” experience is key to entire purchasing process. Well, the card was stopped and the staff member was advised by the machine to have the customer call the bank in question. “Perhaps” my tailor advised “you have run over the limit?”. “Not likely” I replied, “I have acres of space on the card”. My tailor handed me the land line, and we called the bank. The bank did not deal with the query and handed me over to credit card services, who in turn told me to go to the local bank branch IN PERSON and sort this out. Wow, I said. I work in this kind of business and this is a horror. “No problem said the Taylor. I will hold the suit for you”.

I go to the bank THE NEXT DAY and they say, hey no problem with the card. “You were just making an unusual purchase, and they stopped the card” (because I was in Dublin, not Limerick). I think I looked at the bank official for a few minutes waiting to see what they were going to do to ensure that this situation would never happen again. No such luck.

First, there is no reason why when an account is triggered as a potential fraud alert that a call cannot be initiated to that person’s known mobile, a pin number requested, a transaction legitimised, and a confirmation received, all in the one phone call and with no other need for human interaction. Secondly, an automated call asking for verification could have increased my confidence in my credit card company; Thirdly, I could be a “highly risk averse person” who very much appreciates these kinds of alerts and interrupts.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

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Dion Hinchcliff over at ZDNet has an update on American Express and their use of Enterprise 2.0. What is interesting to me is that when combined with Paul Greenberg’s comments on Reardon Commerce and their supply of “Mashed Services” into the American Express Customer base, what you begin to see is a “Traditional, Conservative Company”, really understanding that the dynamics of customer interaction and value creation are changing.

The three “buckets” that American Express is currently dividing its Web 2.0 and SOA technologies into:

Web 2.0 and SOA Combined: Three Resulting Aspects

1) Improving the Customer Experience (”this is top for us”)

* Interactive, dynamic compelling user experience
* Convenience and reach
* Harnessing user generated content in recent promotions they’ve been doing
* Experimenting with rich Internet applications
* RSS used on customers sites and partner sites
* Looking at RSS technologies, subscribe to the events that are interest to them, and get notified when they want.

2) Community and Collaboration

* Experimenting and piloting wiki technologies
* “Pretty good uptake” with tools by internal teams to collaborate and generate content
* AmexLabs, an online area where select customers come into a site and preview and provide feedback of new interactive capabilities (these customers are individuals, not businesses, cardholders)
* Gives us the opportunity to better understand how products are being developed)
* Pioneering and piloting widget technologies

3) Simplicity and approachability

* How do we make integration a whole lot easier (REST)?
* Leveraging the ease of use of the consumer Web

Dion goes on to say that “This is a pretty interesting list in and of itself but Bob went on to keep explore how Web 2.0 techniques, when combined with SOA, can help deliver returns that SOA by itself generally hasn’t been able to”.

Notes on Using Web 2.0 to Leverage SOA (Source: Bob Morgan, American Express)

* SOA succeeds in making data more readily available in general
* Integration and security requirements, combined with Web 2.0 creates brand-new challenges (compounds integration and security challenges)
* The power combination: Web 2.0 (mashups and RIAs) can bring the data in a SOA to life
* Allows one to take the volumes of data on hand and makes it accessible
* Because it’s embedded in place, mashups can put corporate data into the right context
* But putting so many pieces together creates problem in the environment
* Enterprise-specific Challenges

* Security – If we can’t secure it, we won’t use it (hit with as first issue every time)
* Protecting privacy and including identity in mashups

# Manageability, Performance, and Scalability

* Mashups can result in overly complex integration
* Unpredictable throughput, capacity, and difficult to monitor
* Lots of sensitive customer data, big challenges, and not a lot yet done to address this
* When we build these things, there’s lots to take into account, how to deploy, monitor, manage end-to-end

Also he says that “sites made of mountains of user generated content — are far less constrained by regulation, governance, privacy, and trust issues than business sites are. Thus figuring out how to leverage the positive aspects of the emerging best practices on the Web today, without eliminating the very benefit they provide, is one of the biggest challenges in providing a Web 2.0 “context” in the enterprise”.

Some Challenges sited by Dion in Applying Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

1) Development Challenges

* All of this needs close ties to manageability
* The big design tension: Fast and easy vs. well designed and well engineered
* Lack of standard development methods with Web 2.0: Need proven tools and enterprise design patterns
* We now have tools built to bring applications together very quickly, in contrast with traditional development platforms
* And if you build them this way, how can you make them scale to million of customers?
* Lots of existing platforms with different tools, how to preserve an organization’s huge investment in current skills and technologies?

2) Business Value

* Is there broad business value in social networking?
* How to do this dealing with a lot of private customer data?
* It’s not likely you’ll want to bring people together to share customer data
* Not entirely clear yet how to apply social networking profitably to business models

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

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Some interesting information on how to “get your customers attention” over at TomBomb, and this is important for Marketeers thinking that with teens, its time to go All Digital, All of the Time. Why? it’s harder and harder to “interrupt people” and give them your marketing message, and its very much harder to get new customers.

- Catalogs are persistent, in that you deliver it once, you can read them over and over again
- You can use the catalog to help you make online purchases
- People have to live somewhere (physically) and this is a way to make them reachable.

What I find interesting about Tom’s comments is that are all pretty much about becoming “embedded” in the customers life, their home, the “way they do things”.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

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There is a new report out by cScape about the challenges of customer interaction management. Company respondents said that the five “greatest barriers” to delivering the best possible customer experience were:

1) Lack of resources / time (regarded as a “great barrier” by 66% of company respondents)
2) Disconnected systems & technologies (50%)
3) Lack of skills and training (38%)
4) Lack of finances (37%)
5) Lack of regular processes and / or suitable methodology (36%)

Appetite for “Web 2.0 technologies”:

- 42% are planning to apply user-generated content (UGC) to their websites in the next 12 months; 23% are using it already.
- 35% are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months; 17% are using them already.
- 33% are planning to use podcasting in the next 12 months; 18% using it already.
- 35% planning to use videocasting in the next 12 month; 17% using it already.

Gap between aspirations and reality:

- Almost two thirds of company respondents (64%) believe that joined-up online and offline experiences are essential for engaging with their audience, but 60% of companies are either not very advanced at mapping customer experiences and identifying touch-points (36%), or admit they have to start looking at this because they are not doing it all (24%).

- Half of respondents (51%) believe that personalised experiences are essential for audience engagement, with a further 44% believing they are useful. But despite the perceived importance of personalisation, 37% of company respondents are not providing it at all.

What I find interesting about this is that as always getting the basics right goes a long way to making an impact on the quality of your customer interaction. Do you capture all the relevant customer information “upfront” in the process? can you see all your customer data when serving the customer? did you close out the call at the first touch? etc. etc. If you are not the kind of company that gets this basic stuff right, you are (in my opinion) unlikely to get any of the 2.0 stuff right either.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: Barriers, Best Practice, Customer Interaction Report