Spoken Communications

Top 5 Call Center Links for 12-23-09

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Adding a slight narrowing of focus for this week. Wit the end of 2009 fast approaching, many call center bloggers wrote some great posts specific to the call center industry. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy the five best call center posts from the last week.

•   Call Center Cafe gave five secrets for getting people to let you manage them. Pointing out that while no one really wants to be managed, we all do need some direction from our managers. Tips include avoiding the "I've gotta do everything around here" bug and giving small, manageable steps for larger projects.

• A 2009 Datacraft survey of Asian contact centers shared some valuable statistics for comparing and contrasting outsourcing options. The study revealed that Asian call centers have more full-time employees than their Western counterparts, which favor part-time hiring. Those same centers spend more, about 2% of their budgets, on motivational and team-building efforts. And they seem to be paying off, because retention is high; Asian centers reported 29 months as the average tenure for call center staff.

• Jo'Ann Alderson questions the value of using Average Handle Time as a call center measurement tool. While she doesn't propose a single solution, that is her point--there is no single solution, but a combination of metrics (I'd humbly propose first-call resolution as one) to determine call center efficiency.

• Call Centre Helper published the results of a consumer call centre survey  conducted by KC and concluded that local call centres are the solution:

The consumer poll conducted by KC (Kingston Communications) found that the majority of customers (54%) were most annoyed by overseas call centre staff when calling customer service lines, over and above the need to navigate automated responses (22%) and the inability of customer support staff to provide answers outside of their script (12%).

While the results of the survey are quite telling, I suspect local call centres with similar IVRs and training programs would suffer from the same critiques. Better perhaps to invest in a more natural IVR so that automated responses aren't so frustrating and better staff appreciation, trust and training, so that they are willing to deviate from the script and interact in a more human manner.

• And, just for a laugh, funny call center jokes: how a mouse can be jammed in the printer. Yikes! Sure hope that mouse is Photoshopped.

Who determines your brand experience? Your customers

Excellent animated slideshow with audio by Brandon Schauer:

Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.

Schauer's presentation begins by positing that while the company does design the brand with an experience in mind, it is ultimately the customers that have the experience and determine the brand's reputation. Even with a large company, Schauer argues, in which the Big Company communicates the brand through a created experience, the customers still interpret that experience and determine the brand's reputation.

Other points:

• distinguish between the visual expression of the brand (color palette and logo) and the brand experience
• the brand experience isn't direct; for customers, the experience is different from the communication
• the "experience" includes product itself, the product delivery, the return process--every opportunity the customer has to interact with the company
• that experience isn't the sole responsibility of marketing; it's the employees that provide this experience on a daily basis (see how HotTopic shows their model for employee engagement that ultimately provides a great customer experience)
• focus on a slower build for a bigger benefit--think beyond the next quarter

What kind of experience does your customer have when he calls into your customer support line? Is the IVR he encounters friendly, open and truly interactive? Does it repeat the same question over and over again with an insincere "sorry, I didn't understand that"? Do the agents ask the customer to repeat all the same information she just painstakingly gave the IVR? Do the agents focus on lowering average handle time or on first-call resolution, which might take longer but is ultimately more satisfying to the customer?

In short, what type of brand experience are your frontline employees giving?

Twilight Zone: what if customers automated, too?

IVR's can save time, money and, if done right (and that's a big IF), frustration for the customer. More often, IVRs are poorly designed with deep menus and imperfect speech recognition engines. And with more organizations automating for the benefit of their customers, have you ever wondered: what if the customers started automating for the benefit of the company? What if a customer bot could just repeat the issue over and over again? What would happen if one bot were talking to another?

You'd get something like this, courtesy of Dave Griffiths:

And a very gracious hat tip to Joan Koeber-Walker for bringing this Twilight Zone fantasy of fully-automated customer service to my attention. A nice chuckle for the day!

With all the chuckles this video brings, to me it hit deeply, too. The thing is, no speech recognition engine is perfect--or anywhere near it, no matter what claims the company might make. The technology just hasn't caught up to the vagaries of human speech, and it most likely won't for a while. A robot still can't tell the difference between a customer clearing her throat and saying a phone number. And I'm not holding my breath for that technological advancement; we're still miles and years away from it.

The reason this video is funny is that the idea of a robot talking to a robot is, well, pretty darn ridiculous. For the interaction to work, we need humans. Of course, we at Spoken add a little secret sauce and supplement our "robots" (IVRs) with a human safety net.

So go ahead, bots. Call in. We've got humans on our end that can understand you. :-)

How to avoid cold calling: customer service

In today's browsing, I ran across this fun post on cold calling from the Fill the Funnel blog, a site dedicated to the sales process. And my immediate reaction was, "Seriously? People are still cold-calling?" Why aren't they taking advantage of all the available social channels to build an engaged fan base instead?

Granted, at Spoken, we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on customer service and customer retention. Most call centers (and indeed, our virtual call center solutions) are implemented on the assumption that customers will only call in if they have issues or problems.

This doesn't mean that the call center can't be a sales tool. And no, I'm not referring to the upselling techniques that are so common at call centers these days. Customers can be annoyed by obvious upselling offers, especially if the agents rush to sell before thoroughly answering the customer's more urgent questions.

In today's hyperconnected world, customers have a voice. Gone are the days when they will hang up from a call to your call center and complain to their neighbor that the wait time was too long, the agent wasn't helpful or that they were transferred three times and had to repeat their information twice. Nowadays, they can simply Twitter those bad customer experiences. And they do. A quick sampling from just the last hour of complaints lodged via Twitter:

 

Keep in mind that Twitter mentions are searchable via Google. When your customers do a search for your company name, how many complaint Tweets will they find?

On the bright side, satisfied, engaged customers share, too:

So instead of cold-calling, try putting energy, time and financial support into selecting and training outstanding customer service agents to create powerful, long-term relationships with customers. It's already been proven that consumers will pay more for a good customer service experience and that companies with better-rated customer service are more profitable than those with poor customer service--to the not insubstantial tune of 24% higher net profits. And customers who have good experiences share those and become brand advocates, as we've seen just in this morning's Twitter stream.

Forget cold-calling. Create fantastic experiences with the customers you already have, and they will spread the word for you.

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 12-7-09

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy the five best customer service posts from the last week. On me. :-) This week, many articles focused on the basics: what is frustrating to a customer and how can you build better relationships so that when frustrating experiences occur, the customers don't walk?:

• In a recent survey, Aurix named the biggest call center frustrations from customers. Some aren't a surprise, and some are telling about company's upselling practices:

The lists of complaints included “impolite” and “nasty behavior,” “tactlessness” and “obvious efforts to sell products while evading answers to pertinent questions.”

• In another telling survey, Forrester's Andrew McInnes reported that most customers expect poor customer service experiences as a matter of course. Not surprisingly, the lowest marks were in computers and health insurance policies, where only 30% of consumers expected customer service to be easy. It's hard not to add a "C'mon, folks; we can do better than THIS" comment to this report.

• Fortunately, Bill Self in the Thinking Like a Customer blog addresses the issue, not with generalities but by citing examples of companies "flying under the radar" and providing single-minded, narrowly-targeted customer service in specific markets. His solution? Lower your risk by getting close to your customers.

• Similarly, Brent Leary whipped out some stats to support the model of relationship-building with customers in a great post entitled It Takes a Village to Raise a Customer. Some telling statistics:

A recent survey commissioned by e-mail marketing provider Campaigner found the top challenge facing small business owners today is customer acquisition and retention -- by a landslide.  The 2009 State of Small Business Online Marketing Survey questioned over 250 North American small business owners with 20 employees or less.  And customer acquisition/retention was the top business challenge of 50 percent of those surveyed.  Growing revenue was a distant second with 15 percent, followed by improving cash flow and maintaining profitability -- at 9 percent and 8 percent respectively.

[bold mine] See that? The top business challenge was retaining customers. And since we know that customers make decisions based on service over price, beefing up customer service seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it?

• Lest you take this week's lovely link list for a customer service love-fest, check this out: Patrick Maguire recently launched a blog positing that the customer isn't king--nor is she always right. ServerNotServant.com is his site, where he blogs chapters from his upcoming book as the "voice for service industry workers everywhere" and "a case for human-to-human service and civility."

Rockin' the customer experience: how HotTopic does it

How do you create an amazing customer experience? Create an amazing workplace.

The Annual Call Center Exhibition just sounds like a boring event. However, this year ACCE put a fantastic challenge to attendees, and ended up with some bang-up videos that show how real customer service gets done when it comes down to it. (It involves socks and music videos.) The winner of this year's Customer Experience video contest was submitted by Hot Topic, where company representatives show in no uncertain terms how they go above and beyond in their call centers.

What I love about this video is that without saying it, HotTopic shows this: that in order to treat their customers to an amazing experience, they treat their call center agents to an amazing experience. They seems to be treated less as employees and more as part of the team--they work in the store at least one day, watch music videos at work and get compensated for concert tickets.

In short, the way they make raving fans of their customers is by making raving fans of their call center agents.

From VoiceCon 2009: Productivity fuels B to B growth

VoiceCon 2009: Kevin Kennedy, the recently-appointed President and CEO of Avaya, gave the opening keynote of VoiceCon 2009 in San Francisco:

His opener caught my attention: we are "collectively underwhelmed" by the state of communication today. He went on to point out that in the past, recession bred innovation and new economic models--and even now, customer challenges remain the same. In this time, he says, productivity fuels growth for B to B: "Economics matter, and the issues remain the same."

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 11-20-09: Customer Service and Profit

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy the five best customer service posts from the last week. On me. :-) This week's theme is Investing in Customer Service = Profit. This week seemed to be the week for reports touting customer service as the way to assure that companies remain profitable, even in a recession:

• Survey of 16 Countries Shows Poor Customer Service Costs $338.5 Billion per Year in Lost Business, according to an article in CNN this week. From the article: 

"According to a new international survey of consumers, the cost of poor customer service in 16 major industrialized economies causes businesses to lose a total of USD $338.5 billion per year when customers defect and abandon their purchases as a direct result of poor customer experiences. The hardest hit industries across all countries surveyed are financial services, cable and satellite TV providers, and a variety of telecommunications companies." Does anyone else want to send this article link to the CEO of her bank, cable, telecommunications and TV provider?

• Customer Experience and Bad Profit: In combination with the above article, it's easy to conclude that some companies are choosing to make their customers suffer bad experiences in favor of the short-term bottom line--and that that's not working long-term:

"Just look at sites like www.complaints.com, www.my3cents.com or www.getsatisfaction.com to see customer frustrations with companies that are addicted to bad profit. The fact is, bad profit actually costs companies in time to handle complaints and in lost customers."

• For those seeking to take a lesson from the above articles, a great post on How to define, create and measure customer experience, including Five Decisions Your Company Makes That Drive Loyalty and Customer Experience.
• And more good advice, 8 Strategies to improve customer service
• As well as detailed instructions on customer feedback: Feedback should go both ways from Information Management, citing the fact that investing in these conversations is the wisest choice for CEOs and IT specialists:

"This is illustrated by the fact that while overall IT spend is down, IT spend on voice of the customer and other feedback programs is on the rise. A report by market research firm Gartner Inc. ("Predicts 2009: CRM Customer Service and Support") predicted that feedback management technologies will be the top investment made in 2009 to improve the customer experience."

New tools won't fix bad customer service

We've said it before: new tools won't fix your bad customer service. Or, as B.L. Ochman once put it, nothing else matters if your customer service s*cks.

You can add a Twitter account, a Facebook group and online chat agents, but if your corporate culture isn't akin to Zappos' and rewards fantastic customer service agents, you'll most likely find that those initiatives will fail.

Take this example of an online chat session, originally posted to Gizmodo under the title AT&T's Tech Support People are Just as Happy as Their Customers:

I don't mean to rag on AT&T; so far, I've found their service to be satisfying. Truth is, this could have been any wireless carrier. Or energy provider. Or any company in which the agents don't feel empowered to actually help customers in a meaningful way.

The lesson here is that while these communication tools are useful in connecting with customers, the end goal is to help customers and hopefully save them a little time in the process so that they walk away with a positive experience relating to the brand.

Online chat can be a valuable channel, both for the company and for its customers; I've used it to get quick questions answered, and I've never had an issue with it.

Voicemail is dead. Long live unified messaging!

A few weeks ago, many of you were kind enough to contribute to a survey asking about your voicemail habits. And the results were fascinating, leading to the conclusion that perhaps listening to voicemail messages is a passe activity. In a New York Times article earlier this year, UReach Technologies, a company that operates the voice messaging systems of Verizon Wireless and other cellphone carriers, reported that more than 30% of voicemail messages go unheard for over three days.

Even in our own survey, only 39% of respondents reported listening to every voicemail message all the way through. And studies are showing that the younger generations in particular prefer texting or even good, old-fashioned email to voicemail. 

Many of you emailed to ask why we were asking. Now that Exchange 2010 has officially launched, we can say: because our newly-acquired nifty GotVoice voicemail transcription service is being offered as an upgraded option on Exchange 2010!

 The press release is here, and here's the scoop:

At Spoken, we recently acquired a nifty service called GotVoice, a voicemail transcription service. The service works kind of like Google Voice--when you sign  up, you can have your voicemails transcribed to text and sent to your email and/or texted to your cell phone. The difference between Google Voice and GotVoice would be in the accuracy. Remember when we first reviewed Google Voice? Cool service, but the accuracy of transcription was, as Gilad Odinak, our CTO and reviewer put it, "the quality is... funny."

That's because Google Voice uses an automated speech recognition engine (ASR). And speech rec alone just isn't in the place where accuracy is going to be much higher than 40%. But hey, it's a free service, and you can still get the gist of the message, even from the wonky voicemail conversion.

Enter GotVoice. If you want an accurate transcription, add a human. ASR + humans (for tweaking garbled utterances) has proven to work very well for Spoken's IVR offerings, so why not apply the same technology to improve the accuracy of voicemail transcription service?

Interestingly, until now, GotVoice's most enthusiastic user has been the individual. However, on Monday of this week, Microsoft launched  Exchange 2010, and with it GotVoice's option for upgraded voicemail transcriptions. What does that mean? If you're an enterprise moving to Exchange 2010 and just need the gist of the converted voicemail, no worries, you're good. But if accuracy and recordkeeping really matter, you have the option to upgrade your transcriptions using GotVoice in association with  Exchange 2010.

The fact that voicemail transcription is being offered as part of such a huge, unified message product is interesting for a few reasons:

• We are moving to a scannable text world. Audio is linear and can't be scanned, so it's being phased out.
• We are showing a preference for short bursts of information (think Twitter) instead of long, complete thoughts.
• Our multitasking is so extreme that we must have scannable text in order to determine if a task is worth interrupting or if it can wait.
• The flow of information to and from us is so great that we need searchable records of every transaction, even quick voice ones.

Unified messaging is the wave of the future. With our work days and workflows becoming more and more fragmented, taking the time to answer a call or even listen to a 30-second voicemail represents too great an obstacle to productivity. Soon, it won't be just the Gen X and Y'ers who prefer texting to voicemail; soon, it will be everyone's preference.