Spoken Communications

Call center humor

A little lighthearted humor before the weekend, courtesy of Call Center Comics:

Customers complain about IVRs, but the truth is that when machines act like and understand humans, they're darn handy to have around. And chatty agents aren't all that helpful--sometimes, if they'd act a bit more like an automated IVR, customers would be more precise with their demands, and the agent would be less likely to interrupt.

Maybe Milton is on to something. Cylons, anyone?

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 11-2-09

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. :-)

• Mark Suster gives advice on being an "inside out" organization--one that "lets outsiders have a glimpse of what is going on in the sausage factory"--and listens to what they want to see, hear and use: 5 Tips for Becoming a More Customer-Centric Organization
• William Cusick applies psychology's "peak-end rule" to customer experience: customers will remember the peak, not the entire experience, so he gives advice on building the peaks: The peak-end rule: can it transform your customer experience?
• Ensure success by putting the Ritz in customer service such as this subtle distinction they make at the Ritz: "At the Ritz, they would never ask a guest if they would like an umbrella when it is raining. Rather, they would go out and hand them an umbrella."
• And Inc. Magazine is no different, headlining with There's no substitute for great customer service and giving CRM tips for rewarding loyal customers to give them that warm, fuzzy feeling when they think of your brand
• And if you want to be really tech-geeky about your service, 7 tips for providing better online customer service from SEOHosting.com offers good, basic tips on making your website user- and customer-friendly

Is voicemail passe?

With the acquisition of voicemail transcription service of GotVoice here at Spoken, I've been wondering about how people actually use voicemail these days. Do they do what I do--see the number, listen to maybe 10 seconds of the message and call back without listening to the entire message? Do people return calls without listening to voicemail at all? And why or why not?

So we conducted an informal survey of people's voicemail habits. The survey was just four questions long:

1. In the last 48 hours, approximately how many voicemail messages have you received?

2. In the last 48 hours, what percentage of your voicemails did you listen to all the way through?

3. In the last 48 hours, what percentage of your voicemails have you NOT listened to at all (even if you did return the call)?

4. On average, how long do unheard messages remain in your voicemail inbox?

The results were fascinating. Most respondents (81%) reported receiving 1-7 voicemail messages in the last two days. Interestingly, only 39% reported listening to every message all the way through. The remaining 61% reported listening to only parts of their messages:

Next, 57% reported never leaving messages entirely unheard, leaving 43% who only listened to parts of some messages.

Finally, a slim majority (53.2%) reported that voicemail messages only remained in their inboxes for a few hours, which left 46.8% that left messages unheard for one to four days. That last statistic is interesting, implying that there is only roughly a 47% chance that a message will be heard within a few days of the caller leaving it.

Why is this? A few respondents added comments to the survey, indicating a preference for text messages over voice. Mark Lomas reported, "Given the choice I would prefer voicemail to be disabled, forcing people to send text." Text is less intrusive and easier to scan than linear audio. Others have already jumped on the voice-to-text bandwagon: Colleen Carrington specified "the reason I don't listen to all of them (up to 25%) is that I read the transcribed text using Google Voice and don't need to listen to them."

Voicemail, it seems, is going the way of the mimeograph machine and the fax machine. Text seems to the new, faster way to leave messages.

What do you think?

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 10-22-09

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. :-)

• When you can't say yes, there is opportunity for success: Parature blog provided this tip sheet for what to do when the customer isn't right. Or, rather, even if the customer is right, but you can't really give her what she wants. As a corollary to this, Grammar Girl shares tips in episode 191 on how to write a complaint letter in order to give the customer service rep room to negotiate and help you for a win-win conflict resolution.
• Fees are penalties, always: in this well-informed post, Jackie Huba shows that airline bag fees aren't all they're cracked up to be in terms of revenue-builders. In fact, her post was so informative that it inspired my own rant (er... "post") on the cost of alienating customers!
• Duct Tape Marketing, the blog of all things buzz sans the fluff, offers advice on 5 ways to get your customers talking about you and your product.
• Jason Falls gives a quick tip guaranteeing 100% social media success with your customers (and it applies to non-social media customer service, too) 
• And let's not forget those working on the front line: It takes EQ, not just IQ, to work in a call center. Let's face it; the call center is an emotional place, so you should consider hiring those with a high emotional intelligence to handle those dissatisfied customers.

Airline baggage fees: revenue fail

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Everyone hates airline baggage fees, right?

So why do some airlines insist on charging them? Theoretically, it's to make up for flagging revenues. However, leave it to the insightful Jackie Huba to dispel that myth. Amongst reports that airlines have collected hundreds of millions of dollars in baggage fees and that these new fees are a goldmine for carriers, boasting $670 million dollars in the second quarter alone for U.S. carriers, Jackie Huba points out the obvious: everyone hates them. And they hate the airlines that charge them.

What's more, she backs her finding up with facts. In her recent post, Fees are penalties, always, she cites figures for actual miles that passengers are traveling on certain airlines. Southwest and JetBlue reported substantial increases in passenger miles (8.8% and 9.8% respectively), while Delta, American, US Airways and United all reported decreasing passenger miles.

What's the difference? JetBlue and Southwest don't charge for bags. The others do. As a result, JetBlue and Southwest get more customers flying more miles because they provide a better customer experience. And the others brag about revenue from checked bags, all while their customers fly fewer miles or simply take their business elsewhere. Wonder how those baggage fee revenues will look when all the customers have switched to Southwest, JetBlue or just decided to take the train?

And in an age where customer service trumps price for consumer choices and retail stock prices reflect customer satisfaction levels, that simply won't fly.

Cross-posted to Talk it up! blog

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 10-16-09

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. :-)

• Confused about whether to focus on phone, internet, chat or social media support? In Whole lot of shakin' going on, Paul Greenberg gives great stats on customer behavior and advice to follow up
• How to keep your customers happy: great advice on how a support engineer can think like a customer from BobCares blog
• If you have to deal with angry clients or customers, Service Biz Coach offers 10 useful tips for dealing with irate customers. Good advice, especially #6, apologize when appropriate. Heck, I say to apologize no matter what.
• Not much time? Skim four quick tips to building customer loyalty
• If you've been sitting on the fence about using social media for customer service: five ways providing social customer service can increase revenues

Is using hidden agents to support speech recognition “cheating”?

by guest blogger Bill Meisel, President, TMA Associates and Editor, Speech Strategy News

Is using hidden agents to support speech recognition “cheating”? Not too long ago, SpinVox was attacked in the British press for using agents behind the scenes to help the speech recognition technology in their voicemail-to-text service. Part of the reasoning in the critiques was that they were making the speech recognition look too good by a false pretense. The company had in fact revealed long ago that they were forwarding bad-scoring transcriptions, or at least part thereof, to agents, and using those corrections to improve the speech recognition.

Is Spoken Communications “cheating” by using hidden agents, making the speech recognition in telephone dialog-based systems look better than it is? Cheating who?! Customers get better results. Speech recognition processing can be improved by noting where agents have to help.

Maybe humans are being fooled into thinking speech recognition is better than it is. We want to know computers won’t take over the world, and that they are really dumb when trying to do things that we associate strongly with being human. There is clearly a tendency in the general press to express indirectly this visceral distaste for machines acting human. The usual statement is something like, “speech recognition is still not there yet,” usually citing a funny example of a recognition error. As if human speech recognition is always infallible, and we never ask, “What?”

The idea of hidden agents in contact center automation is to improve results, not impress the caller. The only legitimate issue is the same as it is with SpinVox—is the solution cost-effective? Users may not be willing to pay much for transcribing voicemail, so clearly voicemail-to-text services must fully automate a large portion of messages. Some speech-to-text services don’t use agents at all, giving them a competitive advantage in cost. In call centers, the cost tradeoff is much different; the alternative to automation is to pay agents.

Some customer service lines use only agents. For some caller requests, these agents are doing what a computer might do quicker and better, e.g., providing flight status or account balances. I hate it when humans do a bad job of simulating computers!

Computers are never near the end of their shift, anxious to go home. Spoken Communications’ agents don’t ever get to talk to customers and are limited to computer-controlled options. If they get tired, they just respond a bit more slowly.

The point is that there is a continuum between full automation and one-on-one agents. The real issue is to meet caller needs in a cost-effective manner, and hidden agents are simply one point on a spectrum of choices.

More on this subject.

How to provide killer customer service in a recession

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

During a recession, most business leaders are faced with tough decisions about where to tighten the company belt. How can we improve customer service while cutting costs, they wonder. What system should we implement? What focus groups do we need to organize? What widgets do we need to buy? What phrase do our CSRs need to say in order to ensure repeat business?

None. The secret to providing killer customer service, even in a recession, is to provide your basic service in a consistent manner. The basics are still the same, and the basics only require a corporate culture supporting the customer service process and a strong desire to listen to customers.

In this video, Sara Cook of the Stairway Consultancy gives advice on customer service. The gist? Get really good at providing the basics. Provide what your customers want when they want it. Then ask them how you can do better. Once the basics are covered consistently every time like a graceful dance, you'll find that what your customers ask for in terms of improvements will be fractional. Tiny, inexpensive adjustments instead of major, industry-shaking changes.

Do the basics well, consistently

Last week, I had three customer service interactions. Every single one failed on the basic level.

1. Purchasing a car. Since my car was stolen last month, I spent many harrowing weeks shopping for a nice, reliable-yet-fun used car. Finally, I decided on a model and a unit and commenced the grueling haggling process with the salesman. He began by promising "I won't put you through a three-hour-long negotiation process." The negotiation took exactly three hours. He promised to have the car detailed by the end of last week. It's Thursday, over a week later, and I still don't have the car. The basic level of customer service--providing a speedy transaction ending in my owning a car--was never met.
2. Getting ink cartridges refilled. Last weekend, I went to a local ink refill store, handed the clerk my near-empty cartridges, and watched as she checked the numbers on the back and handed me two new cartridges. When I arrived home, I discovered both were the wrong type. A week later, when I had the chance to visit the store again, it was closed (at 2:00 on a Saturday). When I Twittered about my week without ink and eventual decision to purchase new cartridges elsewhere, the store owner requested that I should have contacted him by phone instead of Twittering. (I wonder if he would have answered, even with the store being closed?) The basic level of customer service--providing a refill for my ink cartridges--was never met.
3. Getting groceries delivered. Last weekend, I opted to have groceries delivered, since my work schedule is rounding 60 hours a week. The delivery slot was between noon and 2:00, so I scheduled an appointment for 2:15. By 1:50, the groceries hadn't arrived, so I called in to customer service. After 10 minutes on hold, I hung up. I found an email address and sent a complaint, then opened the door to leave--there was my delivery man, who promptly informed me that he wasn't late. Only he was late because another customer had an extra item that hadn't been included... etc. The basic level of customer service--groceries arriving as ordered--was not met.

The key to surviving the recession? Distinguish yourself by providing the basic service you promise in the manner in which you promise it in a consistent manner. This will put you miles ahead of competitors who are so busy futzing with customer service "techniques" that their customers are still emailing them, asking them for the widget they ordered last week.

Back to the basics wins it.

[cross-posted at www.heidi-miller.com]

Top 5 Customer Service Links for 10-4-09

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Every week, the blogosphere and Twittersphere are rife with for great (and not so great) ideas and posts on how to improve customer service. Every week, Spoken brings you the best of the best of customer service blogs. 

For the week ending October 4, 2009:

• The biggest customer service news this week by far was Salesforce's announcement that new upgrades to its existing platform would provide an entire call center running in the cloud. Is it a coincidence that Five9 released a similar product nearly simultaneously, calling it "industry-first cloud computing platform for call centers"?
• When Strativity Group  released the findings of its 2009 Customer Experience Consumer Study, we finally got proof that most consumers are willing to pay more for a good customer service experience
• For those in our particular industry, ifbyphone published a great articles on 7 Questions to Consider for Good Self-Service IVR System Design
• At the Engaging Times Summit, research was presented indicating said that 48% of marketing professionals believe social media has the most impact on the customer experience

All links are ranked on Spoken's Digg page--any other suggestions to Digg for the week?

Want to work at Spoken?

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Want to work at Spoken? We're hiring for three new positions:

Senior Project Manager

Do you enjoy juggling multiple priorities, tasks and deadlines while meeting customer needs? Do you like solving challenging customer technical issues? Do you work best in a small, intimate team? Spoken Communications is a fast-paced technology startup in the speech recognition and customer service automation fields. We aim to increase efficiency and decrease the cost of customer service for our clients’ contact centers with a unique hybrid solution: patented speech recognition technology complemented by human intervention. We are looking for an experienced, customer-minded Senior Project Manager who would get a kick out of working closely with new clients to implement the Spoken product from soup to nuts while ensuring that our clients become raving fans. Position is in-house in Bellevue, WA.

Senior Software Engineer

Do you believe that technology is the key to keeping customers happy? Do you enjoy a challenge and love juggling multiple tasks and priorities? Spoken Communications wants you to become an expert on everything Spoken. We are a fast-paced technology startup in the speech recognition and customer service automation fields. We aim to increase efficiency and decrease the cost of customer service for our clients’ contact centers with a unique hybrid solution: patented speech recognition technology complemented by human intervention. We are looking for an experienced, customer-minded Senior Software Engineer who gets a kick from owning projects end to end, engaging in customer interactions, drilling down specifications, tracking development and diving into Q&A. Position is in-house in Bellevue, WA.

Call Center Support Engineer

Do you want to be heralded as a hero when you walk into a customer’s office? Do you live and breathe contact center efficiency? Are you always tweaking technology and working 24/7 to troubleshoot new solutions? Do you enjoy juggling multiple tasks? Spoken Communications is a fast-paced technology startup in the speech recognition and customer service automation fields. We aim to increase efficiency and decrease the cost of customer service for our clients’ contact centers with a unique hybrid solution: patented speech recognition technology complemented by human intervention. We are looking for an experienced, customer-minded Call Center Engineer who enjoys providing technical support for clients and maintaining system availability through monitoring, maintenance and troubleshooting as well as supporting ongoing day- to-day changes. Position is in-house in Bellevue, WA. 

If interested, please send a cover letter and resume to jobs at spoken dot com. Thanks!