Steve Jobs- Bringing Information to Life

So, Steve Jobs passed away a few weeks ago and many in the world of technology still are mourning the loss of a person that has been referred to as an icon, genius, pioneer and legend. I have decided to hold off my criticism or admiration for him until now, so as to not let emotions get in the way.

While many will be talking for years and even decades to come about a man that ran Apple with an iron fist or a man that changed 6 different industries in a matter of 15 years or a man that was as much artist as he was business man, I will remember Steve Jobs for doing something much more personal, Bringing Information to Life.

Let me explain. I think the beauty of what Steve Jobs has lead Apple to do over the last 15 years wasn't so much that they created incredible devices to consume information/media on. What I think is the genius behind what they have done is that they have made that information or media come to life in a way that I personally have never seen before. Whether it be the GUI with the Mac or iTunes or iPods or iPhones or the wonderful iPad, each device reimagined how people would consume information and allowed it to come to life.

Where this has really hit home with me is in my personal life. One of my little girls has both Down Syndrome and severe Autism. She can not really communicate with the outside world or should I say has not been able to communicate with the outside world. About a year ago we start working with her on an iPad and trying to get her to understand how to use it and communicate with it to let us know what she needs or wants. It has been a slow process, but we are starting to see hope where we once saw dispair. We are starting to see smiles where we once saw tears. And we are starting to see life where we once saw cold blank stares. The iPad has started to bring the information and words and knowledge that lives in my little girls brain to life in ways that we never imagined possible.

We may never know in our lifetime why the brains of children with severe forms of Autism lock up and trap them in a prison of their own mind. But my wife and I will always remember Steve Jobs as a visionary leader of a company of people that helped bring information to life in very personal and important ways.

Second Class Customer Experience

So I was ready through my twitter stream the other night and found an interesting article. Parenthetically, that is what I love most about twitter, you can find out what other people you share things in common with are reading.

Anyway, I clicked on the link and was dazzled by the Slideshare presentation that I saw from a major multi billion dollar company and their Social Media lead. It showed all of this info about how they use social media, how they respond to people, how it makes the company that much better, how they have integrated social into the fabric of the company. It was pretty compelling and impressive to see from such a large company. A real strategy for how they are using social media to create digital relationships.

Then something came to my head, I thought I would click over from there to their website to see if they are following the same principles and ideas on their website. I would think that a consistent experience would be a no brainer for this company, based on the message in the slides.

Sadly, the experience was much different than what they talked about in their social channels. All of the ideas about customer loyalty and customer experience and wowing the customer in social media didn't extend to the website, specifically the support pages of the website.

It got me thinking, why is this the case? Why do companies put so much effort and time into creating a unique and compelling experience in the social media channel, but neglect the place where people still, more often than not, go to get answers to the questions they have?

Maybe it is because different groups own the different channels internally at the company. Maybe it is because some executive is in love with social and is just demanding a different experience in that channel. Or maybe it is because the perception is that your brand can be damaged much faster on the social channel than on the website.

Regardless of the reason, I think it is only damaging the company with their customers when they choose to focus dollars, time and resources on the channel of the day and relegate the other channels to second class experiences.

What I Learned From My Cab Driver

I travel a couple of times a month for work. A day or two at a time. Nothing too crazy like those technology or management consultants!

When I travel, I take a cab from my home to the airport for three reasons. One, my family only has and only needs one car for our typical daily life. Two, it is much faster for me to get to and from the airport which cuts down on the overall travel time I am away from my family. And three, it is just cheaper usually for me to do it this way, which only benefits my company.

When I was in the cab the other day, I was talking to the driver, a guy that I have been using consistently for about 3 years now. And he shared with me the success that he is having as a small business man. He shared with me how business is going well and this time of the year is usually even more busy because of vacationers and last minute business deals.

But the best part of the ride was when he was sharing with me about how he is being careful to not grow too fast and add the wrong drivers to his team. He told me that he could very easily triple his business tomorrow if he wanted to, but said that he is going to take it slow. He then gave me two reasons that made me smile and nod my head up and down.

First, he said that he liked the pace of life that he had right now and enjoyed having the flexibility in his schedule to see his family quite a bit and not work 16 hour days to make a living. Smart man in my book. He gets the work life balance he needs to be good at what he does.

But the second thing he talked about was what made me want to post about it here. He said that if he were to grow too quickly, he would actually likely lose business. He said that if he grew too fast, he would have to add drivers to his team that were new and didn't know if he could trust them to do the job, be on time and be respectful to his clients. He said, in his own way, that he wanted to put the customer experience before growth at this point. He wanted to put in place a good team of people that valued the relationship with the clients as much as he does, so that he can grow slowly over time. Genius....

I love the unexpected learnings that we can see everyday in front of us if we just keep our eyes open and our ears tuned.

Where's the Vision?

I interact quite a bit with executives in the customer service arena on a daily basis. From the folks that have yearly P&L responsibility for the whole of customer service to the folks that have daily responsibility for operations and with the folks that are becoming more common in organizations in a role that is part IT part Business Operations.

The common trend that I am hearing from them all is that they are more and more being overwhelmed with the volume of requests they get from sales teams about new technology in the market for customer service. But as I dig, they also tell me that they are seeing nothing out there that is making them sit up in their chair and say "wow".

A common theme I hear is that while there are seemingly more and more vendors of "solutions" out in the market, there is less and less true innovation in customer service technology. And I would tend to agree with them. There was the ACD, which revolutionized the way people communicate with companies. Then there was the IVR, which in it's prime was a fantastic innovation. There was Workforce Management technology to free people from the bonds of Excel. There was cloud routing technology that tied together disparate ACD's. There was call recording technology that gave companies a view into the customers world.

Those have been the biggies in the last 20 years. But what do we have to show for the last 5-7 years? Sure, we can say that the whole space around analytics has had a pretty significant impact in some companies, but I don't know that we can really lump it in yet with the likes of the others above. It may get there, but the jury is still out.

Where is the next true innovation in customer service? What is the next frontier that will upend the way we think about deploying customer service? And will it come from someone like Verint, Nice, Interactive Intelligence, Cisco, Avaya, Genesys? Or will it come from the likes of Apple?

Pull My Hair Out

Sometimes I wonder if companies actually use and test the technology they deploy before they deploy it. I called a major airline today to book a flight. I called instead of booking online because it was a multi segment flight and it was just not something I could do online.

So I call in and I get an IVR. It asks me a few annoying questions and then instead of transferring me to an agent to help me and get things taken care of quickly, it promptly dumps me into an IVR flow to try to walk me through the booking.

What a nightmare experience. I promptly hit zero a few times and got to an agent.

How in the world can any sane person believe that an IVR is the right interface to help someone book a ticket. Although it is a linear process that seems logical for a linear tool like an IVR, there is so much variability within each step that it becomes messy quickly. Then layer on top of that the truly inadequate nature of Voice Recognition and it is a disaster.

It is as if someone in the customer service group made a blind decision to help save money without ever trying the experience for themselves. Because I am certain that if they would have, they would have come to the same conclusion that I did.

It is simple, try it yourself first and see if you would use. That should be your litmus test. Not how much money you are going to save.

Sport

99% of the time this blog is dedicated to the ideas, technology and concepts of customer service. Everyone once in a while I just get fed up with something in life that is so obvious and clear to me that I need to say something somewhere and this seems like an ok spot.

So today, I want to say here on my blog what so many Americans and likely Europeans are saying right now in their homes, in their work places and in there local establishments of find beverages. Politics is nothing more than a sport. Simple as that.

What made me come to this conclusion today was watching some morning news while I was eating breakfast and it just hit me, the way they are reporting about the political climate is just like they report about sports. Here in the US, the cable channels, MSNBC, FOXNEWS and CNN are just like ESPN is in the world of sports. They follow politics, watch politics and report on politics like there is a match, game or event happening where the outcome is nothing more than the meaningless win or loss for a free enterprise organization that pays people to entertain.

The sport of politics has teams of people, it has positions on the team, it has coaches, it has managers, it has owners that spend the money, it has interested observers, it has media coverage from all angles, it has controversy, it has the big comebacks and the colossal collapses.

But, in real sports, the winning and losing only really effects the private enterprise of a team of people that are being paid to entertain. I know it, you know it and they know it. It is entertainment that we can either choose to engage in or not.

In the current sport of politics, the winning and losing never really impacts the people that are doing the playing. The unfortunate truth is that treating politics and policy as a sport impacts all of us in ways that we can't always control.

I wish that more people in political life would see this and treat their job with the dignity and respect that the office deserves. And realize that while they are playing a game, real people are the ones that are losing.....

Ok, now off my soap box....

Simplicity

Something that I have come to have new found respect for is the idea of simplicity. Whether it be simplicity of a process. Simplicity of design. Simplicity of a message. Simplicity....

I was reading an article today about a guy that has done research on all the talks that have been given at TED. He broke down the topics and ideas into curious facts about what people seemed to like most in a talk based on traffic to that video. He had some interesting facts that he could not explain, but the one that jumped out to me was the more simple the presentation, the more people viewed it.

It has been proven that the human brain can not focus on a presentation or talk for more than 20 min. After that, the brain starts to shut down on the message and start thinking of other things it can do to keep going.

Keep it simple and short. People will appreciate it.

Confusion

I was watching a show this morning that I normally watch pretty much every morning. I am not a huge TV watcher, just sports. But I also watch a program in the morning every day pretty much as I am helping with my kids and getting ready for work. Anyway, I was watching this morning and at the commercial break, I saw a commercial for a telecom company that had an ad that was very curious to me. It said something like, " Real people there to take care of you".

The reason I found this curious is that I have been seeing this alot lately. It seems like the new popular thing to advertise or market to consumers is that you are "real" or "human" or you have "humans ready to help". It does not seem to be centered in any one industry type, but I have seen a number of the new web consumer companies trying this strategy. What seems odd to me about this strategy though is why this strategy seems to be on the rise. Why are companies, especially new web savy companies so aggressively taking this track?

My hunch is that they are trying to differentiate themselves by telling people that they don't have to deal with technology getting in the way when they have a problem. They are subtly or sometimes not so subtly tellling the consumer that they will have humans answer their questions. I am sure this is a natural reflex to the influx of consumers who are fed up specifically with IVR's that seem to be such a road block to getting things done. But is this really the best marketing track to take?

My sense is no. Especially when according to Forrester Research 65% of people go online first to find an answer to their question. I think what people really want is simple. They want to quickly go to their mobile device or online to find an answer. Not hunt for the answer, find an answer immediately. If their question is a bit more complex, they want to be able to call and believe that the company will quickly get them to an agent because they know that if the person is calling, it probably is something more complex that requires human intervention.

I think the company that has the advertising right is Esurance. "Technology when you want it, People when you don't." That is exactly the right idea in my mind.

What do you think?

Web Self Hunting... I mean Service.

I was on a webinar the other day by a company that promotes and builds web self service solutions for customer service. They have all the technology and all the tools and all the "expertise" to help companies deploy web self service.

As they were talking and showing and talking and showing, I started to think about what they were saying and what vendors are pushing to companies in this space. Web self service to some means emailing the company with a problem. For others it means putting up FAQs so people can find answers. For some it means putting in a search mechanism that gives a number of possibilities to answer your question. And for still others, web self service means communities and forums that are moderated by customers and the company.

But is that really what self service should be? Should we really be putting so much of the burden on the customer to find what they are looking for?

My sense is that web self service is going to start changing drastically over the next few years and it will go from a collection of people and information that we force our customers to parse through themselves, into an experience that is much more about being guided to where the answers are.

Just from my personal experience, just like others my age and younger, my first stop is either Google or the company website to figure out how I can solve a problem or answer a question. If the question is complex, I typically call the call center right away because I know it requires more human intervention. The trend that I seem to see on websites, especially large consumer company websites, is to just throw up every and all the information that they can and hope that the customer doesn't call them because the answer is there somewhere in that mess of info.

Maybe it is just me, but I guess I would expect more from a company. I know it is called "Self Service", but I just don't think that is enough anymore. It is great that Knowledge Management companies and web self service companies are starting to help corporations organize the information a bit better, but even that falls short. My sense is that customers are soon, if not already, throwing their arms up in surrender to the mass of information that exists help solve their problem.

My sense is that very soon, companies are going to invest time in finding ways to guide web self service customers more and help them find relevant information much more quickly. Customers are going to start expecting that if you want my business and want to keep my business, then step up and help me find the answer and don't force me to hunt down the answer on my own.

People, old and young alike, don't want to hunt. They just want the answer.

Web 2.0 (Lack Of) Customer Service

TWITTER USER:

For the record - going into week 6 without useful tech support from Conde Nast for New Yorker Mag iPad app. #Fail

SAME TWITTER USER ONE HOUR LATER:

RE: Conde Nast Tech support: Last email was a form letter describing how to solve a different problem (crashing)... That doesn't bode well

I posted these two tweets from my Twitter stream because it speaks to the topic for today, Customer Service, or lack there of, with companies in the digital space. Whether it be old companies like Conde Nast in this example or LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook/Zynga/Groupon etc. Companies in the digital space are orders of magnitude worse about the experience of their customers when it comes to service on the whole.

To be frank with you, I am perplexed at this reality and have no real answers as to why this is the case, but I know it is the case. I have heard many a story and had my own experiences where the talk certainly does not match the walk with these companies. And I guess that is the part that is so frustrating to me as a avid watcher of the customer service marketplace. Every website you go to or every leader you talk to at a web 2.0 company or a digital offshoot of an older company, talk a great game. They talk about how they don't have an IVR to burden their customers. Or talk about how they think that customers are happy with an email response to issues or how customers will just put up with web self service because they are a new company.

Problem is that people are measuring them against the best of the best. Just because you are social media company or a web 2.0 company or a cloud based provider of this or that, does not mean that you are somehow judged differently in the long run. Nope, sorry to say that you will be judged just like all the other companies and technologies before you. Does your stuff work and if it does not, how good are you at helping me fix it. You will be judged against the likes of USAA and Zappos, who universally get it right, not against the 5 competitors in your space.

When will these companies day of reckoning come you might ask? I just don't know. But what I do know is that the customers will speak with their wallets and their feet or digital feet. The lip service about how their customer service is different will only hold up for so long and then customers will be on their way when they actually experience the sub par service that is seemingly common place at these companies.

I am an interested bystander on this one. Wondering if anyone else sees it the same way....

Be Human

I have been married to my wife now for going on 7 years. In that time, she has never known me to work outside of the world of customer service. When we first were dating up until this day, I have been squarely focused on and engaged in the world of customer service.

In that time, she rarely will engage in conversation about my work because she prefers to allow me to leave work at work, which is great and something I really love about her. But once in a while she will drop a gem on me that will get my head spinning and leave me scratching my head. The other day she told me a story while we were driving somewhere that really for me summed up what should be at the core of every companies service experience.

She told me that she recently went to Whole Foods and was looking for some ingredients for a recipe that she wanted to try to make for our oldest daughter. Long story short, our oldest has some very important special diet restrictions that force my wife to be very picky about what she can cook for her for meals and forces her to experiment quite a bit to get it right. As you might imagine, these restrictions can make shopping for my wife both expensive and also frustrating.

Well, on this day she was walking down the aisle, looking for some specific ingredients for this dish she was looking to experiment with. She bumped into one of the employees and asked them a question. He did not know the answer, but guided my wife up to the front help desk to see if the person there happened to know the answer or would be able to provide more guidance. She reached the help desk (who knew Whole Foods had a help desk) and the woman there helped her figure out what she was looking for and then walked with my wife through the store helping her find the other ingredients that she would need to finish up the dish. As they finished up getting the items, the woman started writing on the items across the back of them. When she had finished, she handed the items to my wife and said, "We know how expensive and difficult it can be sometimes to help your kids eat that have special needs, so this one is on us." My wife was shocked and speechless. When she told me the story, I also had my jaw drop.

I started to think about this experience in the context of all of the things I talk about here and hear about daily in the world of customer experience and customer service. And I think I just had a moment of clarity about what is real customer service. Being Human.

As simple as it sounds. Customer service and authentic customer service that will win customers and keep customers is service that lets people know that you are human and are able to see their challenge or problem as if you were in their shoes. It is not about technology, it is not about process, it is not about being social or having a social business etc.... At the core, customer service needs to be about being human and relating to someone that is calling to you for help. Does that mean that we are always able to help them get what they want? No. But it does mean putting yourself in their shoes and trying to find a solution that helps them see you are human!

What is the core of your service philosophy?

Most Analytics Packages Don't Tell The Whole Story

I was doing some digging on the general topic of Analytics over the past few weeks and have been trying to wrap my mind around what makes a good analytics package. It may be different for different people, but I am not sure it should be. So I have been searching and think I might have found something that works.

So as I have said before on this blog, I am baffled by all the "me too" companies that are filling up the space on their website or in their marketing slicks with their story about Analytics. It has given me a bit of heart burn for a while now and still makes me shake my head.

But recently I started to dig in a bit more and try to distill down a clear difference between what I consider useful Analytics and what most people put out which is enhance reporting. I am not sure if this will help others very much, but what I have come up with is that Analytics should be a tool that gets to the real reason WHY the data is showing one trend or another. It should not just be about the fact that you can show the data. It should be about giving you the tools to interrogate the data to understand why so that you can take action. So much of the work with tools that people are calling Analytics is manual and human based educated guesses about WHY things are trending a certain way.

I think it is valuable to have great reports, I think it is great to have them in color and in multiple digital formats for different devices and consumption styles. But, instead of worrying about looking at the data and forcing humans to make so many decisions, why don't we use some brain power to build tools that actually tell us why someone is calling, why someone is going to the website, why they are upset, why my hold times are through the roof, why why why.... Because most of what I am seeing is helping us see the what and not giving us the why.

Do you agree?

Live Chat... Drives Me Nuts!

Just have to say that I can't stand the experience from almost every company I have dealt with in a live chat session. I don't understand how you can associate your brand to a customer experience that basically takes you back 10 years in how you are serviced. And I have chatted with companies that are supposedly working with the best chat systems on the market. Here is what bugs me the most:

1. You have to put in a bunch of info before hand to even start a chat session. I am just looking to understand very quickly, without a bunch of searching, whether or not my question can be answered. I don't want to have to spend the extra min of time to put in to the chat window what appears to be useless information that never really helps the agent on the other end. When this becomes exceptionally annoying is when you have already logged in to the website and been authenticated. I should not have to put this info back into a chat window.

2. The connection time to actually get to an agent to chat is HORRENDOUS! In the last couple of months I have tried to use live chat systems from no less than 10 companies and I counted an average of 88 seconds of "hold" time before I got to an agent. What is unacceptable in a voice que should hold true in a chat que as well. Don't make customers wait. Especially when it is a digital channel and they are expecting instant communications just like they get from using Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger etc... Their expectations based on their "consumer" technology is instant. Make yours instant as well or at a minimum set their expectations that it will not be instant.

3. When you are chatting with the agents, you know they are not dedicated to talking to you. The biggest reason I know this is that it takes forever for them to get back to you after you ask each question or answer their question back to you. In my interactions with these companies, I averaged 52 seconds between each question and answer from the agent. So, if you ask and answer 4-5 questions, you end up sitting and "chatting" to this agent for around 5 min. And these questions I had were simple, pretty straight forward questions. I can't imagine if I had to chat about a real complex issue.

So, although more and more companies are putting chat on their sites, the sad thing is that they are not making the experience consistent with their other channels. It seems once again that companies are using technology to try to solve a problem or add another channel of communication without understanding the experience from the customer side. There is so much potential promise in getting answers in real time for customers while on a website that goes well beyond the crappy search that exists today. Unfortunately, the chat promise is not living up to the expectations of customers.

How do you use chat or view it as a customer? Does it help you find information quickly?

Voice.... It's Alive!!

The last few years of living in the connected world have been truly fantastic to watch play out. I am sure we will look back 20 years from now and we will think we were in the dark ages or something, but it still has been so much fun to see all the changes in how we communicate, what is important, what is possible and how these changes can have some incredible impact. Both good impact and maybe not so good impact.

One of the trends that we have been seeing though with both mobile devices and traditional devices is the continued "irrelevance" of the use of voice communication in the daily lives of most of us. I remember when I got my first mobile phone in 1998 and couldn't wait to make phone calls to my family and friends to tell them about the phone and to see how it sounded. Never mind that SMS was killing it all over Europe as a shorter, faster and less expensive way to communicate with a mobile phone, we here in the US loved talking.

Fast forward 14 years and every where I look, on blogs, in the news, on podcasts, everyone is commenting on the "death of voice". You see the impact of this thought process in the simple things like young people getting data rich mobile phone plans instead of voice heavy plans. But you also see the so called "death of voice" in the intense and difficult negotiations that Verizon is having with their Unions right now. Companies like Verizon and AT&T are trying to figure out how to manage their work forces in the traditional land line business when people are getting rid of land lines by the millions every month.

A word of caution folks.... Voice is not dead. Voice is only just beginning. We may be seeing the death of a certain kind of transmission of voice that is outdated, costly and inefficient. That is the natural cycle of business. But by no means is voice dead. In fact, there are likely more opportunities today for voice than there have ever been. What do I mean?

Think of all the possible outlets today where you can communicate with your customers. All the different places that voice could be used to facilitate a discussion or help with a problem or reassure or express frustration. In the last example, you can only use so many exclamation points in a paragraph to show emphasis before it gets annoying. But what if instead of writing that same message, you could leave a voice message in that space? What if when you went to leave a recommendation on a site for a great book you just read, you could leave your voice message instead?

See communication is only a fraction about the content that is exchanged and almost entirely about the way it is communicated. Tone, inflection, speed, etc... The written word can rarely communicate the most important things we need when we receive a message from another.

So voice is not dead my friends, in fact, it is alive and well. I would challenge those that are thinking about how they can redefine customer service and experience to think long and hard about how they might use technology to help their customers express themselves with their voices in ways that will only enhance the connection they want to have with that brand.

Customer Choice in Customer Service

I have had this topic on my mind a lot lately both as a business person and as a consumer. I have been thinking about what it means to give your customers choice and where do you draw the line in providing choice to customers in the world of Customer Service.

The central question I consistently ask both Customer Service execs and myself is, "How are you deciding whether or not you add specific consumer choices to your customer service group?" As an example, how do you know when it is right to add a new technology to offer choice in web self service? Or how do you know when it is right to add another channel to support your customers?

The quick answer that I get from many CS Executives is, we add choice based on consumer or customer need. Really? How do you know this? Are you actually asking them? Or are you just responding to what the latest buzz or fad is in service? Or are you just responding to a competitive pressure?

My sense is, from being a consumer and from talking to these people, most customer service organizations are entirely reactive to how they add options to customers choice. They wait until the very last minute and then finally cave in because they feel the need to keep up or they jump onto the newest fad without taking the time to really understand why they should or should not give that choice.

Couple of quick examples:

1. Big Cable Company- I was talking to an executive about one year ago at a cable company. He told me that he needed to get some type of customer support going up on Twitter. I asked him why he thought that was imperative, he said that Comcast was doing it and getting all kinds of press from it and it was forcing him to react as the executive team at his company started asking him why they didn't have a Twitter support group.

Now, I am not debating here in this space whether or not it is right to have a Twitter support group. That is for another post. But what I am saying is that the decision to give consumers choice about their support needs should come from a solid, reasoned and a logical thought process. Not because you got pressured to do it by your exec team and their focus on the shining new object.

2. Large e-Commerce Company- I was recently out to see a large e-tailer and we were talking about self service. She told me that they don't see voice self service as really something that their customers would really like. I asked her how she knew that. She told me that she just knew and that based on their own bias towards self service and it's generally poor design across all industries, they would likely never offer it to their customers.

Now this is the other end of the spectrum. In this case, they are not being pressured by anyone to offer choice, but they are assuming that their customers don't want something based on nothing but pure hunch. They are denying their customers a potential choice that may be really useful to them without even asking the question of them. Again, whether or not you like voice self service or not, that is not the argument here. The question really is how do you know whether or not your customers will like it or want it if you don't ever ask them and you just assume they won't.

I am curious, have others of you run into situations like this? Have you been forced to make decisions about choice or just assumed answers about consumer choice without asking the question?

Six Sigma in Customer Service

I have been in and out of call centers and contact centers speaking with leaders of those groups for the better part of the last 8 years. I have been in big centers and in small. I have worked with companies that have 20,000 agents and companies that have 20 agents. And one of the things that I see over and over again is the tension that exists between management and reps about what is the best way to solve a customers problem. To distill it down, what is the right process to follow and how do you change that process to fit the changing business.

On one end of the spectrum you have companies that have very little process and their main goal is to just please the customer in whatever way the rep deems appropriate. This is the ultimate in employee enablement. Then you have the other end of the spectrum that has a process for everything and wants the rep to follow that process all the time without deviation. This end also tends to change the process only when bad things happen.

Somewhere in between exists a middle ground of harmony between enablement and process that makes both the agent feel good and the customer feel good about getting their questions answered. Then the question becomes, how do you do this? Is there an approach or a methodology that can help? Is the approach different for different companies?

I can't answer that question here on my blog for two reasons. One, I am not in your company and will never tell people what they should do without first understanding the situation. Number two, every company is different so giving blanket advice in this case is just foolish.

What I will say though is that I have been meeting with more and more companies that are finding value in using Six Sigma like methodology and approaches to how they manage customer service teams. I am told that the value that they are seeing in using this approach mostly comes from putting in place the mechanisms to continually measure and change what you are doing as a group in order to be both efficient and relevant to your end users.

Getting more specific, I know of a number of companies that are using the methodology to enforce good decision making around how they make changes to the process around service on new products of services. This is a great place to introduce the concepts and ideas and see if they work for you. I know of one retailer, very large, that was looking to add some new services to their offering to their customers. Instead of going to either of the extremes by giving reps full autonomy or locking them in to a rigid process that was not going to change, they used the Six Sigma approach. They first understood their goals with a core team of different stakeholders and baselined themselves with hard data. They then put in place concepts or ideas as to how the process should work. They then built out the process with ideas and technology in a way that they thought would be best. They then piloted the process with a small group of people. Next came collecting data on how they did. Then they iterated on the process to make it better and better. Finally then releasing out to all the agents.

I don't know if Six Sigma or derivatives of this approach are right for everyone. But I know that the methodology and approach has worked for a number of companies to help them evolve their customer service delivery teams. If you are struggling today to find the balance of how to bring new processes to your teams, it might be worth the time to look into a methodology that can help you over the long term.

Asking The Right Questions

A few weeks back, I wrote a blog post that talked about analytics and how it is not always about the technology. Sure, choosing the right technology is important, but most analytics projects really are a success or failure based on making sure that you ask the right questions to get data that will be relevant and actionable for you. Whether it is Speech Analtyics, Text Analytics, IVR Analytics, CRM Analytics or Web Analytics. Asking the right questions is the key.

Great quick 4 min video of the President of North America Operations from Office Depot.

http://bit.ly/nKjhRT

The key takeaway? You can have all the data you want, but unless you ask the right questions you are missing the boat.

Are you asking the right questions?

Proactive Customer Service Part 3

After I wrote my first post on this topic, I got some great feedback about Proactive Service from a number of different people. Some executive leaders from the retail space, the automotive space and from the media and entertainment industry chimed in about what they think. One response in particular stood out for me and I wanted to share the story here. I think this, just like my airplane story, is a great example of a company doing it right. Understanding what customers want and respecting them by keeping them "in the know".

I asked this executive if I could share their comments on my blog and they gave me permission. So below you will find the word for word account of what real life Proactive Service is:

"I think keeping people abreast of changes is critical. We had an 88 count fiber that got cut due to a farmer knocking over a pole in his field. This took down service for 2 headends and about 4000 customers and was not going to be an quick fix. This could have been disasterous for our hold times and queues but instead we posted updated messages for customers calling in every 2 hours and notified them that after we determined final outage duration we would be providing a blanket credit. We were able to keep our ASA to less than a minute and avoided any disconnects. Addressing issues before they become customer impacting is the best approach particularly as this industry has started to become commoditized and we need to use customer service as a differentiating factor."

In my opinion, these guys did it right. They kept their customers in the loop, updated them when possible and made sure they communicated that the customers would get a credit.

And what did they get to show for it? Nobody disconnected their service.

Great story about how treating people with respect by keeping them informed can make a huge impact on a business.

Proactive Customer Service Part 2

To build off of my previous post about proactive service, I recently had a conversation with a company and they were interested in how other companies are using the idea of Proactive Customer Service in their organizations. They wanted some practical approaches. I told them that there a number of different ways people are getting into using Proactive Service and it just depends on what technology you may already have in place and what type of interaction you are looking to have with your customer. Let's look at a few examples.

Proactive customer service dates back a few years with companies and public institutions using dialing systems to make outbound calls to people in order to make them aware of some type of information that was important to them. The most common form of proactive service that most people know is the phone call that comes from the local school district that tells of a day of canceled school for the kids. But there are a number of other types of organizations that have used the dialing method to reach out and touch their customers. Hospitals call back after surgery to check in, the doctors office calls a day ahead of time to make sure you keep your appt, the cable company calls the morning of your appt to make sure you will be around etc.

But now, many other companies are jumping into the fray with newer technology that allows for a different type of experience around proactive customer service. Whether it be through the SMS channel, email, or the website, most everyone now is using service as a way to head off calls to their call centers or create a much more positive customer experience. Electric companies are sending SMS or Email to their customers when a storm rolls through to update them on status of electricity so that people don't call. Commerce sites on the internet are using Click to Call or Click to Chat as well to be proactive with potential issues that customers might call about. Regardless of the channel, people like to know when things are happening that might effect them and typically react in a positive way when they are kept in the loop.

So, many companies are using the technology to reach out and touch their customers before they lose them or before they make a call to the call center with a problem. But is it really working?

The straw poll that I have taken after talking to a number of leaders in a number of different industries is that, indeed, proactive service absolutely makes a difference. But each person also makes sure to caveat the statement with a word of advice.

To a person, each leader that I spoke with made sure I knew that the key to making the project go well is to make sure that the target audience is very much encouraged to participate. Some of them even go as far as automatically enrolling people in programs while then asking them after the fact if they would like to be enrolled or not.

That is how important getting the audience engaged is to these projects. Not only does the customer engagement lead to a better and smoother operational environment, but it also leads to a much better customer experience at the end of the day. We all want to be "in the know" and the more companies reach out to their customers with information that is timely and relevant, the more positive the customer experience will ultimately be.

Another story on my next post from a real world example of a great use of proactive service.

Proactive Customer Service Part 1

I was on two different flights this past week from two different carriers and I think the differences in the stories will help even the lay person understand what it means to provide Proactive Customer Service.

Carrier number one was flying a common route in the US from one big city to another. It was a flight I have taken a number of times and most of the time it is on time without any real major delays. So, I strapped in, got my headphones on (cause I am always scared of the real talkative guy or gal that may be sitting next to me) and pulled out my reading material for the flight. The closed up the doors, pushed the boarding ramp away and we were ready to go. Or were we? 15 min later we were still sitting in the parked position at the gate, ramp now pushed away but no closer to our end destination. 20 min later. 30 min later. 35 min later.

Finally the captain gets on the horn and tells us that there had been a minor issue with a component of the plane and he was waiting on that to get fixed before we could push back. But it took him 40 min to remember that there about 150 people on the plane that were trying to figure out why we were sitting on the plane for 40 min without getting closer to our destination. Everyone was frustrated, upset and angry. Because, of course, by the time he told us were were going to be on our way, we could no longer use our phones to send an SMS or make a call to tell that cab company or that co worker or that loved one that we were going to be 40 min late. Not a lot of happy campers.

Then, later in the week, I was on another flight from a different company. A similar delay apparently was hitting this flight, lucky me. We all sat strapped in and ready to go for about 5-7 min and then the captain got on the overhead and told us that there was an issue with flight control and were going to sit for another 15-20 min before we pushed out to the runway. He said for us to go ahead and turn on our phones and make phone calls or whatever we needed to update people on the other end who were waiting on us.

This is proactive customer service. Our nature as humans is that we desire to understand and to some degree, control the situation we find ourselves in. Typically we gain this control or at least the perception of control when we have information. With this information we can then make follow on decisions that will allow us to move out of the emotional state of frustration and into a mood of acceptance of the situation. All we want is to be "in the know".

Proactive customer service is not all about technology and process and flow charts etc. Proactive service is thinking about how you would want to be treated and then reaching out ahead of time and making sure your customer is informed.

How are you using Proactive Customer Service in your company?

Interesting Article

For those in the software space and particularly those that are involved in new software companies, I saw this article today from last Nov that I thought was excellent. Ben Horowitz is reported to be a very sharp and extremely successful leader in the tech community. He has founded a number of large companies and is a well known Venture Investor now in Sillicon Valley.

So many companies are rising up out of no where with the advent of new cloud computing models and the cheap infrastructure that goes with it. Those that are focused on the enterprise space should heed this advice as I think it is spot on. There has been some very interesting press lately about this topic. Especially from the very young and what I would consider naive CEO of Box, formally Box.net.

Just something for all management to keep in mind when building a new company....

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/13/new-enterprise-customer/

What Does All This Data Mean?

In the last few months, I have been blessed enough to visit and speak with leadership at a number of large companies, specifically leadership in the customer service arena. One of the things that I always make a point of asking them is, "What do you think of all this Analytics talk?". Invariably, they launch into a story, sometimes a story about the great usefulness they are seeing and sometimes a not so good story about how they spent alot of money and didn't see a return that they had planned for. In each case though, the company had done a lot of due diligence in finding the right vendor, finding the right technology and in their eyes picking the right partner. But, in both cases, the good and bad, the determining factor for whether or not their was success had nothing to do with the classic criteria that they were using to choose a partner/product. More on that in a minute.

Lets do a rundown again of the different solutions that are in the market today for customer service groups and "Analyitcs" solutions. I use the term broadly, because as I have said in a post earlier this year, it is hard to tell what company is providing Analytics and what company is just calling their reporting packages Analytics because it is the new buzz word. So a quick rundown. Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but only meant to highlight the couple that are seeing most traction today in the market.:

1. Speech Analytics- Using technology to analyze what both customers and agents are saying on calls. Or more broadly, using technology to analyze content in any type of voice based interaction (think video)

2. Text Analytics- Using technology to typically parse unstructured text to find trends or spot issues within all types of text sources (community forums, emails, chat sessions, blogs, social networks etc..)

3. IVR Analtyics- Using technology to analyze the IVR to understand why customers are or are not using the IVR in the way that brings the most benefit to the customers and company.

4. Customer Experience Analytics- Using technology to stitch together the customer journey to understand their total experience with a company over time.

5. Performance Analytics- Using technology to better understand and measure the performance of customer service representatives in an organization.

6. Multi Channel Analytics- This is kind of a catch all phrase applied to some companies offerings that typically represents some combination of some or all of these solutions mentioned above.

As I said, there are a number of options in the market today to fulfill any technology desire or wish that you might have. But my conversations again point to the tipping point being less a decision on technology and more of a decision on something else. That something else is the expertise that is needed to know what to look for in the data.

There are three companies in particular that I have spoken with recently that all told me that their projects for analytics all started out rather slowly and without a bang. The had expected so much more from the technology right away and what they all concluded was that if they would have had the knowledge or expertise about what to look for from the beginning, then they would have been much more successful, much faster.

All of these companies and many more are starting to see real returns from different analytical solutions that are on the market. But the lesson learned here for vendors is to do the heavy lifting and work for your clients up front. Put together best practices and lessons learned that can packaged for companies or industry types to help your clients get started quickly. And customers, make sure that when you are looking at these solutions and technologies, put the RFP matrices aside and focus on companies that can help you ask the right questions of your business because that will be the key criteria to whether you succeed in making analytics a

differentiator for your customer service team.

The question isn't who has the right technology. The question needs to be who helps me ask the right questions.

Back At It

It has been some time since I last posted on my blog, March 15th to be exact. I had taken a new job in Jan of this year which consumed alot of my time and also have been wrapping up some very exciting personal items that have taken me away from talking about customer service as much as I would like. But, things are getting more manageable now and I am back in the saddle.

For the next few weeks I am going to focus on a few topics that seem to be of interest when I talk with people who make customer service their profession. Some of the folks I talk with are strategic leaders of customer service groups, some are operational leaders, some are technology leaders and some are technology vendors or analysts.

Here are some of the things that are of interest in the broader customer service community and I will try to tackle them here in an interesting and informative way:

1. Analytics- I will cover the different types and how people are using them.

2. Proactive Customer Service- What does it mean and why does it matter

3. Six Sigma- Does this methodology have a place in the world of customer service

4. Customer Choice- What does this mean for business

5. Voice- Where does voice go from here in customer service

6. Ethics- Will dig into some stories

7. Web 2.0 Customer Service- Not sure it exists

8. Zappos- My tour and my thoughts

So that is where I will start. I hope that you will enjoy reading about what I am hearing in the market.

Analytics Overload

I have not written in a while, mostly because I have been in the throws of a job change and trying to figure out how this new job relates to my blog about creating an authentic customer experience.

One of the things that I am coming to realize in this new job is that I am tired of hearing everyone in their mother talk about how they have "Analytics" for their application. Because there has been an explosion in the data that we are collecting, analytics has become almost a Must Have for an enterprise. But with this need, also seems to come the realization by marketing organizations that they need to tell the world that they too have analytics.

The reality is that most companies have reporting or maybe I will be gracious and call it enhanced reporting. But certainly not Analytics. And absolutely not Business Intelligence, another key buzzword that marketing is using to get attention.

My suggestion to buyers in all industries would be to dig in a bit and ensure you understand the differences between reporting, analytics and business intelligence so that you don't get overwhelmed in the buying process by the marketing non-sense.