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.