Article: Held Hostage by Service Calls November 12, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research, OnProcess.Tags: at-home service, Customer Experience, customer experience research, Harris Interactive, SoundBite
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Held hostage by service calls
The last time I needed an at-home service call, I thought, “Does this company think we’re living in the 1950s? Who can be at home from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on a Tuesday just because they bought a new fridge?” Even for someone who works out of a home office, such service policies mean a half-day trapped at half-capacity: no field calls, no paying clients, no lengthy and involved phone conferences.
Such four- or five-hour windows are the norm in home services and have been for decades. Are service providers expecting that anyone who needs cable installed or a refrigerator repaired has a stay-at-home spouse? Or do they simply not consider the inconvenience? Either way, the idea rankled. Then I saw a survey by Harris Interactive for SoundBite Communications that made this claim: “One out of two consumers feel like prisoners in their own homes due to long service windows.” That about sums it up.
[ For a look at where tech support is going, read Christina Tynan-Wood's "The (better) future of tech support." | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]
Maybe times were different when service companies decided that customers would be willing not only to pay for new cable service, a new fridge, or in-home repairs, but also give up a vacation day or station someone at home to handle it. Now, when we’re expected to get work done while commuting, be on call 24/7, and pull our weight in lean organizations, asking for the afternoon off to wait at home so that you can watch TV on the weekend doesn’t contribute to a reputation as a dedicated, invaluable employee.
According to the survey, 81 percent of consumers had to take time off from work to meet a service technician, and 76 percent were inconvenienced by this. The experience left 51 percent feeling imprisoned in their own homes.
All this waiting around for trivial in-home services costs American businesses a fortune, too, according to the survey. “Eighty-one percent of consumers report having to take time off from work or adjust their schedule,” says the release. “To ensure they are home during the service appointment window. This translates into more than $13.4 billion in lost productivity for U.S. businesses.”
What’s the solution? Texting, according to SoundBite Communications, a company that hopes to provide this solution.
“One thing that came out of this survey is that people are OK with taking the time out. They understand the necessity. The issue is the four- or five-hour window and the complete feeling of helplessness as you wait,” explains Mark Friedman, chief marketing and business development officer of SoundBite Communications.
The survey asked consumers if they would be interested in receiving a text alert one hour before the technician was due to arrive, allowing them to go home from work to meet the tech rather than waiting around for half the day at home. Fifty-four percent said a service like this would improve their overall satisfaction with the service and their opinion of the company providing the service.
I have found that simply asking — when I set up the delivery or service — will usually get me a phone call from the technician within a reasonable time frame before the appointment. But I concur that rather than hoping the technicians are agreeable, the system could stand a technology update to tighter scheduling and more information sharing with customers.
I know that when I make an appointment with someone, I show up on time and keep the meeting to an agreed-upon length. If my intentions are thwarted, I call to say I’ll be late. If service technicians can’t manage that for some reason, I’d prefer GPS tracking on my technician. That way, I could log on and see where he is — perhaps with a time estimate of how long he will be there — and decide if I can answer a call as it comes in, join a phone conference, or take the dog for a walk. Then again, I suppose a text message saying the tech is an hour away would be an improvement over waiting around all day.
Got gripes or questions? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.
This story, “Held hostage by service calls,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Christina Tynan-Wood’s Gripe Line blog at InfoWorld.com.
Study: Customers Will Pay Organization More For A Great Customer Experience November 9, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research.Tags: Customer Experience, Harris Interactive, research, RightNow
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We’ve been saying this for some time to our prospects and clients — here’s some more research to support that position. –sk
Customers Will Pay Organization More For A Great Customer Experience
Bozeman, Mont., 10/13/2010
According to the fifth annual Customer Experience Report, a Harris Interactive study sponsored by RightNow Technologies (NASDAQ: RNOW), customer experience is playing a significant role in determining where consumers choose to shop and how much they are willing to spend. Results show that exceptional customer experience creates loyal customers and has the power to impact a company’s top and bottom lines.
Read entire Customer Experience Report
Nearly all consumers (85 percent) said they would be willing to pay more over the standard price of a good or service to ensure a superior customer experience. Of those consumers that said they would pay more for an excellent customer experience:
- 55 percent would pay 10 percent or more
- 27 percent would pay 15 percent or more
- 10 percent would pay 25 percent or more
Customer Experience, the Secret Weapon for Driving Revenue
These results show that delivering a positive customer experience can help organizations increase revenue. For example, in 2009 Cyber Monday alone generated $887 million in revenue for e-retailers. Based on the results of this study the industry could have generated an additional $87 million in revenue in just one day by providing superior customer experience.
View industry infographics in the Customer Experience Report
This year’s research also shows that a great customer service experience significantly impacts purchasing decisions:
- Nearly all consumers (82 percent) have stopped doing business with an organization as a result of negative experience and most (75 percent) do not return
- 55 percent of consumers became customers of a company based on its reputation for great customer service, and 40 percent of consumers have switched to a competitive brand simply because of its reputation for exceptional service
“This year’s report not only demonstrates the financial impact of a negative customer experience, but the real value of positive customer experiences. By focusing on delivering exceptional experiences, businesses have the opportunity to grow their customer base, improve brand loyalty and increase overall revenue.”
Greg Gianforte, chief executive officer, RightNow
The Power of Word of Mouth
Consumers not only voice their customer experience preferences with their own wallets; they also influence their peers. According to the 2010 Customer Experience Report, customer advocacy should be a key focus for businesses because:
- Customer service is still the number one reason consumers recommend an organization, more than products or price
- Word of mouth is the number one influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions (76 percent), followed by customer reviews and online feedback at 49 percent
- 79 percent of consumers that have had a negative experience with an organization told others about it, and 97 percent chose to share their experience via word of mouth
- 85 percent wanted to warn others about the pitfalls of doing business with that company and 66 percent wanted to discourage others from buying from that company
What Makes a Great Experience?
The 2010 report outlines why consumers stop doing business with a company:
- Rude staff (73 percent)
- Issues weren’t resolved quickly (55 percent)
- Unknowledgeable staff (51 percent)
Companies can improve the customer experience by providing friendly, knowledgeable support and resolving issues in a timely manner.
“Drugstore.com is heavily invested in delivering a positive, personalized customer experience and it has a tremendous impact on our business, steadily increasing our Net Promoter score and increasing sales.”
Lisa Larson, Director of Customer Care, Drugstore.com
“Customer experience is a top priority for Nikon. We work hard to quickly respond to customers’ needs no matter how they choose to reach out to the company. Our dedication to providing customers with a great experience is helping Nikon consistently achieve a 95 percent customer satisfaction score.”
David Dentry, GM, Customer Relations, Nikon
Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the United States between June 30-July 2, 2010 among 2,217 adults (aged 18 and over) by Harris Interactive on behalf of RightNow Technologies via its Quick Query omnibus product. Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Where appropriate, this data were also weighted to reflect the composition of the adult online population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.
Article: Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You August 10, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research.Tags: building customer loyalty, Customer Experience, customer service, self-service
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Fascinating article in the Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/07/why_your_customers_dont_want_t.html
8:36 AM Wednesday July 28, 2010
by Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff
Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you everwaited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?
If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.
In our research on this topic (which we discuss in our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“), we’ve found that corporate leaders dramatically overestimate the extent to which their customers actually want to talk to them. In fact, on average, companies tend to think their customers value live service more than twice as much as they value self service. But our data show that customers today are statistically indifferent about this — they value self-service just as much as using the phone. And guess what? By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.
This attitude toward self-service has been a long time coming. Two-thirds of the customers we surveyed told us that three to five years ago, they primarily used the phone for service interactions. Today, less than a third do, and the number is shrinking fast.
What is it that makes self service so appealing? Maybe it’s the efficiency of the interaction — the airport kiosk is probably faster than interacting with a check-in agent — but that wouldn’t explain why we go out of our way to take care of our service needs ourselves. On a psychological level, it might have more to do with the unique element of control that self service affords. Or, maybe this self-service love affair is a product of our infatuation with gadgetry and electronic communication. All fairly benign explanations, to be sure.
But here’s a hypothesis that would be concerning if it’s right: maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be explained away as just a change in consumers’ channel preferences, skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the “out” they’ve been looking for all along.
For managers hell-bent on deepening relationships with their customers, that’s a sobering thought.
Consider this: Running your company as if customers want to talk to you isn’t just expensive, it’s potentially undermining your efforts to build longer-term loyalty. Our research shows that customers who attempt to self serve, fail, and are forced to pick up the phone are 10% more likely to be disloyal than those customers who were able to fully resolve their issues in their channel of choice. As one CFO remarked to us recently, “When you think about the relative cost of live service and the disloyalty effect of channel switching…it’s like paying your customers to be disloyal to you.”
How often does channel switching happen? All the time.
We found that a staggering 57% of inbound calls come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company’s website. And over 30% of callers are on the company’s website at the same time that they are talking to a rep on the phone. That’s a lot of frustrated customers.
What do you think? Are we simply seeing a change in customer preferences — or a relationship on the rocks?
Matthew Dixon is the managing director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice. Lara Ponomareff is a research consultant with the Customer Contact Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice.
Article: Comcast “Twitter Guy” leaving July 28, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management.Tags: Comcast, Customer Experience, customer service, Frank Eliason, social media, Twitter
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http://www.philly.com/inquirer/breaking/business_breaking/20100728_Twitter_guy_leaving_Comcast.html
Article from Philadelphia Enquirer.
Goodbye, Comcast Twitter guy.
Frank Eliason, the social media apostle who responded to tens of thousands of online Comcast Corp. customer complaints over the last two years, is leaving the cable company for a new challenge – helping banking giant Citigroup navigate the Internet to connect with banking customers.
Eliason’s new title is senior vice president in New York, a sweet one for a 37-year-old who began his career stocking shelves in Clover, Strawbridge’s former discount chain, in the late 1980s.
Thursday is Eliason’s last day at Comcast. He chatted with chief executive Brian Roberts on Wednesday morning – not the typical departure in a company with 100,000 employees – and then a grateful public relations department threw him a party.
Said Roberts in an e-mail: “Frank has had a huge impact on Comcast. He literally made himself available to our customers 24 hours a day and he created a team of people who are dedicated to do the same thing.”
Why the fuss?
In the depths of Comcast’s customer-service woes, a time when an elderly Virginia woman busted up a Comcast office with a hammer because her phone had died and a blogger launched the website Comcastmustdie, Eliason began combing the Internet for Comcast references and responded to online rants. He found many of those on Twitter, the quick-blurb social media site.
Eliason hit the Twitter moment almost perfectly. One business news story about Eliason and his Twittering led to another story and another. Soon, people were talking about Comcast’s innovative use of social media to improve customer service, instead of about Comcast’s customer service fiascoes.
Eliason’s department grew from himself to his current ten employees. Eliason, who has 42,000 followers on Twitter, said the Comcast digital-media group will remain Twittering.
Contact staff writer Bob Fernandez at 215-854-5897 or bob.fernandez@phillynews.com.
Article: Customer Engagement Phase is Completely Neglected June 28, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, OnProcess.Tags: after the sale, Bruce Temkin, customer engagement, Customer Experience
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Great little article by former Forrester Customer Experience expert Bruce Temkin:
http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/customer-engagement-phase-is-completely-neglected/
Excerpt:
The Engagement Phase starts right after a customer has made a decision to purchase something from you. It begins with the point of sale (PoS) and ends with what I call the point of value (PoV). I define the PoV as:
The point at which customers get the value they were expecting from their purchase and are satisfied with their decision
OPT opportunity for action: Reach out proactively after purchase to reinforce value, educate on usage. Research by Accenture (amongst others), supported by our clients’ experience, shows it reduces remorse returns significantly and has a positive impact on satisfaction.
(Note: no endorsement by Mr. Temkin or his firm is expressed or implied)
–sk
Temkin Group’s Survey on Customer Experience May 24, 2010
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, OnProcess.Tags: Customer Experience, NPS, survey, Temkin Group
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http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/survey-shows-strong-customer-experience-ambitions/
Interesting initial window into the customer experience assessments companies give themselves. One quick observation was the possible disconnect between leadership roles owning this process versus roadblocks to implementation. If you’re a senior manager with responsibility for CE, and yet you can’t make it the organization’s priority, what does that say?
The Cost of Poor Customer Service December 2, 2009
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Care, Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research, OnProcess.Tags: cost of poor customer service, Customer Experience, differentiation on service
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The Cost of Poor Customer Service – an excellent blog post by the folks at 1to1 media, with subsequent emphasis added here at OPT –sk
Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog
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Engage the 1to1 Media editors on the topics driving customer strategy
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Topic:
The Cost of Poor Customer Service
by Mila D’Antonio
Whether you’re a large retailer or small business, the importance of good customer service cannot be underestimated. This is especially true in a business environment that is growing increasingly more competitive.
But according to a new a new international consumer survey from Genesys Labs in conjunction with Datamonitor/Ovum called “The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement,” the cost of customer service in 16 major industrialized economies causes businesses to lose a total of $338.5 billion per year when customers defect and abandon their purchases as a direct result of poor customer experiences. A total of 8,880 consumers, at least 500 from each country, were selected from all ages and income groups and surveyed for the report.
The hardest hit industries across all countries surveyed are financial services, cable, and satellite TV providers, and a variety of telecommunications companies. The average value of each lost relationship across all countries surveyed is $243 per year. Losses were defined as transactions taken to a competitor (63 percent of the total) and transactions abandoned entirely (37 percent of the total).
The survey asked consumers their priorities and the changes most needed to improve the quality of their customer service experiences. Consumers surveyed reside in: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, the U.K., and the United States.
Some highlights of the survey include:
• In the past year financial services firms saw more than $44 billion in lost revenue.
• Cable and satellite TV providers alone suffered more than $37 billion of losses.
• Wireless carriers and Internet service providers each had $36 billion in lost revenue.
• Landline carriers also lost $33 billion.
• When asked to select the industries that did the best and worst job of customer service, consumers gave the most positive ratings for consumer products, travel/hospitality, and financial services. The most negative ratings are for telecommunications and government.
• When asked why they leave, consumers cited self-service that is not intelligently integrated with assisted service, being trapped in automated self-service, being forced to wait too long for service, having to repeat themselves, and representatives who lack the skills to answer their inquiry.
• When asked what they would most like to see companies deploy to improve service, 40 percent chose human service, but more than half of consumers chose at least one new communication channel among their top choices. More than 18 percent selected as their first choice better integration of communication channels, 16 percent chose enriched content such as video, and 16 percent said Web assistants or avatars.
• More than 86 percent of consumers defined proactive engagement as a strong benefit when stuck on the Web or in some form of self-service.
Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction at Ovum, said the difference between delivering exceptional customer service and merely providing acceptable service is pronounced in this survey. “Differentiating on service, especially in service-centric industries, such as finance and telecommunications, is how enterprises can retain customers in today’s challenging business climate.”
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OPT takeaways:
- a mix of service channels is beneficial, but they must work together in a cohesive, well-considered process
- a proactive approach in certain cases can be a game-changer
- differentiation on service is again confirmed as a key success factor in customer experience management and competitive strategy.
Our CE360™ suite of Customer Experience Management Services may be of interest to you in this regard.
destinationCRM.com: 5 Recession-Busting Customer Service Strategies March 9, 2009
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research, OnProcess.Tags: business strategies in a downturn, Customer Experience, Customer Experience Management, customer service, Customer Service in a downturn, economic downturn
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destinationCRM.com: 5 Recession-Busting Customer Service Strategies
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More on the theme of boosting customer service and the customer experience, especially in this economic downturn. A Forrester Research report is framed in the article.
I found this quote particularly telling:
A major issue Petouhoff finds with many companies is that the c-level executives do not realize just how important customer service is to the bottom line.
Really?!
The article quotes the report further, highlighting five action steps to be taken:
Organizations looking to make the most of what customer service can offer in a poor economy must first lay a foundation before bolting on additional software, according to the report. Petouhoff recommends a five-step process, in which software evaluation is the final leg:
- Reject the old paradigms that treat a contact center as nothing more than a cost center.
- Demand ownership of the customer experience.
- Listen to your customers as you create your strategy.
- Conduct a gap analysis of your customer service offering and then implement best practices to address those gaps.
- Evaluate software with customer experience as the top goal for a business case.
Note that software is last in the list, purposefully. We like items 1 & 4 in particular. Hey — this IS our blog after all — we don’t sell software, we sell solutions and beneficial outcomes.
–sk
Focus on the Customer and Win in the Downturn December 12, 2008
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Experience Management, Customer Understanding Research, OnProcess.Tags: Customer Experience, customer experience assessment, Customer Experience Management, downturn strategies, focus on the customer, strategies for managing in economic downturn
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It seems obvious enough, but when things get tight and cuts loom, sometimes it’s important to take a moment and remember what you can’t afford to forget.
Here’s a good article from InsideCRM.com:
Every economic downturn in history has inevitably been followed by an upturn, so embracing a good customer strategy during a slump will greatly increase your chances of still being in business when the recovery comes around. Ultimately, a recession can actually help differentiate companies and their service propositions. It is therefore worth making the case that cutting into customer-service spend is not necessarily the right option.
More at: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/focus-customer-win-downturn-111808/
Critical to this approach is knowing what areas of your customer experience are delivering value and which are hurting you. Need more visibility into customer-service related issues at this critical juncture? You may want to talk to us about our proactive customer experience management programs.
–sk
Does a Pleasant Tone Really Matter? October 17, 2008
Posted by OnProcess Technology in Customer Experience Management, OnProcess.Tags: Customer Experience, Customer Experience Management, Duarte Esteireiro, Impact of Pleasant Tone on Satisfaction, Tone of Voice
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In basic terms, being nice to customers is good for business. We all know that! Right?
If you’re a skeptic like me, hard numbers are the best way to support any theory. With that said, I have some exciting news.
Recently, we sampled over 1,300 customers and asked them to rate the tone and courtesy of our representatives. The majority of the customers that were sampled had expressed some level of dissatisfaction and we wanted to determine if a positive customer experience would have any impact on the their overall impression. At the end of the survey we asked customers if they would recommend the service and this is what we found:
Positive Impact of Pleasant Tone of Voice
As the theory would suggest, if the customer felt that they received an outstanding level of customer service, they were very likely to recommend the service regardless of their prior experience. As the customer’s impression of our tone declined so did the likelihood that they would recommend the service.
In business, mistakes will happen but customers are very willing to forgive and forget as long as they feel like their issue is taken seriously. We understand that you can’t please everyone every time but by making a solid effort to deliver superior customer service, you are more likely to retain that customer.
–Duarte Esteireiro
