Engage Customer September 2013

engage customer ISSUE TWELVE I SEPTEMBER 2013

WHY ENGAGEMENT IS THE KEY TO BUSINESS EXCELLENCE NEW WORLD OF OUTSOURCING: Revealed in the Big Interview Customers have better technology than organisations - exclusive report on mobile engagement

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evolution of voice of the customer February 6 2014 Customers are playing an increasingly important strategic role in the development of organisations’ services and products across channels and the Voice of The Customer is critical to the development of customer engagement strategies. Strategies around customer feedback and feeding back on feedback, closing the feedback loop, are business critical issues and the VoC marketplace is set for rapid omnichannel growth.

This Directors Forum will examine the key challenges and issues facing customer experience leaders in the evolution of their Voice of The Customer strategies as part of an overarching employee and customer engagement approach.

Venue: The Hatton, 51-53 Hatton Garden London, WC1N 8HN Time:

09:00 – 17:00

Date:

Thursday February 6th 2014

Delegates will learn: • How world class organisations are successfully implementing voice of the customer and customer feedback strategies to improve customer service and enhance customer loyalty • How focussing on taking a holistic view of customers can improve your customer engagement and measurement strategies and gain competitive advantage • How the proliferation of customer feedback and measurement channels including social media and increasingly mobile is changing how organisations interact with their customers across those channels • The latest trends in the relationships between organisations and their customers as the voice of the customer plays an increasingly pivotal role in service and product development • The performance and profitability benefits that can accrue from the customer insights gained from effective feedback/measurement/voice of the customer strategies • How organisations who implement strategies that enable them to feedback positively to customers on the feedback they receive can gain market share and boost the bottom line

For sponsorship and promotional information contact Nick Rust on T: +44 (0) 1932 506500 M: +44 (0) 7968 416007 E: nick@engagecustomer.com #engageforums Engage Customers Forums are organised by

www.engagecustomer.com

Register http://vocdf.eventbrite.co.uk

a word from the editor

Steve Hurst, Editorial Director Customer Engagement Network @stevieboy6

WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE OF

engage customer

Our new magazine and website branding designed to reflect more accurately activities of the highly respected and independent Customer Engagement Network as we build up to our second Customer Engagement Summit in November Four years after launching the Customer Engagement Network, owner ICT Communications Ltd is re-launching as Engage Customer Ltd, and at the same time strengthening its senior management team with the addition of a new sales director.

The re-launch as Engage Customer coincides with the development of a fresh corporate identity, a new website www.engagecustomer.com and the renaming of the highly respected and well established Customer Engagement magazine as Engage Customer - with this issue being the first under the new masthead.

This strategic decision is seen as a natural progression for the Customer Engagement Network as it further develops its expanding roster of activities in the marketplace both online and offline. This includes our hugely successful Directors Forums, our Customer Engagement Summit, the new Engage Customer Awards, webinars, round tables debates, plus magazine and newsletter publishing both in print and online,

Employee and customer engagement the key At the same time industry stalwart Nick Rust has joined the new company where he will work alongside managing director Chris Wood and editorial director Steve Hurst who founded the Customer Engagement Network under the ICT Communications banner back in the summer of 2009.

Nick has over a decade of experience in the customer space and brings a new skills set to Engage Customer. Commenting on his arrival Chris Wood says “Nick is a highly respected professional in the employee and customer engagement arena and we are delighted to have him on board at what is an exciting time for our development.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for Engage Customer as the marketplace moves ever closer to our founding mantra around the need for organisations to cut across their internal silos and take an

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holistic view of their customers both internal and external and across all channels.

“We remain firm believers in the critical business link between employee engagement, customer engagement, performance and profitability.”

Customer Engagement Summit ‘best event of the year’ And following on from the huge success of our inaugural Customer Engagement Summit last year - hailed by delegates as the best joined up employee and customer engagement event of 2012 - it gives me great pleasure to announce our second Customer Engagement Summit in London on Thursday November 28.

Building on the success of last year’s Customer Engagement Summit we are promising an event stronger event this time around with exciting added features such as live performance and a roster of world class case studies that are simply not to be missed.

And in addition to our unrivalled programme covering every aspect of customer and employee engagement across all channels, offline, online, social and mobile, there will be plenty of peer- topeer networking opportunities at this year’s Summit including a post event drinks party.

Delegates will be rubbing shoulders with close on 500 senior employee and customer engagement professionals at the Summit to be held once again at the prestigious Park Plaza Victoria Hotel in Central London on Thursday November 28 So if you want to find out more about the employee and customer engagement strategies of organisations such as Lego, BT Retail, LV=, Argos, Starbucks, Lloyds Banking Group, Virgin Media, Nationwide, Boots, British Gas, o2, Siemens and EON then please register for the Summit now.

I look forward to seeing you there.

https://cesummit2013.eventbrite.co.uk ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

Visit our

new look website Join engage customer today Register FREE now and enjoy a host of beneďŹ ts

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contents

News Beat

6-7

ICT communications re-launches as Engage Customer.The rise and rise of contact centre outsourcing . Engagement gives huge boost to performance and profits. Rapid growth forecast for both VoC and CEM technologies

Cover Story – why engagement is the key to business excellence

contents

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Dr. Jamie Burton and Joe Goasdoué report on the findings from ground breaking new research commissioned by the British Quality Foundation into contemporary business practices and how four leading companies from different sectors are achieving outstanding levels of performance through employee and customer engagement

Webchat and the online service revolution

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Fraida Silver takes a look at the rise and rise of webchat as a customer engagement channel enjoyed by both customers and those delivering the service

The Big Interview – the brave new world of outsourcing

13-15

One of the most impressive presentations at our Public Sector Directors’ Forum came from James Milner, who described the outsourced procurement exercise he led for BBC TV Licensing. Steve Hurst asks the questions

The evolution of Voice of the Customer

16-17

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is no longer a distant rumble. Its arrival has been heralded across the enterprise as a key strategy to deliver differentiation based on the quality of customer experience says Karine Del Moro

Customer communication disconnect and how to solve it

20-23

Steve Deaville looks at the new challenges facing organisations as technology runs amok and the dangers of not joining up customer service across new channels such as Instagram Video

Mobile customer service the game changer

24-26

Paul Crutchley explains why he believes education and collaboration are the keys to mobile customer engagement success

Yes customers do expect more for less

27-29

A new Interactive Intelligence surveys reveal customers expect more for less.

David Paulding takes an in depth analysis of the key findings

Breaking the technology deadlock

30-31

In this case study special we examine how hosted technologies are giving one outsourcing business the freedom to innovate

Mobile customer engagement on fast forward

32-34

The lightning pace of change is charging organisations to rapidly evolve their mobile engagement strategies

The Final Word – why employees need to be engaged rather than happy

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Being happy and fulfilled is just not enough for employees today says Colin Shaw - they also have to be engaged and feel valued

To join Engage Customer (free membership) and receive weekly Alerts, Digital Magazines and Invitations to the Directors Forums go to: www.engagecustomer.com Editorial Director: Steve Hurst steve@engagecustomer.com T: 07545 088407 Sales Director: Nick Rust nick@engagecustomer.com T: 01932 506500 Managing Director: Chris Wood chris@engagecustomer.com T: 01932 340367 5

Editorial Advisory Board Dr Guy Fielding, Richard Sedley, Rod Butcher, Hugh Griffiths, Marcus Hickman, Karine Del Moro, David Cottam, James Rapinac, Crispin Manners. Professor Moira Clarke, Professor Katie Truss, Mike Havard engage customer magazine is published by engage customer Ltd, the organisers of the Customer Engagement Directors Forums. ©engage customer ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

ICT communications re-launches as Engage Customer Engagement gives huge boost to performance and profits A ground breaking long term new study reveals the true worth of employee engagement. Higher employee engagement resulted in 2.5 times greater growth in stock price during a three-year period, according to the research by Quantum Workplace.

The report compares a sample of publicly traded, highly engaged organizations with an average of 75.6 percent engaged employees to a group of publicly traded organizations with an average of only 54.8 percent engaged employees.

Examining a variety of measures of financial success, the study shows the correlation between employee engagement and the bottom line. Other findings from the report include: • More engaged organizations experienced greater revenue growth.

• Organizations offering opportunities for career development were more likely to see greater financial success.

• Highly engaged organizations experienced 11.74 percent quarterly revenue growth compared to a 6.30 percent decline in revenue at organizations with less engagement.

• The greatest difference in engagement between the two groups was in the area of making employees feel valued.

“The two most important organizational aptitudes today are innovation and resilience—and culture is the single biggest driver of both,” said Greg Harris, CEO of Quantum Workplace.

“Therefore, the link to wealth creation should not be a surprise.”

The report also shares insight on how engagement trended with the Dow, how organizations differed in the areas of leadership and retention, and how the groups differed in terms of price to sales ratio, stock price growth, and revenue.

Four years after launching the Customer Engagement Network, owner ICT Communications is relaunching as Engage Customer, and at the same time strengthening its senior management team with the addition of a new sales director.

This strategic decision is seen as a natural progression for the Customer Engagement Network as it further develops its expanding roster of activities in the marketplace both online and offline. This includes our hugely successful Directors Forums, our Customer Engagement Summit, the new Engage Customer Awards, webinars, round tables debates, plus magazine and newsletter publishing both in print and online, The re-launch as Engage Customer coincides with the development of a fresh corporate identity, a new website www.engagecustomer.com and the renaming of the highly respected Customer Engagement magazine as Engage Customer.

At the same time industry stalwart Nick Rust is joining the company as sales director working alongside managing director Chris Wood and editorial director Steve Hurst who founded the Customer Engagement Network under

the ICT Communications banner back in the summer of 2009.

Nick has over a decade of experience in the customer space and brings a new skills set to Engage Customer.

Commenting on his arrival Chris Wood says “Nick is a highly respected and successful professional in the employee and customer engagement arena and we are delighted to have him on board at what is an exciting time in our development.”

“In terms of our new corporate identity we feel strongly that the name Engage Customer really does what it says on the tin and is a much more accurate descriptor in terms of our activities now and moving forward.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for Engage Customer as the marketplace moves ever closer to our founding mantra around the need for organisations to cut across their internal silos and take an holistic view of their customers, both internal and external, and across all channels. We remain firm believers in the critical business link between employee engagement, customer engagement, performance and profitability.”

Nick Rust says: “I am delighted to be joining Engage Customer at this pivotal stage in its development. We have an exciting and innovative roster of events both for the rest of this year, into 2014 and beyond and I can’t wait to get my teeth into the job in hand.”

For more details of Engage Customer and the activities of its Customer Engagement Network go to www.engagecustomer.com

To view the complete report, 11 Reasons to Be Bullish About Employee Engagement Impacting Financial Success, visit http://www.quantumworkplace.com/BeBullish

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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news beat

Rapid growth forecast for both VoC and CEM technologies Spending on Voice of the Customer and Customer Experience Management technologies is set to rocket as organisations increasingly realise that understanding and listening to their customers is the way forward.

The brave new world of contact centre outsourcing Clients of global CCO engagements increasingly are looking beyond cost savings to more growth-oriented value, according to a new report issued by Everest Group, an advisory and research firm on global services.

Instead, buyers want a partnership with their service providers to unlock new forms of value including customer retention and growth while unlocking new business opportunity from customer data and engaging customers via nonvoice channels, especially social media.

The report, Contact Center Outsourcing (CCO) – Annual Report 2013: Focus on Customer Experience Management, is designed to assist key stakeholders (buyers, service providers, and technology providers) in understanding the changing dynamics of the CCO market.

The report will help them identify trends and provides comprehensive coverage of the global CCO market. This includes detailed analysis of market size and growth, buyer adoption trends, CCO value proposition & solution characteristics, and service provider landscape.

The market for CCO globally grew at 78 percent in 2012, reaching US$65-70 billion, a steady rise from the lows seen in 2009. The global contact center

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spend stands at US$300-350 billion, of which third-party outsourcing accounts for 20 percent.Data for the report came from two proprietary Everest Group sources.

The first is a proprietary database of more than 400 CCO contracts, exclusive of shared services or Global In-house Centers (GICs). The second is the firm’s coverage of more than 20 CCO service providers including Aditya Birla Minacs, Aegis, Alorica, FirstSource, Genpact, HP, Mahindra Satyam, NCO-APAC, Serco, Sitel, Sutherland, Sykes, TCS, Teleperformance, Teletech, Transcom Worldwide, Webhelp, WNS and Xerox.

As the global economy has shifted towards growth, the customer care function is once again viewed as a strategic operational area.

“A maturing CCO value proposition has moved beyond cost savings and labor arbitrage to include support of business growth,” said Katrina Menzigian, vice president at Everest Group. “As a consequence, we’re seeing forwardthinking service providers and savvy clients build new contracting relationships where service providers identify and deliver new sources of value. It’s an important trend that’s driving the high single-digit growth we’re now seeing and expect to continue for the next several years.”

The growth of VOC and CEM is one of the hot topics in the market after CRM. The reason behind the market growth is that, enterprises are going to apply customer centric approach and henceforth they have to reach all customer touch points to understand customer feedback, behaviour, and expectations and analyze them by using CEM analytics, to derive effective insight for supporting business decisions.

CEM is a solution through which many organizations interact with their customers to understand their experiences related to specific products and services. CEM is done through different tools and techniques such as EFM, web analytics, text analysis, and speech analytics. It is the revolution step to connect the organizations with their customers. CEM blends customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, relationship management, user experience, experiential marketing, and customer centricity.

CEM metrics are performance indicators which help to understand how the company is adopting different tools to accomplish customer needs.

Companies rely on delighted customers to accomplish market growth while unhappy customers defect brand names and negatively impact business. A company that proactively plans for future growth should invest today to understand its customer experiences. CEM, with the ability to collect VOC and measure and report customer experience data, fills this gap effectively.

The global Customer Experience Management market is expected to grow from $2.68 billion in 2012 to $6.61 billion by 2017, at an estimated CAGR of 19.8% between 2012 and 2017.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

Dr. Jamie Burton and Joe Goasdoué report on the findings from ground breaking new research commissioned by the British Quality Foundation into contemporary business practices and how four leading companies from different sectors are achieving outstanding levels of performance through employee and customer engagement

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The research covers four key inter-dependent areas that are core to the EFQM Excellence Model, a tool that improves business performance and profitability: ‘Adding Value for Customers’ (Customers), ‘Leading with Vision, Inspiration and Integrity’ (Leadership), ‘Succeeding through the Talent of People’ (People) and ‘Managing Processes with Agility’ (Processes).

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cover story

dly i p a r e r sa n o i t a t c e ical p g x o e l o r e n h l tec ustom a c i , t e n l er i e p h n s o o w r p e p x h e d an ing e w “All t v i o l v l r o u s f nd t g a a n i h e l v t l b s i o v n x e fle , c izatio i n m a a g r n o ds” y e d e e h t n s T ’ o s . r t m e om the men t p s e r o u l c a e r t v i a e e d se th to th o g h n t i e d b n spo will e r n i e l agi The organisations studied in the research are Boots UK, O2, Ricoh UK Products Ltd and Siemens Industry Automation and Drive Technologies [IA&DT]).

data collection at the four studied companies. The areas identified represent the areas where the most important new research activity was identified and may at times over-lap.

The British Quality Foundation (BQF) is the community for every business seeking insights, tools and experiences to improve itself. It provides companies with help and advice to improve their performance, particularly around the Model. It undertook this research project to support UK businesses by providing them with access to leading edge insights and experiences from excellent companies. Unfortunately, UK businesses such as these are in a minority, and by showcasing their examples of excellence, the BQF wants to challenge the majority to aspire to greater levels of achievement.

In terms of Adding Value for Customers, the key contemporary topics identified were Customer Experience, Customer Engagement and Customer Effort the latter of which was addressed in issue eleven of Customer Engagement in June.

Multiple Leadership topics were identified and these were often inter-related: Level 5, Distributed, Trust-based, Creative, Positive, Authentic, Visionary and Inspirational, Discursive Leadership, Sustainability and Positive Turbulence and Crisis Management.

For ‘People’ the topics identified were: Employer Branding, Employee Innovation and Employee Engagement. The contemporary topics identified for ‘Processes’ were: Process Quality, Social Media and Social CRM, Next Best Offer: Intelligent Targeting and Open Sourcing / Crowd Sourcing.

The research focused on emerging areas of business excellence: new ideas, concepts and practices identified in extensive reviews of current practitioner and academic literature. In some cases these practices can be small things, appearing almost inconsequential to some, but combined together and driven by an uncompromising and consistent strategy, their accumulation gives the organizations involved an edge, something for which every business should be searching and striving.

The studied companies have all achieved excellence, doing so through a commitment and passion to be the best. They are outstanding organizations that lead their sectors in market share and customer satisfaction, have consistently high employee satisfaction levels, have achieved sustained growth and high performance, and have won an abundance of awards in recognition of their success.

Four areas of focus The research team at MBS led by Jamie Burton identified key academic leads for the four areas and conducted extensive reviews of the latest academic and practitioner thinking in these four areas. This was conducted in order to identify the scope for

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Lessons to be learned As expected with case study research, the findings are rich, extensive, inter-related and complex. Some key highlights include:

Adding Value for Customers • Organizations need to recognise that the customers’ experience of their offer may extend beyond the ‘visible’ interaction with the firm and the ‘visible’ consumption of the product. When striving to improve customer experience, manufacturing organizations need to consider how they develop new services to offer solutions for customers.

• Dialogue is key for understanding customer needs and providing solutions for those needs, which engage customers.

Simplifying customer engagement measures, such as the Net Promoter Score, are useful for benchmarking but not always effective at generating understanding when communicating about customer engagement internally.

• In terms of customer effort, all four companies recognised the need to make their organizations easy to do business with, in specific areas that could provide the most value for the customer.

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In search of excellence

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

“It requires unc ompromising co nsistency, tota commitment f l rom every Boar customer agend d Member to th a, and the abil e ity to really und what this mean erstand s for people, cli mate and proce sses”

Leading with Vision, Inspiration and Integrity

Dr. Jamie Burton is a senior lecturer in Marketing and Research Director for the Customer Management Leadership Group at Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester http://www.mbs.ac.uk/research/people/profiles/jburton

• The research identified practices designed to deliver effective distributed leadership via culture (climate) development, personal reviews, mapping behaviours to staff developed behaviour templates and mapping behaviours of individuals to organizational strategy maps.

• Sustainability leadership was identified at two levels: leadership succession planning and environmental protection. The latter was achieved through developing relationships with a network of appropriate organizations, developing innovations in order to minimise environmental impact, and developing and sustaining emotional engagement of employees.

• In the current economic climate, the importance of transparent communication was highlighted as key for leadership in times of positive turbulence. Leaders need to be seen and be more engaged in dialogue with employees at turbulent times. They also need to focus on increasing agility and flexibility during periods of turbulence, linking Leadership with the Managing Processes with Agility theme.

• Authentic and ethical leadership practices were identified and in some cases involved looking beyond the ‘normal’ markets of the organization in order to engage with a wider group of stakeholders. Authenticity is dependent upon an organizational foundation involving the other three themes: having the right People, enabled by the right Processes in order to develop the right culture through which to Add Value for the Customer.

Succeeding through the Talent of People

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Joe Goasdoué is the Chief Executive of The British Quality Foundation www.bqf.org.uk, @TheBQF

This theme was clearly co-dependent upon the themes of Leadership and Process: • In order to create an excellent employer brand, firms should think of potential employees as customers and brand advocates. Hiring for attitudes that fit organizational values, but that might also bring new ideas, was seen throughout the case studies.

• Employee innovation should be encouraged through the development of a climate of empowerment and engagement. Examples of this in practice include the use of the Cloud to facilitate sharing, working on and processing information across teams, and recognition of the importance of accessing information externally through interaction with other bodies.

• The studied organizations encourage a climate of engagement by focusing on keeping things simple and on communication about how this links to the overall brand. They focused on developing trust through concentrating on achieving outputs, rather than getting hung up on how people work and there was evidence of increasing flexibility on working conditions.

• There was however a note of caution: successful engagement can mean that staff do not leave, pushing churn levels dangerously low so that there is a lack of new ideas entering an organization.

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cover story

, d n a r b r e y o l p m nt e e l l e c x e n a e t a e as s e e y o l p m e “In order to cr l a i tent o p f o k n i h t d l tes” a c o v d firms shou a d n a r b customers and

Managing Processes with Agility • Improving process quality at the case companies involved: (i) understanding customers as the starting point and (ii) empowering People to develop dynamic flexible Processes around customer needs. To enable this, the companies developed performance leadership, reducing unnecessary work processes and used lean improvement tools. Key process quality improvement steps identified included customer centricity, strategy mapping and use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

• Social Customer Relationship Marketing (SCRM) was important for both B2C organizations, but played a less significant role for the B2B companies. The case studies suggest that organizations should perhaps be cautious in developing a social media presence. The rules of the game are fluid and still emergent and there is potential for brand damage because social media is not ‘space’ that a company can control.

• In terms of the Next Best Offer, the research identifies best practice as Intelligent Targeting which can be delivered in a number of different ways, depending upon context; utilizing database technology and/or employee observation and instinct.

individual directors’ personal objective statements. Developing a transparent culture of high trust is essential and all levels of management must consistently live the values of the organization.

All the while, customer expectations are rapidly evolving following exponential technological development. The organizations that survive and prosper will be those that are the most dynamic, flexible and agile in responding to their customers’ needs.

The full report “How to achieve and sustain outstanding levels of performance” is available in 5 volumes from the BQF website: www.bqf.org.uk/research. Each volume contains rich depth and detail that will act as key learning tools for senior managers across most organizations. In developing this article the authors would like to acknowledge the work of the co-authors on the original report, particularly Jan Kitshoff of KitshoffGleaves.com

So what does this mean for other organizations?

Unfortunately there is no quick fix to achieving excellence.

It involves developing a holistic strategic view of: • How an organization’s leadership team lead and manage its people so as to keep them engaged and empowered • How to make its processes more agile, so that it is flexible and dynamic in its approach to adding value for the customer.

It also requires uncompromising consistency, total commitment from every Board Member to the customer agenda, and the ability to really understand what this means for people, climate and processes. Leaders must apportion responsibility for customer management at Board level and document it in

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ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

big interview

Fraida Silver is Marketing Director of Firstsource Solutions www.firstsource.com

WEBCHAT AND THE ONLINE SERVICE REVOLUTION Fraida Silver takes a look at the rise and rise of webchat as a customer engagement channel enjoyed by both customers and those delivering the service Most industries are now firmly focused on driving down costs. In this challenging environment, service sectors such as telecoms, financial services, retail, utilities etc, are aiming to reduce costs by encouraging customers towards online self service.

If customers have a particular problem that needs expert advice, websites that offer detailed FAQs, as well as customer forums where customers communicate with each other can help to solve problems without the involvement of a live agent. But self service can leave customers frustrated. For every customer who satisfactorily self-serves and achieves the answer to their question or completes their purchase, there is a significant number who abandon their transaction.

Web chat – communicating with a customer service agent via an online dialogue in real time – creates a positive experience for customers, and can reduce call and email volumes while at the same time encouraging and supporting customers to self-serve.

Web chat has been around for a number of years now, and early adopters have, over time, learned important lessons about how to use it most effectively.

Webchat buttons need to be positioned in the optimum places on the website to support customers who want to self-serve. Also, intelligent rules can now identify customers who become stalled in their transaction and who are likely to abandon the transaction without swift assistance.

Boost to first time resolution A clear advantage of using web chat to solve customer queries is that it can increase first time resolution to problems. Previously, questions posed via a website may have required several email exchanges before the root of a problem could be established and a solution provided. For one of our telecoms clients, we have seen web chat improve First Contact Resolution (FCR) around questions relating to bills, packages and technical support to over 80%.

Working with one of the UK’s largest broadband providers, we have also found that webchat received an 87% positive customer satisfaction score, helped increase the client’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) to + 37, and helped generate £3m of sales during a three month period. In addition to helping bring about CSAT improvements, web chat is a major platform in many companies’ call and email deflection strategies; its objective is not only to drive down costs but to resolve customer queries faster.

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There is no doubt that staff who are handling multiple chats simultaneously, as opposed to one phone call at a time, are able to improve the speed at which customer queries can be dealt with as well as significantly bringing down their cost. Research from LivePerson indicates that sales generated through web chat cost 60% less than phone sales.

Webchat equals sales conversions The latest evidence also shows that webchat can deliver a high rate of sales conversions – a prized goal for many organisations.

Research from LivePerson indicates that website visitors who chat are three times more likely to buy. This is because customers who choose to engage in web chat do not view it as a sales-related conversation, but as a conversation with an expert assisting them to find what they need.

Consumers, when deciding on a purchase, may have a query about a particular piece of information and queries can often be clarified and resolved quickly via an online conversation enabling the purchase to be secured instantly. One of the key benefits of the latest webchat software is that it uses intelligent rules to ensure that webchat agents don’t engage with people who would make a purchase anyway, only with those who require assistance before purchasing.

Our own research shows that customer acceptance of webchat grew by 15% between 2009 and 2012. Our research also revealed that the acceptance of proactive invitations to engage in webchat grew from 45% in 2009 to 66% in 2012. This is a universal trend as ContactBabel research published in June shows. The research shows that webchat is one of the fastest-growing technologies used by US contact centres, with 18% of survey respondents saying they intend to implement web chat over the next 12 months, the highest of any of the 13 contact centre technologies surveyed in the report.

Customer insight The greater acceptance of webchat means that smart companies can use it to learn more about their customers. Webchat software can now be easily integrated with customer intelligence platforms to gain crucial customer insights into issues such as how their customers make purchasing decisions, and when and where during the purchasing chain they are most receptive to influence.

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big interview

“Quite simply, the more revenue they collect for us – while still delivering a customer experience that complements the BBC’s brand – the more they stand to benefit. This is a new principal in outsourcing that is being adopted to create more commercially focused relationships that focus the OSP on ‘performance’ rather than ‘activity’” 13

One of the most impressive presentations at our Public Sector Directors’ Forum came from James Milner, who described the outsourced procurement exercise he led for BBC TV Licensing. The exercise was heralded by the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) as the most successful public sector outsourcing project of 2012.

Steve Hurst asked James to explain why First off James tell us a bit about your background and your role as head of Contracts and programmes at the BBC prior to joining Ember PS? I’ve worked in the public sector for more than twenty years, both as a consultant bidding for and winning work from government agencies and within public sector organisations leading procurement teams. During my time at BBC TV Licensing I led a major procurement and change programme that has released £220 million in cost savings for the BBC. The deal was absolutely critical to the BBC’s future. After all TV Licensing is responsible for collecting £3.7 billion of license fee revenue every year, the vast majority of

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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James Milner is Director of Ember Public Service Solutions www.emberservices.com

THE NEW WORLD OF OUTSOURCING

Since then I have joined the customer management consultancy, Ember, to set up and lead a new public sector consultancy practice, Ember Public Sector Solutions (Ember PSS). Our aim is to help government organisations procure more effectively and to secure real commercial advantage from their outsourced relationships.

What were the biggest challenges presented by the renewal of the TV Licensing Contract when you were at the BBC? We knew from the outset that the world had changed – both for the BBC and for consumers – since the last procurement in 2002.

In those days the phone was still the dominant channel but, since then, the internet has transformed the way consumers wish to interact. Today 60% of all customer interactions and 80% of all payments are made by non-voice channels, which meant that, in the last four years of the old contract, calls to our contact centre halved from twelve to six million a year. This new procurement exercise gave us the opportunity to realise the cost benefits of this shift and to build a wholly new delivery capability, more in tune with today’s rapidly evolving technology environment.

At the same time, the BBC was under increased economic pressure. In 2010 the license fee was frozen until the end of 2016 and the corporation had to take on the additional cost of running the BBC World Service, BBC Monitoring and S4C. With more demands on our income, we had to maximise revenue and, with a license fee freeze in place, we could only do that by tackling evasion.

So, in this procurement exercise, we looked for a provider who could not only administer the license fee programme, take payments and provide customer service. We also looked for a partner that could help build revenue by tackling evasion.

We took a radical approach to achieving our objectives. In our new contract our provider’s remuneration is directly linked to improvements in our collections performance. Quite simply, the more revenue they collect for us – while still delivering a customer experience that complements the BBC’s brand – the more they stand to benefit. This is a new principal in outsourcing that is being adopted to create more commercially focused relationships that ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

focus the OSP on ‘performance’ rather than ‘activity’.

The new contract has been in force for a year now – have you been able to measure its success or otherwise?

The new contract has very simple measurable success criteria that combine collections performance, mentioned above, with cost, quality and service continuity. The contract is well on track to deliver its promised £220 million worth of cost savings. That’s partly because we are leveraging lower cost self-service channels, but also because we brought two contracts together, combining customer management with revenue collection. That’s done more than reduce cost – it has opened up opportunities for revenue growth. License fee evasion stands at about 5% and has been static for some time. TV Licensing’s new partner is committed to deliver a significant revenue enhancement over the life of the contract by lowering that percentage. To do it they are introducing sophisticated collection strategies, underpinned by the use of advanced analytics. That revenue increase, combined with the projected cost savings is giving the BBC a financial gain, substantially greater than first anticipated.

When you presented at the Customer Engagement in the Public Sector Directors’ Forum you showed a forecast (from Aberdeen) that public sector outsourcing would increase from £20billion last year to £100bn by 2015 - that’s a staggering increase - is it credible in your view?

It’s certainly a dramatic increase and, though we are certainly seeing a clear trend in that direction, only time will tell. One thing is absolutely certain; public sector organisations are looking to outsource as a means of managing through their current cost constraints. Simple processes have already been outsourced so, in my view, more complex, mission critical processes will follow.

Procuring those more complex services and managing the outsourced relationships that will deliver them requires a level of procurement expertise many public sector organisations – by their own admission – lack. Francis Maude himself has recognised this problem and responded to it by setting up a Commissioning Academy with the aim of improving the skills of 2,000 public sector procurement professionals over the next three years.

Certainly at Ember we are being inundated with requests from organisations that need help with procurement exercises. Our aim is to help them strike a good deal and also to pass on the skills, techniques and approaches we’ve honed over the last twenty

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the BBC’s funding, and uses an outsourced business model to do it. We transformed that model to improve our ability to collect that revenue over a multitude of channels.

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“OSP’s have been talking about transformation for decades but there are, in fact, very few examples of real transformation out there and none where the credit can be given to the outsourcer alone”

years. My ambition is to make outsourcing work for the public sector; to make it easier and cheaper for organisations to deliver the public services citizens have a right to expect.

Finally everybody likes lists and you mentioned in your presentation 10 golden nuggets of outsourcing – could we have them please?

You said in your presentation that there always has to be a Plan B in outsourcing partnerships – can you amplify what you mean by that?

Outsourcing contracts are typically of five years duration or more.

That’s a long time to be stuck in a partnership that’s not performing. The perceived wisdom has been that there’s not much you can do except sit out the contract term. However, I would say that it is always wise to take action to fix the problem, even if this means the negotiation of quite drastic changes to the contractual terms. Outsourcing relationships often flounder because the contract has been poorly set up in the first instance and isn’t benefitting either party. We often find ourselves called upon to help get outsourcing relationships back on track, brokering a new relationship based on shared objectives, clear governance and robust controls.

Of course, they are part of the best practice approach that Ember had developed over twenty years.

1.

Ensure that the operation is fit for outsourcing: Make sure processes are clearly articulated, and that key performance indicators are defined.

2.

Invest time to articulate your requirements: Define the customer experience you want to deliver and the cost targets you aim to meet. Share that with your OSP and make sure they have a realistic plan to meet your expectations.

3.

Incentivise to achieve business outcomes: Link your OSP’s remuneration to the achievement of the business outcomes you need to achieve – better revenue, lower cost, higher citizen satisfaction.

4.

If all attempts at mediation do finally fail, you should consider withdrawing from the contract and, if you’ve established a Plan B – a well prepared exit and transfer plan – well in advance, you won’t find that prospect quite so intimidating.

Make sure those desired outcomes are clear, unambiguous and measurable: Set clear goals and monitor progress diligently.

5.

Outsourcing seems to be undergoing a revolution – commentators are now using ‘business transformation’ and ‘outsourcing’ in the same breath - what’s your take on that?

Ensure reward, linked to objectives, are appropriate: Ensure that the remuneration rewards you offer reflect the value of the OSP achievement to your business. For example, if your OSP achieves a 5% cost reduction, that financial benefit can be shared.

6.

Allocate risk to the party with the greatest ability to influence it: Different areas of risk are best managed by the OSP and others by the client. For example, inflation risk may be best managed by the OSP as they have greatest exposure to salary costs.

7.

Retain expert knowledge in your organisation: Make sure that your team maintains and intimate understanding of how the service works, only then will they be able to evaluate is performance accurately.

8.

Ensure your contract is flexible and future proof: Good contracts act as a guide rather than a straightjacket. Build in review periods that will allow you to refocus and reshape your operation without financial penalty.

9.

Build sustainable governance and structures: Ensure you have the management disciplines in place to keep your partnership on track; the procurement itself is only the first step in the journey you will take together.

OSP’s have been talking about transformation for decades but there are, in fact, very few examples of real transformation out there and none where the credit can be given to the outsourcer alone. Transformation is hard work and nobody understands your operation and its challenges as well as you do, so expecting a third party to come in and transform it is a tall order! Outsourcing works best when you hand over a known, stable process, allow the OSP to run it through a couple of business cycles and then work in partnership with them to identify and grasp the transformation opportunities that exist. Your OSP will certainly be able to bring expertise, resources and, possibly, technology to the table, but transformation must be a joint effort. Again, the nature of the contract is key. Most commit the outsourcer to simply replicate an existing operation, usually at a lower cost. It is pointless in that case to chastise them if they do that and no more. However, if, like the contract I negotiated for BBC TV Licensing, the OPS is required and motivated to deliver real change they can be held accountable for doing so.

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10. Maintain a plan B at all times: Be prepared to call for rebrokering of the relationship or, if all else fails, a termination of the contract.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

“The incorporation of socalled ‘unstructured’ social media data alongside more structured feedback from a mature VoC programme is the best way to provide the more complete customer view that companies are looking for in the future”

THE EVOLUTION OF VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER Voice of the Customer (VoC) is no longer a distant rumble.

Its arrival has been heralded across the enterprise as a key strategy to deliver differentiation based on the quality of customer experience says Karine Del Moro

Looking back, it’s clear that initial discussions between technology, marketing and customer care service providers about the impact of VoC on customer engagement and loyalty in 2012 tended to focus on ‘how’ to capture the voice of the customer. The debate centred on a number of factors, including • The difference between ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’ • The benefits of adding indirect feedback to direct feedback and the technology available to do this • The emerging use of the mobile channel to facilitate ‘in the moment’ surveys’ • A growing awareness of the benefits of combining feedback from all channels in one reporting platform • The increasing realisation of the need for tighter integration between VoC with business systems.

In spite of budgetary restraints in 2013, it’s interesting to note that comprehensive VoC programmes have been implemented and that they are making a real difference to business. More significantly, that the debate is no longer just about tactics and technology.

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Karine Del Moro is VoC evangelist at Confirmit www.confirmit.com

The evolution of VoC over the past two years has resulted in a higher level discussion about driving change, empowering employees, insisting on creativity and demanding action across the enterprise. There are in my view five key opportunities for customer experience professionals as VoC continues to evolve.

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Establishing Customer Experience as a strategic business discipline Organisations that want to learn more about their customers in order to deliver a superior customer experience and increase revenue are, quite rightly, hugely attracted to the benefits of integrating large financial and operational data sets with customer and loyalty data. More and more executives now expect the analysis of this ‘big data’ to uncover predictions and improve decisions by tapping into the ‘context’ provided from other business systems. Customer experience practitioners are increasingly under the spotlight to demonstrate that their programmes can proactively drive business change. As a result, there is a real need to provide tangible and actionable insights in a way that enables key decision makers to act upon them in a timely and decisive manner. The boardroom is looking for definitive answers to questions such as “what is the value to my business of increasing satisfaction by 5%?” and it is increasingly falling to VoC professionals to provide these answers, using sophisticated reporting platforms and dashboards to provide real time data in a format that is readily understandable to business users.

2 Linking Customer and Employee Experience Companies with mature VoC programmes are already investigating and putting in place Voice of the Employee (VoE) programmes to drive employee satisfaction; gathering feedback at key moments of truth for the employee in order to empower, motivate and retain the most effective staff. What’s important to note however is the absolute determination to increase the link between VoC and VoE. In 2012 there was an increase in the number of organisations seeking comprehensive employee lifecycle data, but companies now want to do more than just collect job satisfaction scores or exit data. They want to better understand and directly impact customer engagement by improving employee engagement. As a result I expect that companies will increasingly put in place joint VoC/VoE initiatives to proactively seek employee insight about customer experiences. This new focus is more likely to gain insights from groups of customers that don’t typically respond to feedback invitations which will add an alternative, ‘indirect’ perspective that will also help to improve processes and increase customer experience in the long term.

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Understanding the customer journey across multiple channels Running a customer-centric business increasingly means changing your modus operandi to suit each individual customer, and avoiding a generic approach to service. Companies no longer set the rules for engagement; the customer does and the customer expects to interact with businesses across multiple channels, via the website, in store, on the phone, whenever it suits them. It is vital to monitor the experience customers receive across these different channels and enable them to provide feedback in the most appropriate way for that channel. In a world of over surveying, organisations are going to have to be much smarter and more targeted in how they collect data. Companies are recognising the need to offer a variety of interactive feedback channels to 17

collect data in a variety of ways. VoC programmes need to be a creative and dynamic experience that mirrors the best digital experiences. Going forward, VoC professionals will need to become even more efficient in designing, implementing and analysing comprehensive programmes that address a variety of delivery channels, timing cycles and customer types, without over saturating or boring their target audience.

4 Putting Mobile in the driving seat It’s obvious that the mobile channel is no longer a ‘nice to have’ from a general business perspective. It is simply essential for VoC programmes - enabling customers to complete VoC surveys on smart phones and tablets, as opposed to just desktops and laptops. Businesses need to deliver VoC and VoE programmes on mobile devices in order to gather feedback from time-pressed individuals. Mobile should be viewed not only as an essential channel for data collection, but also for reporting, as a way to further empower VoC professionals and business leaders to drive action from all types of feedback.

What this means for VoC programme designers is that survey structure and delivery methods will need to operate seamlessly across multiple channels – but especially mobile. Data collection methods will need to be optimised for smart phones and tablets, as more and more surveys are being opened and completed via this medium in ’cracks in the day‘, when people are commuting or during other downtime. If a survey does not render properly the first time opened, it is highly unlikely a respondent will return to the email/survey on a different medium, so the opportunity to collect feedback will be lost. Beyond mobile rendering, it is also crucial that mobile programmes be considered in their own right, with SMS and Apps proving very efficient and generating great response rates.

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Adding context to Social Media will deliver segmentation and customer profiling Unsurprisingly social media has continued to grow in popularity as a business tool but now companies that have deployed social media campaigns are looking to introduce more structure and discipline to the process of collecting, using and disseminating data gathered through this channel. Organisations have rightly started to move beyond a basic interest in ‘what is said’ via social media, to a more strategic need to segment and profile customers for marketing purposes. I think the incorporation of so-called ‘unstructured’ social media data alongside more structured feedback from a mature VoC programme is the best way to provide the more complete customer view that companies are looking for in the future. It may also provide quantifiable ROI about the value of investing in social media management in the long term.

The five key opportunities outlined here should not be viewed as an exhaustive list, but they definitely appear at the forefront of the 2013 VoC agenda for a number of organisations. The ability to tie all these trends to overall business priorities - and financial results – will as always be crucial to successful adoption and long-term, tangible benefits.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

r t e n m e o m 13 t s ge 20 u C a it BER g m EM ARK n E m NOV RIA P OTEL Su 28 VICTPOLAZAOHNDON

Engage at the ‘ employee enga

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The only joined-up customer experience event to drive customer and employee engagement solutions, performance and profitability across all channels Following the fantastic success of the inaugural Customer Engagement Summit last November the 2013 event will be held once again at the prestigious Victoria Plaza Hotel in Central London on Thursday November 28 - and it promises to be even better!

The programme of over 30 leading speakers will help delegates gain first hand insight into finding the best

solutions to challenges and opportunities around customer and employee relationships in a rapidly changing, volatile business environment.

The Summit will focus on the need for organisations to take a holistic view of their customers in order to drive business performance and profitability.

“Some excellent, inspiring speakers from whom we can all learn a lot” Virgin Atlantic Date: Thursday 28th November 2013 Register now and benefit from: • Valuable insights • Latest best practice • Leading case studies • Expert speakers • Network with 500 + customer and employee engagement peers.

REGISTER https://cesummit2013.eventbrite.co.uk

SPONSORS

Time: 09:00 – 17:00, registration and coffee from 08:15, Networking Party from 17:00 Venue: Park Plaza Hotel, Victoria, 239 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EQ Accommodation: For Hotel accommodation and a special Summit rate contact Park Plaza Victoria, London T: +44 (0) 20 7769 9760 For Sponsorship and other enquiries contact: Nick Rust on E: nick@engagecustomer.com or T: 01932 506500 SUMMIT PARTNERS

‘best customer and agement event’ of 2013 Agenda Summary 08:15

Registration and Coffee

Stream Options: 13:30 – 15:00

Plenary and Keynotes – Victoria 1 09:00 Welcome: Mike Havard, Summit Chairman, Director Ember Services 09:10

Economy and Business Keynote: Anthony Hilton, Senior Business Commentator, Evening Standard & The Independent

09:40

Customer Engagement Keynote: Morris Pentel, Customer Experience Foundation

10:10

Keynote: Virgin Media Case Study/ 'live performance'

10:40

Coffee

Q&A 13:30 – 15:00

12:30

Coffee

Stream Options:

Evolution of Voice of the Customer – Victoria 1 • BT Retail Case Study • Jeremy Cox, Ovum • Voice of the football fan Case Study

15:30 – 17:00

Omnichannel Customer Engagement – Victoria 1 • Nicola Millard, Futurologist, BT • British Gas Case Study • Starbucks, Case Study • Barclaycard Case Study Q&A

Q&A 11:00 – 12:30

Employee & Customer Engagement – Victoria 2 • Nationwide Case Study • Essex CC Case Study • Lego Case Study • Bruce Rayton, 'Nailing the Evidence' Q&A

15:00

Stream Options: 11:00 – 12:30

Customer Engagement in Contact Centres – Victoria 1 • Carnival UK Case Study • Guy Fielding, horizon2 • Lebara Case Study

Customer Engagement in Public Sector & Utilities - Victoria 2 • Norfolk CC Case Study • British Quality Foundation Case Study • eon Case Study

Customer Engagement in Retail & Financial Services – Victoria 2 • ASOS Case Study • LV= Case Study • Argos Case Study • Lloyds Bank - Case Study

15:30 – 17:00

Q&A

17:00

Closing Keynote: Ben Page, Chief Executive, IpsosMORI

17:20 - 19:00

Chairman’s Summary & Networking Party

Q&A

Lunch

Dominic Graveson will Chair Streams in Victoria 2

“If you only go to one Customer Management Event each year, go to this one! The best line up of topics and speakers I've come across.” Merchants

Who will attend: Senior executives responsible for customer service and customer and employee engagement

• CRM Directors/

• Customer Service

• Marketing Directors/

Directors/Management • Customer Loyalty

Directors/Management

• Contact Centre

Directors/Management • Social Media

Directors/Management

Management

Management • Direct Marketing

Directors/Management

• Digital Marketing

Specialists • HR Directors/

Management • Operational Directors/

Management

Steve Deaville looks at the new challenges facing organisations as technology runs amok and the dangers of not joining up customer service across new channels such as Instagram Video A social media savvy business decides to run a campaign on Twitter. The deal offers Twitter followers half the price on one of the most popular items if they order today. A customer eagerly picks up the phone and dials the call centre to order. They tell the call centre employee that they would like to redeem the offer… and the employee has no idea what they’re talking about.

This (unfortunately all-too) classic case shows a common disconnect in customer communication strategy. But, in fact, the story can get much worse: The spurned customer takes to social media to voice their feelings about the company’s poor customer service. But instead of tweeting at the company, they take a more…visual approach… and release a video on Instagram Video

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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Steve Deaville is Regional Director, Northern Europe, at Pitney Bowes www.pitneybowes.co.uk

in the form of an unfavourable, fifteen-second review of the company’s disconnected business practices to the mobile social network’s 100 million members.

Which team is supposed to respond? The call centre? The Twitter team? Does another team own the Instagram channel? Does the business even know that the video exists?

What if the customer sent an angry email, instead?

Welcome to the complex world of customer communications, where the pace of technology and the complicated new channels emerging today have made effective proactive and reactive messaging intensely challenging.

Furthermore, Instagram Video and similar channels like Twitter’s Vine, actually present some unique challenges of their own. What do marketers have to do today to avoid being overwhelmed and, most critically, what does the rise of social video mean for technology, brands and privacy?

Adapt to new data types…

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The pace of change in technology is dramatic. How dramatic? Well, when I first thought of this piece, I was basing it on Twitter’s Vine service as the latest-and-greatest customer communications channel. But now, Vine has already been surpassed by a newer platform – Instagram Video. And that really is the case in point: while marketers have always been focused on staying one step ahead of the curve, the sheer volume of channels, platforms and data being exchanged today and the velocity at which “the next big thing” is introduced, make that incredibly challenging.

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ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

“Welcome to the complex world of customer communications, where the pace of technology and the complicated new channels emerging today have made effective proactive and reactive messaging intensely challenging”

…and new attention spans The fifteen-second maximum for Instagram clips is testament to the direction the average consumer’s attention span is headed in.

Marketers need to go where their customers are and, thankfully, the rise of services like Instagram Video and Vine aligns well with a medium (video) that marketers are at least used to. That short length, though, is another issue.

Video has been in brands’ content repertoires for a long time and they’ve gotten good at producing very polished, engaging videos with storyboarding, higher end equipment and post-production editing. That shouldn’t stop, as that type of content will still be useful on other channels and indeed for broadcasting on Instagram Video itself. But the rising popularity of short form social video opens up the option and even more importantly the expectation from customers, for brands to actually react and engage in video form. This means quicker reactions and a more candid feel. Brands need to create a new set of processes, experts and stakeholders that can make video a rapid response medium that still takes in to account a customer’s full journey with the brand.

As Internet and wireless connectivity rates and speeds grow, forms of content like rapid-response social video that seem maybe a bit less viable now will increasingly become more ubiquitous and marketers need to flex their content creation set ups to match.

Data and analytics can help meet the demands of social video interactions…

Many of the same best practices about data and analytics still apply to incorporating a new channel like Instagram Video.

Marketers need to make decisions about how to meet these new customer expectations based on facts and numbers and when

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

there is this much going on and at this kind of pace, Big Data and analytics must ride to the rescue. Integrating, controlling and normalising data is vital if organisations want to find out what customers are saying about the brand on all of these new platforms and channels. This means re-evaluating data governance strategies and consolidating and cleaning available data.

As usual, to further target messaging, companies should also enhance this data with information from other sources. From statistics about demographics, expenditure and social media channels, there are many other supplemental sources that can help build a full view of the customer.

However, as mentioned earlier, Instagram Video requires a new set of processes and stakeholders to create the kind of rapid-response content the medium demands and that directive also extends to how data and analytics are created and consumed within an organisation. With the right data governance methods in place, the next step is enabling these new stakeholders to derive quick, useful insights from it. The self-service mantra has been permeating software and technology in recent years and for marketers new formats like Instagram Video make self-service analytics tools all the more important. To make an informed, rapid video response on these new channels marketers have to drive the analytics process themselves rather than rely on drawn-out ITdriven tools that they can’t access.

…but be cautious about visual recognition and data privacy Unfortunately, the Instagram Video format presents some major technical hurdles to bringing any real automation or sentiment analysis capabilities to bear.

Social sentiment analysis tools that can parse data within text-based channels like Twitter or Facebook have been around for some time.

But tools to do the same with actual video are much, much rarer and the ones that do exist present significant privacy questions.

Several retailers have made headlines for revealing that they are using facial recognition technology to identify high value shoppers and celebrities. The news did not exactly go down well with store patrons who didn’t like the idea that their face may eventually become part of some database to be sold to the highest bidder.

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Instagram Video epitomises the complexity of the consumer-brand relationship. While a company could run a promotion on Twitter, the consumer could react through a video on Instagram, which is a completely different platform. Can the business link the two events together fast enough? Can it detect, analyse and, as I’ll get to later, store the sentiment captured in that video’s unstructured data? Is there a response method in place for that kind of content that takes in to account that customer’s history and interaction preferences with the brand on every channel?

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The message for marketers who are always seeking to prepare for the next channel and in this moment are looking at how to not just broadcast on Instagram Video but possibly engage and react via it, is to always respect customer privacy and be entirely transparent and open with them about data usage practices. Even if video recognition and analysis software isn’t yet the norm, imagining a future where it is possible is relatively easy.

As for hoping such technologies can help automate and manage the deluge of brand-relevant information that can be created via channels like Instagram Video, it seems brands will have to make do with a more manual approach for the time being.

New formats new expectations New formats breed new customer expectations, creating new types of information and bigger data volumes and new risks for marketers in how they use that data to create interactions that are actually interesting to customers. One thing remains constant though: adapting to new channels and mediums to create an intelligent customer communications loop was, is and is likely to remain, one of the foremost challenges for brand marketers. Instagram Video and its many similar competitors like YouTube’s Mixbit, does present a unique point in time for brand marketers though: not only do customers expect personal treatment but the medium itself demands it, yet trying to bring technology to bear to solve that problem presents significant privacy challenges.

For future brand marketers to stand a chance at making the most of social video, or whatever the next big new channel is, it’s imperative that they have the structure in place now that will at least enable them to easily engage with customers wherever and however that conversation takes place.

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“Instagram Video epitomises the complexity of the consumer-brand relationship. While a company could run a promotion on Twitter, the consumer could react through a video on Instagram, which is a completely different platform”

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

Paul Crutchley explains why he believes education and collaboration are the keys to mobile customer engagement success Mobile has quickly changed how we go about everyday life. Customers have become accustomed to an instant world where they can use a mobile device to look up information about a product, access a bank account or make a restaurant reservation.

Many brands have recognized this trend and have started to invest more into supporting mobile offerings. In a survey conducted earlier this year by BDO, 60 per cent of retailers were planning to maintain their investment levels in mobile for 2013, with 38 per cent planned to increase it. While mobile is top of mind, maturity levels across organisations do not yet match this commitment.

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It’s clear that mobile generates opportunities for many organizations, particularly retailers; but it also creates challenges as well, especially for small businesses who may not think that they have the means to compete in the mobile space. However, with mobile becoming a central part of the end to end shopping experience, it’s a topic they can’t afford to ignore.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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“The study found that 52 per cent of retailers aren’t optimising search for mobile and that 26 per cent of retailers haven’t optimised their site for mobile at all”

The Mobile Retail Scene The Internet Advertising Bureau performed a mobile retail study in June of this year and the results were surprising. The study found that 52 per cent of retailers aren’t optimising search for mobile and that 26 per cent of retailers haven’t optimised their site for mobile at all. Additionally, the study found: • 38 per cent of retailers don’t have an app, • 67 per cent of apps aren’t using a single user approach, and • Only 12 per cent of retailers provide contactless payment in store.

Mobile provides a huge opportunity to drive relevant customer experiences.

The challenge lies in ensuring retailers, their staff and customers are properly educated on the various elements of mobile services and encouraging the wider ecosystem to work together.

The GSMA is currently working to foster collaboration amongst retailers, mobile operators, town centres and third party vendors to ensure the mobile gap among retailers is closed.

Education is King Many retailers are focusing on mobile commerce‘s effects on the point at which the transaction takes place – a tap of a phone or card to pay. However, transacting is merely the r 25th mile of a marathon. There are so many opportunities for retailers to actively engage with their customers before, during and after the customer’s journey to a store, restaurant or town centre.

It’s important that retailers take a holistic approach to mobile commerce if they want to fully exploit the mobile channel to deliver great customer experiences in-store, and customers are expecting opportunities to engage both in and out of store. .

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This means they must be willing to learn more about mobile commerce services, such as NFC, QR and barcodes, as a whole and how they can be used to interact with their customers. The goal being to drive footfall to the retailer or brand but also engaging with customers throughout their entire retail journey; helping customers travel to and from the retailer and undertake many other activities during an outing to a town or destination retailer.

A recent survey by Latitude noted that customers are quite open to receiving mobile prompts. In fact, the survey found 60 per cent of UK and American smartphone owners are spurred to shop or make a purchase at least once a week because they’ve received a mobile alert, an email, notification or text message, from a brand or retailer. The survey also found that these alerts work best when they were location-based and related to a product or service the consumer has professed an interest in. This is important information for retailers to take on board. They need to do their research on customer preferences in order to become and remain relevant and effectively drive customers to their store or town centre.

Ultimately, education is one of the key components to successfully engaging with not only prospective and current customers but retail staff as well. It’s important that retail staff know and understand a brand or store’s mobile offering and are able to explain how, but also what, an offer from the shopping or town centre may be based on and how loyalty, couponing and transactions work.

Collaboration is essential For mobile commerce to reach its full potential it is vital that retailers, town centres, mobile operators and banks collaborate.

They must work together to define a consistent transactional journey, online and in store, for consumers and retail staff.

Collaboration is the foundation of mobile commerce and customer engagement. With all parties working together toward one goal, customers and staff won’t have to adapt to multiple processes to make payments, redeem vouchers and accumulate loyalty points in merchant outlets. This is key for adoption but also providing an enhanced customer experience.

The goal for all parties involved is to deliver a consistent service to all customers, as a baseline. This means providing ubiquitous services for transacting, engaging in loyalty programmes and

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In order for retailers to take steps toward driving customers in-store they need to understand the current retail mobile landscape and the elements, education and collaboration, that will enable them to succeed.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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couponing and ensuring new technology is brought in-store to help support and enhance the overall shopping experience. Once these baseline items are in place retailers will be able to provide access to decision making, VIP services and digital experiences, no matter what handset, tablet, or network.

Paul Crutchley is Strategic Engagement Director at the GSMA www.gsma.com

Additionally, it’s important for all parties to look at how they use mobile apps. Apps are widely used by customers but there are often many individual apps available for a range of services customers are looking for. For example, if I’m looking to go to a town centre I could potentially download multiple apps to find out what stores I should go to, where to park and what else I could do while I’m there. Through collaboration, retailers, banks, mobile operators and other third party vendors could create a central app where visitors could go to for a variety of information. A , comprehensive app , or central link to third party retailer apps or mobile wallets, could also provide an opportunity for retailers to reach key customers and provide them with relevant offers from a range of stores in the town, saving customers time and bringing and keeping visitors in the town centre.

While there is still more collaboration to be had, there are companies that have joined forces to provide and create richer mobile commerce services, enabling retailers and large brands to leverage technology and engage with core customers, while attracting new ones.

Across Europe retailers, third party vendors and mobile operators are working together to provide enhanced opportunities for retail and superior customer services. In the UK, WEVE is currently working with retailers to develop compelling retail and consumer opportunities and in France the AFSCM is working with retailers to discover new and compelling ways the mobile can support consumer shopping experiences.

Additionally, in North America, ISIS in the US, working with retail to deliver a compelling payment, couponing and loyalty programme. In Canada, EnStream was created to deliver payment capability over the mobile handset. It’s now evolving to become a common mobile commerce interface between Canada's mobile carriers and the Canadian ecosystem for NFC transactions.

“In the short term, mobile operators and retailers should consider tactical mobile commerce deployments that support couponing and loyalty, but ensure that these services can be expanded to support the entire consumer journey” ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

So what’s next ?

In the short term, mobile operators and retailers should consider tactical mobile commerce deployments that support couponing and loyalty, but ensure that these services can be expanded to support the entire consumer journey.

Couponing and loyalty are significant to developing a full suite of services to retailers. But it’s important that solutions like couponing and loyalty are consistent to ensure both retailers and customers are able to easily adopt and use the technology across the market.

Additionally, in order to support ubiquitous service mobile operators and their partners need to provide a toolkit that enable retailers and service providers in other industry sectors to easily integrate payment, coupons and loyalty services into their applications.

By partnering with loyalty providers, brands and retailers to build services, developing common practices between industries will be more common place and brands will further support and enhance how they engage with customers.

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YES TOMERS CUSEXPECT DO RE FOR MO S! S E L A new Interactive Intelligence surveys reveal customers expect more for less. David Paulding takes an in depth analysis of the key findings

Dave Paulding is Regional Sales Director EMEA at Interactive Intelligence www.inin.com

The pace of modern technology in our industry is showing no signs of slowing down and consumer facing businesses must respond quickly to meet customers’ higher expectations for consistent and multichannel support. The shift in the way customers communicate with companies has rapidly diversified in recent years. Social and mobile channels have become the norm for contacting businesses, and companies’ customer service strategies have to support that.

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The expectations of some of today’s consumers, in terms of customer service and the technology behind the experience, has been quantified in two recent surveys commissioned by Interactive Intelligence. Conducted earlier this year by independent research firm, Actionable Research, the 2013 Customer Experience Research study involved two separate surveys created to define what makes a great customer service experience.

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ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

“A true unified communications solution should incorporate all of the individual communication tools, the database, web, email, SMS and video conferencing, as well as fixed and mobile telephony”

The research was designed to gather data addressing two overarching questions: What do customers want in a great service experience? What do customers and companies want from the technology behind that great customer experience? One of the key themes that emerged from the results is that as technology evolves consumers expect more for less, highlighting that companies need to offer great service with a minimum cost for the customer.

The global survey for consumers was conducted on more than 1,400 individuals across seven different countries, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, North America, South Africa, Sweden and the UK. Those surveyed had been involved in a non-in-person interaction with a business during the last 12 months – either an online or telephone order, web chat or similar type of interaction.

The professional survey targeted IT professionals and customer care leaders in the same geographical areas, questioning more than 450 people in all industries who were responsible for the technology behind a great customer experience. The key findings from the research showed that many of the results from the professional survey mirrored those in the consumer survey.

In the consumer survey, based on communications channels, consumer expectations, and other customer service outcomes, respondents from around the globe shared many of the same views in what contributes to a great customer experience. Those views largely expressed that a representative/agent who is knowledgeable, quick and friendly in delivering an effective response to an issue is seen as the most valued aspect of a customer service interaction.

UK customers world’s most demanding!

One of the most interesting highlights from the study was how

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

the results were split geographically, with the UK respondents displaying the highest expectations. UK consumers were at the top of the chart in terms of having the most demanding customer service standards in the world - a significant 86 per cent of Britons polled said that they “expect good services as part of doing business”. This was also backed by UK professionals in the global rankings, with 62 per cent saying that paying a fee for better service would not be beneficial for an organisation or its customers.

Based on our expertise as a global provider of contact centre automation, unified communications, and business process automation software and services, these results reinforce the fact that customers expect nothing less than service excellence when they contact you. Companies can no longer afford to delay making the necessary technology changes.

Another key finding from the consumer survey was that a knowledgeable representative and a timely response are the most valuable components of a great service experience. Those professionals surveyed agreed with consumer wait times, citing that these should be less than three minutes for both phone calls and web chats. This underlines the importance that in today’s fast moving industry companies need solutions to allow them to connect customers with a knowledgeable agent faster, as well as improve agent training and agent performance, including remote agents.

The research also highlighted specific sectors that excel in customer interaction, with hotels, online retailers, and banks named as the types of companies who provide the best customer service experiences. Perhaps this is not a surprising discovery, given these sectors probably have the largest number of contact centres around the world and are renowned for using the latest technological advancements in a bid to improve customer service.

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Two key questions

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feature story

“Cloud contact centre solutions offer much greater flexibility than premise investments and are able to support the rapid changes in customer support as they reduce the time required to make upgrades”

Telephone still king In terms of the customer interaction itself, the study revealed the live agent remains the preferred interaction type, followed by email and then there is a significant drop to web chat. These results reflect the breed of next generation customers as preferences differed according to the age demographic. Telephony will continue to be the main form of customer contact for the foreseeable future and, in our experience, the reason people speak to agents is because they can quickly and accurately handle multiple and complex tasks, which is not yet possible to achieve through self-service.

However, in the current climate companies may struggle to survive if its communications strategy is solely based on the telephone and traditional PBX equipment. Businesses have to evolve their customer contact strategy to the next phase of interaction, with IP telephony solutions that support voice over IP (VoIP), open standards like SIP, mobile workers and the unified voice and data communications that customer service standards demand.

Unified communications provides a way to bring everything together and improve collaboration among co-workers, partners, vendors, and customers. A true unified communications solution should incorporate all of the individual communication tools, the database, web, email, SMS and video conferencing, as well as fixed and mobile telephony.

Even though consumers cited live agents as their preferred interaction type, not being able to understand the agent was rated as the most frustrating part of an interaction. This may have contributed to more consumers using a laptop or desktop computer for customer service, and that more than half (52%) of consumers have used or would use Facebook to interact with a company for customer service. Interestingly, the research highlighted that customers are more willing to use social media to praise a good service experience rather than complaining about a poor experience.

Customers want to hear back For mobile customer service, the study showed the use of smartphones, at present, is far higher than tablet use, with the most desired mobile application functionality being the ability to get a scheduled call back. This demonstrates the shift in the way customers communicate with companies in recent years.

Some contact centres have found their ability to respond to this

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new population of customers limited by prior software and hardware investments, which were unable to provide effective integrated cross-channel support. This would explain why a growing number of contact centres are migrating to the cloud to adopt the right technology solutions to deliver the necessary crosschannel experience.

Cloud contact centre solutions offer much greater flexibility than premise investments and are able to support the rapid changes in customer support as they reduce the time required to make upgrades. In addition, many of the benefits of cloud solutions address some of the biggest areas of concern that came out of the two surveys. Advantages such as integrating cross-channel capabilities, providing more agile responses to customers and gaining insight into relevant social media discussions, are invaluable to today’s customer facing businesses.

One of the questions asked in the consumer survey was what is deemed as the most valuable feature of an interaction and the response was access to historical information. Cloud solutions are designed to provide consistent handling of all customers and deliver personalised responses. In addition, advanced analytics means businesses can spot trends and emotions and respond more quickly to emerging problems, and this was the top feature desired by contact centre professionals.

It’s always about the cost As highlighted earlier, cost is key for both the consumer and professional respondents. Consumers expect high levels of service to be standard, and are not willing to pay extra for that service.

Subsequently, any technology solution has to be more efficient and effective in terms of performance and cost. Companies who have invested in cloud contact centre solutions have found quantifiable areas of financial and operational savings. Faster time to market, reduced in-house training costs and the ability to manage upgrades on a convenient schedule, and has made them a sound business investment for many companies.

What is clear from all of the survey results is the quest for delivering a great customer experience must be a top priority for companies.

Consumers have expressed their preferences, likes and dislikes, and the more providers can align their businesses with what consumers expect, the more the service experience will create a great competitive advantage.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

In this case study special we examine how hosted technologies are giving one outsourcing business the freedom to innovate

BREAKING THE TEC TSYS Managed Services (TMS) EMEA is a joint venture between the world’s leading card payment processing business and a global customer management outsourcer with a thirty-year track record. Hardly surprising then that it has established a reputation for providing highly-focused customer management services to major banks and financial services providers.

Today it is raising its game even further, using a hosted technology platform to meet the financial services industry’s growing appetite for multi-channel customer service.

“In the troubled aftermath of the financial crisis, the need to win, build and maintain customer trust and loyalty has become the driving issue in financial services,” says TMS’ Managing Director (EMEA), Adrian Garton. “That means services have to be helpful, personalised and available to customers on their terms. In today’s digital and sociallyconnected world, that means via any channel and across social networks. As an outsourcing business we have to respond to that.”

“For the first time ever, technology costs are directly tied to our business activity.

This brings game-changing flexibility to an outsourcing organisation.”

This new reality presents a challenge for financial services organisations, and an opportunity for TMS. TMS recognised early, that in order to grasp that opportunity, it would need to achieve a step change in its technological capability.

Like most outsourcers, the issue of technology investment has been a vexed one for TMS in the past. Investing ahead of the curve can be a risk that applies a brake to growth. When its joint venture partner, Merchants, presented an opportunity to access leading-edge technology and functionality on a pay-as-you-use basis via its Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform, Adrian and his team recognised that an important roadblock to its ambitions was about to be removed. The ability to bring key contact centre functionality on-stream without cost-prohibitive up-front capital investment would free TMS to innovate on behalf of its clients “Quite simply, Contact Centre as a Service means there are no limits to our technological capability or our power to innovate,” says Adrian. “It gives us access to every customer interaction channel we need today or are likely to need in the future. It also gives us advanced analytics, so we can help our clients understand their customers, anticipate their requirements and build personalised service approaches. There is no question in my mind that multi-channel, personalised service is the way forward for financial services organisations and we are now ideally placed to make it happen.”

The multi-channel future

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CCaaS was deployed in TMS’ show-case contact centre in Milton Keynes, UK, in August 2012, will be deployed at a further UK site this year and across TMS’ EMEA business in 2014. Already it is helping TMS win business. At the close of 2012 TMS closed a six

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TSYS Managed Services (TMS) EMEA is a provider of advanced customer management services to major banks and financial institutions. Contact its Managing Director, Adrian Garton at adrian.Garton@tsysmsemea.com

According to the 2012 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, almost three quarters (74.6%) of financial services providers have implemented some form of self service. Within twelve months the use of web chat has almost tripled and the use of automated speech solutions doubled. Social media has emerged from nowhere to establish a presence in almost a fifth of organisations and a quarter (25.4%) have developed smartphone apps.

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case study

HNOLOGY DEADLOCK hundred seat deal with one of the UK’s ‘new style’ banks that, because of its customer experience focus, recognised a soul mate in TMS. So impressed was this organisation with the CCaaS platform, that it has gone on to forge a deal with Merchants to install it as part of a transformation of its own in-house contact centre in the north of England.

“CCaaS is the powerhouse behind our proposition and clients recognise that it makes our promise of a differentiating customer experience a reality,” says Adrian. “Today we have a pipeline that could easily double our revenues within the next twelve months.”

Existing clients, too, have responded enthusiastically. When a major contract recently came up for renewal, TMS was able, not only to retain the business, but to grow it substantially. A newlyagreed five year contract will see TMS’ revenues from this account double. “CCaaS’ multi-channel capabilities were a major factor in the deal,” says Adrian. “The client is keen to reach a younger demographic and appreciates that, to do so, it will need to adopt the service channels that demographic favours. We expect to introduce web chat and social media to their customer management strategy in the early days of the new contract.”

Economy and agility CCaaS’ pay-as-you use cost model has transformed the economics of outsourcing for TMS. Its introduction immediately delivered a per-seat technology cost reduction of over 50%, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. “The real benefit is that we pay, month by month, only for the functionality we use on the seats that are active,” says Adrian. “For the first time ever, our costs and, in turn, those of our clients, are directly tied to our day-to-day business activity.” This flexibility is key in an outsourced environment where, as projects scale up, scale down and change shape, requirements can flex considerably.

But it’s not only the reduction in cost and risk that TMS values; it also relishes the increased business agility CCaaS brings. “The ability to bring new functionality on stream quickly is important because speed-to-market is vital for financial services organisations,” says Adrian. “It also helps us to implement new business. Today, we can be ready to support a new client project in a matter of days; previously it might have taken several weeks to get the technology in place.”

All of this means TMS can now anticipate growth with confidence, knowing that technology will be an enabler rather than a barrier.

This is an important consideration as the company plans expansion in line with new business growth. “Previously, if we

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were considering a new site, the economics would have dictated that anything under 300 seats wouldn’t be financially viable. Today we can open a centre of virtually any size – small or large – confident that technological functionality can be extended to it (and, if necessary, pulled back) on a seat-by-seat, month-by-month basis,” concludes Adrian.

CCaaS is a hosted platform, and works on a hub-and-spoke model that creates a virtualised contact centre environment for TMS. “We have double resilience via a data hub in our Milton Keynes office and in Merchants’ own facilities,” says Adrian.

“Essentially we can, deploy from those points to any location we choose. For a company like ours that is anticipating growth on an international scale, this is an important feature.”

Significant productivity gains TMS is also looking for significant productivity gains as it uses CCaaS to streamline its operation. “The platform gives us highly effective call recording, quality and workforce management,” says Adrian. “But more importantly, it gives us a unified agent front-end through which we can stream multi-channel interactions to teams of blended agents. Essentially, we can have a single workflow for all channels.”

The platform also responds automatically to protect agent performance and customer satisfaction during peak periods. “If call volumes peak beyond expected levels, the platform will automatically divert more calls into the IVR system in order to prevent dropped calls and service degradation,” explains Adrian. “All of this is done without human intervention, which means the automation of minute-by-minute operational management is now a reality for us.”

This blend of efficiency and agility is helping TMS grow its business and to become even more a force to be reckoned with.

Throughout its history the company has grown by delivering exceptional standards of customer service. In 2013, for example, the contact centre operation it operates for Nationwide Building Society won the ‘Best Achievement in Customer Service’ accolade at the prestigious Card & Payment awards. According to independent third party analysis, the customer satisfaction it delivers firmly outpaces that of Nationwide’s competition. With the ability to introduce new channels at will and to effortlessly keep pace with technological innovation that award winning performance looks set to continue.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

MOBILE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT ON FAST FORWARD The lightning pace of change is charging organisations to rapidly evolve mobile engagement strategies says Steve Hurst

The rise and rise of mobile customer engagement has been instrumental in changing the whole face of customer relationships. Today’s customer has more power, a greater say in how an organisation designs its products and services and is more likely to take the opportunity to have their say.

Time: Venue:

9:30am – 5:00pm The Hatton, 51-53 Hatton Garden, EC1N 8HN London

For more information contact Chris Wood: chris@ictcomms.com and +44 (0) 1932 340367 or visit our website: www.customerengagementnetwork.com

Mobile Customer Engagement 23rd May 2013, London The rise and rise of mobile customer engagement has been instrumental in changing the whole face of customer relationships. Today’s customer has more power, a greater say in how an organisation designs its products and services and is more likely to take the opportunity to have their say.

This Directors Forum will examine the issues, challenges and opportunities around mobile customer engagement and how savvy organisations are working with this burgeoning channel to market to gain competitive advantage.

Agenda Summary: 8:45

Registration, tea and coffee

9:30

Welcome

9:35

Opening Keynote: Mapping the mobile customer engagement opportunity Ross Sleight, Chief Strategy Officer, Somo

10:10 giff gaff Case Study: giffgaff run by you Claire Kavanagh, Head of Loyalty, giffgaff 10:40 Mobile Customer care: is it more than just an App? Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence 11:10 Coffee 11:30 Perfecting Mobile Customer Engagement through App Prototyping Kieran Bourke, Managing Director, Mobext 12:00 Business value of mobile for customer engagement programmes Miguel Ramos, Subject Matter Expert, Mobile Solutions, Confirmit

The sheer pace of change and the need for organisations to be agile and mobile and armed with strategies to stay ahead of the mobile customer revolution were central themes in the Customer Engagement Network’s first Mobile Customer Engagement Directors Forum, sponsored by Confirmit and Interactive Intelligence and chaired by CEN editorial director Steve Hurst.

12:30 Customer Engagement Awards in association with the Peer Awards Stephen Citron, Director, The Peer Awards 13:00 Lunch 14:00 Panel debate with Steve Hurst Steve Hurst, Forum Chairman, Editorial Director, Customer Engagement Network 15:00 Imagine, Mobile Marketing Simplified Pratick Thakrar, Founder, Imagine Mobile 15:30 Coffee 15:50 Mobile - the glue which helps deliver connected customer experiences Alex Meisl, Chairman, Sponge 16:20 Around the world in 80 apps - The next big things in mobile & tablets Morris Pentel, CEO, Customer Experience Foundation 16:50 Chairman's Forum Summary, followed by drinks and networking

SPONSOR

SPONSOR

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

In his Opening Keynote ‘Mapping the mobile customer engagement opportunity’ Ross Sleight, Chief Strategy Officer, Somo, demonstrated how mobile has quickly grown to become one of the key platforms for customer engagement.

Customers in control Ross said that it is customers who are leading the mobile customer engagement revolution and that organisations must keep up with the pace of change. They must be prepared to come up with customer mapping and behavioural design strategies that keep them ahead of the game.

There are a wealth of opportunities in mobile customer engagement for businesses to interact and grow profitable relationships with customers in a technology driven world where customers are increasingly dictating channels of communication.

Next up came the first case study of the day with Claire Kavanagh, Head of Loyalty, giffgaff. Claire gave overview of mobile company giffgaff’s unique business model and how it involves its members in all areas of the business. She revealed that more than 500 customer ideas had been implemented by giffgaff since it launched four years ago.

She touched on the three key challenges around mobile and social customer service, the importance of trust, changing expectations and measuring quality and clearly indicated how customer engagement and involvement – giffgaff does not have a contact centre because customers solve other customers’ problems - improves performance and profitability.

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For the first time in history customers and employees have better technology than the organisations that service them and that they work for and mobile devices are core to this brave new world – mobile has become a key customer and employee engagement platform

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directors forum report

Then came Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence with a thought provoking presentation ‘Mobile Customer care: is it more than just an App?’ Conrad said that as many organisations reach out to mobile platforms to extend their customer care strategy.

Silos bad – holistic good Conrad gave case study examples of customer care delivery on a mobile platform. For many of these organisations mobile has become yet another channel demanded by an ever more savvy customer community yet he warnEd of the dangers of the ‘silo’ approach to mobile taken by many organisations and called for a more holistic approach.

Kieran Bourke, Managing Director, Mobext came next with a fascinating presentation ‘Perfecting Mobile Customer Engagement through App Prototyping’ Kieran explained that there are major challenges to successful customer engagement with Apps. The average smartphone user downloads just 2.5 apps per month. Only 5% of Apps are in use a month after downloading and only 20% of users return to an App after it is downloaded.

Kieran revealed how 'prototyping' can help to ensure brands remain meaningful within a colossal App ecosystem. He showed examples of App 'prototypes' developed for major brand clients and explained the prototyping process he uses to ensure App usage and customer engagement is optimised.

Kieran stressed that organisations need to ‘fail fast’ and ‘fail smart’ in their prototyping and talked of the growing trend towards ’hackathons’ which are effectively brainstorming sessions aimed at getting apps out there that customers will find of use and value.

Next up came Miguel Ramos, Subject Matter Expert, Mobile Solutions, Confirmit with his presentation ‘Business value of mobile for customer engagement programmes’ Miguel ran through the case study of a Multinational Consumer Corporation, and described how mobile technologies can be used to capture data and report on findings, in order to help improve customer experience and sales.

innovative customer engagement initiatives.

All shortlisted finalists feature in The Independent newspaper, and speak at the Peer Awards conference in Central London on 27 June, where they are judged by everyone attending the conference, including the finalists. The winners are announced and celebrated at a champagne ceremony in a prestigious Central London hotel. Finalists in the Customer Engagement Awards categories include Sony, o2, SimplyHealth and Lebara.

After the networking lunch all morning speakers took part in a lively and wide ranging panel debate chaired by Steve Hurst which delved deeper into some of the issues raised during the earlier presentations

Augmented Reality Next presentation came from Pratick Thakrar, Founder, Imagine Mobile with his presentation ‘Imagine, Mobile Marketing Simplified’ and one again the theme of the lightning pace o change in mobile engagement came to the fore.

Pratick demonstrated examples of his work with organisations such as Disney and Burberry to campaign target audiences via the mobile channel.

These case studies included included live demos of Augmented Reality. Pratick also discussed how clients are able to simplify mobile marketing and take the risk out of test and learn environments Next up came Alex Meisl, Chairman, Sponge with his presentation ‘Mobile - the glue which helps deliver connected customer experiences’ which delivered a series of impressive stats around mobile use and mobile engagement – not least that one in three ‘showrooming’ smartphone owners I the US cancel a purchase once they are in store because they have found a cheaper alternative.

Then using case study examples from organisations including Asda, Dyson, Investec and Adidas, Alex focussed on how a wellimplemented mobile first approach is delivering loyal and long-term engaged customers for brands.

Blended contact the future Context is king He shared some of the deep insights that can be delivered through a mobile implementation as part of a VoC multichannel strategy. He shared best practices, dispelled myths and showed how recently introduced features, such as GPS tracking, photo/video capture and playback, increase the depth of data in a meaningful and measurable way. Miguel aid context is king when it comes to mobile customer engagement.

He also helped identify the opportunities in mobile and overcome challenges in managing the mountains of unstructured data that organisations now collect. A purposeful mobile strategy as part of a VoC programme is the conscious design for a mobile environment where technological features are maximised thereby delivering on the true promise of mobile.

In a change of pace and tack Stephen Citron, Director, The Peer Awards told delegates about the Customer Engagement Awards in association with the Peer Awards.

The Customer Engagement Network is working in association with the Peer Awards, to provide exposure and recognition for

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Closing keynote came from Morris Pentel, CEO, Customer Experience Foundation with his crystal ball gazing presentation ‘Around the world in 80 apps - The next big things in mobile and tablets’ Morris looked at some of the latest trends in the mobile and tablet communication and use and forecast a future of ‘blended customer contact’ where personalisation of customer service across all channels enabled by technology and driven by the customers themselves would come to the fore.

He also looked the impact of some of the very latest apps and websites that are having a big impact on the way consumers are using technology including John Lewis. He alsoexamined the rise and rise of so called Over The Top (OTT) operators such as Skype and WhatsApp. He concluded appropriately by saying that there had been a fundamental sea change in the relationship between organisations and their customers with a huge shift in control to customers who do indeed have better technology – much of it mobile – than the organisations who want their business.

ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

PRESENTATIONS: MOBILE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT FORUM 9:35

Opening Keynote: Mapping the mobile customer engagement opportunity Ross Sleight, Chief Strategy Officer, Somo

Mobile has quickly grown to become one of the key platforms for customer engagement. Naturally, this growth has presented a wealth of opportunities for businesses to interact and Ross Sleight grow profitable relationships with customers. But the key question is which of these opportunities should be progressed and prioritised within an organisation?

10:10 giff gaff Case Study: giffgaff run by you Claire Kavanagh, Head of Loyalty, giffgaff Claire will deliver an overview of giffgaff’s unique business model and how it involves its members in all areas of the business. She will touch on the three key challenges around mobile Claire and social customer Kavanagh service, the importance of trust, changing expectations and measuring quality.

10:40 Mobile Customer care: is it more than just an App? Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence As many organisations reach out to mobile platforms to extend their customer care strategy Conrad will take us through Conrad real world examples of Simpson customer care delivery on a mobile platform. For many of these organisations mobile has become yet another channel demanded by an ever more savvy customer community.

As we consider how to engage, organisations are trying to ensure that mobile isn’t an isolated communications channel but an embedded element of a true multi-channel customer approach. Using these real world examples Conrad will illustrate successful strategies and help illuminate where the challenges are in successful mobile strategies.

11:30 Perfecting Mobile Customer Engagement through App Prototyping Kieran Bourke, Managing Director, Mobext

Today mobile Apps are seen as an excellent means to engage customers. After all, the Google Play store contains 700,000 Apps and the Apple App store over 775,000 Apps, with 40 Kieran Bourke billion downloads of iOS Apps to date ( 20 billion in 2012!). However, there are real challenges to successful customer engagement with Apps.

The average smartphone user downloads just 2.5 apps per month. Only 5% of Apps are in use a month after downloading and only 20% of users return to an App after it is downloaded. Kieran Bourke. Managing Director at Mobext, the mobile division of Havas, will explain how 'prototyping' can help to ensure brands remain meaningful within a colossal App ecosystem. He will be show examples of App 'prototypes' developed for major brand clients and explain the prototyping process he uses to ensure App usage and customer engagement is optimised.

12:00 Business value of mobile for customer engagement programmes Miguel Ramos, Subject Matter Expert, Mobile Solutions, Confirmit Participants will gain a new appreciation for the mobile industry and its current and future role in fostering customer engagement. We will run through the case study of a Multinational Consumer Corporation, and describe how mobile technologies Miguel can be used to capture data Ramos and report on findings, in order to help improve customer experience and sales. We will also share the wonderfully deep insights that can be delivered through a mobile implementation as part of your VoC multi-channel strategy. We will share best practices, dispel myths and show how recently introduced features, such as GPS tracking, photo/video capture and playback, increase the depth of data in a meaningful and measurable way. We will help you identify the opportunities in mobile and overcome challenges in managing the mountains of unstructured data that you can now collect. A purposeful mobile strategy as part of a VoC programme is the conscious design for a mobile environment where technological features are maximised for your and your clients’ benefit, thereby delivering on the true promise of mobile.

12:30 Customer Engagement Awards in association with the Peer Awards Stephen Citron, Director, The Peer Awards The Customer Engagement Network is delighted to announce that it is working in association with the Peer Awards, to provide

exposure and recognition for innovative customer engagement initiatives. All shortlisted finalists feature in The Independent newspaper, and speak at the Peer Awards conference Stephen Citron in Central London on 27 June, where they are judged by everyone attending the conference, including the finalists. The winners are announced and celebrated at a champagne ceremony in a prestigious Central London hotel.

15:00 Imagine, Mobile Marketing Simplified Pratick Thakrar, Founder, Imagine Mobile During the presentation Pratick will demonstrate examples of how they have worked with clients to engage campaign target audiences via the mobile channel. Examples will Pratick include Rich media Thakrar executions to Augmented reality. In addition, Pratick will discuss how clients are able to simplify mobile marketing and take the risk out of test and learn environments.

15:50 Mobile - the glue which helps deliver connected customer experiences Alex Meisl, Chairman, Sponge Alex will focus on how a well-implemented mobile first approach is delivering loyal and long-term engaged customers for brands and retailers and will use examples from some of the largest retailers and fmcgs.

Alex Meisl

16:20 Around the world in 80 apps - The next big things in mobile & tablets Morris Pentel, CEO, Customer Experience Foundation Is the future bright? A look at some of the latest trends in the mobile and tablet communication and use.

This presentation brings together the impact of some of the very latest apps and Morris Pentel websites that are having a big impact on the way consumers are using technology. From research over the past year we look at what is 36 months away from being normal behaviour for most of us.

To download presentations go to: http://www.customerengagementnetwork.com/directorforum.agenda.php?a=10405 ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

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the final word

YES ENGAGEMENT IS THE KEY Being happy and fulfilled is just not enough for employees today says Colin Shaw they also have to be properly engaged and feel valued Happy people give you happy customers. This is the mantra I used to say when I was in corporate life 12 years ago running 3,500 people in call centres around the globe.

Well, as long as your employees are human beings, then you achieve this in the same way. You need to define the employee experience that will deliver engaged employees.

If you want to have a great Customer Experience you must focus your employees as they deliver your experience. I believed this so much that when I started Beyond Philosophy and wrote my first book, ‘Building Great Customer Experiences’, I devoted one of our Seven Philosophies for building a great Customer Experience to it.

It stated:

But here is the only change. Ideally the Customer Experience you are trying to deliver and the employee experience are the same.

Therefore if you want your Customers to feel they ‘trust’ you and feel that you ‘care for’ them doesn’t it make sense that the employees feel the same? Therefore the employee experience and the Customer Experience should match. This gives you the most chance of success on both fronts. So in short you need to define the employee experience that should ideally match the Customer Experience and then design the employee experience around this.

Great Customer Experiences are enabled by inspirational leadership, an empowering culture and empathetic people who are happy and fulfilled.

I now realise this needs updating. The important word that is missing is ‘engaged’. … “empathetic people who are engaged, happy and fulfilled”.

Happy … but not actually working Over the years I have come to realise you can have people who are happy but the reality is they may do very little work! So, happiness is part of what you are trying to achieve, but not all of it, as you can have great fun at work but get nothing done.

‘Engaged’ is a really important word. Being engaged means your people voluntarily give you and their Customers their commitment.

Engagement means they care for the organization and therefore their customers. Engagement means they believe in the organisation and the goals. Critically engaged means they have chosen to give more of themselves.

If you are engaged you have built an emotional bond with your organization and its Customers. But how do you get employees engaged and want to provide a great Customer Experience?

Let me draw a parallel. My regular readers will know that we advocate that when designing a Customer Experience you should take a ‘human centred’ approach. As customers are human beings much of their behaviour is driven by emotions. We believe you need to define the experience you are trying to deliver for your Customer and the emotions you are trying to evoke and then design your experience to achieve this.

Trust and care common denominators

Too many times we see examples of where organizations do the complete opposite. One of our clients wants their Customers to trust them but they do not trust their own employees, which is quite common! For example, we have recently conducted CEM training. The final event was planned to be a face to face event.

The procedure they had to go through to get authorization for travel was so bureaucratic I was stunned. At every turn it says ‘We don’t trust you’.

Worst ever manager Another example is one of the worst managers I have ever worked for. He arranged a 121 development meeting with me. The first meeting we arranged he didn't show up! The second meeting he was late and spent most of the time fiddling with his mobile phone. The message was clear. He wasn't interested. As a result I wasn't engaged.

These types of things send out important messages to your employees. They say 'we don't trust you', 'you are not important’, ‘we are cleverer than you are’, ‘we don’t care about you’. These are the important subconscious signals that you are bombarding your employees with every day of the week.

So to provide a great customer experience you do need happy employees, but creating happy employees is only one part of getting engaged employees. You certainly won't get happy or engaged employees if you treat them like idiots....

This means if you want your customers to ‘trust’ you, feel that you ‘value’ them then you should design your experience to evoke these emotions. It also means you should look at your experience and stop doing the things that are opposite to this. How does this apply to the employee experience and engagement?

Colin Shaw is founder & CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books, an engaging key-note speaker & also recognized as one of the original top 150 Business Influencers by LinkedIn. Beyond Philosophy provide consulting, specialized research & training from their headquarters in Tampa, Florida, USA. Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter: @ColinShaw_CX

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ISSUE TWELVE • SEPTEMBER 2013

calendar 2014 directors forums February Thursday 6th Feb • Evolution of Voice of the Customer April Thursday 24th • Customer Engagement in the Retail Sector May Thursday 22nd • Customer Engagement in Financial Services

July Thursday 3rd • Employee and Customer Engagement September Thursday 18th • Omnichannel Customer Engagement

webinars January - Thursday 23rd April - Thursday 3rd June - Thursday 5th

October Thursday 23rd • Customer Engagement in Utilities

July – Thursday 10th September – Thursday 25th December – Thursday 4th

2014 Customer Engagement Summit - Thursday 27th November, Victoria Park Plaza, London For more information please contact: Sales Director: Nick Rust nick@engagecustomer.com T: 01932 506500

2014 Engage Customer Awards – October, London

Editorial Director: Steve Hurst steve@engagecustomer.com T: 07545 088407

2014 Outsourcing Customer Services Summit Victoria Park Plaza, Thursday 27th March

Managing Director: Chris Wood chris@engagecustomer.com T: 01932 340367

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www.engagecustomer.com

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Customer Engagement Forum – Manchester, date to be agreed