Engage Customer July 2014

engage customer ISSUE FIFTEEN I JULY 2014

SOCIAL MEDIA HOW TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE

FEATURE: Social Media - the wrongs and rights INTERVIEW: How BA is transforming customer service www.engagecustomer.com @engagecustomer

SOCIAL MEDIA ISSUE

Employee and Customer Engagement 18 SEPTEMBER 2014, LONDON Employees and customers – the pivotal link The relationship between employee and customer engagement performance and profitability is fast becoming one of the hottest of all strategic business issues.

Venue: Blue Fin Venue, Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU. Time:

09:00 – 17:00

Date:

Thursday September 18th 2014

Delegates will learn: • How organisations who recognise the link between properly directed and engaged employees and the levels of engagement they have with their customers are gaining competitive advantage • The latest compelling evidence that shows organisations with engaged employees consistently outperform those where engagement is at a lower level • How the fact that for the first time in history employees have better technology than the organisations they are working with is impacting on employee and customer engagement • How the increasingly omnichannel nature of customer engagement is changing the dynamic of the relationship between organisations their employees and their customers • World class case studies from organisations who are thinking innovatively about the nature of employee engagement and how to drive through the link to customer engagement performance and profitability.

Speakers todate include: • Case Study: Austin Reed (Peer awards winner) • Case Study: HMRC • Case Study: Aola

For sponsorship and promotional information contact Nick Rust on T: +44 (0) 01932 506 301 M: +44 (0) 7968 416007 E: nick@engagecustomer.com #engageforums Engage Customer Forums are organised by

www.engagecustomer.com

Register Sponsors

a word from the editor

Steve Hurst, Editorial Director, Engage Customer @engagecustomer

How social media is revolutionis ing the rela tionship between org anisations and their custom ers

The last five years has witnessed a revolution in the way that organisations interact with their customers - and also the way that customers interact with each other - and the impact of social media as a customer communication and engagement tool has been a major factor in that revolution Social media is putting power into the hands of our customers while at the same time offering us fantastic opportunities to engage those customers and increase wallet share. Social is proving an effective tool when it comes to getting closer to our customers, enabling them to interact with each other, and critically in winning their trust.

The ROI of engaging through social media is critical to long term success and it is something we examine in the Cover Story in this issue of Engage Customer. In his new book ‘The Social Media MBA Guide to ROI: How to Measure and Improve your Return on Investment’ author Christer Holloman gives a series of examples of how organisations are engaging customers through social channels.

Much more than just Twitter and Facebook In our Cover Story we detail examples of how brands such as Barclaycard, Sony and O2 have used social media to engage with customers and as Christer points out none of these examples is based around social media stalwarts Twitter and Facebook.

There is a positive plethora of social channels and new ways of engaging with our customers for business benefit limited only now by our imaginations.

Social business is rapidly coming of age in our digital world. Our customers want to be engaged by the brands that are relevant to them and in sectors such as retail there is now a blurring of the edges between offline, online, mobile and social as brands seek to forge closer relationships with their customers wherever they may be.

Social business is not just about retail though and not just about B2C relationships either. Social permeates all business sectors and B2B 3

customer relationships are also being impacted by social media - once again there is a blurring of the lines of engagement.

Importance in social of the human touch A critical factor here is the way organisations operate their social business strategies - and here it is important not to take the silo mentality and just as important to make sure social has that human touch.

A new Forrester study has revealed a lack of ownership and understanding of social media within organisations that it warns could see brands fall behind in the overall customer engagement and experience stakes.

The research points to a ‘power struggle’ between the marketing and customer service departments which means that there is often a disconnect. The message is clear in that organisations need to take an holistic approach to their social media business strategies – customers today are channel agnostic and they want personalised, relevant joined up offerings and communications from the organisations they are spending their money with.

Social media and social business is here to stay. The ubiquity of social has changed the very fabric of the way we do business and how we interact with our customers. Those of us who embrace social across the whole business with our customers’ wants and needs at the front of our thinking will win out, while those who do not have a social strategy really do not have a long term viable business strategy.

To quote Ben Stockman, our resident social media blogger, and who has a special feature in this issue of Engage Customer social is a conversation and it’s a conversation that we all need to be part of.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

contents

contents Cover Story HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN SQUARE THE CIRCLE OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

6-9

Social media presents a whole raft of opportunities to engage with customers across all areas of the business says Christer Holloman author of a new book on social media ROI. In this exclusive article he highlights three case study examples of the most innovative ways companies are doing just that

The Big Interview HOW BRITISH AIRWAYS IS REINVENTING ITS CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT OFFERING

11-13

In this exclusive interview we talk with British Airways head of flight operations Charlie Maunder about its ground breaking Beyond the Flight Deck programme that has helped transform the customer service reputation of the airline

TALKING HEADS

14-15

How Visual IVR is changing the customer experience game

Special Feature: SOCIAL MEDIA - WRONG AND RIGHT AND THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE

16-22

As a social media consultant Ben Stockman performs a lot of audits of social media for brands - and the results of those audits are almost invariably the same: they have a social media presence, but that's all it is - a presence. Somebody in the organisation clearly thought it was a good idea. "The kids are all OVER it", a bright spark in marketing may have piped up. "Coke are doing it! We should too!"

Review: FINANCIAL SERVICES DIRECTORS FORUM

24-25

Case studies from the likes of First Direct, Nationwide, Barclays, Tesco Bank, Hastings Direct and Skipton Building Society enthral delegates at Engage Customer’s recent Directors Forum

EXPERT OPINION

26-27

Transforming the contact centre in the ‘age of the customer’

Review: RETAIL SECTOR DIRECTORS FORUM

28-29

Our recent Customer Engagement in the Retail Sector Directors Forum highlighted how the sector is being transformed by fast changing consumer behaviour

30

COMPANY PROFILES

To join Engage Customer (free membership) and receive weekly Alerts, Digital Magazines and Invitations to the Directors Forums and other Engage events go to: www.engagecustomer.com @engagecustomer Mainline:

T: 01932 506 300

Steve Hurst

steve@engagecustomer.com

T: 01932 506 304

Nick Rust

nick@engagecustomer.com

T: 01932 506 301

Chris Wood

chris@engagecustomer.com

T: 01932 506 303

Rachel Blake: rachel@engagecustomer.com

5

T: 01932 506 302

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 Published by: Engage Customer Ltd, Nicholson House, 41 Thames Street, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 8JG ©engage customer ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN SQUARE THE CIRCLE OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT Social media presents a whole raft of opportunities to engage with customers across all areas of the business says Christer Holloman author of a new book on social media ROI. In this exclusive article he highlights three case study examples of the most innovative ways companies are doing just that Can crowdsourcing work in credit cards?

A small team within Barclaycard US decided to find out if it could – and create a better credit card in the process.

Consumer trust in big banks was at an all-time low, the credit card industry faced unprecedented regulatory pressure to be simpler and more transparent and the proliferation of

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

social media and community-based reviews had redefined how products were made and priced, changing companies’ abilities to interact with and serve their customers. Barclaycard’s answer to these trends was a virtual cardmember community and a new business concept called Barclaycard Ring – the first community crowdsourced credit card.

M

“Throughout the evolution of the product, Barclaycard US has utilised the power of social media to gather feedback and enable its cardholders to be involved in decisions and have a say about what they want the product to be”

6

cover story

Throughout the evolution of the product, Barclaycard US has utilised the power of social media to gather feedback and enable its cardholders to be involved in decisions and have a say about what they want the product to be.

The Ring of truth New cardmember acquisition is driven largely by word of mouth and referrals from within the community, with no largescale paid advertising support. Barclaycard Ring has been hailed as a disruptor to the current credit card marketplace and its success relies on Barclaycard’s ability to create a strong bond and high level of trust with its community.

Already, the bank is seeing stark differences with its Ring cardmembers compared with other cards in its portfolio: 75 per cent of Ring cardholders are active online, versus just 48 per cent for other Barclaycard branded products. They log in more (66 per cent compared to 41 per cent), pay their bills online more (51 per cent versus 44 per cent) and have decided to go paperless (55 per cent compared to 25 per cent).

Barclaycard US has learned that a community – connected by social media – is really a group with shared interests. In this case, Ring brings together a community that understands and wants a good deal in a credit card. They are engaged in the product – they use it and rely on it to drive revenue to the

7

programme. They care about it and make timely payments – and use cost-effective online servicing and e-statements. By aligning the interests of the issuer and the customers, both are satisfied with the product.

The rise of giffgaff Back in 2009 customer service costs within the UK telecoms industry were on the rise, while at the same time the industry as a whole didn’t have a great reputation in terms of customer care. On top of this the network O2 looked at their customer base and found their brand was under represented within the younger demographics and needed to come up with a solution to both these problems. How could they get these people on board and provide a new form of customer service that would reduce the cost but keep or improve the service to the customer?

To address these two points, O2 created a new brand called giffgaff. The decision was made to set-up an interactive forum where giffgaff’s customers could help each other to answer questions they had. The main challenge was: How do you get people to start delivering the customer service for you about a product they don’t know anything about? How do you get them involved? And how do you keep them there? giffgaff looked at different solutions, such as getting the customer service agents involved in the forum - setting the example - and technical solutions, such as auto-escalations to ensure people were warned when questions weren’t being answered. An ‘all hands on deck’ approach of everyone in the company being involved in the community, answering questions where they could, as well as scouring the internet for forums on mobiles and finding people there who were willing and able to train and asking them to get involved, by offering them rewards for their participation.

M

The 300-year-old bank knew how to do credit cards very well from a technical standpoint, but combining that with a transparent online, community platform and single sign-on servicing site was a big change to implement. Beta testing with an invite-only cardmember base went live just months after the idea was first conceived and the product was launched for the broader public within six months.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

Christer Holloman, is the author of The Social Media MBA Guide to ROI: How to Measure and Improve your Return on Investment, published by Wiley, May 2014 (ISBN: 9781118844397; RRP: £19.99).

Starting at the beginning

Sony mobile and social media

There were a few things that needed to be done right from the start. The online forum community needed to be set up intuitively and work as effectively as possible. The messaging throughout the site and all other communications needed to be clear to ensure people would understand how the proposition worked: i.e. if you’re looking for customer service, please go to our community first.

Sony Mobile is a leading mobile phone maker and in 2005 the company began to listen to what was being said about the brand online. The main purpose was to use it as an intelligence source together with information collected internally from contact and service centres, turning it into an early warning system to detect faults with newly released handsets with the aim of reducing the time it took to feedback information to manufacturing. Every hour saved by identifying and correcting a fault more quickly is saving the company a large sum of money.

In terms of the results they measure how well the service is provided in terms of community members giving the correct answers to questions and how happy people are with the service in general. giffgaff also looks at the Customer Satisfaction Index, which they get out of monthly surveys. The scores they see are consistently around 80. And the last measure they also look at is their Net Promoter Score, as this is very important to them in terms of customer acquisition.

The scores they see are consistently around 75. Today giffgaff has one of the lowest customer service costs per customer in the industry.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

Sony Mobile started to receive structured information from social media about consumer issues with products from its services and technology supplier. The information is the result of a daily social crawling and filtering process, of tens of thousands of social media networks, forums, discussion boards and blogs using large Boolean search expressions.

The search expressions, collectively referred to as taxonomies, are continuously updated and evolve as new products and software updates are released. The search taxonomies enable the quality filtering of social media conversations on a product or software level.

Advanced search expressions enable the decomposition of conversations to a product feature and issue category level (build quality, Wi-Fi, reception, camera, display, application, etc.). The net result of this initial crawling and filtering process is

8

M

The customer service team (who deal with any type of query that needs access to the back-end, think account related queries) needed to be brought up to speed with how they wanted this to work. Then they needed to start making people aware of who they were, what they stand for, how the idea works and what’s in it for them. And last but not least, they needed a few people ready to start answering questions for the company, should they come in.

cover story

“The issue tracking programme has demonstrated the value of ‘listening to the consumer’ to the Sony Mobile team and has helped better align the awareness of customer issues and the importance of proactive actions to help to solve issues” a “clean” set of data that is quantitatively structured. The data is then qualitatively analysed by experienced analysts to identify key customer issues.

All Sony social media activity tracked Each product and category taxonomy has its own variations for key markets and languages, which allows for the investigation of volume trends (peaks and troughs) to guide the qualitative analysis. The programme tracks all Sony Mobile products in social media on a daily basis, and flags and reports an emerging issue as soon as it is identified, subject to a threshold and priority level.

When an issue is identified and monitored in social media or a contact centre, a rapid assessment is undertaken: all findings are collected, analysed and cross-referenced; the issue is checked to establish if it is known, or if there are similar or related issues reported and the issue is assessed to understand its commercial impact by reviewing the issue volume, momentum and sentiment.

The results of the issue tracking programme have been impressive. The benefits from proactively putting in place actions to fix detected problems with products or preventing further widespread customer dissatisfaction have led to a

9

range of both tangible and intangible benefits: ■ Identification and prioritisation of the KEY issues for Sony Mobile ■ Benchmarking issues across competitive products to understand relative performance and issue severity ■ Avoidance of costs ■ Avoidance of brand and reputational damage ■ Improved consumer satisfaction As important, the issue tracking programme has demonstrated the value of ‘listening to the consumer’ to the Sony Mobile team, and has helped better align the awareness of customer issues and the importance of proactive actions to help to solve issues.

In conclusion, you are able to engage with customers in a variety of ways across the organisation using social media, far beyond the most obvious marketing and PR routes.

Also note that none of these examples mentions traditional social media channels like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’, this illustrates the point that social is a way of communicating, interacting and engaging - not about a collection of websites.

Applying this mindset will allow you to see new opportunities for your organisation using the mechanics of social media like the cases highlighted in this article.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

big interview

HOW BRITISH AIRWAYS IS REINVENTING ITS CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT OFFERING In this exclusive interview we talk with British Airways head of flight operations Charlie Maunder about its ground breaking Beyond the Flight Deck programme that has helped transform the customer service reputation of the airline

We came together with BALPA and recognised that we needed a common goal.

We found one in our shared desire to

11

promote a broader pilot role within British Airways encompassing a strong leadership and customer element. The BFD programme formed part of the relaunch of the British Airways brand campaign and our brand promise ‘To Fly To Serve’. Our management of the BFD programme with BALPA is distinct and separate from the transaction of our normal business. It’s been a healthy if at times schizophrenic relationship!

M

Charlie Maunder, Head of Flight Operations, BA

• First off Charlie could you give us some background to the origins of the Beyond the Flight Deck (BFD) partnership programme with the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) within BA and how it got off the ground?

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

• I understand there are four key elements to the BFD programme could you outline those four elements and how they interact together? Do you know of any other similar programmes at other airlines?

The programme provides our pilots with the training and information so they can have a positive effect on the customer experience.

Our experience is that customers generally have lower expectations of the level of customer service they might receive from a pilot. When our pilots get the opportunity to interact with our customers, the feedback shows what a positive impact it has on customer and pilot alike.

The 4 elements of the programme we are promoting are: • 2 day personal development training delivered by OR Consulting • Provision of relevant customer, commercial and route information delivered over iPad to equip aircrew to best serve the customer’s various needs • Introduction of a new joint briefing between pilots and the cabin crew with a focus on the specific customer needs via a flight-specific ‘Customer Plan’ • Customer feedback on the pilot impact on their customer experience (both on a route and individual basis) through British Airways’ feedback tool ‘Customer Voice’

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

There has been widespread industry interest in the BFD programme but to my knowledge it is a unique initiative that sets British Airways apart from the competition.

• Could you tell us how you came to work with OR Consulting on the BFD programme and how the relationship with that organisation has evolved over the past years since inception of the programme and also looking forward?

In 2009 we engaged Mark Hamlin of ORC to repair our relationship and to set up the framework for the BFD programme. Since then we have worked closely with ORC and the programme lead, Aedrian Bekker, to develop and evolve the content of the training course. We manage the programme through a monthly steering group and ORC is a key contributor.

• What are your plans over the next few years in bringing the BFD programme to all BA pilots and what changes are you planning to further enhance the relationship between pilots, cabin crew and passengers?

To date we have trained approximately 1,100 of the 3,650 pilots who work for British Airways and we estimate that it will take us approximately 2 more years to complete the training for all. I am pleased to say that the programme has good

M

“The BFD steering group has an aspiration for pilots to be able to harvest feedback right down to the individual flights they have operated. There is no better motivation to improve performance than knowing the effect that you have had on the customer experience”

12

big interview

“There remains tremendous scope via mobile technology to further improve the provision of timely and relevant information so that our crew can continue to improve the customer journey”

momentum. Pilots are sometimes sceptical of corporate initiatives, which is why we encourage BFD to be an individual or personal experience. For many, the behaviours that BFD promotes come naturally but the programme, through the training and continuing embedding of the initiatives, aims to upskill all of our pilots to feel comfortable in this space.

The launch of the ‘Customer Plan’ and the joint briefing are however relatively new concepts that we must now embed and improve. There remains tremendous scope via mobile technology to further improve the provision of timely and relevant information so that our crew can continue to improve the customer journey.

• What tangible benefits have you seen so far from BFD my understanding is that it has had a positive impact on pilot engagement and also customer engagement?

It’s very clear that customers are noticing the difference and liking it. Our customer feedback mechanisms show this both through the individual verbatims and personal correspondence we receive from customers and also from the quantative data generated by Customer Voice.

This data shows that customers consistently welcome the high levels of service they receive from our pilots. Whether it’s in the quality of the public announcements, the personal greeting at the beginning or the end of the flight or the really significant impact that the most proactive pilots can make at times of operational disruption, we know that the customer benefits are real and tangible.

• Could you tell us a bit about Customer Voice and how that fits in with the overarching BFD programme?

It’s vital that we are able to measure the effect of the programme through the collation of customer feedback. Through these means, we can identify trends, training issues and where to focus our investment resources so that we can respond to customer feedback and provide our customers with an experience aligned to their needs.

In time, as the functionality of the customer voice programme develops, the BFD steering group has an aspiration for pilots to be able to harvest feedback right down to the individual flights they have operated. There is no better motivation to improve performance than knowing the effect that you have had on the customer experience.

• Finally Charlie what impact do you think the BFD programme is having on the BA brand overall and it’s overarching ‘To Fly, To Serve’ brand promise?

BFD is playing its part in the resurgence of the BA brand that has recently seen British Airways voted the UK’s number 1 Superbrand. Our brand promise can only be delivered by the people in our business and so I think that there is a clear recognition from customers and colleagues that the BFD initiative is delivering real benefits. It is something that the whole team is proud to be associated with.

The benefits of BFD are probably most apparent in this last area. More and more of our pilots are confident and willing to engage with customers on a one to one basis when disruption occurs. This level of personal attention quite often turns potentially negative customer experiences (which delays are typically seen as) into positive outcomes.

13

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

TALKING HEADS

How Visual IVR is changing the customer experience game In this exclusive profile we interview Steve Herlocher Chief Marketing Officer at customer service experience leaders Jacada about the benefits of Visual IVR which is being hailed as a game changer in the world of mobile and web self service customer contact Visual IVR is being talked about as a future ‘game changer’ in customer contact Steve.

How far do you think that is true and why?

Today the average consumer in most parts of the world attempts some form of mobile or web self service first and, unfortunately, in most cases that attempt fails. When this happens they commonly end up calling the company in frustration and then are faced with starting over in the Voice IVR, driving significant frustration and dissatisfaction. This problem of siloed information has existed since the introduction of the web and continues to get worse as social and mobile emerged as additional customer service channels. Visual IVR works with the existing mobile and web self service assets to make them more effective and in the event an agent is still needed, it preserves all of the effort the customer put into the self service session to identify themselves, identify their problem, and the steps they attempted to resolve the problem. This information then starts the engagement with the agent, skipping the frustration of the Voice IVR entirely, and helping the agent resolve the customer question quickly and in the process killing the dreaded “silo”

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

effect. Any technology that closes that gap quickly and inexpensively such as Visual IVR definitely counts as a “game changer” in the competitive race to keep customers and keep them profitably.

What are the key user benefits of Visual IVR for consumers using the technology?

Consumers who choose to engage with Visual IVR do not have to listen to the often frustrating Voice IVR menus and options. Instead they have a concise, easy to use experience that leverages the strengths of the powerful smart device in their hands. They are able to interact with companies more quickly, with less frustration, investing far less time, and commonly get the correct answer from the first person they communicate with.

Some example benefits of using a Visual IVR over a Voice IVR include: • Scanning a smart phone screen is a lot faster than listening to a long voice tree • Visual IVR gives you the ability to enter alphanumeric data, something the Voice IVR cannot do

M

Steve Herlocher, Chief Marketing Officer, Jacada

14

TALKING HEADS

“There is little that frustrates us more as consumers than when we’ve entered all our data in the IVR, and the first thing the agent asks is for the same information you just entered”

• Visual IVR makes it easy to go “back” in the call tree and explore more suitable options, whereas a voice IVR typically makes navigation quite difficult • Visual IVR allows you to capture additional information to enrich the experience: The customer’s current location, being able to attach a photograph etc.

What are the key benefits to the organisation of Visual IVR – and what are the downsides?

The key benefits that a company gains by adopting a Visual IVR are four fold. First, the ease of use results in increased customer satisfaction as discussed above. Second, costs to serve are decreased due to starting the agent with the full context of who the customer is and what they were doing as well as fewer transfers between agents (customers will pay attention to a visual menu and select a reason for connecting vs. the “zeroing out” of an IVR with complicated menus). Third, top line revenues are increased through additional cross-sell by offering a personalized and dynamic offer to the customer in outbound Visual IVR. And finally, a Visual IVR provides greater self service options involving complex data as compared to a Voice IVR, thereby increasing call deflection and avoiding costly agent assisted interactions.

Additional benefits for the organization are the relatively low costs of implementing a Visual IVR solution, and the quick time to market.

Leading Visual IVR solutions can reuse the existing Voice IVR interactions, allowing you to be up and running in weeks, not months.

In addition, the cost of a Visual IVR solution is far lower than the cost of a Speech enabled IVR solution, with customers tending to prefer Visual over Speech (poor recognition, accent problems, noisy environments…all add up to problematic speech adoption).

The mobile channel is now ubiquitous and wearable technology is already with us – is this good news for Visual IVR and if so why?

It absolutely means good things for Visual IVR adoption as digital engagement increases. Devices such as Google Glass allow consumers to visually interact with their real world surroundings. As they wish to engage with companies, governments, service providers, and charities a compelling and personalised Visual IVR connection that utilises their profile, id, location, and object of interest is only an eye blink away. Other smart wearable devices such as watches, exercise monitors, and health monitors each carry context and could leverage Visual IVR to bridge the worn digital experience into the contact centre or sales agent.

15

Can you explore the link between customers and agents when it comes to the use and adoption of Visual IVR? Customers do not think of the company as silos and they are demanding continuity from one channel to another. It is not uncommon for a customer to start a session on the company’s website and then later resume the conversation by calling the contact centre. And when they do, they expect the conversation to pick-up from where they left off. There is little that frustrates us more as consumers than when we’ve entered all our data in the IVR, and the first thing the agent asks is for the same information you just entered. It starts the call off with a negative perception and causes a natural animosity between the customer and the agent. Visual IVR’s core strength is to make this bridge from self-service (website or Voice IVR) to an agent-assisted session, with full continuity of the conversation. Agents and customers are instantly connected with context, ensuring the right start to a call.

As customers start experiencing how convenient this visual mechanism is, they will naturally tend to favour using Visual IVR. It’s been said that the new web browser technologies such as WebRTC are the death knell for IVR – is this true and if so does the same go for Visual IVR? Oddly enough, initially technologies such as WebRTC by itself stand to only increase the traffic into traditional Voice IVRs making a phone call a click away. By pairing WebRTC with a Visual IVR engagement the customer id, web context, and intent immediately pair up with the voice connection. This ensures that all of the necessary information to find the correct agent and start the conversation off in context naturally connects the customer to the agent. Together WebRTC and Visual IVR offer consumers a simple and compelling way to communicate that eventually leads to the death of the Voice IVR. There is still a sharp learning curve especially for customers when it comes to Visual IVR – how do you see the technology and its applications evolving over the next couple of years Initially, as consumers go through the educational phase, the early adopters are offering Visual IVR integrated with the traditional Voice IVR (playing helpful “voice prompts” to guide the customer to the Visual IVR experience) and are offering incentives such as priority queue placement to help shorten the learning curve and speed adoption. Over time, as Visual IVR matures, consumer demand for consistent interactions across channels is expected to skyrocket. At this time consumer expectations will include the ability to pause and continue interactions between their devices and with agents in the company allowing one dialogue to commence from the initial inquiry through to the final resolution, all in context and personalised to the current state of the consumer.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

SOCIAL MEDIA - WRONG AND RIGHT, AND THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE

Ben Stockman @BenStockman

As a social media consultant and engage customer blogger Ben Stockman performs a lot of audits of social media for brands - and the results of those audits are almost invariably the same: they have a social media presence, but that's all it is - a presence. Somebody in the organisation clearly thought it was a good idea. "The kids are all OVER it", a bright spark in marketing may have piped up.

"Coke are doing it! We should too!"

"It would be great for engagement and it's so easy to do!", they say. WRONG. "We don't need social media", is another cry I have heard in recent years. "We know loads about our audience and besides, our clientele already have a great way to contact us - everyone prefers the phone!" - WRONG. Or, on the ipside: "I LOVE social media! We've got a fan page on Facebook and we post our stuff to Twitter - our goal is to get a million fans by the end of the year!" You might be surprised to hear that this one too is WRONG. Equally; "Ooh, I loved that campaign! Let's do something just like that one!" Wrong, wrong, WRONG.

M

The best (and simultaneously the worst) thing about social media is that it is EVERYWHERE. It is on our phones and in our homes and is without doubt the most invasive communication tool of all time. It has overtaken consumption of pornography as the #1 activity on the web. Generation Y already far outnumbers the Baby Boomers generation, and 96% of them are on a social network. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. In 2010 it was estimated that there were over 200 million blogs. In 2014 that number is over 300 million. I'm not going to keep throwing statistics at you, but you get the point, which is:

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

16

social media feature

Even if you haven't dealt with social media for your business, surely, you've sorted out your website?

You cannot avoid it any longer, and if you do, I promise you - your business WILL suffer.

Do you know the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook? Women aged over 55. All our mothers are on Facebook. Firstly, do not EVER accept their friend requests, because then she will know EXACTLY how drunk you got that night - secondly and more importantly, this demonstrates very obviously that social media is both mainstream and very firmly here to stay. I'll say it again - your business cannot avoid being on social media any longer.

And what about Twitter? Do you understand what happens there, and how? Have you understood its almost limitless potential? It is Twitter, more than Facebook, that has revolutionised the way in which we communicate, and the way in which we consume information. Consider the awful incident last year in Woolwich, in which a soldier lost his life to a holy war he wasn't fighting. For two hours journalists were being kept away from the scene, and for those two hours every news outlet's announcement included the phrase "We're getting unconfirmed reports from Twitter".

This has huge implications for the way we do business. A former colleague of mine became IBM's global head of social business as a result of a tweet that simply said "Arrived San Francisco". A couple last year reported profits of £100 million because they used Twitter to contact fashion bloggers and celebrities and ask for endorsements for their products.

Even if you haven't dealt with social media for your business, surely, you've sorted out your website?

The vast plethora of SEO consultants in the marketplace suggests otherwise. If I type what your core business is into Google and I don't see it on the first page of results, again, you're doing it wrong. This is not the Field of Dreams. "If you build it, they WON'T come" - especially in today's myriad of communication streams, all full to the brim with brands desperate to engage the very people you want to talk to, you're going to have to actively lead people to interact with your brand at every step of the way.

M

With the decision made to do this, however, you now have to answer some questions: where, when, what, how and most importantly WHY. This will take you time - and unfortunately it's time that most choose not to take, which is why so very many get it so very wrong.

17

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

Social media is a conversation - and you no longer have a choice about being a part of it

We can all create Facebook and Twitter pages with relative ease, but now what? Do you know how many brands are playing in this space, clamouring for attention from the very people you're targeting? Do you know what your competitors are doing with social media?

What the hell are you going to say in order to keep people's interest in a VERY crowded space EVERY SINGLE DAY, including, sometimes, very late at night, not to mention at weekends and bank holidays?

Are you proďŹ cient enough to do this? Is your business agile enough to support it? If you're like most businesses, the answer is currently "no". But now, having decided to "go social", you need to be able to answer yes, and fast. If you're going to swim, you need to very quickly learn to do so - and in the deep end - or you need to get out of the pool.

Make no mistake - this is not an easy thing you're about to do. Put simply, to do it properly you have to make your ENTIRE business ready to support it. Your customer service staff do not want more work. Neither do your sales teams, or your operations manager, or your marketing department but every one of these people has to be involved in your plans in order to make it a success. Content marketing for social media is HARD. To do it well, you're going to need buy-in from a large proportion of your organisation.

Ignore this last piece of advice at your peril: You too could end up being one of those brands that posts funny cat pictures on a Friday afternoon. "Like this picture if you're happy it's Friday!" you may say. "Our customers like funny cat pictures! People share them on Fridays and that's brilliant content!" No - and I really can't stress this enough - NO - IT REALLY ISN'T! It is boring, unoriginal, crass and irrelevant to your brand and to your audience. People will like a funny cat picture on the internet whether their friend posted it or you did. Is it relevant to your brand? No. If your brand is doing this, stop it immediately. I promise we'll all think better of you.

Social media is NOT a place to post cat pictures in the name

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

M

"But I've already GOT good social media!" I hear some of you cry. "We post great stuff!" (I hope that my last paragraph has made you doubt that a little). I can name at least twenty large UK based companies that I know think like this and are so, so wrong. (I'm not naming them all, but... "Are you a scruncher or a folder?" springs to mind). The same goes for April Fool's day - where once I used to love it, as a kid, now as an adult I dread it - we seem to have lost it to unoriginal social media marketing departments!

18

social media feature

Social media is a conversation - and you no longer have a choice about being a part of it. You wouldn't sit in a corner at a cocktail party and only talk to the people you came with (you might, but you wouldn't get much from the experience) - social media IS the world's cocktail party, everyone you could ever want to talk to is there and you ARE sitting in that corner, if you've even bothered to turn up.

Worse still, some of you are sitting in that corner shouting "LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OF A CAT! AREN'T YOU GLAD IT'S FRIDAY?! I LIKE THE WEEKEND! DO YOU?!" Would you talk to that guy at a party? Neither would I.

Changing humanity I'd tend to categorise myself a social media activist, rather than a consultant. I started out in activism (2009-10 were great years for community-led Facebook campaign groups) and this has led me to a belief that ďŹ rst and foremost social media is one of the most groundbreaking things to have ever happened to our species.

Every communication advance in history has brought forward a huge leap in human behaviour and development: the alphabet made democracy possible. The printing press pretty much kickstarted the renaissance. We are currently living through the greatest communication advance in the whole of human history and we have no idea what it is doing to us in the longer term.

Our attention spans have become shorter. Our thumbs are becoming more developed and powerful. Our children can play a computer game before they can tell the time or tie their shoes. Will their children even know what a clock face looks like?! Or, come to that, a newspaper, or a DVD? We are living in a world where the technology of ďŹ ve years ago looks outdated to us today - there are already children alive who will never have known anything but a life lived out in relative openness on social media. Our children will ALL be storing data in the cloud, whether we are or not... whether many of us even understand what "in the cloud" even means!

Wearable technology is currently an expensive "nice to have" - but it's only a short matter of time before business execs are wearing Google Glass where only a few years ago they were sporting those oh-so-fashionable bluetooth headsets.

As a result of this rate of change, of course, there is no such thing as a true social media "expert" (and beware anyone who styles themselves this way!). The landscape is changing constantly. While the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook may be our

19

mothers, the younger generations are abandoning it in their droves.

And why? Two reasons: First, "They are sick of marketing" - a lesson that we should all heed - and second, because their parents are all on it! The same rate of drop-off among younger users is happening to Apple for identical reasons. To compound matters, to most kids today Twitter is seen as a news source, not a social network.

Any brand today has to realise two things: One, that communication to customers is expected to be consistently carried out across a number of channels and two, that whatever technology, or platforms are being used today, in order to stay relevant to customers (current or potential) that they must move with the times. They must invest in technology, and invest in time and resources to cover as many new emerging platforms and channels as possible. To quote an old social media content adage, they must continue to "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks".

Driven by technology and digital, customers' expectations have become much higher - if it's easier for them to do business with a competitor, they will. Businesses have to keep evolving their offerings with customers at the pace of the rate of change. Those that deal with social media as a conversation and not as just another PR channel will always come out on top for customer service. Many of our parents may have at some point said "You have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you talk." This is what a massive percentage of brands are still failing to understand.

Unlimited potential If however- IF - this is done right, the sky is the limit with social media's potential. Many businesses now use interactions with their customers on social as a means to create a "virtuous circle" of information - and in no industry is this more true than software.

Users of a company's product provide feedback, which is in turn passed to the product team who create an update based entirely on what the community of users has been asking for that week.

One such example of this is a former employer who use their Facebook community as a platform for this exact purpose. First, we embedded a Facebook "Like" button into the product, growing our online community by directly appealing to the users of their software. Every week, we monitored the wall for the most common problems being discussed. This data then got sent to the product team, who created updates to the software based entirely on what the community was asking for. Taking things one step further, we used some of that very customer base as both testers of new updates to the software and as on-page tech experts to help other customers.

This is, I would argue, one of the best possible pieces of "ROI" in social media - constant access to customers allows the team to

M

of "being on Facebook". It is NOT a fad, or an advert, or a vanity project, or just another channel for your brand's PR. It is NOT somewhere where you can endlessly churn out marketing messages and track your ROI in resulting sales. More on the perceived "ROI" of social media later.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

E AG R G EN OVE H RS, S, T E I K E W PEA YNOT S 40 Y KE NEW , R NA EAMS LE E L S P TR DTAB RINK S 2 UN ,D RO MME 500 A GR Y AND ES O PR ART GAT P E DEL

28 NOVEMBER, VICTORIA PLAZA, LONDON THE JOINED UP CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EVENT The Summit is the only joined-up customer experience event to drive successful customer and employee engagement strategies for organisations looking to improve customer retention, loyalty, and business performance and profitability.

Register

Sponsors include:

social media feature

Beyond this, too, into marketing, social media can do incredible things. Recently, fashion and fragrance brand Marc Jacobs gave away products at their New York flagship store in return for tweets and Instagram posts. Ostensibly as a method to thank their fans, they recognised that the value in recommendations and endorsements would far outweigh the cost of giving away a few products, and planned their campaign accordingly.

They are not alone. Already Tesco are operating a wine "Cobuying" scheme, in which the prices drop when customers share their involvement on social media. More still are following suit.

"Social currency" may be a relatively new idea, but it is obviously on the rise. Social media itself is less than a decade old, and already we're seeing new methods of marketing, new methods of buying, new methods of talking and new methods of customer advocacy.

Now that constant customer feedback is such an important part of service, the savviest companies are utilising their customers to become, in effect "agents" for the brand. First Direct and E4 are great examples of brands doing this well - given the right tools, a true brand advocate can become an extension of a company's supply chain, a partner, a reseller, a technical support engineer or even a social media community manager of sorts.

The 'Holy Grail' In essence, now that we have "real-time" communication, customer service done right is better than marketing - in some cases it does away with the need for marketing altogether! Word of mouth is far more powerful and far more trusted (especially among the younger generations) than any form of traditional advertising or PR. Concentrating on a consistent customer experience should be a far higher priority than marketing to almost every brand at the moment.

The fact is though that achieving the "holy grail" of customer experience is a continuous process, and every savvy business will recognise and prepare for this - you'll have to consider every angle; how it will affect your staff, how you communicate concepts to those involved, the what, the where, the how, the why. Adopting new

21

methods of business involves trust and engagement at every level.

The same applies to new methods of communicating with customers, if you're not using social to do so already. Having a contact centre is no longer enough in these days of instant interactions. If you're going to deal with your customers demanding that you have an online presence then your whole organisation is going to have to buy in to your ideas. It's not going to be easy - again, you're going to need buy-in from a large proportion of your organisation, it will require clear leadership and exceptional communication. Leading from the front is one thing, but ensuring that others follow behind is another - your idea will develop once others start thinking about it and managing that process is going to be challenging.

Pain Points Social media has to be harnessed correctly, and plenty of time and resource has to be dedicated to it - rest assured done WRONG it will immediately highlight any issues in your customer service or customer experience. This is one of the biggest issues that you might experience as a brand on social. The added exposure and customer interaction that social media brings - yes, can translate to "a lot of people have seen or heard about my product" - but if your product doesn't work, if your supply chain is flawed, if your business can't deal with the inevitable problems that this much interaction will expose or if you don't care enough about your customers to provide a prompt reply - then social will cause you problems and it will definitely not translate to sales - if anything it's more likely to create a drop in them!

Many a business has fallen foul of flaws in their customer experience leading to a tirade of abuse from unhappy customers on social media! If the business has flaws anywhere along its customer processes, an exposure of those flaws to a demanding customer base will do nothing but make you highly unpopular. With the power of Twitter, an unhappy customer (especially an influential one) can become a dangerous enemy.

Look at British Gas, as a recent example. On the same day as the company's price hikes and profit announcements, the marketing team's #AskBritishGas hashtag, (designed, I imagine, to promote transparency in customer service!) was ruthlessly decimated by angry and very witty Twitter users (e.g. "which items of furniture do you, in your humble opinion, think people should burn first this winter?") who took to the network to vent their disgust.

M

have the best possible insight and sentiment analysis. In this instance, the customers only really care about two things - how good the product is, and how much they're being listened to.

Social media done right provides them both.

ISSUE FOURTEEN • APRIL 2014

social media feature

Man vs. machine The sad fact is that for many organisations, social media is just a numbers game. I've heard many a marketing person say "Our CEO wants us to get a million fans by summer!" No, no, wrong. What does that number even mean to your business?

With the greatest respect, if you've heard this statement, your CEO is clearly not the sharpest tool in the box. Any idiot can buy "likes" and Twitter followers, but (outside of making you look more popular than you really are) I can tell you with authority they are totally, utterly worthless. I'll explain: My team and I once decided to test this theory by creating fake accounts on Twitter and buying followers. We offered a £50 Amazon voucher to the first three of our 500 new followers to reply to our tweet. Not. One. Replied.

There is a whole industry out there creating fake social profiles as a way to make money.

Any fans "purchased" in this way don't have any more meaning for your brand than fans "bought" by a Facebook ad. (It's no surprise to me that 27% of people who leave Facebook site "too much marketing" as their reason!) Why focus on numbers so much? Have we lost our human touch in the light of all the "big data" we keep reading about?

Let me ask you this: Is it more important to you as a person to have a lot of acquaintances, or a few close friends?

There is a whole industry out there creating fake social profiles as a way to make money

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

This isn't a high school popularity contest. You don't NEED a million fans just because your competitor (the good-looking sporty kid) has them. Look at the VALUE you get from having a presence online - not just in potential repeat business, but in feedback - if they're talking to, you're doing it RIGHT. You don't need to employ cheap gimmicks ("Send in your selfie!"

- DIE) or giveaway tactics ("Like the page to win an iPad!" - KILL ME). Just do what you do BETTER, with more care than everyone else. It will show!

There's no point in having 78 million fans on Facebook if barely a percentage of that audience is actually talking to you. You don't want 78 million acquaintances - you want a decent, trusted, loyal group of close friends.

I know from experience that it is this tiny proportion of their audience who WILL be of use. They will feed back, they will tell you what they want, they will act as advocates - some of these people might actually run your Facebook community FOR you, FOR FREE. If you get this right you will become more popular among the very people whose attention you crave, you will be seen in a new and friendlier light, you will start getting the content right for your audience, and you will understand your market better than you can currently even begin to imagine.

I do not doubt for one minute that we are in the middle of a seismic shift in the way that humans deal with each other. The ability to instantly communicate has brought us closer together in a way that we could never have predicted. Boundaries of class, gender, sexuality and geography need no longer be an issue. We can pool our resources and collaborate on things that have previously never been possible.

It amazes me that some businesses STILL aren't attempting to take part in the information revolution. Your business can and MUST be part of it if you wish to still BE in business by the time your kids have left home. Be prepared for anything and realistic about it (You can't, for example, announce record profits and a price hike and then take to Twitter to answer people's questions and expect to get away with it without a well-deserved hiding). You AND your organisation will be required to be much more open and ready to change if customers require it - and believe me, they'll let you know if they do.

The 21st century has been here for 14 years now. We're changing as a result. Is it a consciousness shift? Is it a revolution?

Whatever the answer, more important is this question: Are you a part of it?

22

review

Financial Services Directors Forum Case studies from the likes of First Direct, Nationwide, Barclays, Tesco Bank, Hastings Direct and Skipton Building Society enthral delegates at Engage Customer’s recent Directors Forum Engage Customer’s Financial Services Directors Forum highlighted the rapid changes in consumer behaviour and the disconnect between what customer want and what the sector offers as it fights to win back customer trust.

On the flip side there were some inspiring case study presentations from organisations such as First Direct and Nationwide who are getting it right.

The Financial Services sector is under continuing pressure to get its customer offering back on track. That pressure comes from consumers, who have lost trust in the sector for a whole host of reasons, and also from regulatory bodies such as the FCA who are continuing to introduce a roster of changes that impact on

VIEW HIGHLIGHTS VIDEO

I S S U E F IOF UT ER ET N E E •N J•U LAYP R2 I0L 1 24 0 1 4

the relationship between financial services providers and those who use their products and services.

The conduct of FS orgs has never been under greater scrutiny – and yet of course there have also never been greater opportunities for the sector to engage customers operating in a digital world The Directors Forum chaired by Engage Customer editorial director Steve Hurst and sponsored by Nunwood, Procter, ServiceTick and Interactive Intelligence highlighted the key issues and challenges facing the much maligned financial services sector and its relationships with customers at a time of rapid change. It drilled down to the core of the challenges and gave delegates invaluable advice on how to find the best way forward.

VIEW KEY MESSAGES VIDEO

22 44

review

Agenda Summary Opening Keynote: Youbiquity Finance: Consumers, channels and engagement in retail financial services Marcus Hickman, Director, Davies Hickman Associates Based on new consumer research across France, Spain and the UK, Marcus will explore how banks and insurance providers can build stronger relationships with customers: How is consumer engagement with traditional financial services providers changing? Trust and source of information and advice - What is the role of the human touch in retail financial services? - How is mobile banking changing the channel behaviours of consumers? - What are expectations of channels now and in the future (eg branch, web-chat, phone, social media and video)? - What alternative or challenger brands appeal to consumers? - How are consumers using social media in financial services? - How can the branch evolve and develop to meet consumer needs? - What would improve the engagement of consumers with providers, now and in the future?

Customer Experience Excellence in the Financial Sector: International Best Practice Review Carol McCreadie, Financial Services Director, Nunwood Financial Services continues to be a highly competitive market, perhaps never more so than now. Many companies are aiming to rebuild trust with consumers and trying to differentiate themselves with new, 'fairer' propositions. However to retain customers over the longer term and maximise word-of-mouth, their customers' experiences needs to be as good, if not much better, than the brand promise. This session is a practical examination of how FS brands deliver this. Over the last 4 years, Nunwood's Customer Experience Excellence Centre has studied over 800 of the world's leading brands. It has revealed the common DNA of all great experiences - The Six Pillars. In this session we draw on over 700,000 consumer evaluations from the UK, USA and Australia to illustrate how the world's best brands master The Six Pillars of customer experience.

Case Study: Barclays Charlie Casey, Customer Experience Manager, Barclays Laura Jamieson, Director - Head of Customer Experience Improvement, Barclays Laura and Charlie will talk about the journey that Barclays has been on and how it has sought to take the strategic themes and messages and translate this into the customer experience Barclays deliver to their Retail Banking customers. They will discuss the challenges they face but also the opportunity to transform customer experience.

Case Studies from Skipton Building Society, Wonga.com and GM Financial Service Leon Stafford, Regional Territory Manager, Interactive Intelligence Leon Stafford, Financial Services TM for Interactive Intelligence will explain how 'all-in-one’ communication technologies delivered via cloud or Premise can deliver significant changes to Customer Experience – reflecting the changes in customer expectation and engagement. Case Studies from Skipton Building Society, Wonga.com and GM Financial Services will be referenced in the presentation Tomorrow’s World - understand the next generation of retail banking Jo Thomson, MD, Procter As a thought leader in customer and people engagement – Procter asked Senior representatives from a cross section of High Street and Challenger banks what their forecast was for the future – particularly enablers for long lasting change. The results are an interesting and thought provoking view of what genuinely needs to happen to deliver a better outcome for Banking customers. Procter will share these views and present their own opinion on subjects such as the Impact of Leadership , Sense of purpose & Empowerment on ‘Tomorrows World’ of retail banking.

25

Case Study: The Nationwide story – engaging for success Heather Mustafa, People Insight & Advocacy Manager, Nationwide Looking at Nationwide as a case study, our approach to employee engagement in the Branch Network and how this drives the behaviours that lead to great customer outcomes.

“Making what matters better – How Tesco Bank is changing the nature of service in Financial Services” Michael Sherwood, Customer Experience Manager, Tesco Bank In the January 2014 UK Customer Service Index report Tesco Bank was identified as the brand with the most improved performance. This case study reviews how the insurance division of the bank implemented a continuous customer feedback process that allowed them to: identify and quantify the service issues that frustrated their customers; prioritise the remedial actions that were required; identify and fix variations in service performance between call centre sites and teams as well as at individual agent level; and mend processes that antagonise customers such as overlong IVR introductions.

Case Study: If a tomato is a fruit, then we're a bank: First Direct - the unexpected bank Chris Maddren, Head of Financial Planning & Invest Direct, First Direct Delegates will gain an insight in to the very unique world of first direct. In an industry where there is a lack of trust and goodwill, first direct stands out as a bank that is consistently recognised for its customer satisfaction year after year. The presentation will include: • A history of first direct - 'the unexpected bank' • How first direct consistently achieves market leading customer satisfaction • An overview of first direct values and behaviours • An insight in to the people that make first direct • How we do things differently Case Study: Hastings Direct - Creation & implementation of Social Media Strategy Jamie Wicks, Head of Social Media, Hastings Direct Jamie initiated the use of social media at Hastings Direct creating the first Social Media customer service strategy for the company, researching best practice both inside and outside of the industry by the introduction of competitor monitoring through social media monitoring tools and online research into best of bread in social media customer service. Including - • Transforming the way that the business interacts with Customers by providing the option of a service channel through the Customers site of choice. • Driving increasing activity from an average of 110 messages a week in 2012 to 250 per week on average in 2014, Facebook likes from 800 to 4500 and twitter followers from 295 to 1133. Hastings also has a share of voice of an average of 35% against 3 identified competitors on social media. • Leading the company’s review strategy which is responsible for the #1 rating on Review Centre and recently the implementation of Trustpilot to gain customer reviews.

Searching for the win /win: Bridging the gap between what FS companies want and what customers want Peter Ballard, Founder, Foolproof "In this session Peter will share some of the insights and recent trends Foolproof have observed in the financial services sector from both the business and the customer perspective.

Contrasting what FS brands are focused on with what their customers want from financial brands to give some practical tips on how to achieve the win / win in designing engaging and valuable customer experiences"

DOWNLOAD PRESENTATIONS

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

EXPERT OPINION

Transforming the contact centre in the ‘age of the customer’ In this exclusive profile we interview Ann Sung Ruckstuhl senior vice president and chief marketing officer at LiveOps Inc the global leader in cloud contact centre and customer service solutions First off Ann tell us about your background and how you came to your award winning CMO role at LiveOps

business while also refocusing the company by taking our cloud contact centre technology to market as a separate offering.

I am senior vice president and chief marketing officer at LiveOps. In this role, I drive LiveOps' overall marketing and revenue generation strategies across the customer lifecycle.

LiveOps started life as a BPO – a provider of outsource contact centre services, with thousands of contact centre agents handling calls associated with Direct Response TV advertising in the US. What made us different was that our 20,000 agents were all homebased. We developed our own cloud-based technology to handle that fulfilment model. Many of our agent services clients asked us to deploy our contact centre infrastructure to enable their own multi-site and flexible working strategies.

I have more than 15 years of executive management experience in building successful software and service businesses at start-ups and Fortune 500 companies including Symantec, Sybase (an SAP company), Billpoint (acquired by eBay), and Hewlett-Packard.

I am a Direct Marketing News 2014 Marketing Hall of Femme honoree, and a frequent speaker at industry conferences on consumerisation of IT, cloud computing, customer service and marketing automation. I received my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and my master's degree in business administration from the University of Florida.

LiveOps has undergone a significant business transformation of late could you highlight some of the key changes and how it is impacting on the business?

The transformation is more of a natural evolution. We’ve grown our core agent services

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

So we began to commercialise our own cloud contact centre technology. We’ve subsequently added full multi-channel capabilities – providing a single view of the customer across all interaction channels, and created two operating divisions to more logically separate these two distinct businesses: the agent business, which is US-only; and a cloud contact centre technology business division that operates on a global scale.

LiveOps Engage is one of your flagship products – talk us through its key features and the benefits it brings to your customers LiveOps Engage helps contact centres overcome many of the barriers that prevent

M

Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, LiveOps

26

EXPERT OPINION

them delivering great service. Typically, contact centre agents have to toggle between several screens – five on average but often many more – to find customer information. With Engage, all interaction types are routed to agents via one application.

For LiveOps, multi-channel means that all contact channels - voice, email, web chat, SMS, Twitter and Facebook – feed through to the agent in a universal queue via a single desktop window. We call this LiveOps EngageTM – a modern, browser-based unified desktop.

Through LiveOps Engage, agents can easily respond via a customer’s channel of choice, and can then ‘pivot’ from one channel to another – from Twitter to email or a phone call, for example.

The product stores all contact history in one place, empowering agents to resolve enquiries faster and to have a better appreciation of the existing relationship that every customer might have with the brand.

And we can easily synchronise with 3rd party CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.

Home working is a growing force in the customer contact space and I believe you have 20,000 home agents and growing – how do you see the future for home working panning out?

Some contact centre organisations have blazed a trail with home working, typically offering it for specific teams, roles or individuals. The enabling technology has often been the Achilles heal for these “home working 1.0” leaders.

LiveOps believes that it is the evolution of the role of the contact centre agent that will drive renewed interest and adoption of home working options. Increasingly, customers conduct their own online research, study FAQs and interact in community forums prior to engaging with the contact centre. Enquiries that reach the contact centre are now more complex in nature as a result, and the agent’s role is in transition from call handler to advisor, and in some cases, to subject matter expert.

communication channels. And that’s where cloud has the edge.

What is your take on the emergence of new web browser-based telephony WebRTC and its role in the contact centre environment and how will this impact on traditional ACD going forward?

For sure, we need to find a simple way to explain what WebRTC is, but one way is to provide an example of what it can do. If you wanted to deploy a 300 agent contact centre today, imagine the technology and physical infrastructure, the human resource and the investment required to do it. Now consider that you could simply hand out a laptop with a headset to those 300 people and have them connect from anywhere with an internet connection, simply by clicking a contact centre application embedded in a WebRTC-enabled browser, like Mozilla Firefox. LiveOps has deployed such a contact centre already.

WebRTC provides developers with an easy way of embedding audio and video communications into web applications, to communicationsenable them. And that communications traffic could by-pass traditional telephony networks.

We won’t see the death of the ACD anytime soon, but a whole telecoms industry has been built based on traditional dial tone, and that industry will have to find new ways of generating revenue streams as WebRTC takes hold.

You have recently formed two new subsidiaries (LiveOps Cloud Platform and LiveOps Agent Services), and acquired UserEvents Inc and its CxEngage technology after raising $30million in new funding – how are these new developments going to impact on the development of LiveOps over the next few years ?

Formally separating our business into its constituent parts is a logical thing to do: the ‘vital signs’ of a BPO business are very different from a high growth Software-as-a-Service business.

We can expect to see significant progress with retention strategies, including flexible working options enabled by cloud-based home working solutions, for these high value employees, with organisations positioning roles within the contact centre as a desirable, long term, career choice.

We recently secured a round of funding that we’re using to accelerate global expansion. We just announced a new technology centre in New Zealand, and we’re extending our data centres to Australia and Europe. It will also fund strategic investments, like UserEvents, and allow us to expand sales and marketing activities.

How do you view the continued transition from on premise to cloud deployment in the CRM and contact centre space?

The acquisition of UserEvents allows us to take a lead in the area of ‘contextual routing’.

In our experience, one of the primary concerns for contact centres today is how to address the challenge of multi-channel contact in the ‘age of the customer’.

Some brands use analytics technology to dissect customer interaction history and preferences. They use that insight to drive process improvement, or to identify areas ripe for self-service. Brands must look beyond this by seeking ways to actively manage and influence a customer’s journey in real time.

Organisations that are serious about solving this don’t tend to talk to us about a cloud versus on-premise delivery model: solving the business challenge is their focus, especially where the customer service function is leading the charge. Having researched a potential solution, they’re then engaging with IT to vet the decision, to apply the necessary technical due diligence.

The multi-channel challenge essentially relates to the integration of a voice channel with a multitude of non-voice channels, plus the synchronisation with 3rd party, web-based applications such as CRM. The problem is that traditional contact centre technology is based on the ‘plain old telephony’ fathered by Alexander Graham Bell. It can manage phone calls extremely well, but it was never designed to support online

27

UserEvents’ flagship product, CxEngage, is a contextual routing engine that can aggregate and process customer activity on any social, web, mobile or voice channel in real time.

CxEngage laces together information across all channels to identify patterns of behaviour. Once a pattern is identified, CxEngage notifies the contact centre and supplies recommendations as to how best to respond or how a customer should be handled.

With this type of intelligence, a brand can track customer engagement in real time across all touch points and would be able to sense a customer’s possible frustration.

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

review

Retail Sector Directors Forum Our recent Customer Engagement in the Retail Sector Directors Forum highlighted how the sector is being transformed by fast changing consumer behaviour The retail sector is in a state of major flux and at something of a tipping point and there will continue to be winners and losers as changing consumer behaviour driven by technology controls the sector.

While the squeeze on consumer spending is having an often detrimental impact on the High Street, online retail sales are continuing to enjoy exponential growth as customers use their smartphones and tablets for as an integral part of their retail behaviours and savvy retailers market to these geographically sensitive devices.

Retailers are more and more focussed on finding creative, innovative and compelling new ways to engage with customers. Throughout all channels - in-store, online, via mobile and social - retailers are striving for a consistent, cohesive brand experience.

These were some of the key issues and challenges addressed at our Customer Engagement in the Retail Sector Directors Forum, sponsored

by Nunwood, Interactive Intelligence and Procter.

An excellent opening keynote from David Wild, CEO at Dominos Pizza Group on engaging customers in a rapidly changing retail world set the scene for a great day where delegates were enthralled by the sheer variety and scope of presentations on offer.

David was followed by Craig Ryder Director Customer Experience

VIEW HIGHLIGHTS VIDEO

I S S U E F IOF UT ER ET N E E •N J•U LAYP R2 I0L 1 24 0 1 4

Excellence at Nunwood who gave some great case study examples of those organisations getting their retail customer experiences right.

There were further case study presentations from Drew McMillian of Ladbrokes on how the organisation has linkd employee and customer engagement and Katie Lips at Aimia/Nectar on the growth of mobile engagement. There were also presentations from Jo Thomson MD of Procter on the power of conversation and Mike Murphy head of retail at InteractiveIntelligence on technology.

Jon Copestake chief retail analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit gave an upbeat assessment of the future for retail as the economy recovers and Martin Newman CEO at Practiclogy gave a fascinating insight into how organisations are engaging with digital customers in a fast changing world with some illuminating case study examples.

There were also presentations from Stephen Citron who talked about the Customer Engagement Peer Awards and the day was rounded off in some style with a state of the nation report from Matthew Hopkinson director of Local Data Company.

There was a lively panel debate chaired by Engage Customer editorial director Steve Hurst who also concluded the day with the message that retailers who do not devise strategies to engage customers will suffer.

VIEW KEY MESSAGES VIDEO

22 48

review

Agenda Summary Opening Keynote: 'Engaging Customers in a Changing Retail World' David Wild, Chief Executive, Dominos Pizza Group David will give an overview of the challenges posed to Retailers by the continuing changes in technology and discuss the importance of changing to capitalise on the opportunities that these changes present.

The DNA of brilliant retail experiences Craig Ryder, Director Customer Experience Excellence, Nunwood Over the last 4 years, Nunwood's Customer Experience Excellence Centre has studied over 800 of the world's leading brands. It has revealed the common DNA of all great experiences – The Six Pillars. In this session, we’ll review how retailers around the world uniquely implement and harness these universal principles, plus the rewards of doing so.

Drawing on over 700,000 consumer evaluations from the UK, USA and Australia, we'll examine: - The Six Pillars of retail excellence: what these are, who achieves results and – most importantly - how - Empowering staff in the digital age: how the world's CX leaders manage their talent Innovations in technology and multichannel: where they work, where they don't.

Out of the shadows - Retail & Consumer Goods in 2014 (EIU Report) Jon Copestake, Chief Retail & Consumer Goods analyst, Economist Intelligence Unit This year will be one of transition, as retail and consumer goods firms address changing consumers and markets. Retail trends that have emerged in recent years will continue to bed in during 2014, becoming mainstream in the process. In the meantime, consumption patterns from before the 2007 crisis will resume as European incomes recover.

2014 Customer Engagement Peer Awards Stephen Citron, Director, The Peer Awards Engage Customer is delighted to again be part of the prestigious Peer Awards. The awards provide exposure and recognition for innovative customer engagement initiatives. All shortlisted finalists feature in The Independent newspaper, and speak at the Peer Awards conference in Central London June 24-26, where they are judged by their peers. Stephen will tell you more about the Peer Awards and how to enter.

Customer engagement in a multi channel, multi device world Martin Newman, CEO, Practicology Ladbrokes Case Study Drew McMillian, Former IC & Culture Director, Ladbrokes' Ladbrokes – Vision & Values Programme Ladbrokes’ ambition is to lead in the international betting and gaming market. A key driver to make this happen is transforming their culture by activating a core set of values: Buzz, Bold, Team and Winners, which were identified by employees as representing Ladbrokes at its best. Ladbrokes partnered with employee engagement specialist INVOLVE to help activate and embed the values, to make Ladbrokes a better place to work and to create a better experience for customers. A five-year programme was designed to harness the very best of Ladbrokes on exciting, high-performing business days like The

Contact Centre technology that delivers your competitive retail edge!

Mike Murphy, Head of Retail/Travel and Leisure, Interactive Intelligence Hear how retailers transformed their contact centre’s to help them leverage the Cloud, Mobile, Analytics and Social Customer Service trends that have presented themselves, in a way that’s been easy to consume, maps tightly to their cost base and gives them the sharpest insight and control of their customer service strategies ever.

In today's multi channel world, customers expect to move seamlessly across channels, touch points and devices. Get insight into best practice and top tips on how to make sure you deliver the experience expected by customers.

How Mobile is changing the face of retail Katie Lips, Global Mobile Strategy Director, Aimia Inc At Aimia we make business personal; be that through our analytics and customer insights businesses or via our household name loyalty programmes such as Nectar in the UK. As Loyalty experts we are seeing the natural shift of loyalty programmes from plastic cards to mobile apps to mobile wallets to fully integrated 'Mobile In Retail' experiences. A loyalty programme can play a key part in a customer engagement strategy and mobile is now a vital component of a loyalty strategy. In her talk, Katie will discuss the evolving requirements for mobile customer experiences and how customers' experiences of other types of mobile apps are driving a new minimum standard. Katie works at the forefront of developing Mobile Strategy for brands and retailers and is currently involved in defining how Aimia as a global player, will deliver the promise of fully integrated "Mobile in Retail" experiences across Mobile Apps, Mobile Proximity Marketing, Location Based Services, Mobile Wallets and Payments. Katie will explore examples of best practice and winning ideas in this dynamic space.

'The Power of Conversation' Jo Thomson, MD, Procter Procter brings its 30 + years of experience into this session – specifically focused around the art of a meaningful conversation. Knowing that customers are choosing to buy and be served through very different means and channels – what does this mean for an everyday interaction? How do we make it easy and quick? How do we work those invisible customers who prefer to do it themselves but are high value? How do we connect with customers through modern day channels? And finally how do we really make the most of making it special when we do have the opportunity to interact? • Self-analysis – how good is your company at having meaningful and relevant conversations with customers • Evolution of the conversation – 1950’s through to modern day and beyond? • Adapted conversations – examples and how to’s.

29

Local Data Company latest report Matthew Hopkinson, Director, Local Data Company - Retail and leisure market - Alternative review of the high street - Vacancy rates - Occupational changes - Changing property profiles – Town Centre v Shopping Centre v Retail Parks

DOWNLOAD PRESENTATIONS

ISSUE FIFTEEN • JULY 2014

COMPANY PROFILES EMBER SERVICES

INTERACTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Ember is a customer management consultancy focused on helping clients maximise the commercial value of their customer engagement activities by identifying and exploiting opportunities for cost reduction, revenue enhancement and improved customer worth.

Our approach is unashamedly financial. In every consulting project, we will identify not only how to make your business better, but how much you stand to gain by doing so. Our services span customer management strategy, operations consulting, outsourcing procurement, contracting and mediation, innovative deployment of analytics services and increasingly the strategy and deployment of digital channels into the mix.

We would be pleased to understand your challenges and explain how we can help.

Contact details: Alastair Murphy info@emberservices.com 0207 871 9797 www.emberservices.com

Interactive Intelligence is a global provider of contact centre, unified communications, and business process automation software and services designed to improve the customer experience. The company’s solutions, which can be deployed via the cloud or on-premises, are ideal for industries such as financial services, insurance, outsourcers, collections and utilities.

The company’s standards-based all-in-one communications software suite was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity of multi-point systems.

Founded in 1994 and backed by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, Interactive Intelligence is an experienced leader in delivering customer value through its on-premise or cloud-based Communications as a Service (CaaS) solutions, both of which include software, hardware, consulting, support, education and implementation. At Interactive Intelligence, it’s what we do.

Contact details: Jamie Salmon Jamie.salmon@inin.com 01753 418852 www.inin.com

MINDPEARL

CONFIRMIT

Mindpearl is a BPO specialist focusing on international, high quality contact centre operations. Mindpearl was recognised as the ‘Outsourcing Contact Centre Provider of the Year 2013’ at the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) Awards in the UK. With an emphasis on inbound, multichannel customer support, Mindpearl supports global brands in the aviation, leisure, telecommunications, retail and weight management industries in English and 20+ languages. With our highly skilled, motivated multilingual workforce and our strategically located ‘Follow the Sun’ locations, in Brisbane, Barcelona, Cape Town and Suva, Fiji, we have the know-how, experience and resources to maximise business performance and profitability.

Contact details: South Africa Candace Laubscher Candace.laubscher@mindpearl.com T: +27 (0) 21 440 6707 T: +27 (0)79 514 7006 UK Alan Graham alan.graham@mindpearl.com T: +44(0)7780 115 042 www. mindpearl.com

Confirmit enables organisations to develop and implement Voice of the Customer, Employee Engagement and Market Research programmes that deliver insight and drive business change. Confirmit’s clients create multichannel, multi-lingual feedback and research programmes that engage customers, empower employees, deliver a compelling respondent experience, and provide high Return on Investment.

Confirmit’s customer engagement model provides the power to listen to the Voice of the Customer, integrate it with financial and operational data to generate powerful insight, and take action that will deliver effective business change and create competitive advantage. Confirmit has 350 employees and is headquartered in Oslo, with offices around the world.

Contact details: Joe Lenny Joe.lenny@confirmit.com +44 (0)20 3053 9376 www.confirmit.com NUNWOOD Nunwood helps businesses create consistently brilliant customer experiences.

Our approach is uniquely ‘full-service’. This means we join up customer strategy, experience measurement, feedback technology and frontline training.

By connecting the dots, our clients delight their customers more frequently and achieve their commercial goals more easily.

CLICKTOOLS Clicktools is the leading provider of premium, Cloud-based survey software for businesses. The company lives by its brand promise to help customers better understand and serve their customers. Since 2001, the Clicktools solution has enabled organizations to improve customer experience by collecting, centralizing, and acting on customer feedback, leveraging the power of CRM. Notably, Clicktools was the first survey provider to integrate with Salesforce™ and was an original member of the AppExchange®. The company is privately held with headquarters on the South Coast of England and a US-based office in Phoenix, Arizona. More info at www.clicktools.com.

Contact details: sales@clicktools.com communications@clicktools.com www.clicktools.com Clicktools Ltd. 7 Branksome Park House Bourne Valley Road Poole BH12 1ED. UK.

Clicktools Inc. 1661 East Camelback Road Suite 235, Phoenix Arizona 85016, USA.

Main: 01202 761822 Sales: 0800 0432587 Fax: 0800 471 5273

Main: 1-800-774-4065 Sales: 1-800-774-4065 Fax: 1-800-767-2070

ADVERTISE To advertise here contact Nick Rust • T: 01932 506 301 E: nick@engagecustomer.com

To create brilliant results, we work hard to understand what ‘brilliant’ means. Our Customer Experience Excellence Centre is the world’s largest customer experience research centre. Its work ensures every Nunwood client is connected to the cutting-edge of international experience design and best practice.

Contact details: Tim Knight timknight@nunwood.com 0845 3720101 www.nunwood.com

LIVEOPS LiveOps is the global leader in cloud contact centre and customer service solutions. More than 350 companies around the world, including Salesforce.com, Symantec, Royal Mail Group and Neopost, trust LiveOps’ technology to enable effective multichannel, social and mobile interactions with their customers. LiveOps' award-winning platform has processed more than 1 Billion minutes of customer interactions and managed operations for the largest US-based cloud contact centre of 20,000 home-based, independent agents.

Headquartered in Redwood City, California with European regional headquarters in London, LiveOps has more than 10 years of cloud experience LiveOps is the partner of choice for companies wanting to migrate to the cloud.

Contact details: Ann Ruckstuhl, Chief Marketing Officer info@liveops.com +44 (0)20 3006 8280 www.liveops.com

Upcoming Engage events

www.engagecustomer.com

Employee and Customer Engagement Directors Forum - 18th September 2014, London Blue Fin Conference Venue, Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU

Mobile Customer Engagement Directors Forum - 9th October 2014, London Blue Fin Conference Venue, Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU

Customer Engagement in Telcos/Utilities Directors Forum - 23rd October 2014, London Blue Fin Conference Venue, Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark Street, London SE1 0SU

- 28th November 2014 Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London

THE JOINED UP CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EVENT

Webinars • July 10th • September 4th • September 25th • October 16th • November 6th • December 4th

Peer Awards Ceremony 22nd September 2014 Waldorf Hilton London

For more information please contact: Nick Rust nick@engagecustomer.com T: 01932 506301 M: 07968 416007

Engage now at: www.engagecustomer.com @engagecustomer