Contact Management Magazine Issue 3 2016

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 • 2016

The People Issue

❯❯ Contact centre attrition: It’s time to focus on the team ❯❯ How microlearning took MCAP’s customer support from good to great ❯❯ Self-service gone wrong: Highway toll evasion & sleeping in a flophouse

The People Issue

Contact centre attrition It’s time to focus on the team

By Tom Marsden

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e’re all used to thinking that contact centres are a tricky place to work for front line agents. The job can often demand a heavy amount of ‘emotional energy’: dealing with customer complaint issues can increase the risk of anxiety, depression and stress. It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that call centres experience notoriously high levels of staff attrition.

It’s estimated that as many as 14 per cent of new Canadian call centre employees experience high levels of stress, 10 per cent of call centre staff are absent on any given day and that the average cost of replacing a stressedout departing worker can exceed $6,000 CAD. Clearly 2 | contact management

something is not right with call centre management, but what?

Attrition analysis is not exactly new on the HR scene and there are a host of different metrics that HR professionals can look at to try and get an indication of how big the problem is. Measurements such as the number of sick leave days taken, lateness, average employee tenure change over time and cohort analysis can give managers a solid picture of what’s going on in the present, but they rarely offer predictive insight.

The key problem with existing attrition metrics is that they rarely give decision makers information that is truly actionable. It’s no use collecting a huge amount of employee data if there’s no easy way of translating that into policy action. ‘Pay more’ is rarely a practical solution. There are other areas that call centre managers can look at to get more actionable insight.

There’s increasing appreciation for the role that social dynamics—or understanding ‘cultural fit’—plays in Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue individualistic places to work. Many approaches link an individual’s personality or behavioural profile with the ability to do the job.

Assessment is done on the individual in isolation. This is interesting and can explain some of the variance in performance. However, new research indicates that the best way to get improved performance and enhanced overall happiness out of workers is to draw more attention to the influence of social connectivity. Hiring managers can now start measuring social dynamics. This is an indication of whether teammates will work well with each other, share information and support each other emotionally.

Algorithmic data assessing social connectivity in a team can be of use here, providing an objective ‘voice in the room’ which can lend additional ballast to decisions over which course of action to take. A key benefit of this approach is that the technology used is transparent: if mistakes are made—the wrong person is hired or someone leaves quickly—people can review what went wrong and make adjustments. This couldn’t be more different from the opaque ‘gut feel’ approach prevalent in many current culture fit assessments.

Try new things with your team structure

employee longevity. Here are three ways to utilize this new approach in your call centre.

Measure employee cultural fit There are many ‘hard metrics’ that call centres use to measure individual performance, such as number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction or average handling time (AHT). However, managers are less accustomed to measuring a worker’s social well-being in the workplace and this is a key error. Many academics have noted that people who fit in well with their job, team and organization have greater job satisfaction, are more likely to remain in their organization and show superior job performance.

It’s normal for managers to see call centres as highly Issue 3 • 2016

Teams are the future of work, not individuals: according to McKinsey, 40% of jobs in developed economies such as Canada’s involve a high degree of collaboration. Employees in call centres get a lot out of their teams: not only do teams lend a degree of social structure and stability, but they also form a professional support network which workers can look to for advice and guidance.

Most work in call centres is socially intensive and can be emotionally stressful. Given this, having a socially supportive environment isn’t simply a ‘nice-tohave’, it’s an integral part of a call centre’s success potential. Managers should pay close attention to the everyday functioning of their teams and isolate problem areas, such as friction between team members.

Really pay attention to what’s going wrong and speak to individual team members where possible. Experiment with the membership of each team to see what works and what doesn’t.

We’re seeing more companies use data-driven models to help them make these important resourcing

decisions.

Encourage downtime This is easier said than done, but downtime is really important to boosting call centre worker morale and thus reducing attrition problems.

Several companies are now looking to use their workers’ break times for good or at least to not let it just be ‘dead time.’ One commonly known example is Pixar: Steve Jobs insisted that all the office bathrooms would be located off the ground floor lobby, so as to increase the likelihood of chance interactions between employees in different teams and departments.

Fast forward a few years and this thinking is present across much of the corporate world.

Call centres can tap into this way of working. Managers should be encouraging the same groups of employees, groups that you know work well together socially, to take breaks at the same time. This encourages easy social bonding and is backed up by MIT research on improving call centre worker productivity: by ensuring that everyone on the same call centre team took a break at the same time, a bank’s call centre AHT fell by more than 20% among low performing teams and fell by eight per cent overall.

Canadian call centres experienced a decline in the latter half of the 2000s as jobs were relocated to India and the Philippines. These jobs have started coming back to Canada, partly due to very high turnover rates in those countries, so it’s vital that Canada doesn’t forfeit its advantage by letting staff attrition creep up.

Not all of these suggestions will work for all call centres: there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to tackling attrition. However, with the average cost of replacing a front line call centre worker in Canada approaching $6,000, it’s imperative something must be done to get to the bottom of the attrition issue and there’s a clear business justification for further investment. Managers should experiment with team dynamics by structuring employee downtime and adding some social data into the mix.

With the right combination of HR innovations, call centre managers will find themselves with happier teams and more profitable branches.

Tom Marsden is CEO of Saberr, a people analytics software company.

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The People Issue

How microlearning took MCAP’s customer support from good to great Shelly Woodley

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uying a home is the largest purchase that most people make in their life. It can be a daunting process, with high expectations, demands and anxieties every step of the way. This makes customer service critically important. Home buyers, understandably, have a lot of questions and with such a momentous (and expensive) decision on the line, they expect them answered accurately and efficiently.

But buying a home is also a complicated process, which can make it challenging for us at MCAP, a mortgage financing company, to address our customers’ queries effectively. It’s not enough for our mortgage specialists to be responsive and polite. They also have to possess a reservoir of knowledge that they can draw from at any moment, otherwise they risk losing the customer’s trust or, worse, providing misinformation that could compromise that customer’s business and cost the company thousands of dollars in lost revenue opportunities. When it comes to mortgages, customer service is a high-stakes game and one that we can’t afford to lose.

Our contact centre agents are tasked with making the people they talk to feel comfortable and confident that their mortgage is in good hands. This means they have to be well-versed in everything from mortgage refinancing policies to renewal procedures, and know how to update the mortgages themselves. Furthermore, they work in a high-volume environment, which means they have to be quick as well as accurate.

Third, we needed to reduce manual processes and paperwork.

As a service provider organization, MCAP is required to undergo annual staff certification, and the only way we could meet this requirement was by performing manual, paperbased knowledge assessments. This involved taking staff off the phones for testing—a painful and costly process for both employees and the company. We needed an assessment process that wasn’t so resource intensive.

Finally, MCAP needed up-to-date metrics for continual coaching. Our performance-based culture meant it was important to measure progress continually against key business targets. However, we didn’t have an efficient and ongoing way to monitor employee knowledge that would identify where they might need extra support. By proactively addressing areas where they are struggling, we would also be able to avoid issues that resulted in escalations.

Four barriers to best-in-class customer service

“Microlearning” emerged as a solution that could overcome these challenges. This approach delivers information in bite-sized chunks that are easy to digest and convenient.

Learners can access the lessons anytime, anywhere, with minimal interruption to their workflow.

Microlearning is effective for a number of reasons. To start, it eliminates the need for dull, drawn out corporate training sessions that not only take employees away from their jobs, but also don’t really work.

Secondly, microlearning delivers information in small pieces and reinforces that knowledge throughout the day with mechanisms like short quizzes. Re-exposing learners to the same content over and over ensures it sticks. Third, microlearning allows people to rest their brains

At MCAP, we recognized that knowledge was the key to delivering top tier customer service and reducing escalations. We identified four key challenges that we needed to address to ensure continued success.

The first was engaging contact centre agents on an ongoing basis—most of whom were Millennials. These agents started out excited, so we wanted to maintain that enthusiasm over the long term. We also wanted to find a way to offer ongoing learning—from a developmental side—that would appeal to a tech-savvy group of 24- to 34-year-olds, without taking them off the phones.

The second challenge was to increase knowledge retention after the initial onboarding process. While our agents showed high retention directly after a training session, it quickly degraded (this isn’t surprising, as the Forgetting Curve indicates people forget 90% of what they learn within 30 days if it isn’t reinforced). In some cases, our agents only retained 15–20% of the material after receiving two weeks of introductory training. This was concerning because we needed MCAP agents to be experts in our products and services.

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Investing in knowledge

in between lessons. This provides the opportunity to recharge, so employees return to their learning and jobs with renewed focus and energy. They don’t feel overwhelmed.

MCAP was able to deploy a microlearning strategy through Axonify, an employee knowledge platform that delivers daily, personalized, bite-sized “gamified” learning content in short, three to four minute bursts. Employees can access the lessons anytime, anywhere, from any device, so learning is easy to weave into their day. In addition, the platform personalizes learning to target and close individual knowledge gaps, which gives our employees the confidence to perform their role to the best of their ability.

This confidence, as well as a solid foundation of knowledge, led to significant results. Within the first 90 days of implementing Axonify, we achieved a 94% employee participation rate in learning on the platform, along with knowledge lifts ranging from six per cent to as high as 21% in key topic areas. MCAP also achieved call quality rating scores of 86% and decreased call escalations by 20%, resulting in significant time savings and improved customer satisfaction. Plus, we were able to put our time-consuming manual processes to rest.

Approaching employee knowledge with a digital, microlearning platform has enabled MCAP to deliver the bestin-class service our customers want and deserve, which has translated into real business results. By making training as fun and convenient as possible, we also empowered our specialists to reach their full potential.

Shelly Woodley is associate director, training and CC projects at MCAP.

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The People Issue

Self-service gone wrong: Highway toll evasion & sleeping in a flophouse Emily Nielsen

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risk being castaway for saying this but self-service could use some personal service!

You see, I was recently hit by two frustrating experiences as a customer.

In each case, I needed to speak with a person but each company had constructed a fortress made of self-service tools to deflect me and keep me out.

Having said that, I love self-service and it works wonders when you’re doing a simple task or seeking answers to common questions. But it’s when things go wrong that you need to speak to a real human being with the power to a fix an uncommon problem.

Now let me tell you the first story which highlights the need for more—not less—personal service.

Recently, I was driving through New York State with my husband and we pulled through a malfunctioning highway tollbooth. It wouldn’t process the self-service pass which up until now made our trip a breeze and it wouldn’t accept our money.

The tollbooth was plastered in big, bright red and yellow warning signs with bold type which read: VIDEO MONITORING IN USE, PAY TOLLBOOTH, EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY and DO NOT BACK UP! Since this was a self-service tollbooth, there wasn’t a person who could help. This left us between the proverbial rock and a hard spot.

Traffic piled up behind us and the other drivers grew frustrated with us and began honking. Despite all the ominous warning signs, we blew through the tollbooth and came out the other side feeling like Bonnie and Clyde on the run from police.

Not accustom to breaking the rules of the road, I immediately used my phone to Google for customer support. Relieved that I found the phone number, I called to clear up the matter before the red and blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror.

The instant my call got answered I knew I was in trouble. Because I went straight to an automated menu and I was certain that no option would be for committing toll evasion!

After listening to five options, I selected the best option.

Mind you, the best option was just the best of the worst options. It wasn’t really the option which promised a solution!

As you’ve probably experienced, I was then lost in a maze of entirely unrelated options desperate for a human being. I went deeper and deeper into the menu, down the rabbit hole I went into an abyss where I hung up and ended my odyssey for a person with a solution. Sadly, this Issue 3 • 2016

experience is more common than it is unusual!

However, on my second call I resolved the situation, as if by a stroke of good fortune, when I accidentally stumbled on the option to speak to a live agent… a choice hiding far out of ear shot on the ninth and last option in the menu!

Now here’s my second story: Using my favourite and wellknown website to self-book hotels, where I am a Gold Member, I sent my staff to what appeared to be a trendy, upscale hotel suitable for professionals. It had an on-site health club, secure parking and a desk in each room to work from. A perfect place to stay for a couple nights.

Turns out, the pictures posted online must have been taken by a gifted photographer with a knack for making the obscene look professional.

And the description of amenities was an outright lie. Because when I showed up to meet my staff after they’d slept there for a couple nights I realized I had sent them to something more like a flophouse!

The place was fashioned with old furniture and pictures taken from a museum. It was dark and depressing!

The on-site health club was actually a little dank gym, in a basement, a block down the street! As for parking, there were just six spots, unsecure and down the street by the gym in the basement.

Frustrated because I had spent a lot of money to send my staff there, I snapped pictures of the rooms to post online.

When I returned to my office I uploaded these snapshots and wrote a review. Now remember, I was a Gold Member because I booked 60+ nights with this website in the last year. This status made me feel important to them and I expected to get a call from a customer service agent.

But, I was shocked—SHOCKED— when I published my review and I heard nothing but the sound of crickets.

It seems to me that, with so much self-service—with so much emphasis on trying to service the customer without interacting with a human— many businesses are overlooking in person service when and where it’s still needed.

The problem I see with self-service is a fundamental one. Inherently, it’s somewhat flawed because at its core it strives to eliminate personal service.

And personal service is what’s needed when something goes wrong during your customer’s journey.

So what should you do? It’s simple, really.

If you want to improve your customer experience, rather than solely striving to cut costs by reducing call volumes, customer interactions and live agents, then start identifying touch-points where a person is needed and make them easy to reach when self-service goes wrong.

Strictly thinking from a mindset of eliminating human interaction can create, as I’ve told you, very unfavourable experiences. Because there will be unforeseen situations that will arise which self-service tools just can’t address!

Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s top unified communications (UC) and contact centre consulting firms, in 1999. Carrying an impressive portfolio of 100+ projects and having managed $65 million worth of UC and call centre solutions, she regularly acts as a trusted advisor to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Emily can be reached at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.

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The People Issue

From dated to digital Seven questions to ensure quality customer experiences

By Brian Spencer

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ustomers expect quality experiences from every company with which they interact. When reaching out for customer care in particular, easy and personalized communications are key to positive interactions and earning continued business. Unfortunately, in today’s interconnected world, many companies’ systems are outdated and simply incapable of delivering great experiences across all mediums. With an individual customer’s data scattered across different systems, as well as the myriad choices consumers expect in contacting companies—everything from voice to text to instant message—providing personalized communications isn’t as easy as it sounds. In aiming to deliver exceptional digital customer care, ask yourself these seven questions beforehand.

1. Who exactly are your customers? How can you address their individual needs with digital services?

It is important to gain as much knowledge as possible about your customers and consolidate that knowledge into one place. Understanding their preferred methods 6 | contact management

of communicating, expectations of access and what technologies are important to them—and then acting on that information—will improve the customer experience.

Enabling this requires involving your IT team at the inception of the digital transformation strategy.

Assess whether changes to your fundamental infrastructure are required and examine the impacts of architecture and applications integration. Determine how available your care services need to be for your specific customers and whether cloud services or internal infrastructure best support this.

Consider whether other digital initiatives such as mobile apps should seamlessly link into the customer care infrastructure. Think holistically from the vantage of your customer.

2. Who is in charge of customer engagement?

The answer to this question must be established before embarking on any successful journey to a fully digital customer experience. The more senior this person, the better the chance of success. Not only does it signal the importance of the project but more importantly it allows the project to bridge all customer touchpoints. This person must be able to envision customer journeys that cut across operations and ensure customer experiences are prioritized every step of the way.

Consider customer onboarding for a utility—this involves online research, signing up, scheduling installation, receiving and paying the first bill. Is customer care one tap away at each stage through the various digital tools used to undertake the journey?

Who can see the entire process?

Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue 3. How can you expand the customer experience beyond voice interactions?

Voice interactions remain important as one of many equally valuable elements of customer engagement. If starting your transformation from a voice-only status quo, how do you expand into digital channels? First, assess which digital channels are already used but not managed by your contact centres. A likely target is email. Another may be online chat, which may have been separately deployed and managed by the marketing team. Second, consider if and for what processes self-service make sense.

Many customers today prefer self-service if engineered for rapid, easy, always-on access. This can please customers with access through their preferred channels and also increase the speed of care without adding staff. But take caution: do not engineer for cost reductions, engineer for great customer experiences.

4. Can you use a full scope of digital channels to engage with customers?

If not, which channels are the most important to your business based on the nature of your customer relationships? Understanding your customer demographics and the most frequent care services consumed can smooth the path to digitizing your contact centre. Start with the digital channel most desired by your customers that is effective for the most frequent care provided. If quick and easy answers are needed, say scheduling for a spa or ordering a pizza, SMS may be the right place to start. If more elaborate care is required, such as technical product support, web chat or even video may be appropriate. Once you have deployed your first digital channel and collected customer feedback validating the approach, then move on to others. Make sure to nail each one before moving on or you will lose customer attention and not achieve full return on investment.

and progressive transition away from costlier live assistance. Third, are there deployment models such as private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid model available that both meet your operational requirements and mitigate up-front costs for the supporting technology? The answer to this is almost certainly “yes.” The options today for digitizing customer care provide many options for managing costs effectively. And the revenue impact of staking a claim as a customer experience leader in your market almost certainly justify the investment.

7. Are you fully taking advantage of all the tools at your disposal to empower your customer care workers?

As you expand the customer touchpoints available to reach the contact centre, be sure to give every tool possible to those workers staffing the centre. There are many tools available to expand the pool of talent available to you, from intelligent workforce scheduling software to meet various work-life balance requirements to secure,

high-quality remote worker tools like softphones. Thinking more broadly, make sure to consider the tools that link the contact centre into the enterprise at large for onetouch access to those that can help address customer needs. Unified communications tools make it easy to bring in subject matter experts on demand via internal text messaging, ad-hoc conferences and even desktop sharing sessions. Research indicates the top factor in great customer experience is speedy resolution so making everyone available for rapid response can make a meaningful difference.

Brian Spencer is general manager, contact centre at Mitel. With nearly 20 years of sales and executive leadership experience in the contact centre industry, Brian joined Mitel in 2014 as part of the company’s acquisition of OAISYS, where he was president and a board member for six years. He held prior posts in sales and sales engineering and additionally led sales, marketing and customer service at OAISYS and InterTel during periods of rapid growth and transformation.

5. Are your management and reporting metrics as effective as they could be?

Customers inherently look at their experiences with services as a comprehensive lifecycle, as opposed to analyzing the various individual touchpoints. Thus, it’s necessary to start building cohesive customer experiences from the management level through real-time reporting on performance, schedules and other metrics. This way, your company will be able to provide consistent visibility and provide customers with an interconnected lifecycle.

Even if your contact centre achieves its service goal 90 per cent of the time, if a service experience requires four interactions there is a 40 per cent likelihood a customer will be dissatisfied along the way. This may profoundly change the importance of any single interaction step and thus the service levels you set.

6. Are you worried about increased costs associated with new or improved communications channels?

You almost certainly are concerned about costs, even if there is hard data to support the return on investment.

Consider these questions in your cost modeling. First, will additional channels increase communications demand or simply redirect what is already occurring?

Most likely it is the latter and you can find cost reductions in the anticipated decrease of existing channel usage.

Second, will self-service tools focused on fast and easy customer care be deployed? If so, model a conservative Issue 3 • 2016

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The People Issue

Why being polite is not enough

By Mike Aoki

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ow would you rate the following customer service interaction?

The agent answered the phone using their company’s standard greeting.

They used the caller’s name three times.

They asked enough questions to solve the caller’s issue.

They also asked if the customer had any other questions and thanked the customer for calling. They also used polite phrases such as, “please” and “thank you” during the call.

Would you evaluate that as a “good customer service call”?

Or, is it a merely adequate one?

Here is some additional information: the agent failed to acknowledge and paraphrase the customer’s complaint as a sign of courtesy and respect. They offered a solution but did not ask if it was acceptable to the customer. They did not ask permission to place the client on hold or thank the customer for waiting when they took them off hold. They failed to offer any empathy statements acknowledging the customer’s feelings. Finally, they did not tell the customer their credit would take two billing cycles to appear on their bill. That guarantees the customer will call back next month to scream about their missing credit.

Now, how would you rate that call? I would evaluate it as a poor one since it guarantees a callback from an unhappy customer.

Was the agent polite? Yes; however, being polite is just raw material for great customer service. Here is a comparison: being tall is an advantage in basketball.

However, basketball players still need to learn the rules of the game and practice specific skills such as dribbling, shooting and playing defense. The same is true about customer service representatives. Being friendly and polite is just the starting point. Customer issues are becoming more complex and require a higher skill level than in the past.

For example, 10 years ago I would have called my laptop manufacturer’s help line if I had a problem with my laptop.

Now, I look online first to see if one of the manufacturer’s support groups has an answer. I would only contact their customer service team if I needed a warranty repair or the answer to a very complex question.

Online research has taken away all the easy customer service interactions. What are left are complex issues requiring a higher skill level than just being polite. Agents need to be better trained, coached and supported.

Social media has also increased the stakes. Before 8 | contact management

social media, one upset customer might tell eight to 20 people about their experience. Now, their Twitter complaint can go viral and get picked up by major broadcast news outlets.

Customers can show a photo of a product defect on Instagram or Facebook. Customers can also post your team’s customer service email responses and company Twitter replies on the web. So, providing a high level of service is even more visible—and important—than ever.

The good news is technology is providing better tools than ever to aid agents in their job. Blended learning, which combines facilitatorled classroom training and online e-learning, helps agents master both the technical and soft skills aspects of the job. Predictive pop-up screens provide great product upselling suggestions, while smarter knowledge management systems help agents find answers faster than ever. Remote monitoring systems, paired with live coaching chat from a team leader, can provide real time coaching so agents get instant supervisor help with a call.

“Big data” is another disruptive contact centre trend. It involves using complex algorithms to mine speech analytics, IVR analytics and cross channel (multi-channel) analytics to predict customer behaviour. This can help you train agents on key issues, route certain customers to the right queue automatically and provide live chat agents with the correct prewritten answers to common queries.

High tech tools are very useful; however, it is ultimately how a customer feels about your company that determines whether they will buy from you again, or recommend

your service to others. Customers want their problem solved but they also want to feel valued and respected.

That is where soft skills training becomes crucial. Specific soft skills such as acknowledgment, empathy statements, active listening, paraphrasing, negotiation skills and the emotional resilience to bounce back from challenging situations prepare an agent to perform the emotional side of their jobs at a much higher level.

When I train new agents, they are surprised by the importance of relationship building with their customer, even if the interaction is just a short phone call, email or live chat session. Listening for your caller’s tone or reading between the lines of their email or live chat text help agents uncover hidden needs and feelings that should be addressed to increase customer loyalty.

Overall, great customer service is a blend of high tech and high touch.

Contact centres need to equip their agents with the best technology and the best soft skills training to help them perform well. Being polite is just the starting point.

Mike Aoki is the president of Reflective Keynotes Inc. (www.reflectivekeynotes. com ), a Canadian training company that helps contact centres improve their sales and customer retention results.

A call centre expert, Mike has been interviewed by the Customer Experience Show and the Globe and Mail. He also serves on the Advisory Council of GTACC (the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre association www.gtacc.ca ) and was master of ceremonies for their 2012, 2013 and 2014 annual conferences.

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The People Issue

Closing the gap Five ways to modernize your customer service

By Holly Simmons

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ustomer service is not what it used to be. Twenty years ago companies invested in CRM systems to store customer contact information, track issues and build relationships. With these systems came peace of mind for companies knowing they were managing customer expectations. While this may have been enough for simpler days, traditional customer service systems have fallen behind. In fact, a study conducted by Forrester Research confirms that there is a huge gap in meeting customers’ expectations. According to Forrester, 80% of businesses believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only eight per cent of their customers feel they are receiving superior customer service from these same companies.

Companies want to change Meeting the changing demands of customers requires new considerations in delivering service. In a recent survey by Intergam, customer service leaders identified the following as their top goals: 1. To be more efficient; 2. To improve customer satisfaction; and 3. To make customer service a strategic part of the business.

Clearly, improving customer service is a top priority for most businesses and for good reason. According to studies

by Bain and Company and Harvard Business School, a five per cent increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 95%.

While the financial benefits are there, many companies are still trying to figure out where to start in improving their customer service to take them into the future and meet the goals identified above.

Closing the gap A modern customer service approach must be holistic and bring together teams, systems, and work flows inside and outside the organization to proactively serve customers versus reactive approaches that dominate the market today. Customer service organizations need to be able to Issue 3 • 2016

predict problems before they happen, drive resolution of issues instead of just reporting them and reduce the reasons why customers might call in the first place.

Customer service leaders can begin modernization with these five steps: 1. Automate, automate, automate: Customers want fast service, no longer want to call for support and prefer flexibility in the channels used to get help. Additionally, if the highest cost in a customer service organization is agent time, the only way to increase efficiency is to reduce the time spent on recurring or lowervalue tasks. Provide effortless service via a self-service portal, knowledgebase, social Q&A or chat to enable customers to obtain help when and how they want. Reduce agent load by automating recurring activities through a full workflow that connects front-end and backend systems.

2. Turn customer service into a team sport: Connect customer service to engineering, operations, finance or marketing to engage in problem solving, to drive accountability and to resolve customer issues faster. Assign issues to engineering, operations, finance or marketing for resolution.

3. Find the root cause of issues and fix them quickly: The only way to avoid taking more calls

for the same issue is to resolve the root cause of the issue.

Customer service can work with operations or engineering to identify, diagnose and implement solutions to problems quickly.

4. Capitalize on IoT and new technology: Gain real-time visibility into customer systems—servers, devices, applications or hardware—to identify potential issues before customers call. Avoid servicelevel penalties by aligning monitoring to contracts.

5. Be proactive: Support strategic work such as developing new services and continuously improving existing ones. Get a seat at the management table by leveraging advanced analytics, proactive notifications and event management to expose potential opportunities and issues.

Going beyond CRM with a modern customer service management system can help customer service leaders move from reacting to proactively improving the business by eliminating inefficient processes, improving the quality of service and freeing up time for strategic activities much needed for future growth.

Holly Simmons is senior director, customer service management at ServiceNow.

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