Customer experience report

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Dell tells us how business is booming by keeping the punters happy | Page 5

Ten ways for companies to better measure and act on feedback received from consumers | Page 8

Brighton & Hove residents love to be beside the seaside thanks to the council | Page 11

An impromptu move into social media has brought Panasonic closer to its customers | Page 13

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

July 2012 | business-reporter.co.uk

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Customer experience

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Serve, satisfy and delight In a world of constant communication, reaching out to customers seems easier than ever – but the question on everyone’s lips remtains: how can we get it right?

Publisher Bradley Scheffer brad@lyonsdown.co.uk Editor Lucie Carrington lucie@lyonsdown.co.uk Production Editor Amy Dickson amy@lyonsdown.co.uk Sub-Editor Juliet Conway juliet@lyonsdown.co.uk Production Assistant Fleur Hollett fleur@lyonsdown.co.uk Project Manager Grant Scheffer grant@lyonsdown.co.uk Jonathan Baer jonathan@lyonsdown.co.uk For more information on any of our supplements please contact us: Telephone 020 8349 4363 Email info@lyonsdown.co.uk Online www.lyonsdown.co.uk

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customer comments back to the production teams who

By Lucie Carrington are designing new hardware. Customer experience needs to be at the heart of the organisations improvement QUESTION: WHAT’S A business without customers? processes.

Answer: bust.

There was agreement that it is hard to have happy It’s obvious, and yet organisations still struggle to get customers without engaged, if not happy, employees. to know their customers and make them a business Thankfully, our understanding of both customer needs priority. However, rising consumer expectations and and employee engagement has improved: music streaming tougher business conditions are forcing boards of directors business Spotify has encouraged its 100 customer to think again about the role customer experience has service staff to take control of their working practices in shaping business strategy. and personal development, recognising that this This increasing urgency around customer experience group of people have the ability to turn customer services – and getting it right – from a business cost to a e ncou r age d Bu si ne s s profit centre (p11).

Reporter to launch its Inner Customer experience has Circle events programme the power to galvanise staff with a customer experience in a way few organisations summit. Held in central have understood. Brighton London in May, the summit & Hove City Council’s head brought together about 150 of city services Valerie senior business leaders, Pearce is revolutionising c u s tome r e x p e r ie nce customer services using a professionals and industry network of staff volunteers suppliers to discuss the who want to do more for issues holding them back. local people.

This supplement will The Brighton & Hove enable readers of The Daily example also suggests that Telegraph to share in the you don’t always have to summit and some of its throw money at a problem: About 150 industry professionals attended the summit learning.

Pearce has no budget and Foremost among the only one member of staff themes is measurement, as Gemma Stroud illustrates working on the customer experience improvement on p8-9 – being clear about what metrics you are using programme. and why, and being aware of their limits. Several summit But perhaps the most important message is that serving, participants made much of the Net Promoter Score (NPS): satisfying and delighting the customer is not just about Lego was struggling to get customer service right, but fulfilling orders – important as that is. Rather it is core its NPS remained high; for British Gas it was the other to any business proposition: sound leadership is important, way round. the right products are crucial and a route to market is Having acquired all this customer data and feedback, vital. But without the ability to serve, satisfy and delight it’s vital that firms do something with it. Dell (p5) feeds the customer, they are pointless.

Get connected

How social media can work for you p5

The happiness index

How satisfied are your customers? p8

Firm words

Learn the language of business from those in the know p11

Are you in or out?

The pros and cons of outsourcing p13

Contributors Lucie Carrington has edited a wide variety of business magazines covering management, health and public policy.

She has also written for the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph on business and consumer issues.

Lucie is managing editor of Lyonsdown.

Gemma Stroud is a freelance journalist specialising in consumer affairs.

Find us online For the latest in business news visit goo.gl/h21jn Or scan the QR code here:

would like to thank the following organisations for making the event happen. Without their support this report would not have been possible:

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How will a holistic view deliver customer satisfaction?

For many businesses, back office operations play a crucial role when it comes to customer satisfaction and brand perception THE CUSTOMER SERVICE chain comprises two interrelated functions; the back office and the contact centre.

If a process fails or a service level objective is missed in the back office, it is the contact centre that typically feels the impact, with unhappy customers expressing their discontent and problems which can take call after call to resolve. Get processes working efficiently in the back office, and resourcing and service issues in the contact centre diminish – then customer satisfaction improves.

Leading customer experience agency TARP Worldwide, presenting at SpeechTek 2006, said that up to 60 per cent of customer dissatisfaction issues have their roots in the back office.

That’s not surprising when you

consider that in some organisations, almost every transaction routes through the back office; including new account set-up, order fulfilment, sales order processing, claims management or customer account maintenance.

What’s needed is a 360-degree view that embraces the contact centre and the back office, and can pinpoint process failures, bottlenecks, and resourcing issues, and can identify how these issues impact customer satisfaction. Armed with this insight, the organisation can address the most critical problems and achieve the optimum return on investment.

Get the big picture Ver int Impact 360 Work force Optimisation suite encompasses

Verint Impact 360 Workforce Optimisation solutions can help organisations: • Capture and analyse customer interactions • Improve workforce performance and efficiency • Uncover trends and competitive advantages • Examine employee and customer behaviour and uncover root cause • Make better business decisions faster • Connect customer care operations more tightly with the rest of the enterprise • Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty

Aviva was able to reduce call wait times by 40 per cent and increase staff productivity by 17 per cent Voice of the Customer Analytics and Workforce Management solutions that work together to provide a holistic view of enterprise customer service.

The result can be better performance and productivity throughout the entire customer service chain, along with substantial cost savings and a better overall customer experience.

Organisations can listen to a huge range of verbal and written interactions and other customer feedback processes, and examine workflow in both the contact centre and back office to identify bottlenecks and failures. This delivers valuable intelligence, such as how easy or difficult the organisation is to do business with and how this affects customer spending; it can identify broken processes, communication issues and the causes of unnecessary repeat calls, joining up data to provide a unified view and intelligence on which action can be taken.

Insight into action Companies deploying Verint Impact

360 Workforce Optimisation suite can realise compelling outcomes.

Aviva uses Verint Impact 360 to resource, plan, and optimise staff and ensure they precisely match supply of staff to customer demand. Using Verint it was able to reduce call wait times by 40 per cent and increase staff productivity by 17 per cent.

Telefónica O2 Ireland wanted to gain deeper insight into drivers of customer interactions to improve the overall customer experience.

Verint Impact 360 Speech Analytics helps enable it to uncover insight in their recorded call interactions and identify service issues. By spotting call trends and root causes, it can eradicate process failures to improve quality of service and minimise unnecessary calls. O2 was able to reduce call volumes from 5,000 per month to 1,500.

Contact centre productivity Verint Impact 360 also helps s i mpl i f y c ont ac t c e nt r e forecasting and scheduling, while providing performance management and eLearning capabilities. This enables organisations to reduce costs by staffing appropriately for workload, to improve service by scheduling the

right agents with the right skills at the right time, and to improve employee effectiveness and retention with eLearning capabilities.

David Parcell is managing director at Verint Systems marketing.emea@verint.com www.verint.com

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Customer experience

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5

Make them Dellighted Getting closer to your customers is the key to keeping them happy, according to computer giant Dell loop process of customer feedback which it measures using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) method of SATISFYING CUSTOMERS IS no measuring loyalty and satisfaction. longer good enough – they need to be Dell has a portfolio of surveys and delighted. So says Gary Fox, executive feedback mechanisms that it runs with director of customer experience at customers at what Fox calls “key computer giant Dell. And he has spent moments of truth” or pain points such the past couple of years introducing a as ordering products, delivery and customer-experience programme to follow-up interactions. ensure the rest of the business thinks “We have conversations with this way, too. customers to identify the customer Founded in 1984, Dell is 41 in the pain points and then we try to do Fortune 500, has 103,000 something about the feedback employees worldwide and we get. We listen, we learn and annual revenue of $60 we push ourselves to billion (£39 billion). For the improve,” he says. past three years, Fox has “ O ne of t he mo s t headed a 30-strong team important aspects of NPS is tasked with customer the ability to be able to go experience, giving him a back and close the loop – it unique global responsibility Fox: listen to what shows us the difference in the business outside the your customers between satisfying customers really want company’s Texas HQ. and delighting them.”

In terms of customer And closing the loop of experience, the bar is constantly being customer experience opens the gates raised, according to Fox. What was to business. Delighted customers spend good enough for customers two or three 25 per cent more than detractors and years ago is considered average today. are four times more likely to recommend “If you want to remain at the top, you Dell than satisfied customers. have to keep pushing the boundaries “Customer experience drives loyalty, in every area of the business,” he says. which ultimately leads to results and “That includes customer experience.” revenue,” says Fox. Every year Dell has more than two It’s this clear business sense for billion customer interactions online delighting customers that is pushing and on the phone. It’s these interactions customer experience to the forefront that Fox says help to provide a closed of company strategy to the extent that Dell now quotes its NPS score alongside its share price on the corporate website.

Dell: behind the name It’s no surprise that Dell’s research shows customers are also far happier • Founded in 1984 if they never have an issue in the first • No 41 on Fortune 500 place. Fox has therefore developed a • $62 billion (£39.6 billion) turnover system whereby customer comments • 103,000 employees worldwide and complaints can feed back into • 30-strong customer service team product improvements. According to

By Gemma Stroud

The word on the web

By Lucie Carrington CONSUMERS ARE INCREASINGLY looking to social media to help them make purchasing decisions. A Europe-wide survey of 3,000 consumers by software firm eGain found that more than one in five people made a decision to buy goods or services as a result of a recommendation received on a social media site.

A mong under 35-year-olds this goes up to nearly one in three (29 per cent); but as many as 17 per cent of

Customer service workers must tick all the boxes of communication to truly delight their customers

Fox this can encompass everything from technical glitches to the aesthetics of a machine.

“One example is the placement of stickers, which some customers said looked ugly and ruined the look of the laptop,” says Fox. “So we changed it.

Now, they’re underneath the magnetic panel at the bottom. It was a simple

Delighted customers spend 25 per cent more than detractors and are four times more likely to recommend Dell than satisfied customers change that showed we listened to what customers thought and felt.”

Getting feedback on customer service is vital but it’s almost impossible to delight customers if you don’t also show some respect for their time.

“Customer-experience surveys shouldn’t be an assault course. On average our surveys are 10 questions

long and take customers five to seven minutes to complete,” Fox says. “We have enough information from that survey to understand how we are doing and what we need to do to improve.”

Surveys are sent to customers twice a year and give sales teams a report on how customers feel about service and support. Fox says this enables sales teams to have more meaningful conversations with customers.But the real value of measurement is the conversations they are able to have with detractors to move on their little f r u st rat ion s a nd “ t u r n t hei r dissatisfaction ultimately into delight”.

Feedback data doesn’t have to be complex – often it is as simple as looking over comments from customers about why they gave Dell a particular score – whether they are “promoters”, “detractors” or “passives”.

“We ask them: what is the one most important thing Dell can do to improve the customer experience? This helps us understand the data and sometimes flushes out something different.”

The figures so far suggest Fox’s programme of customer delight is working. In year one the firm’s NPS

score moved up by 59 per cent, followed by a 39 per cent improvement in year two. And this year, Fox has been targeted to achieve a rise in NPS well above 39 per cent.

However, Fox says that it’s not all been plain sailing; he admits that there have been peaks and troughs. The important thing is the longer-term trajectory. And while Fox is pleased with the way the NPS score has been moving, he insists that firms should be wary of putting too much emphasis on single scores. More import for him is the fact that 65 per cent of Dell customers last year were “delighted” with the service they received.

“It’s about the programme not the score. To delight your customers you have to know how they think and feel.

That means listening to what they really want and not what you think they want.”

Watch this online For free access to Gary Fox’s talk, visit goo.gl/xMwpf Or scan the QR code:

If customers like you, they’ll tell someone else. With social media, that can reach a very wide audience

the over-55s also said social media recommendations have influenced their purchasing.

Ratings f rom ot her consumers have an even bigger impact on decisions. In the UK, nearly one in three customers (30 per cent) have abandoned a purchase halfway through because of a negative review.

The survey showed that consumers do not expect a lesser service if they have been offered a deal or a bargain price for an item; 42 per cent said customer service was as important Elmes: route to purchase is more complex

Consumers do not expect a lesser service if they have been offered a bargain price as price.

“The route to purchasing is far more complex than it used to be and customers will probably have come up against your organisation long before they contact you,” Ros Elmes, account director at eGain told Business Reporter at the Inner Circle Customer Experience Strategy Summit.

“Each contact point is one

where you need to be able to impress your customer, develop that relationship with them and gain their loyalty.” She added that ultimately it was about competitive advantage: “Getting the customer experience right is an opportunity to excel against the competition.”

Consumers are increasingly comfortable using a variety of channels to buy goods and services. Two in five still prefer to begin a transaction by phone or email, but one in five now opts for a self-service website.

When it comes to second choice channels, one in three would use web self-service and one in 10 a social media site.

How did a recommendation on social media influence or help you to confidently make your buying decision?

35% Very influential Influential

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

18-34

35-54

55+

Forrester Research Inc: European Technographics Retail, Customer Experience and Travel Online Survey (2985 respondents)

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Innovation on automation When it comes to helping customers find what they want, the very best in technology is the answer DELIVERING WHAT A customer wants, when they want it, is the basic principle of customer service – we all know that. And the ease of access to service goes hand in hand with customer loyalty – the more seamless the interaction, the more satisfied and therefore loyal the customer.

Companies need to deal with customer enquiries as simply and swiftly as possible, and there is overwhelming evidence that self-service plays an important part in achieving this goal.

Tesco’s self-service checkouts account for 10m weekly transactions. Meanwhile, top airlines encourage their first class passengers to check-in at a self-service terminal – currently 55 per cent of all check-ins are completed this way. Why? Because customers perceive it to be quicker, while offering greater convenience and control.

Most companies offer an element of self-service on their websites using a search facility, but customers aren’t always given the right answers.

And when consumers can’t get the information they need online, they more than likely turn to the telephone - a more expensive channel for the company to manage.

As customers, we’ve become so accustomed to using search engines that we intuitively start to guess the right phrases to type to get what we’re looking for. However, this guessing game rarely directs us to the right content on the first try – and Nuance believes the technology should

Self-service at an airport check-in gives customers more convenience and control

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adapt to the consumer rather than forcing the customer to do the hard work.

Businesses need to offer a better self-service option that enables customers to explain their enquiry in their own words, and not only be understood, but be given the precise answer they’re looking for. Nuance’s Prodigy solutions comprise three main capabilities that let customers do just that.

The first is natural input and output, allowing the customer to interact with the technology in their natural language. The technology then extracts the meaning and intent, while asking q u e s t i o n s i n a c o n v e r s at i o n a l w a y to clarify any ambiguity. It then gives the best answer and offers the customer the chance to ask more questions about that answer in a conversational manner, refining as they go.

Nuance’s future plans take this even further adding the ability to access data from multiple sources, including websites, intranets, social media channels as well as SMS and IMs to determine the correct answer by ranking potential responses and selecting the best one. It also plans to add the ability to learn from unstructured content with the potential to radically overhaul the customer experience.

In business today automation is vital – customers want it, economics demand it and technology enables it. Providing precise answers, whatever the channel the customer decides to use, is a hugely important and powerful component to creating profitable long-term relationships.

Sebastian Reeve is director of product management & marketing EMEA Nuance +44 (0)162 849 1600 www.nuance.com

Building blocks for the future Why learning more about your customer is good for business “I AM NOT a number, I am a free man”. So said Patrick McGoohan, starring in the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner.

Your customers may sympathise with him – to your disadvantage.

Many companies treat their customers as just a series of transactions. It is convenient for the company, but for the customer it can be a turn-off.

“For customers, all contacts with your company are part of a total experience – a customer journey,” says Ben Silcox, client engagement di rec tor at information management consultancy TAH. “If that experience is bad they may just leave without telling you why.”

Si lc ox de s c r i b e s t h e transaction-driven approach as traditional business architecture. He contrasts this with what TAH calls customer architecture. The customer architecture approach means building your business around the customer. It involves learning everything you can about your customer’s journey

and all the points where your business processes touch them.

“It’s not just the obvious ones, such as calls to customer services, but those that are invisible to you, such as the times when they try to call and cannot get through,” he says.

Clients that have enabled customer architecture with the aid of TAH include insurance

Creating customer architecture is about changing the philosophy across the whole company company AON, the University of Central Lancashire, retailer Superdrug and Vodafone.

So what does it mean in practice? Silcox cites the case of a customer who bought a camera from the manufacturer, but then discovered he could have got it for less from a retailer. When the customer complained to the

manufacturer he was told there was nothing they could do, he should have shopped around.

Had the manufacturer used a customer architecture approac h it cou ld have monitored the prices charged by its distributors. Immediately after the customer contacted the manufacturer he could have been told that the camera was available cheaper elsewhere, but offered a voucher equivalent to the difference in price.

“This proactive approach helps create a better customer experience,” says Silcox.

Using the customer architecture approach, TAH helped Vodafone to better understand its customer journey.

Its contact centres knew which customers called and when, the call duration and subject. TAH helped the company to gather previously invisible information such as how many times the customer had failed to get through, and whether they had been passed from one contact centre to another.

“Systems like this build a

chronological picture of the customer journey, so the company can proactively intervene,” says Silcox.

“You can tell if your customer has called three times about the same problem, and offer an incentive to mitigate that negative experience.”

TAH can also bring together customer information that is

held in different ‘silos’ within the company, making the full picture available to the people who can do something proactive with it, such as customer services or marketing.

But t ransfor ming t he customer journey is not just about software.

“Creating customer architecture is about changing

the philosophy across the whole company. Most firms do not realise the risk they run with ‘business as usual’,” says Silcox.

Once an organisation has decided to implement the change to customer architecture, TAH discusses the company’s customer journey and identifies problems or gaps.

Then it reviews their current information systems and data, to see where improvements are needed.Finally TAH aggregates the information to produce a platform that can be used to proactively innovate and create a better customer experience.

The necessary organisational and technology changes are carried out in bite-sized chunks.

“That means you can see the benefits within two months, and achieve complete transformation within six months to a year,” says Silcox.

“Once you decide to change your philosophy, we can help you deliver the transformation, resulting in being more competitive and relevant to the customer.” info@tah.co.uk www.tah.co.uk/telegraph

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Taking contact centres to the cloud From saving money to improving customer service, the sky’s the limit when it comes to cloud computing in contact centres S O M E T I M E AG O, A N Interactive Intelligence cloud survey found that more than two-thirds of UK enterprises either had a cloud system in place or were looking to implement one within five years – and that many also recognised the advantages of moving their business communications applications to the cloud. That was back in 2010.

Fast forward two years, and Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS), has become the fastest growing part of Interactive Intelligence’s business, as more and more companies reap the benefits of the cloud to enhance their customer service.

The financial appeal of cloud-computing technology has been well documented.

The cloud could effectively be the ultimate customer relations tool

Expert providers such as flexibly to their customer needs.

Interactive Intelligence deliver It seems a long time since the functionality on a per seat the “call centre” became basis, with the ability to add or the “contact centre”, recognising cancel connections virtually t hat c ustomers wa nt to instantaneously. Customers pay communicate not just by phone for the service they want, not but email, SMS, web, social for the hardware they may or media and more. This requires may not need. an infrastructure that provides So, the cost-cutting benefits unified communications, so are clear, but beyond employees have all the saving money, do information they need organisations at their fingertips actually realise the and can deliver it full potential of to customers and mov i ng to t he contacts in t he cloud? way that is most As well as reducing appropriate at the Paulding: up-front costs and time. delivering faster reap the benefits CaaS is an ideal of the cloud i mple me nt at ion, match for the way the moving to the cloud cont ac t- cent re means companies can actually industr y wants to work, innovate in the way they particularly in an increasingly c o m m u n i c a t e t o t h e i r mobile world, as its flexibility customers, creating a whole suits the changing needs of new way of conducting business. these customer-led companies.

The cloud could effectively It enables contact-centre be the ultimate customer businesses to “scale up” for peak relat ions tool, a l low i ng seasons, which results in companies to respond more both lower running costs

and satisfied customers.

The scalability also means that in a volatile economy, companies can quickly add more functions - meaning they can rapidly adapt to changing business requirements while only paying for what they need.

The virtualisation element of cloud computing could also boost customer service for businesses. A hosted service can support back-up and recovery for remote offices which means that business continuity is more affordable.

Companies have the ability to work remotely – and whether it is a few members of a customer service team or the whole department, doing so has a positive impact on productivity.

The Interactive Intelligence C a a S of fe r i ng i nc lude s applications for contact-centre automation and enterprise IP telephony. It encompasses cloud-based voice services, IP telephony, unified messaging, c a l l cent re a nd u n i f ied communications services. The

A unified infrastructure is essential to effective communication

CaaS offering was designed to provide companies with all the advantages of a hosted solution, while providing the functionalit y, reliabilit y, security and control of a premise-based solution.

Companies are starting to look beyond just the economic benefits of the cloud and recognise the benefits that this solution can bring to their customers. During these times of economic uncertainty, cost

savings are always going to be top of the agenda for businesses but cloud computing is more than that – it paves the way for contact centres to be more flexible, more responsive to the market and meet the needs of today’s customer.

Dave Paulding is regional sales director for UK, Middle East and Africa at Interactive Intelligence 01753 418845 www.inin.com

A new era begins Contact centres are on the brink of a revolution that will pay huge dividends for customers and companies A WHOLE NEW role for contact centres beckons; that of rapidly understanding and efficiently communicating precise details about customer demand to the whole company.

Armed with this insight, contact centres can now be equipped to serve the company’s internal customers better than ever before. Operations management can identify what areas need attention and prioritise action; the finance department can finally see who should be paying for all those calls being answered; customer service leaders can create concrete business cases for improvement projects; HR can target their training budget for maximum impact; and IT can learn what services could and should be put on to the self-service platform.

How it’s done Combine the fact that customers use contact centres to talk to companies about ever y thing, with a new ability to automatically monitor and understand what’s going on in every one of these conversations, and suddenly a company’s contact centre is transformed into a source of amazingly valuable information that can make a

“Now our customers are happier and more loyal and we spend less money keeping things that way!” company more agile, responsive and profitable.

ASC automatically combines disparate information streams such as quality assessments, desktop, speech, and content analytics and customer feedback, to present contact centre leaders with the most complete insight ever into what drives customers to the contact centre and what happens when they get in touch.

Detailed and reliable information about what works for customers, and what doesn’t, is now available within hours of contact being made.

That means, for example, that a spike in contacts about issues with a company’s shipping department can be identified, escalated, and potentially resolved faster than ever before.

Alternatively this intelligence, delivered very soon after first contact is made, can point to changes in how

a product or service is offered that greatly increase sales conversion rates.

Enormous potential This new role for the contact centre is now possible thanks to a combination of better analytics technology and better understanding of how to use this technology.

With almost 50 years of experience, and tens of millions of pounds invested in research and development, ASC is at the forefront of this revolution.

In the words of one ASC customer: “Now that we can understand the

gist of every call, we’re able to reduce those ‘avoidable’ calls that customers hate; we can improve the parts of the company that are overloading the contact centre; we now target agent training and process improvement with surgical precision; our customers are happier and more loyal and we spend less money keeping things that way!”

ASC has the technology, engineers and specialists right here in the UK to help contact centres realise this transformation.

A lready market leaders on

continental Europe, ASC has now entered the UK market with a unique combination of German engineering and a focus on results that put this revolution within reach of every contact centre.

Paddy Coleman, right, is managing director of ASC telecom UK 01276 676070 www.asctelecom uk.com

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Customer experience

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Feel the pulse of your people Getting feedback from your customers is one thing – knowing what to do with it is another.

How can a business unlock the secrets to a more prosperous future?

By Gemma Stroud ORGANISATIONS ARE PUMPING money into keeping the customer happy, but how do they know if they’ve got it right? Here expert Ian Golding outlines some top tips for measuring customer satisfaction.

Know what you’re trying to achieve It sounds simple but the key thing is to understand exactly what you’re trying to determine so you can you pick the appropriate metric.

Different organisations have different objectives and there are different ways of measuring customer experience in order to achieve them. For some it’s Net Promoter Score, for others it’s CSAT surveys. If you don’t know what you want to measure, then gathering feedback from customers is obsolete as you won’t be able to appropriately use the data. It’s a waste of time and resources for you and your customer.

Work out what numbers you want Once you’ve chosen a metric, ascertain the metric score you want to change. Communicate the magic number to all staff and help put strategies

in place to help them improve it. Communication is key. The score should become a company Talisman of sorts. Everyone needs to know the number – although not necessarily the ins and outs of why it’s that number – and the detail behind that score will help govern and stimulate change across the board.

Get your facts right Track customer experience from start to finish so you can back up what colleagues believe, or assume, with concrete evidence. It’s important to determine what’s driving customer behaviour so you also know where to make changes.

NPS alone won’t tell you this. For example, a negative score will only tell you something needs fixing – it doesn’t tell you what or where the “key moments of truth” are for your customer. Be prepared to bring in an additional metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to help you drill down into the data.

Consider outsourcing Think very carefully about the pros and cons of

Customer satisfaction in the digital age Companies are turning to social media as a fast and cost-effective way to gauge customer experience UPLOAD A HOLIDAY snap to Facebook, re-tweet a news link or even advertise your employment credentials… Social media has got us all hooked as we key-tap, scroll and touch-screen our way through our daily lives. So it comes as no surprise that businesses are now using it to reach out to their customers and find out what they think.

Online digital photo service PhotoBox is one company using a multichannel measurement system – the Spotless Service Programme – to

listen and act upon customer insight. Still retaining the more traditional platforms of telephone and email, customers can also interact with the business via Facebook, livechat, virtual agents, forums and more recently, Twitter. With more than 90,000 Facebook fans, head of customer experience at PhotoBox Helen Ellis says a greater online presence keeps the business at the forefront of customer service.

She adds: “Social media helps us move faster.

A score to settle with customers Everyone’s talking about it, but what is Net Promoter Score?

NPS is a customer experience metric that can help businesses gauge the loyalty of their customer base by determining whether they will promote the brand (a promoter) – or not (a detractor).

The metric was introduced in the US in 2003 and has become one of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics.

An organisation’s NPS is shown as one number. This can be as low as -100, whereby everybody is a detractor, or as high as 100, with every customer promoting or recommending the service. Any NPS that is positive and above zero is deemed good and those of 50 and above considered excellent.

NPS is definitely a buzzword among customer experience professionals – but it has its limits. For example, it doesn’t tell a firm why its customers are promoters or detractors. Firms have to look elsewhere for that information. And if they don’t know what they are doing wrong, how can the put it right?

For example, if someone tweets about something, to them – so the head of trading will see what then the CEO and CTO are interested and that people say about product pricing. The production issue moves up the priority list – so we actively director sees what people say about the book encourage customers to tweet about us.” quality,” says Ellis.

In their tweflth year of business, PhotoBox “It means we can immediately reach out to now boosts more than 11 million members and customers and say ‘it sounds like you had an has a growing international presence in 15 experience we don’t want you to have. What can European countries. Ellis says that although we do about that?’” there is not one magic tool for collating data, And the response from customers has been social media helps make a business more positive with customer satisfaction CSAT approachable. scores around 90 per cent and a Net “The challenge is what you do with Promoter Score of 60 per cent. But the all the data that you acquire from benefits haven’t only been seen in customers. It’s about how you listen customer experience improvement. and the value of listening.

Costs have also been cut, as tools such “Social media gives customers an as the virtual agent provide customers easy and immediate channel of with what Ellis describes as a self-help communication with us, allowing us strategy. Customers can ask virtual to listen and respond faster.”

Ellis: agent Phoebe questions with responses It’s about the The Blogosphere – an online generated from previous enquiries or customer forum – allows customer value of listening sent to an agent. Customer contact has feedback and comment to be immediately been reduced by 30 per cent, with a saving of processed and responded to accordingly. around €100,000 (£80,000). “We run fast and “Everyone in charge sees the bits that matter have to have a web release every two weeks,”

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both outsourcing and using in-house services.

In-house can be cheap, quick and simple to implement, but the down side is that it’s not independent. Outsourcers are more expensive, but will provide you with unbiased figures.

Many are accredited by the Market Research Society, which may also give you more kudos with customers and directors alike.

Think like a customer From a customer’s perspective, feedback forms can be complex, tedious and irrelevant, especially when they have no idea how you will use the information. But customer feedback is a crucial trigger for product and process improvements – so make this clear to customers and thank them for taking the time to tell you what they think.

Listen to what the customer is saying Forms can be long and complicated and customers are often not told why they are being asked for their opinion or how the information will subsequently be used.

How often do you go back and thank them or tell them how the information was used?

Feedback is vital for improvements, and customers won’t realise this if you don’t tell them.

Stick to your guns Choose the right metric for your organisation and stick to it until you have a body of data to work with.

This doesn’t mean you can’t run measurements in parallel with one another – it will soon become clear which measurements are providing you with relevant and usef ul data t hat dr ives performance improvements.

Understand the numbers Whatever the metric, you need to make certain that you understand the maths behind it, especially if you’ve

says Ellis. “We therefore have the power to change the customers’ journey every two weeks.

But social media doesn’t have to be used solely as a feedback tool. It can be used to map the complete end-to-end customer experience, as is the case at engine manufacturer Honda.

Customer operations manager Phil Dix says that although feedback is important, pre-empting experience is just as valuable.

He adds: “Customer feedback isn’t just about scores and tables. While Honda has successfully used feedback to drive dealer performance, it has also used it to understand how the customer may think in advance. We want to expand our active customer base and build long-term loyalty – doing so by asking our customers how we can improve their experience with us before their journey has even begun.”

In 2009 the company created Honda Friends – an in-house designed, managed and built online customer panel of 15,704 members split between car, motorcycle and power equipment users.

Customers sign up to receive surveys, which are sent on a monthly basis.

“It’s a way of speaking to thousands of our customers in a very short period of time on a

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range of topics across the business. This can be everything from after-sales care to the price of warranties and the usefulness of Honda car brochures,” adds Dix. Although participants are not incentivised, Honda has seen high response rates with more than 30,000 completed surveys – 1,000 were returned within 24 hours. “Honda Friends is a simple

You can only improve customer experience if you take note of what your customers say they want outsourced to an agency. If you can’t explain it to your bosses, the data (and you) will lose credibility.

Don’t rest on your laurels Customer expectations are changing all the time, so no matter how high your feedback ratings, be prepared to re-evaluate what you are doing for your customers. Question whether or not you’re making a difference and is that difference the right one for your customer.

Make customer service a priority for the whole company Customer satisfaction metrics are now sophisticated enough to enable firms to report customer ratings to individual agents.

This might be too extreme for some, but if you want your customer data to drive tangible improvements in customer experience, then that data has to be relevant to every single member of staff.

Ian Golding, left, is a board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association and former head of group customer experience at Shop Direct UK.

Watch this online For free access to Ian Golding’s talk, visit goo.gl/xMwpf Or scan the QR code:

and cost-effective way of speaking to our customers.

“It brings our customers closer to the business and means we can give them what they want first time round.”

It seems the message is clear. In order to improve customer experience and performance, businesses need to open the channels of communication with their customers and listen to what they have to say… or tweet, livechat and blog.

–Gemma Stroud

9

In my opinion...

Experts give an inside perspective Karyn Stevely, customer service manager, Schuh “We don’t think about call handling time. Every customer is different and every answer is similarly different. If a call takes 20 minutes to resolve, it takes 20 minutes. If it takes five, it takes five.”

Sam Ellis, head of customer experience and loyalty, Atos “Expectations of IT services are so low that an end user with a bad experience would still promote us.”

Valerie Pearce, head of city services, Brighton & Hove City Council “Local elections are the biggest customer satisfaction survey a local authority can undertake.”

Phil Dix, customer operations manager, Honda “Brands that don’t listen [to their customers] will find themselves in the ‘disaster’ stories section of the press.”

Stephen West, interim director of customer contact, Weight Watchers Europe “Customers expect the same experience and the same level of service no matter what country they’re in. If they don’t get it, the brand falls apart.”

H ay l ey J o h n s o n , s e n io r operations manager, Aviva “Head office once sent us an email on our ‘exceptional’ telehandling performance.

They didn’t realise the system had been down all day and not a single customer had actually been helped.”

Claire Muscutt, customer experience strategy leader, Compass Group “You need to ensure that the company vision is a red thread that runs through every aspect of the business.”

Emma Sykes, head of making things right, Ella’s Kitchen “We look for staff with a ‘give it a go’ attitude. Employment credentials are important but my key interview question is ‘would you run a marathon tomorrow?’ We want people who are up for a challenge.”

Sophie Patrikios, senior director of customer services, LEGO Group “Lego culture is stronger than country culture. For our customers, there is a Lego way of doing things. So people in Italy, Germany and England all have the same expectation of what it’s like to call Lego and to have a Lego conversation.”

Barr y Ibbetson , head of corporate contact centre, Leeds City Council “I recruit on attitude not skills or experience. I’m drilling that into my team because people who are enthusiastic and want to do more influence their peers. Attitude is everything.”

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The only way is up An increasing number of businesses are relocating to Scotland, so what exactly does the region have to offer?

COMPANIES LOOKING TO relocate business and customer services centres are flocking to Scotland.

Scotland is the UK’s top area when it comes to attracting foreign investment and the biggest investors are business services companies, according to Ernst & Young. Customer services employment has grown by 30,000 to 86,000 in the five years to 2011.

So what is it that Scotland offers?

“It’s a combination of skilled employees, low business costs, grant funding and a positive attitude on the part of the Scottish Government,” says Mark McMullen, international senior manager specialising in financial services at Scot tish Gover nment-backed Scot tish Development International (SDI).

Among companies that have used SDI’s free services to help establish and expand operations in Scotland are Tesco Bank, which employs over 1,300 people in its Glasgow service centre, asset management company BlackRock, which delivers front, middle and back office functions from its Edinburgh office, and BNP Paribas, which provides fund administration and accounting services from offices in Dundee and Glasgow.

International business trends mean that a move to Scotland is likely to appeal to many more.

“Many companies which moved their customer services operations offshore are considering reshoring to the UK,” says McMullen. “Wage

inflation coupled with high staff attrition rates and the resulting extra recruitment and training costs mean that offshoring to cities such as Mumbai has not always delivered the benefits expected.”

Moreover, UK customers prefer dealing with UK-based service staff.

“They want the empathy that UK-based customer services staff can provide, especially when they are discussing their finances,” says McMullen.

Companies such as RBS actively market the fact that their customer services staff are UKbased. Scotland offers a combination of skilled staff and low costs: overall, companies estimate that general cost savings of 30 to 40 per cent can be achieved in Scotland compared to similar operations in London.

Median earnings of customer services and administrative staff in Scotland are £19,200 compared with £27,600 in London, and the existing workforce has skills that financial services and business process outsourcing organisations look for.

“Scotland has a history of financial services employment, so staff understand the demand for quality when working within the financial sector,” says McMullen.

Commercial property costs are lower in Scotland than in other financial centres: the total occupancy cost of commercial property in Glasgow

is £41.37 per sq ft, lower than Frankfurt, Edinburgh, Luxembourg, Paris, the City, and West London, where rates peak at £118.15.

For companies seeking urban locations, there are business parks and inner city space available, but there are also rural locations such as Inverness, Nairn, and Aviemore.

To make it easier for companies to handle relocation and set-up, SDI provides bespoke solutions free of charge.

“We aim to make relocation and growth as easy as possible and reduce the risk involved,” says McMullen.

“Our sector-specialist consultants factor in what the company wants to do and when. If you are looking at getting your project started within three months we can pinpoint the locations that have property and a workforce available.”

SDI can also help access direct grant support, either as a percentage of capital expenditure costs related to the number of jobs created, or as a percentage of the first-year salary costs.

As well as the financial service sector, SDI also helps organisations in business process outsourcing, life sciences, energy, food and drink, tourism and ICT, and has helped organisations such as State Street, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Capita Group, Capgemini, Amazon and Logica.

McMullen says: “SDI can supply all the support

Glasgow’s financial district attracts big names

required to make setting up a business in Scotland as easy as possible.”

0800 917 9534 www.sdi.co.uk

Figure out your customer data Measuring customer experience can leave behind a trail of overwhelming and uninformative information. How can you turn mess into success?

CAN SPEECH ANALYTICS deliver the call experiences your customers deserve? Firstly we should review why businesses want to deliver excellent customer service. The answer is simple; because happy customers are good customers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 70 per cent of consumers are willing to spend more money with a business in exchange for good customer service. Forrester research suggests improving the customer experience is worth around $31m (£19.9m) for retail businesses, rising to $1.3 billion (£832.5m) for hotels and mobile service providers.

Today’s customer is well informed and has many choices when deciding where to do business.

Once we have ‘won’ a customer the desire to retain their business is high, in order to turn them into a profitable one. Therefore, delivering a superior level of customer service is essential.

While many organisations focus on the quality of customer service they offer, it is open to debate as to how this should be measured. There are many metrics, including CSAT, Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort and the Customer Experience Index. These tend to focus on customer opinion either in isolation or related to a specific

factors during interactions are: professional greetings and closings for calls; the successful completion of a task; the level of effort a customer requires to complete a task and the occurrence of any key positive or negative moments.

Analyse data to truly understand what customers want

transaction. However, they are often subjective and only sample a small proportion of interactions.

Calls still popular This is somewhat driven by the challenges faced by firms in processing the vast amounts of data available to them. A recent Contact Babel report on US contact centres found that voice interactions still represent approximately 72 per cent of inbound communication to businesses, even in today’s multi-channel world. Analysing this much data represents a significant challenge – or does it?

For voice interactions there is a solution: speech analytics. Firstly what should we be trying analyse? CSAT and other approaches measure

the customer perspective, but are limited for the reasons previously mentioned. An alternative approach is to look at quality from the agent perspective. However, this approach is flawed as we often look at the agents’ behaviour and performance from the business view of quality which is not necessarily aligned to what the customer views as a high quality interaction.

Recently new models have begun emerging that take a more comprehensive look at what good customer experience is. These models explore what motivates a customer to call, the elements of a business that influence the customer experience and the points during an interaction that have lasting impacts on the customer. Key

High levels of automation Speech analytics helps deliver customer experience improvement in two main ways. First, it enables the testing of hypotheses across large amounts of data. Its high levels of automation and ability to test for the presence of phrases in real-time or offline media significantly reduces the effort required to test and analyse a hypothesis and to compare and contrast it against another.

This enables decisions to be made on priorities for enhancing the customer experience. Secondly, it can continually monitor and assess the impact of changes, ensuring that Key Performance Indicators measuring business impact are met.

Advances in how information is obtained using speech analytics and how that information is presented have resulted in more efficient and effective uses of its output. The use of advanced and flexible analytics platforms have enabled the delivery of data in an understandable form to those that need it most. These platforms now provide higher levels of automation to allownotification-driven inter ventions, enabling focused action rather than performing continual supervision.

01684 585101 www.aurix.com/speech_analytics

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Seas of change You can’t hope to engage your customers in the business if your staff aren’t similarly committed to making things better

By Lucie Carrington HOW DO YOU transform customer service in an organisation of 8,000 people delivering 700 different services to 250,000 customers with no budget and only one dedicated member of staff?

This was Valerie Pearce’s dilemma at Brighton & Hove City Council when, as head of city services, she had the task of reinvigorating the links between the council and local people.

It seemed impossible at the time, but twelve months on and Pearce says she would not have had it any other way. “If the chief executive had said to me ‘you can have a team of 10 people to drive through this change’, I would have said no. What we’re doing now

is delivering something more meaningful.”

The first thing Pearce did was look for volunteers to join a group of customer experience champions. She needed at least one person from every department and the only criterion for joining was a passion for improving things for the customer. “It’s very nonhierarchical. I don’t care who you are or where you sit in the organisation if you have good ideas and you’re passionate,” Pearce says. “But once you were in, there’s no backing out.”

The role of these champions is to share ideas for great customer services and to energise their colleagues to come up with ways of improving the experience of citizens. “Residents like Brighton but they clearly don’t associate what the council does to shape the

Music to their ears Spotify uses freebies and encouragement to engage staff Music streaming firm Spotify has introduced gaming principles to ratchet up performance among customer advisers. “It puts them in charge of their own development,” says Maria McCann, director of customer service.

“Advisers can unlock badges as they move from skill levels and track their own progress.”

It’s part of a push to encourage customer advisers to take control of their workload and performance.

“More than 50 per

cent of our advisers are Cambridge graduates and they need a lot of stimulation. They are professionals who can make decisions and solve problems confidently and have to start treating them as such,” McCann says.

With less than 3 per cent turnover in the past year among 100 advisers, she thinks they are getting engagement right.

Our customers can c o m m u n i c a te w i t h Spotify via numerous channels inclu ding email, Twitter and blogs.

Advisers pick these up and are expected to decide which customer

issues need a response an d h ow. T h ey a re also armed with a tool box of freebies such as vouchers and playlists, which Spotify calls “random ac ts of kindness”, to hand out when they feel it’s needed.

S p otif y h a s a l s o developed a work space to encourage a sense of ownership among customer advisers. “If they don’t want to work at a desk they don’t have to. There are mobiles and iPads to work on too.

“We’ve created a sense of freedom among advisers so they have choices about how they work,” McCann says.

city with it being a nice place to live.”

One of the great things about such a bottom-up approach to improving customer service is that anything good that happens is entirely down to that department or service and nothing to do with a centralised customer care programme. “It’s the small steps teams have made, based on customer insight.

That have started to change behaviours across the council,” Pearce says.

At the same time it was important to have the support of the chief executive. Pearce says he has been great at championing the customer programme; regularly asking at meetings how any proposal would improve things for the customer.

“This combination of support from the top and passion from the bottom is a very powerful way of doing things,” she says.

This idea of grassroots change where employees do it to themselves rather than have it done to them by some distant boardroom, appeals to Sam Ellis, head of customer experience and loyalty at IT outsourcer Atos. It’s a sort of corporate street violence, he argues, which involves identifying people in the organisation who are able to kick things off.

“If your neighbour is constantly negative and cynical it can be contagious. It’s when friends and peers stop being cynical that you will too.”

To get this viral change in motion, Atos has identified a small number of highly connected people in the organisation. These aren’t necessarily the obviously high-potential people whom, Ellis argues, are not always viewed positively by their peers. Nor is there any personal development linked to being involved. Ellis simply wants to use these people for the skills

Life’s a beach for Brighton & Hove council’s 250,000 customers

t hey already have as nat ural communicators within the business.

“We are setting up an informal, peer-to-peer network [that] will talk up the good news,” Ellis says.

“Stories such as how John the engineer saw an incident through to the bitter end. We’re hoping that gradually, this sort of behaviour becomes seen as the new norm.”

Both Pearce and Ellis emphasise

“I don’t care who you are or where you sit in the organisation if you have good ideas and you’re passionate” – Pearce

the importance of bringing on board the right people. Alex Loach, head of customer services at technology business Serif agrees that recruiting well is vital to any customer experience operation. To this end he recruits employees’ mates and mates of mates.

“This way we know we are getting people who are similar to us and will fit into the culture.”

But while financial rewards have not figured much at Brighton & Hove or at Atos, Loach believes the reward structure is an important part of engaging his team. He therefore runs a quarterly review process for all staff where it is possible to get promoted to the next pay band.

“Not everyone does, but some do,” Loach says. And that possibility is a powerful motivator.

Sexing up strategy Experts thrash out the importance of top-line support when it comes to shifting customer service up a gear C USTOM E R SE RV ICES EXPERTS must speak the language of business if they want their bosses to take more than a passing interest in the customer experience, according to Maria McCann, director of customer services at Spotify.

“You have to latch on to what they find sexy,” McCann told the The Customer Experience Strategy Summit. “With the chief financial officer, it’s numbers. So I started talking about customer experience as a potential profit centre rather than a cost.” This changed the

board’s outlook and customer experience became part of bigger discussions around strategy. “The key thing has been using data to prove the point and always talking about profit,” McCann said.

Profit isn’t such a useful concept at local authorities for senior officers to buy into the idea of a customer – or citizen – centric culture. This could be why Barry Ibbetson, head of corporate contact centre at Leeds City Council, hasn’t seen the assistant chief executive in the contact centre for 12 months.

Alex Loach, Maria McCann and Barry Ibbetson speak at the summit

Ibbetson joined the council three years ago to bring six contact centres together as one; dealing with everything

from cutting the grass to housing the homeless.

He claimed the secret to the success of the merger has not

come through getting chief executive support, but through appointing his own people as team leaders. “The team who report to me have been handpicked. Many of them worked for the council already but I personally chose the people who answer to me.”

Meanwhile, Alex Loach, head of customer services at IT business Serif, said his bosses were fully engaged in the c ustomer jou r ney. “ T he advantage is around 20 per cent of senior management came up through the call centre,” he said.

It’s a well-trodden career route within Serif. “Most people come to work for our call centre as a stepping stone to a job in testing or development or information systems. And why not begin a career with us like that?” Loach said.

– Lucie Carrington

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Give your customers a voice Take careful steps and the road to successful customer experience management can be a smooth and successful one DELIVERING AN EXCELLENT customer experience across multiple channels is crucial for both B2C and B2B organisations aiming to differentiate themselves and to drive growth.

Companies cannot afford to engage with customers in a haphazard manner and must instead create customer experience management (CEM) programmes that will enable them to identify areas for improvement.

Key to this is the ability to harness the voice of the customer (VoC) throughout the customer journey. This provides the insight required to increase revenue through reduced churn, improved cross-sell and the ability to better attract new customers, and to reduce costs by streamlining processes and improving process consistency.

According to VoC solutions providerConfirmit,

The building blocks of any successful VoC programme RESULTS ACTION INFRASTRUCTURE FOUNDATION

Increased revenue

Reduced costs

Operational improvements at the front line

Culture change

Strategic cross-functional improvements

Enterprise-class technology and business processes Executive commitment

there are five key stages that are crucial in building a successful VoC programme.

The first stage is “define” - that is, agree clear, phased objectives and success criteria. It is imperative to define the primary business issues that you need to address at the outset so that you

Organisational alignment

can build a programme that will influence key business and customer KPIs. The next stage is “design”. Ensure that you design the programme to deliver tactical and strategic benefits, mapped to your business objectives.

After that comes “implement”. Use multi-channel

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data collection to maximise response rates and deliver deeper insight. Identify a solution that provides a secure, scalable way to gather customer feedback, automate alerts and generate tailored reports that provide stakeholders with live insight.

The fourth stage is “analyse”. Improve business results by analysing data in a meaningful and actionable way, and creating a clear view of the issues and opportunities.

Finally, act - close the loop with individual customers to deliver some quick wins and create short-term financial benefits. Use aggregated data to identify and address systemic issues that could cause long-term damage.

Be warned though - even when you’ve completed all these steps, you’re not there yet! Customer experience is a journey, not a destination, and a successful VoC programme requires constant review and redefinition. Be prepared to regularly examine all aspects of your programme and to adjust your priorities along the way. The ultimate proof point of a VoC programme, after all, is change.

020 7648 8560 www.confirmit.com

Sky’s the limit

technology services on a pay-as-you-use basis. Services can be switched on and off by clients with little notice, making them perfect for short/medium-term projects, or for organisations that prefer Adopting cloud services can improve customer to have third party experts look after technology so they can focus on experiences by enhancing service quality, advisor their serving customers. productivity and resolution effectiveness What’s often forgotten in all the talk about cloud technology and pay-asTHE THINGS THAT can be achieved and software to deliver, for example, you-use pricing is the impact on the with today’s contact centre technology computer telephony integration or customer. The truth is that cloud are truly amazing. Organisations can “follow me” voice services can solutions can have a positive instantly route callers to global service i n v o l v e c o n s i d e r a b l e impact on service quality, experts simply by recognising the investment – a price that’s enhance first call resolution, number they’re calling from. They sometimes difficult to justify boost advisor productivity can deliver comparable levels of when working on short-term and create happier service regardless of whether customers projects, or when capital customers. Firstly, because call, email or post a query on Twitter. e x pendit u re is u nder c loud s e r v ic e s a l low And they can automatically analyse scrutiny. organisations more time to the content of calls for valuable Cloud contact centre Bates: the cloud f o c u s o n c u s t o m e r can improve information using the latest speech services are a cost-effective experiences rather than get service quality recognition techniques. way around these problems. bogged down in technology However, these capabilities don’t Rather than ask organisations to buy matters. Secondly, because some cloud come cheap. Investing in the hardware systems, cloud vendors rent their specialists don’t just deliver calls but

also monitor clients’ operational performance in real time and suggest enhancements. And thirdly, because cloud vendors deliver performanceenhancing technologies that many businesses simply wouldn’t be able to afford if they had to buy them outright.

Ultra is one of the UK’s most experienced providers of cloud contact centre services. Its reliable and secure services include intelligent inbound

call handling, outbound dialling, customer self-service, computer telephony integration, PCI DSScompliant payment handling, contact recording, reporting and real-time performance monitoring.

Robert Bates is commercial director at Ultra Communications +44 (0)207 965 0207 marketing@ultraasp.net

Can you really have it all?

Using online communities to shift calls from a company’s call centre can help cut costs and offer better service at the same time AS A COMPANY’S products get more complicated and product ranges grow, the need for customer support increases.

But employing customer support specialists is expensive, and a call can cost anything between £2.00 and £50 to handle. Of course, offshoring is less costly but is also less popular with customers.

According to one young British company, the answer lies in harnessing customer knowledge.

“You can cut customer support costs and provide better service at the same time by using

“You can cut customer support costs and provide better service at the same time” – Ertughrul

the right online community technology,” says Dr Orhan Ertughrul, co-founder of Oxfordshirebased support systems provider Enjenta.

“Customer support can cost millions of pounds so shifting even a small proportion of queries to an online user community can mean big savings,” says Ertughrul.

Forum technology that enables online user communities to interact already exists, but Enjenta’s Jemini Social Support Engine offers several powerful enhancements.

“Crucially, Jemini has the ability to demonstrate its return on investment by building in the ability to see solutions, so savings are made clear,” says Ertughrul. Users who pose questions can mark them as “solved” and rate answers for quality, so the company can monitor the advice.

Users whose questions go unanswered can be identified by the system and offered help by the call centre.

Gathering basic technical information up-front means questions can be answered quickly. Commonly asked questions can be answered by auto-response, saving time and providing a better experience for users.

Jemini links to hundreds of social media systems so questions can be crowd-sourced to the wider user community, providing more help

with problem solving. The software is also capable of rich media integration, so community members can make online videos to demonstrate how tasks can be carried out and earn reward points.

“Used as part of a multichannel customer support strategy, we think Jemini can reduce costs while delivering faster and better customer service,” says Ertughrul.

01295 724534 www.enjenta.com

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13

The ins and outs of outsourcing Should you keep your business in-house or use external contractors? We look at the pros and cons of outsourcing through two companies with very different approaches

By Gemma Stroud DON’T KID YOURSELF that outsourcing is yesterday’s news – participants in Inner Circle’s Customer Experience Strategy Summit made it quite clear that it is still a knotty question they grapple with.

Some businesses have tried outsourcing aspects of customer service but decided it is far too important to run at arm’s length. Others, including National Rail Enquiries, have built a hugely successful customer service business on the back of external suppliers providing everything from the technology powering the website to contact centres.

“Some people say you can’t be successful and have a strong brand identity if you outsource, but we disagree,” says National Rail Enquiries CEO Chris Scoggins.

The business provides more than 400 services to around 100 third-party clients; the company’s impressive credentials include being the most-called telephone number in the UK and the number one travel and transport website.

And Scoggins says a large part of the business’s success has been as a result of its extensive outsourcing strategy.

“Outsourcing gives us cost-effective access to the best resources and thus enables us to provide our customers with the best possible service,” he says. “We maintain our reputation as an excellent service provider by reaping the benefits of expertise available outside the business.”

It seems to work for National Rail Enquiries, which goes from strength to strength. In the last financial year, the company saw 25 per cent growth and hit 8 million users online.

However, there are potential pitfalls with outsourcing. Any project can go awry if not monitored correctly and Scoggins says businesses should be aware of this when using external contractors.

“It’s important for us that customers experience consistency across the board. Problems arise if you outsource a project and forget about it. You

“Keeping everything in-house has ensured that the company vision is a red thread that runs through every aspect of the business” - Muscutt won’t receive quality results unless you keep tabs on it every step of the way.”

Scoggins insists that despite the business’s use of outsourcing to deliver much of the business, customer satisfaction hasn’t been compromised.

“Customer experience remains our priority and suppliers are approached as if they were any other member of the National Rail Enquiries team,” he says. “We are always very involved with the process from end to end,” he adds.

The Compass Group has taken a very different

customer-experience strategy provided for all Compass employees.

She adds: “If your employees don’t understand the challenges of the business they are not going to be able to help initiate change or deliver adequate service to clients. And in increasing training opportunities, it creates more engagement and communication between management and staff and makes employees feel valued.”

And the results have been positive. In 2011, Compass Group saw a 45 per cent increase in Net Promoter Score and 60 per cent decrease in labour turnover. Sales have also risen by four per cent, which on one national contract amounted to an increase in revenue of nearly £2m.

“The right training at the right time is a targeted company investment,” adds Muscutt.

“Compass provides a myriad of service expectations to clients and customers alike – staff training and development means we meet these complex needs accordingly.”

But for Chris Scoggins, outsourcing provides business with more flexibility and efficiency. approach. A market leader in the catering “Staff training can be costly and time sector, the business produces four billion consuming. We develop new technology very meals a year to over 40,000 chains and quickly as there are experts on hand to has an employee base of 388,000. get the ball rolling immediately. It According to customer experience allows us to have a multi-service strategy leader Claire Muscutt, approach and avoid putting all keeping everything in-house has not the responsibility in one team or only built an exceptional brand one supplier.” reputation but also developed a strong National Rail Enquiries now brand ethos. outsources the majority of its business “Keeping everything in-house has Muscutt: to agencies all over the world.

Delivering a ensured that the company vision is a And Scoggins says that rather unified message red thread that runs through every than compromise on quality, the aspect of the business,” she says. service is improving.

“We’re delivering the same message across He adds: “Some of our customer-experience the board to all our staff. And that’s not been lost centres overseas have outperformed their UK in translation with outsourcers who don’t counter parts. Customers are happier with the understand our aims and objectives.” service now than they were before – and that’s In recent years, the company has focused the most important thing for us.” extensively on staff training by increasing Which, of course, is the key to any decision apprenticeships and offering management to outsource customer service operations – are courses. Muscutt has also headed a developed you still in touch with your customers?

Social engineering It may have started as damage limitation, but Panasonic’s move into social media has become a profitable as well as powerful way to talk to customers

By Lucie Carrington WHEN AN INCORRECT story about a TV recall went viral, Panasonic knew it had to embrace social media.

“We hadn’t recalled any TVs but with people posting that we had 24/7, the story went right across Europe,” Panasonic’s head of service in north west Europe, Simon Parkinson, told the summit.

Parkinson and his colleagues traced the story back to some inaccurate

advice from a retailer which someone had posted on consumer electronics discussion site AVForums.

“We’d always been quite good on post, phone and email but done nothing with social media,” Parkinson said.

“But there was clearly lots of communication going on about our products and if we didn’t put the information out ourselves people were going to make it up.”

Panasonic embraced Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and discussion sites such as AVForums and What HiFi.

The organisation did this by developing a single access point across Europe that brought together traditional post, phone and email alongside Twitter, Facebook and so on. “We want to present a single face to the customer and have a single view of the customer,” Parkinson said.

He has also put together an engagement team of about 10 people based in Bracknell, Berkshire, who use a variety of tools to understand what’s being said about Panasonic across the internet.

The move to social media has proved hugely efficient. “Where most of our customer contact was one-to-one, now it’s one to many,” Parkinson said.

This has had a massive impact on the cost of servicing customers. Call volume is down by 610 per cent and Panasonic has been able to cut customer service staff by 25 per cent.

And where post, email and phone contact costs around £3-5 per contact, social media costs only 25p. “Our efficiencies have gone through the roof,” Parkinson added.

However, he warned, once into social media, organisations can’t expect back out in a hurry. Someone can throw in a question into Twitter, for example, that doesn’t seem particularly important but firms ignore it at their peril.

“There are occasions when you want to take issues offline, in which case you can suggest to a commentator that they contact you directly. There are also times when the comments on a social media site are just nasty and you need to stay away.”

Business Reporter · July 2012

14

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Call centre queues make us angry!

No one likes to be held in a queue, but improving the experience and matching it to your typical caller profile can ensure customer loyalty in a competitive world QUEUES ARE AN inevitable fact of life for call centres. Given how frustrating waiting is for callers, reducing the perceived wait time and improving queue experience is a vital step to retaining customers in a competitive world. This is not just a nice result to have; great call centre audio branding has a solid return on investment and can produce greater returns than

Case study: Asda In 2010 ASDA was already in the Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service.

As one of a number of initiatives to get ASDA to be amongst the very best in the UK, Premier Business Audio was engaged to advise ASDA on their audio branding and caller experience.

By 2011, ASDA had jumped to number six in the UK Top 10 and took the ‘Most Improved Call Centre Award’ in the Top 50 Customer Service Programme.

agent training or upgrading telephone systems.

So how is it done? Caller experience can be improved by simplifying menu options, engaging and entertaining callers so the perceived queue time is reduced and they are happier to wait, and by providing useful on-brand messaging and not telling callers “Your call is important!”

Average call duration is also reduced by preparing callers in-queue.

Newham NHS PCT reduced average call duration by 31 per cent by doing this, and what’s more, because it was done in an entertaining way, callers were happy to wait 24 per cent longer, meaning 33 per cent more calls were answered. Significant savings can also be achieved through encouraging use of lower cost channels of communication like email and web chat, or self-service online.

Agent turnover can also be reduced

“My call is NOT important to you!”

It’s all about playing the right message to the right caller at the right time by setting caller expectations (especially with complaints calls) answering FAQs in-queue, and avoiding the anger created through badly designed menu options.

Used selectively, the in-queue time can be a powerful marketing medium.

One of the top five global pizza franchises achieved a 5 per cent increase in average order value by playing messages to up-sell additional products to callers while they were waiting to be answered. Take care though: queuing callers rarely like to be overtly sold to. It’s all about playing the right message to the right caller at the right time.

Based on auditing and benchmarking the present caller experience, specialists like Premier

Business Audio can dramatically enhance callers’ perception of that organisation. Premier provide a call centre consultancy and branded audio service for over 350 organisations, including some of the worlds largest and most in f luent ia l brands.

For Premier’s Top Tips please scan the QR code here, or email dan.simpson-haas@ premierba.co.uk

Creating value through claims management Getting the most out of your claims management means ensuring the service is tailored to your needs and developing an open and trusted relationship with your third party administrator OUTSOURCING CLAIMS ADMINISTRATION can not only save money and reduce risk, it can also add long term value through enhancing your customer’s experience, building brand loyalty as well as developing equity value from the data that can be created.

Having a specialist claims administrator working genuinely in partnership with their client is easy to say but not easily or consistently delivered. Castelan is an independent claims administrator that is passionate about building its business through “living” its clients’ products and meeting their needs. The culture of the company has been formed over its 15 years of operation and is centred upon being solutiondriven. Within its UK-based claims and service centre, job satisfaction is derived from delivering excellent customer service.

Castelan manages approximately 1.5 m live policies across the UK and Ireland. It provides product warranties, customer service and claims management solutions to some of the biggest names in insurance and retail – looking after the customers of institutions such as Allianz, AXA, M&S, Maytag, DFS and Furniture Village. “The key to winning and retaining our clients is in

Castelan manages 1.5m policies across the UK. Scan the QR code for more information:

being responsive and flexible in meeting their needs whilst treating their end customers as if they are our own,” said Martin Napper, CEO. What makes a good claims administrator is firstly to have excellent staff that are well trained, well motivated, experienced and retained within

“Key to winning and retaining clients is being responsive and flexible in meeting their needs”

the business. Secondly, it is to have an IT infrastructure that is fit for purpose and is flexible to accommodate clients’ individual needs.

Castelan has worked hard over the years to achieve both these critical factors. The company has a strong track record in staff retention and this has allowed the company to build a high level of skill and expertise within the business.

It continues to invest in its staff as it has also always invested in its in-house bespoke claims management systems – allowing it to effectively manage claims risk and efficiently provide customer solutions. Castelan’s extensive IT

systems and detailed management information could also help insurers with their capital requirements under Solvency II. Having the right expertise is essential but Castelan also firmly believes that the foundation of strong client relationships is built upon trust.

Trusting that your claims administrator will safeguard your brand, be flexible and responsive in meeting your needs in a changing marketplace, and provide consistency and continuity in service.

Castelan is passionate about fostering a culture of openness, honesty and integrity that is underpinned by transparency. “All our clients can have real-time access to their data and our claim management system via our web portal, they receive bespoke management information as often as they require it, likewise their audit teams are free to visit us whenever suits them” said Martin Napper. Indeed, Castelan goes even further and can provide “dynamic forms” within its claims management process that allows their clients to request the collection of new information at any time.

Although Castelan has a turnover of about £14m and has been working in customer service for over 15 years, it is a relatively new name in the market being the result of a management buy-out in July last year. Their vision is to be seen as a “go-to” claims administrator and customer service provider in the UK. Perhaps it is no accident that in some languages Castelan means keeper or guardian of one’s castle.

Martin Napper is chief executive officer of Castelan 01934 423223

Business Reporter · July 2012

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15

Where are all the This time it’s personal promised home workers? Being on hold is tiresome, but you can change that by weathering your calls with cloud technology – at an affordable price The forecast of 100,000 home workers by 2006 – let alone 2012 – is far from being realised. Why are so few harnessing the power of home working?

TWELVE YEARS AGO, home working promised a new era of improved productivity through flexible staffing and better quality through more choice. The promises were so compelling that Datamonitor was forecasting that within 5 years (2006), there would be more than 100,000 contact centre home workers.

But fast-forward six years to 2012 and less than 0.5 per cent of UK contact centre employees are working from home. So what’s happened?

“While a majority of contact centres have or are considering home working , once they look at the long list of to-dos, they realise that it is too complex internally and therefore too risky to try,” says Gillian Bell, of Contacts At Home. “Yes, the rewards of homeworking are tremendous, but so are the risks to get them.”

Cont ac t cent re s have therefore shied away from taking the plunge. Often the key components to make homeworking a long-term success are missing, so the initiative is stifled, or quickly abandoned. Graeme Gabriel of QPC says: “Home working removes the limitations of legacy staffing schedules and breaks all geographic and demographic boundaries that can suppress traditional contact ce nt r e s. Un for t u n ate ly, mindsets and systems are still office-centric so rather than being enablers, they become barriers.”

While contact centres have evolved dramatically over the p a s t de c a de , a l l t h e s e refinements have been for “bricks and mortar” operations who struggle to schedule parttime workers in anything less than four-hour stints.

So rather than continue talk ing about DI Y home working, organisations should recognise their own limitations, whether that’s in terms of funding, resources, technology and willingness to change.

But there are other options.

In 2010, Home Retail Groups’ Argos approached Sensée with a bag full of questions about home working. When Sensée explained their enablement method, it was new territory for HRG. Paul Downham, head of CS operations at Argos said:

Only 0.5 per cent of contact centre employees work from home

“It sounded so complex to deliver we knew homeworking made sense to augment our strategy, but we recognised we weren’t equipped with the systems or processes to do it ourselves, so we brought in Sensée to make it happen.”

Within two months, Sensée had employed 80 HomeAgents dedicated to the Argos brand to take live customer service calls. “We used this pool of home workers to work shifts of 10-12am, 2-4pm and 6-9pm.

Home working breaks geographic and demographic boundaries that can suppress traditional contact centres It help us to meet Argos’s customer demand and translated into increased productivity of 25 per cent in calls per hour. Sensée recruited across the country, acquiring a mature and experienced workforce for Argos.

The comparative performance of the home workers, combined with the enhanced learning of how to lead a remote operation has led us to launch our internal homeworking pilot,” says Andrew Ashby, customer

operations leader at Argos.

Helen Ellis, director of customer experience of Photobox adds: “The PhotoBox customer experience has improved leaps and bounds throughout our period of working with Sensée, with CSAT improving from an average of around 80 per cent to a score which is now nudging 90 per cent. Net promoter score has also improved from the high 40s into the mid 60s.

Homeworking is an integral part of that, seamlessly supporting our ambitions to of fer leadi ng c ustomer support.’’

Steve Mosser, CEO of Sensée, concludes: “There are concerns of visibility, control and security around home working, but we’ve built solutions that deal with these elegantly and robustly. Today we deliver 86 per cent productivity per hour with UK-based staff across all verticals, including FSAregulated campaigns with full PCI compliance.

So the forecasts may be off, but as more organisations wrestle with how to f lex resources to meet the volatility of customer demand in these uncertain times, our message to help reduce costs, increase flexibility, reach and quality is finally hitting home.” www.sensee.co.uk Kelly.Bains@sensee.co.uk

THE VOICE CHANNEL is in danger of becoming front of the queue or put though to a manager. the poor relation of the contact centre “Companies such as luxury retailers are experience. Customers can tweet, email or becoming very interested in prioritising calls go to a website and be confident that they’ll from high-value or influential customers,” says be recognised, greeted by name and given a Gale. “This could include people with a big social relevant, personalised experience.

But if they phone, it doesn’t matter whether they’re the company’s most valued customer “Businesses that we work with or they’ve dialled a wrong number – they go straight to the back of the queue, enduring an can be up and running in a very eternity of music on hold. When they finally short timeframe for almost no get through, they have to give their life history – often more than once – because the agents capital outlay” – Gale haven’t a clue who they’re speaking to.

Companies with the largest contact centres and the deepest pockets have found solutions media presence, who might publicise their to this. They identify callers from their phone experience of the company to a large number numbers (the growing predilection for using of people.” mobiles – even when calling from work – is NewVoiceMedia has recently patented some making this more viable). technology that uses internet search engines, Alternatively, they ask callers to key in social media data and location information to their account number or claim number. build up an instant picture of a caller. This It’s even becoming possible to use can be matched up in real-time with biomet r ic voice re cog n it ion data the company already holds, giving technology to recognise regular the agent a fuller picture of the callers by their voice. customer and their issues and enabling The problem is cost. “Creating a them to provide a better experience. bespoke call personalisation system “Because cloud services are pay-asand integrating it with existing you-go and can be accessed from information sources within the anywhere, it’s possible to involve Gale: better call handling organisation can take months of work people from outside the contact centre and cost a five or six-figure sum,” says – or even outside the company.

Jonathan Gale, CEO at NewVoiceMedia, “It also lets you use remote agents not based the voice-enabled customer engagement within the contact centre. This is very useful for specialist. “This has put effective call covering seasonal spikes in call volumes, and personalisation beyond the reach of all but the as part of a disaster recovery plan. And we’ve largest contact centres.” seen a lot of interest from companies wanting However, says Gale, cloud technology is to enable staff to work remotely during this changing all that. It provides a pay-as-you-go summer’s games.” service that can be accessed by any authorised user with an internet connection and quickly 0207 206 8888 integrated with existing databases. www.newvoicemedia.com “Businesses that we work with can be up and running in a very short timeframe for almost no capital outlay,” says Gale. “Our entry level licence is for just five agents, which means even the smallest companies can afford it. Often it enables them to provide a better level of service than their larger rivals.

“Cloud provides rich services and advanced features that used to be complex and require a lot of bespoke work. We find our clients are using their data in new and more valuable ways.”

Pre-identifying callers enables their information to be retrieved and presented to the agent to save the customer having to explain their issue from scratch.

It also means calls can be routed to the most appropriate person, such as the agent the caller spoke to last time. If they’re a particularly valuable customer, or someone who’s had a bad experience, they can be moved to the

Achieve a service that ticks all the boxes of customer satisfaction

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