The product used to be ‘king’

In marketing, for a long time, product was ‘king’ and an organisation built its reputation on this. Just think of such names as Coca Cola, Heinz, Mercedes, Kelloggs, Bang & Olufsen, and the like. Product-led organisations allowed the marketing fraternity to capitalise on the brand’s market position.

It even allowed them to build, or at least hold, a position in the market for quite a time when their products weren’t up to standard, such as Alfa Romeo in the 80s and 90s. They really built some ‘turkeys’ in this period, but their excellent marketing department still managed to get every one sold.

The public see through poor service

For service, however, it is much more difficult to tell the world you’re great when you aren’t. Organisations like Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer tried this several years ago, and the public saw through it straight away. But those organisations that are really great at service, like Singapore Airlines, Waitrose or First Direct, may just be another airline, supermarket or bank, but through their excellent service have built their reputation so that they can safely promote this to the world, and we agree with them.

A good reputation

Nowadays, there is a growing push for service quality to be recognised as the real builder and retainer of reputation.  A good reputation for customer service is a key factor in successful business results, and research has shown that to do this an organisation should concentrate on four key issues – going the extra mile, treating people as individuals, keeping promises, and handling queries and complaints brilliantly.

These are the route to success, but then telling the world, and also regularly telling your staff, are the key to maximising the benefits of having a great reputation.

In fact, the full involvement in, and commitment of, both staff and customers to your organisation’s customer service excellence programme can depend greatly on your skills at communicating with them.

A coordinated strategy of communications

Keeping people informed, recognising good performance, celebrating success, and marketing your services requires a coordinated strategy of communications utilising all available tools.

A reputation for great service can be easily lost by a poor telephone answering system (especially if automatic), confusing website, or lack of a corporate communications approach. Test it regularly and continually enhance it as new technologies develop.

In my articles over the past few months we have seen how to build this reputation, and by following and implementing the previous nine strategic elements you should be able to develop your organisation to the point where you can proudly tell the world.

Your customers and staff should recognise it

The only note of caution must be that your customer service must genuinely be recognised as great by your staff and customers, not just by management, and it must be throughout the organisation, not just in the contact centre or sales team.

Start with great internal communication

So how does one tell the world? Well, it should, as all service issues, start with great internal communication – a house magazine perhaps, comprehensive intranet, regular meetings between management and staff etc to share success stories and performance.

The word-of-mouth benefit that can be gained by staff that are proud of their organisation can pay dividends in many areas, such as recruitment, ‘going the extra mile’, reduced headcount turnover and much more.

Externally, a marketing strategy based upon great service is the most powerful one can have and, again, customer loyalty, and through this their word-of-mouth, is invaluable.

Loyal and happy customers can be an important part, perhaps the most important part, of your marketing team. Advertising, loyalty programmes, well-placed media articles, high-profile management, and consistently great service can all work together to lift your organisation above others in your sector, whatever the sector is – private or public.

At the beginning of this series, I closed the top ten listing with some simple dos and don’ts. I make no apology for repeating them here, as they are an excellent starting point for your journey towards customer service excellence.

Dos and don’ts in customer service

Do:

1. Have a long-term strategic plan
2. Be committed at the top
3. Involve and trust your people
4. Be customer–centric
5. Listen to your staff and customers
6. Measure the right things

Don’t:

1. Ignore your existing customer base
2. Stop training in the tough times
3. Pretend you’re good if you’re not yet
4. Only listen to the good news
5. Invest in technology too early
6. Quit when it gets tough

We hope this article can be useful for you

And, while it’s super-easy to buy thousands of followers in just a few clicks, Twitter will only benefit your business if your followers are meaningful accounts – ones that will listen to the messages you’re disseminating and help to spread your words.

Here are some techniques on how to populate your account with potential brand advocates, not empty accounts who don’t care about your brand or business.

1. Start with your personal connections. After signing up for your Twitter account, search for co-workers, friends and family members, and check out who they’re following. Peruse some Twitter bios, and follow accounts that look meaningful to you or your brand.

Send them a Tweet telling them why you followed them, or add them to a Twitter list to help you stay organized with who you’re following. As they follow back, send them personalized direct messages to thank them for the follow, and use your lists to search for interesting content to Retweet.

2. Build up relationships with your followers. Whenever an account follows you, look at that account’s page to see what you have in common. If there’s enough to warrant a Twitter relationship, follow them back. For every new follow you get, send a direct message thanking the Twitter user for following. Try to make it personal so the user will see your genuine appreciation and be more likely to share your Twitter content in the future.

3. Use Klout to find influencers. Klout is a great tool to find influencers in topics related to your brand, and it contains those influencers’ Twitter information right on their profiles. Do a Klout search to see who is making waves in your industry, then follow those people and add them to lists. After you follow, be sure to give them +K regularly to continue to show your support.

4. Take advantage of Twellow. Twellow is another great resource for power Twitter users. With Twellow, you’re able to search for top Twitter accounts by topic or location. These are great features, especially if your business’ customers primarily come from one area. By following industry thought leaders on Twitter, you’ll be able to widen your network and possibly convert them to influential brand advocates.

5. Truly Interact. After you follow accounts you think are important, the key to gaining more followers is to interact with your existing ones and post meaningful content that users will want to share. Don’t just copy and paste links from your blog into your Twitter feed – make sure you’re responding to Tweets, retweeting interesting content and sharing your own engaging content that encourages discussion.

The more interactions you have, the more other users will take notice of your account, and the only way to build up those mentions is by being sincere in communications. Have more tips on how to cultivate a significant Twitter following? Leave them in the comments.

Today’s most effective sellers use the free information exchange to their advantage. They focus on the data exchanged through the social web, using that information to analyze buyer behavior and as a result, close more deals faster. The challenge for organizations looking to adopt this strategy is time and data management—keeping traditional data up to date can be difficult, but layering social information on top of that makes everything even more complex. Business now moves with the speed and weight of the social web, so sales professionals need to swiftly identify, understand and act on buyer behavior and data to seize sales opportunities. Knowledge is power—and the data produced by the social revolution empowers sales teams more than ever.

Follow these four steps to organize your sales team around buyer behavior: organize, capture, collaborate and optimize. By using these steps as guidelines, businesses can balance buyer interactions and better arm sales teams with the knowledge they need to always be closing.

1. Organize: Prospect information scattered in different apps doesn’t help anyone close a deal—organization goes hand-in-hand with sales enablement. Orienting sales around buyer behavior begins with providing a one-stop shop for all account, contact and sales opportunity data—and keeping it up to date is critical. This enables sales pros to easily locate, update and act on real-time behavior and eventually allows a salesperson to predict future behavior based on past experiences.

2. Capture: The most effective sales teams capture intelligence on their prospects, customers and markets to form a 360-degree view for each sales opportunity on file—and with the rise of social, for the first time companies can get closer to customers and understand them through social monitoring. During the sales process, it is important to log as much prospect information as possible. A seemingly minute detail from a tweet can be a staple of sales intelligence responsible for closing a deal.

3. Collaborate: Sales is no longer the only company contact point for customers or prospects. Customer service, marketing or operations are often the first touch point and since so many avenues lead inside an organization, sharing interactions with prospects between departments can provide priceless pieces of a puzzle that eventually leads to a sale. Overall collaboration will lead to increased business.

4. Optimize: Optimization comes as a result of sales team data collection. It’s taking the information learned during the sales process and refining messaging or changing strategies based on behaviors gleaned by sales reps. Building in requirements to meet data milestones for each prospect can help reps develop messaging and create a more accurate sales forecast. Having this information also benefits sales managers who need to gauge when an extra touch point is needed to close a deal.

Whatever you are selling, knowing buyer behavior and leveraging it to predict prospect actions is a crucial part of closing more deals faster. For businesses looking to make the shift to leverage buyer behavior analysis, focusing on these steps—organize, capture, collaborate and optimize—will provide a simple, easily digested and shared repository that will serve as the key to closing new business and strengthening existing partnerships.

Read on to find out which one came top.
The good news is that a growing number are based on quality or outcomes, rather than just on pure efficiency.

Here are the most common answers.
1. Quality Scores

Quality Scores were by far the most important metric used. They provide the ability to look at the overall caller experience and also look at the conversations that agents are using on their phone calls.

Scores can be provided at a high level to track how well the centre is doing and they can also be taken down to agent level. Scores are typically measured over between 5 and 10 calls per agent per month, although when things get busy, the number of calls sampled starts to drop off.
2. First Call Resolution (FCR)

Also known as ‘Best Contact Resolution’. This was a very common metric and looks at how many times a customer needs to call a company to get a problem resolved. This is a very good way of measuring a problem from the customer’s perspective.

The problem is that it is quite difficult to accurately measure and tends to be rather subjective. For example, a repeat call could be about a different problem.

Here are some common ways that contact centres measure this.

• Can the agent give a satisfactory answer so that the caller does not have to call back (calls are monitored)
• Looking at the number of callers that call back within 7 days
• Looking at the calling party number within a set period
• Using a post-call IVR survey
• Looking at the quality of answer and positiveness, measured by a third party

3. Customer Satisfaction

An old favourite that looks at the percentage of customers that are happy. This is simple and easy to operate. It can be carried out through a wide range of methods, the most common being a post-call IVR survey, or a follow-up email survey.
4. Service Level

This was one of the very first metrics to be produced by the ACD systems. It looks at the percentage of calls that are answered within a given time. The average figure seems to be between 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds and 95% of calls answered within 15 seconds.
5. Average Handling Time

This was for many years the most widespread contact centre metric. It looks at the total amount of time that it takes to handle a call. This is a simple measure of efficiency. This measurement includes talk time, on-hold time as well as wrap-up time.

It has had a bad press in recent years because it looks only at efficiency but not at the outcome of the call. Critics say that it tends to encourage the agent to rush the caller off the phone rather than solve their problem.
6. Right Party Connects (RPC)

This is a favourite of many dialler managers. It is an outbound metric that looks at the ability to get through to the right person. With the high number of answer machines, coupled with people who are seldom at home, this can often be a difficult metric to drive up.
7. Net Promoter

Given the amount of hype that this metric has generated, it is surprising to see this so low down the list. It looks at the number of people who would recommend the product or service to their family or friends.

This metric has had a huge amount of air play in the past few years and has been promoted as the one metric that can be used to predict customer loyalty. In many ways it is similar to customer satisfaction, but it tends to take a more binary approach to measurement.

It is not as popular as it once was. For many companies who have used it, after some good initial results, they have seen their results level off. It is also influenced quite highly by factors outside the contact centre – for example, pricing policy, news in the press and overall branding.
8. Forecast Accuracy

This is a favourite among workforce planners that looks at the accuracy of their overall forecasts. We looked at this topic on a recent webinar and the average figure is between 5 and 10%.

This is a tricky metric to use. The problem is, as one resource planner said to me, “Our forecasts are normally quite accurate most of the time, but when they go off, they tend to go way off.” Forecast accuracy is highly influenced by external factors such as the weather, marketing and the post.
9. Revenue (or Revenue per call)

Given that many contact centres are used for customer service, it is not surprising that revenue comes down the list. This would be much higher if you looked at telesales or telemarketing contact centres.
10. Utilisation

This metric looks at the total percentage of time that an agent is available to take a call. It typically includes ready time, talk time and wrap-up time. It can be measured either as a percentage or as the total number of hours per day.
The Best of the Rest

There were a number of other ‘favourite’ metrics that did not make the top 10.

• Calls Per Hour
• Conversion Rates
• Employee Engagement
• Promise to Pay (typically used in debt collection)
• Abandon Rates
• Speed of Answer
• Customer Effort Score
• Non-value-add Calls (where customer could have self-served)

Your most important metric

What is the most important metric you use in your contact centre?

A recent evaluation of the support major retailers deliver via e-mail sheds light on the same shocking reality perpetually uncovered by social customer care analyses: many businesses view customer service as an optional exercise.

Stella Service, which found similarly troubling results during a spring inquiry into social customer support, revealed recently that only 54% of the top retailers responded completely to customers’ email inquiries.

Yes, that means in 46% of cases, retailers evidently felt no compulsion to support the entity that is supposedly the driving force behind each and every business.

The study enlisted an army of mystery shoppers to send simple clarifying questions about issues like shipping processes and size/color availability. As far as the brands knew, these questions were pivotal to the customer’s decision to purchase, and they still routinely failed to deliver satisfactory answers.

Particularly tragic about the state of email customer care is that Stella Service, the organization at the heart of the study, actually congratulates organizations like LL Bean, Gap, Zappos, Victoria’s Secret and Tiger Direct, which achieved response rates between 70.4% and 88.9%. Online support is so dire that organizations who dismiss between 10 and 30 percent of customer inquiries are lauded for their customer-centricity simply because they are not quite as bad as others!

I was not dismissing social customer care as a viable business strategy. Rather, I was objecting to the notion that “social” customer service is some sort of unique customer experience practice to which organizations can opt in or out at their own choosing.

In today’s multi-channel world, true customer service delivery is not about deciding to serve customers in a particular channel. It is about assuring that you are ready to efficiently and effectively support your customers in whatever medium they choose for the communication. The second your customers opt to connect with your brand via email or social media is the second your social customer experience strategy commences. The decision is made by your customers, not by your internal stakeholders.

Through various conversations with C- and VP-level customer service professionals, I have learned that e-mail is a notoriously inefficient communication channel for many brands. It is so despised that some brands deliberately tank their e-mail support operations so that customers will be discouraged from enlisting that medium for future conversations.

Though that might partially explain the abysmal aforementioned results about e-mail customer service, it is one of the most offensive, ludicrous customer management concepts imaginable.

Think about that notion for a second. Customers, for whom all organizations are supposed to be exclusively designing their experiences, are electing to contact brands via a certain channel, but because that channel is inconvenient for the brands, they consciously decide not to appropriately respond.
Instead of rebuilding their organizations to better support their customers, these organizations are instead opting to deliberately dissatisfy them. How is a concept so absurd even capable of entering the minds of customer management executives, let alone capable of dictating strategy?

Newsflash: customer service is not an optional practice. It is a fundamental tenet of running a business, and if your brand is unable to deliver the type of support customers desire in the channel they desire, your business is failing. Budget and resource excuses can go a long way in justifying some shortcomings, but when it comes to the customer experience, the most crucial component of achieving the satisfaction and loyalty that drive revenue, they hold absolutely no water.

The rules of online engagement are still being written, and it is unequivocally true that businesses still need to flesh out exactly how to respond to specific issues in specific digital channels. No one is expecting every Twitter or e-mail customer service engagement to go off without a hitch.
But the idea that businesses are in business to serve their customers is not a new or idealistic concept. It long predates the Internet and social media, and it will forever determine which businesses succeed and fail and winning their customers.

And just as it were never acceptable to ignore part of a customer’s question at the customer service counter or only answer one out of every two calls into the call center, it is not acceptable to refrain from responding to any single customer’s e-mail or Tweet. Engaging with customers and working to deliver a satisfactory response is just as important in these channels as it was in “traditional” channels, and statistics on response and resolution rate should be measured against the same benchmarks.

Most frustrating about the poor online customer service response rates is the fact that the cynical, self-interest elements responsible for driving customer experience investment are most resonant in new media.

So many businesses started paying attention to e-mail, message boards, Facebook and Twitter because the customers communicating in these channels were most capable of spreading negative brand sentiment, and yet when it comes to actually dealing with these customers, those concerns apparently melt away.

Apparently, because they are not calling for support, they are going to let disrespectful or nonexistent customer service slide. They’ll never Tweet frustration that their Tweet or Facebook posts are going repeatedly ignored!
Really, retailers?

It’s common to hear sales teams and executives point out their company’s superb customer service as a competitive advantage, seldom translating into front line marketing/advertising messages that consumers see. Until now at least. With economic activity still relatively stagnant, and as products and services become more standardized and commoditized, companies are increasingly choosing to compete on customer service and experience-based differentiation.

Marketing communication pro’s and advertising agencies typically leverage emotion, argument, or endorsement strategies in order to elicit a reaction (Brand Awareness, Brand Purchase, Brand Recall) when conveying messages.

As of late, consumers are seeing television advertisements with Customer Service messages woven into these strategies to attract customers with superior customer service claims. Here is how some companies are embracing customer service in their television ads:
Discover’s “Want Better Customer Service?” Campaign

Discover developed a humorous series of commercials (and a Facebook page) about Peggy, who works as a call center employee for a fictional credit card company based in a remote ice covered landscape. Peggy is actually a man with an Eastern European accent who fumbles calls, maintains long hold times, lies to customers, and is pleasantly ineffective in helping customers. This commercial pokes fun at the poor state of customer service in the credit card industry while at the same time highlighting Discover’s award winning customer service. Discover uses emotion and humor to build consumer awareness and hopefully attract credit card holders with superior customer service.

Consumer preference for interaction channels are mostly divided between the phone and web self service options. Some customers like to pick up the phone, and some don’t. eSurance highlights the choice their customers have by showcasing one of their Online Coverage Counselors being “copied” for an electronic web version.

This commercial minimizes the disparity between a phone experience and a web experience for eSurance customers. eSurance uses customer service features like “Online Coverage Counselor” to make the argument that regardless of the channel the customer uses, the experience will be consistent.
Best Buy’s “Who’s Supporting Christmas” Commercial

In this commercial, Best Buy introduces Kenneth, an animated elf leading Best Buy’s customer support this holiday season. In a motivational speech, he rally’s his fellow elves to provide great support this holiday season over the phone, online, and…. on Christmas Day!
By highlighting this customer service advantage, Best Buy is attempting to raise customer expectations by offering to service them on the day when many people may have to support needs for newly opened gifts when most businesses are closed. Best Buy leverages this customer service advantage as a logical reason for them to buy holiday gifts from their stores.

The idea of Marketing “Customer Service” is not a new strategy. In the 1990’s, Valeria Zeithaml and Mary Jo Bitner founded the concepts of “Services Marketing” which highlighted 5 potential areas for gaps in delivering services to customers:

Customer Gap: Difference between customer expectations and perceptions

Provider Gap 1: Not knowing what customers expect
Provider Gap 2: Not selecting the right service designs and standards
Provider Gap 3: Not delivering to service standards
Provider Gap 4: Not matching performance to promises

The Services Gap Model is more likened to MBA lectures and case studies, and is not exactly dinner table discussion material. However, its concept points to the tactics we see companies deploying customer service as a marketing tool some 20 years later.
When companies minimize the internal and external communication gaps, understand their customers, set realistic expectations, and deliver on promises, a great experience is realized by the customer.

Zappos CEO Tony Hseih built a business model around customer service and has this to say about it, “at the end of the day, we aren’t in the selling shoes online business, we are in the stories and memories business. If we can create a WOW customer experience every time someone interacts with our brand, then those customers become our best marketing effort.”

In today’s hyper-connected world, a happy customer is a marketer’s best friend. Customers make their experiences very public on Facebook, Twitter, millions of blogs, and consumer reviews sites. A great experience can lead to word of mouth and referral business. To that same point, a bad customer experience can easily go viral with a catchy tune or a sad-but-true blog post. Social CRM thought leader Brent Leary stated, “In the social age, customer service is the new marketing.”

How many times have you read reviews on a restaurant or laptop computer before making a purchasing decision? Think about the powerthat the consumer has now.

Whether you choose to follow the Services Gap Model or develop a Customer Experience Management strategy, customer service as a marketing strategy has staying power in our commoditized, social world.

For this reason, it’s nearly impossible to fake it. You can only market to what is true. If you don’t have great customer service, tell customers that you acknowledge the pitfalls and that you are working hard to fix them.

Don’t put lipstick on that pig! That’s what Domino’s Pizza has done with “Show Us Your Pizza”. If your company has created a service innovation or received a customer service award, it’s time to tell the world how great you treat your customers. They will respond to it.

Each customer experience competitive advantages come with its own positive and negatives. What customer experience model are you currently following and how are you using it to get a bigger and more sustainable return on your customer experience investment?

3 Types of Customer Experience Advantages

1. Customer Experience Cost Advantage (Lowest-cost provider)
2. Customer Experience Product Advantage
3. Customer Experience Service Advantage

1. Cost as a Customer Experience Advantage
Competing on price is the easiest advantage to create in the market. All it takes is being willing to offer something for less than the competition. It works, at least in part, because when you’re willing to give or do something for less, there are always people who will take it. Price conscious customers are always available. Price is a field of dreams when it comes to business. If you lower your prices enough, they will come.

The problem is that the cheap solution creates massive problems for you in the future. Brad Smith from FixCourse, talking about the customer experience dilemma of being the low-cost provider. The lowest cost denominator is an easy differentiator to begin with, but it’s tough to sustain. Successfully sustaining profit-generating low-cost solutions requires massive scaling capabilities. Think Wal-Mart big.

Low price leadership is also difficult to maintain. There is always a competitor willing to cut prices, cut corners, and give something away for free in order to lure customers away. The most price-conscious customers are always willing to go, because in the end, they’re loyal to price, not service. Each transaction is a battle between what you offer and a competitor willing to undercut in order to win new business. Add to that Brad Smith’s reason’s for

why it’s difficult to build a quality brand around a low-cost experience model:

1. Price conscious people don’t care about you or your brand… they care about how much it costs.
2. The people who are loyal and who have money to spend, don’t want to do business with a company that’s poorly run and has a bad product/service.
3. Have you found a special way to stay on top?

2. Product as a Customer Experience Advantage
A product-based customer experience is a better route than simply being a pricing leader. Product or feature experience is standing out because of what you offer. Product is still replicable, but it’s tougher to start. It takes time, energy, effort, and organizational commitment.

The competition can replicate your product, your features, your tools, and your offering, but being first to launch will let you build a nice community around it. Being first to market with your offering will keep a core group dedicated to you since you’ll be seen as a market leader.
Customer experience based on product innovation and feature offerings is a solid foundation for long-term customer loyalty and sustained customer growth.

3. Service as a Customer Experience Advantage
The customer experience based on service is the Shangri-La of customer experience advantage. The hardest to replicate, the most exhausting to implement. Service experience takes the most organizational and individual energy. It’s not simply a matter of deciding to do it, or building a function. It takes constant practice, constant action, and commitment from each individual involved in the process.

Don’t just sell a product. Sell an experience.

The beauty about service as a customer experience model is that it’s flexible. The service customer experience model allows you to add components from low-cost, value offerings; it also allows you to add product and feature focus. Ultimately, it gives direction to your organization and your people. It offers a blueprint by which your customer actions are measured.

For acting in the best interest of the service, there are no hard limitations on what you can and cannot do. Service can include price-conscious offers; it can also include product and feature differentiation.

Are You Stuck in the Customer Experience Middle?
So where do you stack up when it comes to your customer experience advantage? If you don’t know, you’re probably stuck in the middle. And though it’s not at the bottom, the middle isn’t an ideal place to be.
Average customer experience doesn’t lead to long-term sustained growth. It doesn’t lead to brand development. It doesn’t lead to customer loyalty.

• · Average customer experience typically means average profitability.
• · Average customer experience means average customer loyalty.
• · Average customer experience means average business success.

How are you making sure you stay above average? What organizations have you worked with that successfully use customer service to stand out from the competition? What customer experience lessons have you learned from what’s making them successful?

Why is customer experience so important?
“Customer experience” is literally how your customers perceive their interactions with your company.
Those interactions occur at each step along a customer journey. That journey begins when people realize that you offer a product or service they might want, then compare your offer to other options. If things go your way, they’ll buy from you. Then they’ll use what they bought. If they encounter a problem, they’ll call for support.

At each step of their journeys, your customers judge the experience on three levels: how well you meet their needs, how easy you are to do business with, and how enjoyable you are to do business with. It won’t come as a shock that if you satisfy their needs, don’t make them work too hard, and don’t annoy them, you’re more likely to earn their business the next time they buy.

Of course, the relationship between customer experience and loyalty makes intuitive sense. But now we can prove it. For five years, we’ve run a large-scale consumer study that we call the Customer Experience Index. What we’ve seen is that customer experience correlates strongly to the most common loyalty metrics, including the willingness to consider for another purchase and the likelihood to recommend. The correlations are so strong that it’s likely that nothing else you do matters more than customer experience.

You don’t have to take our word for it. A firm called Watermark Consulting didn’t. They used our data to prove it for themselves by calculating the performance of a portfolio of publicly traded companies that are leaders in our Customer Experience Index. Over the past five years, a period when the S&P 500 was essentially flat, that portfolio produced a cumulative total return of just over 22%. During the same period, a portfolio of customer experience laggards returned –46%. Not only do customers reward a superior experience, so do the markets.

How everything you do affects the customer experience that you deliver
One of the case studies we describe in our book tells the story of John Birrer, the senior vice president of customer experience at Charter Communications. Researching a recurring problem with software installations at Charter’s business customers, he found the problems could be traced back to a combination of seemingly unrelated decisions by sales reps, the human resources department, and the company’s lawyers — all of whom were blind to the poor customer experience that resulted from their efforts.

Birrer was able to uncover the root causes of the problem by mapping Charter’s customer experience ecosystem: the complex set of relationships among a company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.

As it turned out, Charter’s sales reps got their commissions based on sales, not installations, so they hadn’t focused on technical requirements during the sales process. The human resource managers who’d approved the sales reps’ compensation plan were unaware that the plan had a flaw. And Charter’s lawyers, who had created a policy prohibiting the Charter technicians from touching client hardware — thus preventing them from resolving the installation problem — had no idea of the consequences of their policy.

Once John Birrer brought these relationships to light, Charter was able to solve the installation problem. That’s because the customer experience ecosystem is the single most powerful framework for diagnosing and then fixing customer experience problems in ways that make the fixes stick over time.

Make no mistake: If you have customers, you have a customer experience ecosystem. And if you‘re wrestling with a big, thorny customer experience problem, then something has gone wrong with its complex and interdependent relationships.

If you want to fix your customer experience problems, you need to understand and take control of your customer experience ecosystem. That’s exactly what customer experience leaders at companies as diverse as FedEx and Virgin Media in the UK are already doing today.

From bumper sticker to business discipline
To achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way

Take USAA, a diversified financial services organization. USAA has long been a leader in customer experience because it is mission-driven to serve members, and is blessed with a customer-centric culture. But two years ago, its executive team concluded that in order to be fully customer-centric, it required a world-class voice-of-the-customer program so it could understand member needs in new and deeper ways. It required a customer segmentation scheme based on those needs to guide the design of products and services. It required an organization and governance structure that would let USAA go to market in a radically different fashion that spanned traditional product silos. In short, what USAA needed was a radical transformation in the way it did business.

Wayne Peacock, USAA’s executive vice president of member experience, sums it up this way: “We iterated the customer experience over a five-year period. We made incremental progress. But you come to an inflection point where, if you want to go further and you want to go faster, you have to make a change.”

We see similar large-scale commitment at a growing number of leading organizations. They include Cisco Systems, Cleveland Clinic, Fidelity, and Southwest Airlines. That’s a list of highly respected brand names that speaks for itself.

Will your company join that list? Will you commit to transforming the customer experience at your organization — or will you conduct business as usual and hope for the best? We know that customer experience transformation is hard; that’s what our research on thousands of companies reveals

A workplace worthy of that honor certainly makes the daily grind easy for staff. And, indeed, there is unlikely a single prisoner of the sweatshop-like traditional call center environment not tirelessly yearning for one with games-filled break rooms, intelligent seating arrangements, social events and generous vacation plans!

But StubHub’s real motivation, representatives for the popular online organization note, is not to create an environment that empowers agents to create a relationship of trust with customers. And for that to happen, the organization has to be “all in” on the customer experience. It cannot simply declare itself committed to the customer; it must actually enable its agents to make good on that commitment.

Once cost of service enters the equation, that commitment is irreparably destroyed. Regardless of one’s belief in the ethics of business, he certainly cannot fault organizations for operating according to logic. With profit maximization as a pivotal goal of business, expecting businesses not to minimize their costs is an utterly mindless proposition.

And so when the customer support process is seen as a cost, natural business instinct prompts executives to minimize that cost. Granted, this does not always necessitate a direct reduction in service quality—some would argue that providing better customer service in the short-term will lower support costs down the road—but it does force executives to scrutinize every moment its agents spend interacting with customers.

Inevitably, this mindset will spur trade-offs in the customer service process. From a dollars-and-cents standpoint, it might become superficially unappealing to engage beyond a certain threshold, and that means agents will be at least partially shackled in their efforts. No matter how strong the brand’s philosophical commitment to the customer, there eventually will come a time at which agents will be asked to choose between delivering the service the brand wants to deliver and that which the customer requires.

At StubHub, however, the organization eliminates the financial component to customer service. It surely looks at efficiency and productivity from a workforce management perspective, but when it comes to instructing agents on proper service protocol, they are not conditioned to believe that each additional moment spent with a customer equates to a wad of cash flushed down the toilet.

According to Marty Pelosi, a senior facilities manager at the ticket e-tailer, because the organization does “not put a monetary value on customer service…reps don’t have the sorts of limits on how far they can go to satisfy customers that other call centers impose.”
Thanks to that mindset, StubHub agents never feel as if they are unable to help a customer. And with that confidence comes great engagement to the brand and what it represents.

Training, for instance, becomes exponentially more valuable than it is in most organizations. While so many call centers train agents to avoid costing the company too much money, confident StubHub agents know they are being trained to better deliver for the customer.
With continuous learning and improvement a necessity for effective customer service delivery, StubHub’s culture is infinitely more conducive to achieving agent buy-in. When agents want to be better, they are going to get better.

And that all comes from demonstrating the value of customer service by not putting a value on it. The function is far too critical to the health of the business and far too essential to the harmony of the internal organization to dismiss as an unwanted cost, and businesses need to be sure they are doing everything needed to put customer service on its proper pedestal.

This is not a call to end the quest for productivity. It is not a request that enterprises leave the profit business.
Rather, it is a reminder that if the way your organization manages the customer support process differs from what you are declaring to customers, every facet of your operation is going to suffer. Forget optimal customer loyalty. Forget optimal agent engagement.
Forget being the optimal business.