Category Archives: Methods

Improve Your Customer Service with Our 5 Step Plan

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About Kelsey Zorn

Research Lead at Interaction Metrics
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Improve Your Customer Service with Our Step-by-Step Plan

Everyone’s trying to improve their customer service, some with more success than others. Last month, the New York Times column The Haggler, which usually posts customer service horror stories, gave voice to tales of exceptional service. The column was a refreshing change and likely sent plenty of business towards the companies mentioned.

So how can a company improve their customer service enough to be column-worthy? Google turns up a hodgepodge of papers, articles and books, some of which may bump your customer service up a notch, but you’d be hard pressed to find a clear, step-by-step plan.

That’s where we come in. We’ve improved customer service for dozens of companies: for example, GE CareCredit attributes a 31% increase in revenue to our customer service improvement program. So, we thought it was time to share the plan we use to improve customer service.

Our 5 Step Plan to Improve Customer Service:

  1. Pick your goals. Ask yourself what, in addition to answering customers’ immediate questions and concerns, you’d like to accomplish through customer service. There are seven main goals that customer service can achieve. These include optimizing self-service, expanding your brand and increasing customer loyalty.
  2. Catalog your interactions. Identify each customer touchpoint and decide how you will realize your goals from step 1 in these front-line situations.
  3. Create a model communication for each customer touchpoint. Your model communications may take the form of call scripts, email templates, checklists or talking points. Regardless of the format, you must set the bar and show associates exactly what you expect from each touchpoint that you identified in step 2.
  4. Measure meaningful details. Averages often mislead. So be sure to measure the weird stuff—the stuff that gets at the heart of interaction quality—like percent of time associates demonstrate they care about the customer, or end their interactions in an authentic and positive way.
  5. Keep your employees in the loop. Monitor your performance with mystery shopping, customer service monitoring and other forms of customer service quality assurance. Make sure your whole team knows how they’re doing, and which specific steps they need to take to improve their performance.

Read more about our 5 step plan in our full article here.

Here’s Why U.P.S. Failed the Top Haggler

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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David Segal’s “The Haggler” column in the 2/12/12 edition of The New York Times covered a few horror stories about U.P.S., all of which had one thing in common: a customer’s package was lost, and U.P.S.’s customer service was useless. The haggler conservatively estimated that if U.P.S. is truly exceptional at keeping track of packages (only losing 0.05%), then every day U.P.S. bungles about 8,000 deliveries.

8,000 mistakes a day means 8,000 upset, confused customers and 8,000 calls in to U.P.S. customer service. Segal spoke with one U.P.S. rep who was “extremely helpful” and several who were “pointlessly brusque”. Other customers spoke with Segal about their U.P.S. travails and had a similar ratio of helpful to useless service.

Now, I’m going to extrapolate: If only one out of several calls (let’s say 1/3) was helpful, that means U.P.S.’s error rate when it comes to these critical conversations is 67%. How could a company with an enviably low error rate for deliveries have such a high error rate when it comes to a key, memorable customer conversation that happens 8,000 times a day?

Here’s why: Apparently, U.P.S. Managers don’t consider the “hazy conjecture” and inconsiderate care their team gave Segal to be a problem. If they did, these frustrating conversations wouldn’t have happened—or, at least not 67% of the time.

Most companies simply don’t recognize the importance of customer interactions. They think that with the right software and generalized metrics, they’ve got things covered. In fact, according to a much quoted Bain & Company study, 80% of companies believe they deliver a “superior experience,” but only 8% of customers agree. In our customer service audits, we find that poorly designed surveys that result in inaccurate information are often the source of staggering gaps between executives and their customers.

What’s the solution? Because getting covered by The Haggler can’t possibly be good for business, U.P.S. needs to change its perspective. U.P.S. managers need to turn their gaze away from averages and take a closer look at their actual interactions. After all, by definition, averages obscure the details.

If we had a U.P.S. exec’s ear, we’d tell him/her that they need to study their customer interactions with fresh eyes and different metrics—metrics that more realistically capture the lived experience. If they did that, they wouldn’t have to learn the weak points of their customer experience by reading The New York Times. As always, snaps to The Haggler for giving a voice to the actual customer experience!

Experience Counts: The “Downgrade” Debacle

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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Shep Hyken’s reflections on his hotel experience illustrate a common customer service problem. Here’s what happened: Shep reserved a room, but when he got to the hotel it wasn’t ready, so the front desk worker offered to “downgrade” him to a room that was already prepared. No one is ever happy about a “downgrade,” especially when it comes to an unknown hotel room. Will the room be a closet? The bed a cot? But what rightfully surprised Shep was that the “downgraded” room was nearly identical to the one he originally reserved. So why didn’t the associate describe the room as a virtual lookalike? Why promote the negative when the positive is right at hand?

In subtle ways, frontline employees can undermine an otherwise excellent customer experience. And this slow erosion of the company’s image isn’t captured by big-picture metrics like Net Promoter Scores or overall satisfaction. If Shep had filled out a satisfaction survey at the end of his stay, he would probably have said he was “somewhat” or “very” satisfied, assuming nothing else went wrong. If he were just the average customer, he probably wouldn’t even have thought to take note of the rep’s use of “downgrade.” But it still impacted his perception of the company.

Some might say that small details like word choices don’t matter, that as long as the customer didn’t complain about them it’s not a problem. But Zaltman’s studies, amongst others, find that while customers don’t take note of very much about their buying experiences, small cues have a huge impact on customers’ unarticulated feelings and repurchase rates. Harvard Business School: The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It): “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.“

Moment-by-moment details are critical to a company’s sales success, so it’s hard to understand why managers tend to rely on overly-simplified averages that don’t represent the lived experience.

Action Item: To maximize customer loyalty, ask fine-grain questions like “how many positive words do our reps use in each customer interaction?” Or, “how often to associates use language that supports or tarnishes our brand?” Set expectations for how associates should act to align with your most critical objectives. That way, instead of some amorphous average score, you get a clear, actionable picture of what’s going on on your frontline and what your reps need to do to make it better.

Unstructured Data Needs an Unstructured Approach

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
5

We heard a great webinar from Bruce Tempkin at CXPA yesterday about how to gain customer insights from unstructured data.  Bruce addressed the cavernous disconnect between limited, multiple-choice responses and the reality of complex customer thoughts and feelings.

Here’s what we would add: when dealing with unstructured data (call recordings, free-form response cards, social media posts, etc.), it’s essential to start with an equally unstructured approach. All too often, we see speech analytic programs failing because structure is imposed too quickly. In other words, sentiment and specific words are defined as key indicators of the customer experience before the entirely of the customer experience has been dissected and understood.

The problem with picking indicators too early in the unstructured data mining process is that analysts will only see what they thought was important, not necessarily what IS most important. Also, customer experience branding opportunities will most likely be overlooked. While the idea of ‘when to impose’ structure may seem academic or an ‘overly fine’ point, qualitative researchers will tell you, this is far from the case.

Interaction Thinking approaches unstructured data with few predefined expectations, allowing the data (i.e. customers or experiences) to show their deepest meanings and implications.  It takes time to dwell in a state of unknowing before moving to everyone’s favorite part of customer experience analysis: next steps, statistics and conclusions. But this approach pays off with richer, more relevant insights.