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!

Transparency and authenticity are the buzzwords of business. So why can’t customer service be more clear?

Let’s look at the word “answer”. Merriam Webster gives it two very different meanings:

1. Something spoken or written in reply to a question. 
2. A correct response.

Companies and their call centers often conflate the two meanings and assume that because they replied, they provided an answer.  But while all answers act as replies, not all replies provide an answer.  A real answer is accurate, complete, understandable and addresses the customer’s unique situation.  When customers ask for solutions, but get vague replies and obfuscations, brand loyalty and advocacy plummet. While yammering happens in stores, it is particularly prevalent in call centers.

There are a number of contributing factors:

First, follow the money: sadly, blather is profitable. Typically, revenues rise as call centers chat, talk and email more, regardless of the information conveyed and quality of the answer. And unstrategic call centers view web self-service as a revenue-eliminator, instead of seeing self service for what it is: a way to increase customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, good answers require an investment in resources and a level of spending that is beyond the scope of a typical call center.  Between putting out fires and filling seats (no easy task) call centers are stretched thin—at least relative to the budgets clients require.

Plus, sometimes companies are in a hurry to provide the bells and whistles of excellent customer service, the kind of service that personalizes, customizes and brands. While we always advocate doing more with customer service, this should never be at the expense of the basics. As Dixon, Freeman and Toman in the Harvard Business Review note, “what customers really want (but rarely get) is just a satisfactory solution to their service issue.” In other words, make sure your answers pass muster before aspiring to excellence.

How do you guarantee correct answers? For this, you may very well need an answer engine technology and you’ll also need what we call a Total Answer Management strategy. As Tom Wentworth and others have pointed out, technology is great but it won’t cure your customer experience by itself.  Here’s what a strategy of Total Answer Management means:

Total: Take inventory and prepare a report that details every question (including small variations) that customers have.  Make sure you study enough interactions—it should be at least one week’s worth of conversations.

Answer: Nail the responses to each and every customer question and thoroughly vet those answers for substance and style. Chefs show their cooks everything: how they want the egg poached, how the dish should be garnished and plated, etc. Likewise, if you can’t show your associates a perfect answer, don’t expect them to come up with it on their own. Without clear examples, customers will get different answers depending time of day and who they reach. That’s what Gallup found in their study of the quality of customer service in the Harvard Business Review: “the customer experience still depends almost entirely on the particular rep who takes the call.”

Management: Determine which questions are best answered by which customer service channel.  While some questions can be answered by an FAQ, others require the kind of interaction that only a phone call provides.  Management is about directing customers and measuring answer gaps. It’s also about continually monitoring to determine when answers need to be upgraded or added to—all while gauging how well call centers deliver on their promises.

How well do you answer customer questions?  We’d love to hear about your answer solutions and call center strategies.

Links and Resources:

• Harvard Business Review, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freedman and Nicholas Toman: Stop Trying to Delight your Customers
• Harvard Business Review, John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman and James K. Harter: Manage Your Human Sigma
• CMS Wire, Tom Wentworth: A Common Misconception about Customer Experience Management

Consider the advantages of email:

First, according to numerous studies, emails cost much less than phone calls. In some cases, email customer service costs half as much as the phone experience. Savings of this magnitude deserve to be front and center on any company’s radar.

Second, it’s the customer-centric thing to do.  The customer gets an answer on their time. They don’t have to wait in your call queue and they don’t need to plan around your company’s hours. Instead, customers state complaints or pose questions when it’s convenient for them.

Third, companies can provide information that’s difficult to provide over the phone. For instance, contextual information such as how to avoid problems in the future and extra resources that the customer can refer to at their leisure are better served through text than conversation. In the customer service monitoring business, we’ve heard far too many calls suffer when CSRs tell customers to go to a long-link-web-address and the customer simply gives up trying to write the whole thing down. Links in customer service email solve this problem.

But in spite of these advantages, the state of customer service email is bleak. Often, customers don’t really get answers and when they do, those replies can be a robotic string of FAQs that do little to forge a bond between company and customer.  And customers have been burned by email. They have learned that the only way to get a meaningful answer is to call a company and when that doesn’t’ work to ask for the supervisor. If that’s a dead end, customers often air their complaints on social media sites or in letters to the legal team or the company president.

Why is email customer service such a sorry state of affairs? Here are two reasons:

• Call centers are exactly that: they specialize in calls. While nearly every call center offers email customer service, the fact is email and chat are just add-on services, not their specialty.
• And then, there is the Peter Drucker quote that we return to again and again because it offers a reasonable explanation for all kinds of execution failures: “you manage what you measure” or, as other quality gurus have said “you can expect what you inspect”. The majority of customer service email is an improvised mess because companies lack the right guidelines, procedures and metrics.

All companies that have nailed customer service email have done so because they track critical factors like customer effort, answer completeness and overall empathy.

If you are a company with great customer service email, tout it! Tell your customers that you are different and that while their calls are welcome, that’s not the only way to get a straight answer. Promise replies within the day written by associates who take the time to read—not just gloss over—questions.  Even better: if you can verify it, state up front that your customers report that 95% of your email responses are smart, easy-to-understand and friendly.  By communicating these facts from the start, you’ll get the transition from call to email customer service underway.

2012? Let it be the year of excellent customer service email. Mastery on this front means you’ll have more satisfied customers, better interactions and a more profitable customer experience. Email on!

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.

Certainly, this idea of branding customer touchpoints has made its way into the zeitgeist with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh describing the “telephone as one of best branding devices out there” and other marketers quick to point to the power of customer experience branding.

But the biggest companies mostly leave their customer touchpoints untapped for their brand value and when it comes to customer service (the most memorable of all touchpoints), branding is often completely ignored.

Bodine argues that these opportunities are squandered because large corporations are crippled by too many silos, over-concerned with the demands of ROI and lacking customer focus.

As Customer Experience Analysts, we find these factors are contributive, but hardly the root cause. The real reason why large corporations tend to lag when it comes to touchpoint branding is that corporations largely subscribe to an antiquated notion that engaging customers’ feelings belongs in the back room, not the board room.

Until CEOs and COOs start asking essential customer experience branding questions, like “what percent of our customer interactions are branded?” “how engaging are our frontline reps?” or “have we trained our customer service reps to deliver our core marketing messages?”, these large companies won’t have the institutional inertia to carry their big marketing ideas through to the front line.  And that means they won’t be able to keep up with the hip Zappos-types and Dropboxes of the world.

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.

1- Personalization. Take listening and paying attention up a notch by training your CSRs to pay attention to individual customers’ needs. A rushed businessman who only has 5 minutes to solve a problem should be given quick, concise answers while a confused newbie may need more gentle, patient coaching.

2- An unexpected element. The best way to get a customer to remember you is to do something they’ve never seen before.

3- Uniqueness. Do or say something that no other company could offer. Something as simple as “at HubSpot, we are always trying to improve our services, so if something is not working, we definitely want to hear about it” could change your customer’s perception of your brand.