Tag Archives: customer service email

You Responded, But Did You Answer the Question?

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
4

Customer service boils down to a simple give and take: customers have questions or problems and companies provide answers. It’s pretty straightforward. But all too often, customers are left befuddled, scratching their heads and wondering: “What did they mean? Were they listening? What do I do now?”

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.

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CEx 2012: Nail Email!

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
3

The biggest challenge for the customer experience in 2012 will be to make customer service emails work.  I am not talking about simply sending responses in a timely manner, although that’s a good start. Rather, it’s time for companies to step up and provide thoughtful answers to customers’ questions, answers that show the company and its representatives are listening and care what customers have to say.

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!