At the Nexus — The Contact Center, Marketing, and Product Management

March 28, 2011 — Tom

Let’s not beat around the bush.  Social is not going anywhere.  Whether we like it or not, the new norm in customer relationship management is centered on deeply personalized customer interactions.

The Product Management group is interacting daily with key customers and non-customers.  The Marketing group is focused on marketing communications and sales objectives.  And, the contact center, long the owner of the customer, is in many cases still floundering, trying to figure out how to best meet the needs of an increasingly social customer.

The next-generation contact center will be multichannel, multimedia, multiplatform, and social media fluent.  It will also have intimate ties to the Marketing and Product Management groups in the organization.  Here’s what will change, as these three groups sit at the nexus of customer relationships in the future:

  • Contact centers will evolve to become relationship platforms, with a focus on building personalized and collaborative customer interactions.  Top priorities will involve improving the customer experience and more deeply engaging with customers to strengthen the bonds of loyalty.
  • The responsibilities of the Marketing group will evolve to include not only outbound communication, but also inbound customer care.  Gone are the days of email blasts and PR campaigns.  Welcome to the fold: flash mob focus groups, Twitter campaigns, and video-initiated lead generation.
  • The Product Management group will be tasked with reaching out to non-customers more and more.  User groups and cold emails will become things of the past; welcome to the era of real-time Facebook conversations with non-customers.

We know that customers are communicating in a social manner – in real time.  Unfortunately, many Customer Care, Marketing, and Product managers still approach customer communications in the same old way, with an emphasis on the telephone.  While still an important form of communication, the web has surpassed it in many industries as the dominant form of communication between the customer and the organization.  For example, in the technology sector, customer interactions on the web far surpass support phone calls.  And I’m not just talking about the corporate website, either!  Many technology customers also research information on products and services from social networking sources, such as blogs, wikis, and online user ratings.

So what am I suggesting?  That these three groups will become more closely aligned as social becomes even more prevalent?  Exactly!  It’s time for the contact center to take the lead here in strengthening customer loyalty.  What are you waiting for?

Posted in Call Center Management, Customer service, Social media, Web. No Comments »

Going overboard on CSAT measurement in the call center

March 8, 2011 — Camille

I recently made a purchase from a major online retailer where I used the chat feature to resolve a technical problem before ordering (I had a coupon that wasn’t working and I wanted my discount!).  The agent who chatted with me was very helpful and resolved my issue in just a couple of minutes so I was happy to take the three question satisfaction survey afterward.  It asked the standard questions:

  1. Was the agent helpful?
  2. Was your issue resolved?
  3. And something else I can’t remember, but 2 out of 3 is pretty good

I gave top ratings for all three questions and went on about placing my order.  A few hours later I received an email asking me to take a survey about my purchasing experience.  Maybe it’s because I work in marketing or maybe I’m too easily entertained, but I frequently respond to customer satisfaction surveys so I decided to see what kind of questions I was going to be asked since I had already taken the chat survey.

The first page or two of questions were the standard satisfaction type questions and then I was asked if I had contacted customer service by phone, online chat or not at all.  Obviously I selected online chat and hit the “Next” button.  Low and behold the next set of questions was the exact same set of three questions I had answered after my chat session.

That brings me to the point of this blog post— outstanding customer service is essential for most businesses, but can a business go overboard on their efforts to determine customer satisfaction?

Not only was I annoyed that I had to answer the same three questions, but from an analytical standpoint, if the chat survey responses are compiled with the web survey responses the results could wind up very, very skewed.  I gave the same top ratings in the web survey I had already given in the chat survey and wondered why a business would ask the same questions in two different surveys that go to the same customers.

Maybe it’s an effort to be thorough and solicit as much feedback as possible (had I neglected to answer the chat survey they would have captured my satisfaction in the web survey) or maybe it’s a disconnect between the marketing department and the call center.  Whatever the reason for the duplication, it’s important to remember that measuring satisfaction is important, but if a business sends the same surveys to the same customers it can actually decrease satisfaction and cause customers to stop responding to survey requests.  Skewed data and decreasing response rates are arguably worse than not knowing how satisfied your customers really are so think carefully about the surveys you do and the questions you ask.  And if other departments are sending out customer surveys, be sure to collaborate to avoid overlap and customer annoyance.

Posted in Business, Call center KPIs, Customer service, Web. No Comments »
«
»