Transcript

The Institute of Customer Service publishes a customer satisfaction index twice a year. We survey over 26,000 consumers and we ask them about what really matters in terms of the delivery of customer service.

So it wouldn’t be surprising, would it not, that given the economic challenges and the issues that the banking sectors actually had in the last 18 months, to see customer satisfaction levels fall. Interestingly, our survey indicates that they haven’t. In fact, actually, customer satisfaction levels have increased, particularly for two banks – the Co-operative Bank and First Direct.

What has been impacted, however, is reputation, and it’s increasingly important that the banking sector looks at this and how they can actually map both their reputation to the delivery in terms of the customer service experience.

This means that a continued focus on both their processes, their people and their strategy and culture is very important in terms of being able to deliver the overall customer satisfaction experience.

Transcript

So the Institute of Customer Service has just published its latest Customer Satisfaction Index results and I’m delighted to say that, again, customer satisfaction has increased in the UK.

The survey actually is with over 26,000 consumers across a range of 13 different industry sectors. The Institute has been undertaking the survey for just over two and a half years and during that time the scores have actually continued to increase from 66 out of 100 to 75 out of 100. So what does this tell us?

Well, this actually, I believe, is good news for UK Plc because it is beginning to understand the critical importance of putting customer service at the heart of its business.

Within those scores, however, there are a whole range of results. The leading sector is the retail sector and there are a number of organisations that have scored over 80 within that sector. However, towards the end of the table are the utilities, communications and public sector.

Now within those scores and within those ranges of scores, there are a number of organisations that are performing at the very top and there are also organisations that are not performing so well.

What the Institute is striving to do is to help really improve customer satisfaction because we believe fundamentally that there is a clear link between return on investment and the impact of customer service.

So we know that where organisations invest in their people, their processes, their strategy and put customer service in the board room, it will impact effectively on the bottom line.

This is increasingly important. We have just gone through and will continue to go through probably one of the worse economic times of our age and therefore having a focus on customer service and doing everything we possibly can do to improve that is of significant importance.

We are now entering a period, particularly within the public sector, where we are going to be seeing further cuts. And therefore with those cuts in mind, we need to drive greater efficiencies in effectiveness.

We know from our members, and we have a number of leading organisations in the public sector, where they are really striving for excellent customer service. They are making a difference to their customers and then ultimately that is what we are all about, we are about improving the performance of organisations so they can improve the performance for their customers.

1. Visualization

Providing a graphical representation of hard data is a well–proven way to spot patterns and relationships that lead to all kinds of helpful insights. In customer service this could be used for analysing process data, showing how incoming customer tickets are routed, worked–on and resolved between different teams and over time. Another powerful application would be in researching solutions, using graphical navigation to browse through the knowledgebase of content that’s bound together by its attribute values.

2. Service Orientated Architecture

Taken from the software world, this is about offering small, discrete services that are complementary to existing products and services. Breaking out specialist activities as services, and offering them in a semi–automated, web–based way, has great potential. They provide immediate value to customers in specific situations, and are a great way to differentiate the service portfolio and get more cash flowing in (for a change). With efficiency improvements in handling small payments, the pay–as–you–go services model could be expanded to offer all kinds of features that were not economical before.

3. Problem Capture

…will hopefully finally come of age. Millions of dollars (and hours) are wasted every year because customer problems are poorly understood by service providers. Solving the right problem has always been a fundamental factor in running an efficient service centre; however, it’s still not easy to capture the precise problem every time. But — finally — technologies are starting to come to the rescue. Capturing video and photos to show problems is starting to become standard practice, and as network speeds and compression technologies catch up with the adoption rate it should become more feasible to “show” the problem to the service rep, avoiding any confusion.

Video will help consumers describe problems and organisations disseminate information

4. Knowledge Management

As search technologies continue to rapidly evolve, the capture, storage and retrieval of expert knowledge will become a large part of the service work processes. Knowledge content formats will also continue to evolve from text to graphics, into video, and even into an augmented reality where systems seamlessly overlay additional (real–time) information on top of traditional views.

5. Social Media

Whilst in its early stages, new and innovative tools will evolve that allow anyone to share their thoughts and comments to friends or the world at large. This will increasingly be done in real-time, as all mobile devices will offer immediate capture and sharing of information (visual and textual). I suspect the major advances will be in filtering the noise, so that reliable (or at least like–minded) sources of information are better publicised and easier to find (less trial–and–error).

6. Team Work

More and more collaborative systems are appearing every month (e.g. Google Wave) and the standard model of each problem being assigned to one customer service rep is potentially set to change. Each service rep should be able to have their own area of expertise published, and that expertise could be invoked (or scheduled) as–and–when it is needed. Getting the best person for every task should raise the bar on service standards, although without some simplification and clear management it could end up a confused mess where the most–able are constantly overloaded.

All I can say is good luck if you’re trying to implement these technologies. Hopefully the list will change soon.

We add a series of questions at the end of each survey that provide a snapshot of how the nation feels about a particular customer service issue. This time we asked respondents about their experience of call centres.

We get annoyed when the person we’re speaking to isn’t in the UK. Especially as we get older.

Dealing with staff outside the UK emerged as the number one annoyance for the British when they contact call centres and encounter a problem (17.5% of respondents selected this option).

Maybe it’s the subtle (or not so subtle) linguistic barriers, or perhaps it’s the apparent remoteness of the call centre.

An off shore call centre. The UKCSI indicates that the British dislike dealing with remote call centres when there's a service failure.

Interestingly, there was a clear generation gap in callers’ attitudes. In the 65+ age group 26.8% put this as their number one gripe, whereas only 12.4% of 18-24 year olds placed it at the top of their annoyance list.

This could mean many things. One obvious interpretation is that it reflects a generational shift in attitudes towards foreign-ness. Or it could just be that the idea of speaking to someone in another country about your phone bill has been around long enough for it not to phase younger callers.

I’ve already explained my problem

The second most unlikeable aspect of call centres was Explaining yourself multiple times to different members of staff (16.2%). Again, there was a clear age difference in this area, with 22.8% of the 65+ age group placing this at the top of their list, while it frustrated just 11.4% of 18-24 year olds more than anything else.

An upward trend in frustration starts with the 25-34 age-group, so this difference may have little to do with any age-related decline in faculties or an inability to use call technology. Perhaps older callers demand a better level of service than the young, and become more frustrated at being passed around departments.

Be nice to us

So what does annoy 18-24 year olds? Top of their list wasn’t time spent queuing, gaps in staff knowledge or endless hold music, but Unfriendly staff (18.9%). Conversely, as the British become older they become less and less concerned with how friendly their interlocutor is: a tiny 0.6% of the 65+ age group listed this as their major concern.

Again, we could interpret this data (and use it) in many ways. The MySpace generation may deal with officialdom in a more informal manner than the old, who perhaps maintain a distance when discussing their business. As a consequence, this could affect how organisations deal with incoming calls (see this discussion on our LinkedIn group).

But it could also reflect a shrewdness on older callers’ part. Just as they don’t appreciate being passed around call agents, they are perhaps unconcerned with how personable the call agent is. They just want to solve their problem.

A nation of curmudgeons?

The numbers appear to paint a rather irascible picture of the British and their dealings with call centres, which is perhaps unsurprising considering the frustration they can cause.

Joanna Lumley was the respondents' top choice. Image from http://photographyandpolitics.wordpress.com/

Perhaps fittingly, when asked which celebrity they’d like to take their call, they chose Joanna Lumley (14.7%) before anyone else, with Jeremy Clarkson coming a close second (14.2%).

What do you think? What’s the real story behind the British public’s experience of call centres?

A summary of the latest (January 2010) UKCSI results is available from the UKCSI website. If you’d like detailed, sectoral information, you can buy reports from the ICS shop. Press enquiries should be directed to Daryll Newman at Man Bites Dog (0844 561 1416), or ICS marketing and communications director, Duncan Baker (01206 216180).

Cover of The Best Practice Guide for Customer Service Managers

Customer service text book

There’s no such disappointment here. Trevor Arden and Stephanie Edwards have produced a publication that could stand alone as a first–class textbook on customer service and world–class customer–centric excellence. The book’s strengths are many:

• Comprehensive coverage of everything that professional managers need to know and do in order to be taken seriously by their customers, both internal and external
• For those who consider it important, a content which is authoritatively mapped against the National Occupational Standards.
• A focus on not just getting things right (service efficiency) but also, and principally, on doing the right things (service effectiveness). This means that each chapter is accompanied by a set of learning outcomes and also that each chapter is concerned with performance deliverables. There is no suggestion that simply being “nice” is enough; on the contrary, the authors rightly emphasise here and there that the competent manager must occasionally be an apostle of “tough love” in order to get things done.
• Throughout there is an emphasis on the requirement for a continuous improvement and transformational change mentality on the part of the customer service manager (and not just among customer service managers, in my opinion). So long as customer aspirations keep growing, then companies cannot remain complacent and self-satisfied about their service performance — which means that dealing with customers must remain one of the most exciting parts of any business if only because it never stands still.

Pragmatic advice based on a clear philosophy

The book’s advice is underpinned by theory and research in several ways:

• A philosophical clarity which personally I find refreshing in a world which is normally characterised by wishful thinking, spin and conceptual evasion. For example, on page 13 Trevor and Stephanie make it clear that
  

  what counts is the Customer Experience — the service that the customer perceives, rather than the service the organisation thinks it has delivered.

  Yet there are still many businesses which try to measure their service performance and progress by reference to internal measures like telephone call response times and call duration, instead of asking themselves far more fundamental questions about whether any given customer–facing transaction has generated results which are positively meaningful for both parties involved.

• The whole book is pragmatic, feet–on–the–ground stuff, using accessible language and illustrating its key principles with “best practice” examples from three carefully–chosen exemplar businesses: Euro-Deporte, a European leisure company, Unicentro, a retail operation, and GCU Finance.
• Though not overburdened with “theory”, its material is carefully grounded in solid research findings, particularly those presented by Professor Robert Johnston in his studies of world-class service excellence conducted on behalf of the Institute. In fact, one of the most impressive features of this Best Practice Guide for Customer Service Managers is the fact that it follows its own continuous–improvement advice, and therefore builds on what has gone before rather than merely reproducing it. Thus the Components of Excellent Customer Service don’t simply copy Professor Johnston’s framework but add a further (“Keep it Simple”) element.
• Where appropriate, the authors are cautious about making claims which cannot be justified by evidence. Though they quite rightly draw attention to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, for example, they also point out that “not everyone is driven by the same things”.

Highly recommended

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly as a thoroughly competent, professionally produced and enormously valuable self–learning, self–development and self–enriching text.

You can buy The Best Practice Guide for Customer Service Professionals from the Customer 1st shop.

It might seem like a harmless question. But there’s no such thing as a harmless question when you want people to complete your form.

The fewer questions you ask on a form, the greater the number of people will complete it. So each question you ask has a cost that it must justify. That cost is the number of people who drop out because of its inclusion.

This isn’t because your users say “Oh, I’m not answering that” and leave. Instead adding friction to a process increases the likelihood that users don’t get to the end of it.

Asking too many questions will deter users from completing forms

We are are so often distracted by something else when using the internet. We’re also quite often limited by time, so it’s easy to decide to postpone the form until later when we think we don’t have time to complete it now.

By removing points of friction, you increase the likelihood that users will get through the form without interruption.

Inaccurate data

When people are completing your form, they’re happy to answer questions they feel are necessary to ask. When they’re buying something, they’ll tell you their address because you need to know it in order to make delivery. But when you ask a question that isn’t related to their request, you risk annoying them.

The accuracy of a customer’s response to this question has no impact on them personally. If they answer incorrectly, they still get what they came for. So if you’ve annoyed them, they may deliberately give you an incorrect response. Even if you haven’t, they’ll often just pick an option at random.

You’re relying on goodwill in order to get a correct response. But you’re also testing their patience by asking the question in the first place. This puts goodwill in short supply.

Sometimes it’s just a silly question

When you have a strong brand in your industry, it’s a bit silly to ask people where they heard of you. It’s like me asking you where you heard about Coca-Cola before you bought it.

People often engage with companies having never heard of them. But most of the time they buy from or contact companies they’ve heard of through multiple channels. This makes the question very difficult to answer. When the question is difficult to answer, you’re making them think. And what does Steve Krug tell us about making users think?

You’re adding potential complications that are avoidable.

What are you doing with the answers?

When you ask this question, what are you doing with the answers? How valuable is this data to your organisation? I know several companies who ask this question and do nothing with the data they collect. They don’t realise that this data comes at a cost. If they could truly see the cost, they’d probably stop asking the question at all.

Even if you are looking at the data. How is it driving your decision making? Are you just looking at it and saying “Oh that’s interesting”? Interesting is good, but remember this question is costing you money. Is the information so interesting that you’re willing to pay for it in lost sales?

Conclusion

It’s useful to know which of your marketing efforts are leading to conversions and there are ways of obtaining this information. But asking your users when they’re trying to get through a web form isn’t the way to do it.

You can’t rely on the accuracy of the data and it’s costing you in lost conversions.

This post was originally published on David’s blog, Good Usability.

1. Communicate

The board needs to define how the company is going to offer customer service excellence and how this should be implemented in detail by all staff.

2. Measure

Define, implement and review monthly measures across all channels. Ensure five contact handling targets per person are met monthly.

3. Segment

Segment types of contact: Prioritise urgent calls so they are answered in 1 ring.

4. Technology

When a call or email is received, automatically route it to the next available agent in any of your sites worldwide.

What is self–service?

Self–service is where no agent is involved in customer contact.

Types of self–service include:

• Interactive web sites
• Recorded messages (e.g. the DVA Northern Ireland tel: + 44 (0) 1204 770768)
• Telephone automated payments: (e.g. Norwich City Council tel: +44 (0) 344 8303333)
• Pro–active automatic alerts by email/SMS
• PC terminals and in-house telephones in your reception for customer access
• Direct debit

Self–service can be applied to simple issues across all contact channels (phone, correspondence and face to face).

Reduce non complex enquiries

1. Automate

A housing association could register a social housing applicant for automated updates on the progress of an application by email or SMS.

2. Eliminate

Where customers need to make regular payments, e.g. council tax, instead of paying over the counter we could encourage and incentivise them to pay by direct debit.

3. Simplify

Organisations could publish and give prominence to simple information like opening hours, e.g. DVA Northern Ireland has a recorded message on their phone system and a clear message on their web site.

How to overcome self–service challenges

1. Get a sponsor

For a self service initiative to be successful, it is vital that an organisation has a senior level sponsor.

2. Write a Top 30 FAQs

Record and evaluate monthly the top 30 simple FAQs across all channels to ensure self–service channels are providing relevant information.

3. Get feedback

Receive monthly feedback from customers and staff. Most importantly, ensure improvements based on that feedback are implemented.

4. Monitor self–service statistics

Monitor self service statistics monthly to identify which are the most popular and unpopular channels used.
Based on this feedback, the self service channels can be modified.

Marketing self–service

Newly implemented self-service options need to be pro-actively marketed across all channels, e.g. Norwich City Council promoted self-service under the tagline “Do it online”. Customers need to be encouraged to use them on a regular basis. They need to be implemented properly and made easy to use, otherwise the uptake will be very slow.

The cost of customer contact

Chart demonstrating savings made by reducing direct customer contact

A recent survey found that the average cost per contact was £15 for face to face, £12 for postal enquiries, £5 for phone enquiries and 6p for online. For 120,000 contacts it would cost £1.8million to manage face to face contacts, £1.44million to manage postal enquiries, £600,000 to manage the phone enquiries and just £7,200 to manage the online self-service.

This capture extends to information about solutions to problems. This ranges from simply helping customers fix problems themselves, to invoking and tracking additional services. All knowledge, tips and tricks are being captured.

For most products there is a critical mass where the knowledge captured can serve a reasonably large proportion of customer needs.

Even as product life cycles continue to shorten, knowledge capture evolves at a faster pace. Couple this with the popularity of social media networks and information accessibility, and traditional vendor organisation customer service teams could be set to experience a world where they’re not required for a large proportion of service needs. The days of vendors having a monopoly on their product information may soon be over.

Social media can be used to share, update and evaluate product knowledge

Some product vendors accept this and offer information freely while providing platforms to encourage customers to create and share their own information. Many retail vendors allow honest on–site product reviews, while most internet hosting companies will refer customers to a wiki for their service queries.

Sometimes these platforms come at a price (essentially a new service fee), sometimes they don’t and are seen as an investment in reducing service costs and improving reputation.

Models like OpenSource Software are similar, where the power of the many come together in a controlled manner to create real value. Interestingly, the services supporting open source software were originally seen as a limitation to adoption (customers asked “where do I go if it breaks?”); however, in reality the community itself provides support, backed–up by vendors offering premium services. The success of a product like the Firefox web browser demonstrates how powerful this model can be.

This, I hope, is what may happen to many customer services. A base–level of help can be found using the extensive knowledge within the related community structure, with vendors providing an improved range of premium services that compliment (not just support) their products.

Customer Service is the delivery of a clearly defined service to the customer, simple as that. Too many sales–and–marketing teams have pushed services beyond their intended and realistic scope, setting customer expectations way too high.

Companies cannot afford to spend valuable resources servicing customers for no extra income. Yes, the customer might be happier, and that always helps potential sales, but spending excessive amounts of money on servicing existing customers disproportionately will put you out of business quickly.

One of my roles is as an accredited assessor for the Institute of Customer Service, and we teach a much more rounded (or holistic) view of customer service. This approach divides behaviour into 4 categories, which are balanced to give a more complete and effective delivery structure.

• You and Your Customer – focusing on customers and adapting accordingly
• You and Your Organization – keeping overall guidelines and goals in mind when delivering the service
• You and Your Colleagues – working as a team to deliver a better service than one person alone
• You and Your Development – your own skills and objectives should be developed as the service is delivered

If you think this doesn’t really happen, then look at many successful companies and you’ll notice that the services that support their products have well structured boundaries, and sometimes almost seem quite limited (i.e. they don’t simply do whatever you want). Even in retail, a sector that’s normally very flexible with the service it offers, we’ve seen recent cutbacks in the scope of customer service, such as Marks and Spencer cutting its returns policy from 90 days to 35 days.

Even Marks and Spencer limits its service offer

In the current climate, as many companies look at customer service as somewhere they can cut budgets, it still remains a key differentiator for many product sectors; cuts can have disastrous effects if done without careful planning and downstream modeling.

The proper solution, which saves money and actually gives customers a clarity that they often learn to appreciate, is to adopt the right structure and scope to customer service delivery. This can have benefits for everyone involved.

It’s cheaper when customers use the website

If you can replace a customer phone call with a visit to your website, you’re going to save money. In the UK, it’s on average 14 times more expensive to take a phone call compared to having your customer visit your website.

Having said that, your website is just one part of the overall customer experience. Providing a good customer experience involves giving your customers what they want. So when they want your phone number, just give it to them.

We’re getting wise to poor customer service

As customers, we’ve all experienced poor customer service from companies who are trying to keep costs down by ignoring us. So some of us will do a bit of digging before we buy from a company. It’s all very well having your sales number emblazoned on the homepage. But what about the customer service number? What’s it going to be like after I’ve decided to buy?

In usability tests, I’ve noticed some people go digging for the customer service number before buying. Some even say they call these numbers, just to see what the service is going to be like. They also want to know if it’s a freephone or a local rates number.

This behaviour is a reaction to past experiences of poor customer service. The approach you take to being contacted on your website will say a lot about you to prospective customers.

When these people encounter a website that hides its contact details, they know that the customer service will be practically non-existent. So they don’t buy.

Finding contact details

People tend to look for a link that says ‘Contact us’ when they want to phone or email the company. They’ve become used to the the contact page having this name, so this is what they look for.

This has implications when you provide your telephone number at the top of the page. The example below shows how the Talk Talk website provides its phone number.

The Talk Talk website has the phone number at the top of every page.

I’ve witnessed a lot of people overlooking numbers like this in their search for the word ‘contact’. Of course, other people will notice it quite quickly. So you should never rely on this approach alone. Make sure you also provide a contact page. Thankfully, this is exactly what Talk Talk do.

Avoid the ‘Don’t contact us’ page

The contact page below from Scottish Power is an example of what I call a ‘Don’t contact us’ page. Scottish Power clearly doesn’t want to speak to its customers. We’re shoved towards an online help instead.

The Scottish Power contact page is next to useless

This page tells us a lot about the company’s approach to customer service. The link to an email contact opens a 2-page contact form that asks for every possible scrap of information about you that they can think to ask.

Hiding the phone number

A less extreme version of the ‘Don’t contact us’ page is when the contact details are smothered by alternatives to contacting the organisation. Tiscali uses such a tactic, as you can see below.

Tiscali distracts the customer with online alternatives to phoning

The ‘Contact us’ page here is swamped with alternatives to calling. If you want to call them, you need to find the ‘Contact us’ link on this page. Despite already being on a page of the same name. There’s nothing wrong with providing a few alternatives but these should not prevent the user from finding the contact details.

BT handles this a little better as shown below. The way the frequently asked questions are good.

BT provides some popular questions alongside the contact options

BT presents the top 3 questions to the right-hand-side of the contact options. People who have these questions may read them and perhaps no longer need to call. Importantly, the alternatives don’t smother the main purpose of the page.

Positioning of contact options

On many websites the phone number is the preferred contact option for users. However, some organisations prefer you to fill out a contact form. So they put this first and hide the number lower down the page.

When you put your contact form first, you’ll find that many people don’t get to see your phone number. We’re now very used to websites without phone numbers. So much so, that lots of people hit the Back button as soon as they see the dreaded contact form.

If you want your users to contact you at all, give their favoured options prominence on the contact page.

Contextual phone numbers

On some websites, presenting the phone number at the right moment will make the difference between getting a sale and losing one. In such circumstances, it’s not enough to simply provide the ability to find contact details. Instead the phone number should be presented contextually.

A lot of people research products on the internet but prefer to buy over the phone. If you want their business, you shouldn’t make it difficult for them to find your phone number. Consider providing your contact details contextually at points when they are likely to be useful. See the example below from the Share Centre.

The Share Centre provides its phone number alongside the call to action for opening an account.

The Share Centre associates the phone number with the call-to-action button by positioning the number alongside it and making the text the same colour. So people who don’t want to open an account online are presented with an alternative without the need to go looking for a number. This should lead to more calls from new customers.

This article was originally published on David’s blog, Good Usability.