Getting a 360-degree perspective

But is your strategy covering everything you need to plan for to realize the upgraded contact center?  Contact centers, unlike most technologies, require a 360 degree perspective; that is while you must look outside your enterprise to satisfy the needs of your customers who are contacting you, fiscal responsibility requires a look inward as well to the efficiency and performance of your agents.

A comprehensive strategy should include defined customer contact and functional requirements, an end state technology plan, recommendations for optimized processes and procedures, a technology implementation roadmap, and lastly, a business case to justify the initiative. But if you haven’t included a plan for the foundation for the contact center agent interaction, and that is unified communications, you risk a costly e solution failure with.

A preference for voice

Fundamentally, a contact center relies on voice contact more than any other channel.  A recent Enghouse Interactive study showed 83 percent of customers prefer to access business by voice calls.  Therefore, comprehensive voice readiness planning, including infrastructure and resource planning, dial plan strategy, and adoption planning is just as necessary for the contact center as for an enterprise unified communications rollout. (Click here for more about developing a unified communications strategy.)

Unified communications enables other means of increasing customer satisfaction and contact handling efficiency.  For example, enabling knowledge workers with instant messaging integrated to the contact center agents gives the agents an added resource to answer customer contacts during the initial interaction, which increases first contact resolution (FCR) and thereby customer satisfaction. (For more reasons why this is helpful, please check out my prior post on how FCR improves customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores).

To upgrade or not to upgrade, that is the question

Some companies are delaying the decision to upgrade either their unified communications or contact center to treat them as separate projects, but this presents complications and risks as well.  For example, upgrading the unified communications first without the contact center forces support of two separate voice platforms, often requiring separate support teams. This approach significantly increases support costs.  Integration is also required between the separate platforms to allow contact center staff to communicate with enterprise workers, adding complexity and costs.  Analyzing a total cost of ownership for both projects, the added costs for separate projects are often substantial.

The network and data – the satisfaction backbone

Preparing for a converged contact center means not only that the underlying telephony to the contact center must be designed for voice quality support, but the network must also be designed for contact center data as well.  Specifically, there are two types of critical data that must be transmitted for contact centers; metadata and agent state data.

Metadata is the caller specific information about their choices or profile, and a failure to secure consistent delivery along with a voice call will require callers to repeat authentication data, such as account numbers (a cardinal sin to maintain high customer satisfaction).  The other relevant data communicates continually to the routing engine of the contact center about the agent’s availability to take a call.  If the stream of information is interrupted from the agent desktop to the routing engine, the agent will not get a call, resulting in your company paying for an expensive resource who cannot do their job.

Plan for additional planning

If your contact center includes home agent support, as is the case for 53 percent of current contact centers, then additional planning is needed for the infrastructure and resources used to send telephony and contact center to agents outside of the traditional brick and mortar contact centers.  For example, contact center platforms can either secure a pinned-up and constant circuit to route calls to the agent, or use resources on a call-by-call basis, depending on your requirements.  The telephony in your unified communications infrastructure will be impacted either way, but with significant utilization differences to port access and call session set-up and tear-down.

Do you have obsolete technology in your contact center?  How comprehensive is your contact center strategy?  Please let me know your comments here, and I encourage you to connect with me on Twitter (@lambrobert).

As a contact center consulting team, companies that achieve high FCR can, on average, expect to retain 90 percent of their customers, even if services, features, and prices aren’t favorably comparable.  This is largely based on satisfying the incumbent relationship.  Or, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. On the contrary, from 35 to 55 percent of customers who do not feel their issues have been resolved satisfactorily, even for a single interaction, will be shopping you against your competitors.

Just yesterday, I contacted a travel company who couldn’t adjust my frequent customer account and couldn’t find the right person to resolve my issue, even after multiple call transfers. First, I wasn’t able to find out how to change my profile on their website (and couldn’t access a Web chat feature to guide me). Then I called the toll-free number, which probably increased their cost-per-call by 10x (for more, click here for my prior blog on developing a contact center strategy). In the end, I spent a long time on the phone, which was dissatisfying, and the net experience made it less likely that I’ll recommend this company to my equally busy friends.

The Financial Impact of Customer Experience

FCR also affects revenue. Unresolved issues have the biggest impact on the contact center’s financial performance. Revenue is at risk as a result of the inquiry or problem remaining unresolved. Most contact centers are not aware how much revenue they are losing as a result of unresolved issues. Conversely, businesses can increase their opportunities to upsell by 20 percent once the initial issue is resolved. Trying to sell before the problem is resolved, makes the customer feel irritated at the business pushing the next sale rather than resolving their issues. Our studies show that FCR improves both customer and employee satisfaction, and results in a slower agent attrition rate. Contact centers with lower FCR tend to have low employee satisfaction due to a high level of stress on the employee who handles that second and third call from the customer’s issue that was not resolved the first time. Stress increases agent churn, which in turn drives up operating costs in recruiting, investigating, interviewing, hiring, and training new agents.

Measuring FCR

While FCR is the single key to optimized experience in my opinion, it’s often not easy to achieve or even to measure.  It’s important to consider contacts in all access channels, and not phone calls alone, to truly understand the customer’s experience.  However, as no two contact centers are alike, allowances should be made for idiosyncrasies of the business, such as seasonality of business or  varying definitions to FCR measurement. It’s important to understand the business to set the parameters that match the customer’s expectations, and future posts will dig into the tactical considerations for measuring and improving FCR.

If you’re interested in learning more about FCR, I’ll be presenting the keynote (and blogging) on the customer contact experience and best practices at the upcoming Customer Experience Management Summit and presenting on optimizing mobility customer support at the Contact Center Association’s Virtual Event – “The Social Contact Center.”   I encourage you to register for these events and reach out to me if you’re at the Summit.  And please follow me on Twitter (@lambrobert) to share your thoughts with me at and after these events.

When was the last time you called a company and didn’t get a resolution to your issue?  How do you prevent that customer frustration at your business?

Robert’s specialty is applying convergence technology to develop virtualized contact centers to maximize the bottom line and optimize the customer experience.  He has developed and delivered business strategies across all customer access channels, including social media, SMS text, mobility, video, Email and web, for implementing virtual contact centers and optimizing enterprise-wide centers to meet client’s specific business needs.

Robert has 27+ years of global experience in customer contact and the strategy, design and development of optimized contact centers. He has consulted to over 1,500 customers. Robert’s consulting client list includes organizations such as Best Buy, Fidelity Investments, Ford Motor Company, CVS Pharmacy, Charles Schwab, Farmer’s Insurance, AARP, DISH Network, Caremark, General Motors, Lexmark, Honeywell, US Army and Air Force Exchange Services, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Humana, USAA, Discover Financial, Dow Jones Co., Esurance, GEICO, Qatar Telephone, TelerX, Home Depot, International Hotels Group, Travelocity, West Interactive, Trinity Health Care, Medco, the State governments of Michigan, California and Texas, GMAC, Zurich Financial Services, Recall Inc., CareCore National, American Water, Cardinal Health, and US Dept. of State.

Robert holds technical certifications for design, implementation and application development for contact center and telephony technologies for for Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Genesys. He has designed architectures implemented for +150 clients globally. He also holds ITIL certification.

Robert is a published author on customer contact and has received multiple industry recognitions and corporate achievement awards including AT&T’s Diamond Club for 2012.  Robert is a staff member of several contact center industry and philanthropy organizations, such CCA, ICMI, TMC Net, and MER Customer Response Summit, and regularly presents at their conferences.  He has also presented at leading vendor trade shows, such as Genesys’ G-Force, Avaya’s AAAUG, Nortel’s INNUG and Cisco Networkers Live. He is a member of AT&T’s Speaker’s Bureau, presenting executive level sessions at AT&T’s Executive Customer Briefing Centers.  He has is a leading blogger on AT&T’s Networking Exchange, spoken on radio programs and has delivered webinars and podcasts for various leading organizations.

1. Understand and anticipate your customers’ desires – Use the information available (and there is a lot) and accepted technology, such as intelligent routing, to anticipate your customers’ interests in any access channel.  Customer segmentation, account profile, transaction history, demographics, personality, preferences, social media, and CRM are all puzzle pieces that give you clues to know in advance what your customer wants.

2. Manage customer expectations – Provide an integrated multi-modal, multi-media, next-generation user experience and set realistic and consistent expectations in your communications about your services that are in line with your competitors and your business model.  Tailor your service levels to each channel and customer segment.  Provide automated responses or announcements of expected response times.  People feel much better making informed choices, as long as the information is accurate and reasonable.

3. Honor the customer’s choices – Today’s customer has many choices of methods for reaching out to your company. Accepting and supporting the access channel the customer chooses builds trust capital within the interaction that goes a long way toward the perception of a positive experience.  Mobility and social media support are key to optimizing customer experience in the evolving customer.  If your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a challenge to navigate, don’t disable the “zero out” option to artificially drive up containment, as you’ll organically drive down customer satisfaction.

4. Manage customer perception – Outside of the interaction itself, you have the ability to not only define expectations but also to manage the way you are perceived in the marketplace as a service provider.  Use social media as the perfect focus group to hear directly how customers feel about their experience with your company throughout the full lifecycle of the interaction (see my earlier post on the value of social media support for details). Use Klout , Kred or PeerIndex scores to identify the influencers and manage response times accordingly to avoid an influencer using social media to damage other’s perception of your responses.  When it comes to customer contact in the age of the empowered customer, perception is reality.

5. Plan for the unexpected – Unplanned events happen, either by a significant change in the marketplace or a challenge to overcome in the ability to deliver services or products.  Regardless of the cause, you need to be able to deliver on timely interactions to meet or exceed your customers’ expectations in all cases.  This requires prudent continuity and contingency planning in your technology, staffing, and facilities for both service delivery and budget.  Virtualize and expand the contact center with knowledge workers, home agents, and federation.  Use Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS or cloud), hosted, and managed services to plan for contingency services.  And plan for video as the next killer customer contact app.

6. Exceed promises responsibly – Your customers live in a mobile society and are quickly becoming next-generation users and consumers of your services (see my earlier post on smartphone adoption for details). The optimized value of a consistent experience delivers modestly better than your competitors. (Delighting your customers beyond expectations can be operationally expensive with minimal financial return.)  Remember that global technology is mainstream – customers, users, resources, suppliers, and distributors all impact global brand experiences, reach, and trends.  Use the global network to maximize your resources to deliver on expectations, particularly in peak volume situations.

The most important advice is to make changes prudently – that is, to research, engage experienced resources, plan, test, analyze, optimize, and only then, execute.  The risk for damage to your brand image is always present in customer contact initiatives.

I’ll be presenting the keynote (and blogging) on some of these best practices in greater detail at the upcoming Customer Experience Management Summit and presenting on mobility customer support at the Contact Center Association’s Online Summit  I encourage you to click on these links to learn more and to follow me on Twitter (@lambrobert) to get my and others’ insights shared at these events.

How do you engage and empower your employees to deliver a positive multi-channel experience?  How do you improve your visibility to manage expectations and perception of the customer experience?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix as an engagement metric to quantify customer satisfaction and thereby the inclination to share their opinion. Following a sales or support interaction, surveyed customers are asked whether they would recommend a product or service, using a scale from 1–10. Customer response scores are segmented into three groups:

• Promoters (score 9–10): considered to be loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and referring others, fueling growth
• Passives (score 7–8): satisfied but unenthusiastic customers vulnerable to competitive offerings
• Detractors (score 0–6): unhappy customers who can damage brand image and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth

5 Steps to nurture Promoters through successful interactions

Step 1 - The first step toward developing a Promoter is to create a positive experience for your customer.  Achieving customer satisfaction is particularly important during interactions with your contact center, since it is the formal point of customer-to-vendor interactions.  Human nature shows that if we are pleasantly satisfied, our desire will increase to repeat the activity. For business, this means two things, both requiring significant planning and careful research before execution:

1. Understand the expectations of the customer
2. Prepare to meet or exceed those expectations consistently

Step 2 - A positive experience must be delivered consistently to create predictability. When customers expect a positive experience, by nature, humans want to do it again. When customers predict the positive experience, since human nature leads us to repeat satisfying activities, customers will begin to develop loyalty.

Step 3 – Profitability begins in the third year of the customer and vendor relationship lifecycle, because margin in the first two years of the customer relationship only recoups customer acquisition costs. To mature customer relationships to profitability in these times of peer influence, businesses need to create a loyalty into and beyond the third year of the relationship. When customer relationships become profitable, corporate energy is created to continue down the positive path of customer acquisition and growth for the enterprise.

Step 4 – When businesses establish loyalty with heightened satisfaction in customer-to-vendor relationships to the point of sharing that experience with their friends, Promoters are developed.  Just ask customers of customer centric organizations like Harley-Davidson or Southwest Airlines to try a competing brand, and you’ll often see an enthusiastic response of loyalty. Customers pleased to the point of excitement with having their expectations exceeded want to share their enthusiasm, particularly in the social media enabled world.

Step 5 – A key element in ensuring customer satisfaction is to honor the customer’s choices.  Since first impressions are impactful and lasting, the most notable of choices to honor is to respect the manner in which the customer chose to converse in the first place. In today’s smartphone ubiquitous, time-starved society, customers desire and expect conversations in the manner of their convenience and within increasing expectations of speed the completion.

Practically speaking, if a customer wants assistance within a smartphone application, businesses need to be prepared to deliver a positive experience contained within the smartphone app. To do this, contact centers need to be equipped both operationally and technologically to provide a consistent experience throughout all of the projected channels their customers desire.

Preparing for multi-channel access is a significant task considering the varying expectations and technologies required to deliver a consistent experience across multiple channels. Contact center vendors offer many technology choices, not all of which will achieve the goals intended. Significant cost items such as labor and process development can also make or break the success of developing a positively consistent customer experience.  I have seen careful planning and budgeting with experienced talent go a long way to ensuring that results satisfy the enterprise and its customers — while staying within budget.

How is your business preparing to support smartphone and social media customer access? How are you nurturing and growing your Promoters? We’d love to hear your comments below.

• You’re now less satisfied as a customer because you’ve lost all of the authentication and contextual data as the process for booking the hotel starts over.
• You taught yourself to use the most expensive method of contact (phone call to live agent) both for this time and in future.
• Your image of the hotel chain is lessened by the poor experience from the cool smartphone app that you wanted to use but took you longer anyway.

Or worse – you decided to try a competitor hotel’s smartphone app to book your room. A 2011 Harris Interactive study found that 63% of all online adults surveyed said they would be less likely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels if they experienced a problem conducting a mobile transaction.

Soaring Smartphone Use Brings Customer Service Issues to Forefront

As consumers, more of us are using smartphones to handle tasks more efficiently—and the number of users continues to grow. Nielsen estimates that 44% of Americans use smartphones today (and over 50% in some other developed countries).

Business is driving smartphone adoption, especially in the retail space where mobile shopping is soaring. RSR Research found that 92% of B2C winners (retailers who outperform their peers in year-over-year sales growth) have decided that consumers are using mobile as part of their shopping experience and they need to be there.  Projecting that into the future, Tealeaf Technologies suggests that mobile devices will become the No. 1 medium for digital commerce by 2015. That’s why it is disturbing that so many adult smartphone users (84% in the U.S., according to a recent Harris study) reported problems with mobile transactions.

Apps to the Rescue – Customer Service within Smartphone Apps

A proactive and potentially more satisfying solution to this dilemma is to make customer service resources available within the smartphone app.  This function effectively links mobility to customer service in the channel the customer chose, increasing customer satisfaction. Remember, you chose to use that app as your preference for a reason, and making that interaction into a satisfying one honors your choice.

When you, as a customer, feel your desires are valued by the company you want to do business with, you get a stronger impression that your business is valued, which encourages customer loyalty.  And, since the cost-per-contact is lower in the app than for a call to the contact center, keeping the customer in the mobility channel also reduces customer service operating expenses.

Leading contact center technologies have developed and are enhancing capabilities that provide that link of mobility to customer service.  Functionally, ranges from opening a chat window in the app for customers to connect with a live contact center agent to enabling a voice conversation within the app that brings the context and customer data as a screen pop to the agent.

Options for Deployment – Start with Strategy

There are many choices for how businesses can deploy app-based customer service based on cost to procure and deploy, meeting the specific customer contact requirements of the business, and finding interaction with the best-suited contact center resources that are integrated both into the smartphone app and the host environment.

In our experience at AT&T Consulting, we find that the most actionable and accurate way for businesses to sort through these choices and find the solution that works best is with a comprehensive contact center strategy. A contact center strategy provides definitive and custom recommendations and a cost/benefit analysis that aligns with your business objectives and customer preferences.

Has your business added smartphone apps for sales or other customer contact?  Are you looking for ways to reduce OpEx costs and not reduce customer service?  We want to hear from you.  Please leave your comments below.

After that exercise, the promise of savings looked much less rosy.  What they didn’t realize is trunking is only half of the SIP story, and they were missing out on much bigger OpEx savings.

SIP: Cost Savings and TDM Comparisons

SIP often does provide cost reduction for trunking over traditional trunks.  And using IP in the contact center has it’s own benefits, including agent location independence, support of a single voice and data converged network and obsolescence avoidance.

But unlike prior protocols, SIP wasn’t designed to emulate TDM voice applications.  Now, the primary impact is on the contact delivery.  SIP sessions are designed so that users get access to SIP based applications regardless of their communications choices.  That means traditionally separate functions to deliver customer data (such as caller account numbers) no longer require a separate technology function, such as middleware.

In the past, CTI applications (Computer telephony integration) used middleware to execute translation routes to identify the call destination. It would find the computer endpoint associated with that agent, and then time the screen to pop at the agent’s computer at the same time the call rang the phone.  In this scenario, CTI historically was a complicated and inefficient proposition that required two separate networks to coordinate continually and consistently, often with mixed results.

That meant higher deployment, support and network costs with inconsistent customer experience (how do you feel when you’re asked to repeat the account number to the agent that you just entered into the phone?)

SIP Integration

SIP has the ability inherently to include attached data as just another element in the converged packets delivering the voice, without cumbersome additional applications.  When used for integrations, once a SIP contact is initiated and acknowledged, not only is the complexity of screen pop delivery significantly reduced (particularly for basic screen pop applications), but it no longer forces non-voice contacts to act like a phone call.

That lets multimedia touch-points, such as web chat and collaboration, mobility, and video perform naturally and efficiently.  All of these are needed to support today’s multi-channel savvy customer to conduct business in the manner they demand.

Some of the benefits of integrating SIP in the contact center include:

1. It allows an enhancement to the customer experience
2. Better support of the access channel (e.g. Email, web chat, social media, mobility, SMS, etc.
3. Support of the customer’s choice
4. Retaining customer interaction in low per-contact cost
5. Reduced cost per transaction.

SIP and Customer Interaction

SIP’s elegance means developing new customer interaction services or applications is less complex than in prior platforms.  Since SIP facilitates the re-use of code across channels, that permits accelerated application deployment.  This increases your speed to market for new opportunities and offers to your customers and thus increase your speed to revenue.

That same elegance enables growth and scale to react to business changes and needs at a faster speed to deployment and often at a reduced cost to complete. SIP can connect many of the dots of efficiency and revenue opportunity in today’s integrated and complex contact center.

I don’t want to give the impression that SIP integrations are simple, plug-and-play prospects.  The notion that SIP is a single protocol is misleading.  For example, SIP includes multiple standards — AT&T’s SIP implementation includes support for six RFCs, including how call transfers, DTMF handling, codec negotiation, error recovery, and other features are handled.

Also, SIP has optional extensions available and each equipment vendor is free to implement SIP as they see best.  That leaves interoperability challenges between different vendors, and there are multiple organizations working to develop standard SIP profiles.  As with any contact center project, I strongly urge you to use an experienced partner to plan carefully and specifically to your needs, and only then execute SIP into your contact center.

So, how do you get started?  Begin with a clear understanding of your business requirements to support today’s and tomorrow’s customers.

Have your business owners asked for a faster speed to deliver new services for your customer contact?  Are you charged with finding ways to reduce OpEx in your contact center, but SIP trunking alone isn’t quenching the thirst?  We want to hear from you.  Please leave your comments below.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into and influence public opinion in a changing climate.  Your current and prospective customers are likely talking about your products and services and those of your competitors on social media.

Gaining Insight & Knowledge…

Companies are realizing social media provides an opportunity to develop a competitive differentiator as social media provides insight into your customers’ and prospects’ perception of your company’s products and services.  You get the opportunity to listen into unfiltered opinions that are better than any focus group can provide.  This is due to the broader sample and insight from customers you want to influence at the time you want to influence them.

This gives you a great insight to identify symptoms of dissatisfaction or poor performance.  Then you can perform root cause analysis to improve product offerings and services, product bundling improvement or improve internal processes. Use social network mentions as an opportunity to mine an insight to your customer’s mindset.

Social media can be a rich source of knowledge for troubleshooting your own products and services and for generating new ideas.  Scrub this knowledge into trusted “single source” content before publishing it to your website and customer service organizations.

Companies are using their social networks to provide added services that have significantly improved their market share.   One financial institution has developed an online community to give financial advice not only from its employees but from other community members.  The excellence of this advice has become so noteworthy that it is credited as a key differentiator in the double digit market share growth the company has experienced since this initiative.

Social media also gives insight of the customer perception of your competitors too. This gives you opportunity to find competitive advantages for your products against your competition. It also provides an opportunity to identify weaknesses in your company’s offerings to better improve your competitive strategy.

Companies are also finding there’s a financial advantage to using social media and their customer contact strategy as well.  Companies are using social as a way to reduce expense.  They do this by providing proactive information (e.g., alerts to product or billing changes) or instructions (e.g., how do I begin using my new cell phone) that historically would have generated phone calls into the call center, the most expensive method of interaction, often by 20x.

How to Get Started…

What are the first changes a company should adopt?   The first and strongest is to plan before you execute. While every company has a unique combination of value proposition and customer demographics, there are good, universal best practices to incorporate in your social media strategy.  We’ve seen several companies either fail to address social media challenges to their brand or make a half-baked first step only to turn a small win opportunity into a PR failure.  Protect your brand by not ignoring social media’s impact.

Keep in mind that social media mentions are a window into conversation that is not yours, but that you are allowed to eavesdrop into.  Resist the temptation to engage to change perception or correct details.  Social network members prioritize freedom of thought first.  A strong response to a thread in a poorly received manner can deliver quite an undesired and negative reaction.

Pick the media that make sense for your business and prioritize your investments accordingly.  If your intent is to market your products or answer frequently asked questions before they are asked, the focus on “one to many” media such as YouTube or portals may be a good first step, for example.

Consistent Customer Experience…

Make sure your organization has the policies, technology, knowledge, process, and people in place to provide high-speed, high-quality customer service that is required by social media before jumping in. This is a good best practice in all things customer interaction related, but particularly with the visibility of social media in its “one to many” dynamic.

AT&T Consulting suggests as a good first practice to develop your listening skills first. By doing so, you’re able to gain a sense of the tone of the conversation and gather those valuable insights of what customers are saying about you and your competitors in this most open of focus groups. Once you gain a sense of where opportunities lie, you can then consider when to engage.

Once you’re ready to engage, the speed and quality of customer service responses need to be much higher in social media than in traditional channels. A delay in satisfactory responses to mentions in social media can begin to create a mob mentality. This can create many other mentions piling on to a perceived issue that may have been fostering.

The most effective way to ensure consistent service that breeds the desirable customer experience and to minimize risk of negative reaction is to unify social network support with traditional contact centers.  Unify social network support with traditional contact centers. A lack of this approach has created inconsistent and dissatisfying customer experiences and incomplete evaluation of the customer experience.

Brand-aware, customer-focused enterprises should be planning a unified approach to customer contact that includes social media. This allows contact center agents and online community managers to have a full view of traditional and social customer interactions, and customers don’t have to repeat information and recreate context as they go across social and traditional channels.

Ensure that you provide the right level of service across traditional and social channels—for example, a platinum customer should receive platinum service across traditional and social.  Customer loyalty is as important as ever in social media as it is in individual interactions. Be sure your valued customer feels valued.

To merge the traditional and the social together effectively and efficiently, AT&T recommends developing a holistic plan for customer contact using experienced resources, such as AT&T Consulting. Holistic strategies for customer contact should include social media to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk.

In upcoming posts, I’ll detail how to get started with incorporating these best practices into your customer contact strategy.

How does your company learn about your customer’s perceptions of your products or services?  Have you used social media in your personal buying decisions?  How has the input from a friend influenced you towards a company’s products?  Please share your thoughts in your replies below.

What does that mean to business today?

Today’s dissatisfied customer can tell all their followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn. Plus, YouTube provides a video way to vent frustrations.

16% of customers have already vented about negative customer service interactions through social channels. Social media has changed the influence of our voice to the companies we do business with.

What is Social Media?

Social media can be defined broadly as any method of using the internet to facilitate a “one to many” conversation.  Social media includes networks like Facebook and Twitter but also online communities, podcasts, RSS feeds, wikis, message boards, videos and more.

And don’t forget blogs! Blogs also have a strong community power to share experiences and opinions.  Blogs use subscribers to share their message and many have developed loyal followings.  As an example of influence, Universal McCann reports that 34% of bloggers post opinions about products or brands with 77% of all active web users regularly reading blogs.  Blogs also allow readers the opportunity to reply with their opinions and reactions, further extending influence.

So why does the change in your voice matter?  Loyalty brings profitability.  Profitability begins in year 3 of the customer/vendor relationship when acquisition costs to obtain new customers are not offset until the end of year two. Business spends significantly to identify the best prospects, build brand awareness, package attractive introductory deals, advertise the promos, secure the customer, process the transaction and deliver fulfillment in the initial stage of building the customer relationship.  When these expenses are compared to profit margins in the first year of transactions, the profit is often marginally offset by the acquisition cost.

A Gartner 2009 study identified a significant change in customer buying habits. For the first time, the most compelling influence to a customer’s buying decision is not industry analysts or buyer’s advocacy reviews.  It is certainly not media ads – only 14% of consumers believe them that’s when not fast forwarded on the DVR.  The primary influence factor is input from friends.

Why is it important for businesses to know about social media?

The most popular internet search sites today are Facebook and YouTube with 25% of search results for top world 20 brands as links to user-generated content.  Social media provides an opportunity to control the message about your products and services.

Social media offers marketing opportunities and the opportunity for improved customer relationships. Using social media in conjunction with customer contact presents high risk and opportunity for high reward.  Many companies have experienced negative customer response from short-sighted or poor interactions across social media. Even a non-response to a social media post can develop into a social maelstrom.

Customer interaction has a direct impact to corporate market value.  A recent Watermark study shows that, over the past 4 years, the top 10 companies which in deliver positive customer experience have seen an average increase in stock value of +19% compared against a 46% average loss in stock value of the bottom 10 companies who did not.

To achieve positive customer experiences, it’s important to provide a consistent level of service and information regardless of how the customer reaches out.  Inconsistent information creates dissatisfying customer experiences, which undermines the loyalty objective described earlier.

The easiest way to ensure consistent service that breeds the desirable customer experience is to unify social network support with traditional contact centers.  To do this effectively and efficiently, AT&T recommends developing a holistic plan for customer contact using experienced resources, such as AT&T Consulting.  Holistic strategies for customer contact should include social media to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk.

In upcoming posts, I’ll detail best practices in using social media for customer interaction.  If you are attending the Contact Center Association Conference & Expo in Phoenix where I’ll present on social media use in customer contact, I welcome further and direct discussions on this topic and how AT&T Consulting might be able to help you.

Have you used social media in your personal buying decisions?  How has the input from a friend influenced you towards a company?  Please share your thoughts in your replies below.

Call centers originated from necessity.  When call centers were first created, they were designed to handle calls a ‘first in – first out’ approach, which meant the first call which came in was literally, the first one answered. No other considerations were factored in, such as, the needs of the callers, the value of a particular call to the business, or the relative availability of the best ‘call taker,’ to efficiently answer the caller’s question.  Unfortunately, in many contact centers today, this is still the case.

With today’s advanced technologies and sophisticated capabilities, contact centers can now provide businesses with a wealth of valuable information, such as, the ability to identify who the customer is, the revenue potential or risk to the business, andthe caller’s intentions and needs. Savvy contact center managers can use this very specific data to determine  both the most cost-effective, and the most satisfying way to handle a customer’s request. To adequately respond to the needs of call center managers, and to provide them with this expanded data requires a detailed analysis in developing strategy and resource planning.

For example, an integrated contact center will utilize multiple technologies in order to achieve the results necessary to optimize the customer experience and maximize resource productivity. Consider call routing, for example… Unlike the original ‘first in – first out’ call delivery, today, automated call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing (ICR), and agent virtualization technologies are all used to collect information from the delivery carrier, or from the caller themselves, to understand the caller’s intent, value to the business, and appropriate answer resource. Each requires a detailed understanding of the relevant applications, integrations, and interactions necessary for comprehensive planning. Each of these core and peripheral technologies must be planned in detail for an actionable strategy.

The present day optimal strategy, is derived from a holistic view of contact center objectives, operations, and resources to provide the technology, processes, and people to  achieve  goals. The ideal strategy is designed only after understanding the needs of the business  to ensure that the contact centercapabilities, match the requirements of the business.  Resist the temptation to  design the solution set, before defining the needs.  We’ve seen many clients use a “wish list” mentality as the basis for including interesting features, which increased the solution price, and which ended up failing financial justification.

To properly align your efforts, you’ll need to determine what you hope to achieve by the transformation, with specific objectives.  As you enter the process of objective development, we suggest you use the Harvard Business Review model for SMART objectives.  That is, make each objective: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time bound.  This allows you to track the success of each objective, and to  optimize and support further efforts.  But we’ll get into more of that later.

Begin by defining the specific business functions to be supported by the center’s operations in it’s entirety.  By comprehensively listing each of the business functions supported, you begin to identify the areas which will be supporting elements in the business case for the transformation.  For example, logical business functions which may require some level of contact center functionality may include:

• Sales
• Customer service
• Help desk
• Tech support
• Order processing/entry
• Employee services/human resources
• Lead generation/telemarketing
• Scheduling/appointment confirmation

Each business function will have varying objectives which, hopefully, will support the overall corporate mission. Define your objectives for the transformation in keeping with the business mission. Use your company’s business objectives, to extract your specific goals of customer interaction, based on your customer segments such as business value, behaviors, or common intent, to develop quantified and prioritized recommendations. This approach will help you achieve your business objectives with lower cost, and with repeatable, desirable customer experiences.  This takes the ‘technology envy’ out of creating a technology plan.

The best way to elicit the information needed to determine the overall corporate mission, is to plan on conducting detailed interviews with each of the key stakeholders for each business supported. While this is a time-consuming task, it reaps high rewards in not only securing alignment to objectives, but also as an important initial effort in campaigning for a ‘buy-in’ to the final recommendations. Unless the business owners support your objective, your plan  remains only a plan, and will never become a reality.

Once the functions which will be supported by the contact center are defined, each of those functions should be extrapolated into specific requirements which each function will require, and which will support the activities performed.  For example, a key customer service objective is to complete a caller’s requests quickly. Thus, it’s essential to understand what the customer wants to accomplish in advance, in order to have the information source readily available to support that interest. Some level of automated interaction can allow callers to declare their interest, such as a desire to track order status, before the agent is involved.  This allows the callers to be routed to agents, who can use the advance knowledge to have the fulfillment or shipping screen already present on their workstation. For customer service functions, a caller intent identification is a key requirement. This feature may also be advantageous for other departments. By defining each level of requirement, against the department of function which will use it, the business case which includes this feature, has broader support, with more criteria contributing to the justification.

An important step in ensuring that a company can secure a customer’s loyalty (which Frederick Reichheld has shown translates into corporate customer relationship profitability,) is to ensure that customer  services are satisfying as well as  comparable to those provided by competitors.  Harvard Business Review demonstrated in 2004, that service quality has the highest impact on customers’ decisions to leave or stay with a company by a 5:1 ratio, over product features, or price. Be certain to perform market comparisons of the customer services offered by competitors, to benchmark the delivery of your services, to ensure you positively meet your customer’s expectations.

Today’s customers not only base their expectations against competitors, but they also base their expectations against other verticals and services.  Consider a consumer, who calls your center and experiences a five minute wait time before receiving an answer. In a tech support function, this 5 minutes may not be extraordinary in the vertical, but when compared by the customer against recent calls to other businesses, it may pale in comparison, and it  can also negatively affect the customer’s impression of the company. Relationally, it will negatively affect the perceived value the company places on their customer relationship.  This negative impression can carry forward to affect the next buying decision in either a conscious, or subconscious way.  When performing the benchmark analysis, include a comparison against customer service ‘best practices’ to maximize the customer’s perception of your service delivery.

Once the ‘services required’ are defined, it’s now important to consider the beginning point of the transformation. Unless you are developing from a Greenfield environment, you are likely to have a current investment in either technology or learned capital which will affect the cost and adoption of the new infrastructure.  Ensure you have a comprehensive inventory of your existing voice technology, contact center peripherals (e.g., workforce management, digital recording, performance analytics, quality assurance suites, training technologies, desktop interfaces, etc.)

Another important consideration is the varying models of satisfying the technology requirements, such as cloud-based (multi-tenant), hosted or premises based solutions, against your business criteria. This comparison, based on the specific criteria matching your business, provides a framework for the short list of potential solutions.

Information overload? Well, perhaps, but we’re just getting started.  In my next post, we’ll discuss the next steps which, include developing viable solution alternatives, defining applications, peripherals and integrations, optimizing adoption using a program governance model, and developing an implementation roadmap and business case.

Your Turn: Can you think of some other great practices for developing a Content Center Strategy? Get in on the discussion and leave a comment below!