Nine Quick Steps for Fixing Your Customer Experience

This article, exclusive to Call Center IQ, draws on research from "Nine Easy Steps for a Quick Customer Experience Tune-Up." Download the free, must-read e-book, courtesy CustomerManagementIQ and SAP, now!

A simple myth enables thousands of consultants and corporations to drive billions in revenue: aggressive change is needed to overhaul the customer experience. Organizations with stagnate—or fading—customer satisfaction are led to believe that investment into new technology and drastically-different strategies, overseen, of course, by pricy consultants, is the only definitive answer for turning things around.

Certainly, some consultants and customer experience designers can work wonders in transforming organizations. And, indeed, some technology offerings are pivotal to understanding and acting on the voice of the customer. But, at the end of the day, immense improvement can be had simply from making minor tweaks to how leadership frames certain customer management issues.

For the most part, these minor tweaks require minimal upfront investment, re-training and re-structuring. Instead, they merely require a perception shift, taking existing customer service practices and initiatives but managing them through the eyes of the customer. Organizations do not necessarily need different reps or different CRM systems to become more customer-centric; they simply have to commit to managing these organizational elements against a voice of the customer gradient, rather than an internal operations one.

The "Nine Easy Steps" whitepaper from Bloomberg and SAP, available for free download at Call Center IQ, highlights the following quick steps for tuning-up the customer experience. The analysis and framing is exclusive to CCIQ.

Get rid of a silly rule, practice or procedure
What makes sense in the boardroom does not always make sense on the phone or at the customer service desk. Too often, these rules end up frustrating customers with little—or no—return benefit for the business.

When focused on the customer experience, the worst thing organizations and leaders can do is take unnecessary pride in their "rules." Instead of feeling as though they need to defend policies that frustrate customers, they should instead look for more customer-centric alternatives.

Remember, the goal is not to prove how well one can debate his company’s rules—it is to make the customers happy.

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Establish personal connections
At the end of the day, customers have no choice but to accept reality—they are numbers to an organization. They are tickets to more revenue, more profit and a better position within the market.

But, down economy or not, customers still do not want to feel like numbers. They want to know that businesses truly value their business and that, if they require support, the support comes from a legitimate desire to help—not a fear that the customer will share an unresolved issue with friends via social media.

The key here is in the logic behind customer service interactions. Call center agents and sales representatives should view their customers as humans first and issues or revenue opportunities second. From engaging in honest, no-pressure conversations to moving away from the robotics of most conflict resolution strategies, the front-line shows that it values the customer as an individual with whom it wants to build a stronger relationship, not a problem it needs to hurry off the docket.

Monitor and address online discourse
Even though data suggests customers do not necessarily go online looking for complaints about brands, they’re still human—and they’re still drawn to negativity and statements of outrage. Monitoring of online discussion and social media mentions is essential for controlling the brand image and preventing negative perception from spreading. Valuable tools exist for social monitoring, and many do not require significant investments.

The need for online sentiment monitoring is not only driven by fear. Organizations also need to be sure they are responding to questions in a timely fashion; similarly, they need to assure all positive mentions are on the radar. Praise for a brand may not typically be sexy enough to generate headlines, but if a brand does its part to interact with those who appreciate its products, it can position itself favorably within social networks while also building strong relationships with potential advocates.

Over the long-term, most companies will be able to rebound from isolated bad experiences if they react properly. The benefits of brand advocacy, however, can prove valuable indefinitiely.

Value the community
Online fan communities represent tremendous opportunities for brands. They provide marketing opportunities, customer insights and, ultimately, the chance to influence those who, in turn, influence the market about the brand.

Some have no place for corporate representatives—in such cases, the corporation should assume a passive, monitoring role. And when the community is welcoming of the corporation, the reps need to approach the group as human "fans" in their own right.

This does not mean they should try to invisibly, organically weave their way into the discussion—upfront identification and honesty often make for the best strategy. It does, however, mean that they should be mindful of what a fan comes to expect from brand and product communities. They should speak the language of the customer, delivering messages in "fan speak" and refraining from overtly-formal, overly-exploitative marketing announcements.

If done right, the strategy will help community members see the organization and its staff as fans themselves; as people who are truly passionate about the product and its supporters and are thus willing to continually improve the user experience.

Drive internal passion
The best way to determine if your culture has fallen off the customer-centricity track? New customer experience directives are trickled down to the representatives as "tasks."

Actual management and work delineation is undoubtedly needed in the customer service function, but the real secret to improving the customer experience is assuring the staff feels connected to the evolution. They should see their feedback and experiences translated into organizational canon; they should know that as the face of the business, they are valued and relied upon as customer experience improvement drivers.

When confident that their feedback is put into action, the employees will become more passionate about the customer experience. They will more greatly value their customer interactions, knowing the insight will provide the feedback necessary to drive change. And they will actively share feedback—"waiting around for the boss to give instructions" will be a thing of the past.

Most central to this cultural shift is the notion that customer satisfaction is the benchmark. Sure, metrics like average handle time, first call resolution and upsell revenue might signal the type of customer experience the reps are creating, but the staff needs to ultimately see its role as satisfying the customer. If the culture does not treat the experience as the Holy Grail, it will produce an army of robotic reps uninterested in going above and beyond to strengthen the brand.

Know your industry is not always best
A key competitive advantage comes from delivering a better customer experience than the competition. But in today’s world, that is only part of the battle.

Many customer experience principles know no industry bounds. Many of the principles that made companies like Zappos, Apple and Disney successful at forging customer relationships will work in all industries; and as customers increasingly interact with these universal "customer service leaders," they are going to expect that kind of service in all interactions. They will not say, "The rep was rude to me, but it’s a cable company, so it’s fine."

Customer management leaders should be benchmarking against and adopting practices from customer-centric organizations in all industries. They should not simply be trying to crown themselves the least-spoiled jug of milk in a broken refrigerator.

Utilize transactional surveys
There are mixed thoughts on the right and wrong ways to survey customers after interactions. One that falls more in the former category is the transactional survey, which is given to customers immediately after they purchase something from a website.

This survey is particularly-effective at capturing those who dealt with something negative en route to making the purchase, and it provides the ability to either directly and instantly respond to the customer (if something truly troubling went wrong) or file the feedback for future brainstorming.

You can’t beat ‘em, so join ‘em
One of the biggest mistakes many organizations have been making, especially amid the rise of social media, is trying to be TOO clever and creative with their strategies.

Whether the optimal scenario or not, many customers and communities have flocked to certain communications channels, and they would much prefer companies interact with them in these forums. After all, if a company is truly committed to serving a company, shouldn’t the service happen on the customer’s terms?

Case-in-point: World Wrestling Entertainment, which is now one of the biggest advocates of Twitter in the entertainment world, previously stumbled with an attempt to create its own "WWE Universe" social network. Once it accepted the reality that customers do not want to expand beyond their Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, its objectives were far easier to achieve.

Analyze data at all turns
Customer experience data is irrelevant until organizations have context about what it means. Proper use of analytics, even if the methodologies and tools are simple and free, is essential for turning raw customer feedback and information into actionable insights.

Image credit - Relativity Media's "9"