• Making Customer Interactions Efficient, Consistent Through Process

    At RiverStar, we believe that every customer interaction is fundamentally a process with a very specific objective. Objectives may stem from customer requests — such as billing inquiries or troubleshooting — or company outreach — such as customer satisfaction surveys or upselling. By creating processes around these tasks, you are ensuring consistency and efficiency in your customer service operations, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

    A process is nothing more than a sequence of logical steps that help you achieve an objective. It can be very simple or very complex, but regardless it should follow a structure, taking the customer from introduction to resolution. As the customer service provider, it’s up to you to make sure the results match the objectives as closely as possible.

    For example, Blue Casa Communications needed a more efficient process for addressing customer issues. While the information that agents needed was readily available, the multiple systems could be cumbersome to navigate. Blue Casa sought a process-based tool to ensure consistent customer treatment, triggered by rule-driven dialogs that guide agents through addressing customer needs. RiverStar worked with Blue Casa to develop a solution that helped the telecommunications company increase first-call resolution by 25 percent. By creating a process with consistent steps and an integrated system, Blue Casa was able to resolve more of its customers’ issues quickly and easily on the first try.

    RiverStar solutions make it easy for you to implement processes for your customer interactions that can evolve over time. We can help you integrate your systems so that they deliver the information your agents need when they need it. We can implement logic and rules that eliminate the need for agents to ask customers for background information on every call. As you gain a better understanding of how the process is impacting your customer service and identify new opportunities for efficiency, you’ll have the ability to enhance and customize the solution even more.

    Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you add consistency and efficiency into your customer interactions using a process-based approach.

    October 25, 2013 Blog Comments Off on Making Customer Interactions Efficient, Consistent Through Process

    6 Pieces of Research Every Customer Service Pro Should Know

    Looking to make your point in a presentation about customer service? Trying to sell the case to the boss about why he or she should really care about the customer experience? Considering a foray into social customer service? How about some facts and figures about Social CRM? Stats make a good argument, and help give you instant credibility. On top of that, they are interesting and fun to read. Here are a few that you may find valuable whether you are making the case to the executive team or simply writing a blog post.

    1. Good customer service = Bottom line results.

    • Stat(s): A majority (61%) of Americans report that quality customer service is more important to them in today’s economic environment and will spend an average of 9% more when they believe a company provides excellent service.
    • Source: American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, August 2010

    2. Poor customer service = Lost customers.

    • Stat(s): 17% will leave you after a single service mess up; 40% will leave you after two blunders and 28% will leave after the third mistake. That adds up to an overwhelming 85% of your business that could potentially be lost due to poor customer service.
    • Source: BIG Research, Jun 2010

    3. Declining consumer use of telephone as a support channel = increasing use of self service as a support channel.

    • Stat: 45% of consumers prefer to communicate with customer service over NON-telephone channels (i.e. web self service, social media, email, etc).
    • Source: Ovum, Genesys “Global Cross Channel Survey”, March 2010
    • Stat(s): 36% of online US customers crave self-reliance for service. That preference is even stronger among younger customers: 46% of 18- to 29-year-olds and 42% of 30- to 42-year-olds prefer to be self-reliant. Only 28% of respondents prefer to resolve a service issue by speaking to someone on the phone.
    • Source: Forrester Research
    4. Multi Channel Customer Interactions = Need for integration and process centric technology platforms
    • Stat: 85% of the contact centers observed by Gartner indicated that the multiple interaction channels are not synchronized.
    • Source: Gartner, February 2010

    5. Delivering integrated and actionable Insights to a Unified Agent Desktop = Reduced Agent Training Time.

    • Stat: The technology behind interaction guidance involves systems that extract data regarding the customer and the products owned by the customer, and suggest the best flow for the dialogue. Automating the assembly of actionable information on the Agent Desktop can result in agent training time dropping 25% to 40%.
    • Source: Gartner, February 2010
    6. Social Media Monitoring and Engagement = Mainstream consumer and enterprise adoption by 2014.
    • Stats: By the end of 2014, 45% of contact centers will have integrated some type of social media support – monitoring social networking sites for mentions of a company/product, responding to blog or Twitter posts with an invitation to participate in a survey, incorporating tweets as a means of communicating directly with the contact center (currently, between 6.5% of contact centers have a Social CRM Strategy in place).
    • Source: DMG Consulting, July 2010
    • Stat: 79% of the Fortune 100 are already present and listening (over social media platforms), using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers.
    • Source: Burson-Marsteller Evidence-Based Communications Group

    These are just a few pieces of research that can help guide your customer initiatives. Making note of them may help you stay away from becoming a bad customer service viral phenomenon.

    August 23, 2012 Blog Comments Off on 6 Pieces of Research Every Customer Service Pro Should Know

    I’m a Contact Center, Not a Cost Center!

    Is it really possible to delineate between a pure cost center and a pure profit center at the contact center level?  For example, if I’m a contact center that is solely assisting customer problems with my product, it’s likely to show up on the balance sheet as an expense.  But what if that customer-to-agent interaction consistently delivers exceptional customer experiences?  That won’t show up on the balance sheet either, but it may eventually as future sales because those customers who have received stellar experiences from the contact center will remain a loyal customer and an advocate of your brand.  The data from analysts and consultants reinforces this line of thinking, have a look at Jon Picoult’s article on customer experience return and Bruce Temkin’s post regarding the correlation between customer experience practitioners and stock return.

    A rather mature trend in the contact center world is to have up sell and cross sell offers worked in to the customer interaction work flow. This is an obvious option to generating more revenue and a great opportunity for consumers to derive more value from your products or services over the course of the customer journey, thus enhancing their experience.  Revenue generation doesn’t end with programs for up sell and cross selling in the contact center.   Revenue generation in the contact center begins and ends with the customer centric strategy and tools you employ to support these initiatives. When all’s said and done, enhancing the experience creates more loyalty to your organization, which results increasing the life time value of that customer. The simplistic way of viewing this is to say “customers will buy more products and services from your business when you deliver better experiences than that of your competitors”.

    You may refer to your contact center as a cost center or profit center, but I encourage you to look at the contact center as the delivery mechanism for outstanding experiences which keep customers coming back.  Let the accountants and finance pros identify cost efficiencies and profit opportunities in the product or service.   The caveat is that no cost cutting should come at the expense of the customer. The tricky part is finding the mix of strategy, processes, technology, and people that create operational efficiencies that keep costs managed and the customer experience in an ideal state. In pulling it all together, start treating your contact center as a contact center, not a cost center.

    April 6, 2012 Blog Comments Off on I’m a Contact Center, Not a Cost Center!

    Humility Is a Great Customer Service Strategy

    How many times have you had to listen to explanation upon explanation as to why you received a poor customer experience?  My guess is more times than you have heard, “Sorry, we made a mistake”.  Until companies are run by robots, there will always be mistakes.  Simple mistakes can be costly to a business, but mistakes that cost you a customer can be a permanent loss of future revenue, let alone the damage to your reputation should the customer create a YouTube video or publish a tweet to their 20,000 followers.

    Social media has only enhanced the need for humility.   For example, look at the humility shown by Domino’s Pizza in their new ad campaign that uses traditional media, YouTube, and Twitter to win back customers. They have the CEO admitting that their pizza was not good, with screenshots of tweets that claim “Domino’s pizza tastes like cardboard”.  I have no empirical data as to the results of this “humility” campaign, but I can say that I have ordered a Domino’s pizza because of it. Let’s be honest, being from Chicago, Domino’s can’t compare to Lou Malnati’s and Gino’s East, but for $5.99 you’ll be happy with it.

    It would be interesting to see how Domino’s is leveraging technology to improve the customer experience and the role it played in admitting to their faults. Unfortunately we cannot program a “humility” module into our software. However, an effective customer experience platform can help you identify the customers that need to hear “sorry”.  With that first step, you have a great customer service strategy.

    January 21, 2012 Blog Comments Off on Humility Is a Great Customer Service Strategy
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