Refine & Redefine

OI on oops! The Case of the Missing ‘Sorry’

In ‘OI on oops!’ series we talk about real life customer service bloopers and how to avoid them. We start with my own experience that I had last week whilst ordering for a lunch delivery to my office…

“Recently I ordered for a delivery of a sandwich and an iced tea from an internationally renowned quick service restaurant chain’s outlet located in the shopping suburb in Mumbai. The order was delivered almost an hour later. The ice tea was tasteless – the mix was inadequate. I called the restaurant, informed them about the ice tea and asked them to deliver it again. Without any hesitation I was promised an ‘ immediate’ delivery of another glass of iced tea. So far, so good!

But, the delivery reached me after another hour – by which time I had already consumed the sandwich. If this wasn’t enough, the delivery boy asked for the earlier glass of iced tea back (the glass was made of styrofoam). When he was informed that the earlier glass had already been trashed with its contents poured in the sink, he insisted on getting the glass back and asked if I could remove it from the bin. On my refusal to submit to such indignity, he offered to take it out himself. I could not allow him to do that either. I spoke to the restaurant manager and without sounding apologetic he says, “Let my delivery boy remove it from the bin.” This was utterly disgusting. You deliver a product of bad quality late, you further deliver the replacement product late again and then you expect the customer to give back the styrofoam glass as proof??!! Having lost my patience, I asked the delivery boy to leave… my mouth was already bitter with the taste of a bad experience with this brand and I know the next time I think of home delivery, I will not think of this brand.”

Let’s start by listing the negative interactions that I had with this internationally ‘ renowned’ quick service restaurant chain.

1. The delivery was an hour late.
2. The second delivery that was supposed to be their apologetic gesture was an hour late too.
3. They definitely didn’t trust the customer and wanted proof.
4. Asking a customer to go through the trash can or even offering to do so themselves is beyond-thinking-doubt a wrong step.

To show that you care about your customer’s experience means delivering on time, trusting your customer, apologizing for the mistake and showing that you care enough to delight your customer inspite of the mistake made.

Sending the second iced tea with an add-on item from their range of side orders like a cookie or a packet of chips would have resolved the issue. It would not only have re-affirmed their apology but it would surely have increased the prospects of turning the irate customer into a loyalist. An opportunity to gain a customer who advocates you over your competition should never be missed. All it required from the brand was to say ‘Sorry’ and mean it with their actions!

A very apt quote comes to mind - Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. – Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

Hello 2013

A new year always brings an opportunity for a fresh start. At Onion Insights, we have started this year by signing on as the Brand Showcase Partner for the Retail Leadership Summit (RLS) 2013. RLS 2013 will bring the thinkers and doers of the Indian Retail space on one platform. This is a part of our on-going support to the Retail Industry by sharing original ideas and practices on how Retailers can better their Customer’s Experience.

Another new start will be with our blog. We will be updating our blog more frequently than before by sharing our thoughts, pen our opinions and get your views – starting now. Of course, the core would revolve around Customer Experience.

This year our calendar too reflects on fresh starts. It focuses on 12 ways to refine and re-define your customer’s experience – one for every month. Overcoming challenges with innovation is what good business is all about and we hope that our 12 steps will help you provide a quality experience to your customers while boosting your bottom line. Here is a brief synopsis of the steps:

Step 1: Lead by example – Actions speak loudly. Make sure your actions reflect your views.
Step 2: Involve Your Customers – Ask the people to whom it matters to make your business matter.
Step 3: Engage Your Team – Involving people more means less contradictions to your views (devious isn’t it?!)
Step 4: Set Expectations – Written words create belief, and belief creates the product. Write. Believe. Act.
Step 5: Solicit Feedback – Ask and then ask again. Nicely.
Step 6: Be Customer Focussed – Processes, policies and thoughts should focus on customers. Tunnel vision helps.
Step 7: Provide Tools – Use technology. But don’t forget the Emotional Quotient.
Step 8: Empower Your Team – A “Yes, I can help” fixes customer complaints faster than “I will ask if I can…”.
Step 9: Measure What You Want Done – Galileo Galilei said, “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.” It still works.
Step 10: Recognize Performance – Never forget praise, and make it loud!
Step 11: Say Thank You – To everyone you can think of!
Step 12: Have Fun – Smile, enjoy and spread the cheer… it brightens faces and workplaces!

As a special offering to all our readers, we have made our calendar images available to everyone in the form of wall papers for your deskptops, laptops, smart phones. Below are the links provided for the downloads!

Signing off and hope we have been able to kickstart 2013 on a colourful note for you! Happy New Year!

Check your screen resolution and click on the link to download wallpapers for each month.

1. Standard Square Monitor Wallpapers – Resolution 1024x 768
2. 13inch Macbook Pro – Resolution 1280 x 800
3. 15inch Standard LCD Square Monitors – Resolution 1280 x 1024
4. 11inch Macbook Air – Resolution 1366 x 768
5. 13inch Macbook Air / 15inch Macbook Pro – Resolution 1440 x 900
6. 20inch+ Widescreen Monitors – Resolution 1600 x 900
7. 21.5inch iMac / Full HD 1080p – Resolution 1920 x 1080
8. 15inch Macbrook Pro with Retina Display – 2880 x 1800
9. BlackBerry Curve
10. BlackBerry Torch Slider
11. BlackBerry Bold
12. iPad 2 / iPad Mini
13. iPad with Retina Display
14. iPhone 4S / iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4th Gen
15. iPhone 5 / iPod Touch 5th Gen
16. Samsung Galaxy S3 / Galaxy Note 2

The Three Challenges for
Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service in my opinion is something a company MUST be prepared to do if they intend to also participate in social channels to market their products and services. If a brand launches a Facebook page, Twitter handle or sets out to conquer any other platform for marketing purposes they will get customer queries, and support questions. Smart brands have found ways to support these customers on these channels.

A few years ago when I was working on launching BlackBerry’s Social Customer Service program I was looking for examples and the most commonly referred to were Dell and Comcast. Just a few years later a quick search and you will find many more success stories including; Xbox (which recently became the first brand to reach 1 million tweets), Zappos, JetBlue, Starbucks, Best Buy and AT&T. Yet, a quick look at some stats, show how that while customers expect to receive responses to their complaints and questions, many companies are just leaving them waiting.

Social Customer Service is challenging. It is a large shift for many customer service departments who have often been running in the same manner, with the same tools, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and processes for 50 years. Taking what was always 1:1 to a very public model is scary and daunting. There are plenty of reasons why companies have failed to adopt social customer service. To triumph in social customer service you will need to be prepared to tackle three challenges: 1) Maintaining stakeholder support, 2) Accepted success measures, and 3) Scalability

Maintaining Stakeholder Support

If you are building out a customer service team for social media you will need not only initial support but ongoing support from your executives and partner departments. Social media customer service relies on teamwork with product, marketing, issue management and other teams. These relationships are crucial to ensuring customer feedback, complaints and concerns are dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

Understanding the needs of your partners, and stakeholders will help your social customer team provide value to the business. Which teams want to know when issues are bubbling up? How do they want to receive customer feedback? By providing continuous value with your partners and stakeholders you will maintain their support which will result in resources, budget and backing when you need it. You will need to create a sustainable practice of communication with your executives, your partners and team. Share success, challenges and roadmap through roadshows, reports, and regular meetings.

Accepted Success Measures

When you first launch a social media customer service team you will probably get away with saying “Look how many followers we are getting!” and “Isn’t this great what feedback we are getting from our customers?” This will suffice for your executives for only a short time. Eventually they will want your team to be measured against KPIs. A traditional call center would measure teams and individuals against a variety of KPIs all of which would be tracked on a scorecard. KPIs could include: Time to Response, First Call Resolution, CSAT, Average Handle Time, Average Hold Time, Quality Assurance and the total quantity of interactions.

By creating a score card for your team before your organization asks for it will allow you to show success and your continued progress. When possible find ways to include KPIs your customer service department is familiar with and uses. Some tools in the market will help you manage a number KPIs, but some KPIs such as “Average Handle Time” won’t make a lot of sense in the social space where a customer tweets to you and then walks away from twitter for a coffee break and in reality those aren’t terribly good KPIs to drive a positive customer experience. Instead look at CSAT, Time to Response, and Resolution. Consider working with your Quality Assurance team and developing a QA program that works for your social customer service reps.

Scalability

As you first build out the team you will have the newness and excitement on your side. You might be lucky and build a good sized team in a short period of time. If you measure success and performance you might have fewer challenges in building out a team to manage the influx of customer questions and complaints. But the organization won’t likely keep throwing resources against your team so you will need to find other ways to scale in the long-term.

We hear a lot about the inability to scale social customer service. However, I suspect similar conversations happened when companies started answering the telephone. How will we ever have enough people to answer the phone every time a customer wants to talk to us? Yet, social customer service has one added benefit….it can create an archive of answers that is searchable and when we help one customer we have the potential the help ten, a hundred or a thousand. When responding in social channels keep this in mind, and use the conversations with customers to drive content creation for your self-service options (forum posts, blogs, knowledge base and how-to videos). In addition use the conversations to fix what is broken. If you regularly get questions about a feature…maybe it isn’t as intuitive as you think it is!

The right tools can help you manage your engagement, success and content. Finally setting expectations with both customers and internal partners is crucial- what are your hours of operation? What questions will and can you answer? How quickly can they expect a response? Certainly the need for Social Customer Service will grow and the team will need to revise process, expectations and find additional ways to meet the customers needs. Finally never underestimate your army of employees or advocates!

While there are challenges to adopting social customer service there are businesses that have risen to the challenge to help their customers on social channels.

Source: Social Business News

Image Courtesy

Mobile Brands: Customer experience a priority

To this point, mobile may have been all about the convenience factor, but new research from OpinionLab finds that moving forward mobile will be about the experience – just as online and social have become. The data, conducted during the Forrester Customer Experience Forum, found that 84% of respondents believe a customer experience strategy is ‘as important’ in mobile as for other online experiences.

Regardless of whether the platform is a mobile device, tablet or computer, online customer experience is fraught with issues,” said Geoff Galat, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing with Tealeaf. “As is the case with fixed websites, how successful companies are with their mboile channels will depend largely on their customers’ ability to complete transactions easily.”

Other interesting findings include:

1. 87% believe online customer experience management should be a top priority.

2. 50% have customer experience as a top priority now, 50% plan to adopt a strategy soon.

3. 28% are adopting a CEM strategy to improve satisfaction, 19% to attract new clients.

Meanwhile, data from General Sentiment finds two mobile brands fighting to be the top global brands. Google, primarily known as a search engine, surpassed Apple as the top brands for Q2 2011. Google’s buzz factor has been helped along by the release of Google+, an increase in adoption of Google’s Android mobile platform and Chrome browser.

“The tech sector continues to drive the top ten brands as consumers tend to follow these companies closely and discuss new technology products heavily in social media sources,” said Greg Artzt, CEO, General Sentiment. “However new product innovations and strong earnings are driving brand value for non-tech companies.”

Google, Apple and Microsoft are the top three global brands for Q2, following by Mercedes-Benz and Ford. Yahoo, Sony, Intel, Canon and Panasonic are also in the top ten.

Source: BizReport
Image Credit: Benchmark

Blind Spots in Customer Service

Most financial institutions rely on complaint volumes as an indicator of the company’s performance in customer service. Conventional wisdom among executives suggests that declining complaint rates are desirable because they reflect fewer dissatisfied customers. As a result, many institutions develop strategies to address and resolve complaints in hopes of reducing the number of complaints received. Unfortunately this strategy overlooks an important part of the equation: Many customer irritants never make it to the formal complaint stage. In fact, a large percentage of customers who experience a dissatisfying interaction never voice concerns to their financial providers.

In December 2010, the Corporate Executive Board surveyed 5,000 financial services customers across seven countries to shed light on what happens when a customer experiences a dissatisfier. Our data show that financial institutions failed to meet the expectations of 31 percent of financial services customers in 2010. Furthermore, 35 percent of those dissatisfied customers never formally complained to their institution. To put this in context: For a midsized bank, “hidden dissatisfied” customers represent a $243 million revenue risk that executives are missing—a risk roughly the size of that bank’s annual technology and marketing budgets combined.

The root cause of this problem is that company emphasis on resolving formal complaints means that the issues of “hidden dissatisfied” customers often are never addressed. In fact, 65 percent of dissatisfied customers who did not complain did not have their issue resolved, creating customer-experience “blind spots” for the business. Despite withholding feedback, however, noncomplaining customers are as likely to defect to a rival institution as customers who took the time and trouble to formulate and submit a complaint. In other words, it’s not resolving the complaint that’s important, but resolving the problem, even if it must be done in lieu of a complaint.

ANTICIPATE AND FACILITATE COMPLAINTS
While the actions of the “hidden dissatisfied” may seem largely out of executives’ control, our research indicates that companies can significantly mitigate dissatisfaction for customers by doing two simple things once an issue arises:

1) Make it easier for customers to complain. Throughout the research process, we tested the factors that would affect the likelihood that a customer will not voice dissatisfaction to the financial institution. We took into consideration customers’ personal characteristics, characteristics of their problems, and characteristics of the institution. Of the three, institutional attributes such as availability of preferred channels and staff ability to provide assistance had the biggest impact on the likelihood that a customer will complain.

2) Identify dissatisfied customers in absence of complaints. While making it easier for customers to complain might increase the likelihood that customers will voice dissatisfaction, many progressive financial institutions have stopped relying exclusively on complaint data to drive their issue-management processes. These companies have identified such red flags as missed SLAs (service level agreements) and customer behavior patterns, which signal a potentially dissatisfied customer.

Keep in mind that while making it easier for customers to complain and identifying problems in the absence of complaints are effective ways to mitigate the negative impact of problems once they have occurred, Corporate Executive Board’s analysis suggests that for the average customer and the average problem, even the most outstanding problem resolution process fails to improve loyalty sufficiently to compensate for the loss of loyalty the problem generated in the first place.

Source: Business Week