Four Steps for Optimising Customer Service Operations

 

Customers want efficient, effortless service from the touchpoint and communication channel of their choice. They want to receive accurate, relevant, and complete answers to their questions upon first contact with a company.

 

Forrester data backs this up: Sixty-six percent of customers agree that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. Forty-five percent of US online adults will abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question. Why is it so important to deliver on customer expectations? Customer satisfaction correlates to customer loyalty, and loyalty has economic benefits.

 

Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue. Conversely, poor customer experiences are costly: Our data shows that 75% of consumers move to another channel when online service fails, which can incur a cost of many millions of dollars.

 

We also know that it is difficult to deliver customer service in line with customer expectations. Our customer service technology ecosystem is increasingly complex. Social technologies have disrupted traditional communications, and smartphones and tablets have made the delivery of consistent experiences across touchpoints more challenging. And the number of vendor mergers and acquisitions has complicated vendor selection.

 

So how do you do better? Forrester’s customer service playbook details a four-step prescription that can help you out:

 

Discover what matters for customer service. Understand customer-facing, agent-facing, and technology trends that are shaping the future of customer service-trends like changes in communication channel usage by demographic, mobility solutions for customer service, the value of tighter coupling of knowledge management to case management, BPM adoption, the rising importance of outsourcing, cloud-based technologies, and the evolving technology landscape.

 

Plan for improvements. Assess your current operations against best practices to understand your strengths and pinpoint areas of opportunity. This will help you build a concrete plan for improvements and lay out a technology adoption road map. It will help you answer questions such as

“Do I first fix my IVR navigation, launch web self-service, or update my case management solution?”

 

Act on your findings. With your planning in place, it’s time to choose whether to outsource customer service operations and/or technology, buy it from a vendor, or, in unique cases, build it yourself. This decision is very important, as the vendor landscape is broad, mature, and rife with mergers and acquisitions. Partnering with the right technology provider can make or break your operations.

 

Optimise. Customer service is no longer viewed as just a cost centre. Key success metrics have historically focused on productivity, efficiency, and regulatory compliance instead of customer satisfaction. However, forward-thinking organisations are gradually adopting a Balanced Scorecard of metrics that include not only cost and compliance, but also customer satisfaction, which is more suited to drive the right agent behaviour and deliver outcomes better aligned to customer expectations.

 

Customer Experience Is Greatest Untapped Source of Profits

Courtesy - Computer world


Analyst firm Forrester claims that customer experience is the greatest untapped source of profits in business today, and that projects commissioned to target this are putting pressure on technology departments.

Harley Manning, co-author of “Outside In: The Power of Putting your Customers at the Centre of your Business”, told Computerworld UK that companies need to rethink how they approach customer experience.

“If you look at customer experience from the perspective of what it can do to decrease your costs, what it can do to increase your revenue, and then look at the return on investment from doing those kind of projects, then the discussion of customer experience happens on a very different level and you realise that is probably the greatest untapped source of profits in business today,” said Manning.

“If you set out to be the best in the world at marketing you would struggle because it is a mature discipline and well understood. However, if you said you are going to focus on providing a better customer experience than your competitors, suddenly you are competing in a different arena.”

Manning said that it is hard to assess your systems internally to understand what impact they are having on the customer’s experience, and as a result the technology department should take an ‘outwards-in’ perspective, whereby it assesses every point at which the customer interacts with the business.

“Take each of those touches that the customer has with your company. Perhaps in a retail location, over the phone, on a website, on a mobile app—looking at whether the underlying people, processes, policies and technologies that contributed to the experience that the customer had at each of those points makes you quickly realise that you have an opportunity to do very specific things with technology to improve that experience,” he said.

Bill Band, principal analyst for Application Development & Delivery at Forrester, agreed with Manning and said that companies are beginning to waken up to the benefits of making customer experience a priority, which is placing pressure on IT departments.

“Improving customer experience is putting new demands on technology departments. In particular, one thing that I have noticed is that the projects that get backing tend to cluster around digital interactions with customers because in this day and age a lot of these revolve around mobile or web.

“As a result, a lot more technology-heavy projects are being commissioned around these customer experiences,” said Band.

“Also, the role of technology employees inside these organisations is changing as companies start to focus more on the customer experience. Technology employees have to become more strategic,” he added.

“There is more of a spotlight being placed on the IT organisation to help execute business strategy. So it’s no longer about maintenance and support, these people are now important strategic assets. A lot of them are moving out of pure IT roles into business technology roles and are moving closer to marketing/sales business units.”

The book will be published on 28 August and includes more than 80 case studies from across 15 industries in 16 countries, including examples from Boeing, E.ON Energy, FedEx, T-Mobile and Virgin Media.
 

8 Levels of Information Technology Security

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What is Quality?

Quality is meeting customer expectations, simple as that.


Sourcing managers are frequently polled on their satisfaction with their services relationships. And usually more than half, sometimes closer to three quarters, say they are dissatisfied. Their expectations are not being met. Trillions of $ are spent every year on services that do not deliver the quality required.

That level of failure is dramatic and suggests an industry in crisis one would assume. What are these failures? What’s being done about them? Is it in service delivery, performance, continuous improvement objectives, tools or process, threat or issue management, knowledge management or the relationship itself? Incompetent service providers are at fault surely, perhaps it is unreasonable customers, or maybe outsourcing just does not deliver on expectations.

Some sourcing managers are satisfied however, a minority it seems, but for some there are competent providers, customers are reasonable and outsourcing delivers on its promise. Something is making a difference.

The darkest secret of outsourcing is that in the majority neither customers nor service providers make the necessary investment to ensure that quality expectations are met. They invest massively in production systems, ticketing systems, people (advisors and consultants at least, not so much in talent development and training), ERP add-ons, in sourcing projects and the commercial engagement.

However, neither party spends anything like the right amount of time and effort on the core capabilities required to ensure that attention is being paid all day every day to the small stuff – measuring things, understanding what matters, identifying issues, spotting potential problems and assigning actions, ensuring accountability is set and responsibility taken, change is planned for (and recognized when it happens), that the correlation, or more simply, the connection between things is thought about and acted on. The core capability is governance.

It is this small stuff that makes the difference in the end. Doing this small stuff well all the time is how the Service Provider shows they care, they pay attention, and they want to do better. If the culture of the customer is ‘this stuff matters and we pay attention to it’, that will be reflected in the attitude of their people and how they expect service providers to behave. This is hard work not through complexity, or the intellect required, but because it is repetitive, time and effort, tedious maybe, stuff that is not usually considered high value, or strategic. It only becomes that when things go wrong. It is not difficult work for the most part, and the preparation and care required to get it right at the beginning is relatively easily done. The hero who resolves the big problem of the day is lauded. The person who makes sure the problem never happens gets scant recognition. The result of not doing this well is poor quality, always. People can define this but it cannot be done reliably without a technology enabler. Because this is what technology is good at, consistently doing things the same way all the time. What’s this called? Good governance.

Using an enabling technology to support the Governance of your services engagements and experience quality, is the best investment you will make? The world smartest outsourcing relationships rely on technology to ensure quality.

Penalties and rewards in Telco Managed Services contracts

A lot of our time is spent helping Service Providers and Operators create a framework for managing what is most important to both businesses.

 

From a commercial point of view this is crucial because the Service Provider’s performance against agreed KPIs will determine service-level penalties and rewards paid by the Operator. We have seen interesting differences in Managed Services contracts of varying sizes around the world in terms of the Operator’s approach to penalties and rewards.

 

Here’s a typical example:

 

• KPI success >= 99.97% – reward of 5%
• KPI success >=99.93% but <99.97% - no reward, no penalty
• KPI success <99.93% but >=99.88% – penalty of 5%
• KPI success <99.88% – penalty of 10%

 

In this case hitting 99.97% and above gives a 5% reward to the Service Provider, whereas failing to hit 99.88% gives a penalty of 10%.

  

We have seen some contracts where there is no provision for reward but only small penalties; others where the balance is relatively equal; and others still that have enormous potential upsides and significant penalties for underperformance.

 

It is difficult to draw any universal conclusions or patterns in these approaches because it depends on so many different factors, including the maturity of the outsourcing relationship, the difference in size and importance of the Service Provider and the Operator, the level of development of the country’s infrastructure, and the experience of the individuals involved.

 

However, we are starting to see the discussion on rewards and penalties being framed as part of a wider debate about moving from technical network KPIs to end-to-end metrics that genuinely reflect the Operator’s business objectives, because it is far more satisfactory for both parties to link the Service Provider’s rewards to KPIs that represent tangible business benefits that the Operator can derive from the Managed Service.

 

So, when setting up this sort of discussion, make sure you incentivise and penalise behaviour that you want to control, and be fair, in order to avoid running into problems with the relationship later in the contract period.

 

Enabling good governance in a Managed Services contract

Managed Services 2.0 demands good governance to be successful. More than half of all outsourcing engagements fail: 20% in the first 2 years and a further 30%+ are not renewed (Gartner Group Survey Nov 2011).


Good governance is about control over processes and control over information. When done well it enables the customer to communicate and then measure its service provider’s performance against its expectations. It clearly establishes the framework within which an operator expects its managed services providers to innovate, and it demonstrates the alignment (or otherwise) between both businesses.

It has the additional advantage of building evidence-based cases for targeted investment in the network by service providers; and it clearly illustrates the impact of poor network performance on meeting business objectives.

Good governance ensures that attention is being paid all day every day to the details that matter:

o Measuring things
o Understanding what important
o Identifying issues
o Spotting potential problems and assigning actions
o Ensuring accountability is set and responsibility taken
o Change is planned for (and recognized when it happens)
o The correlation, or more simply, the connection between things is thought about and acted on.

An enterprise with strong governance will be able to look at its most important processes such as project delivery or customer service and understand clearly the risk of the process failing.

In Managed Services contracts the risk of a process failing can lead to penalties, clients not renewing eight-figure contracts, and even legal liabilities due to not hitting certain KPIs or SLAs.

But in those contracts it is not just the risk of process failure that can result in contracts not being renewed – poor control of information can lead to the same result.

Handling governance consistently well is hard, painstaking, essential work, and technology is the only answer.