Bill Price

Companies that shirk customer experience during down economies do it at their own peril, providing ample reason for their customers to experiment with other providers and switch allegiances. Instead, this is precisely the right time for companies to reinvest in customer experience, cleansing their system of all "dumb contacts" and their underlying reasons and retraining all of their customer-facing employees to exhibit appropriate empathy, and to look for potential customer defection.

After all, these employees are probably also affected by the downturn, nervous about their futures, so if they feel neglected it will come across to the customers and most likely lead to their turnover once the economy rebounds.

Reduce Customer and Employee Stress

Let's look at two steps that companies can take to reduce customer and employee stress during the down economy.

The first, big step to take is to eliminate "dumb contacts." What are dumb contacts? Put...

Contact centers today talk a whole lot about empowering agents, investing in their skill development and reducing escalating attrition. Unfortunately, most companies are unable to track individual customer contacts and attach crisp, actionable performance measurement and management to them. Instead, they still overly rely upon "the old ways" involving hard technical metrics emphasizing speed and quantity to track and manage "average" agent performance.

It has become all too easy to judge those agents who have the highest contacts per hour, the lowest minutes per incident or the highest sales per hour as the "best" performers, just based on the average time they spend on the phone with customers: the average handle time.

The problem is that those...

It still amazes me how many customer service operations still do not display complete purchase history and contact history with their customers. Hasn’t this been available for more than 10 years now? What might be new is adding IVR and web hits to classic inbound phone, email, and chat contacts—maybe even more important since a failed IVR or web self-service interaction means that the 1st call or email or chat already represents the 2nd contact—so achieving “first contact resolution” is already impossible.

So if you’re not displaying purchase and contact history for your customer-facing agents, do it! Soon!

But there are fun ways to present these histories, using technology even more to power up customer management. One way is to add how important each customer is to your company (after all, “all customers are not created equal”, as I’ve been preaching more >15 years now). Your CRM system can easily add a field that shows a rosette or star...

Almost every company in the last two years has told me “our products [or services] aren’t really very different from our competitors’, so we have to differentiate based on delivering great customer experiences … so how in the heck do we do that?”

Good question, and the reality for too many companies today. Bill Taylor addressed this challenge in his article in The New York Times four years ago (“Companies Find They Can’t Buy Love with Bargains”), lamenting that years of innovative product development hasn’t budged customer satisfaction scores. Why, you ask? Well, I keep running across this situation:

• Marketing and IT create all sorts of new stuff that we might need, asking “the market” to sort the wheat from the chaff, thereby confessing that there will be failures and that’s part of the game.
• Customer Service keeps hearing all sorts of wants and needs from customers who call, email, send chat messages, and otherwise contact them, but Marketing and...