in Customer Experience, Customer Service, Management

86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience

SURVEY RESULT: 86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience. So why do companies continue to cut customer service costs and increase spending on marketing?

Customer service is a hard job. I’ve previously discussed how customer service is harder than programming, but there’s something even harder than the work customer service people do day-to-day. Helping individuals and professionals see the value in their customer service people is even harder.

Stop Undervaluing Customer Service

RightNow Technologies conducts an annual Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, which shows the value of exceptional customer experiences and the value of great customer service for organizations. Here are some of the eye-opening customer service findings:

86% – The number of U.S. adults who will pay more for a better customer experience.

89% – The number of U.S. adults who switched to a competitor because they had a bad customer experience.

73% – The number of U.S. adults who said a friendly customer service made them fall in love with a brand.

There are too many organizations who are missing the opportunity to get the full benefits from customers service. John Kemp, Director of CRL Solutions, discusses how badly undervalued customer service is today.

Unfortunately Customer Service departments are often under resourced and under valued in the corporate hierarchy. They are perceived as a necessary evil of modern commercial life rather than an opportunity to get closer to customers; an unwelcome cost centre to be contained rather than adding value to corporate performance.

Customer service too often is just an entry-level job. It’s not job that you can just hire anyone off the street to come in, answer phones, and expect to get great customer service results. Great customer service, like being personable, likable, and being a good public speaker, is a talent and skill that needs to be learned, developed, and practiced. Real customer service is more than answering phones. Hiring just anyone to fill customer service positions is like just hiring any kid who can code to be your company’s programmer. The question becomes, are you REALLY getting value? Or are you just getting someone who can do some basic procedural tasks.

A quick reminder…

86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience.

RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte said,

“To thrive in today’s consumer-empowered environment, brands need to deliver the very best possible customer experiences when, where, and how consumers want it.”

Just because your CS college student can code, doesn’t mean that you’re going to get the very best developer. Just because a business student has taken business classes, doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best business decisions. Just because someone can answer phones or talk to customers, doesn’t mean that you’re going to get great customer service. 

Customer Service is a Professional Skill

Yes, it can fit the role of an entry-level position. But to organizations, that entry-level position means the world, even though it may not be recognized for it. When systems break, products fail, services fall short of customer expectation, it’s not the programmers phone that starts ringing. It’s customer service. 

Successful organizations realize that each member of the team is a contributor to the overall success of the organization. Time, effort, energy is spent in hiring for sales, marketing, IT, and programming, why not customer service? 86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience are you working on bringing in the very best people to make sure the experience you create for your customers is the very best?

in Customer Experience, Customer Service, Excellence, Management

Measure Quality, Not Call Time

If there’s one call center metric report that I abhor, it’s the call time report. I can’t think of another report, outside of accounting reports (sorry accounting folks, it’s not for me), that I find less useful for me as a manager. The reason why I can’t stand the call time report is because call time reports offer no indication on the quality of service. Too much time in call center and customer service management is wasted on the call time report.

Let’s face it. Long calls, don’t necessarily mean bad service, I’ve seen superstar customer support people spend hours on the phone with a customer resolving a customer issue. This is a good thing, we need to encourage engagement in our teams and taking the time needed to solve the problem. I’ve also seen the other hand where individuals not confortable with an issue will take much longer than needed to solve the problem, resulting in longer phone calls.

Measure Quality, Not Call Time

Traditional customer service call center metrics are terrible. Call center metrics today are too focused on usage of equipment and not on helping customers. That’s probably why customer service today is measured in customer satisfaction and not customer loyalty. Zappos, the online retailer, has a reputation for awesome customer service and customer loyalty, without resorting to your traditional call center metrics.

There are only 4 metrics questions you ever need to ask your customers. Evan Hamilton, at UserVoice, reveals the secret metric Zappos uses for customer service. Zappos doesn’t measure call times, in fact, they often tout stories about 6-hour support calls and referrals to competitor sites when they were out of stock of an item and some people look down on them for that. Or the dismiss it saying that it only works for Zappos. If you are focused on calls times and discuss that with your team members, you’re not focused on the customer. Fortunately, real customer service, customer-focused metrics aren’t hard.

The only 4 customer service metric questions you ever need to ask (call time is not one).

Customer-focused metrics are the gateway to great customer experience. Customers are looking for problems solved and not as much for a specific amount of time on the phone. Successful customer service is about creating great customer experiences where customers come away with a renewed sense of value from working with you, looking forward to work with you again, and willing and wanting to share about you with everyone they know. You don’t get that from a call time report. You can find how effectively you’re doing this by focusing metrics around these 4 key questions, notice that call time is not included in any of these:

  • Question 1: On a scale from 1 – 10: How likely would you be to recommend Zappos to a friend or family member?
  • Question 2: On a scale from 1 – 10: How likely would you be to request the person you spoke with again?
  • Question 3: On a scale from 1 – 10: How likely would you be to recommend this person to a friend or co-worker?
  • Question 4: On a scale from 1 – 10: If you owned your own business, how likely would you be to try and hire the person you spoke with?

Don’t throw out the call time report and other metrics. They can still be valuable.

Traditional call center metrics are valuable, in the right context. Call center metrics are part of the key to great customer service. Since great customer service and awesome customer experiences involve having team members available to work with customers, that’s where traditional metrics comes in, they give you an idea of where you need to staff people. But traditional call center call time reports should rarely be used with employees since they don’t give a full scope of the actual service being done. Instead, customer service and call center managers can implement the following practices for utilizing call time reports:

  • Review long-term call times (over 1 month is best since shorter times lend to inaccurate information).
  • Get average call times for your entire team (compare only employees working similar shift hours).
  • For team members with statistically significant higher call times, review longer phone calls and look for potential issues causing slower service responses.
  • Incorporate findings into your on-going regular individual employee training, but not specifically pointing out that the training is being done because of longer call times.
Why? Because you don’t want to have discourage employees from taking the time to help customers. You’re only addressing long call times if there is a legitimate need to address it. Good service is not a legitimate reason. That’s what you hope for. The next time you see the call time report, take a minute and think about what it really means. There’s a lot of good service taking place in those precious minutes.