By Randy Saunders

In the latest Customer Creation podcast, Blake Landau interviews Maura Sullivan and Rob Siefker from the Zappos call center management team.

Maura and Rob have both worked for Zappos since the ... Read More

Which of these statements is true?

Statement 1

Contact center employees are a vital link to the customer.  Through the way they exercise their talents, knowledge, and resources, they are uniquely positioned to influence customer perceptions of the enterprise and build or diminish the brand promise.

Statement 2

Contact center employees are among the most poorly paid and under- appreciated employees in the enterprise.  They have limited career growth opportunities, are measured and evaluated more frequently than any other group of employees, and incur the highest turnover rates.

Of ... Read More

By Randy Saunders

Convergys recently surveyed 5,000 customers on their attitudes towards their primary bank, both before and after last summer’s economic downturn. While many companies struggle in the global recession, financial institutions find themselves especially challenged in the current environment.

The Convergys research report, “Recent Trends in Retail Banking,” finds that while nearly 22 percent of respondents hold banks responsible for current economic conditions, this attitude is not having a significant impact on customer loyalty; good customer service remains the most important factor.

Key findings from the research include:

• Customer Service is Key – Nearly half of ... Read More
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By Randy Saunders

A recent Ventana Research report titled, "Customer Experience Management: Improving the Consistency and Quality of Customer Interactions," found that only “12 percent of organizations provide optimal [Customer Experience Management] CEM.”

In an era where “customers may be one annoying phone conversation or frustrating experience at a poorly ... Read More

By Dale Wolf

This post starts with some sad statistics. It then moves on to some very cogent advice from Pete Blackshaw. If you don’t know him yet, you will learn a bit about him and why he is very important to your business success. The post ends with a challenge. Don’t you just love challenges?

Dimension Data surveyed 300 call centers in 36 countries across five continents. The research shows that from 1997 to 2007, key performance metrics indicate a significant deterioration of quality of service in contact centers.

• Call abandon rates, due to long hold times, increased during the 10-year period by nearly 127 percent,
• The average time to ... Read More
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The airline industry on average makes it easy for all of us to complain. What customer experience? All we get is transportation from one city to another. The experience is dreadful. It is easy to rant on the airlines because they have, with a few exceptions, made themselves a target of our ranting.

An article by Ginger Conlon (Ending Contact Center Chaos) on the 1to1 Media Blog about Continental Airlines gives me hope. Wow, I did not know there was an airline anywhere in the US that still served an in-flight meal. I recently went from Cincinnati to San Francisco with a box of assorted snacks that I had to ... Read More

By Dale Wolf

A variety of different surveys indicate that at best only one in ten consumers have an outstanding experience when calling corporate contact centers. The other nine are average, mediocre or poor. The fact that I work for a company selling contact center technology brings an interesting observation. As much as we want to sell our solution, the reality is that providing a great customer experience on the phone is mostly about how you use the technology. Sure, you need certain features to enable agents to fluidly provide fast and accurate responses, but the customer happiness is about how company policies and whether the agent actually cares about providing the customer with a wonderful experience.

The features touted by ... Read More

AP reported that Sprint Nextel has cancelled service for customers it determined were calling customer service too often.

That is an interesting spin on the customer experience. We all know it is bad business to retain unprofitable customers, but typically one company’s unprofitable customers are another company’s best customers. A lot of the difference is in each firm’s business strategy and ability to deliver operational excellence.

It is also interesting to ponder if Sprint’s banished customers were penalized for trying to get what they paid for. Frequent calls to customer service can mean the company itself was and still is delivering poor customer service. And, as I’ve written here before, anyone who can figure out how their wireless ... Read More

We all have been witnessing the steady growth of contact center agents who work outside the main call center (remote agents). The main driver of this business trend is the need to reduce costs and to improve contact center efficiency. Secondarily, enabling remote agents supports recruitment of an increasingly diverse and distributed workforce.

But Aberdeen Group has discovered a new benefit for using remote agents. Best-in-class companies have seen a +10% improvement in customer satisfaction.

This might run counter to logic. The assumption is that on-premise agents can be more closely monitored for consistent customer care. The best-in-class companies overcome this by paying more attention to training and learning how to manage a ... Read More

By Marco Pacelli, CEO, ClickFox

How well do we really know our customers? With corporations investing hundreds of millions each year to improve the customer experience, management seems to have forgotten the main issue: serving the customer! Today’s contact centers crunch numbers and provide management with statistics on how much has happened in a given time period. The focus on crunching numbers has caused today’s contact center to morph into a well-oiled machine — cold and robotic.

We have all been taught, "customers are number one," "the customer is always right" and "a company is its customers." So why have so many senior executives lost touch with their core values and entrusted their most ... Read More