Are You Enjoying The Ride?

By Donna J. Malone
President & CEO – AFFINA

I recently attended a conference where speaker and author Steve Gilliland talked about how too often we focus on the destination rather than enjoying the ride. This is the time of year when that happens more than ever. It’s easy to get so focused on planning for the holidays that we forget to enjoy the simple pleasures in each day. How many times have you felt like you spent countless hours planning a holiday celebration that was gone in the blink of an eye – I know I have felt that way more times than I would like to admit.

I am a list maker so typically almost everything in my life starts with a list. This time I made a list with the goal of spending the last two months of 2009 enjoying the ride rather than focusing only on the destination. It’s simple, make a list of the 5 people you are most grateful for and the 5 things you enjoy doing most. Then, next to each name, write down how many hours a day you spend with that person or doing those things you enjoy. You may need to look at hours in a week since many of us don’t spend our time in the ways we would like.

If you are happy with your list, congratulations, you are clearly enjoying the ride! If you wish your list looked a little different, the good news is there is someone who can change it, and that person is you! Remember not to get so caught up in focusing on your next destination that you forego changes that will make the ride more enjoyable. Perhaps more than anything we need to remember to make the changes we want today, because we never know what the future holds.

In business, it’s no different. What changes would drive positive results for your company? What’s on your list of tasks to complete today? Are there ways to wow your best customers and find new ones? Will they make the ride more enjoyable, solidify your customer relationships, and make an impact on your business?

Life is too short! Make your list, get changes made, and ensure you are enjoying the ride.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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What are People Saying Online about Your Brands, Products, and Promotions?

Why Social Media Strategies Should Integrate with Customer Care.

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director – AFFINA

Imagine a never-ending, virtual focus group during which your customers openly share candid feedback and opinions on your products, promotions, and brands. Let’s say this virtual, never-ending focus group includes participants who have actually used your products, and the audience is thousands or even millions of individuals in your target market.

Wouldn’t you want to listen-in? Facilitate conversations? Dispel myths? Thank those who praise your products? Make things right with those who have had negative experiences? Learn more regarding the buzz being generated about your company?

The virtual focus group is going on right now across more than 100 million social media sites! What are customers saying about your products and brands right now?

If you have a strong customer care strategy, you are ready to add social media as an essential moving part of your customer relationship solution. How many customers are waiting for a response? How many more would be delighted and surprised to know you hear them?

You would never ignore a customer who contacted your toll-free number or emailed from your website. Maximize the online buzz about your company through a smart customer care approach.

What are your company plans for integrating social media buzz into your customer care strategy? We want to hear your experiences!

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Use Customer Data to Make Strategy Decisions

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Through hundreds of thousands of contacts across multiple channels, your customers are saying, “I have this product,” or “I use this service,” and most importantly, “here’s what’s happening,” and “what can you tell me about it?”

When analyzed carefully, data can uncover trends and customer feedback that can be used to help improve the service experience and reduce overall service cost. Using data to your advantage should start with an overall review of the information at hand. A few suggestions include:

Fully understand call arrival patterns and channel distribution. Optimize staffing so your agents are available to handle contacts in a timely manner. After all, overstaffing can drive up your cost per contact; understaffing can cause customer dissatisfaction and abandons. Both scenarios are counterproductive to your overarching goals. Look at volume arrival history in 15 minute increments to determine staffing and scheduling.

Don’t ignore customer satisfaction and loyalty survey data. Made up of 100 percent customer perception, these data can help verify or validate other trends, and when viewed in tandem with customer case data, can uncover the specific drivers to satisfaction and loyalty (or dissatisfaction and disloyalty). If you could pinpoint exactly which of your multiple call types, products, or reasons was causing a customer satisfaction metric to dip, wouldn’t you want to know?

Similarly, if you ask your customers for their opinions on your products or services, be sure to listen and then respond.
Customer care interactions with customers offer a voluntary market research pool. Don’t abuse it, but a few quick questions can glean spectacular data that can help shape your service delivery. For one of our clients, we were able to reduce inbound contacts by 27 percent by conducting a quick packaging survey and recommending changes to package instructions.

Use data to make decisions on the level of service offered. When brainstorming ways to reduce costs, use data to back up your suggestions and test customer tolerance. For example, we helped a client reduce the number of agents required to staff their customer care program by analyzing the impact of service level variability on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Using service level performance data and analyzing it with parallel timeframe data from our customer satisfaction survey, we were able to isolate specific customer tolerance levels to hold time. Specifically, we were able to recommend a longer hold time and reduce the number of agents, which lowered our client’s overall cost of service. At the end of the day, our data proved that as long as customers’ inquiries were resolved to their satisfaction, they were more tolerant to wait for a representative.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Social Media and Customer Service: Your Questions Answered

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Social media sites of all types have become powerful channels for companies to use for smart marketing strategies that reach targeted customer segments and further evangelize their brands.

The influence of social media on customer loyalty is unmistakable. Social media channels – including blogs, message boards, networking sites, and many more – are full of comments from customers who are offering opinions, complaints, compliments, and advice on millions of brands and products.

A customer service strategy for social media is understanding the online buzz, analyzing it, developing a smart strategy uniquely designed for your company, then responding to customer comments to build relationships, dispel myths, reverse complaints, and reward compliments. In a few words, it’s the essence of customer service: listen to your customers and respond to resolve their issues and drive loyalty.

Here are answers to some common questions:

Should I monitor online consumer discussions?
Absolutely! There may be thousands of people talking about your brands right now online that could have a significant impact on your brand image.

There are so many sites out there; which ones should I pay attention to?
There is no secret formula or a set of universal sites that are the magic bullets for all companies. It’s critical to find out what’s being said about your brands, and then start to monitor for trends.

Should I respond to online consumer comments?
Maybe. There are certain things you will want to respond to, while others, not so much. For example, some consumer comments may be through sites that have large audiences, others may not have the same influence and reach.

Isn’t Social Media just a fad?
Not likely. Social Media has been around for years in different forms, and has gained popularity exponentially in the last few years. Studies suggest that social media is here to stay.

How can I keep up with social media if it’s changing all the time?
Monitoring online consumer conversations isn’t a one time event. It requires daily monitoring and analysis to understand when the buzz trends related to your company change.

Are you contemplating a social media customer service strategy? What are the questions you have that need answers? We want to hear from you!

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Is Reducing AHT a Good Cost Savings Strategy for Your Operations?

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Companies everywhere are seeking ways to cut costs at no risk to the customer experience. Is it possible to achieve both? Absolutely.

When customers reach out to you, they are seeking resolution, and doing so quickly, accurately, and to their satisfaction is one way to keep them coming back for more of your product or service.

There are a lot of ways to achieve cost savings; in this post, the focus is on one: reducing average handle time (AHT) in ways that will protect the customer experience and reduce your overall costs. Here are two quick ways to determine if reducing AHT will work for you.

1. Stack rank your agents by handle time and quality scores to identify variances in your team’s performance.
2. Look at average talk time (ATT) and after call work (ACW) as separate metrics to isolate areas for improvement.

Stack ranking helps compare the AHT of the total team with the AHT of highest performing agents and lowest performing agents. If a significant gap exists, AHT improvements may very well help shift the team AHT enough to drive cost savings associated with labor and telecom costs.

Use the stack rankings to hold round table discussions with your best performing agents to brainstorm on ways to streamline the customer experience to everyone’s benefit. It’s not surprising that good agents know exactly what it takes to make the customer experience more streamlined to everyone’s advantage.

As a next step, use the stack ranking exercise to also evaluate the differences between talk time (part of the customer experience) and after call work (outside of the customer experience). Oftentimes, improvements in ACW can be the low hanging fruit, and a way to make changes that will be seamless to customers.

Finally, don’t discount a return to basics. Fundamentals training in call control can provide a refresh on how to satisfy the customer and control the call length. Using your best performing agents for positive side-by-side mentoring will build teamwork and help agents improve metrics.

What AHT reduction strategies have been successful for you? What challenges are you facing to reduce AHT of a team? We want to hear from you!

Interested in other ways to reduce costs while protecting the customer experience? Click Here to get the AFFINA White Paper: Enhancing the Customer Experience while Reducing Contact Handling Costs.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Bright Ideas for Upcoming Customer Service Week in October

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director AFFINA

Customer Service Week (CSW) is October 5-9. Do you have plans to mix things up in your customer care operations to recognize and reward the team members who work each day to delight your customers and maximize their experience with your brand?

Here are a few quick ideas to get you started on planning:

Go with a theme. Last year when our company celebrated its 35th anniversary, we chose the week of CSW to celebrate, and rolled back the style to the 1970s. Our teams had fun with 70s trivia, jargon contests and 70s costume day! Have some fun and get silly with a creative theme.

Don’t forget the FOOD! Cookies, hot dogs, popcorn, donuts; all designed to put smiles on the faces of team members. Especially when served by the management team!

Hold team contests. Scavenger hunts, trivia, chair decorating (more fun than it sounds actually), penny wars … form teams and compete for prizes – big and small. Generate some excitement and a competitive spirit. Even a cheesy traveling trophy can become a coveted prize!

Find ways to help team members connect with each other. Use CSW as another opportunity to build a positive and connected employee-focused culture. One idea: have team members fill out a fun questionnaire with questions like, “If you could be any super hero, who would you be?” or “What do people always catch you saying?” Then, make a contest to match the answers with the person. These are great ways to get people talking and laughing … making connections to build teams and relationships.

Whatever you do, be sure that the spirit of customer service week resonates all year. Make special plans to celebrate Customer Service Week and show appreciation for the exceptional work done on the front lines of customer care. Then extend that to everyday … catch people doing great things and call it out, and be sure your customer service team knows that caring for customers, one at a time, is the lifeblood of a company’s sustainability.

What creative ideas have you used to celebrate Customer Service Week? Share your ideas here … we want to hear from you!

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Cinnamon Rolls have a Pinch of What?

A recipe philosophy for training contact center agents.

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

My grandmother was a fantastic baker. Everything she made was wonderful and magical. As a child, I would spend days in her small kitchen that was filled with the smell of cinnamon, cookies, cakes and other wondrous treats. Good memories and delicious goodies!

As I got older and starting experimenting in my own kitchen, I often would ask her for advice and recipes. My favorite of all time were her tiny cinnamon rolls … little warm gooey bites that were oh so good.

As many grandmas are, her instructions were less than precise. Some flour, a little butter, throw in a dash of salt, an egg or two.

What?! Wait a minute, that's not a recipe … I need precise instructions, measured amounts, exact baking times … otherwise I will certainly fail!

“Baking isn’t a science, it’s an art,” she would advise. So after hearing her detail the art of cinnamon rolls, I watched her make them a few times. I picked up a few tricks and learned a little more about what to do if the dough is too sticky or if the outsides cook faster than the insides. I noticed something different each time I studied her technique.

Finally, I made them on my own … sort of. She was there helping me along the way. Today, I can almost make cinnamon rolls that were as tasty as hers.

So what’s the point of this story on a blog about customer care?

Just as I went through the steps of listening, observing, and doing on my journey to the perfect batch of rolls, the same success can be achieved in a customer care setting. After all, few would disagree that customer care is indeed an art as opposed to a science.

The right recipe for training new agents or even existing ones should be to add a few things, and mix well.

Sit them in a classroom too long, and the detail becomes detached and quickly loses meaning.

When learning to perfect a recipe, I had to observe the challenges first hand, and see how an expert handled each one. The same can be applied to customer care employees - allowing them to transition to working on their own through structured learning, observation, role play, side-by-side mentoring, and live production - results in prepared agents who feel confident and ready to knock the socks off your customers.

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to prepare agents for contact handling? Any challenges you have encountered? Best practices to share? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.
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