Mitch Lieberman

It is time to move on to ‘How’ – Where the Rubber Meets the Road for Customer Service

by Mitch Lieberman, on May 9, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , , , , , , .

From products and pricing to service and social, there is no shortage of talk on what companies need to do to achieve service excellence. For the past many years, specific to ‘social’ the number of people who are more than willing to share ‘what to do’ is staggering. It is easy to say what to do, to be an advice giver. That said, telling someone how to do something is not nearly as easy.

There is not only a tremendous difference between ‘what’ and ‘how’, the ability to cross the chasm between is where companies succeed or fail. Transitioning from what to do to how to do it takes hard work, planning and execution – especially in the realm of customer service!

Customer Service Mission:
A mission is the very big, long-term end-result or achievement in your sights. A Customer Service mission is the biggest and most important thing you and your team aim to accomplish. Mission statements can be tied to financial metrics, directly or indirectly, but financial metrics can also get in the way. A mission is a ‘what’ not a ‘how’. What is your customer service mission? Do you know it by heart?

(A quick sidebar regarding a mission: The company certainly needs to have a mission, but that is not the same as the customer service mission. For example, a company mission may be to reduce the need for customer service. That is not going to fit for the customer service team, now will it.)
Service Goals and Objectives:

With respect to customer service, goals and objectives are often interchangeable – just as long as you are clear. There might be a slight nuance that goals are customer facing and objectives are internally focused, but they should be very well aligned. Each is an end game towards which actions and activities are focused. But, we are still in the land of ‘what’, not yet progressing to ‘how’; that said each should be smaller than the mission.

Customer Service Strategy:
Here is where I think organizations lose sight of their purpose. If there is not a clear mission, or set of goals (or objectives), a strategy is almost a waste of time. The idea of a strategy is to focus the team towards achieving the goals and objectives, towards the mission. I believe too many people jump to strategy, when they mean mission. The importance of strategy, is that we finally have moved from ‘what’ to ‘how’, hallelujah!

What is a strategy?

A well thought and constructed plan of attack with actions that will be used to achieve the desired objective. The strategy is the first, most important step in the ‘how’ process.

Customer Service Tactics and Actions:
Simply stated, tactic and actions are what is done to deliver on the strategy. This is where the rubber meets the road. Although tactics and actions are more about doing (versus thinking), in customer service, poor execution of tactics and actions will have far reaching consequences; leading eventually to inability to succeed at the mission. The inability to succeed at the customer service layer will impact the ability for the organization to achieve the higher mission as well.

The Outline

Mission = the most important thing you and your team aim to accomplish

  • Goals = an end-game towards which actions and activities are focused
    • Strategy = the plan of attack
      • Actions and Tactics = the execution of the strategy

What it Might Look Like for You

Customer Service Mission: We at <company name> believe that you, the customer, are part of our family. We are dedicated to treating you with respect; being courteous towards you and creating a positive experience for you each and every time we connect. We hope to convey that we are a caring and genuine team, here to help you to the best of our ability; in-person, on the phone and across all digital channels.

  • Goal 1: Increase Customer Satisfaction
    • Strategy: Improve Service Experience
      • Be responsive and courteous
      • Offer Chanel Choice
      • Remove or reduce problematic metrics (AHT, FCR)
    • Strategy: Improve Self-Service
      • Offer How-to guides
      • Increase use of Video
    • Strategy: Focus on Product In-Use Experience
      • Facilitate online community
      • Incent to contribute, engage further 1:1
      • Encourage social sharing; product
  • Goal 2: Increased Loyalty and Retention
    • Strategy: Create Passionate Customers
      • Offer extra value to repeat customers
      • Train Customer Service Reps as brand advocates
      • Reward Agents with a positive experience
    • Strategy: Facilitate Organic growth
      • Encourage customers to share brand stories
      • Encourage social sharing; experience
      • Recognize Super-users
  • Goal 3: Meet Customer Expectations
    • Strategy: Manage expectations
      • Publish response time service levels
      • Consistency across interaction channels
      • Hit response targets
    • Strategy: Service with a smile
      • Empower agents to make decisions
      • Rewards agents who go above and beyond
      • Remove robotic scripts
  • Goal 4: Bring Social into the Process fold
    • Strategy: Operational Efficiency
      • Web-Self-service, let people help themselves (WSS is the doorway to SCS)
      • Decide on the Proper Process for Social Contacts
      • Proper Process to capture knowledge and reuse
    • Strategy: Offer Channel Choice
      • Deflection as an outcome, can be right (caution advised)
      • Understand your customers, where they want to talk to you
      • Active Pull to proper channel (Content /Value) – not push

So What?

I cheated a bit, and used the results of our research with thinkJar to drive the conversation. Well, maybe that is not cheating, but the results did show that organizations are focusing heavily on the Goals I listed above. Gartner (8 Pillars of CRM) and Forrester also have been know to recommend building the Customer Service program with specific goals and objectives in mind – no, not just operational efficiency, but how the impact can be felt directly by the customers.

What are your Goals and Objectives as an customer service organization? If you are Vendor or Analyst reading this, what how do your clients articulate their Goals and Objectives? Do they have a Customer Service Mission Statement? Please, feel free to add to the list and do not beat me up too much for missing something. To give credit where credit is due, thanks to Clare Dorrian for editing help and good ideas!

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Esteban Kolsky

Social for Customer Service: it’s About the Customers

by Esteban Kolsky, on May 1, 2012, in Guest Blogs and Thought Leadership, about , , , , .

How can organization embrace social channels and technologies to improve customer service?

I must’ve heard this question every day in the past 6-9 months.

The intent was not how to do twitter, how to leverage Facebook, or should we use Klout scores for customer service – it was very specifically about how customer service departments can embrace it.  It was getting so ridiculous that together with my friends at Ciboodle we conducted a research report to answer those questions. We got nearly 400 responses (some of them very interesting) and you can get the report here if you want to read it.

I am not going to give you a full summary here, we do have a great executive summary if you are not interested in reading the data or the whole report, but I wanted to cover two issues that came out of this study:

  • How today’s processes are faring in an increasingly social world
  • What is the value to the organization of embracing social channels and tools

We asked the question of how processes used to support social channels compared to those processes used to support traditional channels.  Overall, the answer was (almost) as expected: 2/3 of organizations have not created processes yet as part of their social adoption, they are more or less living day-by-day and trying to figure out how it will play out in the long run.  At this early stage of the social journey that is not very surprising.  We then cross-tabulated those answers against the length of time they had been supporting social channels – and this is where we got some interesting data.

The table below shows the results of that cross-tabulation.  (note: we did not have sufficiently large numbers to make the conclusions final but it does indicate where the mindshare of the market is in relation to this question):

Equally defined Less defined More defined
0-6 months ago 11 12% 32 15% 3 20%
6-12 months ago 21 23% 50 23% 1 7%
1-2 years ago 27 29% 53 25% 3 20%
2 years ago+ 21 23% 18 8% 4 27%
not there yet 12 13% 61 29% 4 27%
n = 92 214 15

When using social channels, processes are less defined – almost by a ratio of 2:1.  Among those that claimed their processes were less defined, the majority were those that had been doing Social for between six and twenty-four months.  The ones that would be a more logical choice (those just starting out, below six months of experience) to have less defined processes are not – showing how newcomers to this set of channels and tools understand how it is no different than any other channel implemented before: it has to have a strategy, integrate well into existing processes, and don’t change the way experiences occur – rather augment them via a new set of channels.  Clearly delivering similar experiences via new channels is in the mind of those that are just starting as well as those that have been doing it for a while.

The second issue we spotted was the value to the organization of embracing social channels.  We asked respondents to identify what were the benefits they were seeking from embracing social.  We asked them about the two most often cited reasons to adopt any channel: to meet customers’ expectations or to save money.  The difference between these two reasons is a slant towards a customer-centric, efficiency view of the world (saving money) versus a customer-centric, effective view of the world.  The table below shows the results:

Primary Benefit Secondary Benefit
Deflected phone calls 13 3% Deflected phone calls 27 7%
Increased customer satisfaction 95 24% Increased customer satisfaction 55 14%
Increased loyalty 31 8% Increased loyalty 45 11%
Increased revenue 6 2% Increased revenue 17 4%
Intangible benefit 35 9% Intangible benefit 39 10%
Met customer expectations 55 14% Met customer expectations 37 9%
Not using social channels just yet 71 18% Not using social channels just yet 67 17%
Reduced cost of customer support 20 5% Reduced cost of customer support 22 6%
No Answer 74 19% No Answer 91 23%

It is very clear from these results that focusing on meeting customer expectations, and exceeding them, is the main driver for social channel adoption having been quoted not just as the top reason overall, but also as s secondary reason for organizations to adopt social.  The reason organizations deploy these channels is not driven by outbound company-centric needs but to give customers what they want, need, and ask.

The rest of the report is actually even more interesting and proved many other things – but to know what, you will need to download it and read it.

And give us your comments.

Many thanks – Esteban Kolsky, thinkJar

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Mitch Lieberman

Who is the Social Customer?

by Mitch Lieberman, on April 24, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , , .

First and foremost the social customer is a person.

This person would like to control the intensity and frequency of their interactions with you.  They do not think of it in these academic terms however. Consider the person: a stay at home mom, 20 something with their iPhone glued to their hip or a business professional. Each has learned how to leverage the social web in their own way.  The change from customer to social customer and now transitioning to engaged customer is fascinating to insiders. This shift in culture, which has been enabled by technology and peer influence, is critically important for your business to understand. In some ways it is all very new. In other ways, it is very old.


How do you have a relationship with the ‘Social Customer’ – give them control and they will give you their loyalty. I would add that you should give them (the person) value and they will give you loyalty. As a business, there is a balance, after all, businesses are in business to create value. At the moment, the social customer has a disproportionate amount of influence within your organization – fact. The reason is simple, they tweet, blog and share their opinions very vocally. Add to that the simple fact that your marketing and PR team are the one monitoring the channel. Does you PR team listen to all the phone calls in your call center? Didn’t think so.

How does a company prepare to engage with a social customer?

First, it is critically important to understand that the customer will choose his or her level of interaction and/or engagement. According to Paul, here is what we need to do (and I happen to agree).

  1. Create systems that allow interactions where customer want, which will then foster engagement
  2. Capture information at each stage, across each channel, so that you can later refine the process of engagement

The core capabilities of a system of engagement are two parts technology, one part process and two parts people. Systems of record combined with systems of engagement (interactions/channels). The basics are really about the ability and capability to interact in a meaningful way with the each and every customer. The process needs to include putting the right two people in touch.

How important is this anyway?

Viscerally, many people agree of the importance of the social customer, yet it is difficult to see where and how to influence the conversations that are taking place. What level of engagement is the proper level? As Paul discusses, your tem simply needs to present the options. However, just how to measure the return is really hard, for now realize it is important and get it done.  The velocity of the conversations is tough to predict as well. They may occur over a weekend or over the course of weeks and months. They cannot be forced one way, or the other.

Customer Engagement is the extent to which an organization commits, both emotionally and intellectually, to communicating and interacting with their customers, relative to accomplishing shared goals driven by customer need. Engagement can be seen as a heightened level of interaction and ownership where the company wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of the customer.

In other words, proper customer engagement is the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.

Social media is the the protocol of the social customer cannot be treated as a passive activity driven by managers in marketing. Social media channels are a new set of channels that need to somehow fit into your existing processes or you need to adapt and create new ones.  The social customer is extremely adept at curating knowledge about you, your products and your policies and procedures. They have very high expectations, and will make future purchasing decisions based not only on price, but service.

The implications for your company are very real. Systems of record have been the foundation of your organization for a long time. Systems of engagement are becoming increasingly important and will soon be on par with systems of record. The marrying of the two systems is what it is going to take; the problem is that systems of engagement live in marketing and systems of record live in IT and your customers are talking to customer service.

I have said before, what is really being described here is a maturity model; If Social CRM is about a company’s programmatic response to the social customer, then engagement is where the compromise occurs. Both customers and business need to mature and be willing to invest emotionally and intellectually.  Since the customer will mature at his or her own pace, your organization will need to adapt to the rate of change, as driven by your customers.

The effects of the social customer have been felt by most industries and by most organizations in the developed world. This customer type will continue to impact your industry and can be felt directly by your company. An engaged customer will have an even greater impact to your organization, with your employees and on your products and services.

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Mitch Lieberman

With IBM, the focus is the Customer – PureSystems

by Mitch Lieberman, on April 11, 2012, in Company Voice and Thought Leadership, about , , , , , , .

Mind-numbing complexity, combined with a lack of resources has created a ’situation’ in corporate IT: $2.5 Trillion – 70% of the global IT budget – is spent just making sure the status quo works. Your customers expect better – status quo does not cut it anymore!

Its time to reduce complexity and focus energy on projects that will help businesses innovate, adapt to the needs of the hyper-connected customer and focus on their jobs to be done; it always needs to be about the customer, no? With this in mind, Ciboodle are partnering with IBM, as the PureSystems initiative does just that, helps you to turn the focus to the customer.

”Sword Ciboodle is now working with IBM as a certified IBM PureSystem Business Partner to introduce a new category of computing,” said Bruce Maule, director business partner programs, IBM systems and technology group. ”This category incorporates expert integrated systems to fundamentally change the experience and economics of IT.”

Sword Ciboodle is excited to participate along side IBM,  pioneering a new era of computing that will help simplify the complexity and fundamentally transform the internal experience and economics of enterprise information technology. Your IT team is worth thinking about because everyone plays a role in regards to enhancing customer experience. The IBM Expert Integrated Systems is a new category of smarter computing that combines the flexibility of a general purpose system, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance – Ciboodle expertise is part of the solution.

In case you are wondering, IBM PureSystems is a new family of expert integrated systems offered by IBM that combines hardware, software and expertise into one solution. The cool thing here is that this new system will simplify IT infrastructure by tackling the biggest, consistent IT pain points. Ciboodle bought into the idea early, and we excited to be taking part.

“Congratulations to Sword Ciboodle for being among the early adopters of IBM PureSystems,” said  Michael Riegel, vice president of global ISVs, IBM  “This will enable them to offer an industry leading solution to clients in a way that cannot be matched by competitors.”

The Ciboodle Platform provides a powerful framework for deploying and managing an integrated, multi-channel Contact Center Solution. Built and proven to scale in high volume multi-channel customer implementations, the platform conforms to all common non-functional standards and enterprise best practices.

Built to provide a solution for today, with a close eye on tomorrow’s challenges.

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Mitch Lieberman

From the Long Tail to the New Normal

by Mitch Lieberman, on March 26, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , .

This is a continuation of a series I started on my personal blog. That said, it can live just fine on its own – the idea is that I spend a fair amount of time ‘connecting the dots’. Working to bring either over hyped concepts or ignored concepts to a broader audience.

My objective here is to help people understand the importance of ‘New Normal’, in writing this I have a better sense of it myself. Working backwards, the ‘New Normal’ is very similar in concept to what Seth Godin calls “Weird”. The best way for me to describe ‘Weird’ is that it is the rest of the story, left out in most Long Tail discussions. The Long Tail, as discussed by Chris Anderson, talks about the outliers, the ones who live and purchase at the edges of the spectrum. In other words, the Long Tail does not talk too much about the rest of the distribution, at least not from the customer-centric perspective. While I have heard New Normal used before, I have not seen many illustrations of what it might look like (other than teenagers walking down the street texting from a mobile phone).

The value of the diagram is to illustrate to others, using specific examples and to talk about the ‘New Normal’, moving beyond buzzwords or hyperbole.

The New Normal has been and can be used to understand many of the changes and challenges many people have been talking about for a while now. Ideas such as; The Social Customer, The Collaborative Organization, Social CRM, Social Business  and more might be better understood with a simple illustration.  Think about the distribution of communication channels used 5 years ago, versus now. We simply have more choices. This is not only about customer communications, think about the ways in which you communicate with your peers now, versus 5 years ago. Would it be interesting to chart some this with your own data?

What exactly is ‘New’ about the New Normal

When applied to a business context, the bell curve is being ‘flattened’.  While Chris Anderson and peers talked about Amazon and Netflix –this is now about your products, services and your customers. The long tail is now the ‘tail wagging the dog’. Let’s bring this a little closer to home; the customer journey. What follows is an objective view, with some sweeping assumptions and data without research data as the foundation. For the purists among you, I am focused on the journey and channels of communication, not the product economics of weird, nor long tail.

Consider the number of modes of communication that a customer used from evaluation to purchase for your product 10 years ago (If you did not have a product 10 years ago, think of your own journey). There might have been a Yahoo search, then a phone call. Maybe an email and a website visit. For the sake of this conversation, let’s speculate that the number of channels used averaged 3 and for 70% of the customers they used between 2 and 4 channels. The rest likely used between 1 and 5 channels. This brings us really close to a pretty, normal distribution, though slightly narrow and steep.

How about today? What would the number of channels look like for the same (or similar) product purchase journey? Again, not scientific, but the data is likely available for your business – Could we guess average of 4 channels? This is just one channel more, on average, but it changes the game. Based on the flattening of the curve, to get to that 70% of your customer base it is likely something like “70% of the customers use between 2 and 7 channels; a pretty big range, not as simple as it used to be. The key point here is that you need to dig in deeper and understand what they are doing on each channel. How many channels would we need to include to get to 95% of your customer population (the -2σ to 2σ in the illustration above)?

The important part of the flattening is not only the reduction in the middle, it is the increase on the edges. I want to be clear on a few things. The new Normal for your customers is dependent upon where they have been. The pace of change is determined by you and your customers, not by a consultant or analyst. Just for fun, if you want to see a Normal distribution in action, take a look at this graphic of the snow in Vermont, as it careens off the bell curve in 2012.  All I can say is, I hope this does not represent the ‘New Normal’. There is a whole lot more to this story – just think about it.

Sources:

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Rachel Tait

We’re all going on a –social- holiday!

by Rachel Tait, on March 22, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , , , .

It’s that time of year, when a lot of people are thinking about how they want to spend their vacation days.  Be it skiing in the Rockies, or a beach holiday in the Dominican Republic, or a simple city break – in my experience booking holidays often produces two polar emotions.  Excitement at the thought of time off work to relax, partake in some famous sites, maybe even a gin and tonic or two, and a lurking sense of foreboding as you wonder if you are getting a good deal, whether all reservations will meet expectations and if you’ve checked all the required boxes.  It’s a rollercoaster of emotions!!

I’ve been riding that rollercoaster for the last couple of weeks.  Top of the rollercoaster: “yay – we’ve booked a 2 week break to see 5 cities in Europe. Woo hoo!!!”  Bottom of the rollercoaster: “holy moly – travel between different countries is a complete nightmare! They want how much for some train travel??” (Off topic –they wanted $1200 for 4 days of train travel.  I can only assume that included taking part of the train home with you or shares in the company… /rant).

Rather than admitting defeat or alternatively crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, I took to the web and used every social weapon I had at my disposal to get advice, options and of course obtain the best possible deal that I could.  My personal social media arsenal included several different channels, with each as important as the other in the war against anything putting a damper on my holiday!

Social Media Weapon 1: Online review and advice sites.

I’ve been a fan of these for a while (I even wrote my first ever blog for Ciboodle on one!) and while some of the reviews you have to take with a pinch of salt, on the whole this in my opinion is where you get the best advice.  Websites like www.tripadvisor.com and www.yelp.com are written by the people for the people, with contributors providing reviews of activities, hotels etc. based on their experiences.  So you are getting a first-hand experience of someone that has literally ‘been there and done that.’

Even though these are written by end users based on their experience with your company, there is a really easy way for companies to positively influence reviews on these kinds of websites.  Wait for it… Provide good customer services and experiences in the first place!  Mind blowing, eh? But seriously, those that have the best reviews aren’t doing anything different to that.  More often than not those that stand above the rest are not the fancy pants 5 star or top dollar places.  They are the companies that go that extra mile and go beyond the call of duty, focusing on exceeding the expectations of their customers, and can be lower priced or unknown brands.  For example, I read one review where a couple who were staying in a three star hotel in Florence had got lost trying to find it.  They phoned the hotel, and not only did the front desk provide them with directions to the nearest obvious landmark to the hotel so they could get their bearings – they also sent a staff member there to meet them and guide them the final distance to the hotel and the nearest parking location.  Nice, simple and no additional cost to the hotel – but it went a long way with the customer and now lives forever on a review website for prospective customers like me to read.

For the service providers – restaurants, hotels, spas, etc. – I do realize there are still going to be times when things go wrong; it happens to everyone.  Many of the best reviews come from customers who started out with a negative experience that was turned around by exceptional attention and care after something went awry. So, when things go wrong, the best thing to have is a strategy to deal with it. All providers listed on social media sites should create a feedback policy which includes a regular check of these websites, reading reviews and gathering feedback both good and bad and doing something about it!  In simple terms, your reviewers are identifying service or product breakdowns, and they are doing it for nothing!   We all know the old adage about it being cheaper to keep a customer than recruit a new one, well now this is truer than ever because it’s even harder to get a new customer with negative experiences available to anyone with a computer or smart phone device.  Ignoring a problem is no longer an option, but if you deal with these in an effective, timely manner more often than not potential new customers will see you are listening and care enough to fix where you may have once fallen down.

Social Weapon 2: Online Communities

I’ve not spent a lot of time on online communities; instead my preference is to phone and speak to someone. I have a short attention span and when I set my mind on something I want to get it sorted then and there (ask my colleagues, my polite, unrelenting nagging is that of legend around Sword Ciboodle offices globally).  Phoning the call center was actually my first stop when trying to figure out our rail travel options and any terms and conditions pitfalls I should be wary of.  After a lifetime on hold listening to some particularly poor hold music, I decided to save whatever soul I had left and ‘resorted’ to posting on the company’s community.  My experience of doing this has changed my opinion of using online communities moving forward.

I posted on a Thursday afternoon and had an answer by the time I got to work on Friday morning.  Not only did the response completely answer my initial query, they went onto advise me of which trains I should look to catch and some other good ‘hints and tips’ that I didn’t even ask in my initial query.  Seriously, I nearly fell off my chair.  For a company I couldn’t even get on the phone, and to be honest was having second thoughts about, they completely surprised me and the level of service far exceed my expectations.

In the end the rail option wasn’t for us, but the service level definitely opened my eyes to what an influential asset online communities can be for companies who want to provide efficient and satisfying customer service whilst easing the demand placed on other channels.

Social Weapon 3: My Personal Network

I’m not going to lie, I know some pretty awesome people.  I’m also lucky enough that via various continent hopping manoeuvers on my and their part they are also nicely spread out around the globe.  Geographic proximity, travelling experience and a character reference because I know them all personally means their recommendations hold much more water than even those on online review sites. For this trip, I reached out via Facebook asking for any advice on anything in form.  I received some great replies and good options for closing out the final part of trip planning.  Like I said, my friends are awesome.

Organizations need to work on identifying these ‘awesome people’ who get actively involved in the online conversation and have influence within their social network.  Plug into these individuals and find out what they like, what they don’t like and most important find out how you can get them singing your praises.  More likely than not, if they are active on one channel they will be active on many more, therefore 1 or 2 positive experiences will multiply exponentially once you’ve clued into what floats their boat.

At the start of the blog, I referred to these channels as a social media arsenal, and that is exactly how organizations need to look at them.  Focusing and investing in just one social channel isn’t going to work, and neither will creating a social media strategy which sits outside of your overall customer service vision.  In traversing the social media landscape, companies must have an integrated social strategy that is laid out with timely, appropriate objectives and actions for all channels.  Finally, this should all be integrated into your central customer service platform – so that when social is no longer the weapon of choice for a customer they can switch to calling the contact center or going on the web and receive the same level of customer service and query resolution from an agent who is knowledgeable about their customer service journey to date. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I phoned up the train company and they could see that I spoke to Jeffrey on their community just 2 days ago and he solved my query about using a train pass for consecutive days in Europe, and therefore something else potentially more significant has befallen me.

Now we’ve got all our travel sorted, I suppose the next thing to figure out is what we’re going to do when we get there. Feel free to send recommendations my way – Facebook, twitter or other social channels all accepted by this now socially savvy Scottish traveler.  I will cheers to you all with a Daiquiri in the sunshine from Monaco :)

ps. For those of you that are wondering, that is indeed 2 Ciboodlers on tour, and was taken when Clare Dorrian our EMEA marketing genius and I took on Barcelona.  I think Barcelona won….

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Mitch Lieberman

A Conversation with Lynn Costlow

by Mitch Lieberman, on February 16, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , .

I had a tremendous opportunity to speak with, interview style, Lynn Costlow*, vice president of customer service for U.S. Cellular®. The conversation can be read in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight a couple of the questions and answers, as they really drive home some points worth noting. I want to again thank Lynn for her time.

Question: Some companies are using social media to get closer to their customers but they’re not succeeding because they don’t already have a strong connection with those customers. U.S. Cellular® has a strong personal interaction with its customers based on your high level of customer service. How do you transfer that personal interaction to an online forum?

Our customers are the reason we’re in business. It’s amazing to be part of a culture in which the customer is discussed in every conference room and in every meeting and in every conversation. I haven’t seen anything like it until I came here. As we embark on this journey into social media and online support, we would never take action to try to minimize the shouting that happens online in a way that would shut down our customers. Every word about our company on social media outlets offers us an opportunity to try to figure out how to help a customer feel differently about us. Obviously, we can’t be in every forum, but we respond to as much as we can. We want to help people and so we ask if we can call them. We invite them to be on our earnings call; we try to help them through social media.

My commentary:  Really successful companies put the customer at the center of every conversation. From Amazon.com to USAA conversations about customer experience, customer satisfaction and value to customer are the center of the conversation. U.S. Cellular is in great company with an approach like this. What the text does not highlight is the passion in Lynn’s voice when she was answering these questions. This was not PR spin or an angle, this was genuine ‘ this is how we do things around here ‘

How do you share your passion for customer service internally? What impact does that passion have on your customers and their experience when they talk to a call center representative?

You can apply the customer experience to anything in your business or personal life. I don’t believe you have to have a passion for what you do to get your job done. But when you do have passion for your job and you show it and articulate it and live it, it’s a catalyst for high performance. I have people who would literally follow me off a cliff even if they saw that it was a cliff. That makes things easier when we have really tough challenges because people know that I am in it with them and I support them. When they know that I have them in mind, they trust the decisions I’m making at the corporate level. It creates momentum and energy that helps me be more fluid in making business decisions.

My commentary: Again, with a question about passion, Lynn’s voice lit up and it was easy to hear. I found it interesting to hear Lynn mention that you do not need to have passion to get your job done. The ‘but’ is that high performers do have passion. I would also add that leadership with passion is contagious. Leading by example (a few members of her team were on the call, and the “off a cliff” comment was confirmed). The team also knows  that Lynn ‘has their back’ another critical internal trust issue. Lynn talks about creating energy. There are two types, this is the good type!

Again, the full text can be read here. I will be adding more commentary in the next few days.

(Lynn oversees customer interactions in the company’s retail, telesales, and care center environments. And she leads more than 2,100 associates who handle more than one million customer interactions every month.)

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Rachel Tait

Passion is Contagious

by Rachel Tait, on January 27, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , .

Steelers fans

Passion: “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate” (Dictionary.com).

So, if that’s passion then what comes with it?  In my opinion: focus, learning, interest and continuous improvement. Passionate individuals and organizations never stop learning, and in terms of customers, your passionate ones are often those that are most loyal, most valuable and importantly most vocal across all communication channels.

I’ve got a long list of things that I’m passionate about. I don’t want to bore you but on there would be chocolate, wagamama (delicious noodle house in the UK… unfortunately not available in Chicago. Sad face), Scotland, NFL Football and of course marketing.  On marketing, I’ve always been passionate about it and I like to think I always will be.  I did it for 4 years at university, have worked in this field since graduation and everyday know that this is the job for me.  I’m not saying there are days when marketing isn’t the top of my fav list – ask some of my colleagues in the Sword Ciboodle office, the stories they could tell! But to this day, I’ve never got home and started looking into how I change careers to become a dentist, carpenter or Shetland Pony Breeder.  In fact, with my passion comes an interest in advancing my knowledge in marketing and supporting disciplines.

For organizations that want to make waves in their industry, and stand out as the best, one of the secrets is to get passionate about your customers, and make them get passionate about you.  Care about how they get treated, learn about what they want, and then go out of your way to deliver it! Don’t just find out why they like you, find out why they love you.  And when you know why they love you – make sure you’re delivering these products/services/traits to them, and others like them, in spades.  It’s important that you don’t just run through the motions in a predefined script or process  (yes Abercrombie and Fitch I’m looking at you…. the fact your sales associates follow me around asking if they can help me because they were told to do so whenever they see a customer is more than a little creepy, and annoying).  Go beyond what is expected or required, show off your passion and theirs will follow.

If you can grow this passion within a small customer base, you will often find it grows exponentially as beyond anything passion is infectious.  Just look at sports fans!  As a proud supporter of the Pittsburgh Steelers, I’m never more passionate, loud and proud than when surrounded by my other Black and Gold brethren.  And when I say surrounded, that’s not only when watch games but also in groups online.  I recently joined www.32loud.com which is a website which welcomes fans from all of the NFL’s 32 teams, and I joined because they are targeting those that are vocal to be part of their online community.  They got to me via a facebook group for Steelers fans based in Chicago, which has 400+ fans who post on the ups and downs of the Steelers on a daily if not hourly basis.  So what made me join?  They locked into my passion.   They have a leaderboard on the website, which ranks the teams in terms of number of members, number of posts, number of likes etc.  Can’t have the Bengals or Ravens out doing my boys so I got onboard and ‘got loud’.

Like 32loud, find passionate voices out there, and let them know you’re not only listening to them but taking on their comments.  Log into your company facebook, hold interactive focus groups, hey stand outside with a sandwich board speaking to people if that works for you!  Just do something, as passion isn’t something you can just say you are and that’s that.  It requires action, and not just one off action, but continuous action.  Anything less is just lip service.

I know it’s not as simple as just getting it done, and many ‘ducks need to be in a row’ for this to happen – including people, technology, budgets etc.  However, without a vision, and a commitment to achieving that vision, the norm will remain just that – normal, beige, ‘just ok’.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of many examples of cutting edge companies that are ‘just ok’….. and for Rachel Tait.com, marketing extraordinaire to the stars, just ok isn’t an option….

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Mitch Lieberman

Mirror Images – Customer Experience versus Employee Experiences

by Mitch Lieberman, on January 22, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , .

In my first Mirror Images post, I referred to Social CRM as a “A complex overlay” on top of customer service, customer relationships and the supporting strategy, technology and processes. If we can accept this, that Social CRM is an overlay, then we should be able to agree that it does mirror Social business (or Enterprise 2.0), as Social Business is also an overlay on top of many standard business practices and concepts. Diving deeper to a more definitive concept; is employee experience the mirror of customer experience? Unfortunately, most people who talk/write on the topic of ‘experience’ focus on the customer aspect and neglect the employee experience; the literature therefore is not as extensive. In this area, topics typically include empowerment, engagement, and satisfaction. There is very little that directly talks to employee experience, after all it is just a job, right – no, wrong. Moving forward, this is going to have to change.

Your own Marketing team is working very hard to enhance the customer experience, hoping to take advantage of what mobile and tablet devices have to offer (Cool UI) to build stronger relationships with people (customers and prospective customers). But, let’s not forget that before you drove into work this morning, you were a consumer, using these devices and you were the target of these efforts, by some other company. The number of connected TV sales is expected to double in 2012, these same people are highly likely to have an Xbox, an iPod, Kindle, KindleFire or some other next generation device. Now, you are sitting in front of screen, your team is sitting in front of an even bigger screen, maybe with a headset connected and they are using circa 1990’s technology to help your customers. What gives?

Think about it, all of this effort which is customer facing and your internal teams are frankly having a lousy experience. Can we gamify work a bit, to make it more fun? Or is that pandering to misaligned expectations of a certain employee type or demographic? As a did in my previous post, I turned to friend for some help and insight. I asked the question to Mark Tamis and we had a bit of an electronic conversation or Socratic debate. My going in position is the better employee experience will lead to a better customer experience, as this is the logical answer. But, as Mark points out, it is not that simple.

Does better user (employee) experience lead to better customer experience?

MT: First of all, I believe the question leads to trying to compare apples to pears.

ML: That is better than apples to oranges, no?

MT: French expression badly translated

MT: The customer has gone through a journey and his experience has been shaped by interactions at every touch point (dealing with your company, in-store experience, exchanging with friends, family and peers and so on), whereas the employee experience is shaped the interactions with colleagues, suppliers, systems and – only at very precise touch points – clients. So although the customer and the employee are intimately linked, they are not on the same journey.

ML: Valid point, but at that critical point where the journeys intersect will define many things and likely be more impactful to the customer. We have both been known to say that the experience perceived is more important than the intended design. Like most of life we spend most of the time learning and preparing for those moments where we have to act. While not on the same journey, the journey’s are linked and aligned.

MT: By the very nature of company-customer relations, the employee journey is sub altered to the customer journey which leads to the chicken and the egg problem of when a negative customer experience is taken out on an employee who is not able to or not empowered to do anything about it, which in turn leads to a negative employee experience that negatively influences the way the employee deals with the following customer et cetera.

ML: Very interesting, and I agree that the employee experience impacted by the customer experience and journey. I will suggest that the employee would only partially hold his own organization accountable for the treatment by the customer, unless it is a trend, and they are not empowered to do anything about it. While valid, employees should be able move beyond this type of reaction.

MT: Partially, but up to which point? Either stop trying to fight it and become demotivated, go on a crusade and risk being shot down, or simply…leave.

MT: Breaking this vicious circle consists of first by understanding the customer’s journey and coordinating efforts to improve it and second by providing the employees with the infrastructure (data, insight, tools and processes) and conditions (work conditions, a company culture that facilitates collaboration) to do so. Ultimately it comes down to reducing frictions (for the customer and for employees) to help the customer in his job to be done and reach the desired outcomes.

ML: Who is responsible and accountable for removing the fractions? It must be on the employee side, management etcetera, driving for a positive employee experience.

Mark, great stuff and I do appreciate your time and thoughts. I believe we are mostly aligned, though I will admit it is bigger and more complex than I had originally thought. The two journeys are different but it is those all important intersections where things happen. The key question is what will the state of mind (on each side) be at those points? Business units and IT departments will need to invest more in the design of services, for the internal customer. The expectations by everyone; not just the younger or Millenial crowd, are higher, and need to align with customer expectations. In order for a true person to person relationship to be established, experience must be aligned on both sides of the firewall. This is clearly not all about technology (yes, we are a technology vendor) but at the same time, technology is a huge part of the equation, there is no getting past that point. For contact center agents, their experience is critically important, and I believe there is a connection to customer experience – a big one.

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Mitch Lieberman

Mirror Images

by Mitch Lieberman, on January 17, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , .

For a some time, I have been watching, reading, discussing and doing my best to understand the very broad field of customer service, customer relationships and the supporting strategy, technology and processes which go along with each discipline. Along the way, Social CRM – a complex overlay on all of the above, has become everything from a hot topic to nothing more than part of buzzword bingo and back again. At the same time I have also been trying to keep tabs on Enterprise 2.0, Social Business and Collaboration (not Emergent). Going back and reading my own early thoughts here I can see that in some ways my own thinking has changed, but in many ways it has simply matured. I have been saying for a fairly long time that Social CRM and Entperprise 2.0 are closely linked. In September 2009 I said it here and here. I am not patting myself on the back here, more being self critical. I said this 2.5 years ago and frankly we have not come very far.

This line of thinking have caused the following questions to nag at me a bit:

  • Does better agent (employee) engagement lead to better customer engagement?
  • Does better employee satisfaction lead to better customer satisfaction?
  • Does better user (employee) experience lead to better customer experience?
  • Is the collaborative employee the mirror image of the social customer?

Taking a bit of a leap from where my own thinking was a couple years ago to now considering how many elements need to be, or are essentially mirror images between inside and outside the organization. I am not going to be able to tackle all the questions in a single post. As any good learner does, I asked a few friends for some help.

Does better employee satisfaction lead to better customer satisfaction? Mark Walton-Hayfield of CSC had this to say (BTW – congrats to Mark and all of CSC on the Paul G Watchlist Review!):

“In summary YES! However, you need to make sure that people are empowered and that businesses deliver on their promises to customers too.

People who are encouraged to make decisions by themselves at work and who have the authority to solve problems with the outcome of keeping customers happy are generally more satisfied with their job than employees who need to seek out a manager for approval. Business owners who empower their employees tend to have both a lower staff turnover and higher customer satisfaction levels too.

A core tenant of modern leadership thinking is that you need to make people (at all levels) understand why they are being asked to do something and the part that they play in the bigger picture. By leading people through great communications which encourage motivation and with empowerment designed into the operating model you are creating an environment within which people can be proud and satisfied in the work that they do. For those people who are customer facing (and even those who are not) this will most likely translate and spill over into better relationships with customers. These customers will perceive that the representatives of the company are going the extra mile (and they probably are) and so over time this will improve customer satisfaction.

However, this comes with a warning – ensure that you have delivered upon your original promises to your customers and that you are responding to them in an effective manner on those occasions when you are not”

Mark Walton-Hayfield | Social Business Strategist | CSC | MarkW_H

I happen to agree with Mark’s thoughts, it makes logical sense, but why does it seem so difficult to carry out in practice? For commoditized products and services, where low cost is the differentiator, this might be very difficult to carry out, no? This is not a disagreement with Mark, more of an expansion of his thoughts.
Moving on to some other tough question, I posed the following to Laurence Buchanan of CapGemini (Also a CRM Watchlist winner): “Is the collaborative employee the mirror image of the social customer?” In hindsight, this was a bit of a leading question, isn’t it? In a way it is playing with buzzwords.

“Customers have always been social. For as long as trade and commerce has been around, customers have spoken to each other about good deals and warned each other of rip-off scams. But when we think of a social customer today we use the term to describe a customer who is a) connected to people and information via digital channels and social networks and b) someone who leverages that connectivity and information in their relationships with vendors and other consumers. For example, a customer who is connected to a network like Tripadvisor might use information from that social network to influence their choice of holiday as well to influence others in their network through their own contributions. The motivation of a social customer will vary greatly and may include simply getting a better deal, building up trust and respect from peers, or naming and shaming a poor product or service.

Employees have always been collaborative. Ok, perhaps not as collaborative as they could be (!), but we have always had to work with others to get the job done. The collaborative employee mirrors some of the traits above. Although the networks might be different, the collaborative employee is certainly connected to people (e.g. other employees, suppliers, customers…) and to information. In addition, the collaborative employee leverages that connectivity to help them work more effectively (e.g. breaking down internal silos), to build relationships or to build their profile within the enterprise.

However, the boundaries between the social customer and the collaborative employee are increasingly blurred and increasingly irrelevant. People play multiple roles in their daily lives (consumer, employee, supplier), information (and transparency) now flows much faster inside and outside an organisation and networks are increasingly interlinked. More and more it will be harder to separate the social customer from the collaborative employee.”

Laurence Buchanan | Principal, Digital Transformation | CapGemini | buchanla

Sharing the wealth a bit, I asked Prem Kumar of Cognizant the same question as Laurence, “Is the collaborative employee the mirror image of the social customer?”

“If you recollect the concepts in the book reorganizing for a resilient organization, orgs (organizations) need to have people with specializations, areas where they have high efficiencies, areas which could be highly routine and monotonous. There is not much need to take decisions, and even if any, they would happen with in a predefined scope, options. This is what brings the scalability, the industrial scale. Collaboration happens at a minimum in these organizations, especially between people who need to make decisions on non routine issues. These are the people who have been empowered to take decisions.

One of the reasons for this collaboration that Ranjay mentions in his book is innovation, to meet the demands of the evolving customer. I do not remember if he talks about customer support, but here is again an area where you need to take decisions as well as collaborate with various dungeons in the org. ‘Responsiveness’ is the key reason for collaboration I guess. That means responding, at speed.

Now cut to the era of the social customer as he is right now. What he asks is public knowledge, so add the PR angle if there was not enough pressure on being responsive already. No wonder you need to be even more connected, at speed. Collaboration has been clamoring for attention for a few decades now, but now it has become inimitable, unignorable.

Collaboration is no longer a motivating factor to do better, it is now a hygiene factor; you stay healthy if you do it, else you fall sick. It is not doing pilates, it is eating good healthy food. Which means, it’s not about putting extra efforts, it’s about changing our habits, or mind frame for the better.”

Prem Kumar | Strategist | Cognizant | Prem_k

I really like that last point by Prem, collaboration is now a hygiene factor, it is a requirement to doing business. This is actually one difference, where the characteristics are not mirrored. Customers do not need to be social in order to be customers. But, social customers do require the internal organizations to be collaborative. All that is left to tackle are the remaining two simple questions.

Links provided from Mark W-H

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