Shep Hyken's Blog, page 167

5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of June 12, 2017

Each week I read a number of customer service and experience articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

27 Experts Discuss Key Customer Support Metrics That Drive Growth by Robbie Richards

(Jitbit) We reached out to 27 professionals leading support teams of all sizes at companies like Zapier, and asked them the following question: Can you list 2-3 customer support metrics you use to measure performance in the following areas: 1. Individual agent metric 2. Team level metrics The goal was to identify companies with successful support teams and see what metrics they used to assess performance and continually improve the customer experience.

My Comment: This is an excellent roundup of 27 experts from many different companies talking about how they measure their customer service and support. The titles of the experts weighing in include CEO’s to directors of customer success, engagement, etc. There are many ideas shared here, do find one or two that you like and “work them.” Great reading and great information!

Customer Loyalty: 20 Compelling Reasons To Double Down On It [Infographic] by Ellen Gross

(Fieldbloom) Too many businesses fall into the trap of spending all their time and money acquiring new customers, only to forget about the dozens, hundreds or even thousands of customers they already have.

My Comment: Our friends at Fieldboom have assembled a short article and infographic filled with stats about customer loyalty. Not all of the stats will apply to all of our readers, but the concepts behind the stats will. The benefit to creating customer loyalty is huge. Read some of these facts and stats and find and you’ll see why.

A Tailored Customer Experience Is Now Expected by Jim Tierney

(Loyalty 360) Loyalty360 caught up with Imagine Experience founder and CEO Bill McCoy to get his assessment on the state of Customer Experience.

My Comment: Bill McCoy, CEO and founder of Imagine Experience, was interviewed by Loyalty360 on his views on the state of CX. His big emphasis was on the personalized experience. The key to loyalty is to create a memorable experience that connects to the customer. Make it all about them. Customers will pay more for it, come back and most important, tell their colleagues and friends.

​6 Tips for Increasing Customer Loyalty by Andrew Deen

(Equities) Loyal customers will do more than just continue to support your business through ongoing sales—they’ll also inspire others to choose you over your competitors. But how do you increase customer loyalty when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the noise on the Internet and influence public consumption habits?

My Comment: The title of this article says there are six tips. Actually there is a seventh, and that is that before you can focus on customer loyalty, you must define what it is for your company. Depending on the type of business you’re in (B2B or B2C) customer loyalty will be different. Once defined, follow the six tips shared and you’ll have a better focus on how to get your best customers to keep coming back.

How Micro-Moments Are Transforming Your Customer Experience & Impacting Your Sales by Tony Bodoh

(LinkedIn) Customer journeys and customer touch points are important at the macro level, but buying decisions are made pre-consciously in the micro-moment experience.

My Comment: This is a fascinating article that focuses on “micro-moments” that have big impact on the customer experience. The micro-moment happens in under three seconds. Sometimes it’s a word that sets an expectation (sometimes a false expectation). Or, in the retail world it can be the way a product is positioned. The article shares many examples from different industries and even gets into the science and thinking behind them. We all want to create a great customer experience (I assume we all do). Many times we focus on big ideas, however sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, professional speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com . For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com . Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

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Guest Blog: Optimizing for Lifetime Value Over Transactional Customers

This week we feature an article by Josh Brown about the importance of cultivating long-term relationships with relational customers who want to get more out of their experience with your company. – Shep Hyken

Recently, Shep Hyken sat down with Lifesize’s Chief Customer Success and Happiness Officer, Amy Downs, and discussed the importance of becoming absolutely obsessed with enhancing your customer’s experience.

Today, I’d like to talk about which customers you should obsess over. Now, don’t get me wrong: All of your customers are important. And you should definitely do your best to provide each and every one of them with the best experience possible when they engage with your brand.

But, let’s face it:

Not every customer is going to become a loyal, raving-mad fanatic of your brand.

While some customers actively seek to build relationships with the companies they do business with, others simply want to make a transaction and go on their merry way.

So, rather than wasting tons of money, time, and energy trying to change the mindset of these transactional customers, you’re better off focusing on cultivating long-term relationships with the relational customers who do want to get more out of their experience with your company.

In this article, I’ll talk about why you should focus on relational customers, how you should go about doing it, and the data you can use to enhance your initiatives and be sure your efforts are paying off.

The Importance of Optimizing for Lifetime Value From Relational Customers

Quick question:

Which is better for your business: Having 1,000 customers who purchase from you one time in their life, or 200 customers who purchase from you five times a year, every year of their life?

In this all-too-perfect example, both sets of customers will provide the same amount of value within a single year. After that, the smaller, more loyal customer base will continue to provide value year after year – while the value from the one-off customers will have disappeared completely.

Now, those 200 hypothetical customers aren’t just going to keep doing business with you because it’s in their nature. Yes, they actively want to build a relationship with a brand that provides value to them – but you need to actually do so to keep them happy.

The most effective way to do this is to make every experience these customers have with your brand as personal and engaging as possible.

Which marketing campaign do you think would be more effective: one where you send a coupon to 10,000 random people (who may or may not be in need of your services), or one where you send a personalized offer to 500 individual consumers who have shown interest in your product?

Casting a wide net doesn’t work. First of all, most of the people who receive blanket offers ignore them. Second of all, of those that do make a purchase because of the coupon, most of them will almost certainly be one-off transactional customers. Lastly, you have no way of knowing which of your new customers are most likely to become loyal followers of your brand.

Collecting Customer Data to Personalize Your Marketing Campaigns

When researching your customers, you should aim to know as much as you can about who they are as a consumer. Your goal should be to determine:

What they want to accomplish by engaging with your brand
How they intend to use your product or service to accomplish these tasks
Which media channels they are most likely to be reached through

This data will help you create personalized campaigns that touch on specific pain points your prospective customers are currently facing – in turn making it more likely that your brand will catch their eye.

You can collect this data through a variety of means, from sending out customer surveys to conducting interviews (both with customers and future prospects alike).

It’s also important to keep track of how your previous marketing campaigns have affected your sales numbers and your customers’ propensity to become loyal. Consider data such as:

Customer Lifetime Value: Determines the projected revenue a customer will generate for your company throughout their lifetime.


Churn Rate: The percentage of your customer base that has ceased to do business with your company.
Net Promoter Score: Determines the likelihood of a single customer becoming a brand evangelist for your company.

By taking an honest look at how your previous campaigns have affected these and other customer-related scores and averages, you’ll equip yourself with the ability to tweak and fine-tune your future campaigns to better resonate with your target consumer base.

Conclusion

Just as there are transactional and relational customers, so, too, are there transactional and relational businesses.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with focusing strictly on making a sale and moving on to the next customer.

But doing business in this way surely isn’t going to set you apart from your competition in any way.

On the other hand, by focusing on truly helping your customers overcome their pain points, you’ll make a clear-cut case that your company is the go-to in your industry. In turn, not only will you generate scores of loyal fans of your brand, but you’ll also make these happy customers more likely to spread the good word about your services.

Josh Brown is the Content & Community Manager at Fieldboom, the place to create beautiful forms and surveys in less than 5 minutes. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Disrupt Your Industry With Stellar Customer Service

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What Has Changed in Customer Service?

Every week, I’m asked, “What is changing in customer service?” The expected answer is that I’ll talk about all the new ways customer service and support is conducted – and I do. There’s self-service solutions that include robust frequently asked questions and video. There’s social media customer service with multiple channels like Facebook and Twitter. And, AI (Artificial Intelligence) that the experts – myself included – say will potentially change everything.

Yes, there is a lot that is changing about how we deliver customer service, so I’m about to make a bold statement. If you look at what customer service is, it is the same as it was fifty years ago. And, it will be the same fifty years from now. Customer service is just a customer needing help, having a question answered or a problem resolved. And, in the end the customer is happy. That’s it. When it comes to the customer’s expectations, they are the same. In other words:

Nothing has changed in customer service!

Okay, maybe it’s better said a different way. When it comes to the outcome of a customer service experience, the customer’s expectations haven’t changed. They just want to be taken care of.

That said, there are different ways to reach the outcome. What has changed is the way we go about delivering service. We’ve figured out how to do it faster – and even better. Back “in the day,” which wasn’t that long ago – maybe just twenty or so years ago – there was typically just two ways that customer service was provided: in person and over the phone. Then technology kicked in and we started making service and support better and more efficient.

For example, for those choosing to focus on the phone for support, there is now a solution that lets customers know how long they have to wait on hold. And sometimes customers are given the option of being called back at a time that is more convenient if they don’t have time to wait. We now have many other channels our customers can connect with us. Beyond the phone, there is email, chat, social media channels and more.

So, as you are thinking about implementing a new customer service solution, adding AI to support your customers and agents, or deciding which tools you want to use, remember this:

The customer’s expectations haven’t changed. They just want to be taken care of, regardless of how you go about it. It starts with someone needing help, dealing with a problem, upset about something or just wanting to have a question answered. It ends with that person walking away knowing they made the right decision to do business with you. How you get from the beginning to the end is not nearly as important as how they feel when they walk away, hang up the phone or turn off their computer.

It’s really the same as it’s always been.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

(Copyright © MMXVII, Shep Hyken)

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Amazing Business Radio: Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg Tells Us The Secrets of Amazon’s Success

How can your business be more like Amazon?

Shep Hyken interviews Bryan Eisenberg co-author of the book, Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It.

First Up:

Shep Hyken’s opening comments focus on how any company can improve their customer service, by thinking about how they can become more convenient for their customers. The reason that Amazon has become so successful is that they have developed a way to create customer convenience. Shep gives an example of how, in areas where Amazon offers two-hour delivery, a product could arrive at your home faster than the time it would take you to drive to the mall to purchase it.

Featured Interview:

Shep begins the interview by asking Bryan Eisenberg about the four secret ingredients to making a great presentation, which are:

Provide entertainment – tell a story.
Present a Big Idea.
Give the “How to’s.”
Give the audience or the reader the hope that they, too, can do it.

Bryan continues his “rule of four” by telling you exactly how you “can do it,” by discussing the four unifying principles of how to successfully run your business:

You must be customer-centric.
You must have a culture of innovation.
You must be agile. Execute, test and fail quickly, so you can keep learning.
You must continually optimize by shaving costs and adding value.

Top Takeaways:

Don’t “water the soup.” Putting a little water in the soup may give you more soup, but it takes away from the great taste. It’s not smart to do things that produce an immediate profit if what you are doing isn’t in the best interest of the customer.
Don’t think short term. An example Bryan gives is when Starbucks payment system went down, they gave away the coffee. Most coffee shops would have shut down until they could take payment for their coffee. But, not Starbucks. They knew the cost of free coffee was better than losing customers – and it showed how committed Starbucks is to taking care of their customers.

About:

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-founder of BuyerLegends. He is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today and New York Times bestselling books “Call to Action”, “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?”, “Always Be Testing” and “Buyer Legends.”. Bryan is also a professional marketing keynote speaker.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert , best-selling author and your host of Amazing Business Radio.

“If you can get your team all on the same page, and give them the opportunity to take responsibility and take action, then you, too, can be a total customer service and customer experience rock star.” – Bryan Eisenberg

 

     

This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions … and more:

How can your business be like Amazon?
What are Jeff Bezos’ secrets to success?
How do I increase customer loyalty?
How can I make convenience my differentiator?
What are the secrets to success for Jeff Bezos?
What has Starbucks done to be more customer-centric?
How can any company improve their customer service? (convenience)

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of June 5, 2017

Each week I read a number of customer service and experience articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

11 Tips to Save Your Retail Business From Extinction by Anne Pilon

(Small Business Trends) Brian Solis gives an overview of the top trends that retail businesses can use to survive and thrive in today’s environment.

My Comment: Brian Solis is one of my favorite people to follow and learn from. He is one of the true CX experts. This article has a number of tips that are focused on retail, but also includes information that is relevant for B2B types of businesses.

Airlines in search of customer loyalty need to do more than improve service by Nick Francis

(The Hill) In the wake of recent incidents and subsequent PR nightmares — not to mention congressional tongue-lashings — airlines are attempting to make up for their customer service shortcomings.

My Comment: The airline industry is a hot topic in the world of customer service. Several incidents over the past months have contributed to public awareness of the problems in the industry. So, how does a company (or industry) pick itself up and get back on track? Nick Francis of Help Scout shares some insights on exactly how to go about it.

Brands unclear who should take responsibility for customer experience by Charlotte Rogers

(Marketing Week) Businesses are increasingly using customer experience to differentiate their brand yet 30% of senior leaders are confused about who should take ownership of it.

My Comment: Who should own CX? My response is… Everybody! However this article is more about who should oversee CX in an organization? That’s the leadership question. Some companies have a Chief Experience Officer. Some companies put it into marketing. Someone has to oversee it. Everyone needs to own it.

Customer Experience Is Everything: Three Steps to Make Yours Unforgettable by Zac Johnson

(All Business) Here are four premium performance measurement tools that integrate especially well with Google Analytics, giving you the power to take action and make meaningful business improvements quickly.

My Comment: Who doesn’t want the experience a customer has with your company to be “unforgettable” (in a positive way)? This short article has three common sense approaches to help you do just that.

How Are Manufacturers Prioritizing the Customer Experience? by Scott Stone(CustomerThink) If you think customer experience is an issue of priority only for customer-facing industries like retail and telecommunications, think again: Statistics show that customer experience affects all industries directly.


My Comment: It’s nice to see an article on CX that is focused on manufacturing and B2B (and not just customer facing or B2C types of businesses). CX is important to every business in any industry.
Top Five Bonus

CX & NPS Trends for Influencers – 2020 Edition by CustomerGauge

(Customer Gauge) By 2020, however, the CX & NPS industry is bound to change. So, what can organizations expect and do in order to create a winning customer experience in the future? We turned to some of world’s most influential CX & NPS thought leaders to find answers on what trends businesses need to keep an eye on.

My Comment: My good friends at Customer Guage put together a great resource of 16 experts and influencers to share their thoughts and insights about the trends in customer service and CX. I’m honored to be included and thought you would enjoy reading about what we can expect in the next few years.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, professional speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com . For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com . Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

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Guest Blog: Moving Past The Fairy Tale – 5 Examples of Great Service

This week we feature an article by Matt Nolan who talks about what a great customer service experience really is. We can learn a lot when we look at what companies around the world are doing to adopt new service models. – Shep Hyken

As customer service professionals, we have a hard time agreeing on what a “great customer experience” really is, and what’s truly possible. We hear stories about companies doing amazing things, but those sound disconnected from reality, given our own experience – they read like fairy tales. They’re hard to believe.

That’s because we live and breathe service every day, so it’s hard to see past the known problems, and the gaps in what our teams can do. We see our organizational limitations, and we know that most companies:

Make their customers jump through hoops – because their systems & processes are outdated.
Talk about what they want to sell – not what their customers really need.
Ignore a customer’s context – what they say with actions, rather than out loud during a call.
Pretend to live in a vacuum – as if what happens to customers in other parts of the business doesn’t impact the service channels.
Ignore customer problems – right up to the point where they’re angry enough to complain, demand a discount, or leave for a competitor.

If you put all these things together, it’s easy to see the pattern – we’re consistently sacrificing customer relationships (our lifeblood) by focusing only on the next day, the next week, or the next quarter – at the expense of something healthier and more sustainable.

We’ve effectively become the victims of our own success. The larger an organization becomes, the harder it is to stay connected. We’re driven by revenue and margin, but our success can make us more bloated and rigid, less adaptive, and more disconnected from the people we’re supposed to serve. Generally, the more processes, channels, systems, and resources we add, the harder making actual changes to anything becomes.

To compound all this, traditional service – which waits until customers called the contact center before addressing a problem – has become much less effective. Service leaders have been forced to provide self-service channels, mitigate risk with pro-active initiatives, and consistently channel customers into more cost-effective mediums. This helps… but it only adds to the scope and complexity of the service role, and can really blur the lines between business functions like sales and marketing.

But there’s a silver lining, here: there are organizations that have become early adopters of the new service model we hear so much about – one built around “knowing” customers, and treating every interaction like what it really is: the perfect opportunity to create value on both sides, and build a stronger, longer-term relationship.

Below are a few great examples of organizations that have completely re-architected the way they think about and interact with customers – and produced a sustainable ROI as a result:

The Royal Bank of Scotland integrated their customer data into an always-on customer brain (video). They’re using it to optimize journeys across all their marketing, sales, and service channels, and they’re seeing huge increases in NPS, balance retention, and overall response, as a result.
Sprint Wireless overhauled their customer care program, providing their call-center agents with real-time recommendations to improve retention. As a result, they’ve reduced their customer churn rate by more than 50 percent since 2014.
The team at British Gas integrated all their inbound and outbound customer programs, including their call-center, email, web, and other channels. They’re now orchestrating connected customer conversations (video) that adapt to customer needs, rather than simply pushing products they’d like to sell.
Cisco Systems uses customer and process data to execute intelligent routing in their customer service channels, dynamically matching each customer to the agents best suited to resolve their issues. They’ve removed over 4 million hours of customer wait time and cut service costs by more than 80 percent.
PNC Financial centralized their customer decision-making within a single customer interaction management platform, enabling customers to start a conversation in one channel and continue it later in another, earning a #1 ranking in customer experience, in the process.

To hear the specifics of how Sprint, Cisco, Air France, and many major brands are disrupting the nature of service, you can livestream their presentations from PegaWorld 2017, which will be held from June 4–7 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Matt Nolan is a Director of Product Marketing at Pegasystems, focused on the Marketing Interaction Systems market and all of its associated technology.  Matt has worked in the Martech sector for the last 17 years, serving in a variety of senior product management, marketing, and analytics roles. He speaks regularly at marketing & analytics events, is an active supporter of the American Red Cross, and a 15-year member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: How Happy Employees Make Happy Customers

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The Force Within

I’m often asked, “How many people in an organization does it take to create a culture focused on Customer Amazement?” The short answer is: all of them. But, the process has to start somewhere. Usually it’s at the top with leadership. But sometimes it can come from someone inside the organization at a different level. I refer to that person as The Force Within. That person delivers Amazement within the larger group, which may not necessarily be operating at the same standard as he or she is.

I wrote about this in my book The Cult of the Customer (Wiley 2008), and the example I used was that of an airline employee. He stood out, compared to many of his co-workers, as a person willing to do anything within his power to take care of his customers. By coincidence, Ted Janusz, one of our master trainers at Shepard Presentations, just flew to a speaking engagement and shared a story about the captain of the jet who was a perfect example of The Force Within.

With all the negative press that United Airlines has been getting over the last month or so, this is a very refreshing and positive story. It happened to be Mother’s Day on his flight from Columbus to Chicago. Pete the Pilot – that’s what we’ll call him – came out from the safety of his cockpit and grabbed the microphone to make an announcement.

He wished all the moms on board a Happy Mother’s Day. He mentioned his wife and his two boys back home, and recognized what a struggle it was for the moms to pack up the kids, find a parking space, struggle through security, and lug all the stuff the family needs onto the plane. He ended his address by saying, “We’ve done some things wrong, for which we take responsibility. But it’s my personal mission to change your mind – and the media’s mind – about how you view us. Welcome to United.”

Ted landed in Chicago and thanked Pete. His extra effort stood out. However, as noticeable as the effort was that Pete made to give his customers the best experience possible, Ted couldn’t help but notice that other airline employees he encountered during the remainder of his trip weren’t making the same effort. For them, it was as just “business as usual.”

Not every employee of United Airlines, or any business for that matter, is going to have access to a PA system to make the kind of announcement that Pete did. But, even a smile and warm greeting can go a long way to make a customer feel acknowledged and even appreciated.

Maybe your organization is truly customer-focused. Operating at Pete the Pilot’s level in such an organization therefore would make you part of a Force of Many. There are many other businesses that aren’t quite at this customer service rock star level. But that doesn’t mean if you work for such an organization that you can’t be like Pete, operating as a Force Within. That force is positive. It’s very much appreciated by customers. And, like enthusiasm, it’s contagious.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

(Copyright © MMXVII, Shep Hyken)

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Amazing Business Radio: Nick Friedman

Nick Friedman Explains What It Takes to “Move the World”

How can you create a purpose-driven, values-based, socially-conscious company that can deliver both success and significance?

Shep Hyken interviews Nick Friedman, co-founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving about how to develop a customer-focused, values-based company that can benefit you, your employees and your customers.

First Up:

Shep Hyken’s opening comments focus on how delivering great service is about being a little bit better consistently, with special opportunities to step up whenever there is a complaint, problem or a chance to create a Moment of Magic.

To illustrate his point, Shep related a story of Cesar Larios, a student at The Art Institute of Florida and a part-time employee of College Hunks Moving, who was inside an elevator with a 79-year-old resident of an assisted living facility when the elevator got stuck. The resident didn’t think she could stand long enough until the two could be rescued. So, Cesar dropped to his hands and knees to turn himself into a human bench until they were saved.

Shep then quoted Nick Friedman, president of College Hunks, as saying, “I thought this was a great example of old-fashioned service and helping your fellow neighbor. Our mission is to move the world, both literally and emotionally. This was a perfect example of a brand coming to life.”

Featured Interview:

Nick Friedman started the College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving in college with his childhood best friend, now business partner, Omar Soliman in a beat-up cargo van and has grown to over 100 franchises nationwide. So, Shep begins his interview by asking Nick Friedman how can a relationship survive with someone who is both a business partner and best friend? Nick answered by saying that the long-term reason for their success and partnership is because their vision and values have always been in alignment. The partners communicate regularly, openly and candidly. Any time that they do disagree on how they are going to accomplish something, they have a discussion then decide to commit to that decision, even if one of the partners doesn’t fully agree.

Nick then explained how his company’s brand promise, which comprises the acronym H.U.N.K.S., standing for Honest, Uniformed, Nice, Knowledgeable, and Service has made a huge difference.

Top Takeaways:

Emotions matter in any service industry, especially with a stranger coming in to the home (or office).
The two emotions that matter most to a homeowner are trust and care. (This applies to anyone in any business.)
You want to provide people a stress-free experience that will lead to the three R’s: repeat, referral and reputation.
In your employee training, don’t just show what has gone wrong and how to fix it, but also celebrate what has gone right, and ask how can we make more of THIS happen?

About:

Nick Friedman is the President and Co-Founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and College Hunks Moving, the largest and fastest growing junk removal and moving franchise opportunity in North America with over 100 franchisees. He has been named among the Top 30 Entrepreneurs in America Under 30 by Under30CEO.com.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert , best-selling author and your host of Amazing Business Radio.

“You can’t put in an operational manual how to create extraordinary Moments of Magic. It’s got to be ingrained into your hiring practices, in your training practices and in your culture. You need to hire service-focused individuals.” – Nick Friedman

     

This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions … and more:

What is your company purpose?
How do you create a values-based company?
What are the most important attributes employees need to have? Why should you offer your customers a stress-free experience?
Why should you share and celebrate positive experiences with your employees?
What should you look for in a candidate during an interview?
What should you do in a five-minute huddle?

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of May 29, 2017

Each week I read a number of customer service and experience articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

How good is your company’s internal customer experience? by Nicolas Maechler

(McKinsey & Company) To excel with customers, frontline employees need high-level service from core support functions. Société Générale’s group head of corporate resources and innovation explains how to achieve such symmetry.

My Comment: It is no coincidence that the companies that are known for the best customer service are also known as some of the best places to work. And, it’s also not a coincidence that they happen to be more successful than others in their industry. Great service starts on the inside with employees being treated the way a customer should be treated. McKinsey & Company interviews Françoise Mercadal-Delasalles, head of corporate resources and innovation at France’s Société Générale about their internal service culture.

When the customer experience starts at home by Sylvie Bardaune, Sébastien Lacroix, and Nicolas Maechler

(McKinsey & Company) To serve end customers better, begin with your employees.

My Comment: While on the topic of internal customer service, here is another excellent article from McKinsey & Company. The opening line of the article sums up what this article is about: To service end customers better, begin with employees. The concept of internal customer service is really that simple. What’s happening on the inside of your organization is going to be felt by the customer on the outside.

30 Awesome Ways To Reward Employees & Boost Productivity by Kelichi Okeke

(CXService 360) Rewarding and recognizing excellent service from your employees not only boosts productivity, it reinforces the actions of the employee and makes it even more likely that they will do it again. The Positive reinforcement sets an example for everyone in your organization and helps them understand the kind of work you value most

My Comment: And yet one more article on the concept of internal service. My friend Kelichi Okeke from Nigeria sent over an article about 30 ways we can reward employees. He opens with a quote from Dale Carnegie: People work for money, but go the extra mile for praise, recognition and rewards.

United Continental: What Customer Service Scandal? by Ben Levisohn

(Barron’s) Shares of United Continental have rallied since video of a passenger being dragged off one of its flights made the rounds. One analyst explains why.

My Comment: What United Airlines scandal! The day or two after the scandal where a United Airlines passenger was physically and brutally removed from the plane, the stock plummeted and United lost almost a billion dollars in value. Well not even two months later the stock is up 11% and touched a new high. How can that be? This very short article has an answer.

Twitter pushes into customer service – can it prove to be successful? by Yaniv Reznik

(IT ProPortal) Twitter released new personalisation features, allowing customers to share their locations when interacting with branded chatbots through Twitter’s Direct Message service.

My Comment: I’ve written about how Twitter is becoming a powerful customer service channel. Here is another article that explains how Twitter is getting users to not only post their likes and dislikes, but also getting them to move into “Direct Message” mode with the brand to work through any issues or answer questions. Social customer care is a viable customer support channel that every company should be considering, if they haven’t already done so.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, professional speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com . For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com . Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

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Guest Blog: In the CX world, tracking these metrics is a way of life!

This week we feature an article by Ganesh Mukundan about how important customer experience metrics are to your business. Companies that track and measure their customer service have a competitive advantage. They know when they are doing a great job, and more importantly, they know when they aren’t. – Shep Hyken

As much as success is about dreaming big, the path towards it is all about setting precise targets to hit or even surpass. Usain Bolt bettered his own 200 meters world record of 19.30 seconds in 2008 with a mind boggling 19.19 seconds in 2009! Ronaldo and Messi, two of the most gifted footballers of our generation, have a renowned reputation for continuously improving their numbers – goals, assists, trophies, you name it – with each season.

So, there you have it. In order to truly taste success, you will have to track your goals and keep improving on the numbers. This statement makes as much sense for a sportsperson as it does to a business. And if a particular business is aiming for long-term growth, it requires key, powerful metrics to base its performance on.

A couple of years ago, these metrics had a proclivity towards transactions and sales. But now with the explosion of Customer Experience into the mainframe, tracking more of experiential metrics has become the norm, and if you aren’t doing it, chances are that you’re actually clueless about how your business ranks against competitors and also in the minds of consumers.

So, what are the most-necessary Customer Experience metrics your Business should keep tabs on?

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score needs no grand introduction. The ‘holy grail of metrics’ is used by most companies worldwide to track customer loyalty.

Based on responses to the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our brand to your friends and family?” on a 10 point scale, customers are either as classified as detractors (0 to 6) or passives (7 and 8) or promoters (9 and 10).

Detractors are the unhappy, frustrated customers while Passives are the neutral ones who neither despise nor love your brand. Promoters, on the other hand, are your loyal and happy customers, who would gladly promote your brand in their circles.

The prominence of Net Promoter Score stems from its ease of use, versatility (can be applied to businesses of any scale) and a simplistic working model.

Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction is another crucial metric that businesses rely on to gauge customer happiness as well as loyalty. In simple terms, CSAT can be defined as the average score that customers rate a particular experience with your brand, like the delivery experience or ticket booking experience.

In order to measure customer satisfaction, customers are asked to rate a question/set of questions based on their level of satisfaction. The answer scale varies from ‘highly satisfied’ to ‘highly dissatisfied’.

The theory here is that customers who are highly satisfied are least likely to defect to other brands whereas those who are highly dissatisfied are the most vulnerable to do so.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score deflects away from the loyalty quotient and instead, helps you quantify the effort put in by a customer to complete a task – be it searching for company information or reaching a live agent to solve a query.

Here are some common questions in a Customer Effort Score survey:

How much effort did it take to find out our company’s contact information?

Answer choices ranging from Very Low Effort to Very High Effort.
The live agent made it easy to understand my query and solve it.

Answer choices ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.

The Customer Effort Score is also an indication of whether or not your business is actually ‘customer-friendly’. Is the customer is able to effortlessly get in touch with you and have his/her queries addressed by spending as little time and effort as possible?

Customer Churn Rate

Customer Churn Rate, directly linked to loyalty, is indicative of how good/bad your business is at retaining customers.

In most business models, churn is the percentage of customers who don’t conduct repeat business or cancel their subscription. Churn percentage is calculated by dividing the total number of lost customers by the total number of active customers for any period of time.

Churn should be tackled in advance, before it grows out, which makes tracking this metric even more integral to your business’s survival. If left unattended, churn can wipe out your business before you even realize it.

So if your dreams are big enough to ace Customer Experience:

• Write down the targets for these above-mentioned metrics.

• Have a company-wide discussion on these targets. Every employee should work towards improving these metrics, and consequently the customer experience.

• Conduct weekly/monthly reviews to keep track of the journey towards hitting these numbers.

Ganesh Mukundan is the Content and Social Media guy at CloudCherry. Chelsea brotherhood. Forza Italia. Crazy movie buff. Constantly redefining the heights of laziness. Feeds off Rap Music from time to time. Ever fascinated by Norse Mythology – hopes to journey to Iceland one day! Molded In Customer Experience Enthusiasm. Don’t Just Satisfy Delight

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Starbucks Turns Coffee Beans Into Coffee And Lemons Into Lemonade

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