Free-Range Organic Blogs... by John Burton

Is Your Call Center Stuck in the Nineties?

Stuck in the Nineties?

The 1990’s were a great time – especially if you were a fan of boy bands or grunge music and flannel shirts.

All jokes aside, the 1990’s was a time of technological revolution with the advent of the Internet and mobile phones forever changing life (and business) as we know. It was during the ‘90’s that a computer – IBM’s “Deep Blue” – first defeated the reigning world (human) chess champion. And let’s not forget, it was also during the nineties that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – both as a business strategy and as a package software solution – first gained a foothold.

And finally, who among us doesn’t enjoy an occasional chuckle at embarrassing ‘90s photos of current celebrities? Fast forward a couple of decades and not everything has completely changed. Skinny jeans, flannel shirts, and day-glow Wayfarer sunglasses are all back in style. However, thankfully most artifacts of the nineties have been gracefully retired – like teased hair bangs, or wearing Lycra bike shorts with high-top basketball shoes.

Sure, we might occasionally glance back at the nineties and reminisce about how cute we looked in our Jordache jeans and  oversized sweaters. And who doesn’t have a couple pair of “MC Hammer pants” hanging in the back of his closet (or is that just me?)? But if we are honest with ourselves, the technology of the nineties – much like the fashion of the nineties – was unsightly, over-sized, and cumbersome.

For example, while the Sony Walkman was a marvelous innovation, I doubt anyone really misses having to manually wind their music cassette tapes back up with a pencil after all the tape came unwound.  And while at one time every street corner in every city was littered with payphone booths, I personally enjoy no longer having to walk around with pockets full or quarters and a pager/beeper to keep in touch with friends and family. And thankfully, it no longer takes us twenty minutes to load a webpage or download an email attachment using AOL and a 200 baud modem. Booting… connecting… downloading… beep, beep, beep, beep. Ah the good old days.

It seems like everything took longer in the Nineties. In that pre-Starbucks, pre-Wifi, pre-digital era, you couldn’t download an album or movie – on your phone – in a coffee-shop while the barista  whips you up a soy vanilla latte like you can today. Such was the stuff of sci-fi movies.  Heck, even renting a movie required a lengthy car drive to a video store (and usually culminated in several dollars worth of late-return fees). And I distinctly remember routinely having to wait on hold for several hours just to speak to a customer service agent! I’m not sure what kind of CTI software and CRM system companies were using, but I certainly don’t miss it!

However, it seems that not all organizations have embraced the latest trends in computer telephony. Many organizations, for one reason or another, are still running their contact centers using old TDM-based hardware. While hardware-based PBXs/ACDs were the de facto standard during the nineties and the first half of the following decade, such technology has quickly become antiquated. Most new CTI products and contact-center infrastructure being sold today are Internet-Protocol (IP) based software solutions. And increasingly, these software solutions are hosted in “the cloud” and delivered via software-as-a-service.

As recently as just five or ten years ago people were still debating, perhaps rightfully, whether voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) was ready yet for mainstream business usage. How stable was it? Would the industry ever standardize on a single protocol? How expensive was it to deploy? Could the company’s IT department support the bandwidth requirements? Today, these questions have all been satisfactorily answered and companies have been rolling out not just voice over IP solutions, but complete multi-channel communications systems based on IP including telephony, corporate directory and presence information, email, Web chat, internal instant messaging, and more.

SAP offers such an IP-based multi-channel communication system – SAP Business Communications Management (SAP BCM) – that is fully integrated out of the box with SAP CRM, including the Interaction Center. SAP BCM enables companies to route customer telephone calls, emails, or Web chats directly to the best-suited available agent who has the expertise, language skills, and product knowledge to help the customer and resolve their issue. Using BCM, Interaction Center agents can reach out to other experts in the organization and request assistance, or even transfer the customer (as well as the customer record and any open sales orders, service requests, etc.).

SAP BCM is available in a number of different deployment models and options. You can, of course, download and install the software locally on an in-house server. Additionally, an “express” version of the software is available from SAP as a “Rapid Deployment Solution” that is delivered and installed by SAP using best-business practices. Other options for deploying BCM include both a “BCM-in-a-Box” and “BCM-in-the-Cloud” deployment models delivered by certified SAP partners such as Covington Creative. If you are interested in using SAP BCM with the SAP CRM Interaction Center or have further questions, please feel free to contact John Burton at john.burton@sap.com.

Whatever you do, don't press THAT button! How to avoid screwing up your SAP CRM Interaction Center project.

Flickr creative commons courtesy of psd

If you haven’t realized by now, one of the truly wonderful thing about SAP CRM is that it is flexible enough to let you customize the heck out of the system to support your own unique business processes. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Consumer Products, Utilities, High Tech, Public Sector, Professional Services, or any of a dozen other industries – you can modify the system to suit your specific industry best practices. Whether you sell chocolate bars or tooth paste, silicon chips or silicone implants, tractors or sports cars – you can tweak the system to suit your company’s individual needs.

But, if you haven’t realized by now, one of the truly dangerous things about SAP CRM is that it is flexible enough to let you customize the heck out of the system, leaving you with a implementation that can be anything but “out of the box” or “off the shelf”. While not a problem in itself, it can become a problem when the one consultant or internal employee who knows how it all works rolls off the project or retires. And let’s not even get started on the topic of trying to upgrade a highly customized implementation to a new release.

And even if you try to stay as “vanilla” as possible with your CRM implementation, you’re often faced with critical implementation decisions that will determine the long-term direction of your project. While in some cases you can backtrack and change your mind at a later point, other decisions can send you down an irreversible path. For example, deciding which CTI vendor to choose for your contact center’s telephony, email and chat needs is typically a long-term decision. Once you invest the capital and integrate a vendor into your call center and corporate telephony landscape, it’s usually very difficult to later “rip and replace”. Similarly, choosing a Knowledge Management vendor and strategy for your contact center’s help desk and your enterprise in general is a critical decision with long-lasting implications.

If you are new to the SAP CRM Interaction Center – or if you are upgrading from an older release to SAP CRM 7.0 and looking for a “fresh start” – you will want to join me at the SAP Insider CRM 2013 conference from March 4 – 8 in Las Vegas, Nevada for two informative sessions on the SAP CRM Interaction Center. On Monday, March 4^th , the day before the actual conference officially begins, I will be presenting a three-hour “jump start” session covering everything you ever wanted to know about the SAP CRM Interaction Center but were afraid to ask. Though the official title of the session is, “Jumpstart: The 2013 guide to SAP CRM Interaction Center: Functionality, updates, and future roadmap”. If you can stay awake for the full three hours, you will not only win a gold star sticker, but you’ll leave with a notebook full of tips, tricks, and best practices.

If for some reason you aren’t able to make it out early for the jumpstart session, or if you fall asleep during the last hour, fear not… we will also have a special one-hour session on Tuesday, March 5^th with a slightly different focus. Specifically we will be looking at critical decision points in your SAP CRM Interaction Center project such as choosing a CTI vendor, selecting a Knowledge Management strategy, and picking the right Trouble Ticketing and Sales Order Management options – all based on your industry, call center size, and business strategy. The official title of this session is, “Guidelines for selecting the most appropriate SAP CRM Customer Interaction Center functionality to most effectively serve your customers”. However, I prefer to call it, “How Not to Screw Things Up” or “Whatever You Do, Don’t Press THAT Red Button”. 

It’s kind of like when a movie action hero warns his side kick to not press that ominous looking oversized red button. “Whatever you do, never press THAT button. Which always make me wonder… if pressing the button leads to such disastrous consequences, whey even have the button at all? Good question. And there’s a probably good answer. Perhaps in some extremely rare, unique situations, pressing that button can actually be beneficial – like if our hero suddenly need to suddenly reverse the Earth’s polarity in order to foil a doom’s-day device created by the movie’s nefarious villain. Not that I’m comparing your call center to a doom’s day device or anything.

If nothing else, hopefully you will walk out of these sessions with a better understanding of what features and capabilities the SAP CRM Interaction Center provides, and more importantly – which features will best support your company’s call center implementation, and which features should probably never be touched (unless all hell is breaking loose).

Two Things Should Never Fail You: Childhood Heroes and CRM Systems!

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

I’ve always had questionable taste in heroes. As a five-year old, I idolized Darth Vader, cheering madly for him to crush those long-haired, scofflaw, pot-smoking Jedi hippies. As an adult, I found a new hero: Lance Armstrong, a man who rose from the ashes of cancer and went on to win the most grueling sporting event in the world – seven consecutive times!

However, both of my life-long heroes are now shrouded in disgrace. Darth Vader, in the end, turned all soft and gooey – renouncing the Dark Side and returning to a life of macaroni salad, rainbows, and unicorns.

Lance Armstrong recently confessed to Oprah that he's consumed more drugs than John Belushi, Jim Morrison, and Jerry Garcia combined – and apparently kept a  refrigerator stocked with kegs of his own blood for late-night snacking and pre-race blood transfusions.

Nobody’s perfect. Hell, we aren’t so naïve as to expect that. But we do expect our heroes – whether they be in sports, politics, or business – to live up to a slightly higher standard. Perhaps no one was surprised when Marion  Jones, Jose Canseco, and Barry Bonds were busted for steroids (come on, have you seen the size of their biceps, not to mention the size of their foreheads).

And yes, we’re all accustomed to politicians lying to us about anything and everything, whether it is Al Gore suggesting that he invented the Internet, or Paul Ryan claiming to have run a sub-3 hour marathon. But I think many of us were surprised when Scott Thompson, the former CEO of Yahoo was fired for lying on his resume. And who among us would have ever guessed that sweet-little Martha  Stewart would go to prison for insider trading?

In a world of falsified resume’s, insider trading, broken campaign promises,  Ponzi schemes, and performance-enhancing drugs, it hard not to get frustrated. We’ve all gotten accustomed to coming home and turning on the television or computer to read about the latest disgraced hero who has failed us.

We’ve been  let down enough in our personal lives. The last thing we want is to go into work  in the morning and find out that our CRM systems have failed us as well. But for millions of business users across the globe, this is an all too painful reality. It’s called, Your-Standalone-CRM-System-Sucks-Syndrome.

You receive a phone call or email from a customer, but your CRM system doesn’t recognize the telephone number or email address; apparently your SaaS-based CRM isn’t connected to your on-premise CTI software. So you manually go into the CRM system to pull up a customer’s account, but instead of one consolidated customer record you find three different records for the same customer, each with different contact information and order history.

Once you manage to find the right account and the correct order, the shipping details and invoice information are stored in a completely different billing and fulfillment system that’s not connected to the CRM system. Later, when the customer complains about your product or service on Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities, you’re completely unaware of the fact that anything is wrong!

It’s easy to forgive celebrities like Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Amy Winehouse for their penchant for cocktails of exotic prescription painkillers. Few people raise their eyebrows these days when politicians (French or  otherwise) are caught having extramarital affairs. And no one is surprised  anymore when world-class athletes are busted for steroids and stripped of their titles. But for goodness sake, we still expect our CRM systems to work. After all, is nothing sacred!

Here’s the thing about CRM. Whether it runs in the server room or in the  stratosphere… whether it’s single-tenant, duplex, or high-density residential… whether you rent it by the hour (in a seedy motel) or are married to it for life … whether you call it CRM or something completely corny like CX… whatever. To get real value out if it, your CRM has to be integrated with your other IT services including your telephony software, inventory management software, pricing software, billing system, order management system, and back-end fulfillment system, as well as your social media monitoring software.

It doesn’t necessarily have to all be from one vendor; but it sure as hell better all work  together!

Going to the Gym Should be Painful. Dealing with Customer Service Should Not!

Anyone who’s ever tried Bikram Yoga has probably found themselves cursing the friend, family member, or co-worker who suggested it. Man, that crap is painful! As soon as you walk in the 105°F room you feel like you can’t breathe. You legitimately worry that you might die.

And that’s before the class even starts. Ninety minutes later (and 5 pounds of sweat lighter) you crawl out of the studio amazed to still be alive. And don’t get me started on Pilates or CrossFit. I wasn’t able to walk properly for three days after doing those.

It’s amazing the amount of discomfort, inconvenience, and mental anguish the average person is willing to subject themselves to in order to get in shape. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people actually enjoy suffering. However, I do know better. And I know that people don’t actually like to suffer needlessly.

While people might be willing to endure hours of self-imposed torture (not to mention boredom) on a treadmill to look a little better in a bathing suit, nobody is willing to put up with that same degree of pain and suffering when calling their bank, cable company, or satellite television provider.

Yet many companies seem to go out of their way to make things as difficult, complicated, and painful for customers as possible. Or these companies are, in the very least, oblivious to the anguish and frustration they are causing their customers by subjecting customers to cumbersome and unwieldy web self service sites, telephone IVR menus, and rigid call center business processes.

Companies, understandably, want to organize their websites, IVRs, and call centers in a manner that steer customers towards objectives that benefit the company e.g., “Press 1 to hear about our great new products, press 2 for sales, press 3 to transfer to our low cost automated self-service app.” Only at the very end of the list, if you are lucky, do you get “press 99 for all other inquiries or to speak to a living-breathing customer service agent”.

It’s hard to blame companies for wanting to pitching relevant marketing offer or product upsells, or for hoping to drive customers to the lower cost support channels when applicable. However, it is easy to blame companies for abusing these tactics and making an already agitated customer (nobody calls the call center just to chit chat) sit through a five minute litany of annoying advertisements and promotional pitches before allowing them to speak to a customer service agent.

What’s needed is balance. Studies have shown that the best way to increase customer loyalty is to reduce the “amount of effort” that customers have to expend to get an issue resolved. Scott Heitland of Pretium Solutions wrote an wonderful blog post, “How Many Angry Customers Are You Creating at $15 Each?” that looks at what happens when companies put their own corporate goals and policies ahead of the best interests of their employee and customer.

Scott gives an amusing example of a company that had a mail-in rebate program that required customers to include the UPC code from the product box; but the problem was that the box actually had 3 different UPC codes and many customers submitted the wrong one. When the company’s executives where asked why the UPC code was required, they admitted it was something they had been requiring for years but that they had no idea why.

In the comments section of his blog post, Scott goes on to share a few personal anecdotes about his interactions with various call centers and his observation that, in general, most call center agents really want to be able to help the customer, but that they are often hand-cuffed by corporate policies and regulations. I could not agree more with his closing statement” “Remove obstacles for your call agent agents, and they will do the same for your customers.”

And I must admit, that as a long-term CRM professional I was horrified to hear him recount how one call center agent remarked that she is best able to resolve customer issues when her CRM system goes down (I’m assuming she’s not using SAP, but rather some flimsy cloud-based vendor) as it is during those moments that she has the freedom to do whatever is necessary to resolve the customer’s issue. Yikes, that is painful indeed!

Hopefully the takeaway here is not that we need CRM systems to crash more often, but rather that we need to design our CRM and call center processes to be more customer (and employee) oriented. Don’t make customers jump through hoops in order to access your online content on your Web site. Don’t require callers bend over backwards or stand on their heads to speak to an actual customer service agent.

The last thing you want is for your customers to work up a sweat or pull a muscle while dealing with your call center. Pain, sweat, and ice packs have their place – but it’s in the gym, not the customer service department.

Uh, Oh! Call Center Reps Gone Wild!

Here’s a worst case call center scenario. You’re the team leader, supervisor, or call center manager for a once respectable call center operation that has suddenly – for lack of a better term – completely gone to hell. Beer cans and clothing are strewn across the call center floor. People are “sleeping” in the training rooms. Absenteeism and turnover are up, while adherence and productivity are down. Way down. Employees are showing up drunk, when they even show up at all. And most recently, you’ve noticed a dramatic uptick in the number of eggs on your car windows and key scratches on your doors.

Anthony Leaper, Senior Vice President and General Manager at SAP, recently wrote a hard-hitting expose, “How to Fail your Call Centers”, that take a unblinking look at what happens when otherwise well-trained and passionate call center reps are hamstrung by restrictive policies that leave them helpless to resolve customer issues. In case you haven’t read his article, basically what happens is that 1) customers get really pissed off, and 2) call center agents start showing up to work unshaven, disheveled, reeking of Bourbon. Chances are, neither of those two things are performance indicators that you want to mention in your annual report.

How you might ask, does something like this happen? Well, let’s take a scenario that we’re all quite familiar with. You’re enjoying a cold six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon while watching Dancing with the Stars on your new, super cool iPhone 7 (the top-end deluxe model with 1000 GB storage and built-in retinal scanning). Suddenly the professional wrestler/action movie star you were cheering for gets voted off the island. You scream, “WTF? He nailed that enchufla! This is complete bullshit!,” throwing your hands up in disgust. Instantly you realize your mistake as you look down at the short-circuiting, beer-soaked iPhone in the lap of your skinny jeans. Crap! You sheepishly dig out your old iPhone 5 (the one with only 999 GB storage and old-fashioned finger-print scanning) and dial up customer service.

The cheerful call center rep immediately sympathizes with your predicament. “Yes sir, he nailed the hell out of that enchufla. Yes sir, the judges robbed him blind. Yes sir, it was complete bullshit.”. But the rep then goes on to apologetically explain that as per corporate policy you are not eligible to receive a free new phone until next week when you’re two-year contract comes up for renewal. Regrettably if you want a new phone this week, it will cost you five thousand dollars.

Obviously you can’t go around in public using your old, now embarrassingly out of fashion iPhone 5, for a whole week. So you grudgingly pay the $5000 for a shiny new replacement iPhone 7. You end the phone call by telling the call center rep that they suck money balls and that if you ever see them walking out of the Abercrombie and Fitch store in the mall parking lot, you’ll run them over with your hipster fixed gear (fixie) bicycle. “It’s on mother****r” you scream as you furiously bang on the phone’s hang-up button with your finger.

So, where did it all go wrong? Clearly organizations can’t just do away with all corporate policies and procedures, right? I mean, we need rules. We need structure. We need rigid, completely inflexible iron-clad corporate policies that frustrate employees and infuriate customers! Right?

Well, maybe not. Clearly, corporate policies and procedures are created for good reason (e.g., to prevent fraud, to avoid giving away non-entitled service, to ensure all customers receive a consistent customer experience, etc.). But call center reps also need the authority and flexibility to deviate from the script and take action to satisfactorily resolve customer issues when appropriate. In the above example, where the customer’s two-year contact is coming up for renewal in just a week, the agent should be empowered to move up the contract renewal date by a mere week in order to retain the customer and garner goodwill and brand loyalty.

Seems like common sense, doesn’t it? Sensible, yes. But common? Unfortunately still not so much. Many organizations haven’t yet embraced a balanced approach to enforcing corporate policies and procedures, while giving call center reps the ability to “go rouge” when it’s in the best interest of the organization. Perhaps when companies start losing more customers (and employees) they will wake up and smell the… what the heck is that smell, and how are you going to get it out of the carpet?

Billionaires Are Bad In Bed

Everyone wants to be a billionaire – or failing that, to marry one. But, alas, the world seem to be suffering from a severe world-wide shortage of billionaires these days. And unfortunately most billionaires are already married (though admittedly some for the second, third, or fourth go-round). And for those of you still hoping to snag an eligible billionaire, the pickings are frighteningly slim.

If someone with a billion dollars in the bank isn’t married already… well, they probably have some rather serious issues that go well beyond Donald Trump’s terrifically bad comb-over, or Larry Ellison’s amazingly plasticized face-lift. The Forbes list of Billionairescame out earlier this year and glancing at the photos, there aren’t a lot of young hotties with abs of steel or full heads of hair. Though on the positive side, many billionaires do seem to still have (at least most) of their teeth.

It’s not just unmarried singles however who should give up on chasing billionaires. Businesses often fall into the same trap of thinking that all of their business woes will be instantly solved if only they can land one or two huge billionaire clients. But guess what? Billionaires are bad in bed! Or more specifically, billionaires make bad business bed-fellows. Billionaires are often notoriously frugal. After all, they didn’t get rich by squandering their money; they got rich by saving it (with the obvious exception of Paris Hilton of course).

99.9% of businesses shouldn’t care about billionaires

Anthony Leaper from SAP wrote an excellent two-part blog series earlier this year entitled, “How to Suck Up to Billionaires (Part 1)” and “How to Suck Up to Billionaires (Part 2).” Anthony’s blogs highlighted the need for CRM systems to better integrate with external data providers (e.g., InsideView) in order to provide companies with more holistic view of their customers, as well as the importance of having a CRM system that can put the consolidated customer information (e.g., customer preferences) into the hands of the front-line employees who interact with customers on a daily basis.

Which brings me to my point however that 99.99% of business shouldn’t even care about billionaires. There are only a thousand or two billionaires in the world. So if your business model is built on chasing billionaires, you better have a pretty low-volume, high-margin product – like luxury cars, private jets, professional sports franchises, or secluded Greek islands.

But if you’re in the commodity products or services businesses, you won’t get rich targeting billionaires (unless perhaps you’re selling black mock turtle necks to Silicon Valley CEOs). Billionaires seldom fly commercial. They’re not searching for used sporting equipment on Craig’s list and they aren’t going to spend an hour trying to outbid you for that used toaster on eBay. They don’t typically incur credit-card late charges or checking account over-draft fees. And I’m guessing they’re probably also not interested in pay-day-advance loans or check cashing services.

Ironically, business travelers are a much more profitable customer segment than billionaires. It turns out that people are more willing to throw around a few extra dollars for upgrades and premium services when their employer is picking up the tab than when they are spending their own money. Thus, companies would do much better to focus their efforts on wooing the business traveler wearing a laptop backpack in the airport and standing in line at Starbucks than the billionaire pulling up to their private jet in a chauffeured Bentley.

How CRM can help

Insights like the one above might not be intuitive, but this is exactly the type of value that your CRM will soon be able to provide. Imagine a scenario in which your CRM system gently clears its throat (or perhaps slaps you in the head) the moment you try to initiate a business plan, marketing campaign, or customer service strategy that is counter-productive to the long term goals and business objectives you’ve entered in the CRM system!

For example, if your stated business objective is to grow your customer base and increase long-term customer lifetime value (CLV), then the CRM system might complain and raise a fit if you try and implement a new customer service program based solely on cost-reduction. After all, while every organization wants to optimize its service organization and move customers to lower-cost support channels where appropriate, care needs to be taken not to drive away existing (profitable) customers and to erode the company’s brand value and goodwill.

Providing poor customer service might be cheaper – in the short term – than delivering a compelling customer experience. But scrimping on customer service will ultimately cost the company more money than it saves, as existing customers slowly migrate to competitors and prospective new customers shy away based on negative brand ratings and customer reviews. This is something we all know, but sometimes forget. And in the not too distant future, our CRM systems will be more than happy to remind us.

Sorry, the Refund Department is Closed

It is no closely guarded secret that I have an intense hate-hate relationship with United Airlines. Sometimes I hate them, and sometimes I really hate them. And I’m apparently not alone. Ray Wang, Paul Greenberg, and many others in the CRM space have written about their painful, near-death experiences with United’s much maligned Customer Dis-Service department. But recently, United managed to surprise me by screwing up a little less than normal; and by actually managing to resolve an issues in a satisfactory manner – on the first call! But more on that in a minute.

Anthony Leaper, Senior Vice President and General Manager at SAP, recently participated in a Coffee Break with Game Changers radio show episode entitled, “Is Your Call Center Missing the Obvious.” One of the points brought up during the show was the idea that many of the customer service horror stories can be avoided if the company would just make a little more effort to make the customer experience a dream rather than a nightmare. I won’t spoil the whole show for you (check it out for yourself), but one main point I took away was that the key to delivering great customer service and delighting your customers is to hire (and to encourage and reward) people who are passionate about your brand!

We’ve all experienced the sheer joy of dealing with the customer service department at Zappos. If you haven’t (Gosh, what the hell is wrong with you), definitely call them and order a pair of new shoes today (even if you don’t really need new shoes) just for the sheer thrill of experiencing world-class customer service. And then, for comparison (and to bring yourself back down to reality) call United Airline’s customer service department, if you can even find the number. The disparity will make your head explode (and not in a good way – if there even is such a thing).

But as I mentioned above in the teaser, last week United actually managed to resolve one of my issues in a not-completely-horrible manner, and on the first call even. Though, to be fair, the call did involve a period of 3 to 5 minutes where I was put on hold wondering if they person was really going to get back to me or if I was just being left for dead. And the conversation did begin quite awkwardly with the customer service agent proclaiming that unfortunately, “The refund department is closed.” It was 2:03 pm in the afternoon in California, so I wasn’t completely shocked that the refund department would already be closed (presuming it was operating on East Coast time). What did shock me, to be honest, was the fact that United even has a refund department. Kudos to them.

The call began with me explaining my predicament to the outsourced call center agent, who despite his heavy accent insisted his name was Tyler Durden. I recounted to “Tyler” that I had requested an upgrade to business class for an upcoming flight to Germany using the Website, but that I had afterwards changed my mind and was unable to find any way to cancel my upgrade request. That’s when “Tyler” proudly proclaimed that the refund department was closed. I of course was expecting things to quickly go downhill. I was already picking out various profanities to hurl. That’s when “Tyler” surprised me and said that he was going to put me on hold to check with a supervisor to see how they could resolve the problem for me.

Five minutes later “Tyler” informed me that his supervisor approved the refund of my miles, and that my credit card would be re-credited. He then asked if there was anything else he could help me with. Unbelievable! Was this really happening, I wondered? Had a company with one of the worst reputations for poor customer service actually come through and resolved an issue that required exceptions to the normal workflow processes in a polite and (relatively) quick manner, on the first call? Yes, that really happened I assured myself. I talk to myself a lot, but that’s neither here nor there.

The takeaway here is that there is hope for any of us. No matter how badly (or how well) our companies’ customer service departments are performing, all it takes is one empowered employee to step up and deliver – delighting the customer and raising the image of the brand. And hell, honestly if United Airlines can do it, any of us can do it!

Sh*t Call Center Reps Say

Anthony Leaper from SAP wrote a great article in on Forbes.com entitled, “5 Stupefying Statements from the CRM Call Center (and what to do about them)” that examined some common, yet absurdly stupid, call center faux pas that make customers want to whack themselves (or more likely the hapless call center agent) in the head with their smart phone. Anthony provided five great examples, and I’d like to add one more.

 “We can’t modify your order, it’s already being processed.”

Unfortunately, for reasons that have to do with my fetish for high-end European bicycle racing components and accessories, I regularly find myself ordering high-end cycling gear from one of several UK-based specialty retailers who are definitely not Amazon or Zappos (both of whom I love more dearly than our family dog). And invariably, nearly every time I order from one of these other on-line retailers who are not Zappos or Amazon, I brace myself for the worst. Instead of the free overnight or two-day shipping, I know I will likely have to wait several days for my order to be even be processed and shipped, and then several additional weeks for the package to actually arrive via what I can only imagine is some old, three legged mule with an arthritic back who handles all of their deliveries.

OK, whatever. I’ve come to accept this. If you want the absolute lightest, strongest, sleekest, sexiest bicycle parts in the world, you have to pay in Euros and you have to wait weeks while your products float slowly across the Atlantic in a leaky rowboat and on the back of the aforementioned arthritic mule. Fine, patience is the greatest of all virtues. I get it. But the one thing that I still cannot tolerate or fathom, no matter how many times it happens, is when a call center agents tells me that they can’t make any changes to the order I just placed online (literally only seconds ago) because the order is already being processed.

As we all know, not all e-Commerce websites are equally well-designed, and some can be terribly complex and unhelpful. I like to believe that I’m fairly adept at clicking the “Add to cart” button and that I am not a complete idiot. But from time to time, I have been known to accidentally select the wrong size, color, or number of items. My good friends at Zappos have no problem with this. “No, problem Mr. Burton, that’s our mistake. Let us correct that for you.” But the folks at Euro Snobbery Bikes generally take a different approach. “Well sir, why did you add the super-duper-ultra-light thingamajig to the cart if you really wanted the über-duper-ultra-light thingamajig? In any case, there’s nothing we can do about it now. The order is already being processed.”

What the hell do they mean that it’s being “processed”? I literally just pressed the “submit order” button seconds ago. Do they seriously want me to believe that magical elves have already picked, pulled, packed, and shipped my order in record time? And if so, great – but where’s my confirmation email and courier tracking ID? At this point the unhelpful call center agent usually confesses that no, the order hasn’t actually been shipped yet, but that the company’s front-end CRM system that the agent is using is not connected to the back-end ERP system that the warehouse uses to fulfill the order. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere…

Many companies, whether through poor planning, or perhaps as a result of mergers and acquisitions, find themselves in a situation where their front-end CRM system doesn’t communicate with their back-end ERP system. This is what is known as, “your-front-office-personnel-have-no-idea-what-products-are-in-stock-and-they-can’t-even-make-simple-modifications-to-an-existing-order”. And it’s bad. Bad for your company, bad for your employees, and bad for your customers.

Without seamless integration between the front office and the back office, Marketing professionals don’t know which products to promote; order entry professionals can’t provide accurate availability or shipping information; and customer service agents can’t make even the simplest changes to existing orders. Instead, customers end up losing their patience, employees end up losing their cool, and your company can end up losing business. My business and your business!

The Nitwit’s Guide to Dispensing Customer Service: When to Strive for World-Class, and when to not even Bother

There are several, conflicting schools of thought about the importance of providing great Customer Service.  The first school of thought (let’s keep things non-judgmental and call them the clueless, greedy, very-very-naughty folks) see Customer Service as a unavoidable-though-regrettable cost of doing business. In their view, Customer Service is a nefarious drain on the organization’s valuable resources that could otherwise be used to fuel the corporate Marketing and Sales machines. This school of thought is naturally comprised mainly of marketers, sales professionals, venture capitalists, and unenlightened executives – often from the Telco or Banking industry.

The second school of thought (again, let’s keep things neutral and call them naïve, altruistic, head-in-the-sand do-gooders) believe that Customer Service affords organizations a chance to differentiate themselves from competitors, and if done well enough, can completely replace the need to engage in any Marketing or Sales efforts at all. These lost souls reason that if you provide world-class customer service that completely blows everyone else out of the water, happy customers will spontaneously refer you to all of their friends, family, and online communities creating a viral tsunami of goodwill (and corresponding sales orders). The main proponents of this school of thought are of course customer service professionals, ivory tower academics and think-tank geniuses (who haven’t ever gotten their hands dirty in the trenches), and fresh-on-the-scene, Social CRM self-proclaimed (wanna-be) gurus.

As you probably already guessed, both of these schools of thought are (equally) severely delusional. For example, you can’t run a successful business by consistently avoiding your customers and outsourcing your customer service operations to the cheapest, no-frills, off-shore service provider. Doing so will simply annoy your customers and incur their wrath in online communities and social forums. On the other hand, while providing top-notch customer service is a great starting point, it is not going to completely eliminate the need to engage with your customers. You still need to reach out to your customers via targeted, channel-appropriate Marketing efforts. Otherwise your product or service is not going to sell itself (with the possible exception of Apple perhaps).

As with anything however, there are always a few exceptions to the rule (“I before E except after C” and that sort of thing). Hence, I’ve provided a list of unique situations in which companies may not need to worry about Customer Service at all.  If your company finds itself in one of the can’t lose situations below, just sit back and enjoy the ride (or not).

Five Situations in Which Customer Service is Unimportant, Superfluous, or Simply a Lost Cause

1)      You have a monopoly or operate in a tightly regulated market where you have no direct competitors and you are absolutely certain that the market will remain so for at least the next 300 years. In this case, you can safely continue to ignore the desperate pleas of your customers and dole out lackluster (or non-existent) customer service as you see fit with an air of superiority and condescension. These revolting, groveling customers are lucky you even bother to answer their telephone calls or provide a confusing and ultimate useless IVR phone tree. You don’t have time (or money) to waste on setting up a self-service web site or providing 24x7 customer service agents; you need to wisely spend all your resources lobbying government officials to preserve your monopolistic empire.

2)      Your products are cheaper (much, much, cheaper) than any other comparable competitor product. Hasn’t anyone heard the expression, “you get what you pay for”? If people want fancy, expensive Grey-Poupon customer service, let them go to Ritz Carlton or their Lexus dealer. Come on, for what these penny-pinching customers pay they are lucky that you generously throw in a thin paper box and a piece of bubble wrap.

3)      Your company (and your company’s products/services) are way cooler than anyone else’s. Or alternatively, your company’s CEO thinks he/she is way cooler than anyone else. In either case you can probably get away with providing mediocre or sub-par customer service without ruffling too many feathers. Customers are much more willing to tolerate customer service missteps from an a company with a very high “cool” factor like an Apple, Google or Facebook than from a company whose products are seen as commodities.

4)      Customers feel they will die if they don’t have your product (think beer, cigarettes or iPads/iPhones). Or alternatively, customers will actually (literally) die if they don’t have access to your product (think pharmaceuticals, medical devices, etc.). If the law of supply and demand is in your corner, especially when it’s a matter of life (real or perceived) the rules go out the window and you’re in charge. If customer’s complain about your products, just argue that the customer is using your product incorrectly. You don’t need no stinkin’ customer service.

5)      You market and sell products to hardworking, loyal, rural American families who have been buying your products for generations (and who still prefer your products over foreign offerings with the same or lower costs and better service). While this advantage won’t last forever and is most likely already eroding, you might still be able to milk that cash cow for another few years. As a rule of thumb, if your customers tattoo your logo on their body parts or display stickers of your brand logo urinating on a rival’s brand logo, you are probably still safe for a while at least. But on the other hand, nothing lasts forever and perhaps now is a good time to start revamping your customer service processes – if you haven’t already.

 

This post is also available TheSocialCustomer.com at http://thesocialcustomer.com/node/27174/. 

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80% of People Are Basically Idiots; Even the Best CRM System Can’t Fix That (Or Can It?)

Let’s talk about First Contact Resolution (FCR) for a minute. For example, an 81% first call resolution rate might sound great at first glance, right? Eighty-one percent! Woo hoo, awesome, high five! But when you consider that 80% of people are basically idiots (more on that in a minute) then that’s means you are really only solving 1% of the real problems that couldn’t otherwise be easily solved by putting a Google search widget on the front of your company’s Web self service portal. And a 1% resolution rate is pretty bad. Unless of course you are United Airlines, in which case – wow, awesome, high five – you improved 1% from last year!

But let’s get back to that contentious statistic about 80% of people being, well… not particularly bright. I know what you’re probably thinking. Is this just another one of those bullshit statistics that John just made up on the spot? Well, um… yes and no. It is generally acknowledged that smart people sometimes do dumb things. And a college degree certainly doesn’t guarantee rational decision making. Heck, I have  a graduate and a post graduate degree and there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t do something incredibly stupid. Take for example last week when my wife asked me what I thought was the ideal weight for the average American woman (hint: whatever you do, don’t say 110 lbs or you will be sleeping on the couch for the week).

But don’t just take my word for it that people don’t always think rationally. Let me prove it to you. Before you read any further, answer this simple story problem: Ashton is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at Justin. Ashton is married, but Justin is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Yes? No? Cannot be determined?

If you’re like 80% of people (including me) you answered “cannot be determined” because we don’t know if Anne is married or not. And you were wrong. The answer is yes, a married person is indeed looking at an unmarried person. True, we don’t know whether Anne is married or not, but it  doesn’t actually matter because we know that a married person (Ashton) is looking at her, and that she is looking at an unmarried person (Justin). So either way, whether she is married or not, she is either the unmarried person being looked at by a married person (Ashton), or she is the married person looking at the unmarried person (Justin). Simple. Yet so many of us got it wrong.  Similarly most people will get some (if not all) of these five tricky questions wrong as well.

Now in fairness, I don’t really believe that most people are “idiots” (that was just the attention-grabbing headline). But I do however suspect that at least 80% of us would rather do something else with our valuable time than spend hours huddled over an instruction manual frying our brain trying to figure out how to configure the new USB toasterwe received for Christmas. And if the majority of us can’t pass a simple logic quiz without popping a blood vessel in our forehead, how can we be expected to do something as complicated as syncing our iTunes with our iPod or resetting the microwave clock for daylight saving time?

That my friends is what Customer Service was invented for. You pick up the phone and the all knowing powers on the other end talk you through the easy 162-step process. Three hours later, you’re good to go. At least that’s how Service used to work. These days of course it’s all about web self service, telephone IVR systems, chat bots, and social-media crowd sourcing.  Companies have realized that they don’t necessarily need to keep  10,000 college kids on staff at all times, constantly answering calls and gulping down 5 hour energy shots.

With a decent CRM system that includes a modern Web self service portal, telephone IVR, integrated knowledge base, and an online social-media community, companies can deflect an extraordinary number of queries that would have otherwise reached the call center.  Not only do companies save money on reduced agent salaries, but customers get their questions answered faster and with more consistent responses. And then there is proactive service, which allows companies to avoid potential costly service repairs by contacting customers as soon as an issue is detected or anticipated. Throw in some remote diagnostic tools and the products can literally report problems themselves. And don’t forget about online social-media communities that provide a platform for crowd sourcing, allowing customers to help resolve each other’s questions and issues.

Throw it all together and you’ve got a recipe for reduced cost of service, increased customer satisfaction, and yes… perhaps even that allusive 81% first contact resolution rate. Perhaps the only thing that a good CRM system can’t do is activate that other 90% of the human brain that people don’t use. Yes, unfortunately even the best CRM system probably isn’t going to make you any better at Sudoku or Words with Friends – though hopefully it might at least be able to help you figure out how to get that USB toaster up and running.

There’s No Such Thing as “Social Media Samurai” or “Customer Service Ninjas”

I grind my teeth whenever I stumble across any blog that encourages readers to be “social media samurai” or “customer-service ninjas”.  I mean, come on, there is absolutely no such things as a social media samurai or a customer service ninja. Just in case this is not already painfully obvious, ninjas and samurai have never been known for their social media or customer service prowess.

Samurais aren’t experts in search engine optimization or online community management. Ninjas don’t wear hands-free  headsets and hide in the call center waiting for you to have a problem with your PC, broadband access or satellite TV. No, quite the contrary, ninjas sneak up behind you and slit your throat. Or they throw sharp (usually poisoned) deadly objects from behind trees. That’s not customer service. Or, at least not good customer service. So let’s stop urging people to be customer service ninjas. 

Well then, you might ask, if we can’t hire ninjas to save the day and make all of our customer services problems go away, what is a company to do? Well for starters, we can make a concerted effort to suck less. Yes, “sucking less” is a real term; and it’s also a pretty decent business strategy. Sure, it would be great if every business was world class at customer service. But as Will Rodgers once quipped, “We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”

However, just because we can’t all be customer service rock stars like at Ritz Carlton and Nordstrom’s doesn’t mean that we all have to absolutely suck like Bank of America or America Online (AOL). Rather, there is probably a happy medium where our customers don’t absolutely loathe us and might actually recommend us to a friend or relative.

So, with that in mind, here are three ways to suck less without breaking the bank or spending an inordinate amount of effort:

• Benchmark your ‘suckiness’.  It is not merely enough to strongly suspect that your company’s service efforts suck. No, you need to know for certain. And more importantly you need to gauge just how truly, madly, deeply your customers dislike you. Do they merely find you annoying and useless, or do they hate you so much that they would stab you with an improvised ‘prison shank’ if they ran into you in the Whole Foods parking lot?
  
  The best way to discern just how much your customers despise you is to benchmark yourself against your worst-in-class peer group via regular satisfaction surveys. There are a lot of good tools on the market that can help you, whether you choose to leverage the survey suite functionality offered by your CRM suite provider or whether you decide to work with one of the  industry-leading stand-alone enterprise feedback management (WFM) vendors. 
  
  For the most part, many of the survey tools are somewhat similar. Any basic tool should give you the ability to send out satisfaction emails to customers are their service process has been completed, or to ask the customer to stay on the phone to complete a survey after the customer service agent has helped them with their issue. More advanced products might provide tools for including social media channels in your feedback collection efforts.
  
  But even the most entry-level tool is better than what you are probably doing now (i.e., absolutely nothing at all). As long as the survey results get looked at things will likely start improving. As any middle manager who ever took a management training course will proudly recite, “what gets measured, gets managed”.
  
  
• Strive to suck a little less each day. Granted, ‘sucking less’ is not the loftiest of goals. But then again, you are not looking to put a customer service rep on the moon for goodness sake. No, your simply want to get to a point where your customer service efforts are like a bland, tasteless meal that satiates the customers hunger without giving them diarrhea or heartburn. Your offerings might not have any Michelin stars or Zagat rating, but at least the customer isn’t going to throw up in the parking lot and call the health department. We’re just aiming for a passing grade here.  
  
  If your customer service operations are a complete disaster (i.e., you are any major Telco, Bank, or Insurance company), then obviously you are not going to be able to fix everything overnight. So start with something small, but meaningful. If customers complain that your website or IVR system are utterly unusable, then start with that.
  
  Fire whoever is currently responsible for the crap you’ve got and hire someone who can help re-design the system from a more customer-centric approach. Provide your customers with menu options and features that make it easier for them to accomplish what it is they’re trying to do. Don’t make them sit through numerous up-sell or cross-sell efforts before you let them check their account balance or reschedule an appointment.
  
  If your customer service operations suck, but don’t suck as much a Telco or Bank, then you’re probably either an airline, a consumer electronics retailer, or a home improvement megastore. In any case, you still have plenty of room to improve. Your website and call center might both be providing adequately just-good-enough lukewarm customer service. But the thing you need to understand is that your frontline employees are just as important to how customers perceive your customer service operations.
  
  Just because airline flight attendants and retail branch employees don’t have the words “customer service” anywhere in their official job title doesn’t mean that they are excepted from treating customers with courtesy, respect, and professionalism. These are the people in your organization who customers deal with on a daily basis, and if these front-line employees aren’t aligned with your customer service strategy, it really doesn’t matter how well your website or telephone IVR system work; customers are still going to hate you.
  
  
• Create a ‘suck-intolerant’ culture.  As surprising as it might sound, most people would rather not completely suck at their job. Very few people wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “let’s go out there today and suck like never before.” To the contrary, event employees who are unmotivated, burned out, or merely going through the motions for a paycheck still would prefer – all other things being equal – to not suck horribly at their jobs. No one wants to fail , and no one enjoys it. The trick is simply giving employees the motivation and the toolset to not suck. We just need to make it easy for people to suck less.
  
  For example, we stack the deck against our own front-line employees and set them up for failure when we first force customers to sit though an annoying IVR phone menu that presents useless options and forces customers to enter the same information several times. When the customer is already pissed off even before reaching a live agent, it’s going to take a spectacular performance from the employee to turn things around.
  
  But unfortunately, most overworked contact center agents are in no mood to deal with angry, disgruntled, antagonistic customers. Working in a high-pressure contact center environment with a supervisor standing over your shoulder and a giant scoreboard keeping track of every second you spend talking on the phone will bring the worst out in anyone. Add to that the repetitive, monotonous nature of contact work and the constant toggling between numerous computer systems and screens and you have a recipie for frustration and failure. 
  
  While this isn't any easy problem to resolve, you can get a long way toward a solution by making sure your Website and telephone IVR systems are optimized for end-user ease of use (rather than aligned with your corporate Marketing agenda) and by leveraging modern CRM software to simply and enrich the employees work environment. If your telephony infrastructure and CRM system have been sitting in the basement since the 1970's, it might be time for an upgrade. (Note: hire a good consultant, not a cut-rate social media assassin).

So, to recap. There’s no such thing as social media samurai or customer service ninjas. And while the code of bushido and the deadly art of ninjitsu definitely have many real-world practical applications (e.g., resolving disputes with pesky neighbors or home owners associations), samurai swords and ninja shurikens have no place in contact center or field service operations. No, if your company’s customer service efforts leave room to improve you might want to skip the Craig’s List ninja want ads and just work on trying to suck less.

And in case there was any doubt about the fact that ninjas don't fight fair, watch this video: