SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Eight Ways to Maintain Your Customer Service Brand Promise
June 24, 2008
By Anand Subramaniam
It is no longer a secret that outstanding customer service has become an imperative for superior performance, if not for the very survival of business. Recent surveys show that existing and prospective customers will not hesitate to defect to competitors if your business does not deliver on its service promise. Moreover, poor service can irrevocably damage brand equity, the only differentiator in many industries.
Here are eight ways to ensure your business delivers on the customer service brand promise every time:
1. Align customer service operations with brand strategy.
What is often fatal for businesses is the misalignment of brand strategy and operations. Enduring businesses have well-recognized brands--cultivated and reinforced over time by aligning operational processes with their brand promise and delivering on that promise. Don’t mix a "Wal-Mart-style" operational approach with a "Nordstrom-type" brand intent or vice versa.
2. Set service levels based on rigorous strategic and operational criteria.
High-performance businesses develop a well-defined customer relationship intent that is aligned with their strategic intent. They use this customer relationship intent as a foundation for setting service levels. For instance, companies that rely on customer service as a key ingredient of brand equity should set higher levels of customer service.
Beyond strategic criteria, such as brand equity, service levels should be based on operational criteria—such as evolving customer expectations, sales potential, customer profitability and post-sales problem severity. Moreover, interaction channels should be considered when setting service levels—a five-minute hold time may be acceptable for the phone but not for chat.
3. Manage expectations through proactive, cross-lifecycle communications.
Setting the right expectations is critical in making the right promise and keeping it. Your business should have a robust interaction management system that takes into account key factors—such as the business' work calendar and contact center workload—to make sure that the "right" promise is made. While processing service requests that involve multiple steps, keep customers informed throughout the process with a pull- or push-based model, based on customer preferences. The former approach allows customers to get easy and secure self-service access to the status of service requests. The latter approach involves sending proactive e-mail alerts to customers, triggered by events or timelines. In fact, proactive customer service and self-service not only enhance customer experience but also generate value for the business by pre-empting inbound service requests and making contextual cross-sell and up-sell offers.
4. Enhance agent experience for better customer experience.
In order to increase the probability of delivering on the customer service promise, route requests to the right agent, based on robust business rules, agent availability, skills, question or problem type, severity, customer preferences, formal service level agreements (SLAs) and customer relationship intent. Furthermore, you can add customers' "state of mind" or emotion to the routing framework. More easily detectable in phone conversations, emotions can be inferred in online communications by looking for clues such as the use of certain words or the length of a customer communication.
5. Provide agents with a 360-degree view of customers.
Forcing the customer to be the contextual "glue" is one of the most cited sources of customer frustration in satisfaction surveys. Consolidate all interactions into a unified customer interaction hub, integrated with the enterprise, to enable a complete corporate memory of prior interactions and transactions. This can help achieve quantum improvements in customer experience and loyalty.
6. Propagate best practices to the contact center through knowledge capture and dissemination.
While contact center agents are the critical "face" of a business, they often play a thankless, high-churn role. Moreover, outsourced "any shore" models have added another level of complexity and uncertainty to service quality and delivery. M&As require agents to be experts across multiple product lines, while compliance requirements dictate what they can or cannot say.
Empowering agents with information through seamless integration to existing enterprise data and content assets is a good first step. World-class customer service organizations, however, are taking it further by guiding agents through best-practice conversations powered by reasoning engines that encapsulate tacit best-practice interaction knowledge as well as regulatory compliance.
7. Eliminate knowledge and best practice silos.
Service resolution and fulfillment often span multiple people and organizations, including those that are external to the business. Accelerated by outsourcing, this trend makes the service level delivery capability of any business only as good as the weakest link in the extended service chain. Providing access to information and best-practice knowledge across this chain is therefore key to fail-safe delivery of the customer service promise.
High-performance service organizations have implemented customer interaction management systems that not only serve up data and contextual information at the right time in the right way to the right agent but also "next best questions or steps" to continue the conversation and maximize the value of the interaction. Moreover, they have taken a centralized "hub" approach to knowledge management so that content and processes are consistent across agents and interaction channels. This could be a huge differentiator for businesses since a 2008 eGain research study revealed that a stunning 60% of major North American companies received a "poor" or "below average" score in multichannel customer service consistency, and 46% received those ratings in service consistency across same-channel agents.
8. Leverage robust SLA workflow management.
Implementing robust workflows to eliminate service process gaps across people and organizations will maximize the probability of meeting service levels. Moreover, workflow capabilities enable frontline agents to easily and reliably collaborate with subject matter experts through simple Web forms or Outlook-based interfaces. Furthermore, "alarm workflows" that alert appropriate people in the customer service organization of a potential breach, help immensely in meeting service levels. In fact, these alerts can also be used to notify customers of anticipated breaches. This proactive expectation setting can sometimes make a big difference in retaining unhappy customers. SLA violation alerts could be implemented in the form of e-mail notifications or pop-ups, and may trigger actions such as supervisory escalations, priority shifting in queues and re-routing queries to subject matter experts.
Anand Subramaniam is VP of Worldwide Marketing, eGain Communications Corporation
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
|
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Marketing Index |
|
|
