12th Annual Customer Contact, West:A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchangeChronicles Excerpt

What works for social media, Twitter and other programs in customer relations?
The winners of the 2016 Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program offer tips on how to hire the right people to leverage social media and how to educate your customers…all with the end goal of obtaining top results.

MODERATOR
Nancy Fratzke, Vice President, Customer Service, U.S. Cellular

PANELISTS
Mary Hill, Manager, Customer Service and Social Media, StubHub
Melissa Hueman, Director, Customer Success, Rocana
Michelle Mattson, Director, Social Media Care, T-Mobile
Ken Mirch, Director, Member Services, Dollar Shave Club

SESSION ABSTRACT
The winners of the 2016 Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program are
unveiled and their success stories were brought to life in a series of interviews and discussions.

INTRODUCTION
The winners of the Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program offered some tips on how to leverage social media and obtain top results:

• Hire the right people
• Educate your customers
• If you work with social media, you must respond in less than 10 minutes
• For security, most of the companies work behind firewalls

Mary Hill, Manager, Customer Service and Social Media, StubHub
The company makes sure customers are educated about its programs and about its online services. They are always examining their brand and customer base. They take pride in having a results-driven approach to managing social media. They are pro-active and the customer service department has a partnership with the company’s marketing department. The company’s customer service team is trained to understand the lifecycle of products.

Melissa Hueman, Director, Customer Success, Rocana
This Omni Channel customer experience winner said they have hired the right people to lead their customer service programs. The two-year old company keeps tabs on the nuances of how its customers are using its technology. They take a proactive role in introducing and managing new technology, keeping an eye out for what the customer wants. Above all, they have a staff prepared to answer questions from customers. They have a high-touch model and look at everything from a 3 P’s perspective: Proactive, Process and People. The company’s technology is complex, and the customer service team is constantly being trained in the features used by customers.

Michelle Mattson, Director, Social Media Care, T-Mobile
The T-Mobile Social Media Care team is made up of 200 professionals who work 24-7. The key for this company is to stay innovative and respond to customer requests in less than 10 minutes. They have patterns of response. They make sure they own the experience. They personalize their social media relationship with their customers. They monitor their call volume to stay on top of trends and movements.

Ken Mirch, Director, Member Services, Dollar Shave Club
This California company makes its online customer service a key component of its business. The company tailors its customer service message to the specific social media channel. It is considered a cardinal sin to switch channels on the customer. They keep the customer on the channel that the customer uses to engage with them. They aim to keep the customer experience simple, for now.

Question and Answer Highlights
Question: Regarding technical support via Twitter, we are trying to expand our Twitter usage…Do you transfer tweets to email support? And how do you figure out staffing for social media?

Answer: Technical support is a large driver because if you are tweeting using the phone, you are having issues staying on channel. Most people are tech savvy enough to know this and have already used the internet to sort out the worst part of their problem and can tweet on-channel to fine tune.

Be sure to focus on response time, monitor your busy time, and plan to staff up team support. Understand that social media is very different than legacy technical support. Possessing the right skill set and training for that skill set is critical. It takes time to have the right agent who can support multi-tasking tweets and chat, and know when to pick up the phone and not get flustered.

What have you built to have informed agents? Personalized agents for personalized seamless experiences?
 
We are complex. We have instituted Jive software for each customer, support tickets that everyone has access to, and provided internal training, complete with a robust internal portal for lookups, product releases and webinars. We also share this directly with customers who allow self-service.

We have consistent, well written, pre-approved responses that are put together before they go out. They are all approved by marketing.

We leverage Jive technology partners across peer groups and drop and drag
knowledge based snippets to offer customers.

For social media…who at your company did you have to get to buy in from?
At our company, it was the acquisition team.
We had an internal blank check to get it done!

Advance Executive MindXchange Chronicles ExcerptInsights and Ideas Roundup from the 12th Annual Customer Contact, West: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange

INSIGHTS AND IDEA ROUNDUP
Implementing the Best, Brightest and Boldest Ideas from the Program

MODERATOR
Mark Simoncelli, Global Director, Growth Implementation Solutions,
Frost & Sullivan

PANELISTS
Philip Bennett, Customer Service Operations Manager, Empire Today
Steve Ellis, Senior Director, Customer Care, EyeMed
Jeremy Ellis, Director of Operations, Experian

SESSION ABSTRACT
Participants at each Customer Contact Executive MindXchange come away with a wealth of key learnings and it can be a challenge to take it all in. During this interactive session, members of the Customer Contact Speaker Faculty and Advisory Board highlighted the most important themes, key take-aways and lessons learned that can be readily operationalized once you are back in the office.

Moderator: People are our key. What are the best practices from this conference?

Responses: It is all about people. Focus on what your customer wants. Invest in on-boarding, invest in the long teaching process. Teach them the why first and then teach the how…teach them empathy.

We are always looking at how we have a conversation with consumers.  Know your consumer.  Tell them: I know why you are calling.

What is the future, how do we take our people to the next journey?

I [would] take a look at the technology and prepare people for what is coming.  New technology is coming.  Some of it we know, like chat, which is not new, but in my company it is going to be new.  There will be agents who do not know anything about it.  I like to comment that I like hiring for skills.  It is important.  I want people who work with the customer. It works well for me. That is the approach I will take with the new technology.

There is so much opportunity out there. There is a lot of change. As leaders, we need to help our people navigate the change. Management needs to work on this.  How do you help people deal with change?  If you are on a team, you work with the team, taking them from here to there. 

We are going through major change in our organization – what does the future change look like?  We are looking at journey mapping, exercises and emerging technology to put it all together. What are we trying to do, we go through the exercise and prioritize trying to understand and help the entire organization be on the same page.

What are your best experiences with customer experience?

From my own customer experience, everything is important. The most important part of the business is finding and keeping customers.  It does not matter what your product is.  Everything must be about that.  You must make that journey painless.  I am a real fan of people who take ownership of the customer relationship from the top to the bottom.  There are regulatory issues you can’t change, but you can help your customer understand them. Any time you get your customer to be your promoter, you’ve won.

I love to talk about customer experience.  When Jeffrey Van deVelde of Sun Trust talks about focusing on the emotion...that drives the customer.

Emotion is the most important connection people can have with your company. This is how you empower your customer.

What about the development of Personas?

Yes, find market segments. You name one persona Susan, she represents young, female professional workers. She is a Millennial. Then you have Bill, he is a senior citizen.  What I love about this is they also look like your employees.  Find the ones that could relate to each persona. Those names that are more descriptive elicit certain emotions in your employees.

It works when we have done it for a defined market. Persona’s help you speak the same language as the customer. Know your customer and make the experience personal – we can use this in our industry. There was a lot of this discussed at the event. 

What about doing pre-mortem analysis?

We have looked at why a new project was set up and then went bad. Why did it fail? It was a frightening exercise, but we could then build a new plan to mitigate those problems that would make it fail.

Where could technologies be used?

My key role is to bring in  new technology.  I know about chat and the cloud, but how do social networks work? Being in the financial business, we do not talk about social.  In other sectors you can feel better with social. SMS is clearly good. Millennials want that. AI technology—how is it being used today, and how it will be used tomorrow?  Where it is going to go? 

Define your terms. We realize sometimes we define terms and we are not talking the same language.  You need to share the language and terms and make sure everyone in the company is on the same page.

Technical terms, not everybody understands the same thing. It is important to remember the people when you implement new technology. You need to be able to teach it to all people.  It is not about having more channels, but how you teach people  to use them. 

Not everyone embraces technology the same way. What we have found when you implement it is that it doesn’t always move effortlessly or seamlessly from one channel to the next. It depends on the company. 

You need to know if you are going to be disruptive, or be the disrupted.  I found two quotes in this conference that I will take away:  “Tobacco is a vegetable and robots don’t sit.” 

Would you get SMS as a technology and get rid of email?

SMS is the most interesting idea. It makes a lot of sense. Email usage is more difficult.

In some industries SMS can be an additional channel, but I don’t know if I could get rid of Email. 

I don’t know if I want to take it away from those people who want to contact me by Email. Let customers contact us, according to how they want. 

It’s about people, process and technology – Expect disruption and change. Technology doesn’t work the same in all markets – you have to adjust.

Customer Contact, East: Executive MindXchange Chronicles Excerpt Strategic Thinkers Only: A Forum for Seasoned Customer Contact Executives

Moderated by Mary Tucker
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
UPIC Health



 



SESSION ABSTRACT

Where are contact centers going as the digital age eliminates the need to interact with a live person – or has it, really? Is disruption possible in the contact center space – where millions are employed around the world – and if yes, what does human disruption look like? Do contact centers complement digital technology, compete against it, or should they be the drivers of its design, development and adoption? Once the great white way of economies of scale, the time is now to rethink and redefine the contact center as not only Customer Service Channels but Brand Communication Centers of Exceptions Management! 

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

• Insights on how to broaden organizational thinking to recognize the power of consolidated communications 
• Best practices for developing service strategies supporting ever evolving end user demographic mix 
• Success factors in organizational infrastructures supporting cultures of change, embracing of technology and supporting its development

OVERVIEW

Pressing Issues Facing Participants

• How to engage executive management?
• Care center – cost versus sales and how to integrate?
• Team organizational structure
• Where does end to end customer experience start and stop?
• Training and communication of change
• Steps to becoming an omni channel enterprise and how to navigate the change?
• How to ensure consistently good customer experience in every contact
• Cultural change management – particularly with M & A
• Speed vs. quality
• Forecasting for seasonality
• Engagement at the front line
• Employee experience and tools workflows
• Maintaining knowledge in complex environments

TAKE-AWAY 

Two key issues:
1. Engagement Conundrum

• Executive
• Frontline Leadership
• Frontline Staff
• All staff – around customer experience

2. Team Organizational Structures

• Frontline roles are becoming more complex
• Digital age brings intense environments of change 
• Overwhelm sets in – frontline managers responsible for “too much”

BEST PRACTICE 

• Energize organization by putting Executive Leadership on the frontline for an hour (or 30 minutes or a day – however much they are willing to give)

• Collect insights/surprises and communicate staff wide
• Create culture of transparency and communication aligned with the shared frontline experience

• Develop idea portal with reward/incentives for new ideas to elevate customer experience – commit to implementing and measuring impact 
• Rethink job titles – does “Agent” mean anything anymore? What title reflects the true job function?”

• Apply creativity – if what they do looks more like a liaison, draft titles that reflect the function. Engage team in developing responsibilities and measurements.

• Rethink the role of frontline manager – including dispensing with them altogether

• Elevate skill requirements and salary of frontline to include self- management  (i.e. maybe they are ultimately User Experience Specialists over Customer Service Agents….invest in understanding the details of their jobs)

• If size of organization mandates point of contact communication by business unit, title the role “Frontline Representative” that rotates among the team.

• Recognize “Time” is not as meaningful a measurement anymore – seek ways to measure end user “value” (Note: be aware of survey fatigue) including both internal and external points of view.
• Embrace “Customer Service is not a Channel – it’s an INTENTION”

• Model that intention across all business units – internal departments in service to each other ensures collective service to customers.

FINAL THOUGHT

Front line customer service staff have among the toughest jobs in any industry – they are expected to be the brand voice, first (and often last) points of contact through all channels, they have to answer for other business unit’s challenges (or failures) and provide insights into consumer behavior. They use multiple systems to resolve issues and have more performance measurements than any other job in any other industry. They also usually have low wages and no voice in strategy development and tactical deployment!

Think about ways to address the above. Think about making the contact center job a sought after role. Pay equitably and reduce front line management.  Make a commitment to trust the team; toss them a problem to solve and test it out.  Give the front line a seat at the table – often they are the only ones who have the 360 degree view of what’s going on. Don’t fear disruption – encourage it! If your front line is on board with you, everything else falls into place.

Modern Organizational Models for Customer Experience Excellence

ASK THE EXPERTS – PANEL DISCUSSION





MODERATOR
Rick Russell
Director, Programs
Planning & Analytics
Outerwall





PANELISTS
Jeffrey Laird, Director, Small Business and Accountant Customer Care, Intuit

Annie Tsai, Chief Customer Officer, DoubleDutch

Mary Tucker, Chief Executive Officer, UPIC Health

Gregory Wayland Manager, Global Customer Experience, Strategy & Transformation, Western Union

Paul Woods, Director, Global Customer Experience, TE Connectivity

SESSION ABSTRACT
Is your customer care operation aligned with your companies brand strategy, or are you constantly pressed to “do more with less” while still being expected to deliver exceptional service, which is causing confusion and conflicts? Is your support center falling behind your competition or struggling to keep pace with customer demands? Are you struggling to gain alignment within your organization, which leads to under-investment in key areas such as technology? The key to a modern organizational model is having a strategy, alignment and above all support - but when that is not present, how do you influence up?

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

• Insight on the stages of modern organizational models
• Guide to recognizing the challenges leaders face
• Proven strategies and tools to get you going

Through our electronic devices such as phones, tablets, etc., consumers are connected in more ways than ever before. We also have more choices in how we interact with various organizations. This new reality means that more and more companies need to listen to consumers and change how they are delivering products and services. In order to be a modern organization, an evolution from cost center to profit center is a journey that must be undertaken.

This session featured a panel of experts discussing the challenges of modernization in delivering a great customer experience, and providing strategies to help organizations transition into more customer-focused care.

TAKE AWAY

• Customer experience as a driver to operations is still a relatively new concept, so building good relationships with others in your organization and engaging key stakeholders early on is crucial to influencing others
• The emotional component to call center interactions is extremely important. Find ways to communicate a customer’s emotional experience (whether good or bad) to leadership by finding data to support it, recording and presenting it, or by exposing leadership to the customer experience directly
• Listen to and gather information from the front-line people in your organization, who typically possess the most knowledge about the customer experience

PANELIST INTRODUCTION AND QUESTIONS:
What does a modern organization look like as you’re trying to keep pace with consumers?

Paul Woods: Our contact center has been centralized for several years, but we’re currently going through a process of de-centralizing our customer care divisions, and distributing representatives into their regional areas.  We believe that by placing those folks out closer to the end users, that they will help to increase responsibility for customer care throughout the organization. 

Our challenge is to continue to drive a consistent experience throughout our different organizations.  Even though our organizations are different, the customer focus is still the same.

Annie Tsai: Our organization focuses on the customer experience as a holistic process, from first engagement with the customer to interacting with a YouTube ad on one of our videos. We’ve structured our organization to focus on the key touch points for success, such as engaging our sales organizations and collaborating with our technical resources.

Gregory Wayland: We’re in our third year of a 5-10 year re-organization. Our role as the customer strategy group has been to put ourselves out of a job by embedding the concepts and design practices in the organization, through learning labs and other methods.  Our goal is to teach individuals in the organization how to care for the customer as a first priority.

Mary Tucker: We serve patients in the Medicaid space, and the Affordable Care Act has hurtled the medical care industry into modernization, without really understanding what that means. Our focus is on the very basic start of identifying, for example, if we made a technology investment, is it being used, is it accessible and understood in the communities we are serving?

We are also looking at data collection on what the customer is calling about and what they need, as well as priorities for receiving care. We’re also demonstrating how removing the script and focusing on continuous training has helped our clients start to understand how they’re missing billable conversations. Rather than being a “customer service rep,” our representatives are basically RN’s in a virtual environment.

Jeffrey Laird: Several years ago we had 12 different business units, all focused on six sigma, so we were very isolated, and each unit operated very much as its own cost center. Over the past 9 years, we’ve been able to develop our voice and show the value of customer care. As we transition from software to cloud, showing the role we’ve played in retention has been key to our success. Today we have integrated teams, we’ve done away with the core processes, and we’re focusing much more on customer care.

Take Away: We’re all over the spectrum, from a younger company that might seem like it’s easier to mold, as well as some older companies with deeper roots that are still making great progress in adapting to the current and future environment.

BEST PRACTICE
What are the challenges that you experience in attempting to make changes driven by customer experience, and what can you share that has helped you move forward in the journey?

Answers as follows, not attributed to specific panelists:

If you look at the heart of a company, and then grow from there, it can be very straightforward, and very useful.  By actually listening to what the customers say, and seeking feedback from the contact center team, you learn what needs are and aren’t being met. You can then begin to focus on areas for process improvement. One phone call that you listen in on can influence the strategy that you have for the next few years.  When you listen to emotion, you can find data to support it, and hard numbers to bring to the rest of the organization to influence your future strategy.

The emotional component to call center interactions is extremely important. It’s often difficult to get leadership to understand the value of the emotional component of a customer experience. What can help is to run your leaders and managers through something like a customer experience boot camp.  It puts your leaders in a position to interact with your company from the perspective of customers.

We also invited customers to sit down with us, on video, and give us responses on what we’re good at, what we’re not good at, and what could be improved.  When leadership heard out of the mouths of their customers how our company impacted them in a negative way that made a huge impact. Communicate the value of those emotional experiences across your organization to begin conversations that will make a difference and produce results.

FINAL THOUGHT
If there was one tip that you could give our audience, that would be the most impactful thing on your journey in your organization, what would that one thing be?

Jeffrey Laird: Build a connection to the customer at all levels throughout the organization, and remember that relationships are key. Building relationships with stakeholders that have a vested interest in your organization will establish rapport

Mary Tucker: Have humility. If you’re new in the organization and your mission is to transform the customer experience, listening is going to be your greatest tool.  Listen to your peers, their issues and challenges. Listen to the CEO, the front-line, and customer experience, and let your strategies develop from there.

Gregory Wayland: Relationship is the most important thing, and selecting the right stakeholders to be involved. Customer experience as a driver to operations is still a relatively new concept, so you’ll need to have the right team around you to interface with the rest of the organization.

Annie Tsai: Quick wins are very helpful in developing relationships, so look for them early on. The relationship between the sales organization and the customer organization is tremendously important. Focus early on building a strong relationship with your sales department.

Paul Woods: When customer care is the primary motivating factor for your organization, you have to drive the change not just through the contact centers, but throughout the entire organization.  We continue to drive that through over-communicating about the customer experience, to get and keep people focused on the customer throughout their role, even if they never interact with a customer in the course of their specific job duties.