Most people reading this article will agree that one of the cornerstones of long-term success is satisfied customers. Despite this, there are still many businesses which deal with customer service as a secondary service, with sales processing or complaint handling, measured by simple ‘how fast’ and ‘how many’ metrics and perceived as a cost.

In this two-part series, we are asking ‘what are the benefits of having a customer service representative on the Board?’ To find out we have interviewed two Director level customer service business leads, from progressive forward-thinking organisations, to find out their views.
In our first article, we find out the opinions of Ben Lappin, Director of Retention and Customer Experience at The Guardian and Chair of the DMA’s Contact Centre Council. He tells us about The Guardian’s refreshing prioritisation of the customer and gives insight into how they engage with customers.

We began by asking Ben how he felt his Board valued customer experience. His response was “I was pleased when our CEO called out customer experience as our third strategic priority, as to me that was genuine . And we got the funding and support to make things better. Many companies claim to put customers first but that’s rarely delivered in practise.”

“By really representing the customer in our business, we’ve been able to attack the issues that really affect customers rather than just responding well to failure. Our approach is much more holistic now, compared to the traditional model of working hard to improve things like response times and numbers of calls handled.”

We then asked Ben whether customer service channels for The Guardian News & Media Group had evolved in recent times, as social apps and instant communications have become more prolific. “We take a simpler approach to this issue. Everyone has access to email and the channel works for dealing with queries. Are other apps necessary? We feel that there’s a dash to apps and other channels driven by Corporate FOMO: the ‘fear of missing out’ combined with the need to make something look like a success because a team has invested in it. Why do you need a new app if you have an effective web chat on your website which also works on mobile?

“Unless you have a compelling case to use a channel, it’s better to retreat from channels where you cannot perform well. There is sometimes a case to switch from Twitter to live chat simply because the customer experience via Twitter isn’t as good, or as personal.”

We questioned Ben about his experience of customer experience being represented at the company’s Board: “I’ve been at The Guardian for three years now. Customer experience is discussed at Board level. We appointed Anna Bateson as Chief Customer Officer, who is responsible for all of reader revenues, but with a clear brief to be focused on customers. At first, the customer statistics used didn’t reflect the real issues. I was able to lobby and place issues where they really belonged and where they could be addressed. For example, newspaper delivery issues were placed with delivery providers to solve, rather than being reported as a customer service statistic. Our teams were recognising the problems through the customer service process and we’re able to improve things by driving real solutions, not by working hard to answer the problems more quickly!”
Ben continues “Company Boards are busy. To prioritise real issues, you have to be concise and punchy. The stats can help by pointing to problems. We have to propose ways to solve those problems. Without that voice on the Board, customer service would probably be a regular set of reports, watched for simple trends and costs but not as a way to really make things better.”

We asked Ben if he thought that the KPIs used in most customer service operations could result in unrealistic expectations?
“Yes. Without meaningful interpretation, customer experience is seen as a cost centre rather than a chance to add value. Traditional KPIs push towards cost management, whether that’s for an in-house department or an outsourced operation.”

He stated “Don’t have contact volumes as a KPI. Measure problems and how you solve them, not volumes. Responding brilliantly to failure should not be seen as success.”

Finally, we asked Ben if he thought other businesses were missing out on not having customer experience representation within their Board meetings?

“Almost certainly. Even if it’s not a permanent Board member, there should be representation at the level where there is regular interaction with the Board. Customer acquisition can almost always be improved by spending more money on it, but customer experience and retention require a more long-term view.”

Ben continues “We can measure our successes, because we’ve made an effort to recognise the value of what we do. We’ve self-funded some initiatives which generate real value for the business, making our customer-facing teams a value-adding department, not perceived as a cost centre. Being able to articulate this allows us to request what we need from a position of authority, and to ask from a position of moral authority, representing the customer properly. Expressing a request by explaining how it’s going to reduce customer time wasted and improve retention makes the problem human, which makes the decision-makers much more likely to react favourably.”

Ben’s experiences made it clear to us that having the customer experience discussed in Board meetings is an important chance to not just represent customers, but to highlight real business issues and initiate improvements which drive better bottom-line results. Helping the Board to understand the value added by improving customer interactions can encourage a problem-solving culture, rather than a cost-management one. This is a way to gain and maintain genuine competitive advantage.

In our next article, we’ll be talking to Liam Smith of Rank Group to find out what advantages his company has found from letting the customers’ voice be heard at the top table.

Get involved

Does your Board listen to your customers? We’d be interested to hear about your experiences. Get in touch. Call us on 0114 209 6120 or email hello@contactcentrepanel.com

New annual survey highlights key trends within the industry

The survey focuses on the key topics affecting customer service interaction. It will be run annually to monitor, track and highlight any market changes in areas such as customer interaction, digital transformation, purchasing, business process optimisation and macroeconomic influence.

2020 survey results are in…

The first Automotive Customer Service Survey was launched at the end of last year and has been completed by a number of leading vehicle manufacturers and retail businesses, including Aston Martin, Avis Budget Group, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Renault, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Pendragon.
The results are now in and have highlighted a number of interesting insights into the current and future shape of customer service delivery within this highly competitive global marketplace.

Communication channels and AI adoption

It may be no surprise to learn that voice, social and web chat are used by almost all the businesses that responded. However, only 50% currently use Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Bots within their customer service provision, this is a surprisingly low proportion given the well-publicised accelerated adoption rates of AI and its suitability for repeatable inbound enquiries.
Although, the survey also showed that 60% of participants believed the use of AI and Bots would rise at the expense of agent handled Webchat, over the next 3 years.
This is a statistic we will watch closely in the future, to see if these predictions become true and the industry starts to take advantage of the cost and speed benefits made possible through the adoption of AI and Bots.

Showrooms: value-add or cost-inefficient?

Showrooms came out as the second most popular customer service channel in the automotive sector. Whilst this is not surprising news, it does raise a point for manufacturers and dealerships in regards to the limitations of providing customer service from the showroom.
Many businesses are benefiting from centralising customer service – enabling the measurement of enquiry types in a ‘hub’ environment and the building and implementation of standardised processes to solve the most common issues faced by their clients. Centralised models help customer service departments to maximise training and development benefits, building strong customer service focused teams without having the added distraction of handling sales.
However, adding value to customer relationships through the showroom must not be undervalued. Vehicle manufacturers and retailers are faced with the dilemma of delivering consistent, centrally controlled customer service, against the more personal and familiar showroom experience, which many of their older demographics, Baby Boomers and Generation X, have become accustomed to and often prefer.
It will be interesting to see, from future surveys, how the rise of the millennial and the introduction of new technologies, such as Virtual Reality showrooms, will impact on future customer service interaction.

Environmental factors driving purchasing

Unsurprisingly, surveyors thought that environmental factors and changes to vehicle tax and legislation would be the main drivers for vehicle purchasing in 2020, with results showing a move away from diesel to electric as the top reasons, followed by finance offerings and a move to second hand.

Get involved

We are always looking for new participants for our surveys so if you represent an automotive manufacturer, retailer or are involved in delivering customer service for a business in the sector, and would like to provide your own insight into the topics shaping customer experience in your industry, get in touch. All participants will receive a full report on the findings of the survey. Call us on 0114 209 6120 or contact us by email.

The impact of not getting important information through to your customers?

Just imagine that a problem is found with one of your most popular products or services, meaning you have to contact all your customers to offer a solution or replacement. How would your service team, or your outsource customer service partner, cope?

Now, stop imagining and start planning. The last 12 months has seen some major brands fall foul of poorly handled product recalls or poorly communicated service failures. Nat West’s Black Friday experience was a prime example, where a lack of regular updates about the bank’s online banking failure, on the busiest online shopping day of the year, created further frustration for thousands of customers, who shared their discontent across social media. By not updating customers, the bank gave the impression they didn’t care, while no doubt they were working very hard to resolve the problem. Worse still, there was no apology once the issue was resolved leaving many customers feeling let down.

Product recalls, if not handled well, can have a very detrimental effect on a brand. Recalls are relatively common in sectors such as automotive, electrical appliances and pharmaceuticals. They must be handled well as the corporate consequences of failure can be serious. The reputational damage can be difficult to recover from, but more importantly, in some cases, there can be a genuine threat to personal safety.

How would you get critical messaging to all your customers?

If you had to get essential information to every single customer, how would you do it? If your customer service planning doesn’t include this as a possibility, there’s a risk that a product problem will result in a huge influx of inbound enquiries, flooding your team and leaving many customers unhappy with your performance. By getting ahead of the problem and proactively communicating with your customers, dissatisfaction can be minimised. A well-handled problem can result in genuine brand advocates, but a badly handled one can irreparably damage your brand reputation.
Critical messaging solutions can vary – using different channels according to the needs of the clients. However, they tend to be built on an initial SMS (text message) transmission. SMS messages, on average, achieve delivery and open rates of well over 90%, so with a suitably clear message, a huge number of customers can be reached and engaged extremely quickly and inexpensively.

The initial SMS will usually contain a call to action, a link, or rich media for an app like experience, that enables customers to self-serve and take control of their own problem resolution. This could be to make an engineer appointment or to arrange collection of a defective product. This is much more resource efficient than waiting for inbound enquiries following a news story or even a proactive email campaign.

Customers are also given the option to engage via SMS or social media to ask questions: this is also far more cost-effective than prompting calls, as agents can typically handle four text conversations at one time, and customers are more accepting of slower response rates via SMS or social chat (via your brand’s Facebook page, for example) than on the phone.

When you compare the self-serve option to staffing up your customer service department, or securing outsourced seats to handle a massive spike in demand, it is both cheaper and quicker, reaching customers more effectively and delivering the required results with minimum human involvement. This is more likely to result in more satisfied customers, despite the obvious initial bad news about their purchase.

How do you turn a negative situation to your advantage?

So, by adopting a proactive, planned approach to dealing with critical messaging, your brand can:
• Reach your customers quickly
• Get resolutions acted on efficiently
• Allow your customer service team to focus on just the complex cases
• Maximise cost-effectiveness
• Convert potential brand damage into happy customers

At CCP we work with specialist partners who are able to deliver the latest crisis management and critical messaging solutions, so if you have any customer service issues, or are concerned that your business is not setup to handle a crisis, get in touch. We’d love to help.

The introduction of automation within the customer service industry continues at a rapid pace. Whilst it’s always well intentioned and designed to increase efficiency and improve the customer experience, what happens when things go wrong? We take a look at some of the potential pitfalls of automation and put forward our thoughts on how to avoid the poor use of technology within your customer-facing operations.

What’s going wrong with customer service automation?

When the customer experience is not managed well, the consequences are serious. According to Accenture’s 2018 research, 60% of customers had not made a purchase due to poor customer service, and 61% of customers had completely stopped doing business with at least one company in the last year for the same reason.

As customers ourselves, most of us can recall experiences where our interaction with a brand has been harmed by poor automation. Poor handover between automatic and human systems; confusing and over-long sequences of button-pressing either on the phone or computer keypad; excessive recorded announcements… the list goes on. It’s situations like these that are often badly implemented, which should be designed with the customer in mind to avoid potential loss of purchase or cancellation of a service.

Common mistakes include:

• Replacing a system instead of complementing it. Recognising when humans are needed is important, because it’s not practical to expect automation to address all issues and enquiries.

• Relying on a single channel. Put simply, customers use multiple channels and they expect to be able to receive customer care through the one they’re using right now. This means that information has to be available across all your channels, which need to be able to share data between each other.

• Automating complex support issues. Some issues are just too complicated to automate. Humans are better at understanding complex issues, negotiating and solving difficult problems. Good agents are also much more effective at empathising with frustrated customers. A well-handled complaint can be worth ten issue free transactions.

• Using outdated systems and information. Not maintaining data in customer-facing systems can easily result in bad information being passed to your customers. Up-to-date information allows your agents to act quickly and correctly.

Caring for your customers

From research by Salesforce and Interactive Intelligence Group – 83% of consumers need some degree of customer support while making an online purchase. The most important factors for customers who use your customer service channels are:

1. Short response times
2. Consistency across channels
3. Knowledge of staff

It’s vital that you provide an effective customer service, which addresses these factors.

Implementing robust systems to deal with the most common enquiries quickly and effectively will improve your customer experience, enabling your human agents to deal with the more complex situations with empathy and expertise, resulting in happier customers. This handover from systems to humans can also be improved with good IVR, call recording analysis and usage monitoring to enable predictive call handling.

How can your business avoid pitfalls?

There are clearly some things to avoid when implementing technology and automation in your customer service operations. If you want to improve your customer experience, not harm it, then consider the following before implementing your next automation programme:

• Automate your FAQs. The most common questions that people ask of your business should be built into an automated FAQ system, or a chatbot. This will help to solve most customer issues quickly and reduce the burden on your customer care team.

• Build automated follow up. Most visitors do not become paying customers on their first visit. By automating follow up, in the form of surveys, emails and/or targeted ads on social media, the time consuming process of sales conversion can be made much more effective.

• Predict customer behaviour. Many customer issues are predictable. By capturing data on ever interaction, repeated enquiries can be predicted and customer service times can be minimised whilst keeping customers happy.

• Design systems that are able to handover seamlessly to humans. 72% of customers blame their bad customer service experience on having to explain their problem to multiple people. This also applies to systems. Make sure that data is handed over to your agents from your systems, so that the human interaction adds value, rather than starting over again.

• Track confidence scoring. Automated systems can record words and actions which flag low confidence and negative feelings towards your brand. By redirecting selected enquiries to a human agent, customer satisfaction can be maximised.

• Update a knowledge base for every customer. After every customer interaction, update the purchases, questions, location and preferences so you can cater to their needs in future. This is as important to straightforward no-nonsense buyers as it is to customers who make frequent enquiries.

• ASK FOR FEEDBACK! Automation is not easy. Regular testing and requests for feedback from users not only helps you to improve your systems, it makes customers feel more valued while you find better ways to serve them.
While there are certainly bad examples of automation hindering the customer experience, a well-designed, tested and implemented set of systems will help you to increase customer happiness, reduce costs and improve sales. If your automation is having a negative effect or you require help finding and implementing a system, get in touch. At CCP, we have access to a network of highly skilled technology and automation experts who will be able to assist.

In the run up to Christmas, online and offline retailers will, as usual, be desperately vying for consumer attention and wallet spend. Whether you’re a fan of the phenomenon or not, there’s no denying that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are an increasingly important part of the build up to Christmas. Since Black Friday’s introduction in 2014, online sales have risen steadily from £0.81bn to £1.49bn in 2018. Black Friday falls on 29th November this year, so is your customer service provision geared up and ready for the sudden rise in demand?

How big is the spike in sales around Black Friday?

As reported in a recent article on SaleCycle.com, the last few years have seen a pattern of increasing sales in the days leading up to Black Friday, with a marked spike on the day itself. Sales have continued at very high levels throughout Saturday, then risen again on Cyber Monday and the Tuesday too. So Black Friday isn’t just one day – it’s a sustained period of high spending and activity driven by promotions, the last pay day before Christmas and consumer responses to perceived limited offers.
According to a survey by SaleCycle, 70% of UK retailers will be taking part in Black Friday in 2019. This participation will be driven by increased sales promotion by those retailers, which will have a knock-on effect throughout retail sales as a whole, as buyers react to the pressure and increase their shopping online.

How does Black Friday impact your customer service teams?

Peak shopping days like Black Friday and the intensely busy days afterwards can put a huge amount of strain on customer service. This is not just because of increased volume, according to Business Matters, but the promotions used. To make an impact, many retailers will launch new products and/or promotions increasing the amount of new information that customer service agents need to deal with during a very busy time. As a consequence, this can result in negative customer experiences if challenges are not handled well.
The potential for success is significant, but the risk of failure is also heightened by the sheer volume and variety of transactions and issues in the few days around Black Friday. The limited timescales of this huge spike in retail spending mean that there’s not enough time to respond to and recover from failures. Therefore, it’s vital that retailers prepare for this period carefully and comprehensively.

How can you prepare customer service success?

1) Plan to succeed

If your organisation has experience of the Black Friday weekend, use all the sales and customer service data you have available to make predictions for 2019. In addition to reviewing sales made and calls handled, make sure you analyse abandon rates and calls received. This also applies to social channels and any online chat services you use. Plan your resources for the anticipated inbound spikes to ensure that you don’t miss opportunities to sell more products and make more customers happy.

2) Test your transactions

For most retailers taking part in Black Friday, their website will be the most critical part of the sales process. A site which performs well will maximise sales, whereas a poorly-performing site will not only lose opportunities, but will result in customers not coming back. The whole premise of Black Friday is limited availability, so your potential buyers will quickly move elsewhere!

3) Find flexibility

Not able to grow your customer service team to cope with the increased demand? There are other options available, so recruiting new team members does not need to be the only choice. Consider working with an outsourced contact centre to cope with the spike in volume, or to handle specific parts of your business processes. This can leave your experienced agents to deal with complex enquiries, while your additional team handles the more predictable tasks and interactions.

If your data from 2018 suggests that coping with Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2019 will be difficult, let us know. We can talk through the options available to you.

The challenges of maintaining good customer service against a background of industry failures

The UK energy industry has seen massive changes over the last 20 years. Since the energy supply sector became competitive in the 1990s, there has been an unending cycle of consolidation and failure as the largest players have sought cost savings and new entrants have miscalculated the demands of the industry.

Energy supplier failures

The advent of supplier choice for consumers was supposed to usher in lower costs, more freedom and innovation in the industry. However, new entrants have found it extremely difficult to sustain growth and maintain customer service against a backdrop of low margins driven by the creation of a highly competitive environment.

Many consumers do not switch suppliers, which means winning new customers can be expensive for energy businesses. This has driven hard sell tactics, particularly from some new entrants, which has caused complaints from consumers. For those suppliers who have won new consumers in good numbers, there has been a consequential increase in back office work, to manage the onboarding of new customers, through established industry systems and when these fail, there are consequences for the supplier. There is also the need to issue accurate and timely bills, where a mixture of inaccuracies, mistakes and consumer misunderstandings can generate high volumes of customer service enquiries.

The established ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers in the UK have a long history of supplying electricity and gas to consumers. Their systems, staff and support are well tested and their large customer bases enable them to cope with fluctuations in consumer numbers. For new entrants, however, a major success or failure in signing up new consumers can have disastrous effects on the customer service and back office teams. This can cause unpredicted increases in costs and as a result we’ve seen a number of high profile failures of new supply companies:
• Eversmart Energy – 29,000 households affected
• Solarplicity – 7,500 households
• Brilliant Energy
• Our Power
• Economy Energy
• One Select
• Spark Energy Supply
• Extra Energy
• Usio Energy
• Gen4u
• Iresa
• National Gas and Power

With the introduction of a price cap and high wholesale energy prices on top of unexpected costs, more suppliers are expected to fail over the coming months.

Suppliers of last resort

Ofgem, the energy industry regulator, assigns a new supplier to the consumers of every energy company which fails. That new supplier then has to cope with the onslaught of new enquiries from consumers who weren’t expecting to switch again so soon and, quite understandably, have some questions they want answered. Taking on a failed competitor’s customer can therefore be tricky, resource intensive and less attractive than you’d imagine.

Consolidation

The recent sale of SEE to Ovo Energy has created a new member of the ‘Big Six’ with 5 million customers. This will add around 8,000 staff to Ovo’s business, and as expected there are likely to be some cost synergies driven out of the combined business. It’s vital that to retain their status as the 2nd biggest UK supplier, customer service levels are kept high throughout the transition period.
In a further shake-up of the ‘Big Six’, Eon has moved to take on Npower’s UK energy supply business. They’ll face the same challenges as Ovo Energy as they look to transform Npower’s loss-making operation and take on their consumers.

Smart metering misery

In recent years, the roll-out of smart meters to homes has caused additional problems for consumers and the industry alike. Just last week, it was announced that the deadline for installation targets in UK homes has been extended to 2024. Alongside the delayed installation programme, many householders are unhappy with the smart meters they have received. Problems with meters failing when consumers switched supplier have rendered the devices almost useless for people who have tried to minimise their household costs, resulting in unhappy customers and customer service issues for energy suppliers.

What does all this mean for customer service?

In an industry which supplies an essential service to every household in the UK, customer service is going to remain under the spotlight for energy companies. The ability of suppliers to cope with fluctuating demands from consumers will affect their ability to win and retain business.
Energy suppliers face a number of challenges when planning the future for their customer service operations:

Customer numbers – can future numbers be reliably forecasted, especially if the supplier is bidding for new business as Ofgem’s ‘supplier of last resort’? How will they cope with large variations in numbers?

Resource planning – if a supplier has merged with a competitor, how are the conflicting demands of providing excellent customer service and realising cost savings for shareholders going to be balanced?

Systems integration and development – how do you choose which systems to adopt following a merger? Can systems be improved to deliver better service and integrated with existing back-office operations? How will this be done within the limits of GDPR regulation?

Skills transfer – can the strengths of a more experienced team be passed into the combined business? How can this be done without harming customer service and minimising staff dissatisfaction?

Outsourcing – is it possible to supplement the team with experts from experienced energy industry outsourcers?

In an essential industry which is regularly in the news, energy companies must strive to maintain not only margins and customer numbers, but high levels of customer service. The high failure rate of new entrants is testament to the unpredictability of the sector and its extremely competitive nature. Ultimately, it will be a case of survival of the fittest; effective planning and management will be necessary to succeed and to cope with the inevitable challenges of the industry and its consumers.

Not even the ‘Big Six’ have been safe. We now have a new group of companies heading the industry and who knows if they’ll still be there in five years’ time? New entrants and old stalwarts alike need to consider customer service as an integral, essential part of their business make-up.
It’s going to be interesting being involved.