Are the customer service shelves bare?” Ambition and a desire for continuous improvement are all very well, but paranoia and curiosity are great motivators, too! Maybe that’s why there’s often something especially intriguing about the opportunity to look at how you’re performing in comparison with your peers and how your customer proposition stacks up next to your competitors.

Unfortunately, mystery shopping and benchmarking can be quite tedious and a lengthy undertaking. But recently a colleague and I carried out a mystery shopping assessment for a client operating in a competitive financial service environment.

So equipped with Neville Doughty’s recent article ‘The Triple Threat: 3 key challenges facing contact centres’, which highlighted ‘staff attraction and retention, channel shift and automation’ as major current challenges to contact centres, I’ve mused on what my bit of mystery shop benchmarking might tell us.

1. Bots still aren’t that common and often just don’t work

Surprisingly, only 2 of the 12 companies use webchat and none of the others actively promote any social media messaging apps as customer service channels. Both of those companies also had a Bot. But neither Bot recognised any standard terms or phrases related to their proposition or service that we used, so consequently none of our contacts were ‘contained’ and managed by the Bots

2. Other elements of best practice or useful technologies are under-represented

3. Service levels are all over the place

Across the 12 companies the average call answer time varied by a factor of 26 to 1 (41 seconds was the shortest average, 1075 – that’s nearly 18 minutes – was the longest)

4. There’s no ‘settled view’ about acceptable, live-agent opening hours

Some companies were only available to customers Monday to Friday, and some also open on Saturdays. A few opened on Sundays, too and one – surprisingly an ‘app-first’ online challenger brand – was available 24 hours per day, across all contact channels. This results in their having total weekly open hours 4 times the number of its least accessible competitor

These are challenging times for brands and their contact centres, but options and possibilities to do things differently and better abound. If you’d like to discuss how different technologies, resourcing and customer propositions might help your hard-pressed contact centre operation, just get in touch.

If brands are to be successful, they need to be:

Authentic: feeding the social consciousness in society.
Differentiated: tough to do in a market where replication is easy. Some form of ‘value add’ needs to be evident.
Responsive: perhaps in a crisis, but with the advent of ‘big data’ the notion of a ‘segment of one’ – brands need to be proactive and anticipate a need before the customer realises that they have it.
Consistent: failures in delivery will typically lead to a customer switching to an alternate supplier if expectations are not met.

Forrester stated that: “Consumers expect any desired information or service to be available, in context, at their precise moment of need.”

So how do we ensure delivery against this level of customer demand? The agility that is required to do so has led to a number of older businesses failing and the growth of many start-ups that are now leaders in their sectors.

Critically many of these do not even own the commodity that they are marketing:

All of these businesses are effectively selling a service that utilises something that belongs to another. This demonstrates the evolution of economies from commodities to goods, then services and latterly to experiences.

Based on this premise, customer needs have changed:

This movement from commodity to experience offers the opportunity to maximise revenues and margins. Take for example Starbucks, the value of coffee beans in raw form versus what is charged as an end product in a coffee shop.

As we face a cost-of-living crisis it will be interesting to see if consumers become less interested in the experience and go back to focusing on costs. For many businesses it may seem like a necessity but there are smarter ways to do this.

If you need help finding new ways to improve efficiencies, whilst maintaining or improving CX, get in touch.

“Consumers expect any desired information or service to be available, in context, at their precise moment of need”

Forrester

The BBC recently reported something that to my mind had already happened a while back, making WhatsApp available to businesses so that they can interact with the customers.

Here’s a quote from the BBC article in which Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that the development would help companies customise their experience and that “The best business experiences meet people where they are,”. He said at the announcement of the new service that “Already more than one billion users connect with a business account across our messaging services every week.”

So clearly customers are already using WhatsApp to engage with businesses, the change here is more about the “how”.

I do agree that customers want to be serviced where they are, the whole point of frictionless CX is making it easy and if I’m having other conversations in WhatsApp, then why not add another? The rules are clear, I must engage the company in the chat, they cannot engage me. The addition to a “Contact Us” page of a “WhatsApp Us” is a good way to support customers in that space.

The operational challenge of asynchronous messaging

From a delivery of service perspective, it can make the conversation harder as there is the asynchronous nature of a WhatsApp. As a customer I may start the chat now but not pick up the response for 3 hours, the conversation could continue for the best part of a week. This creates an interesting challenge for the business and the people within it though. Does it mean that multiple agents are going to interact with that supporter who could send messages across a timeframe that exceeds a shift or a working day? Contact centres have already been managing this situation for sure, but is the result an impact to efficiencies that servicing via WhatsApp is trying to achieve as another member of the team needs to familiarise themselves to respond to the last message? Or should we be setting a lower SLA on the follow up responses, seeing if the initial agent will be back to deal with it and leaving it for them to manage when back on shift?

I remember a time when first implementing e-mail solutions, in which trying to get the system to manage the stop and start of the clock to deal with e-mails “within the SLA” was a whole project strand. This would mean sometimes missing the reason behind the “customer” need and focusing too heavily on what the “client” had stipulated. The model was focused on one mail in and one mail out. Thankfully, technologies have moved forward now and the right blend of technology can ensure the initial phase of a conversation via messaging platforms can capture key information so the agent is best placed to resolve the query. For me, one of the best things with WhatsApp is the ability to switch from messaging to voice easily if needed all within the one channel.

“Meta Platforms Inc (including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) have over 3.6 billion active users.” Statista

Just before revealing that the new domestic energy bill price cap in October would rise by another £800, on top of a near £700 increase in April, Ofgem said that it was ‘minded to’ change the frequency of the price cap setting. From October the price cap will be set quarterly, partly in the hope that when energy prices do eventually start to go down consumers will be able to benefit more quickly.

So, what does this mean for energy providers, which are already struggling with the consumer impacts of a massively challenged – and arguably dysfunctional – market and high contact volumes?

The cost centre

If you are responsible for an energy supplier’s contact centre you can forget about engaging in the old profit centre versus cost centre discussion. Your operation is now firmly in the cost centre category. The market is effectively dead, with little or no customer migration between suppliers and E.ON warning that 40% of its customers will be experiencing fuel poverty by the autumn.

The support centre

That level of financial exposure amongst consumers means that the high degree of vulnerability awareness that Ofgem has long required will only increase still further. Energy firms’ agents are right in the front-line of the cost-of-living crisis. An increasing proportion of contacts will be looking for support and enquiring about the suppliers’ own schemes as well as the growing range of government support measures. Keeping the front-line team resilient, protected and engaged is a massive challenge for contact centre leaders to add into the mix.

The insight centre

But – as we all know – there is one area in which the contact centre excels and that’s acting as the organisation’s ‘eyes and ears’, benefitting from thousands of interactions with customers every day. That insight might now be redundant from a customer acquisition and revenue generation perspective, but it’s more vital than ever when it comes to understanding the customer experience and reducing costs.

In most organisations, one of the biggest drivers of customer contact (and confusion) is the communications the organisation itself generates. With the price cap being adjusted every 3 months then it is almost inevitable that contacts will rise. And this is where the contact centre can really help.

A quarterly price cap will inevitably just put more strain on the contact centre and its staff, but if the rest of the organisation can be engaged it might just help spur some process and experience improvements along the way.

If you are facing these sorts of challenges, in the energy sector or elsewhere, and would like to talk them through, why not get in touch.

With almost six million people around England living in homes provided and supported by housing associations, ensuring that services are delivered to residents, including vulnerable people, is critical.

Whilst these are not-for-profit organisations created to provide affordable homes and to support local communities, they must ensure that support is of the highest possible standard at the most effective cost so that the maximum amount of income possible can be reinvested where it is needed most. However, as cost pressures increase how can housing associations ensure that operating costs of contact centres and service management are not eroding the monies required to maintain and build additional properties and give more families the opportunity to have a space of their own.

As England alone needs 340,000 new homes per year, including 145,000 social and affordable homes, there is significant pressure on providers with new residents to be considered, operating costs will increase because of inflation and rising wages and as the number of residents grows the cost to service them will too.

A number of organisations have turned to outsourcing as a means to support their residents, there are many benefits to this approach of using private sector expertise to deliver this including:

The automation conundrum

Working in an environment where customer contacts are often of high emotion brings challenges. Whether moving in or out of a property or if there is a repair that needs to be made, residents are more likely to be calling at a time of stress or need and who wants to speak to an IVR when feeling emotional, not me for sure.  So how do the opportunities to bring technology and automation reconcile with the imperative to deliver a personal service when support is needed? How can the use of technology ensure that those with the greatest need are attended to first?

Perhaps one solution is to get proactive, the use of insight and analytics solutions can unlock vital information and highlight trends within the housing stock, allowing housing associations to identify and remedy an issue before it even happens.

Where agent support is required it is key to ensure that they have delivered all the essential compliance and safety information that may be needed by a resident. Use an intelligent scripting and decision making tool, coupled with speech analytics, to make sure agents have done all that is necessary on the call, providing certainty for the organisation, the agent and the resident. Layer on top coaching tools and analytics and then your agent’s ongoing development is covered, whilst ensuring that key trend data is made available to the organisation. Having these processes in place means that all the right information is passed to engineer resources accurately the first time. This reduces the need for them to go back to a job, avoiding additional costs to the organisation and inconvenience to the resident.

So in summary, effective contact management can help deliver efficiency in scheduling and planning of work throughout your organisation and therefore improve service whilst reducing outlay. Plus feeding all repair data back into the analytics engine can then help with proactive scheduling of work to reduce risk.

Differentiated service

It should be considered that housing associations are the main provider of supported housing in England with 300,000 homes for older people and 115,000 for people who need extra support.

Outsourcing providers are dealing with vulnerable customers on a daily basis across all sectors and can bring both personal and technical expertise to support and develop services in this area. Access to voice analytics software in real-time can assist agents in identifying where additional care may be needed, more than a simple flag on a CRM to signify that a resident was vulnerable at the point of moving into a property. This data is linked to contact number and query routing technology to ensure that people at high risk are connected to the right support quickly. Technology can now pick up on vital clues that a resident’s situation may have changed and therefore they need to be considered as vulnerable.

Channel divergence

People are now communicating in more ways than ever before and often on multiple devices. Conversocial recently stated that: ‘Customer care teams today are 10 times more likely to resolve customer inquiries via a private channel, like Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM, than they were two years prior. What’s more, the rate of growth of conversations using private channels has accelerated to 20 times that of conversations using public channels (i.e. 900% vs 45%).’

When customers need help they should have the opportunity to interact in the channels that they feel most comfortable in, so whilst an e-mail is great for a lengthy dialogue after the event perhaps, a call has historically been the first action if you have an issue, but what about messaging platforms? These have become the key method of interaction in day to day lives and provide the opportunity to ease communication with residents. The ability to send a message and see it was received in WhatsApp, switch to a call or even a video call so that the contact centre agent can physically see an issue and in turn provide visual reassurance.

Who can you talk to about your options?

Having worked closely with a number of housing associations we have an excellent understanding of what is required to deliver excellent customer care at an affordable price. We have built a ‘best of breed’ network of over 140 contact centres and 50 technology providers, which makes us perfectly positioned to recommend and source the ‘right’ contact solutions for your business. We are entirely independent, so you know our recommendations are not driven by self-interest. Our selection process is managed by industry experts, so you will always be in safe hands.

For more information. Get in touch.

Sources:  

6M number from National Housing Federation –https://www.housing.org.uk/about-housing-associations/what-housing-associations-do/

Over the past few years, the challenges facing the retail industry have been greatly publicised. With intense competition from new online only entrants, years of sluggish economic growth and heavily debt-financed business models, creating an environment in which we have seen a number of major High Street retailers fail. In 2019 alone, we saw Bonmarche, Clintons, Coast, Debenhams, Jack Wills, Jessops, Karen Millen, Mamas and Papas, Mothercare and Thomas Cook – either disappear, undergo major restructuring in pre-pack administration deals or become insolvent and the brand rights sold to other retailers.

In the pandemic ridden year of 2020, we have already seen similar fates for Antler Luggage, Beales, Brighthouse, DW Sports, Go Outdoors, Laura Ashley, Oddbins, TJ Hughes and Victoria’s Secret.

Almost all of these High Street retailers or brands have gone through pre-pack administration deals, which have seen major rounds of store closures and trade creditors largely unpaid, with major stakeholders and landlords facing renegotiated deals. Go Outdoors, for example, were bought by their existing owner JD Sports to be restructured, with unsecured creditors expecting to see only 1p in the pound.

Alarmingly but not surprisingly, the knock-on effect of so many retailers seeking lower rents as part of pre-pack administration deals has been a financial impact on landlords, including Intu properties who entered administration in June. Intu owns and manages some of the UK’s largest shopping malls, where retailers house their major stores, but carries total debts of over £4.5 billion.

While many businesses are failing, others are benefitting from the situation. Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct empire has recently bought House of Fraser and has enjoyed several years of incorporating well-known brands into its portfolio. The group (now renamed as Frasers Group) has purchased House of Fraser, Evans Cycles, Jack Wills, GAME and key assets from the DW Sports Fitness business since 2018, to add to its wide list of brands including Agent Provocateur, Everlast, Karrimor, Lonsdale and North Face.

Boohoo have also been on the acquisition trail. Following major success in the online channel, they have further expanded their offering by purchasing Oasis and Warehouse, to add to their Karen Millen and Coast buys earlier this year. It is worth noting that Boohoo has acquired the online brands only, leaving the High Street stores to close, totalling over 120 stores and around 600 concessions. With reported cash to spare, more purchases might follow and Boohoo will need to build a business capable of incorporating the new brands successfully. The more mature demographic of the new brands’ customers might serve to improve customer loyalty and offset the criticism of Boohoo as a ‘fast fashion’ retailer. Certainly, there will be implications for Boohoo’s sales processing and customer services teams, who will need to adapt or replace legacy systems and maintain service levels to loyal customers who stay with the brands.

Survival of the fittest

With such a bleak sector landscape, how can High Street and online retailers keep their customer service operations functioning well? It might not seem a big priority to financial decision-makers, but ultimately retailers’ survival depends on retaining and gaining shopper spend, so how can they deliver a great service amidst this turmoil?

The impact on the High Street

It is difficult to predict how the High Street will look in future. The efforts of Mary Portas to invigorate the High Street have been dealt a blow by the global economic slowdown. Early signs are that a shift away from out of town shopping to local trips plus online shopping has taken place. If this shopper behaviour sticks, there are opportunities for smaller businesses to succeed and big challenges for large brands to stay relevant in physical shops. To maintain their share of consumer spending, retailers will need to complement an attractive physical experience with excellent online provision and effective customer service.

The only exceptions to this rule seem to be the lowest priced retailers. Both Primark and B&M, for example, appear to be flourishing in 2020 by delivering a simple price-based offering with no online backup. B&M was classified as an ‘essential’ store early in the UK’s journey through this pandemic, and queues built up outside its stores. The lack of online provision by the brand meant that shopping behaviour did not alter in two channels, so change was easier to deal with. Primark closed its stores until June, then continued to retail goods using its established model. Physical retail experiences a much lower level of returns and Primark’s low prices continue to attract shoppers in a much more price-sensitive post-furlough environment. Shoppers simply do not feel as confident about buying expensive goods.

These exceptions, however, do not represent most retailers. Many brands need to offer what consumers want whilst managing costs to balance customer satisfaction with sustainable physical and online retail operations.

The shift to online shopping

Covid-19 has accelerated the already-huge move to online shopping. However, the global pandemic has created new challenges: coping with the sudden increase in demand and the need for new operational procedures means that an increase in online sales has not meant an increase in profits for many online retailers. Take Amazon, the online shopping juggernaut: although sales were up 26% in the first quarter of 2020, profits were down. The company’s net income reduced by 10% from $4.4 billion to $4 billion, and provisions to fight Covid-19 were expected to account for that entire income. Amazon seems to be playing the long game, putting customers ahead of profit. Other retailers can learn from this, but many will not have the profits available to support that strategy.

We predict that the accelerated shift towards online shopping will stick. Much like the realisation that we can actually work from home now, shoppers have realised that online shopping actually works. Once that behaviour is rewarded with a positive experience, it tends to develop into a habit. Lower cost retail channels, managed well, result in higher channel profits for retailers so the winners will be those who can combine good processes with great customer service.

Balancing cost reductions and great customer service

The challenge for retailers is to retain happy customers whilst keeping costs down. Exceptional demands on ops managers to keep businesses working at a time of massive change will have resulted in big cost increases for many. Unprecedented volume fluctuations in sales and in enquiries can stress-test a business beyond breaking point. Those who were most adaptable might already have gained an advantage. How can retailers keep costs down during this time of huge upheaval?

  1. Adopt the right technologies

If your retail business is adapting business processes to deal with your post-Covid future, are you building on a future-proof flexible platform? Even with excellent teams and leaders, legacy systems might restrict your abilities to change quickly and to handle enormous variations in throughput. They may also be unsuitable for homeworkers, presenting problems including how to handle payment processes and personal information over a remote connection.

Flexible business systems now exist which are rapidly deployable and capable of fully compliant end-to-end data handling. They can deliver surprising results in short lead times, resulting in a customer experience which is more seamless, more satisfying and better value than existing systems which seemed fine until the world changed!

  1. Choose the right partners

For many retailers, the biggest challenge throughout 2020 has been forecasting and dealing with massive fluctuations in sales and customer service demand. The shift towards online shopping with associated increases in returns, then back to physical shopping has caused huge variation in the demand for sales processing and customer service support. Failure to handle the fluctuations has resulted in losses of sales, which will be unmeasurable for most organisations. Lack of resource to resolve issues and handle enquiries, similarly, results in failures which cannot be measured by most operators.

Working with carefully selected outsourcers has allowed the best retailers to be truly flexible, adapting agent numbers when needed to cope with unpredictable variations in demand. This has allowed them not only to accurately assess demand but to deliver customer service solutions to a confused and demanding customer base at a time of high sensitivity. In the long term this will result in customer loyalty, however the retail landscape changes into 2021 and beyond.

What does 2021 hold for your business?

If you are planning for the uncertain future, make sure that you build a sales and customer service operation that is ready to deal with the uncertainty we have experienced in 2020. The retail sector will continue to be intensely competitive and challenging throughout and following the Covid-19 pandemic: retailers who survive must be prepared for difficult years ahead, which will require adaptability, cost management and great teams delivering excellent services to demanding customers.

Consider how you will deal with post-Covid customer service volumes and your strategic options for technology and flexibility. CCP can help. Our skilled and vastly experienced team is backed by our comprehensive Contact Centre and Technology Networks.

Get in touch, to find how best to build a future proof customer services solution, using the right technology and support services to deliver a flexible, cost effective and world-class customer experience.

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.

Why customer experience belongs at board level

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.”

Choosing the right customer service channels

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.”

Using customer insight to solve the right problems

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.”

Why traditional customer service KPIs can mislead

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.”

Turning customer experience into business value

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.