Measuring RoI of Customer Happiness...

Every sales or marketing or customer service or engineering initiatives has a cost and reward associated to it. For any company the rewards or benefits should outweigh the cost for it to be adopted by the company's' management. But what happens when it comes to customer experiences, are any short term benefits that can justify immediate implementation of a customer happiness program? Or its long term advantages and what is the most effective way of measuring Returns on Investments (RoI)?

In the financially driven world of business RoI is measured by

• Revenue generated
• Cost Saved
• Profit made

Having said that what is the best way in measuring the RoI of a CEM program? First off we need to understand why a CEM program is put in place... The general answer will always be to keep customer happy and satisfied. However beneath that very general statement are underlying business cases such as:

• Lower number of customer complains.  Just imagine every customer complain can cost say 5$ and if there are 1,000,000 complains avoided every year, that's a 5,000,000$ savings
• Lower the Average Call Handling Time. When calling customer service just imagine how much time is wasted going through the IVR then a long interview with a customer service agent. What if you can reduce this by let's say 1 minute? In an average mobile operator the cost of a customer service call is around 1$ per minute, now consider the 1,000,000 complains where every call handling time is reduced by 1 minutes, that's a 1,000,000$ savings.. In the real world the savings can be as much as 10 minutes
• Improve First Call Resolution rate. For every customer service organization resolving customer issues at the very first instance they complain is very important. Let's just say it will cost 5$ per every complain that is not resolved by first line support so if all the 1,000,000 calls goes to 2nd line support that's a 5,000,000$ cost that can be saved if complains are resolve the first time around.
• Lower Churn rate. Let's just say out of those 1,000,000 callers, 2% churns or departs as customers. That's 20,000 customers, and let's just say they ARPU is 100$ per year that's 2,000,000$ in potential lost revenue saved.
• Increase service usage. Happy customers normally use more services. Let's say as a mobile operator you offer data services for 5$ per month with 1 GB of data, with your customers being happy say about 1,000,000 customers upgrade to 10$ a month. That's an additional revenue of 120,000,000$ per year.
• Deploy wanted services. What a good CEM program will show you are future services that your customers will take. Let's just say your customers move to WiFi every time they use Facebook, now if you know this fact why not offer your subscriber a 1$ a month Facebook usage using your network. For 1,000,000 users who will subscribe to the service that's an additional revenue of 12,000,000$ per year.

There are of course a lot more potential savings and more potential revenue generated with the right solution. Having said that there will be more examples to learn from in Dubai for the CEM Summit  next month. This same topic will be discussed by David Perrota  of Zain, Liz McSorley of Du, Nedal Mostafa of Ufone and Ahmed El-Bana of Mobily.

This group of industry experts will be exploring:

• How to you use the results of your ROI analysis to make the customer experience a strategic priority at a time when all departments are competing for budget?
• How to you monitor and strengthen the link between customer satisfaction, recommendation rates and customer acquisition?
• How to you ensure that your customer experience improvements will increase ARPU?

Now I am tempted to attend....

How can contact or call centers improve customer experiences and make our world a bit better?

In our lifetime, most of have been or will be in touch with a customer care agent, whether that is to complain about a problem, buy a new product or service or casual interview about our experiences and perceptions. Having said that  everyone can relate on unpleasant experiences when dealing with customer care agents especially over the phone or even face to face on a shop floor.

Over the phone we tend to get lost to the myriad of choices on the IVR, which probably takes 2 to 5 minutes just to navigate to the correct selection. After getting to the right IVR menu we are prompted another 15 minutes or more of waiting on  a queue, then finally once we find a customer care agent it take another 15 minutes of explaining to the the customer care agent the issue or problem we are having with a product or service. So as sane humans there goes 30 minutes of our life in a 24 hour day wasted waiting. If we know this can be improve then we realized how much better our life can be… just imagine spending that 30 minutes in something you truly like or love, that will make this word a much better place….

Looking at the other side, just imagine the amount of money saved by the company we called if they can shorten that time even by just 15 seconds. If they have 10000 calls a day, then that is 150,000 seconds saved, that is a 40 hour saving, an entire week. As a person what would you do if you are given a week off and can do anything you want? For a company that is 1 man week off saved in a day and if consider that 1 minute of call is costing a dollar, just imagine saving 600,000$ per year out of 15 seconds….

Now the question is how do we make our customers happier by shortening their waiting time, or even eliminating it if possible. In most contact centers we often talk about two main metrics First Call Resolution (FCR) and Average Call Holding Time (ACHT). On the analogy above we established that improving ACHT can improve bottom line dramatically. What most of us failed to understand that FCR and ACHT is very much related and can be improved at the same time. How?  Its actually very simple… but very difficult to get the implementation right.

If we can provide the customer a faster way of reaching customer service, then the waiting time for them becomes tolerable. Today we deploy self care, but that still has some waiting time… especially if the customer wants to talk to a live agent. So why not provide a direct customer care portal from the customer's device where he presses a button then viola straight to an agent! Or better yet instead of the customer calling, why not let the agent cal the customer as soon as a problem is submitted….

If we then equip the agent with all information about the customer and their experience without having to go to a battery of questions, then that is 5 minutes save. And at the same time provide the agent the capability to immediately isolate the issue and provide immediate feedback, another five minute save and the customer issue solved immediately during the first call…. How about that for better FCR and ACHT?

The question that would come to mind then is how do you that? The answer is actually as simple as the concept. Ensure all information needed are captured and process before even the agent pick up the phone… by this meaning a system that can handle huge amount of data and produce the necessary results in a matter of a few seconds… If I am the customer 2 seconds will be my perfect waiting time, thank you.

Wanna know more? How about coming to Customer Experience Management Asia and listen to the experiences of those who have implemented this kind of solutions….