Embedding the customer in the center of our organizations

In a world where product differentiation is no longer an advantages it is very important that an organization differentiates in how good it delivers the promised customer services.  Most customers today are expecting only the very best service, even if that price for service is dirt cheap. Let's say I dine in an Island in the Philippines, I pay 10$ for an excellent meal coupled with an excellent friendly service so if I dine in London and spends 100$ I will expect the same level of service. If I don't get a good service I might not come back again or might give a bad rating for the place in Yelp or any other social channels. You see I am not the only one with this way of thinking. Do you think the same? Talking of London, I have been to Nobu and to Ramsey's I was surprise to spend less in Ramsey's where the service was a lot better and the food was excellent… Now I can say that Ramsey's is a very good example of providing a wonderful customer service, you leave happy and want to be back again as soon as you can.

All customer experiences are rooted to the people who provides them. When it comes to businesses, the customer experience is all that matters, most specially on service industries like Telecom. So the question to most if not all executives is "How do you embed customer centricity in your organizations?". There is no easy answer to this, there are no shortcuts. Its true that we train our front line staff to deliver a good service, but delivering a good service is no longer just a service, it is giving a positive experience that counts. To ensure that we provide positive experiences, our customers expects us to take the extra mile, go a bit further to give them delight and happiness. Doing should not break the bank either, after all as a business we aim for profitability and as executives we are judge on profitability by our shareholders. In April, at the CEM Summit in Dubai, Liz McSorley of du (VP  Customer Experience) will share how they do it in du.

For a product and technology led company like AmanziTel, we ensure that customer centricity is embedded in our corporate DNA by ensuring that each and every one of us understand and embrace customer centricity and the importance of ensuring happiness to our customers. We do this in various ways

• Customer centricity starts from the top, from our board members to our CEO down to our software developers.

• We hire resources who are naturally service and innovation oriented, so no matter how difficult our deployments get we continue to strive to provide happiness to each and everyone of them.

• It is embedded in our product and service design. When we design a product, especially new innovations and ground breaking product, in every decision we take our customer needs and happiness are taken into consideration. We call that customer driven development.

• We treat every customer request with utmost care and respect. Its like having your own baby being born when customer request arrives and ensuring that he or she is always happy and that he or she is raised and developed the right way.

• In times when we are not perfect, we ensure that we make up for our shortcomings by continuously delighting our customers in our own little ways and make that extra effort.. Walk the extra mile…

• We empower our front line resources to make key decisions in delivering customer happiness when they are put on those awkward situations.

• We always keep in mind that our customers are serving Billions of subscribers that at the end of the day each of our customers will have to deliver that happiness to their billions of subscribers

• For each and every one of us in the company we will always ensure our customer's happiness in our own little ways

And since its Valentine's day let me say we love our customers and we love the billions of subscribers they have.

How are you giving happiness to your customers?

While in London I got to observe how we in the Telco industry perceive improving experiences though better service delivery, improved processes and consistency in varying channels. In the beginning of April there is another CEM for Telecoms Summit tin Dubai, organized by IQPC. As you see the Middle East is a perfect example as to where customer experience should be improve by more importantly give telco customers a better way to connect with customer service by eliminating waiting time. Next time you call a customer service number,  or join a customer service chat, why not demand not to wait? And demand that the customer service representative not ask you tons of questions but tell you directly how to fix problems you experienced?

One thing telco customers will never see or experience with their service providers are the bad and rude services provided by SAS. I flew an SAS flight to London, not only the flight attendants were very rude but also the cabin seals came off during landing. On the way back to Copenhagen, its the same constant experience.. The cabin crew is very rude. At least SAS consistently give you a very bad experience… I think they should send their customer experience representatives to a CEM Summit to learn a thing  or to on how mobile operators are providing delight to their customers.

As an ordinary consumer, are we able to bring delight to others and at the same time bring happiness to ourselves? Last week we were exploring Augmented Reality, some brought the idea forwards, after several days of discussions a product concept is born, a few weeks from now I assume it will be released publicly. Once it is released anyone of us can manipulate reality the way we always wanted it, not just to impress our friends but more importantly bring happiness to others who are beneficiaries of this augmented reality. Just imagine making someone smile by including them on an exhilarating experience you are having…. Or let them experience the joy you are currently experiencing and then share it on social media real time.

Profiting from Implementation of an Effective CEM Strategy

Customer Experience Management  CEM is a practice as old as the oldest form of service or trade. However the term in itself was only coined this century. If we look back in history even before currency was invented when humans exchanged good and services, back then the concept of satisfying the customer already exist. Same concept as it is now, a customer will not buy a product or a service if they are not happy with it, nor they will barter their goods for another if they are not happy with what they will be getting.

Now a days there are multiple strategies on how to implement a CEM program. Tied to each strategy are multiple methodologies developed through the years of interacting with customers. For each company in a particular industry, sector or niche to implement a CEM program they must know how and where they interact with their customers, hence they should know their customer touch points. Each touch point varies between service and products. Now if we take Telecoms as an example, the touch points are as varied as every thing we interact with that has to do with technology, such as phones, TV, radio, tablets, printed materials, social media but central to that experience is the human customer.  Below is an example of a mobile telecoms touch point also highlighting the customer life cycle

Continuing with a mobile network provider as an example there are various strategies that can be deployed in monitoring customer experiences such as

• Network based monitoring 
• Device based monitoring
• Customer surveys
• Text analytic and web crawlers
• Social media listeners

Each strategy has their own advantages and fit falls. Having said that having an effective CEM program in place will improve customer satisfaction, in a lot of cases will improve revenue and more importantly profitability. In this age of cut-throat competition customer experience as a differentiation factor is very important. Back in 2012 watermark consulting identified that there is a very big gap in profitability between companies with good customer experience management programs compared to those who do not.

If we select various industries  and look at how an effective CEM programs impact their business taking from Forrester Research we will see that for some business sectors the difference  in bottom line is very big for a single company.

The question is what can your company profit from an effective CEM program? When you quantify the impact does it justify the effort and cost of putting a CEM program in the first place? There are several experts on this field and I came to learn that they will converge in Singapore on the first week of October. There is the Customer Experience Management Summit Asia in Oct 2 to 3 organized by IQPC and there is the Customer Experience Management in Telecoms World Summit on October 3 to 4 organized by Symphony Global. If you are now confused,  the two conferences are different in such a way that the Customer Experience Management Summit Asia is very general covering CEM in many industries. While the Customer Experience Management in Telecoms World Summit is very focused on Telecoms.

To be fair I am attending both events in one as a speaker and in the other as a writer in both cases I will be imparting knowledge gained and experience learned from various companies about implementation of various CEM programs.

Improving Customer Experiences starts with Human Resources

Recently I blogged about negative experience at Parking spaces in Oslo, of which Europark immediately responded to waive the parking fine. This shows two things in the way Europark is improving their customer experiences.

• They empower their staff to immediately resolve issues
• They did not fully train their staff to provide good customer experience from the beginning

Steven Khor of ePay will be presenting a concept during the CEM Asia summit in Singapore about moving from customer service to customer experience.

Although I am not aware of what he will be presenting let me use the Europark incident to point out why Customer Experiences starts with the Human Resources we employ. In every service industry the main interface if not the first interface of a customer is possibly human or human related.

Take into account Oslo experience. The parking attendant failed to see that parking ticket was paid and issued a fine which lead to a very unhappy customer. If only the parking attendant was trained to be more vigilant then there will be no unhappy customer. However this exercise also exposed that the customer service organization was able to turn a bad experience to a good one by recognizing the mistakes made and waiving the parking fine.

The human resource we employ can reflect loudly on what expectations our customers perceived and more importantly what experience we give them. For example Four Seasons Hotel has very friendly staff compared to say Hilton Hotel (at least comparing experiences in Singapore). Having said that since the price point is very similar returning guest will flock to Four Seasons first before they consider Hilton. what does the avertising below tells you about customer experiences provided by each hotel's staff?

In the services industry a good customer experience comes from how friendly and accommodating the human resources are. Today I had lunch with a friend who mentioned that his IT company wants to increase revenue and margin so they are planning to take multiple support calls at a time by putting one customer on hold while addressing another customer. Just imagine the nightmare that it will bring to the customer who was put on hold for several minutes.  If I was that customer I will take my business elsewhere.

If you happen to be in Singapore try visiting the IQPC CEM Asia event, there are a lot of things to learn from those who have implemented sucessful CEM programs from various industries...

Is Customer Experience a critical differentiator in today’s hypercompetitive, hyper-connected global market place?

Way back in 2011 Watermark Consulting studied S&P 500 companies and found out that those that are perceived to be leaders in providing good customer experiences can achieve up to 20% better profitability compared to the S&P 500 Index at that time. While those companies that do not provide good customer experience lags behind in terms of profitability.

Now compared that with the most recent findings where Cx leaders are performing much better than before.

Similarly Forrester Research quantified that good customer experience can add billions in profitability especially to a typical American company operating Hotels or providing Wireless Services where customer experience is a very important differentiator.

In my previous blog I compared Apple and Samsung, two of the world leading suppliers of mobile devices in this hyper connected and hyper competitive world.  Apple of course provide a fanatical level of experience while Samsung is catching up fast. However what if we compare with BlackBerry who used to be defacto leader in supplying Smartphones back when the world is just learning how to be hyper connected as it is today. BlackBerry went from the market leader on Smartphones to near extinction. What went wrong for BlackBerry and what went right for Apple? Way back in 2005 when Blackberry was cool it dominated the enterprise market, those who wants to be connected to their work 24X7. However Blackberry ignored the consumer market which Apple with the release of the first iPhone focused on. In the iPhone it gave you a completely different experience, a good and rewarding experience that even a 2 year child can navigate and use a Smartphone.

The  great user experience coupled with great customer service (just visit an Apple retail store to find out) enabled Apple to create a fanatical following anywhere in the world. How much a differentiation is a great customer experience, I would say its worth  more than 45B$ per quarter in revenues and more than 10B$ per quarter in profits…. Is that enough to justify why companies should embark on a good customer experience program?

In one of IQPC's Customer Experience event for Telecoms earlier this year M. Agrawal of Optus put together a very good business case financially explaining why a good customer experience program makes the difference in the bottom line. In his example using NPS, by providing a good customer experience and increasing the number of promoters to 10% it will be worth 620M$ to the bottom line of 2 Million subscribers.

The sample above illustrates how some companies benefit from having good Customer Experience as the critical differentiation in their respective domains. If we look back in history we will find out that a lot of the improvements we see today in services provided to us in banking, hotels, restaurant and even transportation services are a product of good customer experience program from some of the pioneers in this field and adopted by most.

More use cases that are not normally published are being shared in conferences, seminars and focused groups such as the ones below...

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….