cust mer engagement issue nine
November 2012
The official magazine of the Customer Engagement Network
www.customerengagementnetwork.com
er nt m e o t em it s 12 g u 0 m C ga m ber 2 n em u v E S 7 No 2
, ria o ict V za n la ndo P rk Lo Pa
Exclusive reports on our Multichannel and Financial Services Customer Engagement Directors Forums
Time: Venue:
9:00am – 5:00pm Gallup Consulting, The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6HS
For more information contact Chris Wood: chris@ictcomms.com and +44 (0) 1932 341828 or visit our website: www.customerengagementnetwork.com
Speakers todate include: • Marks & Spencer • Essex County Council • Best Companies Ltd • CIPD • University of Kent • Gallup • Confirmit • Questback
Employee and Customer Engagement 5th December 2012, London
Delegates will learn: • How world class organisations are using employee and engagement strategies for competitive advantage • The latest thinking on the links between employee and customer engagement and the strategies that are delivering success • How to get the best from our people through a customer centric culture that ensures consistent delivery of customer service excellence across all channels • How challenging economic conditions are determining employee engagement strategies and how to keep your best people on board • The performance and profitability advantages that result from aligning your employee and customer engagement strategies.
This Directors Forum will lift the lid on the employee engagement strategies that are making some organisations winners in the battle for customer loyalty, and where the links between employee and customer engagement are being leveraged to provide benefits to all stakeholders and to gain competitive advantage.
Register FREE TO ATTEND FOR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS
http://employeeengagementforum.eventbrite.co.uk
Host Partner
Sponsors
Why you must attend the Customer Engagement Summit er nt om me t t s ge i 12 u C ga mmber 20 m En Su ove
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This is an exciting time for us at the Customer Engagement Network. Following a hugely successful series of Directors Forums over the past two years we are now looking forward to our inaugural Customer Engagement Summit.
The Customer Engagement Summit is the first joined-up customer experience event to drive successful customer and employee engagement strategies for organisations looking to improve customer retention, loyalty, and business performance and profitability. The Summit is being held at the prestigious Victoria Park Plaza hotel in Central London on November 27 and will include world class case studies, presentations from leading practitioners and academics from around the globe, panel discussions, breakout sessions, top notch opportunities for high level networking with peers and an evening drinks reception with a dose of entertainment thrown in for good measure.
Mash up - and much more
We are now operating in a truly omnichannel business environment and we have to be where our customers are and offer them relevant and seamless service across those channels – otherwise believe you me they will find an organisation that does!
Chief Customer Officers Customers simply don’t give a hoot about the internal machinations of organisations and that is why it is encouraging to see from my point of view the gradual increase in the number of enlightened organisations who now have Chief Customer Officers operating at board level who are able to take an overview of the customer. This needs to accelerate though and my view is that the organisations who are adopting this strategic customer-centric position will be the ones who survive and thrive in continually difficult economic conditions.
The Summit is effectively a ‘mash-up’ - and much, much more - of the content of our Directors Forums examining the employee and customer challenges and opportunities faced by organisations today.
It is against this challenging and at the same time exciting backdrop that we are launching our Customer Engagement Summit. The aim is for delegates to go back to their organisations armed with all the tools, strategies and techniques they need to deliver successful employee and customer engagement strategies over the long term for sustainable competitive advantage.
The changing dynamic of the relationship between organisations, their employees and more especially their customers is already well documented. The pace of that change is being accelerated further by the proliferation of channels our customers are operating on and the fact they are more likely to voice their opinions of how we engage them across those channels than ever before.
You can get details of our Customer Engagement Summit agenda including all the speakers and break-out sessions in the centre pages of this edition of Customer Engagement Magazine. And to register for the event please go to http://cesummit.eventbrite.co.uk/
Organisations must think long and hard about how their internal silos are impacting on their customer relationships. We need to cut across those silos where possible to focus on the needs of our customers. To quote one of the speakers at a recent Directors Forum ‘HR needs to be talking to marketing’.
Our first ever Customer Engagement Summit is a must attend event and I look forward to seeing you there for what promises to be an inspiring and instructive day - and lots of fun too! Steve Hurst, Editorial Director Customer Engagement Network
Have your say - if you have any feedback on this issue of Customer Engagement share it with us by sending a text message, starting with the word ‘Engage’ to 66099.
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Customer Engagement Gets Networked Try our new Customer Engagement Network website for size www.customerengagementnetwork.com
Customer Engagement magazine is published by the Customer Engagement Network, the organisers of the Customer Engagement Directors Forums.
www.customerengagementnetwork.com
contents To join the Network (free membership) and receive weekly Alerts, Digital Magazines and Invitations to the Directors Forums go to www.customerengagementnetwork.com Editorial Director: Steve Hurst steve@ictcomms.com Sales & Marketing Director: Chris Wood chris@ictcomms.com Tel: +44 (0) 1932 341828 Customer Engagement ©ICT Communications Ltd
News Beat 6-7 The rise of the multichannel contact centre – at long last. Mind the employee engagement gap. Corporates wary of employees and social media. One in seven customer reviews will be faked by 2014
Cover Story 8-11 Customer advocacy and the need for passion The need for organisations to engage with their customers and have effective customer retention strategies has never been greater, yet if all you measure is likelihood to recommend, you’re missing key opportunities says James Rapinac
Change or die - the challenge for 12-13 contact centre outsourcing Contact centre outsourcers must move to a multichannel customer engagement environment if they are to survive says Charles Cooper-Driver
Voice of Customer success - six steps to heaven 14-15 Karine Del Moro looks at the six key stages that are key to building a successful VoC programme
Culture people and leadership keys 18-20 to winning back customer trust At the Customer Engagement Network Directors Forum on Customer Engagement in the Financial Services sector an inspirational opening key note from First Direct showed the way forward. Steve Hurst reports
Are you keeping pace with your customers? 21-24 The rise of social media and the ubiquity of internet-enabled devices are creating an unprecedented pace of change in consumer markets. Paul Scott questions our ability to respond
For multichannel read omnichannel 25-27 - our customers are everywhere A Customer Engagement Network Directors Forum on multichannel customer engagement demonstrated how we need to be where our customers are. Steve Hurst reports
Big Data - surely that’s IT’s problem not mine! 28-29 Big data is now firmly on the radar of organisations looking to gain a better understanding of their customers but it’s a tad complicated. Kieran Kilmartin makes it sound simple.
The Final Word 30 Customer experience and employee engagement Colin Shaw reckons the trick to successfully marrying up employee engagement to customer engagement is not to put square pegs in round holes
Editorial Advisory Board Dr Guy Fielding, Richard Sedley, Rod Butcher, Hugh Griffiths, Marcus Hickman, Karine Del Moro, David Cottam, James Rapinac, Crispin Manners. Professor Moira Clarke, Professor Katie Truss, Mike Havard 5
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The rise of the multichannel contact centre – at long last New research published by ContactBabel, the contact centre industry analysts, reveals that over 17% of interactions handled by UK contact centres are through email, web chat or social media. Web chat between customers and agents has risen from 0.7% of all inbound traffic to UK contact centres to 1.3% this year, with social media appearing on the survey this year for the first time with 0.7% of interactions. Perhaps the most impressive growth has come from email, which has jumped from 10.4% to 15.4% of interactions in the past 12 months. "The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers'
Guide (10th edition - 2012)", is a major study of 216 UK contact centre operations, looking at all areas of contact centre performance, investment, technology, HR and strategy. The report's author, Steve Morrell, commented: "After a great many false dawns, we can now state with confidence that the multichannel contact centre is really with us. The rise in web-initiated interactions with contact centre agents - through email, web chat and social media - has jumped from 11.4% to 17.4% in the past 12 months. There has been a corresponding decline in the proportion of interactions that are through voice traffic, with agent calls accounting for 73% (down from 78.7%) and
voice self-service dropping to 3.2% from 4.2% last year. “For a number of years, the trend has been for simple interactions to be handled through self-service, although the voice selfservice channel has declined as web-based self-service has grown. As mobile, app-based self-service takes off further, this pattern will continue. The general move to the website has meant that increasing numbers of customers are choosing to stay with that channel if they need help, rather than use a phone. This has led to the increase in email and web chat, with the improvements in email response times and growing availability of web chat serving to validate these as reliable channels in the eyes of customers.”
Mind the employee engagement gap The 2012 SHRM 2012 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement survey reveals that employees were only moderately engaged (3.6, on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is highly disengaged, 3 is moderately engaged and 5 is highly engaged) - figures that have not changed since 2011, the first year SHRM started gathering these data. The gap between what employees want and what they get was largest for compensation/pay, at 38 percentage points, followed by communication between employees and senior management, at 35 percentage points. The importance/ satisfaction gap for job security was 31 percentage points.
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In addition to examining 35 aspects of employee job satisfaction, SHRM researchers explored 34 aspects of employee engagement. This distinction is an important one, the report notes, because job satisfaction focuses on how employees feel about key elements of their jobs while employee engagement looks at employees’ commitment and connection to their work and the factors that motivate them to work harder. The report notes, however, that negative results for either measure can have a direct business impact: “Low engagement and job satisfaction can contribute to multiple organizational problems and have been associated with increased levels of turnover
and absenteeism, adding potential costs to the organization in terms of low performance and decreased productivity.” As for what topped the engagement portion of the survey: • 83% of employees were determined to accomplish their work goals and confident they could meet them. • 79% of employees were satisfied with their relationships with co-workers. • 75% of employees were satisfied with opportunities to use their skills and abilities at work. • 72% of employees were satisfied with how their work contributed to their organization’s business goals. • 71% of employees said they frequently felt they were putting all their effort into their work -- an addition to the top five list of engagement factors in 2012. • Tied for fifth place: 71% of employees said they were satisfied with their relationship with their immediate supervisor. By comparison, the relationship with the immediate supervisor was ranked fourth in importance in 2011.
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Corporates wary of employees and social media Employee voice has ‘positive impact on business performance’ but social media is being discouraged as a platform for discussion.
One in seven online reviews will be faked by 2014 As many as 15% of online reviews will be made up within the next two years according to new research. Brand and reputation management is considered a key element of social media marketing. But what happens when forums, blogs, tweets and “likes” are sabotaged by hackers, competitors and other villains intent on destroying a company's reputation? As many as 15% of online reviews will be fake by 2014, according to research company Gartner Inc., which can destroy a company's reputation. “Customers are getting more comfortable with these reviews and feel that anything that is fake will already have been exposed,” said Jenny Sussin, senior research analystsocial CRM at Gartner. “But we know that even if a lot of people are getting caught, they'll just find different ways to do it.” And then there's the reverse of fraudulent negative reviews. Increasingly, review sites are being laden with praise by companies themselves, extolling the virtues of their own products and services while pretending to be unbiased users. Gartner's report, “The Consequences of Fake Fans, "Likes' and Reviews on Social Networks,” issued in July, found a significant number of marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions. They might also pay to increase video views on YouTube to make a video go viral and increase their exposure and reputation. Some even go so far as to pay bloggers to praise their products and services, a practice embraced by financial software company Intuit Inc Negative reviews can come from competitors or their operatives who want to trash a company's reputation with an overwhelming volume of criticism. 7
“As reviews become more and more influential, there is an inevitability that review fraud would also increase exponentially,” said Chris Emmins, co-founder of KwikChex, an online reputation management company that monitors review sites for fraudulent comments and provides a star rating system for review sites that screen for fake reviews. Beyond overall statistics, Emmins cited particular practices that are contributing to the problem: • Some formerly honest businesses that have had their reputations damaged by what they believe to be fake, malicious or excessive attacks defend themselves by placing fake positive reviews on such sites as Amazon.com and Yelp. • There are “hot spots” of review fraud, most occurring in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, parts of Africa and India. In the U.S., KwikChex has seen particularly high levels of fraudulent activity in Arizona, Florida and Nevada. • Some companies have set up covert review sites that masquerade as unbiased sources. They seed them with positive reviews to boost their own reputation, and may also add negative reviews about rivals. “The current situation is very sad since customer feedback is fundamentally such a good thing,” Emmins said. “People would far rather get honest opinion from their peers than believe what they see in advertising.” Facebook Inc., which just saw its user count pass the 1 billion mark, last month said that it will remove counterfeit “likes.” Facebook said the automated changes will remove those “likes” generated by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users or bulk purchases, to assure users they are dealing with real people and businesses.
The majority of businesses believe that ‘employee voice’ has a positive impact on engagement and performance, according to new research. But employers - particularly larger organisations - remain wary about workers using social media to express opinions about their company, found the survey from IPA and Tomorrow’s Company. Respondents to the latest IPA study define employee voice not just as allowing staff to express their opinions and ideas, but as organisations actively listening to and involving employees in decision-making. The majority feel that employee voice helps drive employee engagement. Interestingly, businesses report that the main barriers to accessing employee voice arise from staff themselves. Overcoming cynicism and securing staff buy-in were cited as top challenges by the 200 firms canvassed. But nearly half of employers (46 per cent) discourage the use of social media to voice views about the company and one-fifth forbid it. Only 7 per cent of the businesses surveyed encourage the use of social media networks for this purpose. Instead, organisations tend to use a variety of longer-established channels to access employee voice, the research found. The most regularly used channels are team meetings and line manager/one-to-one discussions, which are both used by over 80 per cent of organisations. These are followed by staff surveys (74 per cent) and direct contact with senior managers (72 per cent). Indirect or ‘representative’ channels such as trade union meetings are becoming less common methods of accessing employee voice, but are more likely to be used by larger organisations. Meanwhile, smaller employers prefer to use direct contact with senior managers. “Employee voice is increasingly important in the modern workplace… it is one of the enablers of employee engagement and can significantly impact business performance,” said the report. “But employee voice remains both little understood as a concept and under-utilised in the world of work.”
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The need for organisations to engage with their customers and have effective customer retention strategies has never been greater, yet if all you measure is likelihood to recommend, you are missing key opportunities contends James Rapinac
http://www.gallup.com/region/europe.aspx
This has led companies to seek new metrics that both predict customer behaviour and
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identify areas of action that will improve future outcomes. There are a variety of methods available to businesses, and one of the most attractive is the “single question survey”. The theory, and the appeal, is that a single and easily administered question will address a company’s most important customerretention issues. But in practice, companies frequently add several survey items to this single question because they need to know more about the customer experience than the answer to “how much would you
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James Rapinac Director of Client Development, Europe, Gallup
Companies in all industries and markets are keen to find more effective ways to build and maintain profitable, long-term relationships with their customers. This has been driven by ever increasing competition for customers and share of wallet in economies experiencing zero or slowing growth. As new customers are becoming increasingly harder – and more expensive – to come by, the quest to enhance loyalty and value has never been greater.
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“People who are both rationally loyal and highly engaged deliver a 23% premium over the average customer in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth” recommend this company?” In fact, single question surveys often encourage companies to follow up with an open-ended request for elaboration.
All Advocates are not created equal Indexed Performance Average =100
Non-Advocates
Rational Advocates
100
While this added complexity may have removed some of the lustre from a single question brand promise, it continues to be used extensively. It seems like a lot of trouble, a lot of unexpected trouble, to go through to find out what brings in business, but companies do it willingly. And it would be worth it – if it only worked.
Commercial Banking
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Total Relationship(s)
101 187 96 104
Profitability
155 70 86
Share of Spend
150
Air Cargo Shipping
65
Total Tonnage
97 147
Incomplete information
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Single question surveys tend to focus on advocacy. The thinking is that customers who advocate are also loyal and probably spend a lot. Gallup research shows that that’s true, but only to a very limited extent.
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100
150
200
Advocacy Engagement: Latin America Retail Bank Indexed Performance Monthly Revenue Average =100
Advocates are likelier to spend more than are non-advocates, naturally. But customers in the middle, those who are about as likely as not to recommend, spend only a little more than people who would never recommend the companies at all. That leaves important questions about why the customer would recommend them, who the best customers actually are, and how to get more of them, unanswered.
Not at all
2
3
4
100
Extremely
110 112 68
Satisfaction
114 98
71 113 80
Advocacy
Leaders are left looking at a big difference between the high end and the middle – but no explanation for it. That’s why single question surveys are a good start, but extremely incomplete.
92 113
Advocacy Engagement: Latin America Retail Bank
Emotion trumps reason
Indexed Performance / Monthly Revenue Average =100
But there is an explanation for the difference between the high end and the middle. Single question surveys can’t get to it, though, because they treat customer response too simplistically.
Actively Disengaged
Non Engaged
Engaged
Fully Engaged
100 81 89
Engagement
107 123
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Gallup research has shown that loyalty, and more importantly, spending, is anything but simple. Customers have rational reasons for what they buy, but spending is prompted by emotional response to a company as much or more than reason.
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“A passionate customer describes his or her relationship with a company or brand as irreplaceable and a 'perfect fit' for them. Passionate customers are extremely loyal and almost literally worth their weight in gold” Thirty years of research with millions of customers in hundreds of companies all over the world shows that customers have three rational reasons for patronage: overall satisfaction, likelihood to repurchase, and likelihood to recommend. These are the issues that single question surveys intend to cover. But more important than those three rational responses are several emotional ones which explain customer spending and loyalty. Those emotional reasons fall under four general umbrellas: Confidence: is this company trustworthy? Can it be counted on to do what it says it will do with absolute consistency? Integrity: the essential emotional dimension of fair play and fair treatment. Do I feel that the company treats me the way I deserve to be treated? If there is a problem, will it resolve the issue quickly and in a way that is fair for
a customer like me? Pride: a sense of positive association with the company or brand. Customers who feel a strong sense of Pride feel the association say something about themselves to themselves – not just what the association communicates to other people. Passion: A passionate customer describes his or her relationship with a company or brand as irreplaceable and a “perfect fit” for them. Passionate customers are extremely loyal and almost literally worth their weight in gold.
Passionate advocacy Gallup’s CE11 survey – which includes 11 questions – covers both rational and emotional customer response and categorises people as fully engaged, engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged. Engaged customers tend to be advocates, but that fact alone doesn’t mean much because it doesn’t explain their spending habits, and that’s what a company wanting to grow its customer base needs to know.
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In fact, we’ve found that customers who say they are likely to recommend a company’s products or services spend much less than do customers who feel a strong emotional connection to a brand. However, people who are both rationally loyal and highly engaged deliver a 23% premium over the average customer in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth.
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For example, Gallup studied the investment behaviour of customers of an international private bank. Depending on their stated likelihood to recommend the bank to others, we sorted the customers into three categories: non-advocates (those who are less than extremely likely to recommend the company to others); rational advocates (those who say they are extremely likely to recommend but do not have a strong emotional connection with the company), and passionate advocates (those who are both extremely likely to recommend and have an emotional bond with the company). The passionate advocates were much better customers, both in share of assets and in the net new assets they invested with the bank. Surprisingly, rational advocates did not differ from non-advocates on these key financial outcomes. Enthusiastic advocacy, whether it is positive or negative, comes from strong emotions. Even among customers who say they are extremely likely to recommend a brand, product or service, it is the strength of the emotional connection that determines the customer’s patronage – and whether his or her recommendation is passive and lukewarm or glowing and enthusiastic.
Call for action Single question surveys really falter in the clutch because the metric they provide doesn’t identify who the best customers are and what it takes to get more of them. Customer feedback should indicate the key drivers of engagement and passionate advocacy. Explicitly. And the feedback should cover every touch point and channel that customers use in their interactions with a brand, product, or service. If the metric isn’t actionable, especially to frontline staff, it isn’t useful.
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Actionability for frontline staff was an important issue faced by one of Gallup’s clients, a major financial services provider. When they knew exactly what engaged customers, the bank started holding managers accountable for improving the aspects of the customer experience that were within their sphere of control. The bank knew what to do so that it could integrate both rational advocacy and emotional attachment. No surprise, revenue increased. But it increased more amongst the actively engaged. If a company can tell who its best customers are and what it can do to get more of them, then it knows everything it needs to know about customer retention and recruitment. But if it’s struggling to identify those things, struggling to drive change, struggling to see growth, then the company needs to ask more questions - more, better, and scientifically-validated questions. Change and growth aren’t simple things. And a simple question won’t do much to improve them. James Rapinac is Director of Client Development, Europe, Gallup
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Contact centre outsourcers must move to a multichannel customer engagement environment if they are to survive says Charles Cooper-Driver
Charles Cooper Driver is CEO, UK & Europe for HGS. Contact him at charlesc@teamhgs.com
http://www.teamhgs.com/uk/
While voice remained the dominant communication channel, that business model was secure. The logic was simple, as business activity grew and call volumes increased, so too would the need for outsourced service providers (OSPs) and their large banks of agents.
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Today that business model is being challenged. OSPs must evolve to compete in a multichannel environment. The move away from the telephone as the primary communication channel in favour of online, mobile or social media is inexorable. Research estimates that, in 80% of cases, consumers will make their first contact with an organisation online. Members of today’s Generation Y are 30% less likely to use the phone as a service channel than their Baby Boomer parents and grandparents.
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Since its inception the outsourced contact centre industry has thrived on a simple business model; the use of a shared infrastructure, replicable services and a flexible workforce to receive and (more rarely) make telephone calls more economically than their clients could.
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“Tomorrow’s successful OSPs will offer much more than people and telephones; they will also provide the vital technology infrastructures for the delivery of multichannel service” Inevitably organisations are compelled to respond to this changing customer behaviour by adopting self service channels. They are also motivated to do so by the commercial benefits those lowercost channels offer. If, in the past, organisations have embraced outsourcing as a means of reducing the cost of achieving customer satisfaction, we can be sure that they will embrace self service channels with the same enthusiasm and to the same end. Unless OSPs become their partners in this endeavour they will find themselves obsolete.
Resistance is futile To date, however, with the occasional exception of email, OSPs have resisted entering the multichannel arena. Ultimately, that resistance is futile, but it is also understandable. After all, doing so will involve a dramatic transformation of their business model and the development of new skills that they have little experience of either acquiring or managing. Tomorrow’s successful OSPs will offer much more than people and telephones; they will also provide the vital technology infrastructures for the delivery of multi-channel service and make that infrastructure available to clients on a pay-as-you go basis. They will also provide people with the technological, business and relationship skills to deliver integrated services across that infrastructure. Put simply, the ability to build and deliver online knowledge bases, virtual agents and speech automation services for example, will become as fundamental to an OSP's business tomorrow as the provision of a dialer or a switch today. The ability to develop online content, to engage in social media and map customer journeys will be as vital as the ability to answer the phone (and much more difficult to script!).
The new economics The economic fulcrum in yesterday’s OSP businesses rested on the agent seat. A person, at a desk, ready and able to take calls was the primary asset, leveraged on the basis of a price-per-seat or price-per-hour. Tomorrow’s successful OSPs will sell a much more sophisticated blend of services, skills and resource. That blend will include the intelligence to design, build and deliver self service solutions, the skills to build and manage online content, and the technological resources to support service delivery across multiple, integrated channels. In the new economics the value fulcrum has shifted from the agent seat to the business result. Clients will value, not agent availability and transaction time (self service interactions are automated and timeliness), but measurable business outcomes. They will value the
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OSP’s ability to deliver successful customer journeys across all channels that end in a positive result – satisfaction, retention, advocacy and purchase. The slow evolution of outsourced contact centre contracting must, therefore, speed up. There has been much talk (but little action) in recent years about the need to align remuneration, not with call volumes or per-hour agent availability, but with the achievement of desirable business outcomes. And, at risk of stating the obvious, one of those desired outcomes may well be a significant and game-changing reduction in telephone contact.
The human factor This isn’t to say that the contact centre agent is no longer a valuable asset. But it does face the central Darwinian challenge to evolve in line with changing circumstances. Though 80% of first contact is, as we mentioned, made via the web, 37% of people will pick up the phone if they don’t immediately find the answer they need there . And we know, too, that, for complex, emotionally charged interactions, the phone is likely to remain the channel of choice for some time. This means that the activity of the average phonebased agent will change from ‘answering questions’ (leave that to your online FAQ) to ‘resolving issues’. They will need tact, diplomacy and, perhaps, specialist knowledge. The number of OSPs with professional lawyers, health workers or technology specialists on its books, for example, is already on the rise. The contact centre agent is ultimately destined to become a knowledge worker, highly trained, increasingly networked and, almost inevitably, better paid. They will be a smaller resource, but a much more valuable one. For self service agents, the traditional delineation between ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ communication (answering the phone or picking it up to make a call) will become increasingly redundant. They will become monitors of and participants in customer conversations. Principally they will be deployed to support self service channels or social media by intervening at appropriate moments; to offer a web chat to a customer struggling to complete an online purchase, or to ameliorate an aggrieved customer voicing their discontent on Facebook. In that respect, one thing about the outsourced contact centre industry will remain unchanged – it will be still have people at its core; simply fewer of them, doing very different things. Human intellect and empathy, however, will remain the most vital tools required to design and deliver profitable services across any channel. We just need to find a new way to put a price on that.
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Karine Del Moro looks at the six key stages that are key to building a successful VoC programme Creating a positive and consistent customer experience across multiple channels is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today, and a solid Voice of the Customer programme is core to meeting this challenge. Building such a programme, however, is far from simple and failure to get it right will result in “just another customer survey”. And that won’t deliver the insight needed to drive business change, deliver ROI and create competitive advantage. Karine Del Moro is Senior Director, Confirmit
http://confirmit.com/
Many businesses do now “get” this, but for many, there’s still a lot of work to do if they’re going to secure the investment - both financial and operational -they need to build a real VoC programme. But the benefits are there; delivering an excellent customer experience is the most effective way for both B2C and B2B organisations to differentiate themselves from the competition – and VoC is a vital component in achieving this goal.
We have identified six key stages that are crucial in building a successful VoC programme.
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Successful customer experience management (CEM) provides the insight required to increase revenue through reduced churn, improved cross-sell and the ability to better attract new customers. It also helps to reduce costs by improving processes and creating greater consistency. Finally, taking a customer-centric approach to every facet of the business drives cross-functional change and makes a real impact on organisational culture.
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“Delivering an excellent customer experience is the most effective way for both B2C and B2B organisations to differentiate themselves from the competition – and VoC is a vital component in achieving this goal” 1) Define: Agree clear, phased objectives and success criteria. It is imperative to define the key business issues that you need to address – increasing revenue, decreasing costs through operational improvements, driving culture change – at the outset so that you can build a programme that links to key business and customer KPIs. Otherwise you run the risk of building a VoC programme that simply languishes in a silo.
From a tactical perspective, this means using alerts, for example about dissatisfied customers or poorly performing team members to improve problem resolution and retention, or about happy customers to motivate your employees and leverage positive wordof-mouth. A VoC programme can indeed provide a strong opportunity to engage the front line by showing them when their actions have really made a difference to customers.
Next, map the customer journey from the customer’s perspective to ensure that you are listening to them at key touchpoints. It is vital that you understand when and how they wish to engage with your brand. Identify the ‘key moments of truth’ for customers so that you have a clear understanding of which interactions bear the most impact on customer experience.
From a strategic standpoint, aggregate data to identify key drivers from your customers’ point of view to help you to prioritise long term investments that will drive business change in a meaningful way. This is the best way to find out what your most important customers really care about.
2) Design: Ensure that you design the programme to deliver both tactical and strategic benefits, in line with your business objectives. Decide what channels your customers will find most engaging (web, mobile, telephone, paper, etc.) and take into account both relationship surveys, which analyse the health of the relationship on an ongoing basis, and transactional surveys which are better suited to identifying issues and process improvements at key touchpoints. Ideally there should also be a way to relate relationship surveys to transactional surveys, and vice versa, so that you can identify the critical drivers of loyalty or dissatisfaction. Having carefully designed the most appropriate methods of data capture for your business, decide what reporting you need to drive action and build in closed-loop processes so that you can resolve issues as they occur. 3) Implement: Use multi-channel data collection to drive high response rates and deliver deeper insight. Identify a solution that provides a secure and highly scalable way to gather customer feedback, automate alerts, and generate tailored reports that provide stakeholders with live insight. Make sure you collect information from all sides of your organisation – add VoC data to ERP and CRM platforms as well as employee feedback systems and external benchmarking data - to ensure that you are able to build a holistic, single view of the customer. What matters here is to gather robust, representative, balanced information, using appropriate and relevant channels and integrating it with your internal systems. 4) Analyse: Improve business results by analysing data and creating a clear view of the issues and opportunities.
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5) Act: Closing the loop at the individual level with your customers is of course crucial to the success of your VoC programme. It allows you to deliver some quick wins, and is often easily linked to short-term financial benefits. Set up a robust and actionable alerting system that empowers your employees to retain customers, produce leads, cut costs, etc. In parallel you need to build the foundations that will deliver longterm results: powerful, tailored reports that give insights on a larger scale, about where to invest, what to fix - in short what you need to know about your most profitable opportunities. Everyone in your organisation, from the CEO to the frontline agent, has a role to play in improving customer experience but this is only possible if they have access to actionable information, at the right time, using the right channels. 6) Review: A VoC programme is a living thing – always evolving and changing with your organisation. It’s vital that you review your goals and revise them to keep up with the changing demands of your markets. Once the quick wins are over, the longer-term gains may seem less dramatic and support for the programme can wane. Be prepared to examine all aspects of this programme on a regular basis, with a cross-functional team of experts, to seek continuous improvements, to re-focus on new issues as they arise and to adjust your business priorities along the way. There is a lot to consider, but don’t let that put you off taking those first vital steps. By starting small, making sure you’re getting it right, and taking action when you need to, you’ll learn the lessons unique to your business and will be able to grow and develop the programme effectively. The ultimate proof point of a VoC programme is change, so set achievable goals, implement in stages and use the Voice of the Customer to make your company more competitive, one step at a time.
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er nt m e o t em it s 12 g u 0 m C ga m ber 2 n em u v E S 7 No 2
, ria o ict V a n az do l P n rk Lo a P
register The only joined-up customer experience event to drive customer and employee engagement solutions, performance and profitability
2 n 01 ndo 2 o r
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From the organisers of the hugely successful Directors Forums series and the Customer Engagement Network a Summit providing customer engagement and employee engagement insights and solutions across all channels.
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Book your place now 'End User', Delegate Fee: £195.00
Industry, Vendor, Service Provider: Delegate Fee: £495.00
Delegate Fees include: access to all sessions, delegate pack, free copy of Digital Customer Experience 2012 Report, refreshments, lunch and Networking Party
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Date: Tuesday 27th November 2012
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Time: 09:00 – 20:00, registration and coffee from 08:00
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For Hotel accommodation and a special Summit rate contact Park Plaza Victoria, London T: +44 (0) 20 7769 9760, quote ICTC261112
Agenda Summary: See over page
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Agenda Summary Date:
Tuesday 27th November 2012
Time:
09:00 – 20:00, registration and coffee from 08:00
Venue: Park Plaza Hotel, Victoria, 239 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EQ
er nt om me t t s e i 2 Cu gag mmber 201 m En Su7 Nove 2 Pa
08:00
Registration and Coffee
Victoria 2: Omni Channel Engagement
09:00
Welcome: Mike Havard, Director, Ember Services - Conference Chairman
14:00
Case Study: Dell, Gary Fox, Executive Director, Global Customer Experience at Dell
09:10
Global Economy Keynote: Roger Martin-Fagg, Economist
14:20
Tom Cannon, VP – Product Management, Thunderhead
09:40
Customer Engagement Keynote: Qaalfa Dibeehi, COO, Beyond Philosophy
14:40
Jeremy Morris, Industry Head, Google
15:00
10:10
Case Study: First Direct, Andrew Lea, Head of Banking Services
Case Study: Experian, Avis Easteal, Operations Director Experian
10:40
Coffee
Victoria 1: Mobile Engagement 11:00
Kieran Bourke, Managing Director, Mobext (World’s largest Mobile Agency)
11:20
Case Study: EE, Ben Kay, Head of Digital Strategy & Adoption, EE (Orange and T- Mobile)
11:40 12:00
Q&A 15:30
Victoria 1: Customer Engagement in Retail & Financial Services Case Study: John Lewis, Andrew McMillan, Former Customer Service Director, John Lewis
Chris Buckley, Director of Social Engagement, TMW
16:05
Case Study: LV=, Peter Sinden, Director of Service, LV=
Case Study: giffgaff, Claire Kavanagh, Head of CRM, giffgaff
16:25
James Mitton, Retail Operations Director, Shop Direct Group
16:45
Case Study: Lloyds, Martin Dodd, Customer Services Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Victoria 2: Social Media Engagement 11:00
Justin Hunt, CEO, Social Media Leadership Forum
11:20
Deborah Eastman, Head of Consulting on Social CEM, Satmetrix
12:00
Dara Nasra, Director, Twitter, former Head of YouTube Kieran Kilmartin: Marketing Director EMEA, Pitney Bowes Software
Q&A 12:30 13:00
Customer Engagement Global best practice Lunch
Q&A Victoria 2: Customer Engagement 15:45
Case Study: Philips, Veronique Tordoff, Customer Experience Leader, Philips
16:05
Paul Smedley, Director, Planning Forum
16:25
Case Study: Premier Inn, Gerard Tempest, Director, Premier Inn
16:45
Colin Adamson, Founder of SOCAP & Public Sector Engagement Specialist
Q&A 17:15 18:15
Closing Keynotes/Chairman’s Summary Jonathan Browne, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research Dr. Nicola Millard, Futurologist, BT
18:1520:00
Networking Party, drinks and buffet with Guest Speaker – Lord Bilimoria, Chairman, Cobra Beer Partnership
Victoria 1: Employee & Customer Engagement 14:00
David MacLeod, Chairman at Employee Engagement Task Force
14:20
Peter Flade, Senior Managing Partner, Gallup
14:40
Confirmit
15:00
Case Study: Belron
Q&A
Coffee
15:45
Q&A
11:40
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Register at:
http://cesummit.eventbrite.co.uk/
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Customer Engagement in Financial Services 11th October 2012, London
At the Customer Engagement Network Directors Forum on Customer Engagement in the Financial Services sector an inspirational opening keynote from the head of banking services at First Direct gave delegates from some of the largest financial services companies in the world the path forward. Editorial director Steve Hurst reports The Financial Services sector is under continuing pressure to get its customer offering back on track. That pressure comes from consumers, who have lost trust in the sector for a host of reasons, and also from regulatory bodies who are introducing a roster of changes that impact on the relationship between financial services providers and those who use their products and services. This Customer Engagement in Financial Services Directors Forum hosted by Gallup and sponsored by Confirmit, Interactive Intelligence and Rapide highlighted the key issues and challenges facing the much maligned financial services sector – which receives a staggering 20,000 complaints day from UK customers - and its relationships with customers against a backdrop of continued difficult economic conditions. It offered practical solutions to these challenges for a sector that. It drilled down to the core of the problems and helped delegates find the best way forward.
First by name and First by nature The opening and truly inspirational keynote came from Andrew Lea, Head of Banking Services, First Direct with his presentation ‘Fostering a Customer Centric Culture’ Andrew who has been with First Direct as a founding member since it opened to business in 1989 revealed how customer engagement and service excellence are more important than ever before in a Financial Services industry wrestling with a deep mistrust of Banks, increased regulation and the impacts of a harsh economic climate.
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Andrew outlined the fundamental principles and unwavering customer focus that First Direct hold dear, highlighting the engagement and service strategies that have helped to differentiate the business in such a competitive marketplace. He focussed on the need to respond to today’s significant challenges and examine what opportunities exist to retain or regain customer trust and loyalty
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Wells Fargo on a roll Andrew was followed by Jay Freeman, Gallup Senior Advisor and former Exec VP, Wells Fargo Bank who took delegates through the US banks employee and customer engagement strategies including cross-selling mechanism that have engendered a massive hike in profitability/ Jay explained how Financial Services companies can achieve real and sustainable competitive advantage by recognising that their customer relationships include an essential emotional component that can be measured, managed and improved – one customer at a time. Jay told delegates why cross-selling is key to growing your business, how to bring great customer service to life and some best practices in customer experience concept and execution. Jay was followed by Jeff Green, Financial Services Client Consultant, Rapide with his presentation ‘How to engage customers on the right channel and at the right time’ Jeff explained how in a heavily scrutinised industry the need for companies in the banking and finance sector to meet and exceed customer expectations has never been greater. For over 12 years Rapide has been helping industry leading clients like Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds do just that. Using real case study examples including HSBC he explored how engaging customers in the right way, at the right time can enhance customer experience, increase retention and even generate revenue.
Nationwide the world's biggest Another excellent case study from the world’s biggest building society was presented Lynne Wood, Head of Customer Experience, Nationwide Building Society with her presentation ‘On your side and the journey to Challenger Brand’. Lynne, who has recently moved to Nationwide from HSBC gave a fascinating view of Nationwide’s ‘clear blue water’ employee and customer engagement strategy and how the organisation is moving customer experience from measures to a business discipline with the key being to deliver on the brand promise every single time. Following on from Lynne was Claire Sporton, VP, Customer Experience Management, Confirmit with her case study driven presentation ‘Driving success through engagement and action’ Claire explained how financial services organisations face a multitude of challenges, ranging from regulatory pressures, to complex customer journeys, and rising expectations. The key to thriving in this demanding environment is to ensure you drive engagement at all levels of your organisation, and to empower your employees to do the right thing for your customers
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and the business. Using examples including Metro Bank in the UK and UMPQUA Bank in the US Claire shared some tips about building the right culture, and about delivering results in a measurable way, to ensure long-term success.
Where do we go from here Following the lunch break came a lively and far reaching panel debate under the title ‘Financial Services Where Do We Go From Here’ which examined in detail the issues of culture, people empowerment, leasdership and trust which are to pivotal to the sector going forward. This debate was followed by Prof Moira Clark, Head of Marketing, Henley Business School and Stephen Whitty, Head of Customer Experience, RBS, Business Services with their joint presentation of ‘A Case Study: RBS, Effortless Engagement Are you Working Your Retail Customers Too Hard?’ Effortless engagement or ‘making it easy to be a customer’ is where the real fight for competitive advantage can be found. The session focussed on: what do we mean by customer effort; understanding the different types of customer effort; how to map out the customer effort journey and how to build customer loyalty by adopting low-customer effort. Stephen Whitty took delegates through the RBS journey thus far and revealed there is some way to go. Final presentation was another case study on Skipton Building Society delivered by Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence. Conrad examined how Skipton rose to the challenges presented by an increasingly multichannel business environment. He looked at how Skipton overcame some of the issues around internal silos and at some of the business benefits that have arisen from the organisation’s forward thinking multichannel customer engagement strategy.
And finally ... Summing up what was a truly inspirational day for delegates from some of the largest banks, building societies and insurance providers globally Customer Engagement Network editorial director and Directors Forum chairman Steve Hurst said it was clear that organisational culture, employee empowerment, consistency of delivery and leadership from the top were the keys to the financial services sector regaining the customer trust it has lost over the past four years.
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Customer Engagement Financial Services 11th October 2012, London SPEAKER PRESENTATIONS
Keynote: Fostering a Customer Centric Culture, First Direct Andrew Lea, Head of Banking Services, First Direct Andrew Lea
Customer engagement and service excellence are more important than ever before in a Financial Services industry wrestling with a deep mistrust of Banks, increased regulation and the impacts of a harsh economic climate. Andrew will outline the fundamental principles and unwavering customer focus that First Direct hold dear, highlighting the engagement and service strategies that have helped to differentiate the business in such a competitive marketplace. The session will also focus on the need to respond to todays significant challenges and examine what opportunities exist to retain or regain customer trust and loyalty
In a heavily scrutinised industry the need for companies in the banking and finance sector to meet and exceed customer expectations has never been greater. For over 12 years Rapide has been helping industry leading clients like Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds do just that. Using real case study examples this presentation will explore how engaging customers in the right way, at the right time can enhance customer experience, increase retention and even generate revenue.
Case Study: Nationwide Building Society: On your side and the journey to Challenger Brand Lynne Wood, Head of Customer Experience, Nationwide Building Society
Lynne Wood
A view from the UK’s largest building society on moving customer experience from measures to a business discipline
Case Study: Wells Fargo Bank Jay Freeman, Gallup Senior Advisor and former Exec VP, Wells Fargo Bank Jay Freeman
Financial Services companies can achieve real and sustainable competitive advantage by recognising that their customer relationships include an essential emotional component that can be measured, managed and improved – one customer at a time. Jay will share his expertise on leading effective customer experience programmes at one of the world’s largest and most successful banks. His talk will address: • Why cross-selling is key to growing your business. • Bringing great customer service to life. • Best practices in customer experience concept and execution.
‘How to engage customers on the right channel and at the right time’ Jeff Green, Financial Services Client Consultant, Rapide Jeff Green
Driving success through engagement and action Claire Sporton, VP, Customer Experience Management, Confirmit
Claire Sporton
Financial services organisations face a multitude of challenges, ranging from regulatory pressures, to complex customer journeys, and rising expectations. The key to thriving in this demanding environment is to ensure you drive engagement at all levels of your organisation, and to empower your employees to do the right thing for your customers and the business. Easier said than done! Through this presentation, we aim to share some tips about building the right culture, and about delivering results in a measurable way, to ensure long-term success
Panel Debate: Financial Services where do we go from here? Steve Hurst, Forum Chairman, Editorial Director, Customer
Engagement Network Panel to include: Andrew Lea, First Direct, Jay Freeman, Former Exec VP, Wells Fargo Bank, Lynne Wood, Nationwide, Stephen Whitty, RBS
Case Study: RBS, Effortless Engagement - Are you Working Your Retail Customers Too Hard Prof Moira Clark, Head of Marketing, Henley Business School & Stephen Whitty, Head of Customer Experience, RBS, Business Services
Prof Moira Clark
Effortless engagement or ‘making it easy to be a customer’ is where Stephen the real fight for competitive Whitty advantage can be found.This session will focus on: • What do we mean by customer effort? • Understanding the different types of customer effort • How to map out the customer effort journey • How to build customer loyalty by adopting low-customer effort approaches
Case Study: Skipton Building Society Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence Conrad Conrad will examine how Simpson Skipton rose to the challenges presented by an increasingly multichannel business environment. He will look at how Skipton overcame some of the issues around internal silos and at some of the business benefits that have arisen from the organisation’s forward thinking multichannel customer engagement strategy.
Forum Summary followed by coffee and networking
Steve Hurst
To download presentations go to: http://customerengagementnetwork.com/directorforum.agenda.php?a=10150
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The rise of social media and the ubiquity of internet-enabled devices are creating an unprecedented pace of change in consumer markets. So, just how ready are UK companies to respond asks Paul Scott M
Paul Scott, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Merchants
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“As customer behaviours change, so too must the organisations that serve them”
As customer behaviours change, so too must the organisations that serve them. Their ability to do so will depend on the customer management infrastructures they create, the locations they choose, the facilities they build, the channels they exploit and the technologies they deploy. Our research reveals customer management leaders confronted by change and, in too many cases, failing to plan for it. Over a third of our respondents – all senior customer management decision makers – say their organisations have no one-tothree-year plan for the development of their customer management operations. Almost half have no technology strategy and 54% no strategy concerning facilities and locations. No multi-year… Operational plan Technology strategy Facilities and location strategy
35% 46% 54%
This apparent laissez faire attitude is particularly surprising given that 54% of those same individuals expect their facilities requirements to change significantly over the next three years and that 46% of them expect their technology requirements to outstrip their capability in the same timeframe. In fact, 9% say their technology is already letting them down. So, why do so many customer management leaders appear to have their heads in the sand?
Head in the sand? In part the answer may revolve around budgeting and control. Most customer management leaders haven’t allocated a budget to deal with change and many (38% regarding technology) don’t even have a grasp on what they need to spend. The situation around technology is further complicated
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by divergence in ownership. Less than a third of those who have a technology plan actually own it. For the most part, responsibility for strategic development (as well as maintenance and support) lies with IT. It is, perhaps, the feeling that they control neither their current technology infrastructure nor its future evolution that makes customer management leaders reluctant to plan ahead. But they are not blind to the risks they run. Almost half (46%) of them believe their current technology inhibits their ability to adapt to the changing customer environment. More specifically, they recognise weaknesses in their ability to provide integrated multi-channel service. Current technology infrastructure… Inhibits ability to change and adapt Fails to provide a single customer view Doesn’t cater for desired channels
46% 65% 32%
Facing the future These are very much the issues that organisations that do have a long term technology strategy in place tell us they are striving to address. Enhanced functionality, integration with enterprise systems and increased channel options emerge as their clear priorities. This suggests that there is an overall drive within future-focused organisations to deliver a better customer experience, with greater service options and channel choices supported by better information available at the customer interface. Identified priorities for those with a future strategy Enhanced functionality Integration with enterprise systems Greater channel options
92% 77% 69%
Given what they’ve told us, it’s clear these worthy objectives can’t be achieved with the technology infrastructures they currently have in place. So, it is also significant that more than
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Latest research from Merchants unveiled at the Customer Engagement Network Directors Forum on Multichannel Customer Engagement suggests not very ready at all.
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half are looking at how technology will be sourced and supported in the future. This is a clear indication that customer management decision makers, hungry for change, are ready to embrace new approaches that give them greater control over their technology environment.
Users of hosted technologies say it allows them to… Be more customer responsive Reduce their cost to serve
87% 86%
It is possible that hosting will provide the catalyst that allows organisations to pull out of their inertia in terms of future planning. If we assume that, at least in part, that inertia is
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caused by the feeling that the future is too unpredictable to plan for, hosting may help, since it provides flexibility that encourages experimentation. We can be sure that new channels will continue to emerge and customers’ choices about how they use them will develop in ways we can’t anticipate today. Organisations have to be free to experiment in order to keep pace with an uncertain future.
Fostering experimentation If the route to progress lies in a culture of experimentation, the challenge is to reduce the risks inherent in it. So long as physical and technology infrastructures remain fixed, that’s hard to do. Forward looking organisations in our research tell us they are looking to increase the flexibility of their physical resource through home working, outsourcing and the integration of non-contact centre-based knowledge workers. By the same token, they are looking at new ways to source and support the technologies on which they depend. The overall trend must be to replace, wherever possible, fixed
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In this context it is interesting to note that hosting – the ability to access technology without the burden of owning it – is one of the most talked about trends of recent years. Certainly, it has the ability to liberate organisations (their contact centres or their IT departments) from the resource costly burden of technology maintenance and support. However, our research suggests it can do far more. Forty two percent of our respondents are already using hosted technologies and seeing significant benefits. Eighty seven percent of those doing so say it has allowed them to become more customer responsive and to provide better service, 86% that it has reduced their cost to serve.
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“Working together, IT and customer management can fulfil their shared agendas. Changing patterns in the way technology is sourced, hosted and supported should be welcome to them both” capital investment with variable operating cost within customer management environments. In physical infrastructure terms this has been achieved in recent years through outsourcing, and with ever more refinement through the adoption of transaction or outcome-based pricing models. Hosting is now delivering the same flexibility in the technology arena, bringing the ability to access innovative technologies at flexible cost and with relative ease. For many this offers the promise of experimental freedom; try a technology today, dismiss it if it fails to deliver and embrace it if it does. Risk free experimentation is not the only benefit hosting can offer. It also has the potential to reduce the expensive IT burden organisations carry. Hardly surprising, perhaps, since creating an environment of experimentation in order to improve customer satisfaction is rarely on an IT department’s list of priorities. Reducing the organisation’s operating cost and improving its business agility, however, absolutely are. The next challenge then is to acknowledge the common ground between customer management and IT.
Common ground It is often said that, when it comes to technology, customer management departments feel the pain and IT departments withhold the remedy. A simplification, perhaps, but true in extreme cases. Customer management functions hold profit and loss responsibility for the customer and are motivated by the need to drive satisfaction, retention and spend. IT departments, which typically hold the budget for contact centre technology, are motivated to constrain operating cost while increasing business agility. It is pointless to argue that IT budget responsibility should transfer to customer management. It is much more constructive to recognise that IT and customer management objectives are more aligned than might be obvious at first glance and to urge both parties to work together. Customer management departments’ desire to improve customer satisfaction through better service and improved functionality is not altruistic; it is driven by the recognition that satisfied customers buy more and stay longer. Similarly, their desire to adopt new channels is aimed at reducing cost just as much as improving customer choice. Taken out of their silos, ISSUE NINE • NOVEMBER 2012
the aims of the IT department and the customer management department are one and the same; to create responsive, agile businesses that deliver maximum revenue at minimum cost. When customer management departments are able to demonstrate a clear link between the cost of implementing a technology and the revenue benefit it will deliver they will likely find IT departments more prepared to listen.
Experiments and pilots Again, the key to achieving this is to create a culture of experimentation. Small scale experiments and pilot studies that access new technologies via a hosted model can be used to provide rapid validation of pre-investment business cases without burdening the IT department with significant work towards an uncertain outcome. Working together, IT and customer management can fulfil their shared agendas. Changing patterns in the way technology is sourced, hosted and supported should be welcome to them both. There can be no question that technology is the primary driver of change in customer expectations and, therefore, in the customer management operations that respond to those expectations. While technology innovation continues to forge ahead of constrained organisational spending, it is inevitable that financial considerations will dominate each and every decision taken about the way customers are recruited and served. That needn’t however, be a bad thing and is certainly no excuse for a failure to plan. Customer management departments must learn to defend the changes they wish to implement, not in terms of operational metrics or even customer satisfaction, but in terms of financial benefit – reduced cost and improved revenue. Download your copy of Merchants research report, ‘Customer Management Futures: Keeping pace with customer expectations’ at www.merchants.com About the Author Paul Scott is Director of Strategic Partnerships at customer management specialist, Merchants. Contact him at paul.scott@merchants.co.uk www.merchants.co.uk
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Multichannel Customer Engagement 26th September 2012, London
The latest Customer Engagement Network Directors Forum examined the rapidly changing face of engagement and how we need to be where our customers are. Forum chairman and editorial director of the Customer Engagement Network Steve Hurst reports
This Multichannel Customer Engagement Directors Forum, hosted by Gallup and sponsored by Confirmit, InteractiveIntelligence and Merchants, examined the challenges and opportunities around multichannel customer engagement. It will identify winning strategies for organisations who are taking an holistic view of their customers in what is being increasingly viewed as an ‘omnichannel’ customer engagement environment. Delegates at the Directors Forum heard how engagement of customers across channels is pivotal to future success and that the role of people in delivering that engagement is more important than ever before. They also got a look into the way customer behaviours is evolving and how the smartphone and other mobile devices is changing the customer engagement landscape forever.
Autonomous customers This overarching theme was kicked off with the opening keynote
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from BT Futurologist Dr Nicola Millard with her presentation ‘Clouds, Crowds and Autonomous Customers: Doing Business as Unusual’ Nicola spoke of a ‘perfect storm’ that is forcing organisations to do business as unusual. Customers are often moving faster than the organisations that both serve and employ them. Technology infrastructure is evolving to enable organisations to go into 'the cloud' and virtualise. The contextually aware internet enabled by the burgeoning penetration of mobile smart devices is creating autonomous, omnichannel customers. Customers are sometimes shutting organisations out of the conversation as service becomes crowd sourced through social networks. Based on research from the UK, US, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Australia Nicola looked at how traditional models of customer experience design and delivery from the contact centre and website through to the retail store and bank branch are being challenged by these emerging customer behaviours and the rise and rise of so called ‘networked expert’ customers. Nicola was followed by Sathya Srinivasan, Managing Consultant, Gallup with her presentation ‘Brand-Employee Alignment: Do employees “get” your brand?’ Sathya explained how an essential component of multichannel customer
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Our customers are operating across an ever proliferating range of channels be they online, offline, social or mobile, and organisations need to make their products and services available across these channels. They need to be where their customers are and provide them with a seamless customer experience whatever the channel of delivery.
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Multichannel Customer Engagement
engagement
26th September 2012, London
engagement is ensuring employees have a strong, consistent understanding of your brand identity and what makes it different from competitors. How do companies achieve and sustain this alignment across all sales and service channels, ultimately transforming employees into enthusiastic ambassadors for their brand?
Twitter close to customers The importance of employees in delivering great service across channels was reiterated by Bruce Daisley UK director Twitter with his presentation ‘How can you get closer to your customers with Twitter?’ Bruce gave several case study examples of how enlightened organisations are using Twitter as part of their overall customer engagement strategy including Starbucks, Nike, Burberry and Sainsbury’s. He said that Twitter is the shortest distance between organisations and their customers and that applying the ‘human touch’ in Twitter interactions with customers was of paramount importance. He also touched on the results of as yet unpublished research by Twitter into how organisations and customers interact over the social networking site. You will be able to read about the results of this research soon at www.customerengagementnetwork.com Next up came some more new research – again yet to be published – from Paul Scott, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Merchants with his presentation ‘Creating Your Multichannel Future: Findings of a major UK research initiative’ Paul revealed the extent to which customers are adopting digital channels and expect you to do likewise. An organisation’s ability to keep pace with their demands and the speed of channel evolution will depend on the customer management infrastructures it creates – the locations you choose, the technologies you deploy and the facilities you build. He presented some headline the findings of a major research initiative that reveals how companies in the UK are planning, prioritising and funding their multi-channel customer management futures. The results are designed to help organisations know whether they are leading the field or trailing the pack in the race to keep pace with customer’s multichannel expectations. Once again look out for detailed results of the study at www.customerengagementnetwork.com and in the next issue of Customer Engagement magazine.
Virgin Media tops? Following on from the research came the first of three case studies from Sean Risebrow, Director of Customer Experience, Virgin Media with his presentation ‘Putting our customers at the heart of everything we do’ Great companies find ways to tune in to customers' voices every day, and then systematically take action on what they have learnt. Sean looked at how the largest company in the Virgin group aspires to be the number one for customer experience from the viewpoint of the people who matter most – its customers. In a refreshingly frank and highly engaging presentation Sean told delegates that Virgin Media was around d half way through its ISSUE NINE • NOVEMBER 2012
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journey to excellence and has a target of being the number one in its sector for customer service by 2014. After the lunch break came the Panel Debate: ‘The future of Multichannel Engagement’ chaired by Steve Hurst, Forum Chairman, Editorial Director, Customer Engagement Network. This wide ranging debate examined the trends in the marketplace, the evolving work of the contact centre, the use of social and mobile channels in engagement and the opportunities for customer service and engagement to further establish itself as a key business differentiator Following on from the debate came Mark Hirst, Engagement Director, Watermelon Research with his presentation ‘Bridging the gap …. through bringing it together’. Mark explained how in our newly founded digital world we now have the technology and infrastructure to achieve new levels of engagement with customers. We can talk to a broader demographic of customers through a variety of self complete methodologies. Enabling us to not only interact with the customer instantly but to create platforms for clients to understand their customers and take action if and where required and most importantly all this can happen real-time. We understand the full customer journey. The objective is for us to demonstrate how we deploy these platforms , the technology used and the benefits/ROI the clients get.
Skipton revolution Next up came another case study presented by Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence with ‘The move to Multichannel in a traditional world - Skipton Building Society’ Conrad examined how Skipton rose to the challenges presented by an increasingly multichannel business environment. He looked at how Skipton overcame some of the issues around internal silos and at some of the business benefits that have arisen from the organisation’s forward thinking multichannel customer engagement strategy. Last but by no means least came Richard Sedley, Strategy Director and Chris Thomason Innovation Lead and specialist consultant at Seren a Foviance Group company with their presentation ‘O2 A case Study in Mutlichannel Service Design’ . Drawing on a recent project delivered for O2 Richard and Chris explained how in order to develop and sustain a multichannel approach to customer innovation the six steps they use to help companies consistently deliver extraordinary customer service. They stressed how important employee engagement was in the delivery of O2’s multichannel service delivery strategy and how aligning employee behaviours with brand values was fundamental to its success. As Steve Hurst said in his summing up this was a fitting way to end an excellent day. It is people who are behind the delivery of customer engagement whatever the channel and for the people to deliver the culture has to be right and for the culture to be right the leadership has to be in place – great customer service is led from the top. 26
SPEAKER PRESENTATIONS
Keynote: Clouds, Crowds and Autonomous Customers: Doing Business as Unusual. Dr. Nicola Millard, Futurologist, BT
Dr. Nicola Millard
A perfect storm is forcing organisations to do business as unusual. Customers are often moving faster than the organisations that both serve and employ them. Technology infrastructure is evolving to enable organisations to go into 'the cloud' and virtualise. The contextually aware internet (enabled by smart devices) is creating autonomous, omni-channel customers. Customers are sometimes shutting organisations out of the conversation as service becomes crowd sourced through social networks. Based on research from the UK, US, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Australia, the session looks at how traditional models of customer experience design and delivery from the contact centre and website through to the retail store and bank branch are being challenged by these emerging customer behaviours.
Brand-Employee Alignment: Do employees “get” your brand? Sathya Srinivasan, Managing Consultant, Gallup Sathya
An essential component of Srinivasan multichannel customer engagement is ensuring employees have a strong, consistent understanding of your brand identity and what makes it different from competitors. How do companies achieve and sustain this alignment across all sales and service channels, ultimately transforming employees into enthusiastic ambassadors for their brand?
Twitter Brings You Closer Bruce Daisley, Director, Twitter UK How can you get closer to your customers with Twitter. What Bruce Daisley brands are stealing a lead by a great use of the platform. What are the pitfalls to avoid?
Creating Your Multichannel Future: Findings of a major UK research initiative Paul Scott, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Merchants
Bridging the gap …. Through bringing it together Mark Hirst, Engagement Director, Watermelon Research Paul Scott
Customers are adopting digital channels and expect you to do likewise. Your ability to keep pace with their demands and the speed of channel evolution will depend on the customer management infrastructures you create – the locations you choose, the technologies you deploy and the facilities you build. And how they pay for them. We’ll present the findings of a major research initiative that will tell us how companies in the UK are planning, prioritising and funding their multi-channel customer management futures. The results will tell you whether you’re leading the field or trailing the pack in the race to keep pace with customer’s multi-channel expectations. It’ll help you to: • Understand how your competitors and peers plan to fund their future multi-channel customer management infrastructures. • Evaluate whether your infrastructures are keeping pace with changing customer demands. • Investigate the potential for hosted technologies to reduce cost and improve service. • Understand the priorities for customer focused change. Case study, Virgin Media: Putting our customers at the heart of everything we do Sean Risebrow, Director of Customer Experience, Sean Virgin Media
Risebrow
Great companies find ways to tune in to customers' voices every day, and then systematically take action on what they have learnt. Sean will look at how the largest company in the Virgin group aspires to be the number one for customer experience from the viewpoint of the people who matter most – its customers.
Panel Debate: The future of Multichannel Engagement Steve Hurst, Forum Chairman, Editorial Director, Customer Engagement Network Steve Hurst
Panelists: Steve Hurst, Nicola Millard, Sean Risebrow, Paul Scott, Bruce Daisley, Sathya Srinivasan
Mark Hirst
In our newly founded digital world we now have the technology and infrastructure to achieve new levels of engagement with customers. We can talk to a broader demographic of customers through a variety of self complete methodologies. Enabling us to not only interact with them (The customer) instantly but to create platforms for clients to understand their customers and take action if and where required and most importantly all this can happen real-time. We understand the full customer journey. The objective is for us to demonstrate how we deploy these platforms , the technology used and the benefits/ROI the clients get. Case Study: The move to Multichannel in a traditional world - Skipton Building Society Conrad Simpson, Director, Interactive Intelligence
Conrad Simpson
Conrad will examine how Skipton rose to the challenges presented by an increasingly multichannel business environment. He will look at how Skipton overcame some of the issues around internal silos and at some of the business benefits that have arisen from the organisation’s forward thinking multichannel customer engagement strategy. A Case Study (UK Telco) in Multichannel Service Design Richard Sedley, Strategy Director, Foviance Group Terry Heath, Founding Partner, Seren
Richard Sedley
Drawing on a recent project delivered for a major UK telecoms company Richard and Terry will explain how to develop and sustain a multichannel approach to customer innovation and the six Terry Heath steps they use to help companies consistently deliver extraordinary customer service. Forum Summary followed by Networking & Drinks
To download presentations go to: http://customerengagementnetwork.com/directorforum.agenda.php?a=10095 27
ISSUE NINE • NOVEMBER 2012
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Kieran Kilmartin is Marketing Director, EMEA, Pitney Bowes Software
http://www.pitneybowes.co.uk/Software/
Big data has been on the radar of most organisations looking to improve their customer engagement strategies but it’s complicated. Kieran Kilmartin helps unravel the mysteries and mystique of big data This year has seen a ‘big data’ explosion. Industry analyst firm IDC Estimates that by 2020 business transactions on the Internet will reach 450 billion per day. The value of that data is priceless – but only if an organisation knows how to protect it and enhance it. Bad data can result in bad decisions, ultimately resulting in financial loss, a negative impact on customer relationships or damage to hard won reputations. Particularly where customer data is concerned, taking a business-led approach to data integrity and management is core to the future success of businesses that aim to thrive in an era where the customer has never been more powerful.
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As barriers to doing business globally continue to fall and organisations need to manage data in multiple languages, formats and cultural contexts, data-related challenges have become more complex than ever before. Getting it wrong could spell disaster. But getting it right could provide a much-needed boost in today’s challenging economic environment. McKinsey & Co estimates that in the private sector, a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. This explosion in data means that organisations have to contend with both traditional forms of business data and a rapidly growing list of
M
“Organisations have to contend with both traditional forms of business data and a rapidly growing list of non-traditional data sources including social media”
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non-traditional data sources, such as social media: blogs, communities, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and others.
consulting firm, it found that poor data cost the UK economy £67 billion per year - £46 billion in the private sector and £21 billion in the public sector (Capgemini, 2008).
In addition, there is a steady stream of potentially high value data emitting from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, devices with global positioning systems (GPS), and bar code readers (i.e. QR Codes). In an effort to better understand and anticipate the needs of their customers, organisations have a growing need to process and analyse this data in real-time. An organisation that is not in control of its data is not in control of its business.
In almost five years since Capgemeni published its report, the economy has become increasingly globalised. Data challenges, as a result, have become more complex and costly and the impact of poor data is expected to have grown exponentially. Now is the opportunity to tap into greater profitability as a result of better quality, and better managed, customer data. In our experience, there are three main inhibitors to best practice customer analytics adoption. These include: • Managing and integrating data from a variety of data sources • Ensuring the quality of data across these sources • finding the scale of internal resource to actually process analytics projects.
All roads do not lead to IT Historically, any attempt to raise a data-related issue with the most senior executives within a business would automatically be met with a referral to the IT department. Increasingly, business leaders are recognising the importance of data, and its strategic relevance cannot be underestimated. A global survey by Experian earlier this year revealed nearly 90% of companies admitted to wasting departmental budget as a result of duplicated mailings, lost contacts and missed sales opportunities, all as a result of inaccurate data. Departments such as marketing, sales, operations and customer services reported wasting 15% of their budget on average. Equally, 90% of companies that invested in better data quality saw their profits increase last year. Data quality is an issue that has a direct and substantial impact on the bottom line and business leaders ignore it at their peril. The ‘Big Data’ debate in any organisation will have many contributors. Not only is the quality of existing data often insufficient, but it is usually difficult to connect the data in a timely and meaningful way, if at all. These two areas are further exacerbated by the fact that there are often inadequate resources to undertake robust and meaningful analysis. The IT department will have a role to play in addressing such data-related issues, but it is vital that business leaders drive new initiatives to bring the IT and marketing departments together (with any other functional areas identified as contributors) to effectively address issues such as these head-on. The business must resist the urge to try to solve the problem by using technology alone. Inevitably, issues relating to data quality will be closely tied to “people issues” because the vast majority of businesses will have people, at some point in the business, responsible for capturing or checking relevant data. As a result, part of any data-related solution will almost inevitably include an evolution (or creation) of business processes or employee training. Creating a culture which views data as a critical business asset and holds people accountable for the caretaking of data is as important as the gathering of data itself. Improved business data results in more accurate decisions, lower operational costs, improved customer satisfaction and improved financial performance.
You are not alone Data quality is a global issue that challenges businesses across all industries. In research conducted by Capgemini, a global
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How do I fix it? A critical first step is for the business leader to take responsibility for the organisation’s data and any related data quality issues and start the long, hard process of affecting cultural change within the organisation. As we have seen above, the lion’s share of bad data is being introduced into the organisation’s business systems by employees as they enter information on to corporate databases. It is therefore critical to ensure that staff play an active role in the organisation’s data quality improvement process. Any improvement of an organisations’s data strategy will need to consider aspects such as • The creation and enforcement of new business processes • Designing employee training • Deploying an enterprise data quality solution • Creating a dedicated team to manage and measure continuous data improvement—in essence a data governance programme. It is important to appreciate that the IT department cannot be left to roll out a data improvement project on its own. It may not fully understand the impact of poor data quality on the business, nor understand the organisation’s business rules. Companies should therefore resist the urge to initiate a data quality improvement project and then expect IT to come up with a solution. Just as importantly, only the business can define what “good enough” data is. As companies explore every avenue to increase competitive advantage, including aspects such as customer service and bettering their reputations, some executives are overlooking the impact that poor data has on their decisions and job performance. Today, data should be viewed as a company’s greatest asset. The drive to unlock the power of data as a competitive advantage is evidenced by the emergence of a new role at the boardroom table – that of Chief Data Officer. Would you knowingly make strategic business decisions based on missing, inaccurate, incomplete or corrupted business data? If the answer is no, then the time to start looking at how your organisation’s data is managed is now.
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Colin Shaw reckons the trick to successfully marrying up employee engagement to customer engagement is through not putting square pegs in round holes I have just watched an advert for Delta airlines. At the heart of the advert it says ‘All airlines have planes that are quite similar, therefore when you choose an airline it comes down to the people’; they are right. A very significant part of a Customer Experience is about the people; therefore employee engagement and Customer Experience are inextricably linked. I have always worked from the mantra that ‘happy people give you happy Customers’. Back in the day, when I was in corporate life, I remember pondering how I could get my 3,500 employees engaged further. A key aspect is obviously the need to enjoy the job you do. My eldest and youngest daughters are in vocational jobs. They know they will never earn the same as my son who, according to my daughters, has ‘sold out to the man’. He is in advertising. He earns much more than them, but they all love their jobs. For me this shows engagement is not about money.
A simple question? Let’s turn our attentions to Customer Experience for a moment. Let me ask you a simple question. What is the Customer Experience you are trying to deliver? Do you know? If you do, great. If you don’t, you need to find out. What has this to do with engagement? Everything. Doesn’t it make sense that once you have defined the experience that you are trying to deliver that you recruit people who are naturally good at implementing it? For example, if you want your Customer to ‘trust’ you or make them feel that you ‘care for’ them, wouldn’t it make sense this is delivered by people who are naturally good at that? First Direct think so. They only employ people from the ‘caring’ industries, social workers, health care, etc, not from other financial institutions. When people are naturally good at something they have the chance of being more engaged? Certainly the opposite is true. If you are asking someone to do something that doesn’t come naturally to them, they struggle, feel awkward and this can cause stress. This is what is called ‘emotional labour’. Trying to be something you are not is hard work! Thus understanding an employee’s psychological makeup becomes key.
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“First Direct ... only employ people from the ‘caring’ industries, social workers, health care, etc, not from other financial institutions” Back in the day Back when I was managing call centres I decided to put my theories to the test. At the time we were moving from a position where every person spoke to the customer and then processed the order to a ‘front office, back office’ way of working. One group would speak to the customer, another would process the orders. As I outlined above, we decided the experience we wanted to deliver and then put in place a psychometric test to help us select people who would be talking to the customer. We told people, that if they wanted a role in the front office, talking with Customers, they needed to pass this test. We said that they could take the test as many times as they wanted. We knew this couldn’t be learnt. To our surprise over 50% of the people who were previously talking with customers chose to work in the back office or failed the test. In other words we had 50% of the wrong people talking to the customer prior to the changes! 50% wow! Following this work, Customer satisfaction improved dramatically and so did employee engagement. Many of the people working in the customer facing roles didn’t want to do this and were happier working in the back office. The key message here is that Customer Experience and employee engagement are inextricably linked. If you are serious about improving your Customer Experience you must also address your employee engagement as well.
Colin Shaw is founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy www.beyondphilosophy.com/ one of the world’s first organisations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books. Follow Colin on Twitter ColinShaw_CX
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Time: Venue:
9:00am – 5:00pm Gallup, The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6HS
For more information contact Chris Wood: chris@ictcomms.com and +44 (0) 1932 341828 or visit our website: www.customerengagementnetwork.com
Customer Feedback
FREE TO ATTEND FOR CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS
14th February 2013, London
http://customerfeedback.eventbrite.co.uk
Register
Customers are playing an increasingly important strategic role in the development of organisations’ services and products across channels and the voice of the customer is critical to the development of customer engagement strategies. Customer feedback and feeding back on feedback have become business critical issues. This Directors Forum will examine the key challenges and issues facing customer experience leaders that are impacting feedback, measurement and voice of the customer strategies as customers increasingly become a central part of the development of engagement strategies.
Directors Forums Programme for 2013: • February 14th Customer Feedback • March 20th Customer Engagement in Retail Sector • April 24th B2B Customer Engagement • May 23rd Mobile Customer Engagement
The Customer Engagement Network series of Directors Forums are rapidly establishing themselves as ‘must attend’ events for senior executives working in the customer space who are looking for winning customer and employee engagement strategies.
The only joined-up customer experience event to drive customer and employee engagement solutions, performance and profitability. From the organisers of the hugely successful Directors Forums series and the Customer Engagement Network a Summit providing customer engagement and employee engagement insights and profitable solutions across all channels
• June 13th Customer Engagement in Financial Services • July 17th Customer Engagement in the Public Sector • September 19th Employee & Customer Engagement • November 7th Social Media Customer Engagement • December 5th Omni Channel Customer Engagement To be confirmed: Customer Engagement for Sales & Marketing
er nt m e 13 o t em 0 s 2 er g u t C ga i tob m Oc on n E m 23 nd Su 22- Lo
For Sponsorship opportunities contact: Chris Wood
For Speaking opportunities contact: Steve Hurst
E: chris@ictcomms.com
E: steve@ictcomms.com
Tel: 01932 340367
M: 07545 088407
M: 07775 604011
Customer Engagement Directors Forums and Summit are organised by
www.customerengagementnetwork.com