Seven Ways to Out-Service the Competition by Customer 360

white paper | 2009

Seven Ways to Out-Service the Competition Exiting the Recession a Leader

Seven Ways to Out-Service the Competition Exiting the Recession a Leader Executive Overview It’s a well known fact to every business leader today: hard times have come again. And, unfortunately, the easiest strategies for survival have been exhausted. As a matter of fact, 86 percent of Fortune 500 executives admit that the low-hanging fruit of cost-cutting has already been implemented.1 Yet, within every challenge resides undiscovered opportunities. As the White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently advised, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. …it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”2 History supports this thesis. In studying previous recessions, it’s clear that the companies that increase their marketing and customer interaction investments during tough times improved profit margins, sales, and market share relative to those that do

not.3,4

“Keep your business safe, but keep building for the future.”5 —Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE

The short-term objective of getting through this recession shouldn’t dilute the long-term goal of positioning your company to exit the recession a leader. To do so, you need to first recognize the unique opportunities that today’s downturn provides and second, capitalize on them while they exist. This white paper highlights seven such opportunities, each of which—if acted upon— allows a company to out-service its competition and secure the business benefits that are desperately needed now and in the years to come.

The Seven Ways to Out-Service: Climbing Up from the Recession Today’s recession provides seven unique opportunities for a company to position itself as a service leader as we exit the recession and transition into recovery.

1. Accelerate customer loyalty and company profits 2. Enhance the customer experience and save money 3. Close the gaps 4. Leverage empathetic and emotional experiences 5. Improve the multichannel experience 6. Leverage a centralized knowledge base 7. Use customer insight to drive agility

Where do you start? In challenging economic conditions, your company should be asking two questions when thinking about each strategic investment. First, can the initiative produce a return within 60 to 120 days? Second, how will a new initiative impact customers’ expe-

Figure 2: Importance of Customer Experience in a Recession Many companies report that a continued economic downturn will cause customer experience to be more important.

riences with your company? “These questions are intertwined,” notes Marcus Bragg, Vice President and General Manager of the Americas for RightNow. “They reflect a recognition of a company’s need to deliver a current payback, on the one hand; and, to ensure that the customer is nurtured on the other.” A majority of companies agree. 63 percent of firms report that the customer experience will be more important in the presence of a continued economic downturn (see Figure 2). For companies wishing to act on that belief, today’s circumstances provide seven opportunities to consider. These opportunities

Customer experience will be significantly more important

37%

Customer experience will become more important

26% 28%

No change Customer experience will become somewhat less important Customer experience will be signicantly less important

8% 2%

63% of firms think customer experience will be even more important

represent a chance for your company to become stronger and more viable when the economic turnaround arrives.

Source: Forrester Research6

Opportunity #1: Accelerate customer loyalty and company profits With fewer customers—and each spending less—in a recession, it is critical for your business to retain every customer and maximize their potential. Surprisingly, less than half (46 percent) of senior marketers have good insight into customer retention rates, lifetime value, and profitability. Not surprisingly, however, most (76 percent) believe that the full revenue potential of their current customers is unrealized.7 Since it is five times more expensive to gain a new customer than keep an existing one,8 retention is key. Achieving that goal is driven by the quality of the customer experience which correlates with retention, future purchase rate and positive word-of-mouth.9

Getting It Done Map the customer journey. Identify the sequence of key customer-company interactions that illustrate the path from “need/find” to “buy/get” to “use/support” to “loyalty/profits.” While each of these critical touchpoints either serve to build the brand (or to damage the relationship), all are not created equal. In times of limited resources, focus on (a) those interactions that are most influential, as determined by customer feedback; or (b) those products or services that are strategically most important for your company.

”What is it about trust that makes customers feel valued? In part, it communicates one-half of a partnership reaching out to the other half. And, customers reward partnerships. The smart money is on customer retention—turning transient samplers into long-term partners.”10 —Chip Bell, founder of The Chip Bell Group

Treat customers differently. Customers vary in their actual value and in their potential value. Knowing both types of value allows a company to invest more effectively. Concentrate on delivering superior experiences that either enhance customer loyalty or tap unrealized value. Doing so requires insights into each customer’s needs—the “why” behind the “buy.”11 Service is the new sales. Customer service is especially important now, since the service interaction is one of the few times that companies have to personally interact with their customers.12 As indirect sales through channels become the norm, the first time that a company talks with its customers may be through service. This interaction shapes the perception of the brand which can influence future purchase consideration. Service experiences allow a company to further understand a customer’s needs (e.g., the way in which a product is being used) and to leverage that knowledge to more effectively promote additional items.

Opportunity #2: Enhance the customer experience and save money An economic crisis creates the urgent need to save money. That urgency sometimes hits expenses that support the customer experience. If the economic downturn continues, only 20 percent of customer experience decision makers expect to continue the spending necessary to meet the desired customer experience levels, and 42 percent expect cuts Getting It Done at the same or at a higher rate than everything else.13 “During tough times, it takes courage to stay focused on the customer,” Understand the cost. The expense of mishandled cusexplains Bragg, “but that’s precisely what is required to thrive in tomer interactions has a financial impact on customer the upturn.” satisfaction and the willingness of customers to recomStaying focused on the customer allows a company to save mend the brand to a friend or colleague. money in three ways: Always consider the customer’s perspective. Ask “Will 1. By reducing the number of unsatisfactory customer experithis new action enhance or reduce the strength of our ences, companies can reduce the costs associated with customers’ relationships with our company?” Increases resolving them. in long-term customer equity from superior experiences 2. When service suffers, the reputation of the brand is diminare more valuable than any short-term savings that ished through negative word-of-mouth, making it harder damage customer relationships.14 and more expensive to attract new customers. Demonstrate early wins. Show management that the 3. By delivering excellent customer self-service (e.g., through cost savings from superior experiences isn’t “theory.” customer-to-customer online support forums and dynamic Choose and concentrate on a customer touchpoint that website FAQs), the company is able to deflect costs. is (a) especially influential in impacting the customer relationship and (b) is one where small investments in “Self-service solutions can deliver a 30- to 50-percent reduction automation may have large benefits. in email volume and a 10- to 30-percent reduction in telephone calls, all while increasing customer satisfaction,” notes Bragg.

Opportunity #3: Close the gaps Gaps arise during turbulent times, both internal and external to a company. Each gap represents an opportunity for a company to improve its business performance (Figure 3). The three key gaps focus on (1) funding, (2) best practices, and (3) share-of-customer. 1. Funding. There is a gap between (a) the recognition by companies of the importance of customer experience in driving growth and (b) the extent to which those areas are funded (Figure 4). By increasing investments in the areas that drive growth, a company is able to realize business benefits.

Figure 3: Close the Gaps For companies seeking to exit the recession in a leadership position, a recession provides opportunities to close gaps accelerating business performance. Recognized Importance of Customer Service for Business Growth Existing Efforts to Deliver Superior Customer Experiences

Funding of Customer Service Initiatives

GAP

Current Shareof-Customer

2. Superior Service. A gap may exist between a company’s current efforts to deliver superior customer experiences and accepted best practices. The size of this customer experience gap between leaders and laggards differs by industry, and is greatest for Internet service providers (39 percent), credit card providers (37 percent), medical insurers (32 percent) and airlines (31 percent). In all companies, a new phenomenon is emerging: customers are no longer comparing a company’s customer experience efforts against competitors in the same industry, but against all other companies in all industries. Ask yourself these questions:

Best Practices in Delivering Superior Customer Experiences Potential Shareof-Customer Source: Peppers & Rogers Group

• If a customer can easily find the information that she or he needs on the British Airways website, why is search so difficult on our website? • If eHarmony offers its customers access to a highly effective foundation of answers to commonly asked questions, why is the information on our company’s website limited and out-of-date?

• If Overstock.com can provide a personal experience to every individual using its contact center, why can’t our company? Customers are making these comparisons and expecting the best practices from others to be best practices from you. Unfortunately, only 16 percent of businesses state that their goal for customer experience is to differentiate themselves from their industry.

3. Share-of-Customer. A recession may provide a chance for a company to close the gap between a company’s current and potential share-of-customer by selling a wider range of products and services. Since some competitors will have reduced investments in customer experience, you may now have the opportunity to grow your relationship if you deliver superior service. This positive customer experience can help you gain greater share-of-customer, create positive word of mouth, and acquire new customers. These influences may ultimately enhance your stock price, as suggested by the pattern of results for companies with above average and rising American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores. Over the period from 1996-2006, which included both a bull and bear market, these companies grew more than twice the level of the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) stock index. Even in the current economic cycle, retailers with improved ACSI scores experienced less of a share price decline than the S&P 500 in 2008.

“If customer experience is a differentiation strategy in good times, it is doubly so today. At a time when most firms will cut back, hunker down and reduce staff, it’s a wonderful time for those who truly understand the potential of the customer experience to rise to the occasion.”15 —James Barnes, Ph.D., Principal, Barnes Marketing Associates Inc.

Figure 4: Are Companies Investing for Growth? When comparing marketing categories that (a) contribute more to growth with (b) those that the company most invests in, there is a gap. Note especially the misalignment of importance versus investment for the categories of customer experience and for customer service.

Marketing Categories that Contribute to Growth . . . Advertising and branding Customer experience Customer service Loyalty/CRM programs Direct sales channels (like eCommerce) Promotion and trade Traditional-media spend Demand generation New-media spend Press and public relations Market research I don't know Marketing technology Sponsorships

43 31 29 26 21 17 17 16 15 15 8 8 5 1

. . . Are Not Necessarily Aligned with Investments Advertising and branding Traditional-media spend Promotion and trade Loyalty/CRM programs Customer service New-media spend Press and public relations Customer experience Sponsorships Direct sales channels (like eCommerce) Market research Demand generation Marketing technology I don't know

57 34 26 22 19 18 17 16 13 13 12 10 3 1

Source: Forrester Research16

Getting It Done Understand the growth drivers. For each business objective, identify the customerfocused initiatives that are most likely to contribute to success and pair them with the processes and employee skills required to get it done. About 80 percent of businesses fail to meet their growth objectives for revenue and profitability, because of inadequate consideration of opportunities and the lack of organizational infrastructure.17 Look broadly for best practices. Adopting customer experience excellence—regardless of industry—is a proven way to accelerate closure of a performance gap. It requires a mindset of “being humble enough to admit that someone else is better at something and being wise enough to learn how to match and even surpass them at it,” advises APQC (formerly known as the American Productivity and Quality Center).18 Grow share-of-customer. By concentrating on fulfilling an expanding set of customers’ needs with excellent experiences, opportunity exists for a company to increase the value of its customers. Instead of differentiating products from those of the competition, the goal becomes differentiating customers from one another, collaborating with them, and selling an increasingly large number of products to them over the course of their lifetime.11

”If the Securities and Exchange Commission had any sense, it would require all publically traded corporations to, along with their financial data, reveal their level of customer satisfaction by some impartial method.“ 19 —Claus Fornell, Ph.D., Professor, University of Michigan; and developer of the American Customer Satisfaction Index

Opportunity #4: Leverage empathetic and emotional experiences No doubt that the current economic crisis is causing anguish among consumers. The American Psychological Association reports that this economy is a significant cause of stress for most (80 percent) adults in the US, who recognize its impact on becoming sick (86 percent), having a heart attack or stroke (48 percent), or experiencing insomnia (36 percent).20 Under these conditions, companies have an opportunity to strengthen customer loyalty by delivering empathetic experiences that strengthen relationships. Ford, Hyundai, and GM are all now promoting programs that ease the burden of a car payment if a job is lost; Bank of America waives fees for customers who have lost their jobs; and FedEx Office invited job hunters to print their résumés Getting It Done free of charge.21,22 As the American poet Maya Angelou once said, “people will forget Capture and leverage the customer’s emotion. Use today’s advanced technolwhat you said, people will forget what you ogy to detect positive and negative emotions in contact center telephone did, but people will never forget how you queues and within email text, and route the communication accordingly. For made them feel.” example, when the contact center is integrated with a CRM system, it’s possiCommunicating concern for customers is ble to provide high-value customers in a negative state of mind with interacpart of a company’s character—an important tion treatments designed to quickly address the problem. In addition, the comcomponent for building and maintaining panies are able to survey or request referrals from happy customers. trust: “a belief that the company has the best Train and incent for empathetic customer service. Just as it is possible to interest of the customer at heart, and can be understand customers’ emotional states, it is also possible to do the same for depended upon for respect, openness, tolercontact center agents. Those who are empathetic may be rewarded, for ance and honesty.”23 It’s important, because example; while those who are less so may be identified for training to trustworthiness has the greatest impact on enhance their level of competency.26 customer loyalty;24 and, in the majority of cases when a customer decides not to buy, Convert complaints into satisfying emotional encounters. No company is perfect, and few customers expect perfection. They do, however, expect that the primary reason is lack of trust.25 problems will be resolved promptly and professionally, with courtesy and compassion. Make it easy for your customers to voice a complaint—and, have a complaint management processes in place to address the concerns. If handled well, a resolved complaint can actually increase a customer’s loyalty.27

Opportunity #5: Improve the multichannel experience It isn’t enough for companies to engender trust with their customers through empathetic encounters. Good intentions must be followed with excellent execution. Building trust requires both character and competence.28 In today’s multichannel world where customers assess a company’s trustworthiness in the store, on the web, over the telephone, through email and by using chat, companies can enhance trust by improving the competencies of continuity (i.e., seamlessly bridging conversations across channels) and consistency (i.e., receiving equally accurate and comGetting It Done plete information regardless of channel). For example, if a customer sends an inquiry through email, Test drive your company’s own multichannel customer experience. will an agent in the contact center be able to pick up the converWas the interaction pleasant, prompt and productive? Did it develop or diminish the perception of the trustworthiness of your sation when that individual later calls about the same incident— company? What’s helping (and hurting) the success of the multior, will the customer need to begin again and repeat the channel experience? description of the problem? Will the customer be routed to the same agent who answered the email? Will that agent Develop a multichannel strategy. Assess how each channel might have access to prior transcripts of chat sessions with the cusoptimally support your company’s brand promise. tomer? Will the information that customer receives be comDevelop a multichannel tactical plan. Design a dashboard of plementary to the FAQs that she first read on the company’s performance metrics that will help to establish accountability website? When continuity and consistency in a multichannel and drive budgets. Examine existing capabilities within your interaction break down, customers become frustrated, their company to identify opportunities for reuse or retooling, then relationship with the company is fractured, and service costs look for options to accelerate progress. escalate. In contrast, when it works well, the customer’s experience is enhanced and the company’s costs are reduced.

Opportunity #6: Leverage a centralized knowledge base In a recession when the resources of a company are limited, each must be used to its fullest. This is especially true for customer-facing personnel who have a direct impact on the strength of customer relationships. When customers contact a company, they expect to interact with an informed person who knows the company’s products and procedures. Today products are constantly being introduced and updated, so a centralized knowledge base becomes essential for delivering support that is accurate and consistent across channels. Customers also expect to see a second type of knowledge displayed in the interaction: namely, knowledge of themselves—who they are, what products they own, and a record of their past inquiries. Beyond increasing efficiency and effectiveness, a knowledge base further reduces costs by enabling self-service. When customers can answer their own questions by accessing a web-based knowledge source, support costs are reduced.

“A foundation of knowledge is the bedrock upon which all successful customer experiences are built.” —Greg Gianforte, CEO and Founder, RightNow

Getting It Done Start simply. Make a core set of answers to FAQs available and searchable. This improves the experiences of customers and the productivity of agents. Once the knowledge infrastructure is in place, it will be easy to add new information gradually. Push and pull content. Actively push content from the knowledge base to users to enhance its visibility, relevance and impact. Use artificial intelligence techniques such as collaborative filtering (i.e., suggesting content based upon the pattern of information consumed by other users) and automatic usefulness rankings (i.e., ordering the sequence of answers to a question based upon their stated helpfulness to other users). Actively pull content from agents, other internal functional areas and from partners to enhance the knowledge base. Include the community. Customers increasingly use search, and social networking sites for self-service. These tools extend the depth and breadth of the knowledge base and the support experience. The dialog that occurs in these communities may be captured and used as the basis of new entries in the centralized knowledge base; and, agents may reach out and directly participate in discussions.

Opportunity #7: Use Customer Insight to Drive Agility In turbulent economic times, it is especially important to say on top of the pulse of customers. Knowing more about your customers than your competition is a potent advantage that allows you to respond quickly to changing conditions. In addition, during a recession the pain of wrong decisions is exacerbated, placing a higher premium on fact-based, customer-centric knowledge in business planning. Customer service interactions provide a mechanism to secure that advantage by capturing feedback. When customers are already engaged via a service encounter, the opportunity exists to glean insight. Customer feedback also allows a company to more quickly detect when a wellintentioned change to customer service has gone awry.

“The capability to support ‘learning relationships’— one-to-one dialogs that become smarter with each interaction—is a powerful strategic advantage.” —Don Peppers, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

Getting It Done Don’t delay. Customer feedback is especially rich when it is collected immediately after an interaction, when both the memory and the emotion of the incident is fresh. Doing so typically elevates response rates significantly. For example, an email containing a survey may be automatically sent when a support ticket is closed. Beyond assessing satisfaction, the survey can also solicit information that aids in understanding the customer’s needs and propensity to engage in beneficial behaviors (e.g., word-of-mouth referrals). Survey participation has also been shown to positively impact the likelihood of purchases and the responsiveness to promotions.29 Keep it brief. Ask a small set of core questions that are stable over customers and over time. Allow ongoing comparisons; and supplement as needed with items specific to the customer segment or a timely business issue. Closed-end (i.e., rating scale) questions are easiest for customers to answer, but you should always give the option of providing open-end text commentary. Integrating all this data into your CRM system also allows your company to better customize communications and increase their relevance. Tune up the touchpoints. Because resources are limited in a recession and because not all touchpoints are equally important, it may be beneficial to use customer surveys to gain insight into ways in which the customer experience may be improved—for example, the extent to which the channel(s) that were employed during a customer support incident were easy to navigate.

Conclusion In today’s economic environment, opportunities exist for astute companies to improve their marketplace position when the recovery occurs. Yet, opportunities do not guarantee business benefits— it’s the action you take to capitalize on them that propel profits. The opportunities described in this white paper simply can’t wait 12 to 24 months while enabling processes are established and technology is installed. Today, more than ever before, it’s wise to start with results, adapt as you go, and layer success upon success. It takes an iterative, focused approach that begins with a pilot and grows into a program based upon insights along the way, minimizing risk and maximizing reward. “The key is to start—to map the customer journey and to select the points of pain which, if ameliorated, will have the quickest and greatest business impact,” notes Bragg. “When the recovery arrives, we won’t be returning to normal,” explains Don Peppers, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group. “We’ll be beginning a ‘new normal’—the start of a period in which customers’ view of companies are forever colored by their experiences during this recession.” The trustworthiness exhibited by companies during these times—both in their character and in their competence—will be long remembered, and the residual impact will be long lasting. By capitalizing upon today’s opportunities to out-service the competition, companies will be wisely securing both short-term gain and laying the foundation for long-term success. I

“The world isn’t standing still.To gain competitive advantage right now it’s time to start out-servicing the competition—and, outsaving the budget.” —Marcus Bragg, Vice President and General Manager of the Americas for RightNow

Case Study

Getting it Done at Motorola Delivering a superior support experience can be challenging—especially when you have 28 contact centers around the globe. Yet, Motorola is getting it done. Consider how the company has capitalized upon the following opportunities.

Opportunity: Accelerate customer loyalty and company profits. A key objective for Motorola has been to improve the customer experience and enhance loyalty. The company has succeeded: customer satisfaction is up 15 percent year-over-year, as a direct consequence of the “One World, One Desktop, Any Channel” initiative. Critical to this transformation has been the implementation of a global CRM platform providing integrated eService, Agent Desktop, IVR, and a common knowledge base. The initiative is guided by Motorola’s vision: “Great Support Experiences Today: Accelerating Innovation Tomorrow.” For Motorola, “great” is defined by criteria including responsiveness, accessibility, effectiveness, and pleasantness. “Our goal,” explains Dacia Hurter, Senior Director of Customer Care at Motorola, “is to ensure that customers are ‘always up’—always operating, always live, and always successful.” Making the vision real has involved a cultural change, a shift in emphasis from the device to the customer’s experience with the device. “It is not enough that the mobile device itself works fine—the phone is now part of an ecosystem of components (for example, bluetooth connectivity to a PC), and the customer’s experience is based upon how well the entire ecosystem works,” notes Hurter.

Opportunity: Enhance the Customer Experience and Save Money. Motorola’s efforts are not only enhancing customers’ experiences, but also delivering significant savings: about $15 million to $20 million annually, driven by improvements in first call resolution (13 percent), average handle time (32 percent), email deflection (66 percent), telephone deflection (29 percent) and cost per contact (25 percent). “We’ve seen dramatically higher right-channeling and self-service rates,” reports Glenn DuBois, Senior Operations Manager at Motorola, “with live agent channel usage decreasing by 26 percent, for example.” And, there is yet more to come. “We are in the process of rolling out CTI, which will allow for customer segmentbased routing to the most appropriate agents,” explains DuBois, “as well as on-device help (allowing customers to view knowledge base articles on their phone) and syndicating our knowledge base content to the carriers’ websites (making it easier for customers to access the content).”

Opportunity: Improve the multichannel experience. When using 22 different and totally disconnected agent desktop systems, Motorola was hindered in its ability to preserve conversations across channels and to provide a seamless customer experience. Today, however, the company has implemented a single global platform and a standardized set of processes to provide agents with complete visibility to a customer’s support interactions. Additionally, because the customer support and CRM systems are intertwined, a customer doesn’t need to repeat information (e.g., product ownership details) when interacting with the contact center, saving expense for the company and reducing frustration for the customer. “A link between all channels,” explains Hurter, “gives us the ability to bridge together customer support in a global on-demand environment, and to provide information that is always correct, consistent, and seamless across channels.”

Opportunity: Use customer insight to drive agility. Motorola is now efficiently collecting voice of the customer information through an automated email process that invites the individual to complete a standardized survey following each incident. On a weekly basis, insights are shared across the world-wide organization to drive ongoing enhancements. For example, using analytics on this rich customer feedback allows the company to identify consistent trends between products and to address the common ‘pain points’ in the design of future products. The insight also enables continuous improvement in the customer support experience. Issues are able to be prioritized based upon an examination of customer dissatisfaction and of failures to achieve first call resolution, which may result in the the addition of new content into the knowledge base or of a proactive communication to customers to help them better understand a product’s features. Additionally, by examining customer feedback by agent, Motorola is able to recognize and share best practices as well as to improve agent training. “Customer data is shared across the organization, including engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing, and sales—all the way up to the CEO,” explains DuBois. “Marketing is using the customer service database to target and segment opt-in customers for campaigns, too.”

RightNow RightNow (NASDAQ: RNOW) delivers the high-impact technology solutions and services organizations need to cost-efficiently deliver a consistently superior customer experience across their frontline service, sales and marketing touch-points. Approximately 1,900 corporations and government agencies worldwide depend on RightNow to achieve their strategic objectives and better meet the needs of those they serve. RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. For more information, please visit RightNow.com. For more information, please visit www.rightnow.com.

Peppers & Rogers Group Peppers & Rogers Group is dedicated to helping its clients improve business performance by acquiring, retaining, and growing profitable customers. As products become commodities and globalization picks up speed, customers have become the scarcest resource in business. They hold the keys to higher profit today and stronger enterprise value tomorrow. We help clients achieve these goals by building the right relationships with the right customers over the right channels. We earn our keep by solving the business problems of our clients. By delivering a superior 1to1 Strategy, we remove the operational and organizational barriers that stand in the way of profitable customer relationships. We show clients where to focus customer-facing resources to improve the performance of their marketing, sales and service initiatives. For more information, visit www.peppersandrogersgroup.com

Author With over fifteen years of marketing experience and advanced study in cognitive psychology, research methodology, and statistics, Thomas Lacki, Ph.D., is privileged to contribute to the creation of higher value solutions through best thinking for the clients of Peppers & Rogers Group. In the role of Senior Advisor, Peppers & Rogers Group Faculty, he leverages his own expertise in understanding individuals behaviorally and analytically to achieve measurable marketing results today, and to elevate the practice of one-to-one marketing tomorrow. Lacki has shared his insights with conference audiences throughout the world, has published research about CRM, and serves on the editorial board of an international marketing journal.

ÂŠ2009 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

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