Direct Marketing Magazine Sept 2016

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B2B social media: More than just likes

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Four steps to add oomph to your marketing automation strategy

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Contact Management The People Issue

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vol. 29 • No. 9 • September 2016

The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

Five tips for engaging Millennials with social media marketing ❱ 10 Check us out online

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Vol. 29 | No. 9 | September 2016 EDITOR Sarah O’Connor - sarah@dmn.ca

Five tips for engaging Millennials with social media marketing

PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Brian Spencer Ahmed Elmahmoudy Rob Stocks Sean Jimenez Rob Wenger Tom Marsden Shelly Woodley Emily Neilsen Olga Zakharenkava Graham Powell Holly Simmons LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:

Targeting & Acquisition ❯❯4

Doing social media right

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Engagement & Analytics

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B2B social media: More than just likes

How microlearning took MCAP’s customer support from good to great

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Five reasons your business needs an online community, not a LinkedIn Group

Operations & Logistics ❯❯12

Interactive marketing: The future of marketing communication models

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Four steps to add oomph to your marketing automation strategy September 2016

Self-service gone wrong: Highway toll evasion & sleeping in a flophouse

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From dated to digital: Seven questions to ensure quality customer experiences

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Why being polite is not enough

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Closing the gap: Five ways to modernize your customer service DMN.ca ❰

Targeting & Acquisition

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Doing social media right

By Graham Powell and Rob Stocks

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ocial media has had a large impact on direct marketing strategies. As companies began to recognize the importance of social media as a communications tool and saw the data and hypertargeting abilities that come with it, marketing roles started to change. Many entrylevel marketing roles now consist solely of social media management.

However, just because your company has social media accounts running doesn’t mean they’re being used effectively. Are you writing posts directed at specific audiences? Are you addressing them in a manner to meet your goals? Are you tracking user’s paths and sales funnels on your website? And, most importantly, are you focusing on platforms that best resonate with your customers? If you’re not sure, there are a few steps that will improve your success rate in social media marketing.

Let your goals be your guide Social media is best used to raise awareness. Analytics data has shown that social media is very effective at the top of your sales funnel when people are in the researching stage and because of this it does contribute to immediate sales. Social media is like a megaphone. It helps to amplify your message so that new prospects hear about and consider you,and established customers can keep up to date with your business. Social signals also help to build brand trust which improves your chances of gaining new customers. Rarely is social media the last interaction before a sale is made.

Raising awareness and building trust takes time to set up and do well, so establish your goals before you begin. Goals will help you determine which social media options are the best fit, how you will use them and how ❱ DMN.ca

you will measure your results. Social media is more effective if you have a large and engaged audience so your first goal should always be to build your community. Goals that can be set into motion after you’ve started community building will depend on your business.

Some common goals are: ❯❯ Building brand awareness; ❯❯ Creating brand loyalty; ❯❯ Becoming an authority in your industry (demonstrating expertise); ❯❯ Driving website traffic; ❯❯ Signing up newsletter subscribers; and/or ❯❯ Increasing sales conversions.

Remember, social media is just part of the overall funnel. Goals like increasing subscribers, leads and sales rely on your website as the final interaction step, so make sure your message is consistent and the path to the goal is clear.

Five tips for engaging content Engagement is when other social media users ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your business and interact with or share your posts. Although all social media platforms have different methods and styles of posting, there are a few basic strategies that apply to all in order to build your following. Your main goal when community building is to get users to engage with your business.

Social media feeds are much like search engine listings—they give more weight to posts with higher engagement. Once a core audience is built, then you can start mixing in direct selling posts.

By this point you should have a good feel for your audience and how to post without alienating them.

1. Post interesting, informative and entertaining content that doesn’t September 2016

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take the user directly to a conversion point on your site. It doesn’t even have to be relevant to your industry, just relevant to your target audience.

Show them you’re not just on social media to sell and the people behind your business have other interests they want to share. Chance are high that people in your audience will also share some of these interests and will share your posts.

2. Include an image (infographics have the highest share rate) or video in your post. This can increase your engagement rate by up to 80%.

3. Use hashtags on platforms that support them (words with a # in front of them). This will group your post with similar ones to help it gain visibility. Search to see which ones are popular or trending at the time.

4. Share posts from others.

Try to keep shared content relevant, but at the same time try to keep your followers engaged even if it’s not related to your business.

It’s all about finding balance.

Do more with less Social media platforms are free, so businesses often sign up for every major platform when starting out.

In the days where there seems to be a new social media platform launching weekly, it can be tough to know where to begin. Thankfully the social media industry is mature enough that the leaders are well established. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the best starting points for most companies.

They’ve proven to have staying power and the user numbers to cover almost any audience demographic.

These platforms are large enough to have excellent audience data, so further insights can be gained or new audiences discovered.

To help with managing multiple accounts, services like Hootsuite and Sprout Social allow you to connect everything under one roof. These September 2016

services can be a great timesaver with one login to view all your streams, manage and respond to posts. They also allow you to write one post and have it go out to all your accounts and this is where things can go wrong.

Each platform has its own unique audience, as well as a shared audience.

This does not work well with the singlepost-for-all-platforms approach. The unique audience (a user that sees your posts primarily on a single platform) is used to seeing content in a certain format and they are less likely to view or engage with your post if it’s not in the style of that platform. With shared audiences you run the risk of saturation. If someone is repeatedly seeing the same post, they are more likely to ignore/unfollow/block you.

Leverage your data Always monitor who your audience is, what they are doing and where they end up. Facebook has some of the best user insights available. At a glance it can tell you exactly which posts are performing well and get a breakdown on the audience demographics that you are reaching. Use an analytics platform to track visitors to your website.

You will be able to see where the different social media platforms are performing the best and who they are.

Use this information to tweak your post content, scheduling and explore the potential of other social media networks. Never before has so much data been available to help directly focus your marketing efforts.

Graham Powell is an online marketing

strategist with ideaLEVER Solutions. He brings over 10 years of search engine marketing and online media knowledge, along with his analytical and creative writing skills to set, implement and monitor their client’s goals. He holds a BBA from Vancouver Island University. gpowell@idealever.com Rob Stocks is the president and founder of ideaLEVER Solutions and has been leading the team for over 20 years. ideaLEVER has given Rob a ring side seat to the ups, downs and evolution of the internet and e-commerce. As lead strategist he has worked with retailers, manufacturers, charities and brand owners across North America. rstocks@idealever.com Twitter: @idealever

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Engagement & Analytics

B2B social media: More than just likes

By Olga Zakharenkava

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ocial media marketing is potentially more transformative for B2B than for B2C. What started as an experiment for marketing teams has increasingly become an integral part of marketing and sales strategy for B2C. Now B2B companies are increasingly using the popular social platforms as well. â?ą DMN.ca

Why? B2B marketing tends to rely more on reputation and word of mouth to attract new clients and build partnerships. 91% of B2B purchasers said that word of mouth is the most important influencer when it comes to making a decision. It makes sense to use the vast existing communities on social media that are already conveniently segmented to connect with other businesses.

Social media marketing for B2B versus B2C Social media marketing is becoming a vague term to mean everything and nothing. It is a catch-all term that refers to a broad range of activities designed to gain traffic or attention on social media. While the strategies used

by B2B and B2C are fundamentally similar, they differ in their tactics and which channels they emphasize.

B2B marketers emphasize thought leadership, client education and partnerships with other businesses in their use of social media and are more focused on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Slideshare.

Sixty-four per cent of marketers selling to other businesses used social media to gain a reputation for thought leadership.

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predominantly use social media to connect with customers, improve brand awareness and research customer response to brands, focusing on Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram. Sixty-five per cent of B2C marketers listed Facebook as number one choice in a survey from 2015.

Creating B2B social buzz That isn’t to say that B2B marketers shouldn’t use social media to create a buzz to achieve their marketing goals.

Creating buzz was the primary goal for consulting firm PwC’s #BallotBriefcase campaign, which won a Shorty award for the best in social media marketing.

Using Snapchat, the campaign story followed the Oscar ballot briefcase as it raced around the country accompanied by celebrities, arriving just in time for September 2016

the Oscar ceremonies.

They achieved each of their three goals: to reposition their brand to appeal to a younger talent demographic, to increase visibility of their activities around the Oscars and to reconnect with their employees (80% Millennials). Their potential impressions were increased 136x on Twitter. In the first two weeks their Snap story received 700 views, continued to grow, and received comments such as, “I’m so excited to hold the briefcase. Best day of my life.” Over 2,000 employees waited in line more than 45 minutes to hold the briefcase and have been tagging their friends and colleagues on multiple social media platforms.

The PwC #BallotBriefcase is truly a formidable example of how a word of mouth campaign can work for B2B marketing in unprecedented ways.

There are a few takeaways from the #BallotBriefcase that are applicable for any B2B social media marketing campaign. ❯❯ Match the goal to the channel.

Snapchat was a good fit for PwC’s marketing goals because the users fit their target demographic and the quick, real-time snap stories helped amplify the sense of urgency as they raced around the country with the briefcase. ❯❯ Attract the right influencers.

When Neal Patrick Stewart performed a magic trick with the briefcase on the Oscars, he kick started a buzz around the suitcase, which PwC took advantage of to create the campaign and engage him as one of the celebrities on the journey. His popularity with the target demographic, lighthearted approach and relevancy set the right tone for the rest of the campaign. ❯❯ Monitor the campaign to maintain an appropriate and consistent tone. A member of PwC’s social media team accompanied the briefcase at all times to protect the reputation of the company. For many B2B companies, a social media campaign like #BallotBriefcase appears to be an unnecessary risk for a business, but this risk can be mitigated by planning for negative response and monitoring the message at all times. ❯❯ Encourage employees to act as brand ambassadors. Activating employees was one of PwC’s goals for the campaign, but it was also one of the rewards that will continue to benefit the company’s image.

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Employee engagement won’t be as effective as a top-down order to post on social media, but rather needs to be activated in order to be authentic and effective in the long term.

Cross-promote the event or content. While the primary platform was Snapchat, PwC also promoted the campaign on other social media sites and on their website, making it a cross-channel event and expanding their reach to a broader audience. Even though two platforms, LinkedIn and Facebook, dominate social media for B2B, any social media campaign needs to take place across multiple channels to gain maximum exposure.

Remember B2B marketing is human to human. PwC created a personality for the briefcase that was both humorous and authentic.

Since the briefcase was inanimate, it also allowed the social media team to speak more freely. Even though purchase decisions by businesses tend to be more rational than consumers’, people are still the ones driving those decisions. Cultivating a sense of authenticity through tone builds personal relationships by treating people like people.

Don’t miss out on conversations and opportunities Most social media initiatives by B2Bs won’t focus on creating buzz, but having a presence on social media still plays a critical role in influencing potential customers before they engage you directly. A study by CEB Marketing Leadership Council and Google found that the average customer completed over half their research online, which includes social media, before engaging with a sales rep.

Post only quality content in social media Social media tends to be more informal, however, it is still crucial to keep quality high for all content.

Look at the range of content and posts your organization is creating for social media. The CEB Marketing Study with Google suggests some criteria to evaluate them: relevancy, professionalism, insight, clarity and newsworthiness. If your content doesn’t hold up to these standards, then it might be time to revisit the way you oversee your social media strategy.

It only takes a little time to spread the word As little as six hours a week on social

media is enough time to spread the word for marketers.

For companies that had spent two years on social media, 61% of B2B marketers reported they had gained new partnerships as a result. Eight-one per cent of marketers also said that six hours was also enough to increase traffic and to reduce marketing expenses.

Gather data on your social media engagements It is no longer enough to gather data on social media engagement from shares, clicks and likes because now you need to track offline customer behavior.

With the use of mobile devices on the rise, one of the types of engagement you cannot ignore are phone calls, which are expected to generate one trillion dollars in revenue in the next year. That means including a phone number and tracking the number of calls may be a crucial measurement of your success. Social media can also influence offline customer and employee behavior in other ways that the PwC campaign demonstrated so well and should be a part of the analysis.

Social media continues to rise in popularity—in 2016, it has an estimated 2.34 billion users and is projected to have 2.67 billion by 2018. Facebook is still the leader with only three per cent of marketers not planning to use it. For B2B marketers, LinkedIn looks to be the most important platform in the coming years with 80% planning to increase their usage.

As the social media users mature in a company and their numbers increase, social media will be further integrated into marketing strategy as one of the most cost effective strategies for B2B as well as B2C companies.

If risk-averse PwC can win a Shorty with the engaging and lighthearted #BallotBriefcase, what campaign will you launch to get you a social media marketing Oscar?

Olga Zakharenkava is passionate about marketing and excels at helping businesses choose the right technology to solve their challenges. She spent the past 15 years immersed in marketing, tech and leadership, building great products and teams in startups and established enterprises. At Telmetrics, Olga helps marketers interpret rich data from consumer phone interactions and optimize their advertising campaigns to convert more callers into satisfied customers. https://ca.linkedin.com/in/olgazakharenkava DMN.ca ❰

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Engagement & Analytics

Five reasons your business needs an online community, not a LinkedIn group It’s time to move to a platform that actually benefits your members

By Rob Wenger

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love LinkedIn for career networking but it’s a terrible platform for a community. Activity in a LinkedIn group tends to follow the traditional 90-9-1 participation model seen on other social networks: 90 percent lurker, nine percent contributor, one percent creator.

By contrast, The State of Community Management 2016 report found that mature dedicated communities enjoy a 65-15-20 level of participation, with approximately 35 percent contributing regularly and about one in five creating and collaborating on content. Why such a significant gap? Here are the top five ways LinkedIn fails as a community platform.

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A lack of commitment to communities LinkedIn is essentially a marketing platform—whether for talent or goods. LinkedIn has three main product lines—Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions and Premium Subs—that are not focused on helping companies create communities. And earlier this year, LinkedIn released an account-based marketing campaign tool that allows marketers to send content to members. It seems clear LinkedIn is simply focused on connecting marketers with its more than 414,000,000 users and, with the acquisition by Microsoft, the lack of interest in community features may only get worse.

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LinkedIn owns the data With LinkedIn Groups, you can’t analyze member activities and conversations to better understand what your members’ interests are, how they can benefit from your products and services, and what their challenges may be. With a dedicated community platform, you own the data and gain unlimited access to all the nuances of user activities, conversations and inquiries to gain deep insight into the brand, product issues and trends that are most important to your members.

This information can transform your customer relationships and product life cycle.

3

It’s hard to engage members LinkedIn Groups limit your ability to communicate effectively with various segments of your member population, such as new users versus advanced users, or Canadian members versus international members. With a dedicated community platform, you can segment members based on elements like their profiles and interests, and create targeted communications that can more successfully convey the value you offer, leading to a better member experience and increased response rates.

4

High-value conversations don’t exist The flow of content in LinkedIn Groups does not create an opportunity for

high-value conversations around specific topics. With a dedicated community, you can develop and evolve profile and topic-based subgroups and hierarchies for likeminded members to more easily communicate, encouraging far greater participation and more valuable conversations.

5

LinkedIn Groups search is abysmal With LinkedIn Groups, there is no easy way to search conversations to see if a member’s question has already been answered. This platform failure affects both the members with questions and the contributors who provide answers. Those with questions are forced to wait for an answer they could otherwise obtain immediately, while contributors are often forced to answer the same question over and over again.

A community built on a dedicated platform will provide a simple way for any member to take advantage of the wealth of information that has accumulated over time.

If you are ready to abandon LinkedIn in favour of embracing a community you can truly nurture, start by focusing on the needs of your members to ensure they see the transition as a tremendous opportunity, not a worrisome disruption. For example, don’t simply announce the transition as a done deal to be imposed by a certain date.

Instead, communicate with them well in advance, discussing your goals for improving the community and all the benefits you’d like to add. You can even solicit feedback. Reassure them that existing benefits and resources won’t disappear. Then ease into it. Lay out a time line for the move to the new community and consider having both the new community and the LinkedIn Group accessible simultaneously for a short period, allowing vocal members to discuss the benefits of the new platform. Finally, eliminate friction by making it easy for members to import profile information from LinkedIn. The easier it is to start participating on the new platform, the faster it will thrive.

LinkedIn may have been a great way for you to test the waters of a community, but its limitations and focus on marketing are preventing you from making your community the powerful strategic pillar it can and ought to be. A dedicated, branded community you can manage will facilitate collaboration and accelerate organic engagement, leading to happier and more loyal members.

Rob Wenger is a successful entrepreneur and business executive with a 19-year track record in building, growing and leading high-tech companies. He has been developing social networking applications for associations and non-profits for nearly 10 years. He is currently CEO of Higher Logic.

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Engagement & Analytics

Five tips for engaging Millennials with social media marketing

By Sean Jimenez

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he Millennial generation, which includes those born between 1980 and 2000, has proven to be a tricky group to cater to when it comes to marketing. Having experienced a landmark shift from old to new technology between both centuries, a dichotomy unique to their generation, Millennials have been the subject of in-depth consumer behaviour research. They view the world through a digital lens, which

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has revolutionized the way marketers conduct outreach. As a result, social media marketing has become the new normal.

Accenture’s poll on Millennial shoppers reveals that in order to effectively advertise a product on social networks, there are many moving parts that need to be considered. The brand must become a routine part of online conversations, which would focus on product information, updates and special offers. Creating positive buzz around

a brand can be magnetic, so long as marketers adapt to the appropriate channels with the right message.

Essentially, this generation is looking for brands that have evolved past old school marketing techniques.

Here are five tips on engaging this fascinating group of social media savvy consumers.

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Hone in on the preferred social networks among Millennials The most effective way to access Millennials is through the social

platforms they use most. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak—market research firm Ipsos says the 71% of U.S. Millennials who use social media on a daily basis spend an average of 5.4 hours in front of their screens.

To that end, the latest B2B (Business to Business) Millennial Report asked 2,000 Millennial participants which social media platform they use most often to research new products and services. The results were overwhelming—Facebook reigned over all other channels as the ultimate social

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trust. Customer photos are the perfect example. Some businesses call on customers to share their social media pictures—typically through Instagram, which presents products in an aesthetically pleasing way—using brand-related hashtags, which in turn give conversion rates a boost. A Tidal study estimates that if this is done properly, Millennial customers are six times more likely to make a purchase. One particular company that has mastered the art of creating compelling content is Whole Foods.

The organic supermarket publishes healthy recipes and tips on its blog, incorporating products readily available in its stores.

3

Keep up engagement to convert consumers into brand loyalists The purpose of social media is to share information and interact. Millennials are the first generation to engage with advertisements on this level, giving rise to a new marketing culture built on a two-way conversation.

Simply put, social platforms can nurture relationships with Millennial customers and establish loyalty.

To maintain the customer-brand bond, brands must consistently keep tabs on mentions from customers and respond with comments and likes, specifically on positive feedback. This genre of engagement makes Millennial customers feel they’re being heard loud and clear. As a result, they become avid endorsers and are more than willing to share their consumer experience with their online audience.

4 media platform of choice for purchasing new B2B products and services, reaching 40% of Millennials. Some key ways of engaging a Millennial audience is ensuring your business information in the About section is always current, up to date and engaging, using high-quality photography and posting relevant content that encourages the audience to interact.

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Create compelling content A McCarthy Group study found that 84% of Millennials

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dislike advertising and do not trust salespeople. In fact, they were ranked among the least trustworthy.

Evidently, this is a major obstacle brands face—they must give the consumer experience meaning, as opposed to circulating superficial “in-your-face” ads. User generated content is a great way to reel in Millennials. They want to see how certain products work before taking the plunge and making the investment. This is called “social proof” and it is essential to building

Be transparent and authentic With marketing comes questions of authenticity and transparency, as many brands have proven to be misleading. In order to connect with this generation, these two elements are essential requirements that “humanize” a brand, as Forbes puts it. In all aspects of daily life, honesty is always the best policy, even if the truth is negative.

Millennials can be described as skeptics and don’t immediately believe what they read, especially when it comes to branded content that’s plastered across social media; but if a company’s marketing is tasteful and honest, it will foster a sense of trust, which is the ultimate win for a brand. Sharing with consumers the ‘face behind the brand’

by occasionally showing the people who work for the company, being available for real-time conversations and sharing honest stories about the brand are all ways companies can create honest and transparent engagement.

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Use social values as a means of engagement According to the Young Entrepreneur Council, Millennials have a reputation for being lazy and self-centred but are highly philanthropic. They want to feel as though they’re contributing to their communities in a constructive way.

The 2016 Millennial Impact Report states Millennials are among the most frequent participants in cause work and their influence has the power to determine the success or failure of a social movement. Sixty-one per cent of respondents indicated they post about or engage with social issues online at least once a week, whether it be through an original post, comments or retweets. Facebook is the leading platform, ranking in at 88%, followed

by Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Marketers can leverage these findings to further engagement on a deeper level. Brands with purpose that genuinely stand for something, from CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives to individual contributions to society, will easily attract Millennials, as their desire to give back is strong. A new way to demonstrate a strong commitment to social and corporate responsibility is becoming a certified B-Corp, which is a third-party certification which demonstrates they have met rigorous standards on social and environmental performance, as well as corporate transparency and accountability.

Sean Jimenez is the CEO of Soulpepper, a full

service digital marketing agency based in Vancouver, B.C. A social impact entrepreneur, Sean uses his expertise in e-commerce, sales and sustainable business practices to develop digital strategies to help impact corporations grow. His areas of specialization include omnichannel and digital strategy, web analytics, search engine optimization and online advertising. Sean’s passionate about developing triple bottom line businesses equally focused on profit, people and the environment. He is the former owner and operator of Champions Martial Arts, Canada’s largest martial arts school.

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Operations & Logistics

Interactive marketing: The future of marketing communication models One message does not fit all

By Ahmed ElMahmoudy

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e have witnessed a dramatic change in the way marketing communications have shifted from the mass communication strategies of the recent past to one-to-one communication models brought about by the emergence of social media. As a result of these shifts, brands and companies have started to adopt a new concept of how to interact with their audience.

This change started to emerge with the increasing usage of social networks then expanded with the developments in mobile phones, but still this concept of one-to-one personalized communication didn’t have a chance

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to evolve in the field of below the line marketing platforms, where we can see the DOOH advertising, billboards and in-store experiences still adopting the old concept of mass-communication.

Big brands have taken personalized engagement’s importance to heart, providing targeted experiences for each consumer. Now the concept of interactive marketing can be perfectly achieved using social media and mobile phones, but personalized engagement is still missing where the magic moment of the final purchase decision happens. Interactive media provides a way to close this gap in marketing by using novel media tools and sensing technologies such as facial tracking, eye tracking or emotional coding leading to more advanced real-time interactions.

If you make a personal connection with customers they are more likely to buy your products, remember your name and return to your business in the future. For ID Labs, using a new technology solution for interactive communication such as SmartEye (http://id-labs.org/interactiveadvertising-smarteye/) became a vital component in our overall marketing activities.

Here are five steps to consider while designing your interactive marketing campaign: 1. Personalized experience No two customers are exactly alike; every customer is a separate entity.

While this declaration is not in itself ground breaking, the way that

interactive media and interactive marketing allow communicators to adjust to this reality is unprecedented.

Fortunately, if marketers are good at one thing it is collecting information.

Data and metrics should be applied in as many different ways as possible to most closely match message to audience. By fitting their message to individual differences between customers, marketers are more likely to successfully convert a sale.

Effective interactive campaigns should put the user in the centre of the experience, allowing each user to feel the uniqueness of the experience tailored to him and his reactions. Tailoring user experience to interactive marketing ensures that the user establishes a deep connection to

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Operations & Logistics the campaign.

The deep connections the customers get with personalized messaging and the positive emotions that can be acquired with the experience improves the user experience considerably. This is because the advertisements are served in such a way that they enhance the content significantly, thereby showing the customers what they actually want to see, need or want to know about. Not only does this make the message more effective, but it also saves money by not broadcasting messages that are not relevant to specific users. None of these advances are possible, however, without the audience intelligence that is the key to personalized storytelling.

2. Natural interaction for effective communication Real-time, two-way interaction between the audience and the message is the key to success for the campaign and understanding of how people are interacting with the ad. A study made at ID Labs shows 80% of people above 25 years old prefer to interact naturally as they do in their normal life, which means simple facial expression and minor hand and body gestures.

SmartEye, with its ability to collect, interpret and respond to customers’ natural verbal and non-verbal cues, provides a model for how natural interaction can be used to achieve success with interactive marketing.

By providing users an input method that comes naturally to them and by being responsive to that user input in order to deliver a tailor-made message, natural interaction becomes a powerful tool in the marketer’s toolbox. The recent success of augmented reality apps shows that given the choice between living in a purely online or offline world, users more and more want to connect those worlds and allow them to interact more fluidly with each other. Natural interaction is the next step in this evolutionary process.

3. Communicate smart—with artificial intelligence When we think of artificial intelligence (AI) we often conjure up images of reboots who are attempting to take control of our world. But it’s crucial to realize as a marketer that AI is not only about self-driving cars nor smart robots. AI is already woven in our daily life now in our phones, online ads and search results. AI will be essential in two main things: first to design a user experience and second to get September 2016

analysis and recommendations from this enormous amount of data. AI can predict engagement patterns of the audience by analyzing billions of data points to determine what a user is likely to engage with. By taking advantage of this kind of processing power marketers are able to take advantage of the data they already have as well as fill in holes in their analytics in order to craft the most persuasive messages possible.

Marketers need not fear that AI is purely for the big entities or research centres. Through collaboration with tech companies, AI is now relevant, applicable and achievable for organizations of all sizes. Smart agencies will take advantage of this in order to “get ahead of the curve” on artificial intelligence and begin looking for partnerships with tech companies that can help put them on the cutting age of marketing.

The world of communication is moving now to so called chat bots, so the future might lead to each company/ brand having it own chat bot that represents their products and can deal directly with their audience and answer their inquiries. Such an occurrence not only has a direct benefit on marketing, but also allows firms to better manage the bottom line by keeping labour costs low. Furthermore, these AI-driven chat bots also allow a firm to maintain even higher levels of consistency with their message and branding, ensuring reliable and on-target brand management. Agencies don’t have to wait and see what AI will bring, they have to state what they need from AI. By placing themselves in the driver’s seat, agencies that take a proactive approach to AI will be better set up

once these cutting edge processes become the norm.

4. Consider diversity & the human element Include diversity from people with special needs and accessibility issues within your target audience. This concept will, first, widen your target group and, second, will give the human element to your activities which will create more loyalty to your brand. By widening your target group not only do you find more potential customers, but also widen the amount of data that you are able to collect, which makes all of your other marketing efforts more effective.

Additionally, creating more brand loyalty ensures not only more business from those customers, but means that those customers will act as marketing agents themselves, spreading news of products and services through word of mouth in order to create a feedback effect, dramatically enhancing the efficacy of your marketing and making sure that you get the most return value on your investments possible. Finally, these are market segments that are too often neglected or ignored and using new technology to better include these groups can dramatically enhance the scope and loyalty of a client base.

5. Plan analysis Before you start your campaign, plan what kind of data you need to get from campaign insights. This will help you to organize your data collection and analysis from the beginning. Making sense of this data allows you to measure your campaign results and to plan your next campaign or product based

on information, data and analysis, rather than by trusting sheer instinct.

Additionally, by planning for your data needs at the start of your campaign you can ensure that your campaign will operate at its most effective level.

SmartEye has a smart report system to enable you to design your report and also you can integrate these data insights into other platforms in order to get overall understanding of your activities’ performance. With its unparalleled ability to gather billions of different data points and analyze them and generate reports, the insights you will be able to generate will be far beyond what could possibly be achieved with traditional data collection and analytic tools. More information about post campaign analysis can be found at id-labs.org.

The future of marketing is already here. It is up to agencies to recognize that fact and take advantage of the benefits that interactive marketing can provide. A failure to do so will mean that a firm risks being left in the dust as it uses outdated communication models to send messages to potential customers. History has shown time and again that groups that are early adopters to powerful new technology thrive in competition with groups who come late to the game. If you want your firm to be a major player in the future of new marketing, the best strategy is to plan for the future instead of planning for the present.

Ahmed ElMahmoudy is a creative director and

technology expert. Inspired by the unique blend of art and technology, he is founder of ID Labs and EyeSense.

DMN.ca ❰

// 14

Operations & Logistics

Four steps to add oomph to your marketing automation strategy

By Jen Bullett

M

any powerful tools have emerged to help marketers better understand their audiences, improve brand recognition, streamline messaging and generate sales for their businesses. Investing in these technologies can make a marketer’s life a lot easier, but developing a creative strategy to implement each tool is key and gives projects more impact, adds value and improves lead generation.

When approaching a marketing campaign or strategy that you plan to automate, there are a few key tactics to consider that should improve results.

1. Define your lists One of the most obvious positives of marketing automation is the ability to reach out to large groups simultaneously, often through email blasts. Building out those lists can be tedious work and take months to create, so it’s important to think strategically about how to use them.

The best way to take advantage of the contacts you’ve collected is to create personas. Personas are a way to document and plan for the types of people you’d like to target based on job title, location, industry, purchase behavior, etc. beforehand. By creating these “personalities,” you’ll be able to add the context necessary to critically sift through your lists and break them into targeted groups.

Personas will help you define which types of contacts are actually worth reaching out to. You may find a list of 300 people with only half being influential or pertinent to your specific marketing goal. Creating a clear idea of the person you want reading your message (and hopefully responding to it) will help you filter out the contacts that don’t fit the campaign.

To create an integrated approach, consider aligning the personas you created for your website with those within your marketing automation system. Working with your technology provider, you can integrate your CMS with your marketing automation system.

These personas and strategic lists ❱ DMN.ca

will also come in handy as you begin to think about the kinds of content you want to send their way.

2. Categorize your content This should go without saying, but the content you create should always have a purpose. Your offer, whether it be a blog, a whitepaper, an email newsletter or a tweet, should have a goal in mind.

One popular marketing automation tool, Hubspot, uses the term “The Buyer’s Journey” to help its clients think about this process. This take on the marketing funnel is helpful, because it illuminates that your content is doing one of three things: 1. Creating awareness of a problem; 2. Giving a definition of and insights into that problem; or 3. Offering tangible solutions to the problem.

Many business-to-consumer marketers follow customers through this journey seamlessly. In the B2B and professional services world, the buyer’s journey can be evolved into what we’ve coined the “Relationship Cycle,” where content is still curated to connect context and personas, but the relationships are developed continuously. This approach allows you to tailor the content you’re offering to the stage that the user you’re trying to make a connection with is at in their relationship with you, or where they are in their purchase journey.

If you can think about your content this way, you’ll quickly realize that sending content that offers a solution (a price chart, for instance) for a business that doesn’t realize it has a problem is like offering cold medicine to someone who isn’t sick, or like offering it to someone who’s already taken something. The key is to think about the value of your digital content.

Will your blog reveal thoughtprovoking questions? Is your whitepaper explaining best practices that align with your company? Can your research report help businesses rethink their sales strategy? Always consider whether your audiences will value the content you offer.

It’s important to think about the personas you’re targeting, too. The

chief marketing officer of a company may be interested in very different content than someone looking for a job at your firm. Creating diverse, strategic content that considers your personas along with where they may be in the buyer’s journey not only helps you write better, more substantial content, but should boost engagement with them, too.

3. Optimize everything The great thing about many marketing automation tools is that they do a lot of the optimization work for you.

Collecting data on the best time to send emails and publish content, along with click rates, keywords, engagement and a/b testing are necessary to building out the best systematic marketing strategies.

One thing to remember as you sift through your collected data and analytics is that bigger numbers aren’t necessarily better. For instance, high click rates are pretty meaningless when the average time on a page is less than 10 seconds. It’s imperative to consider how your data fits together, where relationships emerge and if there’s cause-effect explanations for your results.

Leave no stone unturned when it comes to optimization. Add meta descriptions, link every image, take advantage of SEO rankings, consider character count and implement a keyword strategy. The more thorough you are when optimizing your offer, the better chance you’ll have at making an impact on your audiences.

4. Consider your social platforms Marketing automation is all about sending integrated messages across platforms. Although it’s imperative to align your content with your company’s brand identity, it’s not a good idea to publish the exact same messaging on every platform. Each platform has a particular purpose, and defining how your business can use each will help you mould messages around content.

For example, Instagram can be a great tool to display company culture and values, perfect for recruitment.

On the other hand, Twitter is often

used to seek out thought leadership, blogs and news, so the kinds of content being shared should overlap, but not necessarily be identical. Your brand voice should be what binds it all together.

That being said, not all platforms were created equal. You should not feel pressured to be on every social app that hits the market. This goes back to considering what value proposition your content has. What value can your tweets, links or filtered pictures offer? Should every investment banking, engineering or law firm be on Snapchat to better engage with clients and prospects?

The short answer: no. But, don’t let that scare you. If you believe your social content has value, emulates your brand and helps you stand out, by all means, use whichever applications make sense to your business.

When building out your strategy, remember to consider who you’re targeting, the kind of content you want to curate, the tools you use and how you take advantage of them. Interacting with leads and continuously nurturing relationships is key for any business, so thinking critically about your strategy and points of contact can make or break the success of your marketing automation strategy and of your digital marketing endeavors.

This may seem like a lot of moving parts, but the whole point of marketing automation tools is to streamline your digital marketing efforts. Integrating these steps as you begin to collect contact information and develop content will help you create a better (if not bigger) impact in the long-run for your marketing and business development efforts.

Jen Bullett is managing director of marketing

at One North Interactive. She works closely with the brand, strategy, creative and technology teams to develop and enhance One North client communications and exterior messaging strategy. In addition, she provides general marketing direction for One North Interactive and promotes internal culture and talent development by overseeing our recruiting and human resources department.

September 2016

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 • 2016

The People Issue

❯❯ Contact centre attrition: It’s time to focus on the team ❯❯ How microlearning took MCAP’s customer support from good to great ❯❯ Self-service gone wrong: Highway toll evasion & sleeping in a flophouse

The People Issue

Contact centre attrition It’s time to focus on the team

By Tom Marsden

W

e’re all used to thinking that contact centres are a tricky place to work for front line agents. The job can often demand a heavy amount of ‘emotional energy’: dealing with customer complaint issues can increase the risk of anxiety, depression and stress. It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that call centres experience notoriously high levels of staff attrition.

It’s estimated that as many as 14 per cent of new Canadian call centre employees experience high levels of stress, 10 per cent of call centre staff are absent on any given day and that the average cost of replacing a stressedout departing worker can exceed $6,000 CAD. Clearly 2 | contact management

something is not right with call centre management, but what?

Attrition analysis is not exactly new on the HR scene and there are a host of different metrics that HR professionals can look at to try and get an indication of how big the problem is. Measurements such as the number of sick leave days taken, lateness, average employee tenure change over time and cohort analysis can give managers a solid picture of what’s going on in the present, but they rarely offer predictive insight.

The key problem with existing attrition metrics is that they rarely give decision makers information that is truly actionable. It’s no use collecting a huge amount of employee data if there’s no easy way of translating that into policy action. ‘Pay more’ is rarely a practical solution. There are other areas that call centre managers can look at to get more actionable insight.

There’s increasing appreciation for the role that social dynamics—or understanding ‘cultural fit’—plays in Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue individualistic places to work. Many approaches link an individual’s personality or behavioural profile with the ability to do the job.

Assessment is done on the individual in isolation. This is interesting and can explain some of the variance in performance. However, new research indicates that the best way to get improved performance and enhanced overall happiness out of workers is to draw more attention to the influence of social connectivity. Hiring managers can now start measuring social dynamics. This is an indication of whether teammates will work well with each other, share information and support each other emotionally.

Algorithmic data assessing social connectivity in a team can be of use here, providing an objective ‘voice in the room’ which can lend additional ballast to decisions over which course of action to take. A key benefit of this approach is that the technology used is transparent: if mistakes are made—the wrong person is hired or someone leaves quickly—people can review what went wrong and make adjustments. This couldn’t be more different from the opaque ‘gut feel’ approach prevalent in many current culture fit assessments.

Try new things with your team structure

employee longevity. Here are three ways to utilize this new approach in your call centre.

Measure employee cultural fit There are many ‘hard metrics’ that call centres use to measure individual performance, such as number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction or average handling time (AHT). However, managers are less accustomed to measuring a worker’s social well-being in the workplace and this is a key error. Many academics have noted that people who fit in well with their job, team and organization have greater job satisfaction, are more likely to remain in their organization and show superior job performance.

It’s normal for managers to see call centres as highly Issue 3 • 2016

Teams are the future of work, not individuals: according to McKinsey, 40% of jobs in developed economies such as Canada’s involve a high degree of collaboration. Employees in call centres get a lot out of their teams: not only do teams lend a degree of social structure and stability, but they also form a professional support network which workers can look to for advice and guidance.

Most work in call centres is socially intensive and can be emotionally stressful. Given this, having a socially supportive environment isn’t simply a ‘nice-tohave’, it’s an integral part of a call centre’s success potential. Managers should pay close attention to the everyday functioning of their teams and isolate problem areas, such as friction between team members.

Really pay attention to what’s going wrong and speak to individual team members where possible. Experiment with the membership of each team to see what works and what doesn’t.

We’re seeing more companies use data-driven models to help them make these important resourcing

decisions.

Encourage downtime This is easier said than done, but downtime is really important to boosting call centre worker morale and thus reducing attrition problems.

Several companies are now looking to use their workers’ break times for good or at least to not let it just be ‘dead time.’ One commonly known example is Pixar: Steve Jobs insisted that all the office bathrooms would be located off the ground floor lobby, so as to increase the likelihood of chance interactions between employees in different teams and departments.

Fast forward a few years and this thinking is present across much of the corporate world.

Call centres can tap into this way of working. Managers should be encouraging the same groups of employees, groups that you know work well together socially, to take breaks at the same time. This encourages easy social bonding and is backed up by MIT research on improving call centre worker productivity: by ensuring that everyone on the same call centre team took a break at the same time, a bank’s call centre AHT fell by more than 20% among low performing teams and fell by eight per cent overall.

Canadian call centres experienced a decline in the latter half of the 2000s as jobs were relocated to India and the Philippines. These jobs have started coming back to Canada, partly due to very high turnover rates in those countries, so it’s vital that Canada doesn’t forfeit its advantage by letting staff attrition creep up.

Not all of these suggestions will work for all call centres: there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to tackling attrition. However, with the average cost of replacing a front line call centre worker in Canada approaching $6,000, it’s imperative something must be done to get to the bottom of the attrition issue and there’s a clear business justification for further investment. Managers should experiment with team dynamics by structuring employee downtime and adding some social data into the mix.

With the right combination of HR innovations, call centre managers will find themselves with happier teams and more profitable branches.

Tom Marsden is CEO of Saberr, a people analytics software company.

contact management | 3

The People Issue

How microlearning took MCAP’s customer support from good to great Shelly Woodley

B

uying a home is the largest purchase that most people make in their life. It can be a daunting process, with high expectations, demands and anxieties every step of the way. This makes customer service critically important. Home buyers, understandably, have a lot of questions and with such a momentous (and expensive) decision on the line, they expect them answered accurately and efficiently.

But buying a home is also a complicated process, which can make it challenging for us at MCAP, a mortgage financing company, to address our customers’ queries effectively. It’s not enough for our mortgage specialists to be responsive and polite. They also have to possess a reservoir of knowledge that they can draw from at any moment, otherwise they risk losing the customer’s trust or, worse, providing misinformation that could compromise that customer’s business and cost the company thousands of dollars in lost revenue opportunities. When it comes to mortgages, customer service is a high-stakes game and one that we can’t afford to lose.

Our contact centre agents are tasked with making the people they talk to feel comfortable and confident that their mortgage is in good hands. This means they have to be well-versed in everything from mortgage refinancing policies to renewal procedures, and know how to update the mortgages themselves. Furthermore, they work in a high-volume environment, which means they have to be quick as well as accurate.

Third, we needed to reduce manual processes and paperwork.

As a service provider organization, MCAP is required to undergo annual staff certification, and the only way we could meet this requirement was by performing manual, paperbased knowledge assessments. This involved taking staff off the phones for testing—a painful and costly process for both employees and the company. We needed an assessment process that wasn’t so resource intensive.

Finally, MCAP needed up-to-date metrics for continual coaching. Our performance-based culture meant it was important to measure progress continually against key business targets. However, we didn’t have an efficient and ongoing way to monitor employee knowledge that would identify where they might need extra support. By proactively addressing areas where they are struggling, we would also be able to avoid issues that resulted in escalations.

Four barriers to best-in-class customer service

“Microlearning” emerged as a solution that could overcome these challenges. This approach delivers information in bite-sized chunks that are easy to digest and convenient.

Learners can access the lessons anytime, anywhere, with minimal interruption to their workflow.

Microlearning is effective for a number of reasons. To start, it eliminates the need for dull, drawn out corporate training sessions that not only take employees away from their jobs, but also don’t really work.

Secondly, microlearning delivers information in small pieces and reinforces that knowledge throughout the day with mechanisms like short quizzes. Re-exposing learners to the same content over and over ensures it sticks. Third, microlearning allows people to rest their brains

At MCAP, we recognized that knowledge was the key to delivering top tier customer service and reducing escalations. We identified four key challenges that we needed to address to ensure continued success.

The first was engaging contact centre agents on an ongoing basis—most of whom were Millennials. These agents started out excited, so we wanted to maintain that enthusiasm over the long term. We also wanted to find a way to offer ongoing learning—from a developmental side—that would appeal to a tech-savvy group of 24- to 34-year-olds, without taking them off the phones.

The second challenge was to increase knowledge retention after the initial onboarding process. While our agents showed high retention directly after a training session, it quickly degraded (this isn’t surprising, as the Forgetting Curve indicates people forget 90% of what they learn within 30 days if it isn’t reinforced). In some cases, our agents only retained 15–20% of the material after receiving two weeks of introductory training. This was concerning because we needed MCAP agents to be experts in our products and services.

4 | contact management

Investing in knowledge

in between lessons. This provides the opportunity to recharge, so employees return to their learning and jobs with renewed focus and energy. They don’t feel overwhelmed.

MCAP was able to deploy a microlearning strategy through Axonify, an employee knowledge platform that delivers daily, personalized, bite-sized “gamified” learning content in short, three to four minute bursts. Employees can access the lessons anytime, anywhere, from any device, so learning is easy to weave into their day. In addition, the platform personalizes learning to target and close individual knowledge gaps, which gives our employees the confidence to perform their role to the best of their ability.

This confidence, as well as a solid foundation of knowledge, led to significant results. Within the first 90 days of implementing Axonify, we achieved a 94% employee participation rate in learning on the platform, along with knowledge lifts ranging from six per cent to as high as 21% in key topic areas. MCAP also achieved call quality rating scores of 86% and decreased call escalations by 20%, resulting in significant time savings and improved customer satisfaction. Plus, we were able to put our time-consuming manual processes to rest.

Approaching employee knowledge with a digital, microlearning platform has enabled MCAP to deliver the bestin-class service our customers want and deserve, which has translated into real business results. By making training as fun and convenient as possible, we also empowered our specialists to reach their full potential.

Shelly Woodley is associate director, training and CC projects at MCAP.

Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue

Self-service gone wrong: Highway toll evasion & sleeping in a flophouse Emily Nielsen

I

risk being castaway for saying this but self-service could use some personal service!

You see, I was recently hit by two frustrating experiences as a customer.

In each case, I needed to speak with a person but each company had constructed a fortress made of self-service tools to deflect me and keep me out.

Having said that, I love self-service and it works wonders when you’re doing a simple task or seeking answers to common questions. But it’s when things go wrong that you need to speak to a real human being with the power to a fix an uncommon problem.

Now let me tell you the first story which highlights the need for more—not less—personal service.

Recently, I was driving through New York State with my husband and we pulled through a malfunctioning highway tollbooth. It wouldn’t process the self-service pass which up until now made our trip a breeze and it wouldn’t accept our money.

The tollbooth was plastered in big, bright red and yellow warning signs with bold type which read: VIDEO MONITORING IN USE, PAY TOLLBOOTH, EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY and DO NOT BACK UP! Since this was a self-service tollbooth, there wasn’t a person who could help. This left us between the proverbial rock and a hard spot.

Traffic piled up behind us and the other drivers grew frustrated with us and began honking. Despite all the ominous warning signs, we blew through the tollbooth and came out the other side feeling like Bonnie and Clyde on the run from police.

Not accustom to breaking the rules of the road, I immediately used my phone to Google for customer support. Relieved that I found the phone number, I called to clear up the matter before the red and blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror.

The instant my call got answered I knew I was in trouble. Because I went straight to an automated menu and I was certain that no option would be for committing toll evasion!

After listening to five options, I selected the best option.

Mind you, the best option was just the best of the worst options. It wasn’t really the option which promised a solution!

As you’ve probably experienced, I was then lost in a maze of entirely unrelated options desperate for a human being. I went deeper and deeper into the menu, down the rabbit hole I went into an abyss where I hung up and ended my odyssey for a person with a solution. Sadly, this Issue 3 • 2016

experience is more common than it is unusual!

However, on my second call I resolved the situation, as if by a stroke of good fortune, when I accidentally stumbled on the option to speak to a live agent… a choice hiding far out of ear shot on the ninth and last option in the menu!

Now here’s my second story: Using my favourite and wellknown website to self-book hotels, where I am a Gold Member, I sent my staff to what appeared to be a trendy, upscale hotel suitable for professionals. It had an on-site health club, secure parking and a desk in each room to work from. A perfect place to stay for a couple nights.

Turns out, the pictures posted online must have been taken by a gifted photographer with a knack for making the obscene look professional.

And the description of amenities was an outright lie. Because when I showed up to meet my staff after they’d slept there for a couple nights I realized I had sent them to something more like a flophouse!

The place was fashioned with old furniture and pictures taken from a museum. It was dark and depressing!

The on-site health club was actually a little dank gym, in a basement, a block down the street! As for parking, there were just six spots, unsecure and down the street by the gym in the basement.

Frustrated because I had spent a lot of money to send my staff there, I snapped pictures of the rooms to post online.

When I returned to my office I uploaded these snapshots and wrote a review. Now remember, I was a Gold Member because I booked 60+ nights with this website in the last year. This status made me feel important to them and I expected to get a call from a customer service agent.

But, I was shocked—SHOCKED— when I published my review and I heard nothing but the sound of crickets.

It seems to me that, with so much self-service—with so much emphasis on trying to service the customer without interacting with a human— many businesses are overlooking in person service when and where it’s still needed.

The problem I see with self-service is a fundamental one. Inherently, it’s somewhat flawed because at its core it strives to eliminate personal service.

And personal service is what’s needed when something goes wrong during your customer’s journey.

So what should you do? It’s simple, really.

If you want to improve your customer experience, rather than solely striving to cut costs by reducing call volumes, customer interactions and live agents, then start identifying touch-points where a person is needed and make them easy to reach when self-service goes wrong.

Strictly thinking from a mindset of eliminating human interaction can create, as I’ve told you, very unfavourable experiences. Because there will be unforeseen situations that will arise which self-service tools just can’t address!

Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s top unified communications (UC) and contact centre consulting firms, in 1999. Carrying an impressive portfolio of 100+ projects and having managed $65 million worth of UC and call centre solutions, she regularly acts as a trusted advisor to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Emily can be reached at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.

contact management | 5

The People Issue

From dated to digital Seven questions to ensure quality customer experiences

By Brian Spencer

C

ustomers expect quality experiences from every company with which they interact. When reaching out for customer care in particular, easy and personalized communications are key to positive interactions and earning continued business. Unfortunately, in today’s interconnected world, many companies’ systems are outdated and simply incapable of delivering great experiences across all mediums. With an individual customer’s data scattered across different systems, as well as the myriad choices consumers expect in contacting companies—everything from voice to text to instant message—providing personalized communications isn’t as easy as it sounds. In aiming to deliver exceptional digital customer care, ask yourself these seven questions beforehand.

1. Who exactly are your customers? How can you address their individual needs with digital services?

It is important to gain as much knowledge as possible about your customers and consolidate that knowledge into one place. Understanding their preferred methods 6 | contact management

of communicating, expectations of access and what technologies are important to them—and then acting on that information—will improve the customer experience.

Enabling this requires involving your IT team at the inception of the digital transformation strategy.

Assess whether changes to your fundamental infrastructure are required and examine the impacts of architecture and applications integration. Determine how available your care services need to be for your specific customers and whether cloud services or internal infrastructure best support this.

Consider whether other digital initiatives such as mobile apps should seamlessly link into the customer care infrastructure. Think holistically from the vantage of your customer.

2. Who is in charge of customer engagement?

The answer to this question must be established before embarking on any successful journey to a fully digital customer experience. The more senior this person, the better the chance of success. Not only does it signal the importance of the project but more importantly it allows the project to bridge all customer touchpoints. This person must be able to envision customer journeys that cut across operations and ensure customer experiences are prioritized every step of the way.

Consider customer onboarding for a utility—this involves online research, signing up, scheduling installation, receiving and paying the first bill. Is customer care one tap away at each stage through the various digital tools used to undertake the journey?

Who can see the entire process?

Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue 3. How can you expand the customer experience beyond voice interactions?

Voice interactions remain important as one of many equally valuable elements of customer engagement. If starting your transformation from a voice-only status quo, how do you expand into digital channels? First, assess which digital channels are already used but not managed by your contact centres. A likely target is email. Another may be online chat, which may have been separately deployed and managed by the marketing team. Second, consider if and for what processes self-service make sense.

Many customers today prefer self-service if engineered for rapid, easy, always-on access. This can please customers with access through their preferred channels and also increase the speed of care without adding staff. But take caution: do not engineer for cost reductions, engineer for great customer experiences.

4. Can you use a full scope of digital channels to engage with customers?

If not, which channels are the most important to your business based on the nature of your customer relationships? Understanding your customer demographics and the most frequent care services consumed can smooth the path to digitizing your contact centre. Start with the digital channel most desired by your customers that is effective for the most frequent care provided. If quick and easy answers are needed, say scheduling for a spa or ordering a pizza, SMS may be the right place to start. If more elaborate care is required, such as technical product support, web chat or even video may be appropriate. Once you have deployed your first digital channel and collected customer feedback validating the approach, then move on to others. Make sure to nail each one before moving on or you will lose customer attention and not achieve full return on investment.

and progressive transition away from costlier live assistance. Third, are there deployment models such as private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid model available that both meet your operational requirements and mitigate up-front costs for the supporting technology? The answer to this is almost certainly “yes.” The options today for digitizing customer care provide many options for managing costs effectively. And the revenue impact of staking a claim as a customer experience leader in your market almost certainly justify the investment.

7. Are you fully taking advantage of all the tools at your disposal to empower your customer care workers?

As you expand the customer touchpoints available to reach the contact centre, be sure to give every tool possible to those workers staffing the centre. There are many tools available to expand the pool of talent available to you, from intelligent workforce scheduling software to meet various work-life balance requirements to secure,

high-quality remote worker tools like softphones. Thinking more broadly, make sure to consider the tools that link the contact centre into the enterprise at large for onetouch access to those that can help address customer needs. Unified communications tools make it easy to bring in subject matter experts on demand via internal text messaging, ad-hoc conferences and even desktop sharing sessions. Research indicates the top factor in great customer experience is speedy resolution so making everyone available for rapid response can make a meaningful difference.

Brian Spencer is general manager, contact centre at Mitel. With nearly 20 years of sales and executive leadership experience in the contact centre industry, Brian joined Mitel in 2014 as part of the company’s acquisition of OAISYS, where he was president and a board member for six years. He held prior posts in sales and sales engineering and additionally led sales, marketing and customer service at OAISYS and InterTel during periods of rapid growth and transformation.

5. Are your management and reporting metrics as effective as they could be?

Customers inherently look at their experiences with services as a comprehensive lifecycle, as opposed to analyzing the various individual touchpoints. Thus, it’s necessary to start building cohesive customer experiences from the management level through real-time reporting on performance, schedules and other metrics. This way, your company will be able to provide consistent visibility and provide customers with an interconnected lifecycle.

Even if your contact centre achieves its service goal 90 per cent of the time, if a service experience requires four interactions there is a 40 per cent likelihood a customer will be dissatisfied along the way. This may profoundly change the importance of any single interaction step and thus the service levels you set.

6. Are you worried about increased costs associated with new or improved communications channels?

You almost certainly are concerned about costs, even if there is hard data to support the return on investment.

Consider these questions in your cost modeling. First, will additional channels increase communications demand or simply redirect what is already occurring?

Most likely it is the latter and you can find cost reductions in the anticipated decrease of existing channel usage.

Second, will self-service tools focused on fast and easy customer care be deployed? If so, model a conservative Issue 3 • 2016

Connected. Informed. Effective.

It pays to be a NAMMU member.

Talk to us: membership@nammu.ca 416-977-3703

contact management | 7

The People Issue

Why being polite is not enough

By Mike Aoki

H

ow would you rate the following customer service interaction?

The agent answered the phone using their company’s standard greeting.

They used the caller’s name three times.

They asked enough questions to solve the caller’s issue.

They also asked if the customer had any other questions and thanked the customer for calling. They also used polite phrases such as, “please” and “thank you” during the call.

Would you evaluate that as a “good customer service call”?

Or, is it a merely adequate one?

Here is some additional information: the agent failed to acknowledge and paraphrase the customer’s complaint as a sign of courtesy and respect. They offered a solution but did not ask if it was acceptable to the customer. They did not ask permission to place the client on hold or thank the customer for waiting when they took them off hold. They failed to offer any empathy statements acknowledging the customer’s feelings. Finally, they did not tell the customer their credit would take two billing cycles to appear on their bill. That guarantees the customer will call back next month to scream about their missing credit.

Now, how would you rate that call? I would evaluate it as a poor one since it guarantees a callback from an unhappy customer.

Was the agent polite? Yes; however, being polite is just raw material for great customer service. Here is a comparison: being tall is an advantage in basketball.

However, basketball players still need to learn the rules of the game and practice specific skills such as dribbling, shooting and playing defense. The same is true about customer service representatives. Being friendly and polite is just the starting point. Customer issues are becoming more complex and require a higher skill level than in the past.

For example, 10 years ago I would have called my laptop manufacturer’s help line if I had a problem with my laptop.

Now, I look online first to see if one of the manufacturer’s support groups has an answer. I would only contact their customer service team if I needed a warranty repair or the answer to a very complex question.

Online research has taken away all the easy customer service interactions. What are left are complex issues requiring a higher skill level than just being polite. Agents need to be better trained, coached and supported.

Social media has also increased the stakes. Before 8 | contact management

social media, one upset customer might tell eight to 20 people about their experience. Now, their Twitter complaint can go viral and get picked up by major broadcast news outlets.

Customers can show a photo of a product defect on Instagram or Facebook. Customers can also post your team’s customer service email responses and company Twitter replies on the web. So, providing a high level of service is even more visible—and important—than ever.

The good news is technology is providing better tools than ever to aid agents in their job. Blended learning, which combines facilitatorled classroom training and online e-learning, helps agents master both the technical and soft skills aspects of the job. Predictive pop-up screens provide great product upselling suggestions, while smarter knowledge management systems help agents find answers faster than ever. Remote monitoring systems, paired with live coaching chat from a team leader, can provide real time coaching so agents get instant supervisor help with a call.

“Big data” is another disruptive contact centre trend. It involves using complex algorithms to mine speech analytics, IVR analytics and cross channel (multi-channel) analytics to predict customer behaviour. This can help you train agents on key issues, route certain customers to the right queue automatically and provide live chat agents with the correct prewritten answers to common queries.

High tech tools are very useful; however, it is ultimately how a customer feels about your company that determines whether they will buy from you again, or recommend

your service to others. Customers want their problem solved but they also want to feel valued and respected.

That is where soft skills training becomes crucial. Specific soft skills such as acknowledgment, empathy statements, active listening, paraphrasing, negotiation skills and the emotional resilience to bounce back from challenging situations prepare an agent to perform the emotional side of their jobs at a much higher level.

When I train new agents, they are surprised by the importance of relationship building with their customer, even if the interaction is just a short phone call, email or live chat session. Listening for your caller’s tone or reading between the lines of their email or live chat text help agents uncover hidden needs and feelings that should be addressed to increase customer loyalty.

Overall, great customer service is a blend of high tech and high touch.

Contact centres need to equip their agents with the best technology and the best soft skills training to help them perform well. Being polite is just the starting point.

Mike Aoki is the president of Reflective Keynotes Inc. (www.reflectivekeynotes. com ), a Canadian training company that helps contact centres improve their sales and customer retention results.

A call centre expert, Mike has been interviewed by the Customer Experience Show and the Globe and Mail. He also serves on the Advisory Council of GTACC (the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre association www.gtacc.ca ) and was master of ceremonies for their 2012, 2013 and 2014 annual conferences.

Issue 3 • 2016

The People Issue

Closing the gap Five ways to modernize your customer service

By Holly Simmons

C

ustomer service is not what it used to be. Twenty years ago companies invested in CRM systems to store customer contact information, track issues and build relationships. With these systems came peace of mind for companies knowing they were managing customer expectations. While this may have been enough for simpler days, traditional customer service systems have fallen behind. In fact, a study conducted by Forrester Research confirms that there is a huge gap in meeting customers’ expectations. According to Forrester, 80% of businesses believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only eight per cent of their customers feel they are receiving superior customer service from these same companies.

Companies want to change Meeting the changing demands of customers requires new considerations in delivering service. In a recent survey by Intergam, customer service leaders identified the following as their top goals: 1. To be more efficient; 2. To improve customer satisfaction; and 3. To make customer service a strategic part of the business.

Clearly, improving customer service is a top priority for most businesses and for good reason. According to studies

by Bain and Company and Harvard Business School, a five per cent increase in customer retention can increase profits by up to 95%.

While the financial benefits are there, many companies are still trying to figure out where to start in improving their customer service to take them into the future and meet the goals identified above.

Closing the gap A modern customer service approach must be holistic and bring together teams, systems, and work flows inside and outside the organization to proactively serve customers versus reactive approaches that dominate the market today. Customer service organizations need to be able to Issue 3 • 2016

predict problems before they happen, drive resolution of issues instead of just reporting them and reduce the reasons why customers might call in the first place.

Customer service leaders can begin modernization with these five steps: 1. Automate, automate, automate: Customers want fast service, no longer want to call for support and prefer flexibility in the channels used to get help. Additionally, if the highest cost in a customer service organization is agent time, the only way to increase efficiency is to reduce the time spent on recurring or lowervalue tasks. Provide effortless service via a self-service portal, knowledgebase, social Q&A or chat to enable customers to obtain help when and how they want. Reduce agent load by automating recurring activities through a full workflow that connects front-end and backend systems.

2. Turn customer service into a team sport: Connect customer service to engineering, operations, finance or marketing to engage in problem solving, to drive accountability and to resolve customer issues faster. Assign issues to engineering, operations, finance or marketing for resolution.

3. Find the root cause of issues and fix them quickly: The only way to avoid taking more calls

for the same issue is to resolve the root cause of the issue.

Customer service can work with operations or engineering to identify, diagnose and implement solutions to problems quickly.

4. Capitalize on IoT and new technology: Gain real-time visibility into customer systems—servers, devices, applications or hardware—to identify potential issues before customers call. Avoid servicelevel penalties by aligning monitoring to contracts.

5. Be proactive: Support strategic work such as developing new services and continuously improving existing ones. Get a seat at the management table by leveraging advanced analytics, proactive notifications and event management to expose potential opportunities and issues.

Going beyond CRM with a modern customer service management system can help customer service leaders move from reacting to proactively improving the business by eliminating inefficient processes, improving the quality of service and freeing up time for strategic activities much needed for future growth.

Holly Simmons is senior director, customer service management at ServiceNow.

contact management | 9

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