Rant&Rave

ROUNDTABLE

from good to great the role of emotion in customer engagement

Consumers often make purchasing decisions based on how a product or brand makes them feel. So how can companies ensure they are making customers feel good? Customer Focus gathered a group of senior customer service professionals at The Savoy to discuss what defines a great experience and what brands can do to attract new customers.

Here’s what was said‌

Meet the EXPERTS...

Question If every customer is looking for great customer service, what does that look like? What makes for a stand out experience?

Dennis Fois CEO Rant&Rave

Eihab Mohammed

customer engagement director Telegraph Media Group

Katharine King (KK): Whilst we want to provide good, personal customer support for our customers should they need it, we believe we’ll have provided the best experience to our customers if they have no need to contact us. I don’t think online gamblers are really looking for contact, they just want a fast and easy way to place their bets. Our customer experience programme focuses on fixing those things that make people have to contact us. If you stop getting processes wrong, it will drive loyalty.

Roger Beadle (RB): I agree, that element of fixing problems is key and it means employee empowerment is important – employees must have the freedom to fix a customer’s issue.

Emily Brunwin

member experience ma Which?

Jacky Ti

director Autotra

Jasvir Chohan

head of customer service & ICT Eastleigh Borough Council

Katharine King

head of research William Hill

Jasvir Chohan (JC): The level of service you offer is about what the customer wants and how they want it, which can be very different for each individual. It’s about making sure the process is right for all types of customers. That’s why it’s important to sit down with the customer and ask them what good looks like to them and understand how to get it right for them.

Keith Gait (KG): It’s more difficult these days because customer expectations are much higher than they used to be. And it’s also hard to know what those expectations are, because what is good for one customer is not good for another.

Rebecca Vanstone (RV): Brands like Raffles, Sandals and Virgin Holidays all deliver excellent experiences, but they have an

Keith Gait

Chief operating office NHS

Leticia G

head of c Photobox

advantage, as customers use them in emotive circumstances. How can we replicate/compete with that?

Jacky Timmings (JT): Customer expectation is key. For

example, is the Aldi customer experience any different to Sainsbury’s? You’re just going into a shop and buying groceries. But the expectation is that Sainsbury’s will offer better service because

ROUNDTABLE

Lucy Lowrie

Head of customer experience CollectPlus

Martin Sheehan

head of customer experience Alzheimer’s Society

MICHAEL WILLIAMS

director of marketing & communications University of Northampton

anager

immings

Mitchell Nova

r of customer experience ader

head of homepage media EMEA Yahoo!

Nick Boxhall-Hunt

sector manager (energy, utilities and public) Rant&Rave

Simon Korsholm head of service Hillary’s blinds

Rebecca Vanstone

er

head of customer service notonthehighstreet.com

Roger Beadle

Garcia Vergara

director of sales & marketing Hinduja Global Solutions

customer experience x

it’s more expensive. Low expectations of the service at Aldi means you don’t think really think about it, whereas you would notice if the service was poor at Sainsbury’s.

Simon Korsholm (SK): There are two types of service. It is either transactional, which warrants limited interaction and little or no wow factor, or it’s more interactive and so needs to be more caring.

JT: You need to know your customers to know how to treat them. It’s essential to make sure your CRM is completely up-to-date, which can help you to personalise your customer’s experiences.

ROUNDTABLE to our benefit. We consistently hear from customers that the service given in William Hill shops is fantastic, but we weren’t making use of that beyond feeding it back to individuals. We now gather verbatim comments and provide posters so shops can stick up the positive feedback they receive. It’s gone down really well with both customers and staff.

Lucie Lowrie (LL): Consistency across all channels is also vital. But to achieve that consistency, you have to get the employee culture right.

Q: How important is employee engagement to delivering an excellent customer experience?

KG: There’s a bit of a disconnect with employee engagement in the NHS, as the workforce is completely disengaged with the organisation – but they offer fantastic service to their patients. Perhaps it’s not how engaged the employee is with the company, but how engaged they are with customers and their needs.

KK: In retail, we weren’t good at using good customer feedback

Michael Williams (MW): We are trying to overlay customer engagement with employee engagement to see how they correlate – it’s early stages, so we’ll see what the results show – but the important thing is the recognition that employee engagement is important.

RV: Employee engagement is as important as customer engagement.

We measure this monthly and report it to the board. It’s been so effective that it’s now replicated across the whole organisation.

Eihab Mohammed (EV): We developed what we thought was a great equation to help focus the team on service. But this proved to be quite complicated for some people and new approaches have since been developed.

RV: We have HR sitting with the team running service and there are regular huddles to allow teams to share ideas for teamwork and camaraderie.

Q: How are you listening to your customers?

Mitchell Nova (MN): We don’t do surveys anymore because customer expectations move on so quickly.

Whenever we add a new service, it becomes a standard – the new normal. For example, people will no longer wait longer than 3 seconds for an Internet page to load. We stopped doing surveys because, while it offers a snapshot of the past, by the time the analysis comes around, expectations have changed again.

MW: It’s a similar problem for us in the University. There has been a tidal change in the level of service students expect since the introduction of tuition fees. As a result, the University has changed completely in just six years. Surveys are no good because they don’t offer real-time feedback. We now have online communities to allow students to talk amongst themselves and we monitor that instead. It’s good to see we have advocates who counteract the negative comments.

Emily Brunwin (EB): We are able to use customer feedback to shape some operational level stuff, such as changing our IVR – but we need to communicate it to other departments to get them to change the processes that are causing problems in the first place.

RB: It is easy for feedback to be skewed if people only want to leave negative comments. One of our clients has abandoned postinteraction surveys for this reason and now use analytics across all their different contact channels to try to determine the level of service being offered.

KK: Site feedback or voice of the customers programmes are good tools because we can identify common problems and then change them instantly. For example, our ‘cash-in your bet’ button on the website was in the wrong place and people kept hitting it by accident.

ROUNDTABLE Q: What else are you doing to try to improve the customer experience?

Leticia Garcia-Vergara (LGV): We’ve set up a customer ambassadors team.

We meet with them regularly, get inspiration and use their feedback to drive change.

We got so many calls and contacts about it, so we moved it, which addressed this particular problem.

JT: Our biggest challenge at the moment is making people across the business understand that they play a part in the experience of the customer.

We want to get to the point where something affecting just one customer is important, no matter where it originates.

JC: We are trying to push interactions into back office functions so that

processes are aligned as tightly as possible with customer expectations.

We’re making sure there is a lot of communication between departments so that what customer service is saying to customers is joined up with what other functions can deliver.

We’ve even integrated our CRM system into the website so our digital offering is joined up too.

EB: We’re building a customer intelligence database for agent feedback, which is used to inform our research and policies. At the moment the advisors don’t see what happens to their feedback, but it would be great to be able to tell them where the information has gone and how it helps the business.

RV: We’ve planned out the full customer service journey and mapped it out on the office walls. Any changes mean we can update the journey wall in real time and it means we can always talk to our tech team in their own language and get changes made quickly.

JT: We’ve removed the hierarchy structure in our business to empower quick decisions. Most managers report directly into the Board.

LL: We always mystery shop and measure what real customers want, that way we know what is working and how to change things. This insight is fed up the chain and this stimulates great change.

A very productive and insightful roundtable, the discussion revealed that while many companies are still struggling with what customers expect, great strides are being made in trying to tailor the experience to individual customers. Employee engagement and listening to customer feedback are viewed as vital tools for improving performance and providing business insight. However, it’s clear that traditional methods of gathering feedback are no longer fit for purpose, as customer expectations and behaviour simply change too quickly. What businesses need now are more innovative approaches to gathering actionable information and communicating it to the people that matter.