Customer Experience
Managing the customer's experience with your organization
Being in my job, I can’t help but focus on how companies treat myself and the people around me … both the good and the bad. While we will use this forum to share some of those stories, we welcome your experiences as well.
Click on “Comment” below to share a particularly good story … or email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com.
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In general we like to keep this blog focused on the positive side of customer experience: Things that go well or how to help them go better. But every once in a while we have to shake our heads and wonder what (or if) the company was thinking.
Got a story to share? Email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com and we’ll share it.
Read the rest of entry »
In general we like to keep this blog focused on the positive side of customer experience: Things that go well or how to help them go better. But every once in a while we have to shake our heads and wonder what (or if) the company was thinking.
Got a story to share? Email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com and we’ll share it.
Read the rest of entry »
The Customer Experience Management group on LinkedIn has a rather lively discussion right now triggered around the question: What is the relationship between ‘having a good experience’ and ‘delighted customers’? And, can you create an ROI around ‘good experiences’. For my two-cents, I felt it worthwhile remembering that the customer’s perception of the value a company provides is more than the interaction with an agent … it is the entire relationship, which is driven by your differentiation / innovation strategy.
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A B2B software and services company with more than 450 CSRs was looking to standardize the service experience, making it more consistent across all agents. When reviewing C-SAT results by supervisor, the Director of Customer Service was not surprised to note that the supervisors she considered to be rising stars in her department tended to have teams with higher-than-average C-SAT scores.
What caught her attention, however, was that the same supervisors also had received higher levels of employee satisfaction and loyalty in a recent HR-sponsored employee survey.
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Employee engagement is often the primary determinant of customer satisfaction with the service experience. Innovative, valuable products and services are vital but without a friendly, helpful, knowledgeable personal encounter, those products and services quickly become commodities. In addition, it is those motivated and engaged employees who design and create and deliver those valuable products and services. The higher the emotional attachment your employees have to the company and its customers, the higher their dedication, creativity, and performance.
Looking at the call center specifically, our research has confirmed what most HR professionals have been telling us for a long time: If you give your employees incentives and opportunities they are more likely to perform well.
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About three months ago I was in Portland and stopped by a local music store looking for the sheet music to Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel my Love.” In the interests of full disclosure, I don’t play the piano as much as I hack my way through it. But I have a couple songs for which I can keep the butchering to a minimum and this was one I wanted to try to add to my repertoire.
The store was out and the clerk wrote my name on a sticky note and said he would check with the publisher and call me. A couple days later I had a voicemail on my mobile stating that that particular song was out of print.
Okay, not a big deal. Besides, Joan Osborne’s version was definitely better than mine would ever be.
Last week I had another call from the store.
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Last year as we prepared to move from Portland, Oregon to Charlottesville, Virginia, we went through that fit of unbelief as we slowly realized how much unadulterated stuff we had accumulated in 9 years of living in our beautiful Southeast Portland home. Not wanting to pay the freight for all of it, we did a pretty good job cleaning out the extra, the old, and the no-longer-needed (although the crew that moved us would probably politely disagree ... maybe not so politely).
So, my wife took two boxes of books to a local independent bookstore (the “largest independent bookstore in the country,” we’re told) to sell. They do both new and used books and make a big deal out of buying books back. After waiting in line for close to ten minutes, the clerk took a quick look at the title of the top few books in each box and said that they didn’t need any. Didn’t check their stock online. Didn’t make eye contact. Didn’t look at all the books. Didn’t even say “Sorry” or “Thanks”.
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The following is slightly adapted from a post we recently made to a LinkedIn Discussion Group (NPS Forum – Generating insights from NPS open ended question) … the bulk of the thread was a discussion about how to analyze text analytics, the benefits (or problems) of analyzing free text over traditional quantitative questions:
We advocate moving beyond "analysis" and toward "action". While you need to understand the customer's opinions (both quantitatively and qualitatively) you will be better able to make improvements in the customer experience when you include operational and behavioral data in your analysis. Not just "what is the customer saying?" but "who is that customer and what does she mean to our business?"
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An often over-looked consequence of integrating operational data with the survey platform is actually one of its most powerful. If your questionnaire or interviewer is smart enough, you can ask different questions of the customer depending upon who she is, what experience she actually had, and what she means to your business.
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