Living the Customer Experience

Sabio’s Consultancy Director, Ken Hitchen, reports on an Executive Debate that focused on the Customer Experience, and provided its ten senior participants with the opportunity to listen to real conversations between customers and some of the contact centres of leading players in their own industries.

Taking part in the Executive Debate were senior customer service professionals from some of the UK’s largest organisations, all of whom were keen to learn and share current best practice from their colleagues in other sectors. Attending were:

Angie Court who, as Director of Customer Service for Avis is responsible for the company’s customer experience across 112 countries
Boots the Chemist’s Head of Customer Care, Graham Hardy, who sees his main challenge as improving service levels in a world where customers are becoming more and more demanding all the time
Glyn Hughes, Head of Central Sales and Services for the Derbyshire Building Society, whose main focus was currently integrating the Society’s different sales channels
Ashley Machin, who is in charge of all operations and servicing for Lloyds TSB’s credit card business and was previously the Lloyds TSB Group’s Customer Service Director
Dyson’s Customer Service Director, Jocelyn Stewart-Grumbar, who is responsible for the company’s call centre and field service operations
Nicolas Petrovic, Eurostar’s Director of Customer Service, who sees his task as managing everything that the customer sees
Broadsystem’s Head of Operations and Technology, David Bluman, who helps the company’s marketing services outsourcing customers to get a single view of their customers across a range of channels including CRM, contact centres, SMS, websites and e-mail delivery
Oke Eleazu, Prudential UK’s Customer Service Delivery Director, responsible for customer service delivery across all channels including IFAs, representing some 3,500 people

With delegates of this calibre, it was important to get the debate going quickly. We kick-started our session with some real-life examples of how leading UK organisations currently handle their customers. It’s an approach we often use at Sabio as part of our Customer Experience Audit work, where we use one of our senior consultants to trial the customer experience. This way we can get a feel for how customer’s really experience an organisation rather than hear what customer service teams actually think is happening.

By using real world examples we’d provide the Customer Management Executive Debate attendees with a clear focus, and help them to both identify and address some of the key issues that will help them to improve their own customers’ experience.

The panel started out by listening to a call with a major airline to discuss booking flights from Heathrow to Paris. Before each vision clip, we talked about our perceptions of each organisation – with the airline for example, everyone agreed that the company called was very strong in areas such as its website and self-service, so the expectation was that the contact centre experience would be equally positive.

Aligning the contact centre with the brand experience

Our panellists’ immediate perception from the call was that the airline seemed to prefer customers to use its website, as the agent pointed out that tickets could be booked online and that there was a premium charged for each ticket booked via the call centre. A number of panellists observed that the agent’s voice was inappropriate for the airline’s perceived brand, and that the agent needed some help in developing sales closing skills. Another observation was that despite the caller spending one minute 40 seconds in the IVR, there was no effort to capture information about the caller, with the time instead being used to communicate the company’s data protection policy which wasn’t really appropriate for this call.

Matching sales initiatives with contact centre operational readiness

The Financial Services sector has always been a key driver in the contact centre industry. Before listening to a Customer Experience call with an established UK building society, there was a discussion around how financial services organisations dealt with what the panel agreed was the key disconnect between the marketing and promotion of their products, and their operational set-up and readiness to deal with the logical outcome of those campaigns in the contact centre.

For example, it’s all very well dropping a rate by one per cent to attract more customers, but how can you make sure that your contact centre staff are ready for the influx of calls. Surely if an agent’s target for product sales, pre-offer, was 25 new customers a week, then the introduction of a newer, far more competitive product ought to see that target increase accordingly with agents adapting quickly to their newer more competitive market position? One alternative discussed was to not just reward agents on their sales volumes, but on their ratio of calls to sales.

Financial services organisations often use multiple number strategies to help pre-qualify callers. Our example with the building society showed how this can cause confusion, as it proved initially difficult to get in touch with their contact centre as both directory enquiries and the website led our caller in different directions.

At least when we connected the call was free. This raised interesting observations around the general use of 0800 numbers. With this 0800 example, half of the call time was actually spent in the IVR – effectively a cost that was self-generated by the building society. This raised a question about whether it is better to spend this money resourcing the call centre to a higher level and just answering the phone. The call was also a good example of where operational issues had overtaken the customer experience. Originally designed as a freephoneservice to support new mortgage accounts, the same customers were now using the 0800 number to service their ongoing requirements. The debate continued around whether financial service providers should or shouldn’t use 0800 numbers, with one panellist commenting ‘you’re either 0800 or you’re not, but you need to be consistent’.

Customer acquisition or customer retention?

It was felt that while the financial service sector was putting a lot of focus on outbound sales, it wasn’t maximising the potential of calls coming into the contact centre. What was clear for many of those at the Executive Debate was that even in a market like financial services where consumers are increasingly informed about rates and competitive offers, there’s still a place for good service that can overcome the rate-driven argument. Glyn Hughes from the Derbyshire Building Society pointed out that in his contact centre, the agent who dealt with a mortgage application at the beginning would become the case owner for that customer and stay with them right through to moving in. It’s an excellent example of enhanced customer service, but it’s a feature that simply wouldn’t come across in a Mortgage Best Buy Table!

Who do you trust with your customers?

Outsourcing can make a lot of sense for organisations, helping them to manage their customer interactions, potentially proving more cost-effective – dramatically so if the process is offshored to lower cost locations. Our panelists listened to two calls – one with a popular financial services provider and the other with a major department store’s catalogue service - that clearly showed that there were real brand risks associated with outsourcing core customer service processes.

The first call with the store showed how difficult it sometimes is for customers to get in touch with a business. Directory enquiries initially connected our caller to the department store’s head-office in London, we then had to redial another number for the catalogue operation. During this call the agent wasn’t familiar with the product requested, seemed to be unfamiliar with delivery processes, and rather than trying to help the customer identify the product they wanted the customer to make it easier for them by providing theBin Number.

In this instance there was clearly a significant disconnect between the company’s brand image and the service actually delivered to the customer, and the call illustrated the requirement for organisations to be consistent across their multiple brands and channels.

The next call was with a financial services vendor that promises to pick up the phone when it rings. It took our caller four and a half minutes before they got to speak with an agent. As one panellist, commented: “so much for 80:20!” A wrong IVR choice transferred the call to the wrong agent in Norwich, it was then sent to queue in another call centre in Birmingham before being finally transferred to an agent in Chester.

Providing the call works, these kind of transfers are no great barrier for the customer – it’s when it doesn’t work that callers get frustrated. Again the service was being delivered for this organisation by an outsourced services provider, and in six separate calls, the call routing solution didn’t once work. With a total call time of seven minutes, for our featured call, it proved a very expensive way for the company to end up simply transferring our caller to a better credit card transfer offer that was available on their website.

Having listened to these calls, the Executive Debate panellists felt they raised a number of relevant customer experience issues. We know that outsourcing services is a highly competitive sector, and even more so in the credit card market. There couldn’t be an area more applicable for organisations to pursue excellent customer service as a key competitive differentiator.

However, for some credit card organisations the logic isn’t as clear. If, for example, customer acquisition is the main competitive driver then there’s maybe less room in the equation for a higher quality customer experience.

When the product isn’t enough

When a consumer electronics company’s brand has always stood for the highest quality and innovation, it’s important that its different customer channels match up to the brand promise. With the company our mystery-shopper called, however, the experience was quite different.

Having seen a print advert for a new MP3 player our caller had to work through directory enquiries to find an 0870 contact centre number as the only information channel the manufacturer had provided was the web. All of the calls to this number resulted in a long wait – the longest was over ten minutes before connecting to an agent, with customers held on an IVR system that repeatedly explained that this was not the number for other product lines it offers.

When finally connected, there was little brand ambience or enthusiasm, and upon asking for more details of the MP3 player in the current ad, our caller was told that they offered eight such players, with the implication that he should be more specific! Some of our panellists felt that the call was frustrating, others that the agent was borderline rude – whatever the interpretation, we were again left with a massive disconnect between the brand promise, the different channels available and the actual customer experience.

One panellist felt that the agent should have been aware of the company’s current MP3 player promotion. In their contact centre they constantly streamed their current ads on large plasma screens, so that agents were always up-to-speed with current offers. Another felt that the call simply showed how customer service was simply viewed as a functional adjunct to the product sell. To a certain extent this was fine – so long as the service actually was functional! Either way the group conclusion was that this was a customer interaction the electronics company’s Chairman wouldn’t want to hear.

In addition to these calls, the delegates at the Customer Management Executive Debate also listened to calls with other organisations including a car rental company, a train operator, an energy provider and one of the UK’s leading holiday operators. Despite such a variety, there were a number of common conclusions that we all drew.

Firstly, even though most of the calls involved some form of waiting in a queue or IVR system, not a single agent apologised for the delay. Perhaps they didn’t know – in which case they should have, or perhaps there was no policy in place – in which case there should be. Either way, as a snapshot of today’s customer experience for the consumer at large it showed that many organisations still have a long way to go.

Moving towards a user-centred contact centre approach

What’s clear from many of these calls is that organisations have built their call flows and processes around themselves, and then tried to make the customer experience fit their own particular view of the world. What’s our process? What number do we want them to call on to fit our requirements? How can we make the calls fit our reporting requirements? These organisations are thinking about their own operations, not the customer experience.

We need to turn these processes around, and start designing our call flows around the customer. How can we make it easier for the customer to contact us? How can we make sure that our contact centre is aligned with our web and retail operations? How can we make sure our agents are ready to support our customer needs? It’s this type of user-centred design that can start to make a real difference for customers.

But if we’re to get there we need to start making some changes in terms of how we run and measure the performance of our contact centres. It’s not just about simplistic measures such as call duration or sales volumes. Instead we need to think in terms of satisfied customers, and the number of calls agents need to make their sales targets.

When we go in and do a Contact Centre Audit, we obviously look at existing metrics, but invariably the numbers reported are those that the management wants to hear. We’d recommend instead that contact centres focus on new kinds of KPI that actually report on the business data you really need to know about. Agent churn is obviously an issue, for example, but instead how about focusing on Average Duration of Service for Agents.

Similarly, don’t just aim for a standard 90/10 measure, instead we find that those organisations that strive towards continuous improvement are the ones that offer a consistently better customer experience. Once the KPIs have been established, then management can used exception-based reporting to get nearer to their goals.

From my own perspective it was fascinating to discuss these calls with some of the country’s leading customer service professionals. The process again showed the benefits of living the service from the customer’s viewpoint. Not just as a quarterly or monthly gesture but as an active part of an ongoing commitment to improving the whole customer experience.