Customer Management IQ  

Hilton has been raising the bar by providing outstanding customer service with an at home call center representative t program comprising 40 percent of call center representatives. Hilton has saved money with at home versus in house while getting quality call center representative staff. Michelle Rowan, former director of Customer Contacts and Performance Management, talks about how Hilton successfully increased voice of the customer (VOC) and the company’s quality scores. Rowan is passionate about reaping the benefits of an expanded talent pool, valuable for the company, the employee, and for the customer. With decreasing budgets and off-shoring tax law changes, domestic work-at-home programs for call centers are growing exponentially.A work at home strategy, according to Rowan, increases quality, and cuts costs. Homesourcing is making waves in the call center world through improved call center technology as well. The good news includes the major technology improvements enable straight-forward transition to the at-home call center model, reduced capital investment, and reduced labor costs. Hilton successfully reduced recruiting costs dramatically by creating an employee referral program. While the concept of at-home agents has been around for several years, interest and utilization have grown exponentially because of the current economic climate and associated cost pressures. Also, President Obama’s initiatives around removal of tax breaks for offshoring U.S. jobs (which will invariably drive up out-sourcing costs). In this podcast Rowan will also dive in the customer focused virtual training program headed up by the Hilton and discuss how homesourcing greatly reduced Hilton’s overhead costs within the call center.

According to branding phenomenon John Gerzema, the best brands today communicate excitement, dynamism and creativity. So what do companies such as Pixar, Wikipedia, Adidas and the iPhone have that others don’t? We asked Gerzema how he collected and analyzed the data to compile a chart of the highest performing brands today. What he found was sobering: The amount of trust customers place in a brand today is a ghost of what it was more than 10 years ago. What was a consumer crisis has become a confidence crisis. Gerzema’s research shows a trust virus that has affected a myriad of products and services. There is a sea of change in customer behavior, with a return to bedrock values and ways of living. Customers are forcing reappraisal on their lives and the shift is now on liquidity and saving cash. Companies need to find new ways to connect! According to Gerzema, customers are moving from anxiety to action—and companies need to figure out how they will approach this post-crisis consumerism. Did you know that currently 68 percent of Americans carry a library card? American optimism has been rocked by what is perceived to be a lack of a safety net. Customers have settled into an era of hardship and challenge, and people are being more self reliant and resourceful. The new customer is selectively seeking quality to make things last; and smart marketers are leveraging “durable living,” or products that offer future utility. Are you focusing on empathy and respect, or have you engendered a relationship with your consumer? In this podcast interview with John Gerzema, leave your platitudes at the door, and find out how your brand can communicate a message of authenticity, energy and trust.

Zappos--have you heard of them? If not, you must be living under a rock! Zappos is written about everywhere in the business press for their absolutely stellar customer service. Known for their completely unorthodox customer service culture, Zappos views any expense that enhances the customer experience as a marketing cost. The company believes the opportunity to go the extra mile for the customer generates revenue. The company is fanatical about tracking customer purchases and keeping track of customer history. Zappos also boasts an extensive CRM system with an actual warehouse called Genghis, where the whole history of the item is kept in the system. The company and its call center operate differently than most of its competitors, because the call center throws out the standard measurement tactics. The call center representatives don?s use scripts or have quotas or call time limits. Zappos actually encourages customers to call the contact center, and the call center representatives frequently offer free upgrades. Zappos attributes its customer engagement through its 10 Zappos Core values, which include passion and determination, embracing and driving change, building a positive team and family spirit, doing more with less, pursuing growth and learning, fun/weirdness, adventure and open-mindedness, as well as being humble. In this podcast you will hear from Zappos call center managers Maura Sullivan and Rob Siefker, who have both been with Zappos since its early days in San Francisco. They have watched the company grow while maintaining its start-up culture and feel. You will find out Zappos secret ingredient for success within their customer service culture and their call center.

The economic crisis has put pressure on marketing budgets and managers who need to provide quantifiable results for every dollar spent. Before the economic crisis determining ROI might have been a luxury, but now it is no longer an option. According to Les Moeller, partner at Booz and Co. and co-author of The Four Pillars of Profit Driven Marketing, each year billions of dollars are spent on marketing. However, more often than not, most of this cash disappears into thin air, and marketing executives are left wondering if they got any return on the investments. Moeller argues that until now there has been no proven system for measuring marketing ROI. The Four Pillars is the first book to offer a practical, proven framework that helps marketers capture the metrics essential to determining ROI and use them to develop an overall marketing strategy based on accurate ROI figures. In this podcast Moeller makes the case for ROI and measurement and argues that by successfully integrating analytic firepower, decision support, processes and people development, a company can optimize marketing dollars, better connect with customers and watch returns grow dramatically. He unearths the mystery of marketing ROI and explains how to improve ROI by understanding, classifying and choosing analytics. In addition to analytics, Moeller describes how and why marketers need to put the analytics to work with the right decision-support systems and tools. Moeller also unveils how to establish processes that integrate the analytics and tools into operations and use organizational alignment to assure company-wide acceptance and execution.