Customer Management IQ  

Chris Elliott is a consumer advocate for the travel industry. Elliott will tell you he has jet fuel in his veins. He has devoted his journalism career to reporting on unsolvable problem issues in the travel industry. Customer Service excellence and travel have historically been like oil and water. But Elliott aims to change all that and wants to one day be obsolete. But considering the state of the travel industry the end of his work as a consumer advocate and journalist is nowhere in sight. Elliott has made waves by reporting on customer service flukes. Everything from posting a video by a JetBlue passenger on YouTube who refused to give up a video she took of a fight on the plane and was threatened with arrest. In an era where travel has become commoditized, customer service has been relegated to the backburner. The glossy travel magazines don’t expose the negative customer service interactions prevalent today. But social media has brought an end to this customer service utopian view. Elliott covers the stories that mainstream media outlets choose to turn its back on. Most of the major players in the travel industry assumes customers are only interested in price but forget customer service. They assume that service isn’t important. Service with a smile is no longer part of the travel experience. Customer service surveys of the travel industry are worse than that of the IRS. Social media has changed the power dynamic in the travel industry and now this has been turned on its head. Elliott talks to Customer Management IQ’s Blake Landau about the travel industry in the social economy and why customers now are more influential than ever, and how customers can be prepared.

Customer feedback comes in various forms. It can be implicit or explicit, solicited in a controlled manner or given freely in a peer-to-peer setting. Utopy, a provider of speech analytics, is interested in revolutionizing call center speech optimization. Colette Yee, a graduate of Wharton Business School and Director of Marketing for Utopy, sheds light on customer feedback and new trends in leveraging voice of the customer for profit. This voice of the customer feedback on products, services, promotions, delivery or billing is most commonly gathered through surveys, product reviews and ratings. However, surveys – be it online, offline or over the phone – tend to be after-the-fact and delayed. And with increasing survey fatigue among consumers, the response rate could often drop to less than 5 percent. That is too little, too late. More often than not, the questions within surveys are not specific enough for pragmatic intervention, and the customer responses are aggregated and averaged out with little direction for corrective action. If one of our customers gives an interaction or a product a score of 5, from a range of 1 to 10 in a survey, what do 5 mean? And if on average, a product receives a score of 7 from a range of 1 to 10, how does that tell us how and where to improve? Given the inherent limitations in surveys, there is another often overlooked source of customer feedback—the actual interaction or conversation between our customer and our company representative. This conversation provides a unique insight into the customer’s perception, concerns, needs, future behavior and overall experience at a highly critical moment of truth.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the economy experienced a boom. Big Box retail was in. According to Robert Spector, author of THE NORDSTROM WAY: The Inside Story of America's #1 Customer Service Company, it’s out! His book The Nordstrom Way was the first and only up-close and personal look at how this company became the national standard of customer service and spent 17 weeks on the Business Week Bestseller List, and was nominated for the Booz Allen Hamilton/Financial Times Global Business Award. In this podcast Spector talks about the inspiration for his newest book The Mom & Pop Store: How the Unsung Heroes of the American Economy are Surviving and Thriving (September 2009). Spector talks about growing up working in his parents butcher shop in New Jersey and His parents were immigrants and through stellar customer service were able to create a bustling and profitable business. Spector believes entrepreneurs are going to save our economy. He says entrepreneurs are going to bring back the economy through a focus on customer experience. He says consumers are starting to understand the value of community. Customers, according to Spector, are returning to “good old fashioned neighborly values.” Customers want to keep the money in the community. Customers have lost faith in financial and political institutions. In this podcast Spector sheds light on everything from this year’s shareholders meeting with Blake Nordstrom to why we are seeing a shift in how Americans do business.

Editor's Note: Hear more from Gary Schwartz at IQPC's Customer Feedback Week conference in September. For more information about the event, click here. Gary Schwartz, an active speaker at IQPC’s 2009 Customer Feedback Week conference, is excited about turning data into profit through the voice of the customer. He claims that every business must take voice of the customer seriously. Schwartz wants you to enable your customers to talk about what they want, when they want, how they want. This customer feedback needs to be integrated with the business back-office experience. The business needs to know, in real-time, when the customers are having an interaction; and the company needs to be proactive when necessary. Customer service needs to solicit customer feedback and capture customer feedback in aggregate. This will gather the full voice of the customer across the business. Schwartz calls this event-driven solicitation of feedback. In today’s downturn economy the business needs to bring other information into the survey set to know the most profitable customers. If a customer reports extreme dissatisfaction, customer service needs to act on that right away. You need to be able to collect that information through whichever channel the customer wants. The business must make it easier for the customer to offer feedback, because the feedback can eventually be translated into profit.

Editor's note: In this podcast, David Cicarrelli of Voices.com describes how to partner live chat with CRM systems. Hear more from Cicarrell, a speaker at IQPC’s Call Centre Week Canada conference in August. Learn about the event here. David Cicarrelli is interested in matchmaking. The founder of Voices.com, Cicarrelli saw a demand for improved customer service offerings and launched his company, a matchmaker between buyers and sellers of voice recordings. Cicarrelli is interested in improving the customer experience through a simple integration of live chat with customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Voices.com is interested in premium customer care and improving customer management for other companies, in addition to its own shop. In looking at live chat technology, Cicarrelli claims the number one mistake businesses make is treating live chat like it’s e-mail. In leveraging the CRM software offered by Salesforce, Voices.com made a system to capture customer data while engaging with the customer in real-time. This greatly reduced administrative work in addition to time delays for the customer caused by waves of e-mail. Voices.com leverages LivePerson, a live chat solution, to respond to customer inquiries in real time. This can include anything from a sales lead to answering the inquiry of an existing customer. It helps to increase time to resolution, streamlining support cases and reducing overall e-mail. Live chat, a specialized skill, just like outbound telephone sales and support, needs to be leveraged appropriately and carefully. In this podcast with Customer Management IQ’s Blake Landau, Cicarrelli, who is also a presenter at IQPC’s Call Centre Week Canada conference in August, explains how you can create your own match by joining live chat with CRM to clean up and improve your customer service offering.

Colin Shaw, the author of "The DNA of Customer Experience" has caused a stir in the customer service community with his unique perspectives on differentiating your customer service offering. Shaw believes emotions will 'Drive' or 'Destroy' value in your business. Shaw and his team believe they can answer the question 'Where is the Money?', in relation to improving the emotional engagement. Shaw has created the "Emotional Signature," the culmination of two years of research, conducted in the US and the UK. If you are an advocate of 'Net Promoter Score' (NPS) then you can not afford to ignore 'Emotional Signature™' as it will tell you how to raise your 'NPS' and gain long-term competitive advantage!