How Can Contact Center Leaders Avoid the 'Mechanical' Approach to Metrics, and Become More Customer Experience Focused?

By Dan MacDougall

Contact center metrics are developed to measure operational performance (e.g. Calls Answered Live, Escalation Rate, First Contact Resolution, and Call Volume). They are useful to identify and drive areas of continuous improvement in staffing requirements, training opportunities, agent to agent consistency, and mean time to resolve to mention a few. These are what I consider "mechanical" as they show how the contact center is "functioning", however, do not necessarily tell how successful the contact center is at actually serving the customer and how its agents are contributing to the overall customer experience.

How do contact center leaders become more customer-experience focused? 

• Be mindful that the customer is a human being with emotions, not a mechanical object. Human beliefs and actions are not always logical or reasonable, especially when something goes wrong. Most of the time, callers are not going to be in their "happy place". They are calling because they are probably in a state of frustration and need help.

• Realize that the contact center is uniquely positioned to not just fix the problem, but also has the opportunity to provide the help the customer needs and directly contribute to how the customer feels about the brand. 

• Also, consider that the customer directly affects the way of life for everyone in the company. My father used to tell me that "whoever has the money is in control". Most of us work because we have families, mortgages, car payments and taxes. When a customer is emotionally positive about a brand or service, they are likely to invest more of their money into it. They also have the power to take their money somewhere else.

How do we then collect metrics on customer experience? How do we know we are truly customer experience-focused?

Remember, the customer is an emotional being, not a mechanical object. Measuring how well a contact center is at providing a great customer experience will depend on how customers interact with the brand or service and how creative the contact center leader can be with that information. Direct customer feedback is probably the best method for determining how customer-focused a brand is. The contact center leader will need to invest time interpreting customer feedback data to determine what defines a great customer experience for their specific customer base, and how well the contact center is contributing to it.

Customer experience is more than just providing answers and quick fixes. Customer experience is how we can meet and exceed the customer's expectations; how the customer feels about the entire journey with the brand. It's what keeps them coming back for more and sharing the experience within their circle of influence.

For nearly 30 years I have enjoyed supporting and developing next generation technologies, and the people that make them happen. In my humble beginnings as a Consumer Electronics Technician for Radio Shack back in 1989, I represented the brand by repairing the latest "high tech" devices for its franchise and retail customers. This provided me with many opportunities to work directly with people in the service center and in their homes and businesses. In 1994, I was hired into high-tech geek heaven by Intel as a Manufacturing Technician where I directly contributed to the development and production of microprocessors. I eventually moved back into full-time customer support in 2000 when I joined Automation Support as a Call Center Agent. I have been in my current position since 2007 as a second and third-level Systems Support Engineer providing technical support for Intel's world-wide Process Control Systems infrastructure. I enjoy working with a broad range of cultures and people, and actively advocate the importance of internal customer care. Connect: LinkedIn | Twitter

"Follow the Leader", Featuring Al Hopper

What are your thoughts on industry standards, with regards to contact center metrics?

Why do we use metrics? To determine our success at something. In sports we use metrics like yards gained, strike outs, or minutes played per quarter. Those metrics work because it's a standard measurement between teams and even eras.

Industry standards are the same; they allow business leaders to learn how well they are doing when compared to others. However, it is important to understand that not all industries are the same and require different weights on different metrics. Banks might not want to measure their Net Promoter Score against sporting goods stores. Or big box stores might not want to compare Same Store Sales with a coffee shop.

However, banks checking Customer Satisfaction against other banks makes much better sense. Bottom line, I like using industry standard metrics, as long as they make sense for the industry being measured, and they measure something that can tell us how we are really doing.

Al is an Army veteran who has over 20 years in Customer service. He spent 12 years working in the main contact center for a major international bank.

He has been nationally recognized as a thought leader in social media customer service and contact center management for his contributions online, and off, by ICMI, Huffington Post contributors, Microsoft, and Conversocial, among others.

Al is also a cohost of the weekly Twitter chat focused on all aspects of customer service, using the hashtag #CustServ.

Follow the Leader: LinkedIn | Twitter

Customer Experience is Driving the Need for Ethnographic Research to Understand Why Customers Do What They Do

By Darcy Bevelacqua

Customer Experience is Everywhere

From marketing to customer service to the boardroom, it’s recognized that personalized, efficient and engaging customer experience drives customer acquisition, brand loyalty and customer lifetime value (LTV).

The focus has shifted from knowing how the customer interacts with your brand to understanding the why behind their behavior so you can personalize their experience across channels, locations and time.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The customer journey is the entire end-to-end experience that a customer has with your brand. It is not a single touchpoint or interaction but the collection of interactions at all touchpoints over a period of time. We know that customer experience problems are most likely to occur across channels and the best way to understand them is a detailed understanding of the customer journey.

McKinsey found that companies that understand the end to end customer journey and provide a good experience along the entire journey can expect to increase customer satisfaction by 20%, improve sales by 15%, reduce churn and decrease service costs as much as 20%.

The best way to understand your customer journey is to “map “ the customer journey. The map is a visual way of representing the customer’s story from the point at which they first become aware of your product or service, through purchasing, use, and churn.

Ethnographic Research Helps Us Understand the Customer Journey

In order to understand the customer story, we rely on ethnographic research. Ethnography is the study of human behavior in real life environments. The researchers interact with the participants in their culture through observation and questions to learn more about them. The research provides a deeper understanding of the problem and its impact on the person and their environment.

A good researcher is essential in winning people’s trust and confidence so they can accurately immerse themselves into the lives of their target audience, and understand the why behind why people do what they do. This is important as you can only design a better solution if you actually understand the “problem” and the “tasks” that the person is trying to accomplish in the context of what it “means” to the individuals involved.

How Ethnography Works

Short ethnographic studies can be very useful for understanding the “customer journey” and customer experience. For example: in order to understand the way in which a consumer

purchases eyeglasses, an ethnographer might conduct an ethnographic study by working and interacting with the customers in a retail setting for a few days. The researcher will use participant observation, interviews and surveys to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish and how the current environment contributes to a good or bad customer experience.

Ethnographic research is used at the beginning of the customer journey mapping process in order to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish and how they feel about what they are experiencing. It is a key part of identifying the “moments of truth” and “pain points” associated with the customer journey.

The moments of truth are the places that the customer considers essential to the customer experience. These moments of truth can be positive or negative, but they are essential sets in building a lasting customer relationship and in building trust between the organization and the prospect. Pain points are the areas of the customer journey that are not going well and do not meet the customer’s expectations.

The researcher may take photographs or video of the environment and the customers when they are beginning to document the customer journey. For example, in the case of purchasing eyeglasses we observed women taking photos of each other. When we inquired what they were doing, they indicated they were far sighted and unable to see the new eyeglass frames in the mirrors provides by the retailer, without their current prescription glasses. As a researcher, this information was noted as a poor customer experience and one that needed to be added to our list of things to be solved.

In addition, when consumers first entered the retail store they didn’t know how to “look” for different eyeglass frames. Customers couldn’t distinguish the difference between men’s and woman’s glasses and they were nervous that they might select glasses that did not look attractive on themselves. As a researcher, we were able to uncover consumer’s feelings about glasses and how they reflected on the personal images they wanted to convey. This information would also be added to the list of things to be solved so future customers could easily find the eyeglasses that would enhance their personal image and were appropriate based on their sexual orientation.

Advantages of Ethnography

One of the main advantages associated with ethnographic research is that ethnography can help identify and analyze unexpected issues. When conducting other types of studies, which are not based on observation or interaction, you can miss unexpected issues. This can happen either because questions are not asked, or respondents neglect to mention something. An ethnographic researcher’s on-site presence helps mitigate this risk because the issues will (hopefully) become directly apparent to the researcher.

Ethnography’s other main benefit is generally considered to be its ability to deliver a detailed and faithful representation of users’ behaviors and attitudes. Because of its subjective nature, an ethnographic study (with a skilled researcher) can be very useful in uncovering and analyzing relevant user attitudes and emotions.

Disadvantages of Ethnography

One of the main criticisms levelled at ethnographic studies is the amount of time they take to conduct. Because of its richer output, an ethnographic study will tend to take longer to generate and analyze its data than a standard survey. It is also possible that subjects may not act naturally during a short study. We control for this by repeating the observations in multiple locations with different researchers to try to eliminate as much bias as possible.

Conclusion

Ethnographic research is a valuable tool to really understand why customers do what they do. Good research will help you uncover new needs and help you identify how you improve the customer journey. The customer’s emotions and what they are trying to accomplish can be noted at each touchpoint on your journey map in order to help you “optimize” the customer journey to eliminate the pain points and deliver a better overall customer experience.

Darcy Bevelacqua is a Customer Experience and CRM Strategist. She is currently the CEO of Success Works CX, a leading customer experience consulting company with a staff of experts in market research, personal development, campaign planning, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, journey mapping and design thinking.

Darcy has a BA in Psychology from Hood College and a Master’s in Organizational Design from the New School for Social Research. She also has advanced work in Gamification (Univ of PA), Design Thinking and Innovation (UVA), as well as Human Centered Design (UCA-San Diego). Darcy lives in upstate NY in the summer and in Sarasota, FL in the winter. She loves warm weather and sunlight.

Connect: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email 

Audio Deep Dives: Listening Analysis Made Simple

By Diana Aviles

The core part of Speech Analytics that sometimes gets lost amongst the high powered metadata and reporting functionalities are the audio insights themselves. The whole purpose of SA is to have the ability to analyze specific words and phrases mentioned in customer/agent interactions. To SA newcomers, I have found that once the dust settles from all of the extensive training, there’s this feeling of “What’s next for me?” that begins to settle in.

When we talk about “Deep Dives” or listening analysis, we are generally talking about taking a random sample of calls and listening for specific criteria within the audio. Sample sizes can vary from 25 calls to 10,000 (yes, I have randomized 10,000 calls before). Of course the criteria you can look for is endless and that’s oftentimes where people get overwhelmed. There is the fear of looking for too much or too little in a deep dive. Also, there are complicated grey areas which you will need to account for. Here are some dos and don’ts for making deep dives a bit easier to manage.


Don't

• Create “mile-long wish lists” - It’s tempting to want to look at every little thing in one go but depending on the type of deep dive you’re doing, it Is recommended you look at the data in phases. Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are your insights.
  

• Randomize/Size the project incorrectly - Samples require balance to them. If you are trying to look at data from two different markets and for the majority your sample only reflects one of them then it goes without saying that your data is tainted.
  

• Improperly account for out of scope data (OOS) - Some listening analyses will have criteria that cannot be counted into the main pool of data. An example of this would be if you’re deep diving into cable box issues and you encounter a caller who is having issues with his phone service. His call does not meet the requirements for the project and must be bucketed to indicate that. Going back to the prior point of proper randomization and sizing, you need to account for OOS data by making sure that your sample is 20-30% above the total amount you’re looking for. Example: For a 100 call listening project send over 120 calls to account for the possibility of OOS data.

Do

• Keep questions clear and concise – It is important to keep the wording of your questions or standards clear in order to avoid confusing auditors (if you are performing a listening analysis with more than one person). You want to avoid causing people to second guess how they are observing and documenting information.
  

• Have job aids available for reference - I work mainly in telecom and we deal with a lot of technical issues so while I am pretty seasoned with troubleshooting most issues I do like to have a reference for items I seldom come across which I may be rusty on. If you outsource your listening analysis this is also critical as the listening team may not be as familiar with the line of business they are auditing as well as you are.
  

• Maintain uniform data - There is nothing more annoying than having data that is all over the place. I am a fan of using conditional drop downs in Excel to restrict what is entered in the cell and only permitting certain cells to have open text. I recommend the core and secondary drivers you are looking to capture be placed in a drop down for this reason. I also recommend you avoid heavy use of “other” as a driver to prevent data pollution.
  

• Require high level summaries of calls reviewed - I like to ask for two reasons- Reason #1: when it comes to “scrubbing” or cleaning up the data (before I start building charts and reporting against it,) the summaries allow me to see any major trends and observations captured OUTSIDE of the main listening project. Reason #2: to ensure the audio in question was ACTUALLY reviewed. In some studies I ask for a time stamp to determine where the criterion in the call was hit for as a method to maintain data integrity.
  

There are other related topics relevant to deep dives such as presenting and “data cleansing” which may be subject for discussion in later articles. These are a few general suggestions I have for people who are beginning their Speech Analytics journey and looking to start on high level deep dives. Once you get a few deep dives under your belt they will become second nature to you. The goal is to make sure that all your data insights make sense and can be organized in an efficient and concise manner.

Editors note: This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.

Diana Aviles has more than 5 years of Quality Assurance experience in a call center environment. Her objective is to simultaneously promote and educate Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution and overall customer experience.

Follow Diana on LinkedIn.

Keys to Contact Center Consistency and Compliance

By Mike Aoki

I recently had a conversation with Brad Sellors, Managing Director at InfiniteKM, regarding knowledge management systems (KMS), consistency and compliance. Here are our questions and answers. Note, Brad’s responses have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Why is the issue of compliance important for contact centers? Contact centers need to provide accurate information to their customers. That is especially true for industries such as banking and insurance, which are heavily regulated. Contact center Agents need the most accurate and up to date information. Otherwise, a lot of damage - to the company and the client - can be caused by Agents who misread or omit important information when responding to clients.

How can a knowledge management system help Agents be compliant? Being able to quickly search for the right knowledge article equips Agents with the right answers. To maintain that informational accuracy, you should also set up an authorization/review process so, key documents are routinely reviewed by the right stakeholders.

How can you ensure Agents actually understand the information? You can create online quizzes to test for understanding. So when an Agent arrives for their shift, they can review new information updates, pass the quiz and help their customers. This can all be done via the knowledge management platform.

How can you measure and track compliance? Some knowledge management systems can track who is clicking on daily compliance updates. For example, Agents can track what they previously reviewed to see if they missed any updates while on vacation. Team Leaders can track which Agents still need to review daily updates, while Managers can track which Team Leader groups are up to date. You can even make it mandatory for employees to review certain information on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so, your organization stays in compliance with external regulations.

How does this help a company operating in a highly regulated industry? Depending upon the jurisdiction, auditors and regulators may require proof that Agents are familiar with the applicable rules. Some knowledge management systems produce reports showing which Agents have reviewed the information and passed the quiz.

We have talked about compliance. Now, how does this ensure consistency? Think of a manufacturer who sells through franchised dealerships. A common challenge is having dealer staff giving different answers than head office Agents. Now imagine both head office and dealers have access to the same knowledge database. So, they both give consistent answers to educate their customers. On top of that, knowledge articles can be tagged for different job types. So, a dealer salesperson can read an article on the customer benefits of an accessory product. Meanwhile, their dealer service technician can see how to install it for the customer. To build on that, each dealer - as well as head office - have their own reporting tools. So, they can track which dealerships review updates and which ones do not. Dealers can see which of their employees are up to date and which ones need a reminder. That ensures consistency.

Can customers access this knowledge database for consistent answers? If a knowledge management system allows you to control access to information by job type, you can also use this system to share certain answers with customers. For example, if a customer searches your website for “extended warranty” information, they get a description of how it works and what it covers. On the other hand, if a contact center Agent searches for “extended warranty”, their search also brings up how to process a customer’s warranty claim. Being able to tag knowledge articles by job type saves you the cost of designing a separate database for customer accessible information.

Mike Aoki is the President of Reflective Keynotes Inc., a Canadian training company that helps contact centers improve their sales and customer retention results. A call center expert, Mike serves on the Advisory Council of the Greater Toronto Area Contact Center association, and was Master of Ceremonies for their 2012-2014 and 2016 Annual Conferences. He was also chosen as one of the “Top 50 Customer Service Thought Leaders on Twitter” for 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Web site | Twitter | LinkedIn

Adventures in Speech Analytics- Part III

By Diana Aviles

Here we are… Part III is finally here! Where we last left off, I discussed how queries are a major aspect of Speech Analytics.  I also mentioned the importance of establishing a business need for queries; but what happens if there is not a strong enough business need to build a query for a particular topic? Well, the good news is that you are not out of luck and that leads us to part three of “Adventures in Speech Analytics”- Ad Hoc searches.

A friendly guide to ad hoc searches

An ad hoc search is a customized search you can perform within the SA tool.  It is the most common method end users interact with in the tool.  Ad Hoc searches are one of the most exciting parts of speech analytics because it allows the user to have access to deep dive into customer-agent interactions.  Similar to query building, there is a bit of strategy and patience required in order to get the best results.

I have been fortunate to be involved with speech analytics in some aspect since the very beginning of my call center career.  The one thing I often hear from other professionals is that they find ad hoc searches difficult.  I have compiled a few tips and suggestions for how you can have a positive ad hoc search experience!

I’m going to provide an example of a “tricky” type of ad hoc search situation.  Let’s say someone reaches out to you about a new pilot program they have in the Chicago call center that has agents attempting to collect a one-time charge (OTC) from customers for home security equipment upfront prior to service installation.  The ultimate goal is to help agents better ensure a sale and reduce breakage of commission.  That is where you get involved- as this person wants you to provide a weekly report of how many agents are mentioning that customers must pay for their equipment upfront.  Piece of cake, right?  Well, the thing is there are many different OTC’s going on within the organization such as installation fees and late fees.  Since this report is specific to security equipment you are probably asking yourself how the heck am I supposed to sort through hundreds of calls to find Prince Charming?

Take a deep breath and let’s start nice and slow

• Set up your search parameters - You are going to be running this search only for one site (Chicago) so focus your energy on just that location where you know these calls are hiding.
• Queries, Queries, Queries - Remember queries are designed to be your partners in business! Sometimes it’s helpful to take a quick look at your query database to see if you have an existing relevant query or two in the system to run concurrently with your search.  Most organizations will have queries developed around the core lines of business they offer.  In this case, you may find a few different home security related queries that have a core of the logic you are looking for.  This is going to help further vet out your search by focusing on security based mentions in customer-agent interactions.
• Use your words - Oftentimes it’s helpful to request guidelines and scripting that was provided to the agents so that you can formulate your searches based on what the agent was instructed to say.  Keep in mind that sometimes this is not always the best approach as oftentimes keeping things simple and searching for common sense dialogue is most effective.  There is going to be a lot of trial and error here so be patient and stay optimistic.  You will surely find that Prince Charming of search terms.
• Validation - This was mentioned in the last article regarding query building and it is still relevant when you are only performing ad hoc searches.  You want to make sure that your confidence rating of your search and data is in an acceptable range.  You found the “Keep it Simple Sweetie” approach of the term “Pay your equipment upfront”, when searched within the few home security queries, yielded a 92% confidence rating. Great going!
• Smile and bask in the satisfaction - You are now confident that you are able to identify how many equipment OTC mentions have been made on a weekly basis.  You are now contributing to a larger picture of being able to help your organization see the correlation of collecting equipment fees up front with reducing the number of home security order cancellations.

With patience and practice you will become more comfortable with providing valuable data based on ad hoc searches.  I also recommend that you reach out to your speech analytics program manager, or if you are extra lucky to a query builder, if you ever find yourself in a difficult situation.  Sometimes there are methods and approaches that these individuals may be able to recommend to help you out of a tough spot.

Operations Manager, Speech Analytics 

With more than 4 years of Quality Assurance experience in a call center environment, Diana's objective is to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution, and overall customer experience.

Follow Diana on LinkedIn.