Each one of your customers has a unique set of preferences about how they want to interact with your company and what they expect from those interactions. It’s your job to analyze those and discern how to create that customized care in a profitable manner. The end goal should be to provide distinctive and profitable service to each individual customer. It’s no longer safe to assume that one-size-fits-all.

The road to true customer intimacy can be a long one, however there are some things you can do to get started.

• Customer Segmenting: Do you know who your customers are, why they contact you, and what’s important to them? You can probably answer that at a high level today, but start to think in more detail about all the variations and nuances across your customer base, products/services and how they map together.
• Contact Handling: Are you routing calls solely based on what products/services your customers have purchased (or want to purchase) and what language they speak? Do you have one Service Level goal across your lines of business? As the article demonstrates there are other factors, such as cultural preferences, to be considered when setting objectives and designing routing plans.
• Metrics and Reporting: Are you measuring the right things and are you monitoring your success?

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather just a conversation starter. As we kick-off 2009 I’ll be discussing these topics in more detail. Let me know your thoughts.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.