Most companies agree that ensuring a consistent, high-quality customer experience is essential for building loyalty and growing revenue. In fact, last year, two out of three organiza-tions around the world said that customer experience management (CEM) is important to their business, according to research by global enterprise feedback management firm Vovici and CGA, a UK-based customer experience consultancy, in their Customer Experience IQ Report.
Yet the findings also revealed a significant disconnect between strategy formulation and implementation. “Almost 75% of respondents said that they have a CEM/VOC (voice of the customer) strategy, yet less than half have formal programs and compensation systems in place to implement the strategy,” says Jeffrey Henning, Vovici’s founder and VP of strategy.
“For most organizations, customer experience is an emergent property,” he points out. “It’s what you end up with when you interact with the company’s different departments, groups, products, services and staff. But most organizations haven’t really thought about shaping the customer experience — attempting to design and script the types of experiences your customers should have.”
How Do Companies Measure the Customer Experience?
“That is unfortunate, since there has been a tremendous amount of research in the past 10 years about customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer experience measures,” Henning says. He points to the Forrester CxPi as a measure that has generated a lot of awareness in recent years because it specifically measures customer experience, rather than satisfaction or loyalty (although, he adds that it has a strong correlation to loyalty, which makes it a valuable metric). The CxPi is based on consumer evaluations across three areas: 1) usefulness; 2) ease of use; and 3) enjoyability.
From a contact center standpoint, Henning has noted increased interest in the Customer Effort Score (CES). The CES was developed by the Corporate Executive Board’s Customer Contact Council, and is based on a single question to determine the amount of personal effort that a customer must put into the service experience.
Leveraging Behavioral Data in the Contact Center
Even the most effective measures will not impact the company’s ability to deliver an exceptional experience if the feedback cannot be translated into improvements at the point of contact.
“More institutions and customer service centers are attuned to gathering information, such as NPS,” says Patrick Hughes. “Not just measuring how the customer feels about the experience, but measuring the affinity: Are they going to leave you for a better price or have you built loyalty with them so they will come back again and refer you to their friends or family?”
Hughes is director of Total Member Care at PSCU Financial Services, a credit union service organization (CUSO) that serves more than 1,500 financial institutions nationwide. As a non-profit cooperative, the company is owned by more than 600 member credit unions representing more than 14 million accounts and 1 million online bill payment subscribers. Its contact centers handle more than 17.4 million inquiries a year.
PSCU Financial Services regularly analyzes behavioral data for frontline performance issues that impact the customer experience. For instance, if a contact center manager identifies a representative who has a higher call transfer rate than his peers, it is an indication that he is having difficulty taking control of the call, he says. Another is longer hold times, which can indicate navigation issues or insufficient training.
The CEM strategy has to come from the top. You need someone who can take a step back from the day-to-day management to drive that process.
Patrick Hughes
Each member service rep’s performance is calibrated against his or her peers, similar to the traditional “grading by the curve” method, Hughes explains. Each of PSCU Financial Services’ clients have different processes so KPIs like aver-age hold time tend to vary. Grading by the curve allows the contact center leaders to identify the reps who are performing in the lowest and highest percentile for each KPI for either additional coaching or recognition.
A CEM Strategy Requires a Dedicated Leader
One challenge in implementing a CEM strategy is that the customer experience touches and crosses so many different parts of an organization. Since each department has its own performance objectives, aligning a common focus across the various groups requires an executive-level leader to drive the vision.
It has to come from the top, Hughes says. “The managers who are in the trenches are so busy focusing on the center’s occupancy rates or hitting a service level, they may lose track of the overall vision,” he says. “You need someone who can take a step back from the day-to-day management to drive that process.”
Three-quarters of the respondents in the Vovici study said that they did not have a leader who was responsible for customer experience or a chief customer officer, which may be one reason why so many organizations are finding it difficult to execute a CEM strategy, Henning says. “There are a lot of challenges associated with silos in organizations,” he says.“Every department tends to do what’s best for the department rather than what’s best for the customer overall. That’s where you need a leader who can stand above it all.”
One organization that has recognized the need for an independent leader to focus on CEM is Hartford Life, a subsidiary of The Hartford Financial Services Group. Donna Denehy is director of customer experience management for Hartford Life, where she is responsible for the implementation of the CEM strategy across the organization’s operations. At Hartford Life, the Denehy and her team set the strategy, and the operations execute on the strategy. “Having the role centralized allows us to objectively focus on customer experience, rather than expecting the people in the operation, who are dedicated to other responsibilities, to focus on it,” she says.
Create a Closed-Loop Continuous Improvement Process
At Hartford Life, the CEM strategy is “a closed loop” in which customer interactions are regularly measured and feedback is provided to the frontline employees. The process includes measurement, coaching, employee engagement and continuous improvement.
Measurement is a fundamental part of the CEM strategy, Denehy stresses.“We firmly believe that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. It is an overarching theme in everything that we do. If we roll out a new process, we need to measure it.”
There are a lot of challenges associated with organizational silos. Each depart-ment tends to do what’s best for the department rather than what’s best for the customer.
Jeffrey Henning
Hartford Life’s contact center managers play a critical role in driving CEM success across the organization. While managers track traditional productivity metrics — such as average speed of answer, service levels and handle times — to ensure that calls are being answered efficiently, they also routinely review after-call surveys, customer loyalty and customer retention data.
“We keep customer experience and voice of the customer very closely aligned, so there is always the loop going back to different touch points at different points in time to ensure that we’re doing the right things,” she explains. For instance, at the initial point of contact, customer segmentation plays a key role to ensure that customers are routed to the right person to handle their request, and that unnecessary call transfers are eliminated. FCR, considered to be a critical measure of the customer experience, is tracked at the rep level to create awareness among frontline staff of how to handle calls in a manner that doesn’t drive a subsequent contact.
To close the loop, the contact center’s productivity metrics and customer data is integrated into the employee coaching process.
“Coaching is like the blood in our veins,” says Denehy. “We put a pretty high expectation on coaching because, without it, no strategy is going to work. We make sure that our managers understand what the strategy is, and that they’re driving it every day with the frontline staff.”The goal for the contact centers’ frontline managers is to spend between 40% and 50% of their time coaching their staff.
The coaching sessions are not conducted in the traditional format, which typically consists of telling employees whether or not they met their performance standards for various criteria. Hartford Life’s coaching sessions are based on “employee self-discovery” — each rep gets to see how well they scored against their peers on various performance criteria, and then they have a conversation with their frontline manager on what they can do to improve.
“We engage employees in the conversation. We work with them in a collaborative manner to show them different ways to enhance their performance so that they can drive their own improvement. We have moved away from a coaching environment in which people are just told what to do.”The conversation with high per-formers — those who rank in the top quartile for a particular performance criteria — is about sharing best practices that can be transferred to other employees.
Driving Strategy to the Front Line
At PSCU Financial Services, FCR is also considered to be critical to high-quality interactions. The metric is derived from three primary sources, says Hughes.
1. Training. Does the representative have the proper training to service the call?
2. Technology. Does the rep have access to per-form the transaction functionally for the caller?
3. Call routing. Does the contact center have the appropriate skills-based routing in place to get the calls to the right rep who is best prepared to handle it?
The firm has developed its own technology for delivering real-time information to frontline reps to help them handle calls. As they advance through a conversation with a customer, it pro-vides continual prompts on how to respond to various requests. “The technology has provided a significant advantage in providing a quality experience,” Hughes says.
Another benefit is “having a nimble training group that works very closely with workforce management,” he says. As call volumes drop and agents become available, they’re moved off the phone for “cultural immersion training,” to help them gain a better understanding of specific clients’ needs — for instance, the client’s history, types of products it offers, and what differentiates it in the marketplace.
Naturally, technology and training would not be effective if employees are not motivated. Driving CEM objectives in the contact center requires an engaged front line. Recognition goes a long way toward getting employee buy-in and active participation, Hughes says. “Quality assurance programs often dwell on the negative — the areas to improve. But recognizing reps who create a quality experience endorses the direction that you want to go in as a company. It shows that your company is engaged in that activity and treats it with the highest importance. If you have an agent who has an uncommon interaction where they take a problem call, resolve it and then turn it into a positive experience for the customer — that needs to be recognized and spread across the organization.
A Strong Focus on the Customer
Contact centers can contribute great value to organization wide CEM strategies by sharing customer insights. Center leaders need to start “evangelizing and sharing that data more widely,” says Henning. “Share what people are talking about, the top issues. Create presentations that include customer recordings. There is nothing more powerful than hearing from customers in their own frustrated terms, or in their own positive terms, about opportunities to improve. That type of feedback will be used to make decisions upstream that will make the center’s life easier downstream.” Henning recommends that leaders consider creating a full-time position in the center to focus on analyzing, synthesizing and disseminating insights to the larger organization.
Coaching is like the blood in our veins. We put a pretty high expectation on coach-ing because, without it, no strategy is going to work.
Donna Denehy
While customer feedback and data is important, company leaders can gather invaluable insights from contact center staff, says Hughes.
“Roll up your sleeves, go out into the contact center and talk to your frontline reps. The detail may be in the data, but the reps are the ones taking the calls. You can get to the heart of a problem much quicker by asking them what the challenges are from a quality and customer experience perspective.”
Change Management is an Important Component
Change management is a critical part of driving a customer experience management strategy, says Hartford Life’s Donna Denehy. “People underestimate the amount of change management associated with a good CEM strategy,” she says.
“When you’re rolling out new measures and new coaching programs, and trying to involve employees in different components of it, keep in mind that, in your staff’s viewpoint, it is a change from what they’ve been doing. To assume that it’s just going to happen would be irresponsible. We put focused effort on it with the team working toward set expectations.
“When you’re on this journey, you learn a lot along the way. You need to be honest enough with yourself to say, this is different than what I originally thought and I need to change it. If you don’t learn from all the people you’re dealing with along the way — your customers, your leadership team, your employees — and if you’re not changing and adjusting to what you’re learning, then your strategy is going to fail.”
Susan Hash is the Editor of Contact Center Pipeline.
– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com