Consumer Service: A misunderstood function with an astonishing future - Vol 5 - "What should the customer care leaders do?"
What should the customer care leaders do?
The Vol 2 article of this series gave the answer to that question by assessing the Consumer Service direct and indirect impact on a company's P&L. The Vol 3 article Answer the question "So what?" - what consumers and colleagues deem important and how consumer service can help them. Finally, the latest Vol 4 article talked about "what is slowing consumer services down?" In this Vol 5 article we will discover what is the right thing to do in order to deliver the value that was discussed earlier.
Right focus for our consumers’ effortless experience
Research (Link) shows that all companies that deliver exceptionally effortless experience to consumers have four things in common:
1) “Low effort companies minimise the channel switching through boosting the ‘stickiness’ of the initial channels by investing in and promoting (effective) self-service.”
Before we continue exploring this topic, it’s worth defining what “channel stickiness” means. It means an ability of consumers to stay in one single channel throughout their entire journey. The opposite term of “channel stickiness” is “channel hopping”.
An example of the poor channel hopping experience would be: a consumer contacts a brand on social media, just to be told to call them on their phone line because the case cannot be processed there.. The reason why this is not-so-good example is that we are not aware what is the entire resolution journey before consumer contacted us on social media. The consumer might have visited our website that contained a link to t he social media channel. There were at least three hops: 1) Website 2) Social media 3) Phone
Even better example of channel hopping would be: a consumer who is browsing a couple of pages of the brand website and cannot find an information, stays on that website and interacts with the digital concierge that surface them the answer to their question. In this case, a website demonstrated “stickiness”.
However, the best example would be to look at the entire consumer resolution journey, which starts in their bathroom, in front of the medicine cabinet, holding the product package and wondering about the right application of the product. Consumer then visits a website and successfully concludes the journey. In this case, there were two hops: a) Package b) Website.
First of all, it is important to understand what consumers do and can do with our products and services, and then what challenges / questions / support they could be faced with. This is the baseline, which is the current resolution journeys consumers undertake depending on the nature of the inquiry and their circumstances. After mapping and understanding the entire resolution journey for different consumer intents, it is important to uncover why consumers switch channels (e.g. don’t use the website). Finally it is important to understand what is in our control to prioritise act upon.
?consumers couldn’t find the information – the content, or entire channel needs to be created and enabled
?consumers found information, but it was unclear – the content needs to be simplified
?consumers were simply using web to find a phone number – consumers should be aware of faster options
?consumers perceived their issue too complex
2) “Low effort companies empower the agents to deliver low-effort experience by using incentive systems that value the quality of experience over speed and efficiency.”
Besides enabling self serve capabilities in the initial channel of choice, companies need to cater for those consumers who do want to speak to a human being for their more complex inquiries. And when they reach out, what is the experience they would get from the agent? Will it be the experience that every brand manager dreams of, and customer care leadership aspires to?
“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless” – Morris Chang (founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Company) is correct in a sense that for all the effort and strategy that is invested in crated the effortless consumer experience, the every day delivery is in hands of customer service agents. And what they say in every single call, or how they respond to every single email is not in a control of the leadership team. What usually happens, in order to feel in control, the leadership is tightening the process and limiting the freedom of agents on the ground: prescribing them what to say and how to say according to rigid checklists and complex knowledge articles. On the other side, agents feel micromanaged due to the constant reminders of the quotas they need to comply with – for example the average handling time, and Call Quality Control. Being under the constant pressure of problems brought by consumers, it is no surprise that agents feel demotivated and not stay in the role for long. As a nock on effect, the experience provided to consumers is: robotic, repetitive, without empathy or a will to engage with humans on the other side more than just to a bare minimum, follow the work instructions and move on to the next case asap.
Increasing agents’ performance is the key to secure strong execution of the consumer experience strategy. If performance is increased, this means that experience provided to consumers would be closer to effortless. A study (Link) reveals what factors have the biggest impact on the agents’ performance:
a)Advanced problem-solving skills increases the agent performance by 3.6%. This includes curiosity, creativity, critical thinking and experimental mindset.
b)Elementary skills and behaviors increase the agent performance by 5.1%. These include demonstration of the product knowledge, technological expertise, communication confidence, communication clarity, asking good questions and multitasking capability.
c)Emotional intelligence is the factor that increases agent performance by 5.4%. This includes empathy, flexibility towards different personality types, customer service ethics, persuasiveness and customer advocacy.
d)However, the one that is usually overlooked, and which is a secret factor of few companies that are delivering exceptional customer service experience is Control Quotient (CQ). It’s increasing the agents’ performance by 11.2%, almost the same as the three other factors combined. This includes resilience, ability to handle high-pressure situations without becoming burnt out, taking responsibility for own actions, welcoming constructive criticism and ability to concentrate on tasks over extended period of times.
The companies with High Control Quotient agents don’t recruit them by chance – they create environment that fosters it. The study shows that agents within high CQ feel appreciated, feel freedom / autonomy to deal with their own job, they experience trust and not micromanaged / watched over. So, how can we create the high CQ environment with our agents so that we can enable them to deliver experience to the consumers that will make consumers feel comfortable to share their stories? The research states that leadership should enable the following:?Trust in agents judgement, Agents' understanding and alignment with company goals, and a strong support network.
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3)“Low effort companies don’t just resolve the current consumer’s issue, but the agents are armed to solve the potential subsequent calls by employing next issue avoidance”
Agents' ability to identify and solve topical and underlying consumer needs is the key factor in this case. There is no value in asking consumers “Have I fully resolved your issue today?” when a consumer is still not sure if the advice which they got from the agent will work or not. On the ground, this means ticking the box Of the First Contact Resolution (FCR) metric. Better option for companies that aspire to deliver effortless experience is to add the Repeat Contact Rate RCR (from the same consumer) into the focus. This happen to be the GCR’s third thematic goal.?
For example, if a consumer calls today to check about specific ingredient (because of their dietary requirements) in a vitamin product they plan to buy – and if they get the answer, this case will count as FCR. However, if the same consumer calls again in couple of days to ask where they can buy a product, a high-effort company would look at it as a separate case, with yet another FCR flag. However, low-effort companies look at the consumer journey as a whole and would mark this consumer’s journey as effortful, as they needed to call us twice. Instead, what should have happened is?that the agent in first instance check if there are any supply chain issues and warn consumer that there is a stock problem in the area where they live.
How can we go about and enabling effortless experience to consumers. The repeat contact causes analysis should happen in two areas (where the second one is usually neglected by high-effort companies) (Link) :
Explicit Issues: This is the original need that is identified by consumer and a trigger for their interaction with an agent. Hence, an agent should address the original issue consumer calls about.
The root cause of repeat contacts in this cause area is split between company failures (process or technology related causes of repeat contacts) and agent failures (repeat contacts caused by the human error).
Implicit issue: Underlying issues that?typically go unnoticed by consumers until later. Hence, an agent should address the issues consumer did not articulate.
The root cause of repeat contacts in this cause area is split between adjacent issues (technically distinct but related downstream issue) and experience issues (where the previous resolution experience triggers consumers to contact a company again).
4) “Low effort companies equip agents to succeed on emotional side of the service interaction through deploying ‘experience engineering’ tactics”
This is probably the hardest part of effortless experience, but at the same time the most fruitful one. The study has shown that effort levels judged by consumers are not as much connected to something specifically measurable, but directly connected to the consumer’s perception of it. In other words, what consumers have to do will impact their judgement of effort. But what counts even more is how it makes consumers feel. As a matter of fact, the research shows that Consumer Effort is only impacted by 35% by what is required from consumers to do, while their personal interpretation made by them is impacted by 65% (Link).
The differentiation between high-effort and low-effort companies is in their focus of implementing changes.?
What consumers have to do: These are the focus areas of both high-effort and low-effort companies:
How does it make them feel: These are the focus areas of only low-effort companies (only 27% of companies focus on this):
Where are we currently investing most of our time? What areas we are good at and in which areas we should see improvement?
The research shows that soft skills and expectations required from agent should be redefined. Instead of overly relying on agent skills that don’t contribute to the perception of effort (e.g. agent understood consumer, agent listened well, agent demonstrated concerned and empathy), instead these are proven to be the skills that contribute directly to the effortless perception of consumers:
?Active guiding
?Anticipation of emotional response
?Making preemptive offers
?Finding mutually beneficial resolutions
To enable those skills, companies could help agents by building consumer profiles and working out how best to provide issue resolutions based on the personality and positioning alternatives or company requirements with consumer benefits. Some companies have developed a system where agents can easily identify a consumer profile (persona) between “the feeler”, “the entertainer”, “the thinker” and “the controller” and equipped the agents how to handle the calls most effectively to help those consumers in the expected way.?