When CX works well its because people CARE. From what I see, most of us really do care, its just plain being human. When CX doesn’t work its because organisations simply DON’T care. But organisations are just a cluster of people with a purpose.  

So how is it that the collective care of the humans gets lost when they come together as a group and call themselves an organisation?  

Not matter who we work with – your big disruptive retailers, local authorities, insurance companies, healthcare companies – Care is often the key to an exceptional customer experience. 

Its clear to me the “Care System” has engineered out Care and replaced it with ‘process’, demoralising staff and ‘customers’ alike.

We’ve worked with organisations across sectors, whose values clearly promise Care, but rarely deliver it, why? Why do organisations not Live Their Values? What stops them?  

When we live our values, we deliver on the experiences we promise our customers and our teams are fueled with pride and energy for what they do. I’ve seen so many experiences this last fortnight where added care makes all the difference – more difference than a shiny new system could, and in many cases, that care creates tangible commercial value.  

So maybe next time the CX is going wrong, we ask a different question in our root cause analysis “at what point did we fail to care, and why?” #musings#customerexperience#care 

How are you finding working from home so far? Have you got into good habits? Or are you still in your pj’s?

We’ve come up with our 5 top tips for home working!

Stay safe everyone 🙂

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Complaints

Loyalty

Complaints

It can often feel like your complaints from customers are from the whinging minority who are never happy.

On the contrary, our clients find that most of their complaining customers are their most loyal customers and advocates.

They are complaining because they genuinely want to help you resolve the issues that are causing them dissatisfaction as well as getting resolution for themselves. It is that keen sense of loyalty towards you and the desire to feel confident recommending you to others that drives them to invest the time and effort in making a complaint.

They are giving you a valuable Gift.

What they need (and expect) in return is that you listen, that you resolve the issue and that the resolution is visible/tangible to them.

Drawing your team’s attention to the fact that loyalty frequently drives complaints (they are not dealing with just the whingeing minority), fundamentally changes the way they respond and consequently the complaints experience that customer has.

For more tips and tricks on complaint handling, join us at Collaborate On Complaints

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Digital CX

Digital CX
Your customers speak digital… do you?

Digital CX – 65% of Customers are now Digital First. Maturing new customers are almost all Digital Only.

In the future, communication will be pure digital. So why are so many companies behind that curve?

Even those who are conversant with digital channels aren’t ready for what customers want next. Do you have the next generation of channels mapped out?

It really is time to start major transformation Contact Centres incorporating on trend video/visual channels, group based conversation, AI and community led support.

2020 feels like a very futuristic year – let it be your year to create a future focused customer strategy that recognises the future of digital and stop playing catch up.

Come along to Collaborate On Digital CX, our 3 part series, where you can talk with likeminded people from other companies. Starting in December and taking you nicely into the new year.

Alternatively, arrange a chat with Nikki and she’ll share Whisperers expertise with you.

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Change the words to change the outcome

Change the words you use in an area of your business and it can dramatically improve the overall performance!

You’ll be surprised!

What do you think might happen if you changed the name of your Complaints team to Experience Improvement team? What could happen if you changed the name of Lost Property department of your transportation company to Found and Returned Property?

Its a form of behavioural conditioning and it can be very powerful.

To help create the shift from being an online travel booking agency to a leading provider of holidays, call your Reservations team Memory Makers. People start to think about their purpose differently. And one of my personal favourites at a clients was the Director of Smiles – their Receptionist.

That’s why I’m no longer Managing Director here at Customer Whisperers, I’m Director of Everything!

So today lets think a little harder about what we call departments and people and what impact that has on their behaviour.

If you feel a subtle but powerful dose of behavioural psychology could help you, get in touch and we can work through your challenges together!

Why not take a look at Style, Tone & Language

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Thank You Sign

Complaints The Essential Duet

It takes a lot to push a customer to invest time and effort in making a complaint.

When you receive one it’s a Gift.

It is relevant, specific and normally timely. Its free. Its very valuable. So why do so many organisations react so badly to a complaint – rejecting it, ignoring it, looking for a defense, finding a flaw in the customers argument, blaming others (including the customer) or seeking a way to get off the hook.

The vast majority of situations that cause complaints are not one-offs, they apply to many other customers and they repeat themselves. The organisational culture and attitude makes these companies unable to accept The Gift they’re being offered.

Changing that culture is our number one priority and there are many things that need to put in place. But lets start with one simple change right now – proven to reduce complaints and the cost of complaints by 30%.

Go listen in and/or read some of your teams complaint responses – what % of those responses contain The Essential Duet – “Thank you” and “Sorry”.

If its anything less than 100% then this is a gift for you – bring it up to 100% and reap the benefits.

You can transform your Complaints function and the complaints experience your customers have by implementing The Gift in full – contact us and lets chat about how it could help you.

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Artificial Intelligence

AI in the Contact Centre

You’d be forgiven for thinking Artificial Intelligence is all about chatbots fielding mundane, repetitive simple queries. But the potential is way bigger than that!

Artificial Intelligence is being used in the Contact Centre in lots of different ways, for example AI Coaches are being developed to support Contact Centre Leaders and Managers. The AI has a coaching conversation with you; “What outcomes are you expecting to achieve? How will you enagage the whole team? What does success look like?”. I think I’ll call mine Jiminy Cricket!

The cost benefits are huge and lets face it, when time gets tight its often the coaching conversation that gets canned. It even emails you to remind you what you said you were going to do and checks your on target (the follow up our human coaches sometimes miss!). The opportunities for Artificial Intelligence are huge and that in itself can be overwhelming.

Picking out the right areas of customer experience to enhance with AI is crucial, picking out the areas where it could damage CX is equally crucial.

If you want to talk about how AI could advance your Customer Experience and how, schedule a call with one of our team – we won’t sell you tech, but we will help you think it through from a customer experience perspective and find where the value for you is.

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Customer Experience Consultancy, Customer Service

Customer

We have for years been throwing around the hot potato of customer loyalty – every client wants it, every client talks about incentivising it, so how are we in a place where customers are grossly penalised for their loyalty?

13 million households are paying a hefty loyalty penalty across products and services, some essential.

For loyalty to a broadband provider, customers on average incur a loyalty penalty of £113 pa after their initial contract period – that’s almost a 50% increase on the initial price.

For home insurance, a customer buying​ ​the​ ​average​ ​cheapest combined​ ​policy​ ​and then staying loyal would​ ​pay​ ​an​ ​extra​ ​£13​ ​after​ ​1​ ​year​ ​and​ ​£110​ ​after​ ​5 years.

Companies certainly exploit their customers’ tendency to stay rather than go, but is staying a conscious customer decision? Is it even loyalty at all. “I didn’t want to stay, I just didn’t get around to leaving”.

These days customers are more likely to notice a​ ​price​ ​increases​ ​but still only a quarter​ of them do! The other three quarters don’t even notice the increase. Of those customers that do notice the increase, only a third renewed without checking for better deals first.

That implies a conscious decision on the part of customers ‘not to bother shopping around’. But is it? In reality many of these contracts auto-renew a short while after the new price is communicated. But how many of those customers just run out of time or simply forget – life’s hectic, right?

How Does The Customer Feel?

How does a customer feel when they realise they’ve slipped into another 12-month contract at an inflated price because they missed the window of opportunity to switch? Managing household contracts and making wise and well thought out purchasing decisions feels like full time job in my house! Are companies taking advantage of us time poor customers?

They sure are. And they are also taking unfair advantage of vulnerable customers who are at a greater risk of experiencing the loyalty penalty.

Older and lower income groups are more likely to ‘stick’. Customers aged 65 and over are more than twice as likely than younger customers to have been in the same contract for over 10 years.

Customers who don’t switch away can no longer be considered loyal. Too many are simply still your customers because they have failed to get away.

One day they might – what are the chances they would ever come back? Maybe the real test of loyalty is not whether a customer stays but whether, having left, they harbour a desire to come back.

And if you want to see an example of a delightful approach to customer experience at that awkward moment when a customer leaves you – cancel your Spotify subscription. They will present you with a goodbye playlist of songs that will warm your heart and make you smile, feel valued and looking forward to returning. I have both cancelled and returned.

Heart-warming Customer Experiences by Customer Whisperers

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The Self-Fulfilling Failure Prophecy

Challenging the status quo here at Whisperers is a given, but we also love to introduce really simple ideas that make a huge difference. One of our favourite reactions and we get it all the time from client is “OMG why didn’t I think of that, its obvious!”. Well, all of our clients are very bright people, they didn’t miss the obvious because they were stupid – sometimes the simple things are really easy to overlook or not realise the value of. Whisperers make a big fuss about language too – the words you choose determine how people behave in response.

The Lost Property department. Many clients have some form of lost property system. For some clients it is a key function and has a department and set of process all of its own. However, it’s a Self-Fulfilling Failure Prophecy.

Departments (or boxes, whatever they are) collect mountains of lost property, hidden away in dusty cupboards. The items are transported, catalogued and stored. After a period of time, sent to charities or disposed of. Few items get returned to their owners. Every step of that process has a time and money cost.

A Different Point of View

Think about this process from a Customers’ point of view – we’ve all been the customer who has lost something. It can be a mini crisis. We need help, we expect help. An item returned to us has weighty customer experience value. Loyalty, Recommendation, Trust and Reputation boost! “Items lost or stolen by the company”. Surely someone, somewhere knows where it is! Loyalty, Recommendation, Trust and Reputation take a nosedive.

This is not a core business process it can often be seen as a nuisance but from a Customer Experience point of view it is crucially important – it is your Defining Moment.

STOP!

What if we simply renamed it Found and Returned Property? We have done 2 things immediately. The mission has been changed and purpose of the team/function – the focus is no longer on cataloguing items details and storing them to await a customer making claim. We have also altered customers’ expectations – what they see is an organisation that plays a positive and active role they find and returns things. This perception rubs off on both customers who experience the service and customers who see the service being offered. It has now become a service not a function.

Doing something like this and changing the mission means the purpose is changed, therefore, you change the activities and behaviours of people in the team – more items are returned to their owners. In parallel customer satisfaction increases and so does employee satisfaction. Fewer items are going through the process. It takes less time and costs less. Returned items get to their owners much quicker as the first step in the process becomes find the owner not catalogue the item. The team act proactively by seeking the customer and using innovative approaches – what a wow that is.

Your Found and Returned property service now is a feature of your customer experience that differentiates. Your Defining Moment becomes your crowning glory.

So…. ponder this. What similar opportunities might exist in your organisation?

Need some inspiration? No problem! Get in touch using the button below.

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Are you ready for Crowd Service?

Remote working for contact centre staff has been patchy in its uptake. The technology has existed for years. The appetite to trust remote workers has been slower to develop. Sure, it has it’s challenges!

But let’s stretch the thinking a little further. Crowd Service. What if the people working remotely, answering customers queries were not your contact centre employees? But actual customers? It is possible and is being successfully done. It delivers very high CSAT/NPS and quality.

Giff Gaff is a great example. Their innovative approach means the bulk of their customer support is delivered by ‘Ambassador’ customers. 

You may have experienced Microsoft’s Expert customer approach? Same principle. Personally, having used it to set up my son’s Xbox, I love it! We too have been surprised by just how good customers are at providing service to other customers.

This approach can reduce CX costs. Also increase capacity, maintain quality and increase customer engagement. It reduces contact centre recruitment. Along with induction and on boarding. For clients where attrition is an issue or recruitment is difficult, that’s a real win.

If you’d like to chat about how Crowd Service might be integrated into your organisation and the benefits/challenges it could bring. We’ll happily share all we know!

Hit the button below and let’s set it up!

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