Today we are launching our most important survey of the year and you could win one of 71 prizes including the latest I-Pad 2 by taking part.  The role of Shopping with your Mobile is changing more and more each day. Retailers and consumer facing businesses are investing heavily in services that are designed to leverage the features of the latest mobile and Network Services. We want your help to understand the future.

The Direct Marketing Association with Empirix are sponsoring a major research programme with the Customer Experience Foundation on how consumers will be shopping with their mobiles over the next few years. This started with a 2 month research programme interviewing people at the sharp end of Mobile Phone innovation to find out what they think this new future will look like. There is little doubt that the role of traditional channels like the Contact Centre will change as a result of this.

We have created a couple of fun 2 minute videos and 2 questionnaires for Consumers and Contact Professionals to tell us what they think about this new world. We have incentivised the programme with 71 Prizes including a chance to win an I-Pad 2. This will show what consumers expect and how ready organisations are for the change.

Please do take a few minutes and visit the survey site and you will find out about the cross channel challenges that contact centre and website professionals will face over the next 3 years. Some organisation like Amazon & Tesco are already changing the way consumers use the mobile phone with highly successful commercial services amounting to billions of pounds worth of business.

You will get a copy of the research too and your details will be kept completely confidential.

Please pass this link on to as many people as you can and ask them to pass it on as well. It is really important that we get some viral action.

Click Here

Available March – November 2011

Cost: £125.00 Members

£160.00 Non – Members

This is a 6 hour online course including 1-1 mentoring by Morris Pentel providing training on a basic model for Customer Experience planni ng for professionals involved in customer experience. Many organisations today struggle to define best practice and to measure the impact of their plans for the delivery of customer service. In addition the arrival of social media and the changing nature of customer expectation all add to the challenges. CE Professionals need to understand the changing value of brands and the  Return on Investment in a rapidly market.

Operating in this new world Customer Language and Channels are now in focus more & more as we realise that customers are the scarciest resource.

This course is built on the Customer Experience Foundation model and comprises the following modules:

1  Understanding Customer Experience models 

2  Planning tools

3  Developing Customer Insight & Measuring Customer Experience

4  Working with Customer Channels & Language

5  Using Voice of the customer programmes and other tactics

6  ROI on Customer Experience Programmes

This course is tailored to individual needs and delivers actionable insight. Working with your mentor you are able build a working plan for customer experience. Each session is held online with both pre-prepared  content and live elements. Each session lasts 1 hour and attendees can chose the times and dates for their training subject to mentor availability so the course can be done in one day or over 6 weeks.

Attendees gain all the course materials together with a Customer Experience Foundation Certificate and 1 years Foundation membership which gives them access to the Foundations collateral database of research and reports together with discounts on events.

For more info

Customer Insight  is changing fast.

Customer Effort Score has joined a ranks of serious Customer Insight Tools used by large organisations to understand their customer relationships and their Customer Service. These include Net Promoter Score, CSAT TQM & many others. Each of these systems and the organisations who service them are competing for significant sums of money.

Investment in these tools has been increasing year on year and overall spending on Customer Insight is now in 10′s billions of dollars this year alone.

There has never been a more important time to understand the strengths & weaknesses of Customer Insight methodologies and to test how they will add or destroy value for your organisation. For most organisations implementing these methodologies require long term commitment and once in place are difficult to change. They can represent a major risk to customer relationships if used in the wrong way or used to measure the wrong things.

About this Conference

The Customer Experience Foundation chairman Professor Morris Pentel is hosting a panel of representatives of the main players in the Customer Insight area.  Each organisation will be allowed to a 25 minute presentation about their methodology which will include a case study. Then a series of comparative questions about the business benefits will be reviewed against each of the major systems under review. These will include:

• Methods of data capture
• Strengths & Weaknesses
• Ease of use
• Depth of the Business Science
• Return on Investment
• Actionable Insights
• Supporting Technology

The panel will also include members of the End User Communities who work with these systems every day.

Networking

After each of the main sessions and during the lunch and other refreshment breaks there will be networking opportunities and these will allow delegates to share their insights & concerns with each other.

Who should attend?

This event is aimed at Board Level customer experience & customer insight professionals involved in acquisition or customer service functions.

Location

Central London

Takeaways & Goodie Bag

This event will give you:

• A detailed view into the latest developments in Customer Insight.
• A comparison of the current main stream options
• A comparison of the competing technologies
• A usable methodology for understanding your current approach to customer insight and for the delivery of actionable insights to improving your approach using the best tricks of the other main systems
• A networking opportunity with C-Level Professionals in your discipline
• Full Set of Event Collateral’s

This is a focused event to provide a real understanding of one specific subject and will provide delegates with that detail.

For more details and ticket options visit the Customer Experience Foundation

Contact Strategy is changing. It is a vital part of customer service and impacts sales and marketing functions. We are in the early stages of a revolution in the cost and value of contact. We are facing a major change in the fundamentals of contact strategy that organisations need to come to grips with as a matter of urgency.  The customer experience cost of contact is reducing, while the value of customer experience contact opportunities is increasing.

The customer experience foundation has been studying these trends as part of its customer experience modelling work for the past 2 years. Put simply contact costs are going through the largest change we have seen in the last 5 – 7 years. Organisations are having to rebuild their customer experience cost & value models and to continue to monitor the changes as they continue to unfold. This is a customer service issue as well as a call centre issue. The choice of the right contact channel for the right situation is the customer experience. The customer experience model that you use has become a key part of your internal best practice in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience Management (CEM).

Looking at the last twelve months we can see a number of drivers reducing the basic cost but increasing the value of making contact with customers.  Cloud based services, VoIP (voice over IP) and the accelerated growth of social media have begun to gather momentum. These are combined with the increase in automated self-service to change the fundamental costs of making contact with customers and prospects.  Automated self-service through speech recognition, traditional IVR and web portals have reduced the transactional  cost of most simplified business processes to a fraction of the cost that applied over the last three to five years. The drive to reduce the cost of customer service has been a pressure on quality of customer experience over that period.

The acceleration in the use of these automated self-service customer experience tactics has dramatically increased during the last twelve months.  It is also worth mentioning that the move to out-sourcing into countries with low cost bases for staff and buildings has also been a factor in this change but most organisations have revised the principal of outsourcing front line services. Taking all of these factors together, you could argue that the fundamentals of the cost of contact have been reduced overall.

Although the cost reductions appear, on the surface, to be a good-news story, it is worth considering the impact that these tactics have in terms of the value of contact with customers.  Building customer relationships is about managing effectively situations where your customer is emotionally involved in the relationship.  Much of what we have already talked about relates to situations where simple processes are dealt with more effectively through automation and, to a great extent, customers buy into simplified automated processes where they are appropriate.  When checking your  balance, or making regular payments, the need to talk to a live agent is significantly reduced providing you are delivering those processes in a way that your customers are satisfied with.

Contact Strategy Best Practice has changed over the last 2 years as organisations have reviewed the customer experience cost against the value of outsourced front line customer service. This has given rise to one of the key changes in business strategy where organisations are finding that financial cost models are not working for them properly.

Fig 1. Changing Contact Values and Costs

The problem arises when you consider this move to automation from the point of view of deepening and improving your customer relationship.  Fundamentally, a relationship is developed through person-to-person contact and the number of situations where you are actually engaging your customer in a real conversation is being reduced by these trends.   Put simply, you are talking less to your customers.  This means that the value of each real conversation and the opportunity to build customer loyalty is year-on-year being reduced to less conversations.  It therefore follows that the value of live contact has been significantly increasing over the same period.

It also follows that if you have very little live contact with your customers, the opportunity to strengthen your relationship is reduced as your services become just another commodity with no real service differentiation.  In a recent study we found that most organisations are not delivering additional training on the increased emotional value of live contact to their agents.  Yet, if you consider these two major trends, it is obvious that the emotional importance of dealing with live situations has dramatically increased. This year research from ContactBabel suggested that contact centre staff churn rates were continuing to increase and looking at the Fig 1 you can see quite simply that the job that staff are being asked to do is changing.

It is at this point you realise that you are operating under completely new conditions and that new rules will apply. The first key step is to review your contact strategy and understand its strengths and weeknesses. Then you have to consider cost v value as you will find that cost models alone will not guide you forward. At that stage you need your first contact strategy workshop and I have outlined a simple exercise in 10 Questions by Morris Pentel. I hope you find them useful.

What is  the state of  your Contact Strategy?

This article is about the 10 questions we should always be asking ourselves to ensure that compass we use to guide our organisations is set to the operational equivalent of north. This exercise in evaluting Contact Strategy wsas developed by the Customer Experience Foundation.

Here are my 10 best questions to take into any meeting, new project or venture. This is the simplest way I know to find out if you have a Contact Strategy that is working for you in less than 1 hour:

Q1- Could this be us?

•       Think about the organisations you admire the most and work out why.

•       Think about the organisations who have the worst business practices and work out what the worst thing they do are and avoid them.

Q2 – Could we shut up more?

•       What contact is not useful to our current relationship?

•       Should we be saying more or less to our customers? Did you know that most people don’t read most of the junk that they get from their Banks Insurers Mobile Providers Utility Companies and other services? You should do because you feel the same. Most consumers do not trust their suppliers – you know that because you don’t trust your suppliers. Maybe if companies said less then maybe consumers would listen more. So could you say less?

Q3 – Could we listen more?

•       Who to? Most companies survey their customers like a landscape they do not talk to them like people and then they don’t listen to the answers.

•       When? There are times when listening to our clients more is important and most companies don’t know when or how. Customers use different language which means different things to different generations so are you really listening and understanding or just listening for key words

Q4 – Could people lie to us?

•       Have you ever to a lie to a supplier to be polite?

–      At the doctors

–      At restaurant

–      At a shop

–      To get off the phone from a salesman or woman

•       So who is lying to you?

Q5 – What are you honest about?

•       Who to and what?

–      Customers

–      Staff

–      Prices

–      Service Performance

–      Strengths

–      Weaknesses

Q6 – What do our relationships look like?

The big 5 questions

•       Who?

•       What?

•       When?

•       Why?

•       How?

Q7 – What do our relationships cost and how do we value them?

The cost of acquisition

The cost of churn

What is the yield per customer?

Per Product

Overall

Potential

Lifetime

Emotionally

This question is one that most companies cannot answer but interestingly I have heard some academics strongly suggest that the fact they cannot answer it is a breach of fiduciary duty. Knowing the cost and value of customer relationships is as important as knowing bank charges and wage bills. You could ask this question in a different way what is the cost and value of integrity. What is the role of Social Media in changing cost and value is one of the latest challenges but it is not the only one. Should I twitter or sell on facebook are questions will have unique answers for each organisation.

Q8 – What are the low hanging fruit?

What can I test quickly and cheaply?

What can I put on a runway tomorrow and launch change incrementally?

Q9 – How do I get momentum?

There are some key basics to developing momentum

Common Vision

Common Sense

Incremental change

Ownership for all

Q10 – What is question? 10

What is the question we are not asking?

Armed with these questions you will realise that there are a host of questions that you should be asking. The trick is not to be scared of the truthful answer. If you deliver bad service and your happy with it then move on to find out what are the right questions for you. At the moment I am starting work in a white paper about the changing boundaries if social media. I got to the end of the 2^nd line about the impact of twitter and one of my children looked at it and said “Dad you are so out of date. Even Stephen Fry is giving up twitter” With that comment she shook her head sagely and left the room muttering something about old people. Consumers are reacting to change more quickly and change is happening more quickly because devices like I-Phones and App Stores are increasing the rate at which new things get to the market. The old idea that change was constant is now rather like the big bang theory – a little out of date. Change is getting faster and business needs to adapt more quickly than ever before.

So my 10 questions are already a little out of date because the 11^th question should be – How do we keep up?

This white paper is based on a research project called “how I like to communicate” which was a Voice of the Customer” micro study exercise undertaken in March of 2010 in support of a presentation for UC EXPO at Olympia in London. The project was run by the Customer Experience Foundation and BrainFoodExtra.

The exercise highlighted a number of consumer trends which are discussed here in brief but the full presentation (67 pages) is available on request – see contact details at the end.

This downloadable PDF concentrates on some of the key findings only and was prepared for some members of  the Call Centre Association the UK’s largest body representing the Call Centre Industry:

It suggests that much of the hype surrounding the business opportunities in social media are not as they appear.
It indicates that the gap between customer preference and corporate expectation is wide.
It shows that Customers have complex communication needs and that trends change rapidly.
It concludes that finding the balance of which trends to follow requires constant customer engagement at a deeper level.
It found that Customer Partnerships rather than CRM or CEM are at the heart of customer’s expectation.

Click here to view the white paper on-line

Over the last few years we have seen the CSTA establish their role in Customer Service and helping to drive the quality of customer service debate not just in the UK but globally.  The CSTA do a great deal of good work focused on the development of best practice. One of the vital ways that we acknowledge best practice is through the recognition of Award Schemes like those organised by Awards International. Over the last few years we have seen this Award Scheme grow in stature and importance as more and more organisations have seen the value and come on board.

The Customer Experience Foundation is dedicated to creating business science and best practice in Customer Experience. Customer Experience is a new discipline that provides best practice, new tools and measurements to the whole life of the customer relationship including satisfaction sentiment & social synchronicity. It is recognised as a core component of Contact Strategy to drive down cost and increase customer value. Customer Experience provides a vital link in customer service at a time when customer service has become a form of advertising because of the explosion of social media.

This year the Customer Experience Foundation has sponsored Awards International to extend this approach to the creation of the first UK Customer Experience Awards. So we are proud to be involved with the fantastic work being done in relation to these awards. I am sure that this first year will be the beginning of an important programme of awards helping to raise standards of customer experience.

I am tremendously impressed by the quality of this first years submissions and the work done by the Awards International Team to get this great event ready and I want to acknowledge that this event has been made possible by their efforts.

I am looking forward to the 27^th September 2010.

Voice of the Customer is one of those “new terms” in Contact Strategy and Customer Experience that people have been using to describe different approaches to understanding what most people used to call Customer Satisfaction and Market Research.  Voice of the customer programmes are about listening to what the customers say. It is too early to say that we have seen the development of Best Practice and Good Governance at this stage.

Like all of these terms at the frontline of Contact Strategy “Voice of the Customer”  has been given different meanings by different Consultants and used in many different ways by organisations who are struggling with a new set of business measurement criteria. Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes are not yet standard and therefore do not yet support standard financial modelling. Rather like Customer Experience Programmes, Voice of the Customer is something that organisations are starting to do because they think these programmes make sense but struggle to establish best practice easily. This means that they also struggle to find business value from their investment in Voice of the Customer programmes.

Barriers to Action

This leads to a standard barrier to action which is the development of a business case that shows Return on Investment. Ironically the business case process excludes some basic common sense values that organisations know but find difficult to put a value on.

You can’t value what you don’t measure.

If you understand your customer then you can make money from your relationship with them.

These 2 statments are obviously true but where do they fit into your business case process?

A Voice of the Customer programme provides data, then you have to understand what they are talking about and what are the underlying sentiments and the emotional content. The voice of the customer is a programme where contact objects or events that matter to the customer experience have “moments of truth”.

Moments of Truth

So what is a moment of truth? Actually it is incorrectly named as many things are in contact strategy. It should really be called moment of emotional perception because a moment of truth is a point in a relationship when the perception of the relationship changes.

All relationships are a series of shared moments, experiences (or events) and objects. It is the positive or negative emotional resonance that defines the importance of these 3 factors. Some events have no impact on the relationship state. These are the automated events within a relationship with limited emotional value. Good examples might be cash machine transactions, direct debit bill payments or other automated processes. However simply because a process is automated and has a lower importance to some customers it may be the most important contact a consumer has with your organisation.

It’s an approach the focuses on understanding the sentiment that is contained in the answers given by customers to open ended questions. A customer may express a sentiment which reflects their view of the emotional state of the relationship but it is not the case. The emotional state of the relationship is not the same as the sentiment expressed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are some standard sentiment analysis tools built into a number of different types of platforms ranging from Speech Analytics to Social media tools like Tweetdeck and a series of plug ins to platforms. There is also a type of emotion detection software and some tools for textural analysis.

There are different tools for different channels as voice and written represent different emotional strands and as Mark has said there is an issue in relation to context to be considered.

Adding to these Cultural and age related interpretation and the challenge becomes clear. This is not currently easy to do.

Building these tools into your Contact Strategy is what Customer Experience Services can help you do.

CustXse (Customer Experience Services) announce the lanch of a major new whitepaper has be developed based on the survey “Can you repeat that please” highlighting the impact of poor technology in contact centres at Call Centre Expo. The research was commisioned by Empirix and delivered by the Customer Experience Foundation which is the business sciences division of the Customer Experience Services Group. The survey was conducted in four countries who are major users of contact centres – UK, USA, France and Germany – to give a global representation of the findings.

Within the survey, three different groups of people were interviewed – consumers, contact centre professionals and It professionals. This highlighted how different issues are perceived differently by the groups. In all, 5.140 people responded across of which 3,925 were consumers with contact centre professional and IT professionals making up the balance.

Lastly, the major finding was the huge impact of poor voice quality. Therefore, this whitepaper focuses on this aspect of the survey.

Findings

The findings were dominated by the impact of poor voice quality. While the greater use of mobile telephone and VoIP at home had an impact, the move by many enterprises to VoIP was highly significant. Unlike traditional TDM telephone networks that have dedicated telephone lines, VoIP networks share their resources across the enterprise voice and data. Because we haven’t seen this as a significant issue in the past, it can only be assumed that VoIP networks are a significant cause.

Consumer’s perceptions:

• Seventy-nine per cent of consumers globally reported experiencing poor voice quality.
• Consumers said that forty two per cent of all contact centrecontact centre calls are impacted.
• Sixty-eight per cent of consumers will hang up if they experience poor voice quality. For those calling about a new product or service, they will likely call a competing company instead.
• Twenty-six per cent of consumers say they need to redial to complete a transaction.
• “Stress” is the most commonly used word when consumers were asked to explain how they felt after a poor voice quality call.
• Poor voice quality is the second most common bad experience for consumers after IVR.
• Case studies show that consumers are often forced to repeat themselves on calls as a result of poor voice quality.

Contact centre professional’s perceptions:

• Poor VQ takes up 34% of the value of each call across US & UK.
• UK – If consumers perception is correct then national loss (agent costs) £7.6b
• USA – If consumers perception is correct then national loss (agent costs) $36.8b
• Only 1 in 6 Organisations have appropriate tools to monitor poor VQ Issues or plan to install them over the next 12 months.

Other findings of the survey were that bad IVR was still a pet hate of consumers. Also, consumers most often commented that they were stressed by their experience. Clearly, this is not where companies want to be.

Why Such an Epidemic

A whole series of factors have come together to push voice quality up the list of consumers’ pet hates. There is wider use of mobile phone and at home VoIP (voice over IP) services such as Skype and Vonage. However, the results also coincide with many organisations moving their platform to VoIP. While it is difficult for contact centres to change the former, they can change the latter. Unfortunately, it appears that so few have adequate monitoring that it is not surprising that voice quality is such a major issue.

Financial Impacts

Here are a couple of the key financial headlines based on the perceptions of the overall sample*:

Poor VQ takes up 34% of the value of each call across US & UK.

*These figures are based on statistical norms supplied by Industry bodies and recognised research organisations from each market.

It is clear from the table that the impact of voice quality is huge. A 34% agent time wastage is costing contact centres dearly. They have to very simply pay for 34% more agent time to cover the gap. Through proper monitoring, this figure would be much lower saving billions.

Conclusions

1.       Poor voice quality has now reached epidemic proportions due to a series of factors some of which are within the control of contact centre operators.

2.       Given the increasing importance of live conversations between agents and consumers, this is an area that impacts the ROI in contact centres significantly. Indeed, it is simple to say that a lot of valuable time it wasted by say “Could you repeat that please”.

3.       84% of organisation do not have adequate tools to monitor and manage this issue and it is a clear opportunity to reduce cost.

About the Customer Experience Foundation (CEF)

CEF is the academic arm of Customer Experience Services Ltd and provides thought leadership and business science services through a number of partners including Empirix, grameenphone and New Voice Media and supports major financial institutions on a number of areas of best practice. The Foundation also delivers contact centre training and standards in three countries. The Board of the Foundation comprises leaders with experience from some major institutions including Barclays, Cable & Wireless, BT, Lloyds TSB Bank, Virgin Atlantic and Deloittes.

About Empirix

Empirix is the leading provider of service quality assurance solutions for new IP communications.  Since 1992, Empirix has led the market in innovation and expertise for IP testing and application performance management.  It’s widely acclaimed Hammer^™ Test Engine^™, with patented technology is the acknowledged global standard for validating the quality of IP networks, systems and applications. The world’s largest service providers, enterprise contact centers, and equipment manufacturers depend on Empirix^® solutions to maintain the quality of the user experience for business-critical voice, data, video and mobile services. With Empirix, customers can increase revenues, reduce customer churn and cut support costs. Empirix is privately held and headquartered in Bedford, MA. For further information, please visit www.empirix.com.

In customer experience & compliance ….. change is constant and relentless at the moment. New challenges to address and less customers to turn into sales and less money everywhere. New customer behaviour to respond to. Last years methods & data less useful. New types of regulation with new ways to measure success and new types of fines.

Customer churn rates are steadily increasing. We all know its getting tougher so we have to change and keep changing to survive.

People Process and Technology work together to deliver your customer experience and compliance.

We work together with you and your suppliers and customers to define issues and improve performance and we guarantee our result.

If you need to reduce costs and improve the return from each customer and you want guaranteed results you have come to the right place.