Month: September 2013
6 Steps to Implementing a Sustainable Customer Service Program
Whether you are implementing a customer service program within your department or across an organization, it’s a more intricate process than simply creating a customer service plan. Too often are these plans put to action and quickly forgotten about. Truly implementing a customer service program involves sustainable changes to your organization’s culture and processes. While I’ve implemented customer service programs across small departments and large organizations, I’ve found that there are essential steps you can take to ensure that the program is not only great but sustainable.
1. Get real feedback from your customers. Conduct focus groups for your internal and external customers to understand their wants and needs. While most of us think we know what our customers want and why they want it, conducting un-biased focus groups can reveal surprising experiences as well as low hanging fruit. This allows you to find sustainable solutions to satisfy your customer.
2. Use the feedback to get buy-in. Getting buy-in from your organization’s leaders can be difficult when implementing any program. Buy-in, however, is essential to your program’s sustainability as it ensures resources, support and push-back when needed. Using feedback from your customer focus groups is a great way to justify the need for your customer service program.
3. Based on feedback and input from leadership, create a vision statement. Create a vision statement that is the perfect blend of “ideal” and “reality.” It should paint a picture of where you hope to be, without ignoring where you think it’s possible to be. Your vision statement should also align with your department/organization’s mission and values.
4. Create a realistic customer service plan. Use your vision statement to guide the initiatives and processes in your customer service plan. Every aspect of your customer service plan should also tie to the Voice of the Customer based on your focus groups. To better your chances for sustainability, do not create a customer service plan with too many wide-sweeping initiatives: this might present too dramatic of a change to your organization’s operations. Instead, choose one large customer service initiative to tackle in your first year.
5. Develop customer service performance metrics to track progress. Based on the initiatives in your customer service plan, develop specific metrics to track performance. Again, for sustainability purposes, don’t implement your customer service plan and expect to track dozens of metrics. Choose 1-5 important metrics to start.
6. Choose the right person/people to be accountable for the program. If you’re implementing a customer service program within your department, chances are you’ll just have one person who “owns” the customer service operations. If you’re spanning across an organization you may have plenty more. Either way, the person/people who are to be held accountable for customer service metrics need to be both educated on the V.O.C. and the customer service plan as well as have some authority to change the customer service operations.
What steps have you taken to ensure your customer service program is sustainable? Let me know in the comments.
Get Smart: Get Social with Customer Service Interactions
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
RT @OracleCX: #Social customer service – the guide to getting it right [infographic] #custserv #CX http://t.co/uJGsyg906Q
Twitter chat: Engaging Citizens to Optimize Government featuring Rosetta Lue
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
In this Twitter chat on #cxo (customer experience optimization), Rosetta Carrington Lue, Sr Advisor and Chief Customer Service Officer to the City of Philadelphia, joined as we discussed “Engaging Citizens to Optimize Government.”…
See on www.ibmbigdatahub.com
Engaging Citizens to Optimize Government with Rosetta Lue, CCO to City of Philadelphia
#CXO Chat Sept 16th, Noon EST: Engaging Citizens to Optimize Government with Rosetta Lue, CCO to City of Philadelphia
“Is this a Golden Age for citizen involvement in government? As dismayed as some may be with the political process, there are growing opportunities for meaningful engagement in many areas, thanks to growing social media tools and a willingness to participate by many ordinary people.
President Obama has been an early advocate with his Open Government initiative, which encourages transparency, open data, and a willingness to engage citizens through multiply social media channels. This has led to increased use of a range of strategies, including co-delivery, serious gaming strategies, and on-line prizes and contests. Together, these strategies demonstrate the promise of the intersection of technology tools, problem-solving techniques, and the participatory spirit of citizen engagement.” [Adapted from Four Approaches to Crowdsourcing]
In our next twitterchat guest, Rosetta Carrington Lue, Senior Advisor and Chief Customer Service Officer to the City of Philadelphia, joins us as we discuss “Engaging Citizens to Optimize Government.” Michael Stevens, World Wide Government Market Segment Manager at IBM also joins the conversation! Here are the questions we’ll be discussing as well as reference articles to help inspire the September 16th discussion at 12 PM EST.
#CXO Chat Discussion Questions
1. How are you seeing government agencies improving citizen engagement?
2. Why is it important for government agencies to address the multiple devices, channels and customer data?
3. Should governments be tracking citizen sentiment? Why or why not?
4. How can governments improve two-way communications with citizens?
5. How can big data, including social media be useful in improving citizen engagement?
6. How can government agencies address internal processes, silos, and storage problems to enhance the citizen experience?
7. What can government agencies learn from the private sector?
8. What can governments do to improve citizen engagement and optimize government processes?
9. Does the opportunity for better citizen engagement justify more data collection? Why or why not?
CXO Chat Reference Articles:
Four Approaches to Crowdsourcing http://bit.ly/15XP06T
Beyond Citizen Engagement: http://bit.ly/13Szo6T
Addressing Government Challenges with Big Data Analytics: http://ibm.co/1aG1yHH
Healthcare analytics? Obamacare makes decision-support tools imperative:http://linkd.in/1aHmldR
#CXO Chat Guest Bio:
Rosetta Carrington Lue currently serves as the Senior Advisor and Chief Customer Service Officer to the City of Philadelphia Managing Director and was recently name a Huffington Post Top 100 Social Customer Service Pro on Twitter. She was appointed by the City of Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter in May 2008 to serve as the Director of the Philly311 Contact Center, a multi-channel platform for citizens to connect with the Philadelphia City government.
Since Rosetta joined the City in 2008, she created the Customer Service Leadership Academy, an in-house training program for city employees, the Neighborhood Liaison Program, a community empowerment program within Philly311 and the Citizens Engagement Academy, a program to teach and encourage citizens to become civically active, and Customer Service Officers program, which trains and advises senior management staff on strategies to achieve customer services goals and performance objectives within their organizations.
What is #CXO chat?
#CXO chat is a weekly conversation every Monday at 12 Noon EST, on Twitter. Each week we discuss a different customer experience optimization topic.
How do you join in?
If you use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck, HootSuite or Seesmic Desktop, create a search column for the term ‘#CXO’. Then as we tweet with the #CXO hashtag, they will show up in your column. Or you can follow with Twubs – http://twubs.com/cxo and it automatically adds the #CXO hashtag
How do you participate?
Just jump right in! Review the discussion questions posted so you can prepare your thoughts and answers. When the question is posed begin your response with A1: for question 1 and A2: for question 2 etc. No answer is wrong! We look forward to seeing you at the #CXO water cooler hosted by @IBMbigdata
Follow the hashtag #CXO throughout the week for articles, facts and nuggets on customer experience optimization. You can also continue the discussion on LinkedIn in the Customer eXperience Optimization group http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3952442
Top 10 customer experience trends | Impact Lab
Organizations that offer a better customer experience have more customers who say they are willing to buy from them again, according to Forrester. However, if
I agree with the statement – Organizations that offer a better customer experience have more customers who say they are willing to buy from them again, according to Forrester.
See on www.impactlab.net
Why Your Brand Needs Social Customer Service | Social Media Today
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
By choosing social media over other communications channels, millions of customers have given voice to their concerns in what has become an increasingly public arena.
Businesses no longer ask whether they should respond to these issues or not, but how.
Social customer service is now a fully established requirement for customer support. However, many still find it hard to tease out the differences between social monitoring, social marketing and social customer service.
See on socialmediatoday.com
Customer Service: Telephone Still #1 Customer Preferred Channel
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Social media is becoming a customer service trend, but the telephone is still the preferred contact method for many customers – so you need to make it work.
See on www.sharynmunro.com.au
10 Best Practices to Improve Customer Service [INFOGRAPHIC]
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Today’s modern customer is changing the world of customer service. They’re using more channels of communication, making informed decisions and are quick to make demands. How can your organization keep up?
See on blogs.salesforce.com
Should Government Contact Center Operations Services Go Mobile? YES!
Over the past few years, mobile channels have increasingly become a mainstay in many organizations customer service operations. The organizations that have implemented mobile strategies have literally bought into the nearly endless capacity and need for a mobile channel. Other organizations, looming on the outskirts of mobile implementation, view the mobile channel as a technological luxury (excessive, even, in some cases) and do not take the time to explore their mobile options or to listen to the needs of their customers.
For example, a few months back, a technology vendor, Salesforce, blog post highlighted an interview with VP of Product Marketing for Salesforce’s Service Cloud Tony Kavanagh about why mobile customer service is a must. Tony made great points about the uses and need for the mobile and social channels in this interview. As someone who has implemented a mobile strategy in the public sector, I wanted to weigh-in on this topic as well.
In my experience, our move to implement a mobile customer service strategy was a reaction to the lifestyle change of our customers. In recent years, more and more people have moved to a mobile lifestyle—saying goodbye to landlines and using phones for the Internet more than laptops. We saw our customers living on their phones more than anywhere else. This made the decision very easy. Why wouldn’t we offer a channel where our customers spend the most amount of time? Why wouldn’t we open a channel that our customers are more comfortable with using?
Another aspect of mobile customer service that was appealing was that mobile is more flexible than any of our traditional touch points. While IVRs are easily manipulated, call centers as a whole are robust bodies of technology; traditionally they are not readily versatile in lieu of a crisis. We found mobile to be a flexible channel that we can use to pump out instantaneous information as quickly as our customers needed it—wherever they were.
During his interview, Tony Kavanagh was asked: “Do you think that the balance of power is shifting from the business to the consumer? Why?” He answered that the power absolutely was shifting to the consumer and I couldn’t agree more. Customers, now more than ever, want to be empowered by self-service channels. They want easy-to-use portals, ready information and quick responses. A mobile strategy solves all of these problems: if designed correctly with the right technology, customers can have easy-to-access support, 24-hours a day from wherever they are. So far, it’s currently one the most empowering and leading customer service channel in today’s market place.
10 Best Practices to Improve Customer Service [INFOGRAPHIC]
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Today’s modern customer is changing the world of customer service. They’re using more channels of communication, making informed decisions and are quick to make demands. How can your organization keep up?
Very informative and concised list of customer service strategies to engage today’s modern/informed customers.
See on blogs.salesforce.com
Innovative Customer Service Leadership Strategies 