Despite near-constant increases in the investment companies make into customer service, customer loyalty has remained flat for several years. This difficulty to see an ROI on investments into contact centers can largely be attributed to a single fact: 70% of service leaders focus their spending on process improvements or technological enhancements DESPITE the fact that what customers have to DO in the service interaction only accounts for 35% of the perceived amount of effort they expend in the service interaction. The other 65%? Purely dependent upon how the rep makes them FEEL during the service interaction.
In other words, when it comes to unlocking customer effort—and thus driving consumer loyalty—your frontline reps hold the key. The skills and competencies they possess and the words they use are the deciding factors for delivering a superior, low-effort customer service experience. Fortunately, our research has identified four distinct rep competencies that are critical to driving a low effort customer service experience.
Capability #1: Interaction Tailoring
In an era when a full 24% of repeat calls stem from an emotional disconnect between reps and customers, it is vital that reps can scalably tailor their communication style to the customer’s preferred method of interaction. By helping reps to identify the customer’s dominant personality style and “flexing” their own communication style in response, one company was able to reduce repeat calls by a full 40% and improve customer loyalty by 20%.
Capability #2: Content Surfacing
Customers are constantly giving us clues that can help us resolve their issues. However, many times these clues go unnoticed by frontline reps. Attentive frontline reps can better pick up on these clues through active listening and uncover additional information through thoughtful, probing questions in purposeful small talk. By identifying this often unstated information, reps can reduce the need for customers to repeat information while also uncovering additional context that may allow reps to offer better solutions to the customer’s issue.
Capability #3: Experience Engineering
Focusing on friendly and personable service no longer suffices in today’s world of customer service. Instead, reps need to engineer the experience by actively guiding customers to a mutually beneficial resolution. Through experience engineering tactics, reps are able to reduce customer effort by as much as 75% and improve the quality of the service experience by up to 80%.
Capability #4: Forward Resolving
With increasingly complex issues that often require additional follow-up, conceiving of the service interaction as a single contact is no longer accurate. In fact, 46% of call backs are not due to failure to resolve the customer’s stated issue—instead they are the product of implicit issues that are adjacent to the reason for the initial contact. By identifying next likely issues from the original reason for contact and proactively positioning solutions to them, companies have been able to avoid up to 40% of repeat contacts.
Putting These Capabilities in Practice
Through membership with the Customer Contact Leadership Council, we provide a number of resources to help you implement these capabilities in your service organization. However, we have also developed a new offering in which our trained facilitators come to your organization and instruct your reps on how to practice these capabilities. Our new Effortless Experience™ Capabilities Builder combines live training and virtual sessions specifically designed for adult learning styles in order to maximize your reps’ retention of these low effort skills. The program also includes ongoing certification after every teaching every skill set and a number of follow-up programs to help you track rep progress and calculate your ROI on the program.
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Of course, just teaching reps a particular set of skills is insufficient if it not reinforced by good coaching practices. Our recent research has found that good coaching can improve staff performance by up to 12.2% while poor coaching actually has a negative impact on performance. Once again, though, we’ve recently developed a new product offering to help you equip your supervisors to most effectively coach your frontline reps. The Effortless Experience™ Coaching Capabilities Builder combines live and virtual training to help you assess your current coaching effectiveness, build capabilities that support effective techniques, and provide an extended learning journey to drive application and sustainability.
I hope you take a look at these new offerings and see how CEB Customer Contact can continue to assist you on your journey to becoming a low-effort service organization. Every organization will be different, of course, but let us know in the comments below where you think your greatest opportunities for improvement might be—experience engineering? Forward resolving? Coaching? We’re always interested in better understanding where our members’ most critical areas of development may be so that we can continue to build our offerings to help you drive better performance.
Interested in learning more? Please visit the Effortless Experience™ Capabilities Builder website for details and to contact us for additional information.