How Process impacts Customer Experience

I think many people understand that process impacts customer experience. However, I think most companies spend more time fixing front-office processes, such as call centers, rather than focusing on the back-office processes that cause the call centers to be in a state of chaos.

A study by Corporate Executive Board showed that 63% of problems (footnote) resolved by operations did not originate in operations. This demonstrates that many back-office processes, either in product development, origination, or administration, fail to see how they are impacting the customer.

That said, many front-office operations, especially call centers and web sites developers, do not interact and share their feedback with those that control your content and constrict your message. This is one place where Speech Analytics can make a big difference and bring the true "Voice of the Customer" directly to those that impact it in an efficient manner.

Front-office Processes: Front-office processes, such as call centers and websites, must be customer friendly. Through one of my consulting contracts helping a company implement Nexidia Speech Intelligence, we found that almost 20% of all customers were mentioning on the phone that they tried to perform a transaction or find something on-line and were unable to do so. Do you think this is something that call center agents were feeding to the eCommerce department? Of course not. Imagine being the call center director and realizing he could reduce his calls by one-fifth! Websites must be easy, enjoyable, and useful. If they are missing any of those ingredients, they are doomed to fail.

Call Centers are equally as guilty of not sharing information as those that create the products they must sell and service. Call Centers have a wealth of information from their direct interaction with the customer. They know the emotional trigger points. They know what needs to be simplified. They know what causes customers to leave. They know what needs remain unfulfilled. However, they do not attempt or are not afforded the opportunity to share this information.

Case Study: The Tax Extension

Retail counters are also front-office processes and some are

Case Study: Baby Furniture




Back-office Processes: Nothing I have seen creates more non-value add for a company than back-office processes. Don't get me wrong. Some back-office processes are necessary and add value, but most of them are the result of un-necessary complexity that the company has weaved through years of tribal knowledge and not examining the policies and practices.

Case Study: The Fee Waiver

Many people at some point, regardless of your credit rating, have missed a payment and been tagged with a late fee. For this example, we'll say it was $29. Upon using Nexidia Speech Intelligence, I found that for this one company, they had not empowered the agents to waive fees IN ANY INSTANCE! Instead, they had created a back-office team that processed fee waiver requests in an attempt to control lost revenue. Additionally, the call center agents instructed customers to "cal back in five to ten business days" to see if the fee waiver request had been approved. Think about this. The agents were training the customers to call back.

Take that $29 fee, and you have suddenly increased your costs by $10 (assuming customers only call twice), so you are probably overstating your profit for these fees.

When you look further into the practices of this company, we saw they had several complicated rules for determining who would and would not receive a fee waived. What they didn't look at was (1) how many of these rules overlapped each other, and (2) They weren't looking at customer behavior prior to AND after the fee was assessed.

When we examined these attributes, we saw that one rule could account for 87% of the fee waiver requests and 96% of the approved fee waivers. The company failed to realize that more often than not, customers demonstrate positive intent. We saw this on many occasions, using speech intelligence, where customers had disputed a charge and then recognized the charge and called back to have their bill adjusted and have the charge placed back on their bill.