Why Customer Experience Efforts Fail - Part 2: Unable to resolve products, processes, policies, and people

The inability to resolve conflicts between products, processes, policies, and people.

This is easily the hardest thing in creating an enterprise wide enjoyable customer experience.

When a company asks me to come in and examine where they are missing the mark, this is the easiest area to identify. Let me give you some examples.

Imagine a company who has had a strong direct mail presence in the market, all built around analysis in prospecting and acquiring new customers. Culturally, this part of the organization has built the company into an empire. Their models are built with several factors. One of those factors is overdraft, past due, and overlimit fee revenue. This company was so hellbent on capturing this money, so their models would be accurate, they would not empower the agents to waive fees.

Consequently, this part of the organization created another group that would be responsible for reviewing fee waiver requests, where they would control what could and could not be waived with their list of "minor rule breaks". The list, over time, had grown into a monstrosity that was more complex than a bill in Congress.

Meanwhile, the agents are helpless and put into a position of creating a miserable customer experience. "Call back in 10 to 15 business days" to see if you fee has been waived had become the phrase I heard the most when I spent time listening to calls.

The backlog of fee requests was huge. They added a non-value add process that ended up waiving more than 80% of the fees, and they never looked at the overlap with their "minor rule breaks" list.

When we examined this entire process, we found that one rule captured 91% of the fee waivers requests. This one rule, could easily be handed to the agents.

As a result, we were able to reduce callbacks significantly, eliminate a good portion of a back office process, and bring greater alignment among product, policy, process, and people.

When you reflect on your own company, it's important to examine where your efforts are cannibalizing each other. Using the 4 P's as a guide of where you are creating friction for your customers is great way to diagnose your problems and find the root cause.

Why Customer Experience Efforts Fail - Part 1: Siloed Organizations

Siloed organizations that technically, politically, or culturally can not be penetrated.

Overcoming organizational silos is not unique to Customer Experience, but it does introduce new challenges in an effort to improve the customer experience. It is probably more important to first discuss why it is hard to overcome organizational silos and then specifically discuss the issue of why Customer Experience can not infiltrate an entire organization.

Product Managers have a pride in ownership and fear giving up that control to others in their organization. Few product managers seek or invite feedback from contact centers. Product managers feel opening up to operations will just be a “wet blanket” to their creativity.

The Sales Team often over promise on delivery deadlines, forcing others throughout the organization to hurry which creates internal conflict and decreases opportunities to open the dialogue on how to make improvements that the customer and/or the rest of the organization would benefit from.

Operations is in a constant struggle to find the resources and the capabilities to stay afloat with newly added complexity, some of which may not add any value to the customer. Many ideas are not properly vetted. As a result, Operational structures are becoming more centralized and thus, less likely to be penetrated in what is good for the organization and the customer because centralization simply adds bureaucracy and complexity. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that was generated by those upstream from operations. Any savings that this would have produced their centralization is lost in coordination.

Collectively, no common language or common goals exist. I was with one company that every December, we would do our planning for the following year. We generated 256 goals independently. None of the executives were looking at the big picture to see who should be working together and who was working in conflict with their goals. It was incredibly frustrating to those that saw what was happening.

Let’s now translate this to the impact on the customer. Miserable, unhappy, defecting is what was happening. While no individual department had a complete end-to-end view of their collective actions were impacting the customer, the customer saw what the corporate blind spots could not and the experience was not unified or consistent.

Organizations think they are adding value to the customer, but collectively they are cannibalizing each others efforts. Each silo has their own agenda, mostly focused on increasing revenue or decreasing costs, but each silo’s actions have a reaction to other silo’s and the victim is the customer.

Technically, many IT devices are unable to talk across the siloes. Politically, people are serving themselves and not working together to serve the customer. Culturally, it takes a lot of work to collaborate and see how moving the needles collectively has a greater impact. This generates a mis-alignment of expectations among departments which certainly leads to failing to meet the customer's expectations.

In summary, organizations individually create collective complexity, ambiguities, and barriers for the customer. The customer isn’t going to put in the effort to solve your problems. They will move to another company that doesn’t have these issues (sounds like some old girlfriends). You have to solve them for yourself and consequently for your customer. Simplifying for your customer is optimizing for yourself.

If you want to think like your customers, get on the same side of your brain as they are

If you view the Customer Equity Management Blog, they have an interesting slide that shows the difference between CRM and CEM (Customer Equity Management). It got me to thinking about where companies are failing in terms of thinking like their customer.

Many know that the left side of your brain is analytical and the right side of your brain is creative. It is important to translate that concept to customer experience, because if you do not move to the same side as your customer (the right), they will eventually move to your side (the left).

The Left Side of the Brain in Business Speak:

I want to model past transactions that allows me to determine the Net Present Value of each customer so I can plug in concrete values into P&L models that I know. I want to reduce costs by migrating my customer to self-service and make my call centers as efficient as possible. I want to increase the value of each customer to my company.


The Right Side of the Brain in Customer Speak:

I want to invest in valuable experiences that make me feel better about who I am. If I can find a company that can do this consistently, I will appreciate it and they will have my loyalty. I act based on what I believe. I want to have a low-effort, no-hassle relationship. I expect company's to offer value to me....both tangible and intangible.


If companies are unable to get this customer view with their products, policies, processes, and people, then customers will shift to their Left Brain:

I don't want to spend my money on something that feels like a transaction that has led to past disappointments and inconsistencies. I have concrete evidence and know it will happen again, it's just when, not if. I do not want to have to put in un-necessary effort. It's probably not as bad as I am making it sound, but my eyes and ears are open for a better value.

www.customeranalyticsconsulting.com

The survey creates a new Customer Experience opportunity. What are you doing with it?

According to the Gartner Group:

95% of companies collect surveys from their customers
45% of companies alert the staff of the survey results
35% of companies use the insights
10% of companies deploy the insights to make improvements
5% reach out to customers thanking them for their feedback and telling them what they are doing about it.

Think about this from the customer's perspective. If a customer had a bad experience, 95% of them will become more disloyal as they believe that you are not acting on the feedback or don't care. You are the one taking the survey and creating an additional customer experience and giving the customer a chance to affirm their feeling by not acting.

If a customer had a positive experience and you don't respond, you are adding an opportunity cost of not creating a more loyal customer.

If you look at the rest of this customer rolled throughput yield, the fact that 50% of companies do not act on their customer feedback brings the question, why are you doing it and why are you subjecting yourself to more customer apathy?

One possible solution is to avoid structured deliberate surveys and to use Speech Analytics to find both positive and negative experiences. If the surveys are too hard to manage and act on, try something that will reduce the effort for you and your customers.

The Indian Call Center

In my last corporate role, I asked my team to identify some test accounts and to send them exclusively to India and to also send some accounts exclusively to our call center in Canada.

When we ran this test, we saw that the Purchase Volume for those that went exclusively to Canada jumped by approximately $48/month. Conversely, the accounts that went exclusively to India went down by $24/month.

Without further context, these numbers may not seem valuable. However, clearly you could see an impact on customer experience and the behavior of the customer when they were not forced or were forced to deal with a certain environment.

This also changes the equation in terms of the cost per hour of outsourcing and "opportunity cost" must be added to the outsourcing equation so be sure to test for this prior to entering any BPO environment that directly touches the customer.

What impacts Customer Loyalty?

To answer this question, you must first define Customer Loyalty.

Customer Loyalty is measured in terms of:

• Likelihood to return
• Likelihood to spend more
• Likelihood to refer and spread positive experiences

So what behaviors by your company will drive these behaviors by your customer?

Believe it or not, it's more about what you don't do. To drive customer loyalty, you need to go back to the concept of customer effort.

• How are you reducing transfers?
• How are you preventing your customer from repeating themselves?
• How are you reducing multiple (if any) contacts?
• How are you navigating their call to the right agent?
• How are you reducing the time to resolve an issue?

There are also opportunities to impress your customers by leveraging their information and previous behaviors and acknowledging them as individuals by doing so.

• Are you anticipating the reason they called and acknowledging past behavior?
• Are you educating your customer on how to make their lives easier going forward or how your processes work?
• Are you demonstrating transparency with your business practices and policies?
• Is your agent truly acting as an advocate of the customer?
• Are you offering the customers choices in the options to resolve and providing them pro's, con's, and recommendations.
  

Why do companies fail at Customer Experience?

I have been trying to come up with the top reasons why companies are failing at Customer Experience.

Here is my current list:

1. Siloed organizations that politically or culturally can not be penetrated.
2. The inability to resolve conflicts between products, processes, policies, and people.
3. The inability to translate Intangible ROI to tangible ROI.
4. Lack of leadership and/or funding commitment.
5. Data rich, information poor
6. Un-necessary complexity
7. Blind spots
8. Process variation
9. Metrics and Measures that are not actionable
10. Paradigms that create barriers that prevent change from happening

I will be writing about each of these in the weeks ahead.