Five Best Practices in Data-Driven Selling

The digital trail of information that customers and prospects share offers sales teams rich insights into their behaviors, needs, and interests that can be analyzed and acted on to drive higher conversion rates. The customer data that’s available also makes it possible for sales leaders to test hypotheses for different sales strategies and to examine the validity of offers against the needs of different customer groups.

In this 1to1 Webinar, Don Peppers, founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, and Jonathan Gray, vice president of marketing for Revana, examine progressive approaches to data-driven sales that mesh with the needs of both B2C and B2B customers. They explain how these techniques can help increase conversion rates and other key business metrics.

Attendees will learn:

How customer data and statistical reasoning can be used to achieve sales potential and maximize customer value

Which techniques can be used to drive incremental sales from existing customers

How to increase inbound up-sell/cross-sell rates by matching callers with historical transactional and behavioral data

How predictive models and analytics can be used to forecast customers’ potential value to prioritize leads

How leading companies are using data-driven selling to optimize business performance, including the use of customer data to help extend the lifecycle of current customers at risk of being lost

Speakers:

Don Peppers, Founding Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

Jonathan Gray, VP Marketing, Revana

Tom Hoffman, Executive Editor, 1to1 Media

Mobilizing Telecom Customers to Use Self-Service

Though all consumers need some support throughout the customer lifecycle, many prefer to tackle certain parts of the journey alone. For those telecom customers looking to answer their own questions and resolve their own problems, self-service channels offer an opportunity to obtain agent-level solutions without ever talking to a physical agent.

In the past, traditional self-service options only offered basic FAQs and site search functionality. While these tools helped identify potentially relevant content, they did little to assist consumers in determining which piece of content contained the answer they needed. But, as the telecom industry continues to evolve alongside these promising technologies, service providers have begun to expand the scope of their self-service options.

According to Aaron Shidler, vice president of product management at Oracle, today’s telecoms use online and mobile self-service tools to facilitate three actions:

Commerce-Customers can access product and service catalogs, while also managing new product purchases, along with service activation and subscriptions.
Support-Customers can manage their accounts and profiles, while also gaining easy access to the brand’s forums, blogs, and FAQs.
Billing care-Customers can check their usage, adjust their current service to avoid overages, and pay their bill online.

And, as consumers’ needs and behaviors continue to change, the technology driving these self-service offerings continues to evolve, as well.

Making Moves in Mobile

Though consumer mobile adoption continues to perplex many industries, telecom companies have actively begun to integrate mobile offerings to enhance their self-service efforts. Being part of the industry that spawned the smartphone and Internet technologies we now use daily, telecom companies recognize the function mobile plays and its pivotal role in the self-service sphere.

Because consumers have become accustomed to accessing information at a moment’s notice, mobile devices can often be found attached to their hips. In fact, according to Morgan Stanley, 91 percent of all U.S. citizens have their mobile devices within reach 24/7, making mobile an ideal channel for companies across industries looking to leverage self-service. Mobile self-service can automate frequent questions and transactions for telecoms, such as paying bills or checking data usage, while reducing the need for interactive voice response (IVR) systems or live agents. Shidler also notes that mobile has the potential to reduce customer churn by immediately addressing issues, such as texting customers when they are about to incur overages.

But, as Matt Kearney, senior product manager at CSG International, highlights, consumers rarely limit their brand interactions to a single channel. “According to Google, 90 percent of users interact with multiple screens to complete a task, but the most popular starting point is the smartphone,” he says. “Customer service providers (CSPs) can no longer view the customer experience on a desktop PC as the primary focus. They cannot afford to simply let consumers pinch and zoom their way through the Web application on their mobile device.”

Kearney notes one Compuware survey that revealed 71 percent of users expect a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop site, while 57 percent would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site and 40 percent would turn to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. These statistics demonstrate why telecoms must think holistically, moving beyond the desktop experience to accommodate consumer needs and cultivate trust. Successful mobile strategies often lay the foundation for customer satisfaction, and its importance will only continue to grow as mobile adoption gains momentum.

Why ‘Virtual’ Has Become ‘Reality’

Mike Hennessy, vice president of marketing at IntelliResponse, notes that the knowledgebase used by self-service tools is the same used by customer service representatives, giving telecom companies the chance to deliver a consistent message to the customer both online and off. Chat technology has seen a 24 percent increase in recent years. These tools offer the opportunity to simulate human service interactions through self-service platforms that tap into the virtual agent base.

“Self-service tools, like virtual agents, can act as an ‘online concierge’ to customers through the information-gathering process,” Hennessy says. “By offering buying recommendations and tools to compare plans, or resolving simple issues, self-service options preserve and improve relationships with existing customers and increase the likelihood of conversion to a sale, or even an upgrade.”

Cogeco, the diversified telecom company offering television, Internet, and phone services throughout Canada and parts of the U.S., employs a variety of self-service tools to provide customers with an exceptional, proactive online experience. The “Ask Cogeco” virtual agent solution acts as the primary method for delivering online self-service to customers. Customers need only access the main support page and enter their question in the box provided. By entering a complete question, the system can distinguish the virtual agent from regular site search, using context clues to provide the single best answer available. Predictive matching technology also matches the question with possible answers in the knowledgebase based on intent, not keywords, so customers can find answers even when typed keywords cannot be found in the title or text of the answer. This strategy also yields a list of related topics and a dynamic “Top 10” list of additional questions as a means for curbing customer frustration.

Such methods not only reduce email and phone volumes, thereby reducing company costs overall, but the raw voice of the customer data provides telecoms with the chance to generate real-time actionable insights and fine tune their approach. Though many believe virtual agents signal the death of the call center, such technology promises only to enhance the customer experience by freeing up call center agents for more complicated questions that require sensitive personal information, emotional intelligence, and a one-on-one approach.

Adapt Business Process Improvement Efforts for Customer Experience

To deliver great customer experiences, firms must first design them and then orchestrate the complex system of interdependent people, processes, and technology that Forrester calls the customer experience ecosystem to deliver them. Customer experience (CX) pros often know a lot about the design part and uncovering customer needs, but often struggle with changing the operational underpinnings required to deliver on the vision. Conversely, business process management (BPM) pros have the chops to re-engineer business processes, but when focusing on the objectives of internal stakeholders in departmental silos or when reporting up into back-office people like COOs and CFOs, they have little interaction with, much less understanding of, customer needs outside of voice of the customer spreadsheets. The good news is that I’m starting to see business process leaders joining forces with their customer experience colleagues to leverage their counterpart’s strengths and ameliorate some of the weaknesses. Ultimately, Forrester believes these two groups need to unite in order to transform, optimize, and continuously improve the outcomes delivered to customers. CX Pros: Consider the strengths business process improvement teams can bring to your effort.

Business process improvement groups can enhance CX teams with:

Credibility. Business process improvement methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma have been applied successfully for decades. These data-driven methodologies provide a disciplined approach that plays equally well with both product and services firms. When Vanguard set out to simplify a complex error-prone process that was causing its clients unwelcome angst, it called in process experts from its Center for Excellence. The result was a faster process with fewer errors and a flood of unsolicited “thank you” notes from clients who raved about the improvement to their experience.

Scale. Firms that have rolled out business process improvement efforts often have a cadre of trained people embedded across the organization. Tapping into this resource helps customer experience pros extend the reach of their efforts beyond the small teams they typically oversee. From the perspective of business process improvement teams, this is a natural partnership: As their efforts mature, they typically embrace customer experience as a core focus.

Valuable tools and process. Methodologies in the process improvement toolkit complement those used by customer experience designers. What’s more, typical process improvement approaches like Six Sigma’s DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, implement, and control) or Lean’s PDCA (plan, do, check, and act) align naturally with common design approaches.

But Business Process Fixes Alone Don’t Guarantee Good Experiences While business process improvements can lead to better experiences by eliminating defects (Six Sigma) or improving efficiency (Lean), these fixes don’t guarantee success.

That’s because business process improvement initiatives can:

Neglect the emotional aspect of experiences. Process improvement teams often overlook the importance of emotion when redesigning a customer interaction. Houston airport spent millions on reducing the total wait time for retrieving bags, a source of many customer complaints. Even though it succeeded in cutting the average wait time in half — down to eight minutes — it didn’t reduce the number of complaints. Customers still spent 88 percent of their time after leaving the plane standing around at the carousel not knowing when to expect their bags. The operational fix overlooked emotional aspects such as anxiety, uncertainty, and distractions that feed customer perceptions.

Narrowly focus within process silos. Improving the efficiency of a particular process within a business silo might be a wasted effort if that process is part of a larger customer journey that extends across silos — or even across companies. Business leaders at FedEx set out to reduce the number of missed deliveries: instances where customers aren’t home to receive a package. A route cause analysis revealed that the problem often started with poor quality information captured when the consumer ordered a product from a retailer or a manufacturer.

Fail to design for flexibility. A dogmatic focus on standardizing business processes — which arguably makes sense for manufacturing products — misses the inherent variability present in today’s services-based world. That’s why American Express turned away from call center scripts and moved toward hiring and empowering employees who can ask probing questions to understand customers’ unique situations and anticipate future needs.

Take an outside-in approach to business process improvement Customer experience teams, business process pros, and architecture specialists need to work together in a coordinated way that benefits customers and, ultimately, the organization. This means learning to understand each group’s respective change methodologies and then aligning them to work together.

To make this partnership work, firms need to:

Shift to an outside-in perspective. Firms need to reframe continuous improvement efforts around the outcomes that matter most to customers. Customer experience methods like qualitative research, personas, customer journey maps, ecosystem maps, and perception metrics help refocus processes, behaviors, and systems to support the desired experience.

Realign the organization. Firms need to revisit their business architecture — the coordinating framework for organizational analysis and change — to redefine how the organization will deliver value to customers in the future. At the heart of this change is a move from traditional, functionally oriented management and governance models to one centered on key customer journeys or scenarios. For example, USAA has identified approximately 100 key ones (e.g. buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad), all of which have owners and cross-functional teams held accountable for underlying processes.

Transform the culture. To sustain the momentum for transformation, firms need to embed their efforts in the organization’s culture. This comes from engaging trusted employees to purposefully design new customer experiences. Begin by building a team of change agents to evangelize and lead improvement projects. Intuit has 200 “Innovation Catalysts,” specially trained design-thinking “Jedis” deployed across the company to help the organization better deliver delight. Change-management guru John Kotter recommends recruiting upward of 10 percent of employees to work on change efforts in order to create lasting transformations. For the deeper insight on how CX and BPM teams can work together, check out my recent research report, “Adapt Business Process Improvement For Customer Experience.”

About the Author: Paul Hagen is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. He blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/paul_hagen

Governance: The Key To Customer Experience Management

At its core, customer experience management comes down to governance. But what is governance, really? You’ve probably got a hundred different governance processes in your organization, none of them exactly the same. The word “governance” may stir up images of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. And yes, teams of senior decision makers are an important component of governance practices at many organizations. But customer experience governance isn’t about a committee that hands out edicts from on high. And I’m not suggesting that you form a police force to issue tickets for customer experience infractions.

Customer experience governance is about helping you drive accountability by assigning specific customer experience management tasks to specific people within your organization. It’s also about developing new business processes and establishing oversight across your company’s customer experience initiatives. When implemented well, governance practices will help you monitor customer experience quality, improve it on a continuous basis, and keep bad experiences from getting out the door in the first place.

In Forrester’s soon-to-publish book, Outside In, Harley Manning and I illustrate the importance of customer experience governance through a case study about the software company Adobe. Adobe recently created a physical listening post in its headquarters where it aggregates the voice of the customer. Flat screen panels, each displaying a different type of input, dominate one wall of the room. Screens on the far left show insights from Facebook, Twitter, and other social forums; the middle screens pipe in real-time video from the company’s call centers in Asia, Europe, and North America; and on the right screens display the top issues bubbling up in Adobe’s customer relationship management system and customer surveys.

Of course, the good folks at Adobe don’t collect all that data just to satisfy their curiosity. They collect it because it’s a critical input into the company’s customer experience governance program.

Adobe has established a customer advocacy council with senior leaders from multiple functions and its two largest business units. Every month, and as needed, this group convenes to look at the latest customer data. They size, scope, and prioritize issues that they believe will make the biggest improvement to the customer experience and have the biggest financial impact.

Adobe’s customer advocacy council partners with another important cross-functional group: the business process improvement council, which sponsors customer experience improvement initiatives and allocates people to work on them. This group also defines the desired end state and measures of success for each initiative. And, in monthly meetings, they review the status of all open projects and make adjustments to resources and staffing as needed.

Now, if you’ve ever managed a customer experience improvement project, you probably know all too well that fixing CX problems can be like herding cats. That’s why the business process improvement council also assigns an executive sponsor for each project, who’s then responsible for plowing through any roadblocks and making sure that people from individual silos are working together.

With this governance model, Adobe has successfully completed a number of short-term projects, it’s managing several long-term initiatives that are currently in flight, and it’s created an ongoing pipeline of additional initiatives for the future. When fully completed, these projects will have a combined business impact of tens of millions of dollars.

Governance is just one of six disciplines that companies must master if they want to achieve the full potential of customer experience. The others are strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, and culture. Of course, most of these concepts aren’t new in the business world, but they do take on a slightly different twist when it comes to customer experience. If you’d like to know more about the six disciplines and how they’ll help you create great experiences for your customers, please visit outsidein.forrester.com.

About the Author:
Kerry Bodine is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. She blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/kerry_bodine and tweets at @kerrybodine

3 Ways to Change the Customer Perception Gap

Customers form opinions based not only on their experiences with your company and products, but also on their broader experiences and beliefs. Consequently, a gap forms between what you’d like customers to think about you and what they perceive to be true, according to Nigel Barlow, author of Re-think.

During his keynote at the Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit 2012 in London, Barlow shared three ways to stand out that will help close the perception gap:

Challenge assumptions: Doing so is what leads to innovation and new ideas. Also, don’t put your organization in a box; you don’t have to be a certain way based on the stereotypes in your industry.

Differentiate: How can you differentiate your organization by actually being different? Too many companies try to “differentiate” by simply improving on what their competition already does.

Rethink your positioning: What business are you really in? Harley-Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles; it offers the ability for riders to become a part of a cool “club”. Virgin Atlantic is entertainment at 30,000 feet, not a mode of transportation. You need to define your “something more.”

9 Ways to Reward Employees to Reinforce Customer-Centric Behaviors

The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in his blog post entitled Your Culture Is Your Brand: “Advertising can only get your brand so far… So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? In a word: culture. At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff–like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customer–will happen naturally on its own.” When Forrester looks at building a customer-focused culture, we believe firms need some precursors in place, such as a clear strategy and vision, metrics that reflect customer perceptions, and governance mechanisms that set standards and hold people accountable for changes. Once those are in place, rewards systems are one powerful lever to keep employees focused on what’s important. My colleague Belle Bocal and I identified 9 ways that companies use reward systems to build a customer-centric culture.

Celebrate target behavior Many companies make the mistake of trying to tie variable compensation (e.g., bonuses) to customer experience metrics too early. What many firms have learned is that the more informal recognition programs can be even more powerful at moving culture than the compensation metrics.

1. Reward those named in customer surveys. At Pitney Bowes, employees recognized by name in favorable survey or feedback receive a gift certificate, and at GoDaddy.com one lucky employee’s bonus is a paid year’s worth of rent or mortgage payments. Circles, a provider of virtual concierge services, gives agents the ability to accumulate points based on customer satisfaction surveys and redeem them for prizes, including additional time off.

2. Recognize people behind-the-scenes. Since 1992, every Valentine’s Day Southwest Airlines has awarded a Hero of the Heart as a tribute to a behind-the-scenes star workgroup that does not have direct customer contact.

3. Empower peers to celebrate each other’s work. One financial services firm allows employees to nominate peers monthly who have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction and bring value to the firm for its “Random Acts of Customer Engagement” award. KeyBank set up a program that allows employees to give each other “Key Kudos” for work that exemplifies a focus on customers.

4. Align rewards to goals. Instead of rewards like golf trips or dinners that have no correlation to customer experience, Fidelity sent those selected to participate in its customer experience Ambassador’s program to the Disney Institute for three days, which included touring Disney to see behind-the-scenes how it delivers its experiences.

Provide perks that improve the employee experience Many companies on their customer experience journey have recognized that employee experience correlates to customer experience. Just as customers have larger contexts in which they use your products and services, employees have larger contexts in which they work for you. Help them navigate those larger contexts and you have employees who can focus more on your customers.

5. Provide services that improve a work/life balance. Based on employee feedback, American Express built and piloted its first backup child care center adjacent to the Fort Lauderdale call center. It added nurse practitioners to the on-site healthcare service, allowing employees to get more of their medical needs (e.g., prescriptions) met without having to take time off. And American Express even got the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to come on-site twice a year so employees could renew their driver’s licenses and car registrations without having to wait in long lines. Similarly, Cisco provides on-site car tune-ups. CDW also uses customer feedback scores to determine eligibility for extra perks, such as the ability to work from home.

6. Offer benefits that lower stress levels. CareerBuilder.com notes, “The inclusion of on-site services such as manicures, laundry, and daycare are enabling employees to cut their errands in half. Massage chairs, yoga classes, and even napping have been encouraged to cut back the daily errands and reduce workers’ stress levels.” To that end, Kaye/Bassman and Le Gourmet Gift Basket allow their employees to have sleep breaks at work, and Zappos offers employees access to a life coach.

7. Treat the frontline reps with respect. American Express changed the title of its agents to “customer care professionals” and provides them with personalized business cards. Volusion uses “support concierge” for its call center reps. Zappos lets call center agents get their own desk to decorate any way they like.

Compensate and promote based on customer-centric metrics While I’ve emphasized the non-monetary side of incentives, tying variable compensation and promotions to customer metrics is a powerful incentive in companies that have established an understanding of how to impact those metrics.

8. Promotion tied to customer experience performance. At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, no one can further their career into corporate management who has not first started on the frontline, as well as sustaining above-average Enterprise Service Quality index scores over time. The account managers at CDW also have customer satisfaction objectives, and cannot become eligible for job promotions until having achieved high satisfaction scores from their clients.

9. Bonuses to customer metrics. American Express created customer experience objectives for everyone in its service organization from senior managers to frontline employees. For its customer care professionals (CCPs), 85 percent of each performance assessment stems from customer feedback scores, and CCPs have an opportunity to earn an incremental 25 to 35 percent above their base salaries. The professional services firm IHS, ties its CEO annual bonus compensation to key customer metrics that measure the company’s “customer delight” performance.

About the Author: Paul Hagen is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving Customer Experience professionals. He blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/paul_hagen

White Glove Service Is the Hot New Retention Strategy

Organizations in B2C and B2B industries are offering personal “concierge” service for their high-value customers.

In a journey to reinvent its relationships with customers, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center launched a personal representative program three years ago for its 4,000 highest-value customers. The program features such unique services as a private toll-free number, a gift-giving service, and unique win-back promotions including private box seats and invitations to catered receptions.

Additionally, NJPAC has designated a team of its best service representatives with the primary responsibility of building lasting relationships with its high-value customers. Since launching the program NJPAC has been able to reverse churn, stabilize the number of households attending concerts, and increase the price paid per ticket.

With customer loyalty on the wane today, NJPAC is just one of the many organizations leveraging concierge-type service to retain high-value customers and create greater profitability.

According to the recent American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, a survey conducted in the United States and 11 other countries to explore the attitudes and preferences toward customer service, Americans will spend 9 percent more with companies that provide excellent service; and 98 percent of consumers said personal experience is the most influential factor in doing business with a company.

With these recent statistics, it’s not surprising that companies across industries, including NJPAC, Eddie Bauer, and even Lockheed Martin, are offering concierge service, which aims to deliver unique service experiences to top customers to build loyalty and customer retention.

Jeanne Bliss, president of Customer Bliss, attributes the rise in companies offering high-priority service to the realization among a growing number of organizations that different customer groups have different needs, and that means providing service based on their needs and value. “Finally, after all these years, more organizations are being deliberate in how customers are organizing into different classes,” Bliss says “There’s much more rigor and understanding that not all customers are created equal.”

Linda Jenkinson, chairman of Les Concierges, says she too sees an increase in interest for this type of service. “In this global crisis and financial environment, companies are really starting to cherish their customers. They’re starting to take the budgets used for marketing and management consulting to spend on customer support.”

Jenkinson says enthusiasm for high-end personalized service started to increase about three years ago and sees interest in concierge service on the rise in the hotel, retail, high-tech, and even the defense and bio-tech industries.

Many organizations that offer high-touch services use segmentation to help build out their program. These firms will often identify their top customers, assign them to a group based on the level of value defined by the client, and then develop an individual treatment program that includes rewards or concierge services. The concierge representatives then assist customers with varying levels of service, ranging from securing dinner reservations to arranging for the chef to visit them at their table, for instance.

Different customer groups have different profitability profiles, which require varying degrees of treatment models, Jenkinson says. High net worth groups, for example, may require more than dinner reservations to keep them satisfied. In one recent case a client staying at a hotel in Paris requested a four-handed massage. The concierge representative arranged for two high-end spas to each send a masseuse to together give the customer the four-handed massage.

Jamie Comiskey, vice president of client services at VIPdesk, says that years ago concierges would only receive requests for help with booking airline tickets. Today, the types of service requests have completely changed. One recent request was from someone needing his car towed, another involved a customer who was traveling abroad and became ill. The concierge worked with customs and the local embassy to get the customer medicine and then arranged his travel home. “[The requests] range from the sublime to the ridiculous,” Comiskey says.

Despite the nature of the requests, concierge service helps organizations retain customers and increase their profitability. Jenkinson cites a private golf club as an example of how concierge service can increase retention. The club recently deduced that if a member stayed for two years, he would ultimately stay a lifetime. If members use the club’s services three times within two years, they typically renew. “The issue was the club acquired new customers, but typically lost the same number in two years,” she says.

Working with Les Conceirges, the club reached out to new members to offer a range of personalized services like arranging for concert tickets or inviting them to an exclusive wine program. As a result, the club renewed its members at the two-year mark 78 percent of the time. “[Priority service] has a major financial impact,” Jenkinson says. “When people are looked after, they’re loyal.”