Syed's Customer Experience Blog

When agents get smarter than your customer experience systems

I recently had to call a large hotel chain (the Delaware North Group) to make a reservation.  Before getting through to the agent I heard a recorded message telling me that if I would like to give my feedback about the call I should stay on the line after the call ended.  Of course, being in the customer experience monitoring business, I am always interested to see how different companies handle agent quality monitoring and what kind of information is being collected. 

So after a relatively mediocre interaction with the agent, during which she was not able to address my issue (she didn't seem like she cared either), I waited to go through to the feedback system. As I waited for the system to kick in, I thought about how poor the technology integration must be for the transfer to take so long. After about 20 seconds I realized that I was not dealing with a system problem - the agent was, in fact, still on the line!

At this point the silence became more and more uncomfortable, as I sat in this virtual game of telephone chicken. “It’s my time versus her average handling time,” I thought.  After about a minute of this, I gave up, as much out of embarrassment as frustration. She won!

This story demonstrates the problem when companies with call centers jump onto the customer feedback bandwagon, but don't think through the processes, and how these processes can be compromised by their own staff. If the cost of a truly automated call transfer system is too expensive (as they are for some companies) ensure your manual system has the smarts to quickly identify agents that play the system.

At ResponseTek, we recommend our clients monitor results and completion rates for each agent against a benchmark group to deter this kind of behavior. Alerts are triggered when agent sampling, average score, or handling times move outside expected ranges, which prompt supervisors to take a closer look at the agents call records.

You can never stop agents from playing your systems, but you can make it hard for them to win by building some intelligence into your business rules and monitoring.  My experience is just one of many where companies think they have enabled the "Voice of the Customer" according to industry best practices but fail to pay attention to the technology and behaviors they need for the system to work.  In the case of Delaware North their agents have definitely figured a way around their well intended customer feedback system. Is the same thing happening in your call centers? I recommend you find out.

Syed

NPS™:New measure, same problems.

I know that it is almost considered blasphemy to say anything contrary to the simple teachings of Fredrick Reichheld when it comes to NPS™. The pace at which this latest offering from Fred Reichheld has been adopted by corporate america and beyond is staggering. Corporations are getting on board across the globe and customer satisfaction measures are becoming very "yesterday" when it comes to the army of customer experience managers, directors and VP's that have been hired over the past couple of years. For those of you living under a corporate rock for the past couple of years I should explain that NPS™ is a percentage derived by asking customers to answer, " would you refer the company to a friend/family?" on an 0-10 scale, the NPS™ score is derived by subtracting the % promotors(9 &10's) from the % detractors (0-6's).

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against NPS™, as long as you remember it is only a measure and that's all. My problem is when companies get so focused on the measure or the percentage and forget about the customers and the experiences that make up the this new measure that has got the exec's all excited. The problem I see is that just because NPS™ is a simple measure doesn't make it any easier to improve your customer experience. It is just as hard to improve Customer experience in today's world of NPS™ measures as it was when you were measuring customer sat. last year. Companies need to get focused on improvement rather than just measurement. Improvement can only be achieved when your chosen measure, NPS™, C Sat or advocacy mean something to every employee, every day. that is when things don't seem as simple as some of the NPS™ practitioners would have you believe.

The following is a piece I wrote last year talking to this issue. Hope it gets you thinking.
Beyond NPS™ to Advocacy Improvement

ps. To keep the lawyers from sending me more nasty letters I must inform you that NPS™ is a registered trademark of Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Experience Story: Bell - Doing the right things but getting it wrong!

I had a recent experience that made me realize that employees are often better at working around our exec grand plans than we can ever imagine.

I recently had to get a service repair man to visit my home from my local satellite provider, Bell ExpressVu because of some issues with reception on my PVR. The first time the guy came over I was not home so my wife had to deal with him. She told me that he wasn't very helpful to the point of rude and had no idea as to what the problem was or how to fix it. He scheduled to come back and this time I made sure I was home. When he returned a week later I spent an hour with him explaining the ins and outs of the wiring in my house to prove the problem was with their hardware and not my wiring. He then used my phone to call his call centre where he sat in the call queue like any other customer while he knocked back any beverage we offered. When he finally got through he told HQ it was a receiver problem and that they should send a new one out.

Just before he left he handed me the job paperwork and told me to sign in two places marked by crosses. I asked if I needed to do anything else but he said, "no, just sign please". Before signing I took a look at the two boxes to sign. The first one asked "was the engineer able to solve your problem" and the second one asked, "would you refer us to a friend". Both sections had a few tick boxes that the engineer was obviously going to fill out on my behalf later!

So this is what I mean by "doing the right but getting it wrong". Bell Expressvu have followed a best practice checklist by collecting feedback around a transaction, measuring advocacy, measuring ability to resolve and I guess based on the engineer's behavior, linking compensation to the employee with these results. However despite following so many best practices by letting the engineer administer the measurement at the front line, they might as well not have bothered.

I am guessing someone at Bell is patting themselves on the back at how "referable" they are and the level of their "ability to solve problem" metrics. They are probably in line for a promotion based on the success of the customer experience program they have rolled out. The reality is that the engineers have figured out how to play the system and the only people benefitting are the employees that are compensated on these false results. The customer is still suffering and Bell probably has no idea.

Nice try Bell, but time to go back to the drawing board.

Should you focus on managing customer value or customer experience

Here is a piece that I wrote about 18 months ago (pre blog) looking at the challenges for companies that continue to focus on customer value management in a world where all their customers high value or low value are probably networked together. In today's network economy company that try to deliver better service to only high value customers and attempt to "fire" low value customers run a massive risk of destroying their brand reputation.

check it out after the jump. Manage customer value or customer experience?