Which channels do consumers prefer in the omnichannel world?

Last month Mitel commissioned this research which gives an interesting consumer perspective on how they like to contact brands and gain customer service today. The survey delved into channel preference, consumer frustrations, motivations and important factors when contacting a company. It was interesting that '70% would switch companies due to poor experience over customer service' and 'the contact centre has a major influence on this'. Though as expected, the highest frustration was paying for premium rates. How many times have we as consumers put the phone down? Their infographic below highlights these key findings and Mitel's report can be downloaded for further survey findings. …

Customer satisfaction measurement approaches from BT and Henley Business School

Customer effort score may be the new kid on the block, but just like other loyalty measurement tools such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT), it sharply divides opinion. In this article I review my discussion with Professor Moira Clark from Henley Business School and BT's Dr Nicola Millard asking whether customer effort score is help or hype? First emerging in 2008, the team behind the research, the US Corporate Executive Board (CEB), challenged the notion that companies must ‘delight’ customers and argued instead that what customers really want is to simply be given a satisfactory solution to their service issue. Additionally, the research claimed that excessive levels of customer service (such as offering free products or services) will only make customers slightly more loyal to…

Benchmark response times on delivering customer service via social media

When I started writing books about Internet Marketing in 2000, I was interested to look beyond ways to use the Internet to grow leads and sales. It seemed that Internet-based customer service 'Web Self-Service' as we called it would also have a strong role.

PR Smith and I emphasised this with the 5s Goals for businesses to consider in what we now call Digital Marketing. The 5Ss are Sell, Speak (a trialogue between a brand, it’s customers and other web users), Serve, Save, Sizzle (add value to the brand.)

We advised finding the gap between customer expectations of online service against what a brand was delivering and then trying to plug that gap by improving customer service.

So, what is the state of online customer service responsiveness today, specifically through social media?

Well back in the day,…

Selecting the most relevant Social Customer Care metrics

As I read through the different types of social media care metrics, how they should be interpreted, and how they relate to ROI, I was struck by one thought: who do these measures benefit? So, I put together a quick table drawing the different metrics, categories and ROI together. The image is a bit blurry, but if you click on the table you can see where I take the different metrics, categories and ROI from the original article.

The next column is ‘Company benefit’, followed by ‘Customer benefit’, followed lastly by ‘Will this resolve the customer’s issue’. My two observations are: 1. Quality is one of the categories that Walter Van Norden (Telus) proposes. Interestingly, there are no metrics for Quality. 2. It is obvious from the last three columns…

7 ways to provide excellent customer service for e-commerce

The Salesforce infographic provides 7 actionable steps on how companies can overcome some of the failures of customer service which are centred around 'timeliness and being 'personal', within their social media channels: 1. Offer multi-channel support. 2. Social media Listening strategy and meeting your customers' expectations. 3: Track customer interactions. 4. Create a customer support centre. 5. Provide online chat. 6. Timely response to customers. 7. Deliver the 'Wow experience' - empathy and understanding.

Bluewolf have also created an Infographic, sourcing data from Gartner and Aberdeen, to address how people respond to their encounter with social media  - 40% of customers leave the company after two annoyances and 59% will switch brands for better customer service.

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Which are the KPIs to monitor for customer service delivered by social media?

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Social media may be a new set of channels over which customer service can be delivered, but that doesn't mean that some of the old rules don't apply. For instance, the old adage 'you can't manage what you don't measure' is still highly relevant.

In fact, with the jury still out on social customer support, you could even argue that nowhere is it more appropriate than in this field, as businesses are still feeling their way and desperately need visibility into the effectiveness of their efforts to be able to steer future investment.

There are, of course, a great many key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be…

6 steps to successfully managing multi-channel integration.

Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: Whitepaper - Meeting the Multi-channel challenge Vocalcom's whitepaper reviews approaches to customer care within a multi-channel environment. It includes some great insight into how companies are addressing customer service and Managers are meeting the challenges of today's multitude of touchpoints, being caused by greater transparency, insight and accessible technologies. It also provides recommendations on implementing a cloud based solution to support customer service. 'The common theme amongst Managers was a clear desire to understand how customers want to make contact, to integrate channels better, and to implement technology that can facilitate a seamless customer experience across all channels.'

We are sharing one of their table's on the challenges of multi-channel contact and more findings can read by downloading their full report from Vocalcom's website.

What is…

Questions to ask to improve the quality of online customer service by social media

With 44% of the adults now using the web to share grievances the importance of delivering a good quality of customer service across channels is self-evident. Frank Eliason blazed the trail for best practice in delivering customer support by social media  some years ago now, demonstrating how social platforms had the potential to usher in a new age of customer service. But some five years later a growing number of commentators are voicing their disappointment that the revolution has never materialised, including a recent feature on MyCustomer.com by IBM’s Guy Stephens. So what has happened? Was social media customer support a flash in the pan? Did our initial excitement blind us to the fundamental impracticalities of…

Good User Experience = Good Customer Service = More Sales

Christmas shopping has begun and with it, the stress! And no, I haven’t been shopping offline at all, I’ve been shopping online! But this time of the year always brings to the fore one of the most obvious issues that many Ecommerce Managers have control of, but yet remains to be one of the most lacking in terms of solutions. Picture this: you go into a store where a very nice assistant helps you find everything you need to purchase. You’re thinking “Great! All my Christmas shopping done in an hour!”. You walk on up to the till point where the assistant starts totting up all of your purchases, but the sales assistant then suddenly tells you that you can’t actually pay at their till unless you have a specific device. So you…

Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation?

June 2012 update - a new service for benchmarking Facebook customer service: On June 20th at LeWeb, Socialbakers introduced a new service, Socially Devoted, which gives an idea of what are good and bad levels of customer service within Facebook. Here is the worst from the retail category which shows there is still plenty of room for improvement: The most responsive show how it can be done: I originally read this post by Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, in October 2011 about the lack of interaction of brands have on their own Fan pages. Apparently only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand - shocking really! It's really shooting yourself in the social foot…