Putting the customer back in focus
A CRM blog by Erik van Geest

Sure it has happened to us all. We’ve all been the victim of the Interactive Voice Response system, the gatekeepers to the ‘real people’.

An Interactive Voice Response system is that automated voice that you hear when you call your energy supplier, your local council or any other organisation dealing with many incoming calls. They are meant to be win-win setup.

The company wins because they save money and allow the customer to select options so that the call is correctly routed for queueing and handling. The customer wins because supposedly the call can be handled more efficiently….

To me, any customer arriving in an IVR curses under his or her breath. It is a necessary evil, grudgingly accepted because the product or service is competitively priced.

Now study shows that you can really only ask your customer to make an IVR selection twice, with a maximum number of options of 3 in each. Go beyond that, and the abandon rate (when the customer hangs up out of sheer frustration) skyrockets.

Yet the temptation to automate talking to your customer is strong. I baffle at  that variation which tries to answer before I even asked my question. ‘If your call is regarding your invoice, press 1′, ‘If your call is regarding a service outage, press 2′, If your call …. Some of them have the nerve to state: “Please listen to all options” before they present all eight of them. You finally make a choice and if you are unlucky the automated voice responds: ‘We are experiencing high call volumes right now and cannot be of service at this point. Please call back later’. Don’t you just love that one? Or the other classic in which a serious male voice explains the entire terms and conditions regarding your question without actually answering anything, finishing off with: ‘for more information, please visit our website, www.answeryourownquestion.com…’

Ever been through three levels of IVR menu, hanging by the fingernails only to reach one of these dead ends? It makes you wonder who put these together and whether they ever, ever put themselves into the customers’ position and walked through the scenarios before putting it out there.

It’s like coming into a shop, or your local bank and the person behind the counter tells you to listen to a taperecorder giving you 20 answers hoping that one of them might be the answer to your question. Why? Well, because then I don’t have to be here. I can be busy doing something else. Now, if your answer is not in these first 20, push this button and I will play you another tape with more answers. Then, perhaps I could be bothered to listen to your question. It’s the arrogance in the whole setup – listen to me first, then I will listen to you. Ahem, who was customer again?

I find this fascinating and wonder what motivates large, professional organisations to make blunders like this and then not even ever correct them. “So what do you do when the customer has a question?” “Yeah, we send them into our IVR maze, tire them out until they give up in the end”. “Saves us a bundle of money.”

The tip for today is that if you cannot build a customer friendly IVR, which in most cases leads to a human being, then don’t do it at all. The money that you save by getting rid of a handful of warm customer service agents you will lose many times over on the effort you spend on customer retention and sales efforts to counter your disproportionately high churn rate caused by your cold, messy IVR.

And you know, I don’t even think it is technology that creates these Monster IVR setups. It is the organisations who implement them without thinking through the paths, the options and anticipating the customer experience.

Call into your own customer service, pretend you have a real problem and see how it feels. Then do it again with a different problem, and another problem, and another. Exhaust the possibilities.

Still a cool customer? Then please forgive me for publishing this blog post.

Not so cool anymore? Then get in some good business analysts, map out the paths, clean them up and reimplement.

Quickly.

Before your competition happen to surf this way too…

• After a long winter break Customersrcool started blogging again.
  The drive to bring the customer back in focus continues. #

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The world of social media seems to be dividing up into two groups: Those who do and those who don’t.

Those who do are happy to be out there, presenting themselves, promoting themselves, adding this new medium to their portfolio of communication. They leverage perceived risk with opportunity.

Those who don’t prefer to remain cyberspace-anonymous, worry about misrepresenting themselves, prefer traditional means of communication, resist with all their might.

Perhaps they even resist against better judgement. Perhaps they realise they might be missing out on opportunity, but are too afraid of what might happen if it found them. Perhaps they prefer to keep the flexibility of being a chameleon – changing colours depending on the stakeholder. Perhaps it’s the worry that there might still be skeletons in their closet they forgot to get rid of. Perhaps it’s the concern that a customer could easily locate them and make direct contact.

Whatever the reason, it seems to me that this is an ostrich tactic which can only do more harm than good in the long run.

The modern, post-millennium world is not shaped by the internet, it has created the internet with all benefits that come with it. It has grown out of a personal and business need for a new medium where people could be connected and have insight into transparent, factual information.

This is proven by its staggering growth figures, still continuing today.

CRM has had to grow with it. Cyberspace has changed the way customers experience a product or service. Customers are better informed and more demanding, they focus on facts rather than promises and perception. They want self-service, on-line tracking, chat, instant messaging, environmental information, transparency and facts.

This goes hand in hand with a well defined, functioning cyberspace presence, to deliver part of and complement the customer experience. This stretches beyond having a company profile on the internet. It requires organisations to construct the opposite of cyberspace-anonymity.

Cyberspace identity.

One of the changes that Cyberspace has brought about is building a permission asset for your organisation.

It’s the basic principle of asking for permission to approach your customer regarding future commercial opportunities.

We have all seen it before: “May we please contact you regarding the following in future:”. And then follows list with topics such as customer feedback, new product evaluations, Christmas cards, updates regarding your offering, newsletters, blogs and such.

In my opinion, there is intentional permission and circumstantial permission.

Intentional permission represents a genuinely interested customer who evaluates, gives permission and ticks relevant topics. That’s real permission that will deliver response and value.

Circumstantial permission represents the accidental or ‘yeah whatever’ customers who give permission for a variety of reasons such as being in hurry, not understanding the concept, or who just give in due to what I call ‘cyberspace peer pressure’: the fear of losing out on something if you are not in a network or on a list that your peers are or might be on.

Both permission types end up being part of your proudly constructed Permission Asset which no doubt you expect great things from. Finally you have your own tribe, as Seth Godin eloquently puts it.

So next time you get 10% response from customers in your permission asset list, don’t be disappointed. Agreed, if all customers on your asset list fall into the Intentional Permission category, your feedback is really only 10%. Not great, but still valuable to your business. A big permission asset with low response rates.

However, if only 20 out of 100 customers on your asset list fall into Intentional Permission category (the other 80 circumstantial), then suddenly you have a 50% response rate. A small permission asset with high response rates.

The way to manage this is to tailor your CRM setup such that you can capture responses from your permission asset. As a minimum you should register whether or not a response was received, what the response was and an indication of the quality of the response. Register it on the contact person (John D. who works at company X), not on your customer account (company X). It’s the human being that counts when dealing with Permission Assets.

This will help you separate the intentional from the circumstantial permissions, clean up your permission asset and approach both categories accordingly – creating the transparency you need to correctly analyse and action feedback you do receive.

More importantly, you can prevent annoying your circumstantial permission customers, and maybe convert some of them.

Ultimately, it will help you build a quality, responsive permission asset that will deliver real value to your organisation.

CRM is all about matching what is in the head of your customer in your CRM architecture. You need to be able to get to the right customer data when you need it.

This could be information regarding quotations, orders, complaints. service outages, moves, contact persons just to name a few. Phew….

I was joking the other day with a friend of mine how great it would be if you could just teleport the information in your customer’s head into your own CRM databases. All information about ongoing orders, quotations, previous conversations, the customer’s likes and dislikes, his perception of sales conversations, the way he felt when your order was delivered.

Just like that. Teleportation of customer data. Break it down on one end, build it back up in the other.

Now we all know this is not possible. But it’s a good end-point vision. After all, if we had all customer data available at our fingertips, an intelligent conversation with the customer would be relatively easy. There would be opportunity for upsell of other products, there would be opportunity to anticipate the customer’s wishes and surprise instead of disappoint.

The tools we have are not teleportation, but they are today’s CRM architectures which we have to maximise to their potential by making sure we catch all the information in data entities as and when they happen. If a customer sends an email or phones in, log this as a communication object in the customer object. If a customer places an order, log the order in the customer object. If the customer changes their mind and changes the order, log the communication and update the order in a new version. Keep a track record of anything that happens related to your customer and organise it so that you can get to everything.

The key lies in breaking it down into logical entities that suit your business processes and that can be presented to a user so that it matches your customer’s thinking patterns during interaction with your organisation.

Building up your 360 degree customer overview step by step, registering history consistently as it takes place, is not quite as satisfying as instant teleportation, but it will deliver the ability to meet and exceed the customer’s expectation when it counts.

The choice of course is yours – start building and perfecting and creating an infrastructure to build customer intelligence or wait for technology to deliver ‘mind to machine-type’ teleportation.

But that’ll be the time of many other technological breakthroughs.

Cyberspace hologramming, skyping with tourists on Mars, and business blogs that write and publish themselves.