Archive for the ‘ CRM Reflections ’ Category

The Interactive Voice Response Blunder

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 a two-way winning 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. No 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 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. 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". 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 send on customer retention and sales efforts to counter your disproportionately high churn rate. 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 feel happy? Then please forgive me for publishing this blog post. Not so happy anymore? Then get in some good business analysts, map out the paths, clean them up and reimplement. Quickly[ READ MORE ]

Social networks or cyberspace anonymity: those who do and those who don’t

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[ READ MORE ]

Organisations in Cyberspace: Permission Asset CRM considerations

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. This article is about how deal with this important distinction[ READ MORE ]

Amazon.com: Mitigating fear of losing…… control

Doing business has come a long way in the past 20 years or so. Only two decades ago Cash was King and there were no credit cards to speak of. Really, we were all still in the stone age. Buying something meant handing over your money and taking home your product. Today, at the end of 2009, most of us don't even see our money anymore. It might as well be Monopoly money. Many households pay their bills by direct debit or internet banking. Some of the products or services received are of abstract nature such as mortgages, electricity bills, council tax and such. Electronic money for abstract products. Now in the early stages of internet trade, Amazon.com understood very wel[ READ MORE ]

Teleportation of customer data for CRM

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. [ READ MORE ]

Not enough customer information? Time to get paranoid.

There’s a saying that goes: ”if you’re not paranoid, you don’t have enough information”. It is derived from the premise, that even when you think you have everything under control, there is probably something you don’t know about which could and will bite you in the backside when you least expect it. Recognise this from your adventures in CRM world? Sure you do. Of course, if you lived by this rule, you would never be able to relax again. So you don’t live by this rule. Ironically though, this saying represents the exact most current challenge that all of us in CRM-land are facing. The fear of being confronted with something customer related that we don’t know about. How do you have an intelligent conversation with your customer if you don’t have the relevant information[ READ MORE ]

Are we collecting numbers…. or real people?

We all know that social media is a hot topic. I started out carefully on Linkedin a few years ago, added Facebook, Twitter… and for a while I got into this frenzy of collecting people in my network, friends and followers. Some people I meet take pride in having several thousands of followers on Twitter. Sure, [ READ MORE ]

Do you know who your REAL customer is?

Do you know who your customer is? In commerce today, there's a lot of lip-service to CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Millions of Euros, Dollars, Pounds and Yens are spent every year on SAP CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM, SaaS CRM, SalesForce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a lot of other related CRM software architectures. Either the money is well spent and the projects deliver enhanced customer value or they don't, or somewhere in between. For those that don't deliver the desired enhanced customer value - as is the case in some 50% of them in my experience - usually there is an enormous lack of customer focus. How can that be? Lack of customer focus in a CRM project? How can we miss the 'C' in CRM that blatantly? We do[ READ MORE ]

Still not getting the basics right.

Yesterday I referred to not having been treated as I think a customer should. With service and respect. And wouldn’t you believe it. This morning I stroll into a huge retail outlet specialising in elecronics to buy a camera. They have just opened, so shop attendants are still standing around doing nothing, talking, joking with each [ READ MORE ]

Come and go with a smile. A pre-condition.

Has it happened to you too recently that you are in shop, restaurant or some other venue and you receive what I call ‘reluctant service‘? That service received from someone whose entire being clearly communicates: ‘I’d rather be at home on the couch in my pyjamas than talking to you, jackass.’ Not that there is anything [ READ MORE ]

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