Posts Tagged ‘ Erik van Geest ’

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 ]

Treat everyone as your customer for just one day

Just bear with me on this one. Around 10 years ago I learned about stakeholder mapping. A stakeholder map, for those of you who don't know, is a big old spider web with you in the middle and everyone who has a stake in your life mapped somewhere around you in the web. Those with a big stake are mapped close to the center, those with a smaller stake further to the outside. Now, just see what happens if you treat all your stakeholders as if they were your customer. In a sense, if they have a stake in your life, they can influence it. In the same way that customers can influence a company they engage with. [ 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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

Social Networks are ‘organising the world’s people’. Start Nudging your Network Niches.

Slowly but surely social media sites are indeed organising the world’s people. They are creating cyberspace groups or tribes or stakeholder maps of like-minded people. Just to name a few, LinkedIn, MySpace,Yahoo and Twitter are no longer just networks of connected friends. They are becoming influential overlays of groups of people who can approach the web together. Through instant [ READ MORE ]

Salesforce, Oracle Siebel, SAP CRM, Salesforce, it doesn’t matter

Countless CRM projects have completely missed their mark, and continue to do so. Organisations decide it's time to see over the way they deal with their customer and jump straight into software selection. They involve consultancy firms who claim to have built an understanding of 'CRM Industry best practise', and they start configuring right away. No CRM software can deliver benefit to the organisation or the customer if you do not first very clearly decide what you want. Do you want the smooth phone/CRM integration for managing customer interactions that Avaya/Siebel Oracle can provide you? Is integration with Outlook and other Microsoft products important for you and do you want an easy setup that Microsoft CRM Dynamics can give you? Are you after quick wins with SalesForce? What is the business case for your CRM investment? Can you afford on Premise, on Demand, customised or not? What does your business process in Marketing, Sales, Delivery and Service look like? Where does it work well, where does it not? What will you automate and what will remain manual? [ READ MORE ]

Relationskipping, Relationworshipping – it all depends on the market.

Those of us who have been working in the CRM arena for a while get a bit tunnel-visioned, I must admit. We talk, eat, and dream CRM to try to achieve that ultimate goal of complete customer satisfaction and everything that goes with it. It's easy to forget that of course the market, industry and type of business you are in determines just how influential your customer relationship really is and what the ideal composition of it should be. As a hobby, I have run a Christmas tree plantation for some 11 years now. I decided I would start a business selling a product I knew nothing about, in a market equally unfamiliar. I met hands on with challenges such as finding a field, baby trees, a planting machine, putting up a fence to keep the baby trees safe from rabbits. They were tough challenges, as I had to build up everything from scratch, including a production/source network. Now the standard 'old fashioned' christmas tree takes about 5-7 years to reach a height of 5-7 feet tall, about a foot a year[ READ MORE ]

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