 Metrics for measuring the success of customer services Digital disruption has caused many companies to lose their customer base. Though it remains debatable as to what extent today’s customers are adapting to this digital rush, but it is undeniable that customer journeys and experience are all the more dynamic, accessible and continuous - and as they say, if you cannot improve with time, you may as well become extinct. So, it is of paramount importance for organisations to keep evaluating themselves comparing to their competitors. This is where organisations need to understand that if you are not able to measure or at least quantify your company’s performance against your goals, it is of no use on how to improve and where to improvise – metrics are your answer.
No doubt that in this ‘Age of customer’, customer services unit need to rise up to the challenges as bad customer service costs more than good customer experiences. Customer experience metrics should focus on the there key business areas- acquisition, retention and efficiency. Before pinning on which metrics serves the best for your company, one must understand the value proposition since there is no single metric against which to benchmark the performance and success of your customer experience strategy. Moreover, it depends on the level of your audiences. For instance, the top management may be more interested in higher strategic level metrics that align to corporate goals and relate to brand so that KPIs include overall cost, revenue generated, and satisfaction scores as well as policy and regulatory compliance in many industries. Nevertheless, to get to the ground problem or for day-to-day monitoring, customer service managers need real-time, granular operational data. For example, if you compete on cost, handle time and speed of answer will become your primary metrics. However, if you are focused on maximizing customer lifetime value, first contact resolution will rise to the top. Having an umpteen number of metrics to measure everything under the sun is not a clever solution as the volume of data that you gather does not correlate to better performance. According to Hubspot, in most cases you should aim to identify somewhere between four and ten KPIs. In addition, customer service is a time sensitive issue in two diverse (and may be, unrelated) ways – depending on the age of your company and; how urgent and complex the confusion is. To clarify further on the first issue, the metrics used will also depend upon whether the company is in its nascent stages or a large established organisation. Early stage companies may put emphasis on metrics related to business model validation whereas enterprises usually would go for cost per acquisition, average order size or lifetime value. The second issue is a pressing one for any industry as every interaction has an associated cost and value such as cost-per-interaction to optimise the return on investment. Another case would be to consider metrics that shows the value of an active query backlog and the importance of having a timely escalation in the event of a pressing customer matter. Empowered and perpetually digitally connected consumers may bring in bad reputation by airing their frustrations through social channels which will negatively impact the NPS. Therefore, it should be a priority to track the outliers, rather than concentrating on the averages. More often than not, units measure their lagging indicators (measure of output, based purely on results already achieved) of performance and leave out the leading indicators (predictors of future performance and your likelihood of achieving a goal in the future). This can lead to a myopic view of the world. Top level management need to focus on setting a vision and deliver on it. Methodologies like TIPS model (Trends, Implications, Possibilities and Solutions) may be helpful for sales to customers which can help companies to gain insights on seasonal fluctuations that may skew results. Further, metrics that analyse the digital maturity of customer services as a unit compared to your competitor in the same industry as your business as well different industry may help in throwing light on the future. Most organisations have a fair idea on how they are doing on customer services, but having a measurement system corroborate these beliefs and provide actionable insights into future. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.
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In the eon of digitisation, companies must ensure that they keep evaluating and upgrading their channels that they are employing not to just meet but to go beyond the expectations of their customers for optimal outcomes. In my blog, Digital dilemma for Customer Services, I touched upon the concerns companies face and the process that they can follow to freeze on the communication channels for their customers. The ultimate question that every unit head asks before giving his nod is - the quality and cost per interaction. In this blog, I shall discuss a few more.
In this digital age, companies need to develop a 360-degree view of customers’ various relationships and interactions across channels and for that, companies must understand their customers’ digital capability and psyche to share information to be able to target the different strata of customers. For instance, according to a Research Report published in 2014 highlights that Mainstreamers which account for the largest market share can become loyal digital patrons if the companies can show them tangible benefits of each interaction through any channel. Although few experts claim that generational differences may be one reason for the choice of channels, but a study by CXAct (2015) revealed that telephone calls emerged as the chosen one for baby boomers as well as millennials who still prefer traditional and more personalised services. It is altogether a different ball game to use non-traditional channels to raise awareness and engage your customers, and to use it for service and support. Customers select channels that are quick and easy as well as where they expect the fastest resolution of their queries at the first point of contact. Failure to deliver an engaging service in real time can drive away customers; a significant (77%) of customers reported that they consider good customer service when companies value their time as was claimed by Forrester’s Report (2015). Customers can make or break businesses is clearly evidenced in the fact that the quality of customer experiences is directly proportional to the loyalty and advocacy. To be more precise, customers who receive a first contact resolution are nearly twice as likely to buy from the same brand (implying stickiness/retention/enrichment) and four times more likely to spread positive word of mouth about it (advocacy). Companies such as Netflix and Skype have figured out which channels work for them best. In the former case, the company does not offer email as a channel since they cannot adequately provide a quick and easy resolution on first contact and instead focussed on a robust self-service help center online, with easy access to either a live person via chat or phone; while the latter manages its entire customer services through online communities and analysis based support center. For companies, digital disruption can be overpowering and unpredictable, but they cannot ignore the potential this phenomenon stores in it to make them globally successful. Companies would have a better shot at success by leveraging this digital explosion starting with the way they reach their customers. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. Organisations are reaching their customers (inclusive of the prospective ones) via a multitude of communication channels, fuelled by technological advancement and trying to cater to the customers’ needs at lower costs than ever before. Though this premise, be it omni-channel or multi-channel, may seem to present a golden opportunity for businesses by transforming the customer experience and operations to become a fully digital business with overall satisfaction of the quality of service over all communication channels trending upwards, it is also the source of digital disruption.
If you are a unit head with P&L accountability, you would be able to relate to a situation where your marketing guy has persuaded you to allocate an extended budget as a part of company’s digital strategy and at the end of the meeting you would still be asking yourself – “I am not sure if I understand the ROI”. If this holds true for you, don’t worry, you aren’t the only one! The real deal for smart marketers and unit head is to be able to justify the digital investment as a core strategy with tangible return on investment instead of hiding behind the common phrase – it’s a long term investment for the digital savvy consumers. Large scale adoption of digital technology by consumers have bombarded businesses with questions to decide on which mode (web, phone, social media, email, and in-person) to use combined with a choice of available platforms (mobile, web, offline) and whether all those are integrated or not to a centralised CRM, which receives the most queries, and how to monitor the key business metrics and so on and so forth. The mushrooming of channels has created perplexity within organisations on how to design, align and implement their strategies for communication to and from customers, whether they are in their path-to-purchase or path-to-loyalty. To elucidate, smart FAQs, self service channels and virtual agents can be used to tackle low value and low complexity customer queries as these are relatively lower cost channels and that positively impact cost per contact of the CS unit. According to Forrester’s Channel Management: Core To Your Customer Service Strategy (2015) Report, help/FAQ pages on a company's website, speech and mobile self-service channels, use of virtual agents has increased by at least 10 percentage points since 2012 as customers are seeking out time-saving and easier approaches to resolve their difficulties than waiting in queue for service agents to answer or go through the tedious IVR processes. However, on the other end, high complexity interactions and high value queries which demand personalised and more interactive communication should be addressed using proactive chat, call and co-browse, and even, in person visitation and consultation. Although, as per the same Forrester Report, phone interactions have remained constant at a 73% usage rate since the last three years, however, an investigation by CXAct (2015) found that consumers still prefer traditional lines (phone and in-person) of contacting support when they encounter problems during the usage and ownership stages of their relationships with companies and brands of products/services. Somewhere in between the ends, online community forums, virtual agents, email response and live chat are also being used when it comes to medium value and medium complexity inquiries as this bunch falls into the medium cost interaction channels. Therefore, it is imperative for organisations to be able to choose the right channel that best suit their and their customers’ requirements due to the proliferation of channels for communication and business transactions. There are many other factors that the CS unit can explore, for instance, digital customer segmentation, increase customer stickiness, et cetera which I shall discuss on my upcoming blogs. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter  In the epoch of Big Data, organisations seem to be searching for needles in a bunch of haystacks when it comes to effective and relevant use of data available with the ushering in of social computing, mobility, cloud adoption, and the use of other collaborative platforms. Leaders have prioritised this issue as their success hinges on how they are driving value from both the unstructured and structured data. Though there is continuous advancement of search technologies, there is inherent complexity in the nature of language because it is full of ambiguity, contradiction, multiple meanings, and many contexts. Moreover, the complex IT setting, accompanied with the evolving trends within time periods as short as few months, have rendered traditional search and knowledge management solutions ineffectual and resulting in productivity loss. However, one should not confuse between Web/Consumer search and Enterprise search. Enterprise search technology provides a user interface for users’ queries to find and retrieve relevant, contextualised information in order to gain instant access from various public source (website, www) and enterprise sources such as content management systems, email archives, enterprise databases, and file servers to identify and, in the process, perform light analysis and since not all users have the same access rights, metadata files are created across different repositories of information. This search enables retrieval from heterogeneous sources of information and results are ranked based on a complex algorithm, which can be customized by many factors, for instance, industry taxonomy, business rules, date and author. With traditional keyword based searches, the scientific backbone is missing due to limited connectivity to diverse content repositories and different file formats, inability to address security requirements and user privileges, inability to reduce time to go-live, problems in scalability of plethora of information, and customisation to meet specific business and/or industry needs. A study by Grand View Research (2015) reveals that BFSI leads the enterprise search market worldwide and will continue to have double digit growth rate in future, as illustrated on the graph (left). Enterprise search is not a one-time activity. It is a process that the CTO team needs to continuously enhance to ensure that the workforce is not spending time on non-value added activities. Most of the large organisations concur with this thought which is why such organisations are estimated to have a significant growth, whereas SMEs are likely to exhibit a steady growth over the next six years, as indicated by the same study.  A few important suppliers in this market are IBM, Coveo, Concept Searching, HP Autonomy, Lucidworks, Attivio, Perceptive Software Incorporated. The vendors offer a bouquet of social, mobile, cloud and information and impact the information-centric enterprise search market substantially. According to a Gartner report, revenue in the enterprise search market is predicted to reach $2.6 billion in 2017 fuelled by a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%. The delivery models, including software for installation on customers' premises, hardware-based appliances, and installations on the infrastructure of cloud service providers are the differentiators among the vendors. The figure (on the right) shows the vendors placed in four quadrants based on Gartner’s two broad evaluation criteria , namely, ability to execute (includes completeness of products and their success in terms of customers' experiences, vendors’ Sales Execution/Pricing) and completeness of vision (agility and creativity). Buyers’ expectations are gradually hiking with an increased drive for contextualisation and connecting the traditional and unconventional data sources, both on-premises and in the cloud. Companies aim at strategic collaboration to offer a combination of mass market solutions along with serving niche markets. While choice of the product is of paramount importance,the value of implementation partner and service provider cannot be undermined. Hence the technology think tank needs to work closely with procurement to develop a process to measure the depth of the experience and skill that the vendor brings on the table.
Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter In an endeavour to remain competitive in the market, along with the pressure of providing consistent quality enhancements with cost reduction, businesses are trying to get the most out of their people, process and technology. CFOs play a strategic role and they should be always ready to face volatile and uncertain market challenges. Outsourcing has proven to be a win-win solution by creating synergies between the three drivers of an organisation and enabling value creation. Creating value has emerged as an important outcome of the process. Businesses, particularly SMEs, have been outsourcing back-office processes such as finance and accounting (F&A) in order to achieve offshore labour arbitrage by lowering the human costs of performing the associated services.
F&A Outsourcing (FAO) benefits are overwhelming in terms of cost of ownership of resources and technology, saving on time and expertise for concentrating on the core business areas, and security and confidentiality of the data even in case of business emergencies. Businesses can profit from their F&A operation’s performance and seize opportunities for significant process improvement by using bundled and customisable standalone services that focus on people, processes and technologies and help buyers improve their operations and achieve measurable results, in: · order-to-cash process which includes requisition-to-purchase, invoice processing and accounts payable & travel and expenses, · record-to-report process consisting of treasury and risk management, regulatory compliance and taxation, balance sheet commentary among others · procure-to-pay process including billing, order management, accounts receivable, dispute and deduction management · document management services, and · web-enabled process management tools. However, the FAO market has begun to reach saturation with organisations seeking out new ways to be more cost efficient. This fact is evident from the estimated growth rates tapering to approximately six percent by 2015 from a moderate growth rate of 8 percent in 2014. With maturation of the market, the buyers have become more value-centric wanting more than labour costs advantage. Although, contract termination rate has declined in 2014 after a spur in 2013, the contractual scope is increasing in terms of both processes as well as geographies being served. Consequently, the providers are coming up with outsourcing ‘as a Service’ with robust offerings like Robotic Process Automation, predictive & prescriptive analytics, judgment-oriented processes, and hybrid pricing models so as to capture the productivity aspect, rather than taking a dogmatic approach with no differentiation. For instance, according to an IBM report, although 82% of CFOs see the value in integrated enterprise-wide data analytics, only 24% think their teams are up to the task is a troubling trend. Another interesting insight from the same study is that of the highest performing CFOs, 44% combine internal and external data to produce insights. Thus, automation combined with advisory and analytic services present not only an end-to-end process driven approach to FAO but also a promise for consistent, improved and optimised service, including delivery and enterprise-wide integration. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter |
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