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How to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience

by Rod Bennett, Senior Vice President Home Agent Client Operations, West Corporation - June 22, 2011

How to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience by Rod Bennett – Senior Vice President Home Agent Client Operations, West Corporation

Companies work hard to get to a leadership position in their markets. But that leadership is at risk when they can’t sustain good customer service. That’s never more true than when they operate in extremely competitive industries – and when tough economic environments make consumers more sensitive to getting the most product and service value for their dollars.

The smart companies get ahead of that curve. Take the example of one leading satellite television provider, which has as its mission and motto delivering the ultimate television experience. It does that with tons of HD channels, a wealth of HD movies, and surround-sound with every channel. But it knows it has to back up one ultimate experience with another – the ultimate customer experience.

To that end, the satellite TV service provider has had a long history of investing in its customer care strategy, utilizing both its internal staff and through outsourcing relationships with contact center providers, among them West at Home. The satellite provider has partnered with us to utilize our home-based agent solution based on the tremendous advantages the model offers for continuing to protect its customer base and generating greater loyalty.

The satellite TV service provider’s focus on the customer experience has resulted in the company being consistently recognized for the highest rankings in customer satisfaction from national surveys of the cable and satellite TV industry.

The outsourced, home-based agent model contributes to the company’s strong customer relationships – and obvious satisfaction – in more ways than one. For example, 400 West at Home agents are dedicated to this customer, each working from 22 to 25 hours per week. That’s the equivalent of 175 full-time employees. But the important distinction is that the outsourced approach gives the company fine control over the most efficient use of that man-power, so that it can flex to meet peak needs and respond to unexpected events. Customers always feel as if they’re being given priority service, even when there’s big demand for a special event, such as a pay-per-view fight, or during major sporting seasons such as NFL Football or NCAA Men’s Basketball.

Customer service also didn’t have to suffer a dip during this winter’s particularly rough weather. When one of the satellite provider’s brick-and-mortar call centers was taken out of normal operations due to a weather event, it was able to tap into the home-based agents we supply to pick things up, without missing a beat. After all, even if it also was snowing buckets where they lived, they don’t have to commute to work.


Do the Right Agent Thing

There are differences, though, in the at-home customer care solutions offered by different providers. The philosophy at West at Home is that to maximize the benefits, the model has to be truly virtual. What this means is that from hiring and training to agent management and quality control, everything must be done virtually. Not only does this allow us to draw the best talent from across the country—taking advantage of an almost limitless pool of highly skilled individuals with a broad range of skill sets—but it gives us the ability to seamlessly scale up as needed. As an example, during one pay-per-view event, West at Home was able to scale staffing from 150% above forecast to over 370% above forecast in a half-hour period.

Some home-based agent providers operate in a hub-and-spoke model which ties agents to a limited geography around existing call center facilities. This limits the talent pool sources from which they can draw, and can actually limit the scalability and responsiveness of the program, because employees are required to undergo training at brick-and-mortar call centers.

In a true virtual home agent deployment, the provider has to have the capacity to hire and train people remotely. That’s no small order. As an example, West’s home agents are universal customer care agents for the satellite TV provider. That means the agents must be able to handle a myriad of calls: orders, troubleshooting, billing, field service, tech support…the list goes on. So these individuals must be highly trained on the company’s applications to maneuver easily through these systems and provide the level of customer service that the company demands.

West is able to deliver the equivalent of six weeks’ of classroom training on-demand over the Internet to new employees, who are dedicated to that account alone. Our training teams interact on a regular basis with company execs to get updates on frequently changing products and processes, so we quickly can incorporate the new requirements into our training curriculum and push out status updates to the agents. When this customer introduces completely new systems or workflows, we create new training to accommodate that – and because our agents can do it right from their homes, there’s no delay in getting them up to speed in giving customers the benefit of the latest service advances. We think training over the Web has an advantage over classroom training in another important respect. Higher performing agents who can grasp the training curriculum quicker can move through the testing modules at their own pace instead of waiting for the “class” to fully understand the training. This helps get potential top performers taking calls quicker than in the traditional classroom setting.

Our home-based customer care agents have been able to and continue to provide a high level of quality and service for our client’s valued customers. In fact, according to their evaluations, when measured against all of the company’s internal call centers and outsourced providers, our home-based agents have ranked in the top two when it comes to first-call resolution and fewest credits per call. What that tells us – and our client – is that our agents understand how important it is to take the time to give customers a “one and done” experience, which goes a long way to alleviating potential frustration around any service or billing issues customers may be experiencing. And it also says that our agents understand how to manage any frustrations with a deft touch, so that customers feel they’ve been listened to with respect. Sometimes that matters more than getting a free movie in return for their pains.

We think both the training we offer and the talent pool we can draw from helps drive these results. Think about it: Good customer service experiences are better assured when the provider can regularly deliver the training and support agents need, while at the same time being able to choose only the cream of the crop of customer care experts. Our ability to use our web tools for instruction and quality assurance lets us both train and manage at-home agents, so there are no artificial boundaries to hiring and supporting staff. We don’t have to rely only on applicants who can physically make it to a call center to apply and train, so we can be much more selective about whom we hire. On average, the demographics of our employees skew older and better educated than the typical customer care agent, and that contributes significantly to better quality results. And, frankly, our agents like what they do – they like the flexibility of choosing hours that fit their lifestyle and working from home, and that satisfaction manifests itself in their interactions with our clients’ customers.

We’re glad we’ve been able to help our client back up its ultimate television experience with an ultimate customer experience. What is your company doing to make your own customers equally satisfied?
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To Outsource or Not to Outsource Customer Care – Is that the Question? by Jim Boring

Q: How do I decide if outsourcing customer care is right for my company?

A: First you have to decide if customer care is a significant factor in why customers choose your company’s brands. If, for instance, your brand goes beyond product features and benefits – if it has become a part of your customer’s lifestyle or way of doing things – then customer care itself must go beyond the basics. Customer care has become part of the promise of your brand.

Q: What are the implications for customer care when my brands have that level of identification with my customers’ needs and values?

A: Brands like yours are no longer simply commodities – they are personalities. Just as with a friend, the brand personality has its own style, distinctiveness and individuality. When a friend calls, you take into account their interest in you and your relationship with them. The same thing should happen within the context of customer care.

Q: How do I make that happen in a busy, business setting like customer care?

A: You take a marketing approach to customer care rather than an operational approach. The same qualities that raised your brand above others in your customers’ minds and hearts should be the criteria by which you establish customer care.


Q: So the criteria for customer care should be those that reflect the qualities of my brand.

A: Exactly. If your brand is known and valued for style and elegance then customer care should be stylish and elegant. If you are known for friendliness and helpfulness, your customer care should reflect those values. If your brand has a reputation for technological prowess, then customer care should demonstrate those characteristics.

Q: What you are saying suggests that every brand with which a customer fully identifies is like perfume – it is not what happens when it is in the bottle but what happens when it is released that matters.

A: Every brand, from soap to soup, that customers assimilate into their lifestyles is perfume. The brand permeates the relationship with the customer. Expectations are high in such relationships, so anything that disappoints expectations also has a negative resonance throughout the relationship.

Q: How do I deliver on such high expectations for customer care? It must be more costly than a less ambitious level of service.

A: Poor customer care in these circumstances costs more. It takes capital, sustained delivery on the promise of the brand, and time to establish a personal relationship with customers. It takes only a single bad experience with an indifferent brand representative to destroy that relationship.

Q: So how can I possibly delegate such a responsibility to an outside vendor?

A: First you have to look for a real partnership rather than a vendor. The relationship between you and your outsourced customer care partner must be established on the same basis your customers have with your brand.

Q: How do I bring that about? Our vendors are selected through a rigorous RFP process based on financial, technological and operational criteria.

A: Those criteria are obviously important but they are not enough; they are the filter through which a short list of potential partners can be determined – the ante for getting into the game, so to speak. Brand-related criteria should then be used to select the more perfect partner from the short list established by the RFP.

Q: But how do I quantify criteria like enthusiasm and affection for the brand.

A: You do it with the same approach you took to making the brand indispensable in the lives of your customers. You bring your outsourced customer care partner into the fold of the brand itself.

Q: Which implies that I need to be very careful about the partner I select.

A: That partner should only be considered on the basis of a potential long-term relationship. Everything from agent recruitment, selection, brand orientation, training, management philosophy – even the context of the customer care work environment – must be developed and maintained with complete brand identification in mind. From the customer perspective there should be no difference in dealing with you or your outsourced representative.

Q: All of this changes my original question of whether to outsource customer care or to keep it in-house to how to establish and deliver on the right criteria wherever customer care is provided.

A: The same criteria that have established your brand in the minds and hearts of your customers will keep you there if you continue to use them in every customer interaction. It’s that simple.


The author:

Jim Boring is President of Content Management Services LLC, a marketing communications company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

 
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