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What Your Marketing Department Doesn't Want Your Contact Center To Know

by Jim Rembach, SVP, Customer Relationship Metrics - June 18, 2015

What your Marketing Department doesn’t want your Contact Center to Know

By: Jim Rembach

Marketing is creating bad customers. There is an entire society of bad customers…now. Many years ago, we were able to go through the day without interacting with a bad customer, but those days are gone. And having bad customers has become worse than defecting customers. More customers in the world are sharing their “likely to NOT recommend” more than they are sharing their “likely to recommend.”

How retaining customers turns for the worse

I suspect a primary contributing factor is non-existing and poorly constructed contact center Voice of the Customer programs that have grown into big data behemoths of unable-to-do-anything-with-it-but-keep-collecting-it-anyway government-type budget fiascos. We are not getting the right information.

Here is an example of what I mean. I found this in a forum for customer experience professionals. Can you uncover the ridiculousness in a request like this?

Hi,

I am working on CX with an online high fashion retailer. They have never done customer surveys before. I wanted to get your opinion about the survey template in SurveyMonkey https://www.surveymonkey.com/$%#^&*@#$%^%

Do you have suggestions to the questions? Who should receive the survey (e.g only customers that have made purchase in the last 3 months or all customers)? What is the expected response rate and are there ways to increase it?

Thanks,

This question was posted by a consultant! Really?! To me this violates a moral code of conduct. Do no harm. This person obviously has no skill in voice of the customer programs, yet is ignorantly moving forward. This kind of malpractice contributes to unable-to-do-anything-with-it-but-keep-collecting-it-anyway low ROI VoC programs. Monkey see - monkey do.

Executive are unsuspecting (and willing) victims

I recently spoke to a group of customer experience and contact center executives and I asked their thoughts on this forum request. What I got in response was only, “measure what?”

That is not the response I was hoping for. They were unable to recognize the high-risk business and career destroying potential this situation can present.

More folk’s everyday have Voice of the Customer performance as part of their rating and review process. It is part of their livelihood and future! So where are you in this? I do not want to place my well-being in the hands of those that are unskilled.

Are you sure you want the cheap (on the surface) option? Do you think this is going to create an engine for retaining customers?

Customers are unsuspecting (and unwilling) victims

More and more customers are participating in VoC programs that are being designed by the unskilled and unaware. They are innocent victims trapped in the unable-to-do-anything-with-it-but-keep-collecting-it-anyway customer experience benchmarking fiascos.

You and I are caged in this zoo-like setting that seems to be increasing at an alarming rate. Collect more, do less. It seems like the social ill of local storage units. Buy more stuff, put it in storage, buy more stuff. People are doing the same thing with Voice of the Customer programs. Collect more stuff, do nothing with it, collect more.

Customers do not want your cheap option. We want to be engines for retaining customers.

No freaking way!

It becomes unfortunate when you do not have many choices or when marketing departments excel at attracting and then loyalty trapping you. Those discounts for multi-year agreements, points, special offers, electronic payments, and difficult to leave scenarios make it torturous to leave and then the contact center is left with dealing with customers who feel tortured to stay. When the marketing department is retaining customers in this manner creates side effects of the contact center.

I think these are two large contributors in “will not recommend” becoming more powerful and persuasive than “likely to recommend”. It translates to: Do not come here. In fact, run the heck away. FAST!

SHOCKING! 100% unanimous!

The same executives I presented to all said the same thing. They were 100% unanimous! When I have asked a group of folks in previous speaking engagements about their major concerns, I have never experienced 100% agreement. This was unprecedented.

They all said:

• I have so much data, I don’t know what to do with it.

• I am uncertain we are measuring the right things.

• I am uncertain about what to measure.

They all agreed to these three statements yet are unable to see an issue with the consultant’s forum request. Their problem is self-awareness. They don’t know, that they don’t know.

We all need help. We would all be better served if we spent our time finding experts to help us instead of making our full plates even more full by adding such tasks. That is even more insane then repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

I have the same issue

But, I think I became a little saner by hiring a professional organizer. My wife and I have three young kids and our garage is a mess. Toys, bikes, tools, tubes, chairs, scooters, and more just waiting to find a place or new home. However, my wife and I do not have the same perceptions and interpretations of the world. When we have tried to undertake big jobs like this in the past, the mental anguish was bigger than the physical task.

We needed help to prevent us from:

• I have too much junk, I don’t know what to do with it.

• I am uncertain this junk needs to go.

• I am uncertain about what junk to keep.

Repeating our past mistakes would have been foolish. Working smarter made cleaning the garage immensely less hard. Dare I say, it was kind of fun.

No more monkey see, monkey do

I don’t know if it’s my age or the realization that I have two full plates and there is no way possible to take care of one. I am tired of acting like a monkey.
Those executives have a messy garage. And it’s not going to get cleaned up with their knowledge about how to fix their problem. They will be better served investing effort in finding the right partner instead of seeking solutions in benchmarking with others. Remember, they all have the problem.

One thing I am sure they are not measuring is, “are you likely to NOT recommend.”



About the Author
Jim Rembach is a twenty-year contact center veteran, SVP for Customer Relationship Metrics (The Post-call IVR survey company) and Founder of Beyond Morale and One True King apparel. Jim is a Certified Emotional Intelligence Practitioner, Certified Contact Center Auditor, and is a CX Expert panel member for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). He is the author of nine books, introducing leading insights into contact center quality, analytics, surveys, employee engagement, customer experience, and leadership development. Jim helps his clients develop the fearless pursuit to engage customers and employees. You can connect with Jim via LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jrembach/ or on Twitter at @BeyondMorale.

 
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