Orchestration in Customer Care Operations

Customer care involves processes that are complex. Unlike “factory” processes, two or more individuals (agent and customer) are involved, each with distinct goals. These individuals do not collaborate; at best, they negotiate. Additionally, customers and employees are autonomous. For example, in performing tasks customer care staff may skip or repeat steps and recombine processes.

Additionally, the number of complex processes increases as a customer care organization handles more lines of business and volume.  The result is operations managers within those firms find it hard to be successful at what the industry calls Customer Interaction Management ("CIM").

Adding to the problem is that consumer expectations and sophistication are rising, budgets remain under severe downward pressure and technological complexity continues to increase. It always seems to boil down to three seemingly competing tasks:

• Delivering higher quality customer service experiences
• Deriving more revenue from existing clients
• Reducing the cost of customer service

The good news is these do not need to be mutually exclusive. All three results can be achieved through effective “orchestration” of the interactions and complex processes within a customer care operation.  Technology solutions are available and proven to enable orchestration.

Managing Customer Expectations

In order to be effective in managing customer expectations, contact centers must first understand what their customers' needs and wants are.  In a large contact center many customers have different requirements for service, which presents a challenge.  Expectations may vary by the person's age, how much business they do with the firm, product or service they are calling about, past experience with other contact centers and so on.  The only way to accurately determine these needs is through professional market research, such as focus groups. 

The good news is that many customers have some fundamental expectations in common, such as a requirement for informative, accurate, friendly, available and responsive service.  By creating a customer survey that asks customers how the contact center measures up to each of these areas of service, a contact center manager can better understand, in general, where improvements need to be made in the center.  Measurement at an agent level can be even more effective.  Finally, if the survey results are tracked by customer in an IT system (e.g. CRM application), then the next time a customer calls in an agent can see what part of the call needs to be handled better.  This process will steadily increase the way a company manages its customers' expectations.

Trust, but Verify

I recently posted a rather intense bad customer story as an example of how failure to plan for establishing appropriate trust levels with customers can be very hard on the bottom line.  It reminded me of another situation from my consulting career where a similar type of situation was occurring, and where it was fixed simply and effectively.  The story was one of a high tech company whose products are quite expensive (each selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars).  Their technical support operation is understandably complex and expensive, since most of the "agents" are highly experienced engineers.

This company wanted to ensure companies who did not pay for maintenance were not able to get free support.  So they front-ended every call into their support center with an entitlement check.  This typically took about five minutes, since the database of entitlements was unwieldy.  Basically, a low-cost agent had to ask who was calling, get some codes, find out the serial number of the product being called about (many customers have mixed maintenance fee situations, depending on the product).  If the customer passed the entitlement check, they were "allowed" through the gate to talk to an engineer.

Think about this from the customer's perspective.  You are a senior engineer trying to get a million dollar system online, probably on a tight deadline.  You are extremely knowledgeable.  You need help, and you know exactly what kind of help you need.  It will take several calls.  Each time, you have to waste time talking to someone who knows nothing and whose only purpose is to verify that you are worthy of being connected.  Sounds nice, doesn't it?

There is a really simple way to fix this, that saves a ton of money and generates revenue as well.  My customer did it in less than a month.  Here is the idea:

Let everyone through, first off.  Front end calls, if needed, with a triage person to figure out who the right engineer is to take the service call.  Let the engineer handle the call, no questions asked.
AFTER the call is done, check entitlements off line for all calls received. When you find someone who got "free support" (one call only!), you do two things.  First, you have your person who used to act as a (depressed) gatekeeper instead act as a sales person.  Have the person call the "offending" customer and thank them for calling you.  Tell them you were to happy to take their first call, at no charge.  But then tell them that future calls will be charged, and ask for credit card information so you can allow them to get the help they need without delays.  And of course try to sell them a long-term maintenance contract.
If they buy a maintenance contract or give you credit card data, you follow up with the necessary paperwork and meanwhile continue letting them through (but you are capturing usage data for credit card billing).  If they decline, then their name, company, phone number and product codes go onto a short list that can be checked automatically on the way in to the triage person.

This company did that, and did generate revenue.  More importantly, in the 90% of cases where the customer was authorized to begin with, the customer experience was much improved (and costs were reduced).

This is a good example of something that is technically simple (not even evolutionary -- they had all the tools they needed except a lightweight database app for checking against the hot list).  But it required a change in the mindset of the business leadership.  It wasn't even hard -- more of a "why didn't I think of that?!" situation.

The issue is that many of these needless, customer-denigrating steps arise from good motives and too little attention to the experience of the customer.  And too little clear thinking about costs and benefits -- sometimes all you need is a quick, back of the envelope calculation to show the "ROI"!

Again, are you proactively planning on how you will manage trust relations with your customers, or are you fulfilling their likely expectation that they will be treated like children or, worse, cattle?

I think many companies have done similar things, so this isn't really any sort of a breakthrough idea, but more of another good example of how thinking flexibly about customer service, and considering trust as a ket variable to take into account – can lead to surprisingly good results with little or no investment.

I find that oftentimes major changes can be made in business results without major IT investment projects. While IT projects are important (and it's what we do at Aria, after all!), it is equally important for enterprises to become agile, and to learn quickly and adapt quickly.

Hopefully this example helps.

The Issue of Trust in Customer Service

Jerry (his real name) is an independent limo driver in the Reno/Tahoe area. Because of his work, he spends a lot of time in his car with a seatbelt on and his mobile phone holstered.  This tends to be hard on the phones, so Jerry spends extra to get the full warranty coverage available -- after all, this is a business tool.  Recently, on his second Sony Ericsson phone, Jerry began experiencing problems.  He called support at his carrier, and they listened to the symptoms. Then they told him to remove the back cover and clean the contacts of the SIM card and the battery, and then to restart the phone.  He hung up and did this; the problems persisted.  It is useful to note that Jerry used a slightly moistened cotton swab to clean the contacts (no information on how to clean was provided).

Jerry called back and told them "the fix was in" (couldn't resist a little Reno humor), but that it didn't work.  They had him open it up and describe the color of a little dot near the battery (a moisture detector to catch situations where consumers drop their cell phones in water).  He told them it was white, but with a little streak of pink on it.  They told him that his problem was not a warranty problem but a paid repair problem, since his phone had suffered water damage.  He reminded them that this streak of pink was from the cotton swabs when he followed their directions to clean the contacts.  You can imagine the series of escalations, arguments, pleadings, explanations and re-explanations that followed -- not to mention the hours spent on the phone by Jerry.

In the end Jerry was charged $115 for a new phone (skipping lots of details; you get the idea).  He disputed the charge, and continued paying his regular monthly contract fees while the dispute was handled.  On midnight of January 31st, without warning, his phone was cut off (while he was on a run with a customer).  Given that his business depends on his wireless phone, and given that no one else provides reasonable coverage in the mountainous area where Jerry does his business, he paid the $115 and the $38 reconnect fee, vowing to himself to move as soon as he could to ANYONE ELSE.  Happily for me, he had his mobile phone ready to go to synch up with me when I arrived, tired, at the Reno airport!

Let's stop for a moment and consider the economics of what just happened.  His carrier, by acting as it did (at least as perceived by Jerry), has put at risk a reliable current and profitable revenue stream averaging $1200 per year, with an overall past run rate of $12,000.  If they had served Jerry well, they could look forward to a reliable revenue stream of $1-3K per year indefinitely.  Plus, they invested at least 2 hours of people time on the phone with Jerry on this issue (Jerry's estimate); let's assume these are inexpensive agents and supervisors, and set this cost at $80, fully loaded (this is probably low).  Let's assume his carrier charges its loaded cost for the replacement phone, and let's assume the $38 reconnect fee is a profit-neutral item (a charitable assumption).  Then the net result of this is that his carrier invested $80 and forced Jerry to invest several hours of phone time (about 3 in an IVR, and 2 talking to people), in order to avoid taking a $115 charge for sending Jerry a new phone, no questions asked.  And in so doing it virtually guaranteed a reduction of several thousand dollars in future revenues AND got Jerry to advertise his story to others (fortunately including me).

Does this make sense?

Nobody would claim that it does.

So why did they do it?

Because of trust.  Large companies set up rules for contact center people to follow that are intended to guard against consumers' taking advantage.  They don't trust their customers.  Any of them.

Now, many consumers indeed do not deserve to be trusted.  If the customer is an unfortunate person who lives hand-to-mouth, actually knows where to find paycheck cashing stores, and churns cell phones as fast as they can, the suspicious approach would make sense.  But if the customer is a long-time, high-revenue, reliable and profitable customer, this DOES NOT MAKE SENSE.  Furthermore, it would be a simple matter to advise customers of the risk of warranty voiding when asking them to clean contacts -- proactively working WITH the customer to avoid putting them in a compromised situation.

I think this situation speaks for itself.  We all need to think carefully about how trust -- and lack of it -- is handled in our management of customer experiences.  The knee-jerk distrust exhibited in this case is HIGHLY UNPROFITABLE and should not be allowed by companies.  But it may be necessary to plan for trust by examining cases like these and thinking about how to establish conditions of mutual respect and trust.

I find it ironic that I wrote the last sentence, since I tend to be a quantitative analysis type, but the fact is that what always gets me going is when people do what they think is right even when it so clearly isn't -- if only people would step back and see the big picture!

Are you taking trust rules into account in your customer experience planning?

Design versus Discovery: Following the Data, Whereever it Leads

As we all know, contact centers are among the most complex systems that any enterprise must manage.  The mix of technology, people, often conflicting goals, complex organizational relationships, and even channels of communications pushes each of us to our limits.  So much is going on in the modern contact center, especially those that service many types of customer needs, that it is very difficult to get a grasp on what is really happening.  The need to do so is pressing, and many technology solutions are being proposed in an ongoing flood of innovative solutions to the "business intelligence" problem.

As is often the case when things are so demanding that we do our best just to keep our heads above water, there are some common implicit assumptions that tend to push us back down under, struggling for each breath.  One of these is the implied notion that the right way to understand what is really going with center performance is to ask structured questions that are driven by the design of the center.  This is so deeply embedded a notion that it probably does not even make sense on first reading (of course, that could also be due to my writing!).  It seems self-evident – of COURSE we would want to ask structured questions to measure whether our design is achieving what we intended.  But it turns out that self-evident, common knowledge can often lead us astray, and this is one example.  In fact, there are many important questions we should like to ask about our contact centers but typically don't.

To clearly see why this is so, consider call flows.  In most contact centers, considerable time is spent designing call flows to handle all the differing customer needs in an efficient fashion.  Often very large call flow diagrams are developed, and then these designs are coded/configured into routing strategies, ACD vectors, voice/IVR applications and so forth.  Many a contact center war room has walls festooned with detailed call flow diagrams...  Then, in order to measure performance, detailed reports are designed that measure the performance of each of the call flows.  These reports are built up from very structured data that enables the counting of calls that took each flow, as well as the time spent in each leg of the flow (and often the business outcome from the call).

So far, so good.  But, this approach does not measure things that you did not plan for, except when we are lucky.  Unfortunately, unplanned flows are commonplace in contact centers – how it could it be otherwise?  Customers do not care, and should not have to care, how we define our call flows.  They do what they want to do, and the more freedom we give them, the more they will like the experience we provide.  The situation is even  worse on web sites, where users are quite proficient in using navigation tools (back keys, favorites, history lists, etc.) to traverse web sites as they see fit.

These realities call for a different, complementary approach to analytics.  This approach is based on discovering and measuring all of the patterns that occur, rather than measuring only the patterns that are designed in.  In web terms, this means studying the paths people actually take as they traverse our web site, rather than analyzing the paths we designed in.  This is somewhat familiar in the web world, but it is far less so in the "call flow" world.  But the difference in results can be startling.  In one real world contact center where I did some consulting, there were two dozen call flows set up.  Reports were set up for each of them, and these were reviewed by many people.  But, when I asked the question "What are all the call flows that actually occurred, regardless of whether you designed them in, and how often did each occur?", no one could answer it.

In fact, new tools and a new approach were needed to discover all the flows that occurred.  Again, for emphasis, this is quite distinct from measuring all of the flows that were designed.  In the real world contact center situation, there were over 500 distinct call flows that actually occurred.  Not surprisingly, most of the calls were accounted for by counting the most-used flows (the 80/20 rule held, more or less).  However, one of the top ten flows was a completely undesigned – and unmeasured – one.  A very meaningful fraction of callers to this company were ending up in the "Hotel California" queue -- you could check out any time (by abandoning), but you could never leave (that is, get an agent)!  Because the reporting was designed around planned flows, this unplanned flow remained undetected, and these customers remained unserved (if they remained customers or not could not be detected...).

A similar situation likely exists with agent work patterns.  Many centers rely heavily on hard scripting or rigid rules about how to handle calls, and these centers usually also maintain significant investments in highly structured reporting to measure compliance with these designed work patterns.  Analyzing performance using only these "as designed" reports is doomed to miss many important features of agent work patterns.  Some of these might be bad ones – ways that agents might mistakenly or otherwise fail to accomplish what is desired – but many will also likely be good patterns that will not be detected and amplified (by teaching them to other agents).  We too often rely on chance to detect these unplanned flows -- someone following up on a complaint (or a kudo) discovers that things are not, after all, going as planned.

The good news?  There are techniques for performing unstructured data analysis.  Many techniques are well-established today, and we are adding some new ones right now at Aria, in our Strategic Consulting Group (ping me and we can discuss them!). 

But even without these cool tools, it is all about attitude and the approach to data: business analysts should approach their task, and their data, in the spirit of discovery and not in a legalistic search for compliance and deviations.