Finding Simplicity By Asking Your Customers

During Thursday’s Loyalty360 webinar, “Simplify Customer Service Interactions,” which was presented by KANA®, a Verint® company, Scott Hays of KANA posed a question about how to simplify customer interactions.

“Listen to your customers,” panelist Craig Harsip, Technology Director at Vistaprint, told attendees. “Ask them. They know what they want. We created a process to systematically collect and analyze customer feedback. Listen to your customers. They are very likely telling you what they want. It starts at the top. Senior leaders must commit to clearing the hurdles.”

Megan Burns, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, told attendees that making things easy for employees and making things easy for customers should be one in the same.

“The Customer Experience ecosystem has to help well-meaning employees, not hinder them,” she said. “An ecosystem to be healthy, everyone’s needs have to be met in balance. Your Customer Experience ecosystem has to help your employees, not hinder them.”

Burns outlined some key recommendations:

  • Constantly ask and remind yourself how your customers define “simple”
  • Map your Customer Experience ecosystem to find redundant process steps, unnecessary information, and needless complexity
  • Ask employees what would make it easier for them to deliver a great experience. Focus on removing those barriers to success.

“When you ask, you usually learn a lot,” Burns said.

A poll question taken during the webinar asked attendees about the challenges to simplifying customer interactions.

The top two reasons cited as challenges to simplifying customer interactions were: disconnected channels of customer communication (34%) and complex products or services (28%).

Burns said that time is a rare commodity for people as is mental energy.

“We want any interaction to be simple,” she said.

Burns said customer experience needs to have:

  • Effectiveness, value from experience
  • Ease (without difficulty)
  • Emotion (do they feel good about the experience?)

“These are the key drivers of customer retention loyalty, enrichment loyalty, and advocacy loyalty,” Burns said. “These are key success metrics. Simplicity comes up when we drill into drivers of good experience. Simplicity is actually about not wasting my time. Talk to customers in plain language. Resolve customer problems and issues quickly. The simplicity thread goes through all of it.”

Harsip talked about Vistaprint’s transformation in the past year. The company, which helps small businesses market themselves, has grown to 4,000 employees in the past decade.

“We’re listening to our customers, delivering services they value, and making it easy,” Harsip said. “We took our web-based model and applied it to our manufacturing and customer service processes.”

Burns defined a Customer Experience ecosystem as: The web of relations among all aspects of a company—including its customers, employees, partners, and operating environment—that determine the quality of the customer experience.

Employees need to support customers with the following three freedoms:

  • Free movement of data and information
  • Free movement of people
  • Free interactions between individuals

How does Vistaprint approach being fast? How much focus is put on first contact resolution (FCR)?

Shorten feedback loops:

CARE presence in manufacturing plants

Product development teams visit contact centers regularly

“Our audacious goal is to achieve 90% FCR (Full Contact Resolution) raet by 2017,” he said.

Harsip identified the root causes for failure to resolve problems:

  • Inefficient processes: Need process improvement and empower agents to solve problem on first contact
  • Soft skills: As much as two-thirds of FCR perception has to do with communcation of agents. Our training efforts are focused in this area
  • Channel optimization: Certain requests area handled better in certain channels

Hays offered KANA’s three key recommendations for a simplified customer interaction:

Consistent: Same quality of experience and outcome on all channels

Complete: Seamless channel transition, no matter when, where or how you engage

Contextual: Just the processes and information I need, when I need them

Burns said brand messaging is: “How you make promises and Customer Experience is how you keep those promises.”

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