LiveOps Chief Marketing Officer Ann Ruckstuhl participated in a riveting Q&A with Loyalty 360 and discussed customer service, the company’s growth, and the importance of customer engagement in today’s loyalty industry.
What is the key to customer service?
The key to customer service starts with the customer service agent and ends with the cloud. We started in the agent services business more than 10 years ago and understand the needs of the agent more so than most, which has propelled us forward on our cloud services side. Earlier on this year, we evaluated the inter-dependency between the agent experience, customer experience and business bottom line.
What we found was that a better agent experience equaled a better customer experience, which in turn, leads to better customer lifetime value. A surprising 92% of consumers surveyed report that a customer service agent’s perceived “happiness” has a direct impact on their customer experience with the brand. And thanks to the introduction of social and mobile channels, customers expect to be able to engage with a brand in a one-on-one dialogue. We also found that 85% of consumers surveyed feel that how a brand handles issues on their website or on social channels, like Facebook or Twitter, is a good indicator of a brand’s ability to deliver customer satisfaction and quality of support. The way we look at consumers today, well, they’ve changed so much, but we’re the beneficiaries of this of technology. To be honest, enterprises haven’t been keeping up with their customers, especially in the space of customer service and it’s time for companies step up to meet the demands of consumers.
At LiveOps, we are very unique in that we are completely channel agnostic. As companies are quickly starting to realize that they are behind the eight ball when it comes to communicating with consumers there is an urgency in the demand from companies needing social customer service capabilities. That’s where the magic of the cloud comes in. The cloud enables instant implementation and companies can get up and running on a just a couple or all of the channels we offer within a couple of weeks. Our customers are realizing they need a solution like ours to be able to adequately service their customers and they don’t have the patience to wait for an on-premise contact center to be built from the ground up. This urgency easily explains the tremendous growth we’ve experienced – 77% – year-over-year.
Can Companies Keep Up with the Customer?
We’re living in revolutionary times. It’s pretty crazy to see the innovation happening. Not too long ago companies believed social customer service was something that may happen in the future, but we’re already there. Social customer service is a thing of the present not the future. The mobile revolution certainly helped that along more quickly than a lot of people anticipated. The ability to communicate from anywhere has really changed the world of customer service. Right now, enterprises are bit behind consumers and they may be for a while, especially if they continue to drag their heels getting on board with customer service.
Luckily the cloud has made this possible and that has further cemented the cloud’s position in customer service, as well as the entire technology market. The Internet is quickly becoming almost entirely cloud-based and all of the big name brands are finally crossing over. Instead of buying separate voice solutions, chat solutions, running email solutions, and SMS like the used to, the cloud has made it easy to integrate all these channels – email, voice, SMS, social media and chat – almost instantly. This is where we have seen customer loyalty comes in. Consumers have spoken. They have said “serve me on the channel of my preference.” The building block approach is falling down. Since what LiveOps does is all web-based, it’s simple for us to add a channel. We’re very excited about the way we’re transforming customer service. It’s very fluid. Anybody not looking to the cloud is standing still.
What goes into the training of LiveOps customer teams?
From sourcing to onboarding to ongoing certification development, we take pride in our ability to leverage the cloud to its fullest potential and that includes training our agents. Successful completion of certifications enables independent agents to access work opportunities for a variety of industries, including insurance, first notice of loss, direct response, and inbound customer service. In this new era of customer communications, a successful agent certification program is a key part of the formula for customer success. To improve overall agent performance, LiveOps Learning delivers blended learning, which is the delivery of related content across various formats to best address multiple learning styles.
LiveOps offers tools to enhance agent motivation and speed of performance while adding value for organizations. With 90% of consumers valuing the ability to communicate with a live person through any channel, it’s essential for agents to be empowered with the right technology and access to the right tools to improve their skills. LiveOps’ blended learning program enables independent at-home agents to improve their performance and help organizations achieve higher order values, answer close to 100% of leads, and in general, reach new levels of success.
How does LiveOps use Gamification?
LiveOps uses gamification or game theory to drive behavior by injecting some fun and a sense of community into the workplace. LiveOps believes that contact center agents can perform better when they have an idea of where they stand compared to their peers. For example, if 1,000 agents are taking the same types of calls for the same client, is there any value in every agent knowing how they compare to all 1000 of those agents? Will an agent whose performance has put him in the bottom 50 of those 1000 get any value by knowing how well the top 10 performed? Is it truly motivating to know how everyone is doing? Probably not. But if we can show an agent who came in at number 50 how numbers 40, 41, and 43 did, and also how 51, 52, and 53 did, that agent might realize it’s just a matter of taking two more calls during their shift to improve their performance. That’s doable. It’s a competitive challenge that is more realistic than trying to be number one all the time. And as the agents improve their performance compared to their peers who on the same account, they can collect badges with improvement or lose badges if their performance starts to wane. Gamification in the contact center allows us to present the same challenge but in a more productive and inspiring manner that builds and awards performance over time.
How does LiveOps improve customer engagement and the customer experience?
LiveOps Engage is able to alleviate inconsistent service across channels and slow response times, making first contact resolution more likely and an increase in brand loyalty. LiveOps swears by a formula for success: Better Agent Experience (BAX) = Better Customer Experience (BCX) = Better Customer Lifetime Value (BCLTV ™). By offering solutions that arm customer service agents with the tools needed to do their jobs well, both agents and customers are happier. In turn, brands can be confident that they are providing great customer experiences, all while achieving better customer lifetime value. LiveOps Research found that a customer service agent’s happiness is heavily influenced by their ability to do their jobs well.
Highlights of the findings, included below, support the overall objective of LiveOps Engage:
92% of consumers report that a customer service agent’s perceived “happiness” has an impact on their customer experience with the brand
66% of consumers agree that their experience with a brand’s customer service agents has a major impact on their impression with the brand overall
85% of consumers feel that how a brand handles issues on their website or on social channels, like Facebook or Twitter, is a good indicator of their customer satisfaction and the quality of their support