Did you know first chocolate bar was created by Joseph Fry in Great Britain in 1847 and Cadbury began selling individual boxes in 1868 but it was not till World War I when candies started to sell on a global scale to boost the morale and energy of soldiers. Per Greek mythology, Amazons were believed to be the incredible and powerful women ever known. Autonomous and strong females who created a place for themselves in man dominated society. They are world’s first feminine activists. I can probably write a book on everything I learnt in 2020 but lets focus on Customer Experience.
There are many reasons why businesses across the world invest in Customer Experience. However top 3 reasons as per recent survey are ‘ to improve cross-selling and up selling’, ‘to improve customer retention’ and ‘to improve customer satisfaction’. I was not surprised but good to get the facts validated by data.
Companies serve their customers across different channels for a long time, from websites to Call, Chat and Email. Though customers accept different service levels for each channel, they expect consistent communication across all. IKEA remains the gold standard of consistent multi-channel experience and has annual revenue north of 40B worldwide. PWC survey in 2020 noted that investment in multi-channel experience has jumped from 20% to 80%.
Bots are so popular these days. Did you know that ELIZA was the first ever Chatbot? It was developed by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in 1960s. The two most popular words to start a conversation with bots are ‘Hi’ and ‘Hello’. No ‘Alexa’ or ‘Siri’? I was surprised. Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in natural language processing and currently working for Google, says bots would be able to pass the Turing test and be indistinguishable from Humans by 2029.
There are many companies out there who can offer amazing containment services. Many offer very good workforce management services too. But there few, like SuccessKPI, who offers the impact of self-service containment at top to the Agent level staffing. Imagine you increased your containment of billing calls by 20%, you probably need to staff 20% less staff to maintain similar level of occupancy.
I often hear contact center executives getting confused between Efficiency and Productivity. While Productivity is the output produced by agents, Efficiency is more about reducing waste. A simple way to measure productivity is Output/Input where Output = Total Handle Time whereas Input = Daily Work Schedule Time. So if an agents spends 4 hours handling customers (Talk, Hold, Wrap-up) out of 8 hours of scheduled time (usually ON QUEUE time), you are looking at productivity of 50%. Efficiency on the other hand is percentage of Talk time over Handle Time. If agents are putting too much time putting callers on hold, it would lead to less efficiency. You must look beyond math to really understand your contact center operation and drive amazing experiences efficiently.
Finally, we end this with one of the best customer experience stories I heard last year. It’s the story of Steve’s Pizza in Battle Creek, Michigan which delivered more than just a pizza. Steve’s pizza was Morgan’s family go-to-meal when they were living in Michigan. When Morgan family moved to Indianapolis, they kept talking about the place and its rich taste. They had planned to make the drive to Battle Creek to celebrate Ms. Morgan’s 56th birthday. That plan vanished with the devastating news that Steve Morgan had a severe and fatal form of cancer. Ms. Morgan’s father knew how much the restaurant had meant to the couple. He called, in hopes of getting perhaps a note from them. But the person who answered,18-year-old Dalton Shaffer, instead jumped in his car and drove 2 sixteen-inch pizzas 225 miles to the Morgans’ door. When asked about it he said, “I just wanted to do that for them. I just wanted to make them happy.” What a story. How do you teach your agents to be Like Mr Shaffer? I don’t have a good answer for that but I hope every agent be like him.
Very inspiring blog Dr Dimple!