Customer Experience and Org Structure

Most companies still struggle to positively differentiate themselves on end-to-end customer experience and the clearest reason is that they aren't structured to do so. Peruse any number of posted Customer Experience positions in a job search and you'll find the role descriptions to be all over the map. It seems there are at least a few different camps as to where the responsibility for customer experience lies and looking at individual user profiles, you'll see that there is a wide range of titles for individuals claiming responsibility for customer experience.

Not long ago, I was at a conference where an upcoming speaker had the title of EVP of Customer Experience (or SVP ... don't quite recall). This person was hailed in her bio as one of the most senior professionals in the retail industry whose responsibility is customer advocacy. This was impressive to me and I took an opportunity to meet her. At some point, I told her we had customer advocacy in common. She responded enthusiastically, "Really? What do you do?" I said, "I run Customer Care." I found the next thing she said to be remarkable, which was, "oh ... well I'm completely on the other side of the business." 

The other side?

In this case, it was Marketing. She went on to tell me that she mostly tends to loyalty programs and customer research and really has little to do with their Customer Care organization (or any other "operational" area) except that she does stay abreast of how failures in operations might negatively impact sales.

This preference for placement of Customer Experience in Marketing over Operations isn't uncommon or completely surprising considering that consumer analytics, a key resource in measuring and driving customer behaviors, tends to be a function of Marketing. For too many companies however, loyalty and direct marketing programs are where the focus on Customer Experience ends. 

On another front, you'll have companies that cite post-sale care to be just as, if not more of an important driver for loyalty and long-term buying behaviors. Zappos and parent company Amazon for instance, do not mince words when touting the importance of Customer Service and Logistics in driving customer loyalty and in the case of Zappos, the importance of human interaction in that equation. On yet another front, companies that are hyper-focused on self service tend to think of the scope of customer experience to be all about the effectiveness of digital interfaces and the roles within those companies will tend to be in Digital Product Management. All of these would be ineffective without a great data capture and management strategy, which is a function of IT Operations. In my own company, the Voice of the Customer program, which is housed in the Customer Care organization has probably the most pronounced impact on overall customer experience, as that program drives analysis and cross-functional partnerships when there are issues to be fixed. That said, it isn't enough by itself to just respond when things break.

I think most of us believe the customer experience is best when all of these areas are equally responsible but without some sort of blanket oversight, accountability falters. While any of these groups in principle may claim customer experience as its domain, it's just as easy for one group to assume the other is taking care of things or may even have differing definitions and targets for "good customer experience". Competing objectives or gaps in information flow between groups also lead to breakdowns.

While it may be pretty easy to propose that a company will benefit by having a single leader overseeing the full end-to-end customer experience, there are a couple big challenges with this. 

The first is finding an individual with the diversity of experience, skill, and capacity to understand what's happening for the customer at all these touch-points then to be tuned into customer psychology enough to transform information ultimately into long term behavior. Also, vernacular tends to differ between corporate areas, requiring a leader who can effectively communicate value and opportunity from a range of angles and perspectives.

The other big challenge is in figuring out which budget should bear the burden of a talent who is truly cross-functional.

I do believe there are people out there who have the experience and skill set necessary to lead others in providing a top-notch end-to-end experience, but the background needed is probably different that what is currently being sought for these roles. I'll try to outline those necessary qualities in a future article.

With regard to budget group, I don't have a definitive answer and I think there could be a good case made for placement within either. What I do know is that whatever the reporting group, he or she needs to be fully empowered to directly influence decisions in other areas and a personal resistance to taking on the modalities of the home team.

That last part is no small feat.

Why 2013 Will Be The Year You Get A Job

This article is in response to +james altucher's article: 10 Reasons Why 2013 Will Be The Year You Quit Your Job

Though I am about to give a (somewhat long) retort to Altucher's article, I would like to point out that the article is excellent - IF - you don't read too much into it.

I like Altucher. I think he is a bold visionary. Honestly, these are the sorts of people you should be reading regularly. Altucher's not as swashbuckling, but I rate him in line with for instance Richard Branson, one of my favorite icons.

There is a fair amount of truth in the article with regard to how globalization and automation are having a huge impact on the corporate 'middle class' job landscape. I agree with him that there are positions/jobs that will go (or already have gone) away and never come back. I agree that there has never been a better time to diversify your interest, cultivate numerous skills, and genuinely consider that a job isn't your life or your sole source of security. I agree fully that it isn't. But I also think that while most people know this in their hearts (or from the experience of being set free), there is another side.

I have a friend who has been unemployed for a couple years now. He's a brilliant guy, and incredibly well educated. He has numerous talents and an entrepreneurial spirit. He's still had a pretty hard ride and he's damned ready to join the ranks of the fruitfully employed. The same pressures that have weighed on corporations also weigh on entrepreneurs. There is a lot of competition in small spaces, with not a lot of demand. With the economic downturn - and I do fault Altucher some for not being more upfront about the significance of the downturn - a lot of previously corporate people are now entrepreneurs not totally by choice. Entrepreneurs are now as much a dime a dozen as were corporate paper-shufflers. This may be a good thing for American ingenuity but for the individual, it can be a Darwinian nightmare. And while we know the best things in life (time with the pets and family for instance) are free, very little else is. Everything is monetized. Want to go to the beach? You'll pay to park.

While there is still plenty of room for growth and innovation in the non-corporate landscape for the right ideas, the right resources, and right work ethic, I'd argue that an equal amount of opportunity exists today in the corporate world. Altucher says your company hates you. Maybe some companies hate their employees, but those companies are not going to succeed with that attitude no matter how much they can automate or offshore. My current experience is that the downturn has been a bit of an awakening for corporations. Jobs are already coming back and some of us were fortunate enough (or unlucky enough if you believe Altucher) to maintain gainful corporate employment throughout the recession. We were either lucky enough to be working for companies that were innovating or we were lucky enough to be one of those individuals who could do the work of three peers. We still almost universally count ourselves lucky.

Altucher is right that corporations can replace people with robots or outsource their jobs. But, they can only do that if the robot or the outsourcer provides more value and that isn't always strictly about unit cost. I am here to tell you that the best way to excel in today's corporate world is to not be a robot. The new successful corporate employee is as entrepreneurial as any business owner. This employee approaches his/her corporate responsibility with the level of ownership and creativity necessary to elevate that corporation above the competition. Many companies are now aggressively in-sourcing what was previously outsourced in order to maintain much tighter controls on quality. This is even more prevalent in my sector - retail customer experience. What for years past were considered by many to be throw-away, mindless, repetitive roles are now anything but. There has been a near renaissance in customer experience during the economic downturn as companies who found it more and more challenging to compete on price had to differentiate themselves through excellent service. Once you had a few lone wolfs providing 40's and 50's style personalized service but with fresh technological twists (and by the way kicking the crap out of much bigger competitors with it), there became a mad dash for nearly every good company to do the same.

I will tell you - a corporate robot employee does not provide great customer experience. A great customer experience today, as much as great design, great marketing strategy, great manufacturing quality or fulfillment throughput - takes strong, creative, insightful, and diverse talent. It takes a an entrepreneurial spirit and approach. There is plenty to do both for well-designed machines and humans alike.

I see a choice. You can be a self-employed entrepreneur and pay your own insurance, allocate your own retirement funding, build your own marketing campaigns, beat down doors scraping the gravel for every potential customer, etc. Go for it. I applaud you but please stop spamming me online, thanks. You can also be all those things that make a great entrepreneur and have in some cases an even better cultural and team experience, with a heightened (if not fail-safe) sense of security as the company you work for grows and thrives due to your valuable contribution. Just make sure real value is what you bring to the party.

The biggest takeaway from Altucher's article for me is that no one can coast and no one can be one-dimensional. You have to bring it and bring it big whether you're a private entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial employee. Quite the opposite of the main point of the article that there has never been a better time than 2013 to quit - there has never been a better time than 2013 to enter the newly redesigned corporate world where creativity, diversity, strong work ethic, and dynamism are rewarded handsomely (and in more ways than just money). Just pick a company that is a cultural fit for you and don't be dead weight.

Blow it up! Challenge yourself with crazy hypotheticals

... more extreme questions yield insight more quickly. I don’t think of this exercise as a brainstorming session. I think of it more like scorched earth but without all the physical carnage

Who am I? What am I about? Where am I going? What do I really want?

Questions like these explore the underbelly of our consciousness as we second guess our origins, personal decisions, and where we fit in the grand scheme. It is generally considered a healthy exercise to question one’s core understanding, to challenge one’s assumptions, and to reassess one’s value system.

We’re a little schizophrenic about how much questioning we can take. As a society and media consumer, we gravitate toward creativity and exploration while shunning rigidity and closed-mindedness, but we also tend to worship stability, consistency, security, and some degree of predictability.

The good news for us is that as imaginative beings, we have a wonderful capacity for conceptual experiments. We don’t actually have to send live animals into space in a box with a nuclear device in order to get the gist of Schrodinger’s cat. We can – without putting hand to stone – work through the ins and outs of most any scenario we can dream up. For example, I can imagine my life without my current wife, or what it might be like to have been born into serious money, or what my neighbors might say if I painted my house fluorescent pink. The ability to radically question and to think up extreme scenarios can be quite thought provoking, potentially leading one to make real life changes, but also often to affirm the value of a choice or life standard already in place.

The same could be said for business strategy. As with the individual, it is healthy for the organization to run through a similar set of questions as I presented in the top of the article, replacing “I” with “we”. The answers to these questions provide a framework for how we approach almost any challenge or situation that comes our way. Any good, thriving company already has a clear sense of identity and where it fits but the best companies are also adaptable and as the environment changes, reassess. Kentucky Fried Chicken is now KFC and KFC is a very different company in some ways than was Kentucky Fried Chicken. These sorts of strategic moves don’t have to come as a result of paying millions of dollars to a consulting agency, which is essentially going to perform this same exercise, afforded the luxury to harshly question operations in ways that organization members might fear will taint them in the eyes of peers and leaders.

Whether or not you choose to share your crazy thoughts with others, it is worth your time to examine these fundamental questions about identity and to also perform some mental acrobatics with regard to your organizational strategies. While the exercise may not lead to wholesale change, it will lead to considerations that may put you on a path toward the next important strategic or innovative move. It could be something really crazy like, what if I swapped my Finance team with my HR team? How would their approach to these alternative roles differ? It could be something more practical like, what would I do if tomorrow my budget was cut in half? Or, how would I meet this objective if I didn’t have this particular technology at my disposal?

While both the extreme and less-extreme questions provide value, I’d argue that the more extreme questions yield insight more quickly. I don’t think of this exercise as a brainstorming session. I think of it more like scorched earth but without all the physical carnage.

Time To Turn Off Your GPS - Your Vision Is Constrained By Your Work

What will you find when you turn off your GPS and just drive?

You type the destination into your navigation system and you're off and driving, confident that the technology will get you where you want to go. We do the same in our business development efforts. We set a course then vet the various technological tools and processes that we believe from our current experience and understanding may best get us to the destination. This is a proven approach to getting consistent and mostly predictable results. We have a vision then we work to fill in the blanks between point A and point B.

These efforts are almost entirely predicated upon the idea that we know where we are capable of going and what we are capable of doing. And in determining our destination and best path, we use some degree of business intelligence (some companies more than others) - targeted analytics and legacy successes - to get to what we define as the best result.

This process is an important part of business across many industries, especially in the area of customer care, wherein we strive to provide the level of service our customers want. We have a couple ways at our disposal to try to understand what it is they want. We can ask them and we're lucky if they answer at all much less be honest and forthcoming. Another method is to closely analyze their behaviors then de-emphasize process points that lead to undesired behavior (e.g. abandonment), while emphasizing process points that lead to desired behavior (e.g. conversion).

In terms of the tools we make available to ourselves in driving behavior, we narrow our options to only those tools which fit a set of business requirements - requirements that were determined by the process points we've already identified for improvement.

While a productive exercise, it is highly constrained. Even the one explorative aspect above - the analytical process - is constrained. Our technological research is equally constrained because we've already narrowly defined the feature set we're looking for as we drill down to our "best" options.

Have you considered that your customers have a limited sense of what they want? Our experience shows they tend to ask only for what they feel they can get. They are just as constrained in their thinking as we. Those who aren't will perhaps come to our playground and take the ball from us.

Think about it. Back when the service option was limited to phones and phone reps, before IVR, web, or mobile technology existed, if you asked customers what they want in terms of a great service interaction, they'd say something like, "I want my call answered right away, I want the rep to be nice to me, and I want my problem fixed." They wouldn't say "I don't want to talk to you but instead I want a really great tool that will allow me to help myself, something I can use anywhere I am, at any time."

The factor that leads to customers wanting this latter option today is because they now know they can have it.

This is no different for those of us on the business side of the fence. For example, we put the self service option out there according to industry best practices, then try to find places where it breaks. We have a somewhat understandable belief in the absolute business value of self service as the lower-cost, most convenient route of service.

Following the strategy above, most companies completely missed the boat when an inventive player began differentiating itself by intentionally, greatly de-emphasizing self-service technology. One might suggest that this was merely the insight that a niche of customers longed for the good old days of handshakes and friendly subject matter experts and that this company was just following the same paradigm of find a way to do what the customer wants. This may be true to a degree but I'll argue that before any company could pull the trigger on this option, spending millions of dollars on a national ad campaign and denying the millions of dollars labor save from self-service, someone had to have had the vision to look where no other company was looking even though every company was getting the same feedback from many of the same customers.

In both cases, web and mobile self-service and later, the resurgence of personalized human service, someone had to go exploring the land that no other company knew existed. The destination wasn't programmed into their GPS systems.

Now we have effortless spawning of video conference via the web and there are only a narrow band of companies even considering it as a potential service option, even when the technology has been available for a several years and so many customers Skype regularly with their families and friends. Why? Because customers haven't yet told us this is how they want to do business. What about tomorrow? Who's playing with it? Who's allowing customers to give it a try?

My belief is that every company should be devoting some amount of resources to exploring, inventing, innovating, and testing stuff even when there is no current business case or requirement providing a destination.

Google for instance allows every employee to spend 20% of their time working on projects completely unrelated to their normal workload (that's 20% of labor cost for thousands of employees - a huge investment). Many of their most successful initiatives have originated from this program. I am not sure every company needs to go this far to get some good but I do believe that every company, especially those of us in customer care (delivery and technology), must devote resources to do the same - to play with lots of toys, to research principles, techniques, technologies, approaches, and paradigms often from completely outside of the realm of our given industry.

There is great value to finding something then asking, "What can I do with this?" This is exactly how scientific developments in new materials come to practical application (rubber, plastic, silicon. etc). We need to be doing the same.

What will you find when you turn off your GPS and just drive?

A More Scientific Process for Boosting Quality Assurance

Current State

Most contact centers employ a Quality Assurance program, which consists of reviewing customer interactions and grading the performance of an agent or self-serve technology. For this brief article, I am going to focus on live rep interactions. In nearly all cases, the measurement is based upon behavioral performance against well-defined standards and measured on a well-defined scale.

Many companies now supplement or even place more priority on Customer Satisfaction or C-SAT measurement, which is obtained via customer survey either directly or sometime after the interaction.

The Problems
There are significant problems with both methods, especially where measurement of employee performance is concerned.

The two biggest issues are:
1. Low sample size
2. High levels of subjectivity

Quality Assurance Review
For a sample size to be statistically relevant, you're typically targeting 5-10%. The sample size however for the manual interaction review will be well below 1% due to the time expense to thoroughly review an interaction, often multiple times. Though over time these measurements will begin to show some consistency and dependability of trends, frequency and subjectivity are sore spots not only for the business but also pose distractions for the employees themselves. The speculation is often, "but why did they pick that call? ... my other calls are so much better" or "the other Quality Specialist gave me good grades but this one doesn't."

C-SAT
The sample size for customer survey is typically somewhere between 2 and 6% on the good side and lower in some environments. While it is generally a great practice to survey your customers, this is also highly subjective and results are inconsistent. If you're asking customers to rate on a scale from 1 - 10, one customer's 9 is not necessarily another customer's 9. Also, despite how the questions are framed, customers still show a tendency to punish agents when they are dissatisfied with a company policy (like cases where an agent is required to say "no"). As with the Quality Assurance efforts, a center will be able to see some useful trends over time and will probably identify highly substandard interactions quickly but as a dependable employee performance measurement it is heavily lacking.

The Solution
We need to increase sample size to well above statistical relevance and remove as much subjectivity as possible.

The way to do this is with the use of Speech or Text Analytics technology, ('speech' for voice and 'text' for chat, email, or social media support interactions). Unfortunately, most of today's analytical solutions are devoid of the most important component - a modeling component - though the availability of this technology is on the rise.

Step 1 - build the model
Run a large sample of both exemplary and poor interactions through the modeling engine. A good modeling engine will be able to compose a model on hundreds if not thousands of statistical attributes.

Step 2 - develop a scoring process against your model
Your modeling engine shall be able to analyze a new interaction against the model interaction and assign a score (matches on positive attributes and fewer matches on negative attributes). 

Step 3 - calibrate the model
If you plan to use this measurement in concert with your other measurements, the scale should mirror those other measurements, i.e. a call measured by the model to be 90% should align with a personally reviewed interaction scored at 90%.

Step 4 - apply the model at scale
Once you have a model, you will use the engine to grade many interactions. Theoretically, you could even assess every interaction collected in your center (many centers are required by law to record every interaction). For performance measurement, every interaction for each agent can be run against the model in order to come up with an average machine score, which I'll call a "soft score" if I am communicating the process to employees (sounds a bit more warm and fuzzy, right?).

Step 5 - continually refine the process 
Business climates, customer preferences, and standards change, so it will be important to rebuild your model with some regularity. How you use the soft score is up to you and there are options. The idea I present here is not necessarily to replace your other measurements but to inject more statistical relevance and objectivity into your ongoing efforts. The soft score is probably best used as a given percentage of an overall measurement, which includes Quality Assurance monitoring and C-SAT. At the very minimum, this process could be used to calibrate your staple efforts and find points of inconsistency among Quality Specialists on the performance review side, or perhaps products, services, or policies on the business side.