Minutes of the 7-12-05 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG):
"Listening to your Customer-Leveraging Telephone Interactions to Improve your Online Experience"

About 20 people attended tonight's meeting.

MEETING SPONSORS

MicroStaff (http://www.microstaff.com) provides pizza and beverages. Microstaff also provides creative and technical talent for Web, Interactive Media, Marketing Communications, and Software Development projects.

ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com) pays for these meeting minutes. ONEWARE is a Colorado-based software company that provides semi-custom, web-based applications.

NCAR provides free use of their facility for our meetings.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) provides the audio/visual equipment.

_______________

MEETING MINUTES

Announcements:

Jeff Finkelstein: Customer Paradigm has two openings. They are looking for a project manager in their Boulder office, and a PHP developer in their Dallas, Texas office.

Josh Zapin: Maxtor Corporation, a hard drive manufacturer, is looking for two Web content specialists who have a desire to expand their knowledge about Webmastering.

Audience question: What is going on with WebD2? Answer: They are supposed to be working on their email Might have something available in June. To be looked into.

Josh's first wedding anniversary on July 4th.

Introduced Carole Beck as today's minutes taker.

_______________

INTRODUCTION

In 1995, Federal Express proved that you could enhance customer service and save the company money by publishing their service online. This type of service has gone from being a luxury in the past to a real necessity today. Fed Ex now has 2.5 million people going to their website daily.

Josh asked the audience: How many people work in companies that have call center operations? (some) How many people work for companies that have websites that are more than marketing, with a self-service or purchasing service? (about half)

How many people work for companies that have customer interactions tied to websites? (a few)

Tonight we'll learn how you can use customer feedback to reduce costs, enhance service, and increase revenues.

_______________

SPEAKERS

Aleece L. Koss (webmaster@aleecekoss.com) is a Senior Director of Customer Experience for Cendant, one of the foremost providers of travel and real estate services in the world. During Aleece's tenure, she has worked very closely with their CheapTickets.com division, one of the largest online sellers of leisure products in the world with $3 to $4 million in sales each day. An Internet veteran with over 10 years of experience, Aleece has led many large projects including two complete platform and customer migrations as well as championing a focus on the customer that resulted in continuous monthly sales conversion improvements, 43 percent growth in purchases, and 50 percent reduction in customer contacts per purchase Year-Over-Year. Aleece will talk about her experiences using CheapTickets call center data as part of the effort to achieve the above results.

ALEECE L. KOSS

This is excerpted from a webinar that I did for CRM Magazine (http://www.destinationcrm.com) on managing the customer experience. Please feel free to interrupt me as we go along if you have questions.

(A link to Aleece's PowerPoint can be found at http://www.6cp.com/rmiug.org/Alecee.Koss.ppt)

The first thing we'll talk about is the increasing expectations that customers have.

The Customer Experience Frontier

"The customer experience is the next competitive battleground." (Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers) This means that the increased use of the internet is increasing customer expectations, which are putting pressure on companies to meet those expectations in new ways.

"It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does." (Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com) Companies often find something different or beyond what customers might expect from their brand. You need to set the right expectations that your company can deliver against. What does this mean? How do you do that?

In the traditional marketing approach, each department, or "silo," (marketing, contact center, technology) is looking at specific things, specific types of data, and nothing else.. Each of these silos are operating in their own world and you have no idea how they all work together for the company. You need to break down those silos and work together towards what the customer wants rather than just focusing on each silo's metrics.

Customers Provide Business Performance Feedback

One of the ways to determine what the customer's expectations are is through your call center. You can use the call center to cut costs by offshoring work, cutting staff, or eliminating phone numbers that customers can use to call in. CheapTickets.com has used all these methods, but these things won't generate additional sales or promote customer satisfaction.

The customers can provide business performance feedback in the type of calls they make. Initially, our call center reported only aggregate call statistics: average handle time, average speed to answer. Metrics and data collection were focused primarily on agent productivity. Our contact center kept receiving these calls:
It's broken.
He sold me the wrong item.
My bill is wrong.
Why don't you have...?
My itinerary is incorrect.
Where is my order?
Parts are missing.
I don't understand the instructions.
Does this have an attachment?

We had no idea why the calls were happening or how many of each type were coming in. The idea is to collect this data at a granular level, communicate these calls across silos so you can understand the root cause and upstream business processes causing them so you can ultimately prevent them.

Each of these calls provide useful feedback to your types of core business operations, such as Product Development, Manufacturing and Supply (Why don't you have? Parts are missing), Marketing and Sales, Billing (My bill is wrong), Technology Operations (It's broken), or Client Communication.

Chain Reaction of Quantified Business Benefits Catalysts: Customer-driven and Fact-based

We analyzed a chain reaction of quantified business benefits to come up with quantifiable information, such as how much it cost for customers to call in rather than confirm their reservations themselves. What we did was begin with our insight into what the customers expected from call center feedback to:
- Identify and fix broken business processes
- Optimize self service deployments

This led to:
- Eliminating unnecessary calls (resulted in a substantial reduction/cost savings of about 30 percent)
- Aligning business process performance to customer expectations (increased customer satisfaction)

For typical folks not leveraging their contact center data today, it is quite common to reduce costs by 30 percent by gathering the data, identifying some quick hits and implementing them.

Goals

CheapTickets had a major problem in 2003. For each purchase, customers generated more than one call. This trend can't help grow an organization. We needed to prevent calls and understand why they were happening. Our goals were:

1. Cut call center support costs. This created the desire to get the ball rolling.
2. Increase online conversion. This was a natural extension from identifying site errors that were generating calls, which was formerly seen only as new product development. Now it was a goal.
3. Create differentiation by increasing customer satisfaction. The industry has not been very customer focused, so this gave the travel industry an opportunity and way to grow.

Most of the work we did was on the first two goals. The third takes more time to realize.

Challenges

Our challenges can be described as:

1. Silos - Pinpointing what we needed to know and getting that information to someone who could use it. Directing call center data to the appropriate department. We resolved by putting a cross-functional task force together of call center, product and technology analytics staff.
2. Chicken Little - Having reliable data to quantify issues and enable effective decision-making. When we got started, we had a windfall of complaints and it was very easy to get side-tracked on small issues. We had to implement data trending quickly to make sure we were focused on the big issues.
3. Boiling the ocean - Finding "quick wins" that could generate results before trying to tackle everything. Taking the time to analyze the data and figure out where the quick wins were helped us to pinpoint where we were making money and where we were saving money. This helps create executive champions to get more support so you can get more investment to generate more results.

Our findings from the top calls and insights were:

- Confirming flights within 24 hours was important
- Forgetting the username and password. These calls caused us to wonder why even give customers passwords if they have to call all the time because they forgot them!
- Changing reservations - customers were calling to find out if they could do this and how much it would cost.
- Website errors - what was happening on a daily basis, what errors were generating the most calls.

This resulted in these actions/results:

Confirming flights within 24 hours. First we updated the email by linking the email confirmation to an online reservation confirmation. This allowed the customer to self-confirm. Then, if the customer still had questions, we used netSage(tm) to help confirm reservation details. If there was a problem with it, then they were directed to FAQs, and then call center. This saved the company $1 million in quarterly savings, and resulted in a 68 percent decrease in itinerary service volume and only took a few weeks to implement Lesson: review your customer touch points and pay attention to what you tell your customers to do because oftentimes they will do it!

Removing unnecessary barriers - Guest Purchase rather than individual username and password. If customers couldn't remember their password, they would drop off or call in. We changed the order of the process so membership was not a requirement to purchase. Our typical customers only buy once or twice a year, so there was no inherent customer benefit to the username and password, and we used the website and call center data to show the benefit in removing them. As a result, we had increasingly higher number of reservations.

Changing reservations - We enabled self-service. The fees were causing customers to change reservations, so we had to communicate the various fees. We started with the general fees, then went to letting customers change their own reservations online. This resulted in an 85 percent reduction in the volume of customers changing flights.

The bottom line is: increased conversion and lower costs, and it kept getting better.

______________

Q&A PERIOD

Q: Have you had challenges translating customer satisfaction to a financial impact?

A: Yes. There are a couple third party sources we've used to help gain momentum. First, there's a Harvard Business Review article called "The One Number You Need". They did statistically significant trending of company financial results against different types of customer satisfaction questions and recommend that the best question to ask customers is "On a scale of 1 - 10, how likely are you to refer our company?" Results of 8-10 are considered promoters, results 1-3 are considered detractors - the idea is to optimize promoters and minimize detractors. It's a good article and I recommend ordering it from their site if you can. Another approach is The American Customer Satisfaction Index by a company called ForeSee Results - they have trended the stock share price of key companies in several industries against customer satisfaction scores and demonstrated that the companies with the highest customer satisfaction scores have achieved the highest growth in share price.

Q: How does this work for a smaller company?

A: Start somewhere, even with a simple spreadsheet from listening to customers, and categorize why customers are calling in. Track it, and graph it. You don't need a whole expensive tool. Challenges won't be as significant because in a smaller company you'll have a better handle on what's going on.

Q: Are there any other ways to collect the data if you never know which numbers to call, and the call center staff writes customer call information down on paper. Also, we don't have a lot of time to track the calls.

A: Build an online survey tool to ask key questions. Figure out what to ask, how to break things down. You don't have to do every call - gather enough call data to know what is statistically relevant. It shouldn't take long to know where your big problems are.

Q: Can you tell us more about getting rid of the username and password?

A: Get marketing and technology people together to see what marketing wants to accomplish, then can figure out how to remove that barrier. For companies like Amazon where customers purchase frequently, there's a bigger customer benefit to having that username and password. It was a barrier for CheapTickets.com. If the marketing team fights it, give customers the opportunity to subscribe as guest. So, people who want to use it, will. Then your unsubscribe rates will drop as well because, given the option, most people will sign on as guests and will be more qualified if they choose to subscribe to marketing newsletters.

Q: Can you use a call tracking software program if you have one to see why people are calling in? Don't all companies track their calls now?

A: Sure, if you have it, use it. You'd be surprised how many don't.

Q: Did you get any resistance from the call center on this? Because isn't it a headcount issue partly?

A: Managers are not the ones fighting head count reduction! You need to be careful and to convince each type of manager in the appropriate way that this was a good idea. Understand their objectives and their pressures and help them understand how this helps them achieve their goals. Once they started gathering the data and they saw the value, they got behind it. It can be a challenge to communicate potential headcount reductions to the agent gathering the data, so be careful to provide them a benefit as well. Most agents will be happy to know that the company is addressing root causes of problem calls they get from angry customers so emphasize that instead.

Q: Can you talk more about aligning brand strategy and customer expectations?

A: Sure, our biggest problem was our name (cheaptickets) - 70 percent of people going to our site expected cheap tickets. We did Vividence benchmark panels showing that customers' perception of low prices after using our site was better than our competitors at 48% - unfortunately, that left 22% of customers whose expectations were not met! Start by getting marketing people together with business operations, product and technology staff who understand what the company can really deliver on. Do research in brand strategy to leverage what the customer already thinks and promote that idea to others like them. It's difficult to do, but it's exciting.

Q: How did your resume change as a result of this experience? How did you start?

A: I worked at an agency, then went to CheapTickets and leveraged that agency experience. I did a lot of work myself, even the graphics. Over time I had to become more specialized, and eventually I had handled every function in an online environment. I always tried to align myself with the customer to keep the big picture and am fortunate to have been able to move into a role where I could bring all that together.

Q: Was the cross functional team all internal people or did you use a vendor?

A: We used an outside vendor, but wee still needed key people in each functional group anyway to figure out the key questions and answers they needed within their area in order for insights to be actionable.

Q: Who is a key person? How do you know who should be on the team?

A: This depends on how the company is structured. You need a technology person, a business process person, marketing people who know how to reach the customer. You also need hands-on people to connect to high level people who can get things done quickly to make it come together. If anyone is familiar with Six Sigma, it has a wonderful approach to team formation - it's critical to have a champion at an executive level that can remove obstacles, as well as hand-on process owners that are ultimately responsible for all of the impacted areas.

Q: How do you create a good customer satisfaction survey so the results aren't skewed?

A: You have to be careful. Read the article "The one number you need" in the Harvard Business Review. They did a lot of research across 200 different companies to show this was the most statistically significant one to use when compared to financial results. So many companies are using this method today. It's called a Net Promoter Index.

Q: Utilities companies are not as advanced and use usernames and passwords to log into their website. Do you have any articles on the use of a username and password?

A: I will look for some. We used online hotel sites in our case because none of them required it. There's a fear about customers going directly to suppliers and cutting out agencies, so we were able to use that as a rationale to differentiate ourselves. You'll notice that most competitive agencies have since launched guest purchase functionality. You can also ask why the company wants to use them and help identify alternative approaches to meet their objectives in ways that are more customer-friendly

Q: Did you consider using an interactive voice recording system in your call center?

A: At first, the company had one but it was costing too much money so they eliminated it - without truly understanding the costs that would then be generated in increased calls and agent handle times. Now we have one again. Before purchasing one, find out: What questions are customers generating? What could you answer on an IVR that you can't answer on a website? There are some badly designed IVRs out there, so choose carefully and use a customer-focused design process - get it in front of customers and test response times for customers to find what they need as well as overall satisfaction with it.

Q: What are the IVR costs?

A: They are things like networking, switching, etc. as well as costs to update menus if you don't have someone internally to maintain it.

=======================

RMIUG (http://www.rmiug.org/) appreciates the sponsorship of
MicroStaff (www.microstaff.com), ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com), and Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com).