Job Hacking

Arguing for a different direction in Customer Service

Customer Service is easy, right? Figure out how many contacts come in the door, how fast your agents can answer them, staff as needed.

Over the last decade, the notion of over-performing in Customer Service has become the norm: Exceed Customer Expectations (usually meaning that after the customer has a problem, the team follows up NOW, and does everything possible to solve the issue and then some). In this way, you will impress the customer by recovering the situation, and this will engender a greater sense of loyalty toward your product/company. Measure Customer Sat and Net Promoter Scores, and you will be moving toward a long-term virtuous circle.

What if that approach doesn't work? 

Thought-provoking post on Barrett Sales Blog, Why you should stop delighting your customers. 

Long and short: Put your money into making it easy for your customer to transact business with you, and they will come back for more. (Wish there were some performance numbers in this blog post you could hang an ROI hat on, though.)

In the on-line world, this is easier said than done. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make the effort and question some of the current 'best practices'.

When do you have them?

I've been spending a few working hours (and a few non-working) thinking through Retention and Customer Loyalty, primarily from an on-line, B2C business focus.

One of my favorite conundrums: When do you acquire a customer? 

Turns out this is a tough one to answer, primarily because of the proliferation of the free trial offer, in whatever form that takes. Most will say that the answer is after the trial, when a customer puts their credit card number into your system for a purchase. Certainly, Finance-types will agree with that one, an item of value has been given and another item of value has been accepted in return; the classic definition of a transaction. 

Or is it after they've crossed the bridge using your product and are so in love with it that they recommended your product to someone else? And how do you measure that?

Launch: When the real work begins

As many of you have noted, my posts have been few and far between of late. Just a little busy getting ready for our beta launch.

Two days ago, we launched our beta. Yesterday was the first BIG day of product use. And, despite all the nail biting, things went fairly smoothly. Big sigh of relief. Now, we get to run the rest of the race!

From my end, there have been some remarkable learnings that are germane to most anybody starting a company, getting ready to service customers. In no particular order:

• CRM Tools are very capable, and very inexpensive. I'll be talking a bit more in several coming posts about both MailChimp and Zendesk.
• Getting help, particularly through third-party channels has familiar options, and new, and more flexible choices. I'll talk about a few of these in the coming weeks, and one very special one when the firm in question says it's O.K.

All in all, launches are big fun. You place you bets, you see what happens.

Just like most everything else in life, but with a known deadline.

Time to short Adobe Stock?

Over the course of my career in the software/internet industry, first Aldus, and then after they were acquired and became Adobe, they offered up great Customer Support.

I personally know some of the leaders responsible for this perception. And, it's no surprise that their support was great and innovative. Their support was completely in step with their brand.

Sunday, I read about how a user experience which indicates that Adobe has outsourced their Support, and based on the description, it sounded like it was offshore (anyone know for sure?).

This is highly interesting in light of my earlier post, Are you Considering Outsourcing of Support.

If recent research is true, we should see further erosion of Adobe stock (note: most stocks have seen a fairly large drop over the last 6 months). But, I don't know exactly when Adobe outsourced their support, so it would be interesting to know when this event happened, and if there are other moves they've made of late.

Let's say this is already priced into their stock. What might be an interesting forward-looking study is whether there is any difference in the rate of improved company value between companies that outsource v. those that don't as our economy flattens, and then starts to improve.

Makes one go hmmm.

Knowanytechsupportcustomercaregamertypes?

I thought you did!

I'm looking for a couple of contract Customer Care Agents, and a Customer Care Lead to come join my team at Smith & Tinker. The job description for the Lead role is posted in the Jobs, Jobs, Jobs section.

For the Lead role, I'm looking for someone who is really good at helping a wide range of people solve their on-line products/services problems. They should also be a bit forward-looking wrt Customer Care technology and the ways in which they think about how to service consumers in this day and age.

Should you (re)consider Outsourcing of Customer Support?

Last year, several Professors put out a paper, Does Offshoring Impact Customer Satisfaction? There were some follow-on periodical articles, including this one, How Offshore Outsourcing Affects Customer Satisfaction.

Here was the amazing thing about the study: For those companies which had outsourced (onshore or offshore) front-office functions, they had seen a decline in their market cap of between 1% - 5% due to a decline in Customer Satisfaction.

YOWZA!

This is one of those studies that just seems to confirm what people tend to think about outsourcing customer care (and other front-office functions), but unfortunately, has been released well after the damage was done to these companies. Again, we see that the ability to measure certain things (costs), and a corresponding inability to measure other impacts (long-term customer value) leads to really dumb "commonly accepted wisdom" decisions (read: Moneyball).

One of the interesting tidbits from the study was that it seemed that most firms who achieved amazing cost reductions through offshore outsourced support simply let the difference flow through to profit - they did not take the results and reinvest in the product to improve its value to the customer.

BTW, back in the day, I tended to use the CEO's mom test when evaluating potential Customer Care solutions. That is, if my CEO's mom would be befuddled in their attempt to get help through any given support channel, I assumed it needed add'l thought or re-engineering.

I wonder if anyone else has seen this and is thinking about insourcing their support? I suppose they would if there was also a study to illustrate they could get the lost market cap back...