C2C: Can your customers help other customers?

Everyone in the service sector knows about the acronyms B2C and B2B – business-to-customer and business-to-business. It describes the nature of a business; are they marketing goods or services to end consumers – like a retailer – or to other businesses, like an IT services firm?

Companies offering a service all fall into these categories and business students or consultants will spend many hours describing how different these companies are, and how their customer service strategies need to be entirely different.

But what about C2C? What if we considered that a customer-to-customer interaction could also exist? It’s an acronym that is being used increasingly by firms finding that often the best way to support their customers is to introduce them to other existing customers who are willing and able to support the product – often for nothing other than the recognition of being seen as an expert.

It doesn’t sound like much of a service? But it really works and can be especially effective for low-margin services that still need a level of support, for example a sim-only mobile phone product. A product like this has a very low profit margin, yet customers still have questions and need occasional support.

In the same way, people give their time for free to Wikipedia, just earning kudos for their participation, many consumers are happy to demonstrate their expertise with products like telephones and other consumer electronic devices. If that enthusiasm to demonstrate expertise can be channelled into helping peers through a process of ‘crowdsourcing’ the support then it can be highly effective. This often works by gamifying the experience – adding points and badges to the process of participation. There is no actual payment, but people love scoring higher than their friends and so they continue to participate.

Some are critical of this method, pointing to the lack of consistency in services delivered by peers, but other commentators believe it is the future for many types of electronic product.

What do you think, and how best can it be made to work for consumers who want an immediate – and reliable – answer?

Connecting together complexity in the call center

This post is by Luciana Cemerka De Aguiar, the Global Marketing Manager of Teleperformance, based in São Paulo.

What is operational assessment? In most companies it is the process of analyzing a process to determine strengths and weaknesses, to better understand a business process by breaking it down into the component parts and then analyzing how it might work better.

In contact centers ongoing operational assessment has become very complex over the years as the business itself has become more complex, but the most important measurements and processes can be distilled down to three basic measures:

• How quickly is the customer dealt with?
• Is the problem resolved on the first contact or is the customer making several calls about the same problem?
• Is the customer happy with the service received?

In the more traditional environment where a customer called for help, all of these measures can be easily tracked, but the operational processes of the contact center are now becoming increasingly more complex.

The customer query can arrive by a call, by an instant message, by a tweet, by a post on a Facebook wall, by an email, or in some cases by a letter mailed to the customer service center. All these entry points need to be tied together so an agent talking to a customer via IM knows that the customer has previously called about the same problem.

All this is made even more complex when you consider that the social network activity is entirely outside the network of the organization. It’s up to companies to start including data such as Facebook walls inside their own network of customer data, even though this is a public database that resides entirely outside their control.

If you have not started including this public data into your own view of how your customer behaves then you may be missing out on valuable information and losing out on the ability to match calls to previous enquiries.

Can technology leaders focus more on what technology can do for customers?

Is IT spending stuck in a vicious circle? The technology department in every company has changed in importance over the past decade and Teleperformance – and the customer service industry in general – is no exception.

Only a decade ago the technology department was usually assumed to be a cost center. It may be that you work for an investment bank where traders able to be fraction of a second faster than the competition means the difference between a profit and loss. But for most companies technology usually just meant PCs on desks, an email system, and some storage. That’s all fairly basic and unexciting.

For many companies the situation remains largely the same, but some have started exploring online tools, apps, and systems infrastructure in the cloud. It’s now possible to setup a telecoms and storage infrastructure for a new startup company with nothing other than a laptop and Internet connection.

But there are two important trends developing. Companies in every industry are acknowledging now that their technology is becoming a key differentiator – technology is no longer just a cost; it’s a way of delivering a better service.

And customer service is being enhanced by various technologies. Instant Messaging, social networking, and security tools are all helping brands to improve the customer experience they offer.

It’s no wonder the latest management trend is the move towards hiring Chief Digital Officers. If the technology head is more focused on what the technology can achieve, rather than how it is achieved then customers can only benefit from the improvement in services.

Are you blocking BitTorrent trackers in the office?

This blog is a contribution from Bruce Wignall, global head of security at Teleperformance:

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is a Swedish website that links to online copies of music, films, and software – anything that can be easily copied and distributed online. It is possibly the single largest library of illegally copied intellectual property in the world and has been resistant to the authorities for many years, largely because they don’t store the content themselves and the links use very strong cryptography to mask the exact location of copied material.

Law enforcement authorities have generally failed to stop sites like TPB – as they are taken down the content pops up somewhere else. In some countries, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have just blocked access to the TPB website in a crude bid to prevent access to the pirated content.

Of course, this becomes a difficult legal position. The ISPs have long argued that they are providing a link to the Internet and are not responsible for what users do with it in much the same way as a post service employee delivering a packet that may contain content that is illegal – it’s not the delivery person who is breaking the law.

Company security teams should locally prevent access to sites such as TPB for several reasons. Many sites like this contain undesirable content, even viruses, that you really don’t want on the corporate network. And in any case, do you really want the office network slowed down because half the employees are using company bandwidth to download movies?

Access can be prevented at work, but in society at large it is more difficult. The reality is that sites like this will flourish until the legal option is easier and pitched at a reasonable price. Services like Netflix and Spotify are leading the way in making legal content available for a fixed monthly charge. Perhaps it is time to make the carrot bigger than the stick?

Why is customer service so hard to deliver?

Kate Leggett of Forrester wrote a recent blog titled ‘why is effortless customer service so hard to deliver?’ Her main point being that ownership of the customer experience is the real key to success.

Fractured ownership of the customer service process, companies that operate with a silo structure and customer-facing employees who don’t have access to the same information as those receiving messages from the customers – across all channels – lead to a very disjointed experience.

And this is important. When something goes wrong, it is always possible to turn a complaining customer into a fan by ensuring that they are handled well and end the call/chat/email exchange feeling that even though the company dropped the ball, they really care about making good when things go wrong.

But why is this so hard? The silo structure of most traditional companies is the real problem. Customers now operate within a network of communications that does not fit into the traditional boxes.

Think about the normal functions of a company that sells products to consumers. They have a sales team, they have a marketing team, they have a team focused on PR and outreach to the media AND they have a customer service team handling and enquiries or complaints.

Traditionally, none of these teams actually worked together – apart from the oversight of the executive management who had to coordinate all efforts.

But a customer who is offended by an advert can use Google to find out the name of the marketing head of the offending company and then use tools like LinkedIn or Twitter to complain directly. They might not bother with the customer service team at all. Customers already understand the networked society because they use these communication tools on a daily basis.

Leading companies will see this and fully integrate their customer service function into every other part of the organization. It is usually the only place that the customer can interact directly with the company so it’s vital to ensure they have the best information and team. Customer behavior is years ahead of traditional corporate strategy, but it’s not too late to change.

Is solar power cheaper than ever?

This contribution is from Gabriel Toscana, Teleperformance Sustainability Senior Global Advisor, who is based in Bogotá in Colombia.

Several CEOs of solar companies were interviewed recently in the Wall Street Journal discussing the amazing price decreases of solar technology in the past few years. First they began by stating that solar went from being among the most expensive energy sources to one of the least expensive.

At the beginning of their presentation they mention prices below one dollar per watt but then one of them corrects this information by stating that once installation, inverters, and so on, are included, the total price for a residential system is in the range of 4 to 5 US dollars per watt.

What was completely overlooked, however, was that on AVERAGE a solar installation produces power only 20% of the time (in a good and sunny place on Earth).  Thus for 80% of the time OTHER energy sources have to generate the needed electricity.

The above means that solar is always a surplus investment.  No matter how much solar is installed, we cannot remove any conventional generating capacity because aside from the obvious fact that at night there is no sun, a cloudy day can easily reduce the output of a solar installation by 90%.

Sure “if solar could be stored” the situation would be different, but here we have two issues:

1. Storage is extremely expensive and thus would drastically change the economic equation of solar.
2. We have to decide for how long we want to store it?  For a day? For a week? For three months? (Germany, the country with the most installed solar capacity has experienced its darkest winter in 43 years**).  Obviously, storage costs grow exponentially with the number of hours / days required to be stored.

If solar is somewhat viable today it is only because it almost fully depends on the conventional electrical grid to mask its intermittent nature. Furthermore, the costs quoted by the CEOs today do NOT include the additional costs the grid must incur to support the fluctuating nature of solar.

Conclusion: the money invested in solar could be better used, for example, in efficiency improvements and nuclear power.

** Spiegel: February 26, 2013.

How is the contact center changing?

How is the contact center changing? There are trends shaping the customer service industry in general, but what about the way agents are delivering calls out on the floor? Here are five key trends I’ve been reading about recently and that will be important in shaping how contact centers operate in 2013.

• Multiskilling is essential; as agents are expected to switch between voice, chat, and social media support it is becoming essential for them to cope with the requirements of all support channels – not just voice alone.
• Knowledge Management; KM is becoming more sophisticated and is allowing agents to find information from knowledge bases in real-time as they deal with a customer thanks to better ways to access information.
• Mobile; support and engagement direct from phones using apps is becoming a very useful way to not just handle complaints, but to get customers engaged with the brand more often.
• Video; tablets and phones are all capable of making video calls and people used to Internet calls, using tools such as Skype, will have been making video calls for years. Customers are going to start expecting to see who they are talking to.
• More outbound calling; outbound used to be about sales alone, but now airlines want to check your got your tickets, banks are reminding you to pay bills… there are many more reasons for the agent to be reaching out to the customer now and channels in which the customer can be reached.

Do you agree with these five trends? At TP our belief is that the blending of channels – the omnichannel – is going to be the biggest change of 2013, but what do you think about these potential trends shaping the modern contact center?