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High Tech or High Touch? - Cost Savings vs. Relationships?
A False Dilemma - Integrate All for Supercharged Marketing Results
By
Michael Burke
A false dilemma has been spun as regards the delivery of excellence and effectiveness in marketing customer support. Namely, that with the advent of these tough economic times, high tech, high touch, cost savings, and relationship building is mutually exclusive. As companies find they must reduce budgets, inevitably they must also back off on delivery of first class, strategic customer support strategies. Not true.
To the contrary of some companies actions, business can achieve an effective blend of low cost self service "high tech" support, matched with live, "high touch" human, agents who can deliver flexibility, emotional sensitivity, enhanced relationship building, and significant revenue generation.
In fact, all this can usually be accomplished while dramatically reducing cost and increasing efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
Accomplishing this is all about returning to some of the fundamentals like understanding the customer. It has a lot to do with not panicking and not being reactionary after a bad quarter-or year. It’s also about prioritization, redeployment and innovative integration of technology and human resources. This is what the best companies in America are doing and in the years to come they will benefit greatly. Such a commitment to marketing-customer support has a profound long-term profit and immediate bottom line payoff.
Brand Building or Competitor Advantage
Numerous research studies have proven the direct relationship of the quality of marketing-customer support and strategic and short-term business success. As an example, a recent study by the Yankee Group found that 92% of those that who had called a company’s internal or external contact center, formed the image of that companies quality-capabilities by their experience on that phone call. In addition, 63% had said they had stopped using a product or service based on their negative contact center experience.
In other research it has been determined that when someone responds to your marketing communications message you had better deliver the right information promptly and professionally, or you just handed your competitors a sale. Among persons who contacted a company for more information, 94% said that if they failed to get what they needed from that company, they had been motivated to call their competitor.
Yet, looking inside at the marketing-customer support situation today one might be shocked at how oblivious some companies have become to the above facts.
Panic and Forgetting the Customer
A day before the end of Q3 2002 a high tech CEO sent out the flame-a-gram that marketing-customer support costs needed to be cut 25% in Q4. He wanted the list in one hour.
No wonder too many marketing and company executives can be heard lamenting and debating bad strategy to drastically cut marketing support costs while trying to maintain minimal levels of customer support and satisfaction. Otherwise astute business people have taken a sledgehammer to the foundations of their customer satisfaction without ever directly engaging the most important constituent of all: the customers and prospects themselves. Speed to cut has super ceded speed to consult. In some cases what the customer thinks doesn’t matter anyway.
As a VP of a computer service product said: "Frankly, we are afraid to ask customers about our new support policies. They won’t like the cutbacks. We don’t need the brain damage and confrontation. We’ll just do it. But obviously we need to spin it right."
How about this for contorted logic: An executive of an ISP commented, "I am aware that agent cut backs will result in much longer hold times for callers. We think most that drop off will call back and try again. It’s easier than switching providers. If we lose some customers the cost reduction was still worth it. Plus, competitors are in the same boat. Maybe their lost customers will call us."
some good, customer centric companies to swallow hard and do what they did not want to do: make it harder for customers to do business with them, and probably drive some customers away.
But most of the time it does not have to be that way, or at least the cuts and negative impact to customer support can be mitigated and minimized. Lets look at some strategy, solutions, and tools.
Selective Resource Application and Integration
As we will see there are an abundance of powerful solutions and tools for delivering cost effective customer support with high satisfaction. Among those companies struggling to accomplish this, typically they lack a smart, strategy of selective resource application and integration. They look at each solution and tool unilaterally rather than as malleable package that can be and applied as necessary to changing needs. Likewise, these companies do a poor job in application and implementation of the individual solutions.
Herein is the genesis of the aforementioned false dilemma, deficient application and lack of integration. And at the heart of both must be explicit knowledge of what the customer needs and wants.
To follow is a summary of the crucial marketing-customers support solutions and tools and how they need to be integrated.
Web Self Serve Technology
The Internet, CRM systems, and knowledge databases have created an immensely powerful and useful sets of tools that can be described as "web self service technology". Customers can access a companies web pages 24 hours, 7-days a week, from any location. Pages can be dedicated to specific products In theory, customers can get answers to almost all of their questions, do transactions, send communications and get responses on a delayed basis via e-mail.
The customer is in control. It’s a win-win for the company and the customer. This is a mandatory in your integrated support package.
Yet the best news is the cost savings. According to the Gartner Group the cost of web self-service is 0.24 per transaction. Compare that with the cost of $5.66 for "Human Touch" service via a live agent. (What is often overlooked is the revenue generation capability of the live agent). Indeed, the need for a live agent to answer many questions and perform many functions has been eliminated. Depending on the type of business and demographic profile of user, it can reduce agent calls by 50% to 80%. Thus, agents are freed up to handle calls where there expertise is required and they can be focused on those customers with the highest additional revenue potential.
For some complex products/services and those with legal liabilities human touch is often necessary. The age and education of the user also has a bearing on the need for live agent, or another level of assistance. Knowing the customer’s needs and wants dictates the extent and application of the solution.
Now some bad news and a caveat: When some companies eyed the low cost of web self-service, it became a perceived panacea. They directed that virtually all customer support be driven through web regardless of the business or demographic match. To affect this they made it terribly difficult, or impossible, for customers to use anything else. This misguided thinking continues today.
Meanwhile, knowledge databases must be "intelligent" and carefully constructed with the help of CRM insights. The options, answers, and information on the web must align with the customers documented requirements. Unfortunately, many don’t. Companies hurry to put up poorly researched self-help pages that are not much help at all. Consequently, users are driven to a live agent.
Touchtone IVR and Speech Recognition
Touchtone IVR (integrated voice response) has become a pervasive component in marketing-customer support. You dial the number and a recorded voice, sometimes an artificial voice, begins to take you through a menu of informational options matched with the corresponding number to press on your phone. No agent and self-service.
The cost is the primary attraction, just 0.45 per transaction. Recall the agent cost is $5.66. This (unfortunately) is a mandatory in your integrated support package, coordinated with web self help.
A big time down side and some caveats. Most people have come to hate touchtone IVR. Don’t you? Again, a good tool has been seized on as an absolute solution regardless of the customer need or want. Most companies make the scripts far to long and you have to listen, and listen to get the simplest answer. Finally, you hit the button only to get transferred into another "decision tree". Plus, you can’t "zero out" to an operator. The only escape is to hang up.
A suggestion: When you employ IVR keep the script short and simple, and the information menu precise and on target. The better the menu concept, the less likely it is that the caller will need to zero out. In all cases provide this option.
Speech recognition is another form of IVR with outstanding potential. These systems are expanding quickly as software is becoming much more "intelligent" and able to handle more complex interactions. Soon it should eliminate much of the touchtone hell. It is more expensive than touch tone software but worth the differential. This solution has proven to significantly reduce the customers need to speak to an agent.
Web Chat
Here we have a hybrid high tech-high touch technology application whereby a customer can access the web self-service page and enter into an e-mail conversation with an agent. Also, the customer has an option to click and connect with a live agent. This is an increasingly popular option and a mandatory.
Human Touch – Live Agent
Speaking with a knowledgeable fellow human is often the most satisfying and a necessary requirement for customer satisfaction. But it carries a liability of high cost. Simultaneously, however, agents can produce revenue via up selling and cross selling. A good agent is the most potent brand builder in the customer support chain.
Not surprisingly, correctly trained agents are best method to cope with an angry, dissatisfied customer. In much of these instances, the customer needs to vent. Just listening is therapeutic. Interestingly, consumers who have a positive experience with an agent resolving their problem report stronger brand loyalty than before.
Meanwhile, returning to application and integration strategy, the better you devise and implement previously discussed non-agent solutions, the less live calls will be forthcoming.
Other tactics can help reduce the volume of calls to live agents as well as maximizing "one call resolution", which is an extraordinary means to reduce cost while increasing customer service.
Your in house or outsourced contact center should employ advanced intelligent call routing linked to the CRM system. As customers call in their identity is known and the right agent with the right information gets the call. This means shorter calls with higher effectiveness.
You also need the capability to prioritize calls by such factors as customer revenue and product priorities. Herein, agents can best perform revenue-generating services such as up sell and cross sell.
Michael Burke is the 2002 Colorado BMA Communicator of the Year. He has 25-years experience as a marketing, communications, and sales executive, serving Fortune 500 companies. A Board member of the World Trade Center Denver, Mr. Burke recently returned from India, China, and Europe where he conducted business development consultations.
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