TuVox Speech Central

There was a really great segment of NPR’s Talk of the Nation called ‘Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us‘ (March 31, 2009).

For her new book, author Emily Yellin did extensive research around the concept of “customer rage” and found a way to to quantify the exasperation we feel when we call into contact centers.  For example:

• 70% of callers feel rage
• 28% yell at the customer service rep
• 8% curse at the customer service rep
• 15% want revenge
• 1% actually get revenge

Despite all of this hostility, the segment ends on an upbeat note:

Fortunately, Yellin thinks it’s possible things will improve. She concludes that thanks to the Internet and global competition, companies are going to have to take their customers’ needs more seriously.

Let’s hope so!

“Dad, can I ask you a question?”

The seven most dreaded words a parent can hear.  It means you are about to have an awkward conversation about birds, bees, storks, and maybe even a human body part or two.

You can imagine the panic I felt when my 7-year old casually uttered them.  I nodded blankly as my mind raced for the words my father had used.

The came the follow up question.

“What’s a server upgrade?”

I responded with an eloquent “Huh?” as I looked at the Webkinz logo on his computer screen.

Let me back up a step, in case you don’t know any 5 to 10 year-olds.  Webkinz are furry stuffed animals you can buy for $10-20 at most toy stores, gift shops, etc.  Each Webkinz pet comes with an “secret code”  to log into the website.  There you will find a virtual representation of your stuffed animal.

In the Webkinz world, you feed, bathe, and play with your virtual pet.  Like most things my kids are into, I don’t fully understand it, but the kids love it.

Apparently, the enormous popularity of these critters has gotten to the point where the Webkinz World IT infrastructure is busting at the seams.  Hence, the error message.

Relieved, I calmed replied to my son that if the Webkinz world was Linux-based, they may be mounting additional storage devices via the mount -t command, and if the Webkinz world was Windows-based they might be applying service packs.  And, if the virtual Webkinz  world was actually virtualized on VMware, anything could happen.  The universe might collapse on itself.

He stared at me blankly as he reached for his Nintendo DS.

The Wall Street Journal reports that so-called ’small investors’ are being routed to automated call centers instead of being connected to their broker.  The problem is two-fold: brokerage houses have reclassified a lot of long-term investors as ’small’ without telling tell; and they’re treating the shift to call centers as some kind of punishment.  Instead of selling it as a feature, they’re all put telling customers they’re now second class citizens.

This brings-up an interesting issue.  How does one best educate ones client base to see on-demand speech and other IVR systems as a benefit and not a punishment?

Answer: it’s all about the experience.  More on this later…

Over at the always-readable Customer Experience blog, Lou Columbus‘ latest post provides good food for thought, observing that companies aren’t providing their customers with as much information as they once did back in the Good Olde Days ™ when the nation’s economy wasn’t in a free-fall state:

They are locking down knowledge as if it were cash, not sharing nearly as much anymore.

There are two issues here.  First, knowledge is cash, as any patent attorney will freely acknowledge.  If your business model includes charging for expended customer support, one would hope you’d have a way to determine who pays and who doesn’t, yes?

The other problem with the ‘information just wants to be free’  argument is that is costs money to share information.  That customer service rep on the line is typically not there out of some religious conviction: s/he expects to be paid.

On-Demand speech solutions by TuVox help solve both issues by lowering the cost of sharing information while making sure that that the human who wants live customer support is entitled to receive it.  Now that’s smart sharing.

TMC publisher Nadji Tehrani writes in Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine, “In a recessionary economy, experience teaches us that a company can lose as much as 50–60% of its customers.”

Wow.

While the thrust of Tehrani’s piece is on the value of outbound call center activity for lead generation purposes, it makes one reflect on the value of not annoying your customer for business retention purposes. Every unanswered call, every touch-tone tree from Dante’s 9th Circle of Customer Service Hades, every missed opportunity to use an inbound call to not only retain, but upsell, is a tragedy in any economy, much less during a recession.

All the more reason to take a look at one of our On-Demand speech applications.

Businesses ‘got religion’ during the ‘01 downturn and now care about their customers, according to this story by Pam Baker in CRMBuyer.

Missing in this otherwise interesting story on call center best practices is the importance the initial contact between the customer and the call center. The pointy end of the stick, as it were.

Too many companies see implementing a speech solution as an either/or affair. Shutting down a call center completely in favor of a speech solution (even one as good as ours) is almost never a good idea.

Using TuVox to augment a call center, cutting wait times, routing the call properly, and eliminating the need to speak to a call center agent in many cases…well, that’s a great way to add a TuVox speech solution into the call center mix.

Keeping your customers happy (and sticky) while saving money is not a bad way to ride out an economic downturn, yes?

In grim economic times, the last thing a company can afford is to be serving-up poor customer service.  While this may seem like an obviousness to many –when business slows, why risk losing a customer ?– time after time companies cut costs in customer service, only to be shocked, shocked, when people buy elsewhere.

Yet call centers continue to close.  A quick scan of recent headlines shows a mixed bag of closures, relocations, and outsourcing.  And while some of these closures may be the result of shifting business needs (e.g., from catalog to on-line shopping), it’s probably fair to say that many customer service cutbacks are the result of simple shortsightedness.

At the same time, companies have an obligation to turn that penny over twice before spending: in an economic downturn, the customer may be king, but ROI is queen.  

TuVox On-Demand Speech applications offer companies the ability to  increase their ROI through a hosted IVR solution while simultaneously increasing the quality and speed of their customer’s call center experience. Saving money plus increasing service equals an ideal way to survive (and thrive) in a cloudy economy.

Thousands of unemployed Coloradans won’t receive their unemployment checks because they can’t get through to the call center, KWGN in Denver reports. One lady heard nothing but a busy signal for five-plus days.  The sound you hear is me repeatedly wacking my forehead with a telephone receiver as a result of reading this sorry tale of woe.

“We are just swamped with calls, more than we can take”…”many of the calls tying up the phone lines can be answered in the claimant handbook.” 

This is precisely the kind of problem that can be solved by one a TuVox speech solution.  The unemployed have enough problems in this economy without having to deal with this kind of nonsense.

TuVox can help solve Colorado’s problem, and we put our money where our mouth is with our Guaranteed Success Program.  We’d have one of our implementation team members call them, but their line’s busy.

And so it goes…

I just read an interesting article by John I. Todor, Ph.D., on the blog The Perfect Customer Experience.

The entry places some tangible, scientific figures behind what we all intuitively know to be true: whether you provide good or bad customer service, your customers are going to talk about it. Here are a few interesting nuggets:

70% of word of mouth occurs “face-to-face” and only 8% occurs online.

Overwhelmingly, consumers have positive things to say about brands by a margin of more than 6 to 1. This contradicts the common notion people spread negative experiences more than positive.

78% of consumers rank word of mouth as credible at a level of 7 or higher on a 10 point scale.

Why is word-of-mouth marketing powerful?

We trust word of mouth because the person telling us puts the experience in a context that is meaningful to us. Since the peer-to-peer relationship is based on trust, the message is credible. So remember, the next time you’re stuck waiting on hold, or transferred around, or told to call back because the system is down: The Power of Word-of-Mouth.