Shop Talk

Last week I had the opportunity and privilege to attend an CX Excellence Council networking event sponsored by RightNow and hosted at the beautiful Nike campus just outside of Portland, Oregon.   It was a unique opportunity to spend a half a day and evening with nine customer support management peers talking shop.  The size of our respective companies ranged from small, start-up to large, mega-operations.  Some of us in-source, some outsource, some had onshore operations, some offshore and some both.  We talked about everything from the advent of social media as a support channel and how we were addressing it, to what and how we measured Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

At some point during the afternoon I was reminded of an important fact that is too easy to get lost in the day-to-day operations; as customer support professionals we have vital insights into our customers and their experience that few others, if any, in our respective companies have.  It’s our jobs to give our customers and their experiences a voice.  As valuable as analytics and KPI’s are, they don’t create an emotional connection with the customers.  We need to deliver the “voice of the customer” to our senior management, product management and marketing teams.  We need to make it real, tangible and actionable.  Social Media is a great source for this information and so are sample recordings of calls, emails and chat sessions.  It’s not just about how well we resolve a customers issue, which drives customer satisfaction with support, it’s avoiding the experience in the first place that leads to a truly great customer experience and overall customer satisfaction.  There is no better way to make a strong business case than to spice it up with a few real-life examples to bring the point home.