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Companies explore Team Building To improve CusTomer experienCe

ExchangEMarch 2012, Vol. 1, Issue 3

Customer Experience Transforming The CusTomer experienCe wiTh TeChnology

• Backcountry.com employee Ashley Tucker and company founder Jim Holland raft in Hell’s Canyon, on the border of Oregon and Idaho.

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Editor’s lEttEr

T his month, we were treated to some photos from the team at Backcoun-try.com, one of the companies interviewed for Chris Maxcer’s cover story, “Team Building Found to Boost Contact Center Agents’ Performance.”

According to the sporting goods company, team members bond with their fellow employees on outings and also gain confidence in the items their customers are purchasing.

This approach brings to mind several other customer-centric companies that aim to raise the level of the customer experience and increase job satisfaction for employees. For example, everyone knows the funny ads Southwest ran during the past football season with employees acting as referees for customers. It was a bit extreme, but Southwest is often recognized for empowering its customer service representatives to do what they can to improve the customer experience. The Back-country.com example echoes this approach.

Companies can further a customer-friendly image through social media as well as typical advertising. For instance, in “Internal Social CRM Strategies, Personality Seen as Building Brand Awareness,” Vangie Beal discusses why Dell’s six-plus years in social media have helped the company build trust and authority with its custom-ers. With the economy still down, it’s important for companies to build this trust and loyalty. As Anna Fiorentino notes in “Loyalty Plans Win Praise, but Customer Service Must Lead Efforts,” customer loyalty has fallen almost 10% in the past four years.

Have you encountered an agent that offered you an excellent customer experi-ence? Send me an email or reach out on Twitter (@JacquelynHoward) and I may feature you in this space next issue.

Kind regards,

Jacquelyn HowardExecutive Editor

Walk a Mile in Your CusToMer’s shoes … liTerallY

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CovEr story

even though contact center agents spend their days interacting with customers, it’s easy for indi-vidual agents to feel isolated and alone—despite sitting next to dozens or even hundreds of other agents. Can team-building activities in the con-tact center result in happier, more effective

Team Building Found To BoosT ConTaCT CenTer agenTs’ perFormanCeincorporating group team-building activities into contact center agents’ schedules can have numerous benefits, industry watchers say, such as boosting morale and fostering camaraderie. By Chris maxCer

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ties, then it’s unlikely that there will be strong improvement in contact center performance.”

The huddle, it turns out, might be one of the simplest, most effec-tive habits for building a team atmo-

sphere, Temkin said. “I like contact center teams to do periodic huddles, short meetings with the team prior to a shift where they review perfor-mance and customer feedback data and discuss how they can improve as a team,” he explained. “These meetings should also give some kudos to agents who have performed well and let them share how they did it.”

Deb Navarra, a senior analyst for DMG Consulting, has incorporated team-building exercises in contact cen-ters, and she believes such activities can make a difference in agent morale as well as foster a sense of collegial-ity among contact center agents. At its base, she said it’s important to find ways to highlight and recognize in-

agents and better customer experi-ences? If so, are contact centers in-terested and willing to rise to the challenge?

“The answers,” said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, “are multi-tiered. Are managers interested? Yes. Are they willing to spend money on it? Not so much. But should they? Yes.”

“Team building is essential, particu-larly if you have at-home staff because those people need to feel as if they are part of the organization,” she said. “There’s always a balance that you have to make in investing in your staff and keeping your costs down.”

The costs, Fluss explained, aren’t so much about money as they are about taking an agent off the phone. “If you’re a small shop with 50 agents and you take five off the phone, it affects how you can handle the calls. If you have 1,000 agents and you take five off, that’s not as much of a difference,” she said, adding, “The best run call centers will have a weekly team meeting.”

According to Bruce Temkin, man-aging partner of Temkin Group, team building is not usually the goal for highly effective contact center agents, but it can lead to positive outcomes.

“Our research shows that employ-ees are more engaged when they un-derstand the company’s mission, have the skills and training they need to succeed and are asked to give feed-back that the company responds to,” he said. “If, however, team building is an empty set of off-sites and par-

“Team building is essential, particularly if you have at-home staff because those people need to feel as if they are part of the organization.” donna Fluss, presidenT oF dmg ConsulTing

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dividuals who feel lost—that nobody knows who they are or what they do. Here are three of Navarra’s tips:

1. Create contests. For one large fi-nancial institution that was running a balance transfer campaign, Navarra

said she would tie a team contest to the campaign for the team that could deliver the most balance transfers, but then go a step farther to foster the hu-man angle. “We would also create a theme,” she said, “such as which team can decorate their area in the best

A Question of Contact Center Metricsfor backcountry.com, an outdoor gear retailer that also runs several one-deal-at-a-time (ODAT) channel sites tuned to sports enthusiasts, team building in the contact center is critical to the company’s customer experience success. Sam Bruni, general man-ager of closeout and ODAT, as well as acting director of customer technologies, shined some light on team building at Backcountry.com. Bruni believes that team-building efforts can help contact center agents better connect with customers and serve the business at the same time—especially in the industries that Backcountry.com serves—action sports, outdoor, and bicycling.

Do you have any cool team-building efforts at Backcountry.com and the ODAT contact centers? The Backcountry.com call center supports all our Web stores and industries. We are extremely lucky in that we can align employees with their passions, both outside of work and while they are at work. We hire people who are passionate about the indus-tries we are in and have a love for the gear and lifestyle. I don’t necessarily look at it as team building as much as I look at it as culture building. I want a culture that works together and plays together. We actually do an amazing job at connecting people at work who have the same passions outside of work.

Each week we try to have one or two clinics with a vendor to learn more about their products. Most of the time these clinics are in-house, but several of them are out-doors—such as for kayaking and skiing clinics, where we can all come together. The “gearheads,” as we call them—not CSRs [customer service representatives] or reps—spend time learning with each other about the latest and greatest gear. Not every-one can attend, so they take notes and write quizzes for each other to help those who could not attend get the same education.

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summer theme.”

2. Use agent mentors. Navarra said another way to build team spirit is get agents to talk about which parts of the job are giving them trouble. If some-one is struggling with average handle

time, have a mentor on the team who excels at that help,” Navarra said. “You can tie an incentive to it so that if the agent improves the average handle times, both of them get some incen-tive. It doesn’t have to be monetary; it could be the best parking spot.”

We also have a huge adventure contest that the entire company participates in where we encourage our employees to get outside and use the gear we sell, and a lot of them will do activities together such as biking or skateboarding. They earn points for doing so and then when it ends, they are entered into a drawing and can win cool prizes like heliskiing and new gear.

How can effective team-building efforts enhance the customer’s experience?It comes down to knowledge—knowing your customer needs and being able to an-swer difficult gear questions is what is gained from all of the activities. Agents also

know their neighbors, which helps them answer questions that they might not be able to alone.

I’m not a believer in transferring calls. We have a workforce of more than 300 employees with more than 100 of them working from home. They are all connected through in-ternal chat, and they create teams and groups in this chat so that they can support each other with cus-tomer questions.

How about the agents themselves? Does team building in the contact center result in happier, more effective agents?I think the proof is in the pudding. We have a low turnover rate for a call center. We actually did a survey of the entire company a year or so ago. Surprisingly, out of all the employees in our organization, our gearheads were the happiest. That is not a com-mon result with this type of surveying. n

• Backcountry.com employees Jason Whitehouse, Jeff Petway, Ashley Tucket and Scotty Ray on a team- building exercise in Little Wild Horse Canyon in Utah.

photograph: re WIkstroM

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Of course, the team element comes in through the peer mentoring. If you use expert agents for the entire con-tact center, you might improve average handle time, but you might not foster any sense of team, she noted.

3. Connect the contact center to the business. In some contact centers, it’s possible to take team members out on field trips to see how other parts of the business operate. “When I was a man-ager, we used to take agents on field trips [to other departments] … so they were knowledgeable when custom-ers wanted to know what was happen-ing with their payments,” she said. “As a manager, you can foster the sense that your agents are part of the busi-ness rather than just the contact cen-ter itself.”

Of course, the logistics can be daunting for contact centers that have multiple lines of business to serve. In these cases, technology can come to the rescue. “I have seen centers de-ploy gaming-style systems to help drive individual and team behavior,”

said Richard Snow, global vice presi-dent and research director of customer and contact centers for Ventana Re-search. While these systems can help, Snow warned that contact centers

must make sure the goals for using the system match up with desired behav-ior. For example, he noted, “If you set goals for average handle time, most agents will try to achieve it even at the expense of customer experience.” n

Chris Maxcer is a freelance business and consumer technology writer.

“if you set goals for average handle time, most agents will try to achieve it even at the expense of customer experience.” riChard snow, gloBal viCe presidenT aT venTana researCh

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ContaCt CEntEr

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social crm is not about managing the customer through the data you have collected about them; it’s knowing how to leverage social media as a tool—internally and externally—to develop customer relationships through real conversations and relationship building on the social Web, industry observers say.

inTernal soCial Crm sTraTegies, personaliTy seen as Building Brand awarenesssocial Crm is still about business strategy and customer satisfaction, but the social part brings a whole new element to traditional Crm. By vangie Beal

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Like Dell, Logicalis, an international technology and managed services provider with more than 30 offices in North America, also uses a core, in-ternal team to handle its social me-dia accounts and they, too, encourage employees to join the conversations online.

“We send our team information on our Hype or Ripe blog posts each week, so they can tweet the posts from their personal accounts,” said Lisa Dre-her, vice president of marketing for Logicalis. “We also share updates about our press releases to make it easy for employees to post on their personal networks if they want to do that.”

Logicalis uses a number of social platforms, but one key social strategy is to combine targeted LinkedIn ads with marketing campaigns. Logicalis typically targets chief information of-ficers, chief technology officers and CEOs from approximately 2,000 com-panies with LinkedIn advertisements. Those programs are tied to the com-pany’s blogs to further drive customer interactions.

“The most important thing is that we don’t allow our social CRM strate-gies to stand alone. Every aspect is tied into our overall marketing and public relations plan,” Dreher said.

For Dell, the strategy is to use the social Web as a tool across the fabric of the company as part of the complete customer lifecycle, from brand aware-ness and consideration through the purchase path to customer loyalty and back around to the repeat customer.

EffECtivE soCial CrM stratEgiEs start intErnallyTo use social CRM to build brand awareness, organizations must first strategize the process inside the orga-nization. What happens externally in social depends on the strategies de-ployed from within.

Dell is one company with strong roots in social media tools and social CRM. It first established a social pres-ence in 2006, when the company pro-actively reached out to a few thousand customers posting comments daily about Dell in blogs and online forums. People commented on everything from its corporate reputation to things they didn’t like on Dell.com.

Today Dell has a large social pres-ence backing its brand. According to Richard Binhammer, the company’s director of social media and commu-nity, people now contribute more than 25,000 comments about Dell every day. These social conversations help Dell build brand awareness, trust and authority with consumers.

Building brand awareness with tar-get customers starts with building that brand loyalty in the organization, ac-cording to Binhammer. Dell’s social strategy starts inside, where a small core team is responsible for training, governance and social platform test-ing, he said. This group provides the social tool kit to more than 3,500 Dell-certified social media and community professionals, who engage with cus-tomers and keep the Dell name flow-ing in social spaces.

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stay within your brand’s persona.He cites the “Angry Whopper” as

one of his favorite examples of so-cial branding that worked well. When Burger King launched its Angry Whop-per in the U.S. in 2009, Facebook fans could receive a free product coupon by mail—but only if they downloaded the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook app and “dumped” 10 of their Facebook friends first. The tone of the promotion—abandoning friends—fit the “angry” approach Burger King was encourag-ing. Although the stunt didn’t make Facebook very happy, as it shut much of the application’s functionality down, it got people taking about the brand and sharing it with friends on the so-cial networking site.

Rampulla, who has recently com-pleted Web and app design projects for a number of big brands, including the Chicago Bulls and Effen Vodka, also recommends that brands not be shy about using unique strategies to get people talking about it in social spaces.

“If something isn’t working as well as you had hoped and resonating with your social customers, there’s no rule preventing you from switching gears and changing the strategy until it does work well for you and your brand,” Rampulla said. n

Vangie Beal has spent the last decade contribut-ing featured articles and reviews to more than 20 technology-focused publications, including SmallBusinessComputing, SearchCRM, EnterpriseAppsToday and Ecommerce-Guide.

Boost Brand awarEnEss with PErsonalityAfter the social CRM plan is estab-lished within the organization, many external opportunities become avail-able for organizations to boost brand awareness with customers. These in-clude MVP programs, trusted advo-cates and the big trend today of us-ing social media platforms as strategic tools to strengthen brand awareness.

Michael Stricker, a social media strategist at WebiMax, an Internet marketing company, suggests that so-cial brand awareness works best when an organization attaches an emotion to the conversation. For this reason, it’s important for a brand to have a social “personality” that consumers will iden-tify with.

“What is a brand but emotion any-way? You don’t own your brand—it ex-ists in the minds and hearts of the peo-ple you are trying to address,” Stricker said. “They carry this idea of who you are and what it’s like to deal with you.”

Businesses do a great deal on so-cial media platforms, most notably on Facebook, where creating custom pages offering unique branded appli-cations and coupon promotions run rampant. As a brand, organizations should give customers something to talk about, but Phil Rampulla, founder of the Material Group, a design and development studio, recommends that the best brand strategy for engaging customers in social media tools is to

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loyalTy plans win praise, BuT CusTomer serviCe musT lead eFForTswith many companies turning to loyalty programs to lure new customers and retain existing ones, experts note that the best programs are built on a solid customer service foundation. By anna FiorenTino

to ensure they thrive in a struggling market, companies everywhere are experimenting with a whirlwind of loyalty programs that allow them to track and gather feedback from existing and new customers. As these companies figure out what works best, observers such as Matthew Key-lock—recognized as an industry leader in building winning customer strategies—weigh in on the debate.

When it’s time to grow a business, Keylock, senior vice president of new business development and partnerships at dunnhumbyUSA, suggests a

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CustoMEr loyalty

hance their customer base through a series of rewards and incentives pro-grams where they are most likely to see them—on the Internet. The key is knowing which programs are most likely to attract loyal customers.

These marketing strategies range from search engine optimization (SEO) to pay-per-click advertising and newsletters. They include social media and social customer service manage-ment, mobile and even website regis-tration. Furthermore, online metrics now present companies with imme-diate results, showing how well these customer loyalty programs are work-ing, and that’s based on feedback and then number of visits to their sites.

“Since consumers are increasingly active in the social and mobile chan-nels, most companies I talk to have developed or are increasing their on-line presence,” said Emily Murphy, a customer intelligence researcher with

word-of-mouth campaign through those loyal customers. “I generally grow my circle of friends through my existing ones, and in most cases this should be the same in business, but many companies and brands spend their time and effort chasing new cus-tomers,” he said.

CustoMEr loyalty fallingAccording to The Effects of the Reces-sion on Brand Loyalty and ‘Buy Down’ Behavior: 2011 Update by comScore, 54% of consumers said they bought the brand they wanted most in 2008. By 2010, that number dropped to 45% and further to 43% by 2011.

The comScore study, which illus-trates the impact of the economic climate, found consumers are buy-ing what’s on sale rather than staying loyal to a particular brand. This has opened the doors for businesses to en-

Source: comScore

FigUre 1: percentage of respondents choosing “I buy the brand I want most”

2008 2009 2010 2011

54%50%

45% 43%

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zation,” Murphy said. “Implicit loyalty strategies are made up of any data-driven initiative aimed at increasing retention and improving customer sat-isfaction, for example, customer expe-rience management. These strategies often work together.” Online account management and enrollment is vital for loyalty programs to work to the best of their ability, since enrolling at the point of service takes time and can turn away customers, she said.

Denis Pombriant, a CRM analyst firm Beagle Research Group, said com-panies shouldn’t be asking what loyalty programs work best but instead how to shape the attitude of the customers you’re targeting. This is something that is rarely explored beyond the realm of repeated sales.

“The value of loyalty is derived from things that are at best tangential to the purchase. For example, knowing cus-tomer support makes sense for your product is far more instrumental to loyalty and to promoting it than simply by looking at sales figures,” Pombriant said.

assEssing CustoMEr loyaltyCompanies can assess customer atti-tudes toward a business by using soft-ware programs such as Get Satisfac-tion and Radian6. Get Satisfaction is primarily a service and support modal-ity that helps keep customers in the fold so that they eventually buy again, whereas Radian6 lets vendors gauge customer sentiment.

Forrester Research. “Marketers under-stand that consumers have increasing expectations for how and when com-panies will interact with them, and turn to the digital channels to fulfill that.”

CustoMEr sErviCE still CoMEs firstWhatever program a company chooses, most industry watchers say the best way to generate loyal customers is through good customer service first and good loyalty programs second.

“The loyalty programs that work best are those in which a business re-ally seeks to be loyal to its customers, drives this philosophy at a strategic level and implements it everywhere across the business—not just via a marketing tool,” Keylock said.

You don’t want to lose sight of your best customers—you may need to ac-quire more than 15 new customers to replace one loyal customer, he added.

But according to Murphy, the real-ity is more companies are using their loyalty programs as a strategy for ac-quiring new customers or members, not just a retention strategy for exist-ing customers. Murphy breaks loyalty strategies into two categories that of-ten work together: Explicit loyalty and implicit loyalty.

“Explicit loyalty is what we consider loyalty programs—enrollment pro-grams with a structured give and get that often have their own P&L [profit and loss statement] within the organi-

CustoMEr loyalty

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nal-facing tiers to make it easy for members to understand benefits and provide them with aspirational mo-tivation,” Murphy said. “A customer that can see the distance to achieving the next level of benefits will be more likely to want to close the gap.”

Murphy also noted that compa-nies are now integrating rewards and incentives with online social market-ing programs. “They will incentivize tweets, product reviews and Facebook ‘likes’ to start a conversation with their members and engage with them in a new way,” she said.

Loyalty programs can also retain members with something called gami-fication, which doles out rewards that focus on experiences, such as tickets to a concert and improved service, such as a direct line to the call center.

With so many competing programs in the marketplace, this can lead to forcing that customer to choose be-tween transactional loyalty, based on a single transaction, and long-term brand loyalty, which is based on an emotional response.

“It’s all about interacting with con-sumers when it’s convenient for them,” Murphy said. And not just through pay-per-click ads.

“How does bombarding customers with ads engender loyalty?” Pombriant asked. “If anything it frustrates people who want an uncluttered experience.”

Pombriant warns that companies should tread carefully when it comes to customer loyalty gimmicks. He agreed that the best way to generate

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“By tracking customer sentiment, companies can get far more revealing information than simple survey scores such as net promoter scores because sentiment precedes a loyalty decision,” Pombriant said.

Whatever approach to retaining new or old customers a company takes, in today’s net-centric world there is no reason every loyalty program shouldn’t be using analytics. Those metrics iden-tify customers who have asked to be identified just by signing up.

“Program members are often more willing to give up identifying and per-sonal information. So when loyalty programs target too broadly and don’t take advantage of that opportunity to engage these members, they’re doing themselves a disservice,” Murphy said.

“The customer intelligence func-tion and loyalty programs make great bedfellows because applying analyt-ics makes loyalty program segmenta-tion, targeting and offer management smarter, while loyalty programs gener-ate a lot of attributable data that feeds back into the customer intelligence function,” she said.

Path to suCCEssful loyalty PrograMsSuccessful loyalty programs are often multi-tiered to provide rewards with a high perceived value and target incre-mental behaviors. For most compa-nies, these rewards come in the form of discounts.

“Many loyalty programs use exter-

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the truest customer loyalty is through good customer service. Any vendor can offer a product at a price and sweeten the deal with a discount if a customer convinces a friend to join. Sure, that deal size may be multiplied through word of mouth. But it’s a model that could backfire without good customer service.

“The company may not have earned that display of pseudo-loyalty, and if the product or service is not up to snuff, the customer could suffer signif-icant blow back,” Pombriant said. “Ul-timately, the vendor could have many people angry rather than just one.”

At the end of the day, companies should connect across all online and office channels to ensure the cus-tomer’s experience with the loyalty program is consistent and keeps up with the many new online channels available.

“Creating different mechanics and solutions is more likely to fragment the customer experience and can erode loyalty,” Keylock added. He noted that companies can often use customer loy-alty offers to reach out to new custom-ers, but only when done correctly.

“Sophisticated customer insights and the ability to act on them with cus-tomer-specific offers and benefits that use the right channels and surprise and delight new customers do work very well.” n Anna Fiorentino is a journalist based in Ports-mouth, N.H. She has reported over the years for newspapers around New England, including The Boston Globe and The Portland Press Herald.

Customer Experience Exchange is a SearchCRM e-publication.

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