Category Archives: customer care

customer care and related software rants

Dec 5

how high security leads to business loss?

 

this is back in 2008 – 2009, i started a account with religare trading account, i am not sure how they are performing now, below blog post is about my experience with them in above specified period.

they have this highly secured access method, if i remember correctly, to login i need to provide two passwords along with very ‘unique’ username, and i have to reset my password every two weeks, and whenever you change password you cannot reuse the same password used in any of that two passwords for last 3 times, also password should contain at least special character, caps alphabet and small letter and a number, i am not a creative person for passwords, and with this much restrictions, i nearly have to act like a password generator myself. With all these pain, i end up writing down my passwords. One fine day i gave the service once for all. I still get emails from religare once in a while to checkout all new improvised platform, i never feel confident with them…

It is good to impose tight security, but in the name of security dont impose something unrealistic, for a user your website is just another service he uses, his life is not dedicated for your service.

i wish these password mechanisms are simple for end users.

Jun 14

installing IVR for companies – aka my company committing suicide

Hi all this is a follow-up post written at ivrsworld.com in support of IVR, there is a famous sayins in tamil ‘too much anything is bad’, keeping that in mind let us proceed discussing the good and bad of ivr solutions for business and the end users.

Why does a business exist?
Business exist because it has a customer to serve.

Why do business support customers?
To keep the customers they need to support the customers, for whatever business they don’t with the company.

Why ivr?
To keep providing and doing mundane and repitative tasks.

How ivr is actually used, especially by mobile phone operators?
To put customer on loops, that they avoid interacting with the agents at any cause. Which will result in not just unhappy customers but a angry customer, even if the customer called for a trivial information and put to deal with the ivr which is poorly developed will result in a angry customers.

IVR should come in as a last option, if business really want to retain the customers, and the ivr they use should be very detailed and optimized enough, if possible expose the ivr flow maps through the company websites, ivr can be triggered during off peak hours say night hours where agents are not available to take calls and customers won’t be calling much, also when there is too much calls in queue etc, that is the ivr should be blunt enough to provide information like there is already plenty of call, expected wait time is so and so, they can either decide to wait in queue of drop the call and request for a call back.

When ivr is implemented, business should be clear about – why a customer would call them, and categorize it.

1. New customer
2. Existing customers

For existing customers:
1. Is it regarding a problem
2. Is it regarding some information
3. Leaving feedback

Depending on the business interest, ivr should be designed around above said category, and how much time customer should be allowed to deal the ivr machine, eg: if the call is regarding information that can be provided through ivr to customer. If the call is regarding problem customer shouldn’t be put to deal ivr for longer duration it will only annoy and end up angry customer.

As a conclusion, ivr should be used very sparingly only to do mundane and repitative information providing work, no customer would like to deal with a machine for their problems, i am yet to come across a single customer who says ‘ boy i wish this information is provided by a ivr machine’.

Dec 14

social media and customer care

it is hard to see any advertisements these days that doesn’t carry facebook or twitter symbol in it, starting from microsoft to a tech blogs, almost every business unit have their own facebook page, where they get to “like” by their existing customers and future customers, similarly with twitter, they get to follow/followed by customers and future customers and they keep track of brand related topicc. what is really happening here?

 

Mahindra and Mahindra’s Chairman Anand Mahindra is very active in twitter, i am fortunate enough to follow his tweets from the early days he has started tweeting, he interacts with his customers regularly, he educates what his company is upto to the public as well as for his team, he such admiring twitter from india, and someone who uses this medium perfectly, for eg: there was one customer had problem with his new mahindra xylo, after fighting with all possible service centers he tweeted his frustration, Mr.Anand Mahindra retweeted it and asked his next level manager to take a look at it(i think they are following his tweets regularly as well), after sometime i saw a article in magazine similar to “new way of customer care is born” where this customer happen to be Brit journalist living in delhi and pretty impressed with speed of the service carried over after Mr.Anand Mahindra intervened. this is not the one, there are several other stories like this with Mahindra alone, and there are many companies and corporate leaders doing similar job.

 

so thats one medium where customer real voice/frustration is heard and taken care of, thats the tone with twitter, and facebook on other hand, it works like a forum where we can gather all customers and future customers together, you might have seen “like” pages for many brands if you are using facebook.

 

so how useful it is for brands? this one works differently from twitter, i am following ford figo in facebook, ford figo has presence in twitter as well as in facebook, but i pretty much like their facebook page better, they are regularly updating their facebook page with offers, tips, information about the car, which is certainly useful for the owners, and the offers you are always willing to share with your friends if you are already recommending the product, i happen to face some glitches in the car, i wrote about the problem to their page, guess what??? within 15 minutes 25+ comments… including from ford figo page itself, customers recommended direct phone numbers etc.. the problem is solved. now thats innovative customer care.

 

how these two things can reshape our customer care industry?

  • there should be a app for twitter that integrate with supervisor/agent screen pop, which will keep searching for the specific keywords that is relevant to our product. there will be some customer tweeting about the problem in the product, also praising our product, whenever a tweet is found that require support we can reply to customer and be some help, this way we reach customer when they have problem, than they try to reach us.
  • there should be a app for facebook that will connect with agent screenpop, where customers request for help, our agents can reply to them promptly. apart from agent replying, our existing customers do take care of them as well.
  • using facebook fbml we can design calendars, chats, pages and apps for our products.

 

Dec 10

outbound contact centers – answering machine detection

do you have answering machine enabled on your phone? especially cell phone? i do have, both at my cell phone as well as my home phone, not the kind of answering machine provided by service provider, but the application, that will answer the call after certain seconds of ringing then it will read out the message i have recorded and then starts recording the message you might leave for me. then i can listen to the message and decide who called and why they have called, depending on that i can decide to call again or ignore or other options, sounds very simple rite? no rocket science.

 

but many among us, don’t have the habit of leaving the message at the answering machine, they will simply hung up, this is major annoyance, especially if the call is from new number(number you never saved) and you dont know what they have called about, it is even more annoying you are expecting some important call. there are many other annoyance and benefits with answering machine, let us restrict our views with the answering machine encounter at the outbound contact centers – dialers.

 

with respect to dialers, we have two known behaviors when we get answering machine as the outcome.

  1. dialer drops the call when answer machine is detected
  2. without positive voice detection we still dial and patch with the agent.

 

first is very much counter productive in my opinion, why.

  • assume customer is very much interested to buy what you are selling, unfortunately he did not answer and answering machine answered the call, if you just hung up you never conveyed the message to the customer at all, and he never will call back, if you leave the proper message with the contact details and product information, there is very good chance customer will call back
  • another condition is your message will be saved in customers answering machine, he will be calling you back when he really need to buy your product.
  • customer at least want to know who has just called, that is the basic etiquette rite?

second is counter productive too, why?

 

  • first of all agent time is wasted on a customer who is not available right now
  • it is completely upto agent if he leaves the message or not

what we can do about it?

 

the auto detection of answering machine should still happen, instead of dropping the call, we should be able to record the message to the customers answering machine, with the pre-recorded message by the agent himself.

 

benefit?

  • agents time is saved
  • customer is notified
  • the money spent on the call is fully utilized

i am not sure if this feature is available in any of the dialers currently, if you know any please let me know.

Nov 28

voice drop – outbound dialer campaigns

 

nobody would love the random call at the random time, esp., when you answer the call is a over excited machine voice, “hey… the offer ends today, go to nearest store today” i remember such annoy call reach my cell when i am at my close family funeral, there is nothing wrong with those IVR campaigns, the company has uploaded the contact numbers and asked the dialer to dial those numbers and “burst-out” the message to the customer, no matter if the customer willing to listen now or not.

 

since we have someone as our customer we cannot take their time, contact details for granted, many times these ivr campaigns are counter productive, i wont really feel cared when i receive those ivr calls, many times i have gone against the brand and said negative comments about the brand at least for next 5 minutes since the call arrived.

ivr campaign should be used very carefully, it would become annoying and counter productive when not used properly. in my opinion ivr campaigns should be very short, and in neutral tone not too excited or not too boring, preferably reminder kind of messages.

 

i will explore the ivr campaign applications by industry in detail in coming days to come, for now. ivr campaigns are used effectively by credit cards and banks for payment reminders, long ago i even received a call from a car service center to remind me about the due date for my car service etc.

Nov 28

interacting with IVR system – be sharp and specific

Let us accept the fact, no one love to interact with machine, especially

  • the machine voice is annoyingly with flat tone
  • the machine is not recognizing the voice utterances or key in tones(more on this later)
  • longer we keep the customer to interact with the machine
  • annoying background music

but we are in demand of human resources, businesses have much bigger and innovative problems to engage their employees in to solve, business prefer some common tasks are taken by automated systems like

 

  • tracking systems – feed in your tracking numbers and get the status, eg: your current order status is…
  • confirmation system – eg: call from dentist office, you have appointment on so and so date, please press 1 to confirm etc.
  • food order
  • cargo, laundry, car services pick-up and drop service

these common tasks can be taken care by ivr system, the motto has to be “sharp and specific” just to the point, say for example customer want to order pizza,

 

customer call pizza number,

 

ivr answers,

 

detects your details – this can be achieved by comparing your telephone numbers or keyed in customer id

 

asks do you like to order pizza or leave feedback?

 

customer try to order pizza

 

ivr detects his past orders, reads out last and most ordered pizzas

 

customer select a pizza or order new one from the list

 

ivr asks, do you want me to deliver to the same address we delivered earlier

 

customer confirms

 

ivr reads out order number

 

business is completed

 

sadly some ivr are not really to the point, its like “show off” – having ivr is not a luxury to show off – its like “see we have these many advance stuff with us”, where we dont solve the business purpose at all.

 


Nov 15

how many contact centers updates their “homepage” like most websites do?

when it comes to websites, they analyze the visitors, they understand the visitor patterns, e.g.: their geographies, the internet speed they have, the browser the use, the time spent on the website, where they click, what they click, etc after analyzing these details websites change/update their websites from time to time, but we hardly find such thing happening with contact center applications, i am not sure if there are any third party tools available to do this job, most reports available for the system are available from the software developers it self, many times they don’t give useful information but the plain numbers.

 

contact centers should analyze these details like the websites do and revamp their contact center application flow properly. there should be some third party tools that works with almost all contact center application to monitor their contact center application e.g.: how many calls handled, what prompt listened longer, repeated, abandoned, etc, callers time zone, callers tone(very important) etc. i think this is hot cake area to develop some software that solves this purpose. based on these user feedback contact centers should update their “homepage” for better customer experience.