SPECIAL EDITION: CUSTOMER CARE SUMMIT 2019 ustmer

SOCAP International 625 N. Washington Street, Suite 304 Alexandria, VA 22314

PLUS…

ustomerR E L AT I O N S H I P M A N A G E M E N TAdvancing Customer Care and Engagement Spring 2019c

Transforming the Contact Center

Getting a Seat at the Product Table

Fighting Coupon Fraud

Maximixing Rewards and

Mitigating Risks

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SPECIAL EDITION: CUSTOMER CARE SUMMIT 2019

Activating Data to Build Trust and Customer LoyaltyScott Klososky, Entrepreneur & Strategist

Your Business is Unique, Why Measure Customer Engagement Like Everyone Else?Lisa Oswald, Senior VP Customer Service, Travelzoo; Martha Brooke, Chief Customer Experience Analyst and Founder, Interaction Metrics; Michael Callahan, Head of Customer Experience, Bulletproof 360

Intelligence, Innovation, Inclusion: In the Age of Disruption, It’s Never Too LateRoger Lee, Customer Success Leader, Gridspace

Meeting Fans Where They Are: Customer Support in Real Time with ESPNDoug Kramon, Senior Director of Customer Operations and Fan Support, ESPN; Josh Rochlin, CEO, Teckst

Just Because It's Short Doesn't Mean It's Easy: How to Write Excellent Social Media Responses to CustomersLeslie O’Flahavan, E-Write

Contact Center Coaching: You Talk the Talk, Now Master Walking the WalkLisa Diehl, Consumer Advocacy Manager, Blue Dia-mond Growers; Sally Cordova, Partner, Author, and Lead Trainer, McKee Consulting

Consumer Personalization and the Impact on Customer CareScott Klososky, Entrepreneur & Strategist

Voice of Customer Reporting: Strategies for your Customers to be Heard through the OrganizationSalena Scardina, Senior Vice President of Customer Ex-perience, Sweetwater Sound

Five Email Bad Habits That Make People Dislike You Leslie O’Flahavan, E-Write

Social Media Monitoring and Community ManagementStephanie Seber, Social Media Specialist, The Hershey Company; Maria Burn, Consumer Relations Digital Analyst, PepsiCo

http://www.socap.org/knowledge-resources/learning-portal/webinar-series

Top 10 SOCAP WebinarsSOCAP International members benefit from free monthly webinars covering every aspect of customer care and customer experience. Join in the live events to participate or take advantage of the archived sessions at a time, place, and on a device of your convenience.

Spring 2019 • Customer Relationship Management • 1

4 Transforming the Contact Center into a Customer Experience HubBy Mark BishofThe contact center is the fundamental source of cus-tomer insight that can inform organizational strategy.

8 How Customer Care Can Get a Seat at the Product TableBy Chris MartinezCurated data and the context to make it actionable are the currency that customer care professionals use to inform product decisions.

12 Mitigating Risk in High Value CouponsBy Bud MillerVigilance against fraud can create an immediate financial impact and prove key to realizing the value of high value coupons.

15 Review: Strategic Customer ServiceBy Mike MoranA new edition of Goodman's comprehensive work on customer service reveals new strategies and updates tactics with a wealth of source data.

16 Is Your Email Scorecard Making Agents Writing Worse?By Leslie O'FlahavanCommon ways ineffective scoring can de-motivate your agents instead of improving performance.

20 Leveraging Data-based Intelligence to Increase Employee EngagementBy John RubyOrganizational intelligence is the key to maximizing employee productivity and retention.

columns features

2 Editor’s Letter

3 TrendingNews and trends for customer care professionals.

24 MarketplacePeople, products, and technology on the move.

SPRING 2019 • vol. 24 • no. 1ontentsc

2 • Customer Relationship Management • Spring 2019

SOCAPPresident & CEO Marjorie C. Bynum, CAE

Senior Director ofContent & Learning Mike Moran

SOCAP Education CommitteeChair Michael Boudreau, Lilly USA, LLC

Vice Chair Linda Grover, McCormick & Company, Inc. Board Advisors Lisa Oswald Travelzoo Carlos Suarez, Nestle

Design and Production www.touch3.comProduction and Distribution Documation

Founded in 1973, SOCAP International represents a thriving global profession of best-in-class customer care experts across all industries. SOCAP is a member-driven organization committed to promoting customer care and customer engagement as a competitive advantage in business. The Association’s members include vice presidents, directors, managers and super-visors of customer care and consumer affairs from top Fortune/Forbes 1000 companies as well as hundreds of business partner organizations. SOCAP provides the educational tools and professional resources to help its members drive business transformation within their companies. Additionally, SOCAP’s exclusive network gives members access to thousands of customer care experts across the globe. Visit www.socap.org for more information on SOCAP International.

Statements of fact and opinion are made on the responsibility of the authors alone and do not imply an opinion on the part of the officers or the members of SOCAP International. The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the official positions of employers. Materials may not be reproduced with-out written permission.

COPYRIGHT© 2019 by SOCAP International625 N. Washington St., Suite 304Alexandria, VA 22314(703) 519-3700FAX (703) 549-4886Email: [email protected]: www.socap.org

ustomerR E L AT I O N S H I P M A N A G E M E N Tc

There is a great deal of excitement at SOCAP in 2019 with new programs, new directions, and new

staff—myself among them. As the new Senior Director of

Content and Learning at SOCAP International I have had the rare privilege of a brief interlude in which I have been doing more reading and learning than writing and

teaching. Much of this learning has come in the form of conversations with volunteer leaders, session presenters, the education committee and members such as yourself.

I have struggled to preserve a “beginner’s mind”—resisting the urge to draw parallels with past experiences or apply ready frameworks drawn from my years in association management. While listening carefully, I have resisted accepting at face value the descriptions many have offered as to what SOCAP is and what it isn’t, what the biggest challenges and most likely solutions are. While these observations vary and sometimes conflict, they reflect unique insights and experiences and have, without fail, been offered with honesty and genuine generosity.

I would like to share a view of our organization through the framework of the rhetoric of leadership. Aristotle first advanced the theory of rhetoric with three elements he described as ethos, pathos, and logos; loosely translated as ethics, emotion, and logic. In relating to the individuals and

groups in our world, we try both to understand and influence the world around us by balancing these three elements.

The elements of rhetoric are also a useful construct in understanding and practicing leadership. The people we lead and the cultures we foster reflect that balance of elements. The security association I just came from was ethics driven. The statisticians and the insurance agents before them appealed strongly to logic.

The rhetorical chord that resonates through SOCAP is an ethos of passion—passion for the work, for the people, and for the organization. This is a business discipline that concerns itself with relationship and connection; with the reading, understanding, and delight of people. Whether it draws passionate people to it or inspires this passion in them, it is clearly what fires the spirit of this community.

I look forward to serving you and exploring the emerging role of customer experience in enterprise strategy. CRM

Mike MoranSenior Director of Content & Learning

editor's letter

SOCAP and The Rhetoric of Leadership

TRENDINGNews & Trends for Customer Care Professionals


By Mark Bishof, CEO, Clarabridge

Transforming the Contact Center into a Customer Experience Hub

Businesses house an enormous wealth of customer insights in the contact center. This information is no longer only accessible through phone call transcripts. Social media and asynchronous

messaging have introduced a wide variety of support channels customers can turn to in addition to the phone. This evolution has resulted in a stream of customer feedback that pours into the contact center across a variety of channels. In a highly competitive environment, companies are challenged to organize these insights in ways that makes sense, and act on them effectively. With the voice of the customer at your fingertips, however, there is a massive opportunity to transform the contact center into a revitalized hub of customer insights that can add value throughout the entire organization.

The customer journey is a linear progression that ideally results in the customer making a purchase. Too often organizations are blind to common pain points along the way. What if you could hear the customer’s voice at each step of the journey to understand what they’re saying about the process of doing business with your company? What decisions would you make differently if you had this informed view?

Transforming the contact center into a clearing


Leverage the potential of the call center to create a responsive enterprise

The contact center is uniquely postiioned to collect and distill the voice of the customer .

• Use technologies such as natural language processing to turn the painstaking process of manually sifting call center data into a ready understanding of both customers and agent performance

• Transform data into visualizations more intuitively and identify trends in key metrics.

• Share insights across the enterprise to increase the effectiveness of the enterprise and the shared value of the data.


house of customer feedback empowers businesses to make informed decisions that boost customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase loyalty. Implementing processes to operationalize these contact center insights will help your business make money, save money, manage change and reduce liability over time.

A Forward-Looking ApproachTechnology has improved significantly over the last

decade, yet the way most businesses utilize the treasure trove of insights that pass through the contact center has largely remained the same. Many organizations still analyze call center data manually, with small QA or QM teams sifting through call transcripts to identify trends in customer feedback. This is a labor-intensive and inefficient process that by definition prevents companies from achieving a full view of the insights customers provide.

Adjustments in approach will turn this painstaking process into a source of tremendous opportunity for the business.

New technology like machine learning and AI can automate this once manual process. Instead of relying on human documentation, natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be used to accurately transcribe

and analyze 100 percent of calls to identify elements such as customer sentiment, emotion, effort, call duration and agent performance. The same processes can be applied to all communication channels that funnel through the contact centerincluding email, social and messaging to develop a holistic understanding of the customers’ voice.

This in itself is transformative. Organizations can now apply advanced technology to sift through massive amounts of data and develop a crisp understanding of customer sentiment and common pain points across all areas of the business. In addition, it opens up the teams previously doing these manual tasks to focus on more value-added work.

Visualizing these customer insights in aggregate is also extremely powerful. Visualizations of call spines that show trend lines across agents, customer sentiment, call duration and other key metrics provide a roadmap to improving performance and reducing costs across the organization. Showing these types of visualizations to the COO is like showing fire to a caveman.

Not only do these approaches modernize an antiquated, less precise and inefficient process, they also create a wealth of new opportunities for your business to improve the bottom line. For example, health

Today, customer information is often siloed within the team of employees managing customer care or marketing, instead of being distributed to relevant teams including product, supply chain, and operations.


insurance and financial services companies face a host of privacy and consumer protection laws, which can be costly if not followed. Operationalizing a process that unlocks insights from all customer calls and messages will ensure that each potential compliance violation is logged and employee training is improved. This risk is more acute for companies that now must comply with GDPR regulations. Upfront investments in these areas will ultimately save the organization from potential fines and other damage to the brand that would follow.

CPG companies can apply these strategies to gain customer insights that inform everything from product-market fit to potential product defects and overall customer satisfaction. This enables better decision-making that results in getting ahead of a coming product recall or developing new lines of business based on what people are asking for. A large customer of ours, for example, has saved $30 million per year across global brands by identifying what customers want from their products in areas like packaging, size, flavors, etc.

In addition, these efforts can directly impact sales and marketing effectiveness by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities within the contact center and throughout the customer journey.

Once you glean sophisticated insights from the contact center, scaling up requires giving business owners across the organization direct access to the customer voice. Today, customer information is often siloed within the team of employees managing customer care or marketing, instead of being distributed to relevant teams including product, supply chain, and operations. This fiefdom approach to customer feedback is antiquated; and in today’s digital age where you can easily distribute information, there is no excuse to keep feedback locked up.

Take the banking industry, for example. We recently conducted research that found over 79% of Americans have a positive experience with their banks’ mobile apps, but they are typically only using the app to track balances and pay bills. While the customer care team may have insight into this feedback anecdotally, it can be transformed into action once distributed to the product team in aggregate. Because the product team is responsible for creating the user experience and functionality of the mobile app, knowing exactly why customers are reluctant to use it is pertinent information. Armed with insights about customer preferences and habits, the team is empowered to make changes that drive user adoption and increase brand loyalty.

In addition to providing crucial information for

updating current products and services, the contact center is an untapped resource for conducting market research. Companies today invest a wealth of time, money and resources into industry-wide surveys when determining their product pipelines. In reality you already have customer preferences, desires and pain points expressed directly in the contact center. You can save money by turning your attention there. For example, if a kitchen appliances company wants to bring a new pressure cooker to market, mining contact center data to better understand consumer attitudes towards this device, insights on competitors, and loyalty to the brand could all help inform how the product is made and marketed.

A World-Class Customer ExperienceBefore heading down this path at full speed, many

organizations are challenged with gaining buy-in from the C-Suite, which can be especially difficult when including emerging technology in the budget. While the impact and applications of the contact center can be incredible, the technology is relatively new and often perceived as both expensive and risky. The key lies in identifying a strong executive sponsor and positioning customer experience as an investment –– the more resources a company puts in, the higher the return. Since business leaders care about the bottom line, it’s imperative to demonstrate how a well-executed strategy directly impacts the bottom line.

This transformation will manifest itself in a number of ways. For example, forward-looking hotels have begun to offer a virtual butler guests can communicate with before and during their stay. It can make personalized suggestions based on your preferences, for example, offering ideas for family-friendly dinner reservations located near your afternoon outing. Kimpton Hotels have applied this by remembering their guests’ drink of choice. If you’re checking in at night after a harrowing flight with numerous delays, they’ll send the bourbon drinker a bottle of Maker’s Mark to your room with a handwritten note. This gesture, based on an intimate understanding of customer preferences, goes a long way.

Organizations that execute well will push these insights into areas of the business that will affect change. The result will be a world-class customer experience. CRM


In God we trust, all others must show their data

To influence organizational strategy, customer care must be an honest broker of meaningful information.

• Tightly focused dispostion codes can better quantify customer conversations when compiling feedback for other departments.

• Back up quantitative insights with qualitative stories to provide context.

• Curate the data to create a compelling narrative that aligns with company goals.


How Customer Care Can Get a Seat at the Product Table

The first step of being heard by Product is putting yourself in their shoes to better understand their challenges. Imagine you’re busy compiling data from multiple stakeholders, it can be difficult to know who to listen to first. If Mary from Sales says customers need one thing, Bob from Customer Care says customers need another, and

a customer interview reveals a third possibility—who’s right? When it comes to influencing product decisions, we need to come armed with trustworthy, meaningful data.

Most Customer Care leaders inherently know what customers want, we have a deep understanding of the needs of our users, and we care deeply about getting that information into the hands of decision makers. But retrieving meaningful data from thousands of user conversations is difficult. And when arguing with, say, sales, we have to compete with cold, hard, revenue figures.

The good news is that our daily interactions with users give us the data we need to be influential. If we track data in the right ways, we can then go to Product with more confidence and have a positive effect on development strategy. Working with clients such as Pinterest it is clear that the key to making Customer Care more influential in cross-departmental disagreements is to come to the table with quantified, contextualized, curated data. Doing so will help you answer Product’s three most common objections:

By Chris Martinez, Founder, Idiomatic


1. How many other people have this problem?2. What’s really going on?3. Why should we care? “How many other people have this same problem?”

Quantify your data Imagine you’ve landed a new role as a product

manager at Pinterest. What would be more helpful in your search to design the perfect online experience:

1. A lot of people think photos should be bigger than they are today in the profile. 2. 24% of our customers have written in complaining about not being able to see fine details in small print on their photos. The first one is an offhand remark. The second

is useful information. If almost a quarter of our customers have difficulty with the size of photos, that’s definitely something to address in the next sprint. Maybe we can improve zoom, or make the photos have more pixels. It’s a difficult statistic to ignore when we’re asking what customers want in a new feature.

Customer Care teams frequently struggle to quantify data from customer conversations in a meaningful way. Most smaller teams will rely heavily on disposition tagging. When a customer contacts your Care team about a specific issue, the agent can attach a pre-defined ticket tag or disposition code. Then, when compiling feedback for other departments, your Care experts can pull a report of the number of conversations filed under that tag or disposition code.

This is a good first approach. In the absence of an

automated or AI solution, disposition code tagging can be a useful resource. There are two main limitations of which to be wary. First, you need to know what you’re looking for; you can’t code for everything, you need to be focused and pre-define the codes. Second of all, manual data review can be massively time consuming. Therefore, our advice is always to keep the number of codes relatively small and high-level to start, i.e., no more than 30-40 codes.

You can also evaluate AI solutions for understanding customer feedback automatically. For example, Pinterest’s Customer Experience team codes hundreds of thousands of cases a week to pull out actionable insights. The previous manual effort was yielding an anecdotal and imprecise sketch of the customer experience. Switching to an artificial intelligence solution yielded better results with much more sensitivity. Instead of relying on the manual coding and analyzing of Customer Care conversations, Pinterest can see every trend reliably brought right to the surface.

Modern AI techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) can read and analyze thousands of raw conversations rather than needing to search for keywords and phrases or tag manually. This helps identify trends you didn’t even think to look for (or have codes for), and turns customer feedback into data that helps resolve disagreements.

Regardless of how you do it, quantifying Customer Care conversation data makes it easier for other departments to act on Care driven insights. If nothing

Regardless of how you do it, quantifying Customer Care conversation data makes it easier for other departments to act on Care driven insights.


else, make sure your team is performing consistent high-level tagging of disposition codes.

“But what is really going on?”

Contextualize your data When presented with

data, most logical people will want to dig in deeper. They’ll want to know the “why” behind the numbers. Who are these people? What led them to think this way? Can we characterize these users further? That “why” can often be uncovered by analyzing second level trends, or contextual patterns that emerge from within the subset of data. Secondly, context becomes even more compelling when quantitative data is backed up with meaningful qualitative stories.

Combining the quantitative with the qualitative is the true secret to driving product decisions with Customer Care data.

If you’re using AI to surface trends, it’s easy to leave the cross referencing to the computer. There’s no need to pull up every ticket with the relevant code for further analysis. The AI will have already identified the second level trends within the subset of tickets. Product owners can dive deeper with a single click. This transparency brings even more weight to the arguments Customer Care teams have been making all along.

Even if you aren’t using AI it’s key to keep examples all in one place. While Product Owners aren’t easily convinced by 2 or 3 anecdotal stories, they will want to read 20 tickets to have a better idea of what customers are talking about. If you’re using tagging, linking statistics to the tickets responsible for those statistics can be difficult. It’s crucial that you do the hard work of putting all these tickets into one place instead of just pulling 2 or 3 examples because product owners are unlikely to start searching through help desk conversations to find the necessary tickets that it will take to convince them.

To settle disagreements of what customers really want, teams need easy access to second level trend analysis and qualitative stories.

“Why should I care?”

Curate engaging dataFinally, voice of the

customer data needs to be engaging. You can have all the quantified data you want, but if it no one reads it, you’re not going to make a difference. Curation of data can help make reports more relevant to each department.

Curation means:• Trimming out irrelevant or misleading data• Aligning feedback with current company goals• Reducing noise or less important trends

One way to automatically curate engaging data is using sentiment analysis. NLP classifies customer conversations by emotion and tone, so teams can pull out the most extreme feedback to distribute.

Pinterest uses sentiment analysis to send VoC data across the company in a weekly report. Often this kind of weekly report is difficult to get engagement from. But when they started being able to zero in on the most extreme sentiment they found colleagues were excited to receive the reports each week and see what was causing such extreme reactions.

Enthusiasm? About reports? When you’re providing the information colleagues need to do their job better, that’s a very possible reaction to a report.

Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight Maybe equating a product discussion to a gunfight

is a bit extreme. But the advice is sound. When you’re advocating for the needs of your customers, it’s your responsibility to prepare properly. If you try to influence product decisions with opinions, don’t be surprised when Care loses its seat at the table.

Preparation takes time, but if you put that time in you can get great results. Instead of bringing gut feelings, unsubstantiated claims and anecdotal feedback, Customer Care teams need to develop quantified, transparent data to backup their requests. AI can help with that, but step one is recognizing that it’s going to take effort and making a commitment to invest resources in preparing yourself for success. CRM

When you’re advocating for the needs of your customers, it’s your responsibility to prepare properly. If you try to influence product decisions with opinions, don’t be surprised when Care loses its seat at the table.


Consumer response coupons can be a great method for manufacturers to enhance customer relations when challenges arise or to reward loyal consumers who have expressed their appreciation for excellent products or services.

Consumers love them; manufacturers reinforce purchasing patterns and enhance their image. All this happens without incurring the costs of shipping products to a consumer.

Unfortunately, like all things of value, consumer response coupons are subject to fraud and abuse. The two most common types of fraud are counterfeiting the coupons and filing false complaints in order to obtain coupons. If left unchecked, these illegal activities can cause significant expenses for the manufacturer; in some cases, the financial impact can be in the millions of dollars.

Fortunately, manufacturers have many tools to address these situations and can achieve significant loss prevention savings. Four of the most significant tools are:

Data AnalysisOne common scam is to file false complaints about

a product with the intent of obtaining free product coupons or something else of value. We have observed

Mitigating Risk in High Value Coupons

Bud Miller, CPP, Executive Director, Coupon Information Corporation


Tools to Reduce Fraud That Can Save Millions

• Screen for scripted letters from “complaint services” by searching for identical complains of phrases.

• Normalize address data to US Postal standards prior to screening for duplicate submissions to identify fake but deliverable addresses.

• Be disciplined about using physical security devices in printed coupons to aid in catching and prosecuting counterfeiters.

• Seek mutual cooperation opportunities with retailers to share information.

such efforts organized in social media, often by so-called extreme couponers. Retaining and reviewing consumer complaints can help manufacturers shed light on these situations. The data may also help manufacturers respond more efficiently in the event of a real problem that has not been previously detected and can help determine if a complaint is legitimate or a hoax. Similar to the sale of canned term papers, we have observed individuals selling “complaint services” which result in scripted letters and emails being transmitted to multiple manufacturers regardless of whether the purchaser has even had any experience with the product. Much of this can be addressed with cross-complaint review by seeking to identify identical complaints or phrases.

Screening for duplicate submissions can also be a significant opportunity. Care must be taken not to just use a pure dupe process; the address data should be standardized to US Postal Service standards prior to duplication review as the addition of fake apartment or suite numbers is commonly used. We recently observed a number of individuals plotting to steal from a manufacturer using this fake, but deliverable, address trick in a secret Facebook group.

E-mails can also be falsified but functional using the


“dot trick” which is well-known throughout the darker corners of social media. A review of emails compiled in a simple spreadsheet can be remarkably effective in detecting this sort of deception.

Physical SecurityAnything from currency to car parts can be

counterfeits. Coupons are no exception. So why bother with physical security techniques on coupons to begin with? After all, use of these measures does increase printing costs. The simple fact is that there are counterfeiters from all walks of life, ranging from the simply curious to transnational criminal organizations. If consistently applied, the appropriate use of physical security devices can reduce exposure from the less-skilled counterfeiters and can serve as valuable evidence against advanced, professional counterfeiters when they are apprehended.

Retailer-Manufacturer LiaisonCounterfeiting impacts all industry participants.

Mutual cooperation, along with open and frank discussions, can, and has, made a significant impact on addressing counterfeit losses. CIC provides several tools and training opportunities for all industry participants that have resulted in tens of millions of dollars of loss prevention savings. These opportunities are provided by CIC to retailers free of charge.

Law EnforcementRetailers have made great strides in enhancing

their capabilities and willingness to support law enforcement investigations of counterfeit coupons over the last year. Updated POS systems can help detect counterfeit coupons, identify suspicious transactions, and help take the guesswork out of loss prevention efforts at the industry’s “front line” without causing inconvenience for, or even being noticed by, honest consumers. Of course, due care and appropriate training are paramount, but retailers now have a better understanding that counterfeit coupons, theft by deception, and other coupon fraud-related activities should be treated along the same lines as shoplifting.

A Note on Social MediaSocial media is a powerful tool used by all industry

participants and couponers everywhere. The tools that help these vast communities form and flourish are, in themselves, neutral; they can be used to achieve higher goals and noble purposes or they can be abused to create organized criminal enterprises that are often difficult to detect and address.

Unfortunately, criminals have infested the most popular social media communities and the technology companies have been less than proactive in addressing these growing challenges. Advertisers who use social media platforms should be aware of these issues, understand the impact of these criminal activities on their budgets, and fiercely advocate that the tech companies take robust and appropriate actions to protect their advertisers’ interests. CRM

The simple fact is that there are counterfeiters from all walks of life, ranging from the simply curious to transnational criminal organizations.


book review

The second edition of John Goodman’s Strategic Customer Service has just been published with substantial updates and new sections that illustrate insights with data. The new

edition documents changes wrought by a decade of technology that has changed customer habits and expectations as well as organizational processes that have redefined best practices.

Chip Bell notes in this edition’s forward that the concept of B2B has changed to P2P, or people-to-people. Creating customer experiences that foster loyalty and relationship has become a race to the top as pockets of excellent service create new benchmarks for every industry. CEOs are depending on customer care executives to win that race.

Change is the New NormalThis second edition of Strategic Customer Service

confronts the larger shared realization that customers have not changed from one state to another but are continuing to change constantly. Organizations don’t need a transition, but rather to embrace the need to learn constantly and adapt tactics and strategy based on what they learn.

Goodman makes an excellent guide through this landscape, describing a decades-long career of helping companies listen to their customers and respond effectively as “a constant learning experience”. From his work with companies of all sizes and diverse industries, Goodman argues that the biggest challenges today are customer expectations for speed and convenience and how customers gain information. Customers expect an ease of doing business and a high degree of flexibility. Organizations grappling with these challenges are simultaneously dealing with a tight labor market and increased training demands. While many new technologies provide capabilities that didn’t exist a decade ago, each comes with capital and operational investments and a

need to demonstrate a return on investment. With all that change, it is notable that this is an

update, not an entirely new book as much of the best practices documented in the first edition are largely the same, updated only with additional data that increases the strength of the central thesis. Customer expectations of service staff, processes needed for service, the voice of the customer and the payoff of great service remain fundamental tenants of customer experience.

Voice of the CustomerWhen the first edition was published Facebook had

just 30 million users compared to 360 million users today. Twitter was being explained to Oprah viewers by Ashton Kutcher and promoted tweets were still a year away. The rapid adoption of social media as a means of communication has profoundly changed how companies relate to customers.

Social media has not just become an additional source of vox populi, but a channel of two-way communication where organizations must interact with customers and influence a new era of word of mouth.

Goodman documents the omnichannel phenomena and establishes helpful benchmarks in developing efficient and cost-effective systems that meets these needs where they occur.

The Impact of TechnologyChip Bill observes in the forward that “this book will

provide those anxious about technology with more comfort; those enthusiastic about technology with

Building Loyalty and Maximizing Profits

continued on page 28


By Leslie O’Flahavan, E-WRITE

Is Your Email Scorecard Making Agents’ Writing Worse?

Improving Performance Calls for Coaching not Policing

Punitive scoring techniques that "catch" agents errors instead of using them to guide improvement make agents writing worse:

• Repeated score deductions for multiple incidents of the same essential error in a single communication.

• Bundling distinct writing skills into a single standard score.

• Improperly defining and illustrating key writing behaviors and styles.


It’s Friday morning, you’re a third-grader at Maple Elementary School. You’re a nervous wreck because you’re taking a spelling test and you know how to spell only half the words your teacher is reading out. You’re able to spell “nurse” and “doctor” because the teacher

did a lesson on people who work in hospitals, and you got to see those words a lot in the stories you read this week. But the teacher has added the words “puddle” and “dragon” to the test, and you’ve never practiced spelling or reading those words. You like puddles as much as the next third-grader, but you can’t spell “puddle.” You sadly resign yourself to getting a bad grade on the spelling test and spending the weekend without access to your iPad.

Stay with me here as I connect this sad spelling test story to the task of scoring email quality in a contact center. When managers score agents’ email quality in a “gotcha” fashion, or when they score agents on writing skills that haven’t been explained, taught, or coached, they can actually damage agents’ writing skills. Yes, it’s true. An ineffective or punitive email scorecard can make agents’ writing skills worse.

Here are three commonplace ways an ineffective email scorecard damages agents’ writing skills:

1. Taking points off for every incident of the same error. Let’s say you use a 100-point scorecard. Agents can earn—or lose—up to 15 points for correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar. One of your agents, who we’ll call Tracy, made eight egregious comma errors, so you deducted 8 points from the 15 points she could have earned for this standard. This punishing approach to scoring for correctness is going to backfire. Dinging Tracy over and over for the same error isn’t going to help her use commas correctly; it’s just going to show her that the hammer comes down hard when she makes a mistake Deducting eight points may communicate, “Your ineptitude with commas is a big problem” but it doesn’t do anything to help Tracy correct the problem. If you want to build Tracy’s writing skill, you have choices: • Show her how to use a comma correctly • Ask her to use online punctuation practice to brush up on comma rules • Pair her with a colleague who’s great at punctuation If I were Tracy, and I’d lost 8 of 15 points because I

made the same comma error 8 times, I know what I’d do. I’d stop using commas! You can’t get punished for something you didn’t do, right?

2. Combining two distinct writing behaviors into one standard. One of my clients scored agents’ emails on a standard they called “Pleasantries and Empathy.” They allotted 20 points on a 100-point scorecard to the “Pleasantries and Empathy” standard. But using the occasional pleasantry in an email is not the same writing behavior as expressing sincere empathy. Using pleasantries means knowing when to write such phrases as “Have a nice weekend,” or “We look forward to seeing you at our Hometown store again soon.” Writing with empathy means being able to see the situation from the customer’s point of view and express that perspective in words: “I can understand why you are frustrated. We should have corrected this billing error when you let us know about it last week. I’m sorry you had to contact us twice to get this fixed.” These two writing behaviors differ greatly in how much thinking and critical reading they require. Using pleasantries requires relatively little thinking

or wordcraft. A list of pleasantries could be gathered in a “pleasantries template” and copied and pasted as needed. Empathy, on the other hand, requires critical reading and careful writing. Empathy can’t be scripted. The agent has to carefully craft an empathy statement, which must be tailored to each customer and situation. When the scorecard bundles writing behaviors that should be scored separately, it discourages agents from using either writing behavior. Agents may wonder, “Which do you want? A pleasantry or an empathy statement? Should I use one of each even if the email response doesn’t require that? What if my pleasantry isn’t as good as my empathy statement? Don’t take my 20 points away!!”

3. Failing to define or illustrate crucial writing behaviors. The email writing behavior that affects quality and customer experience the most is the agent’s ability to freetext within a template (or put the template aside completely and just freetext). Most email quality scorecards evaluate agents on this skill. Managers often allot a generous portion of the overall score to this writing behavior. But too often the scorecard—and the


When the scorecard bundles writing behaviors that should be scored separately, it discourages agents from using either writing behavior. Agents may wonder, “Which do you want?

accompanying Definitions Document or other explanation of the standards—fail to define or illustrate this writing behavior. For example, one organization I’ve worked with listed this standard as “Proper use of templates.” This standard was worth 30 of the 100 total points. Their Definitions Document elaborated on the standard this way, “Agents should use email templates properly and customize them when necessary. Agents should delete parts of the template or add information to prepare a complete response.” Freetexting within templates is a high-level writing skill. The scorecard recognizes the value of this by making it a 30-point skill. But neither the scorecard or the Definitions Document does anything to help an agent build this skill. It’s the manager’s obligation to define this skill, so agents can do it. If I’m the agent, this scorecard will not help me be a better writer and may make me a worse writer. With vague advice about using templates properly, I’m likely to avoid customizing the template at all or go rogue with my freetexting. Either of those choices will harm email quality. But if the scorecard or Definitions Document had explained the standard this way, I would be able to demonstrate this writing skill: “Agents should choose

the correct email template for the email response and customize it by adding the customer’s name, account number, and product code. Agents should delete any part of the template that’s not relevant or add information to prepare a complete response. Agents should freetext the first and last sentence of the response to build rapport.”For third-graders and for customer service agents,

spelling tests and email scorecards may be necessary evils. They may be stuck having their writing skills scored in these ways. But customer care managers should do everything possible to make sure the scorecard isn’t damaging agents’ writing skills or motivation. Writing emails to customers is difficult enough without making agents wonder, “But how do you want me to write?” and “I’m going to get a bad score no matter what I do!”

If you’d like more information on helping agents become better writers, read my article, Can Bad Writers Improve? If You Coach Them, Yes. And if you’d like feedback on your organization’s email scorecard, contact me. at [email protected] CRM


When the scorecard bundles writing behaviors that should be scored separately, it discourages agents from using either writing behavior. Agents may wonder, “Which do you want?



Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate and committed to their work. Engagement has a direct impact on

organizational profitability, correlating closely with productivity, efficiency, and reduced turnover. Like many managers, call center leadership, management and supervision have direct experience grappling with these issues and are familiar with the direct impact they have on the bottom line.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2020 agent engagement will be the key difference that defines the top 20 % of contact centers.Top performing call centers have 60% more engaged employees. A five percent increase in employee engagement can drive a three percent increase in revenue. McKinsey reports that hiring and training of a new agent costs a call center between $10,000 and $20,000 dollars. Gallup reports only 31 % of U.S. and Canadian workers were engaged in their jobs.As persuasive as the data is, solving these issues

has proven elusive in every function of the enterprise.

By John Ruby, CEO, GCOM Worldwide

Leveraging Data-based Intelligence to Increase Employee Engagement

Operational Intelligence

• Expectations—Well-defined KPIs are measured and benchmarked.

• Measurement—KPIs are collected from multiple data sources and aggregated.

• Awareness—Employees see their performance KPIs in real time to enable them to adjust and improve.

• Transparency—Employee performance visibility creates a culture of self-government and self- improvement.


Using call center intelligence from the two sources is like driving

a truck. You have Business Intelligence which is using your rear-view mirror to see where you have

been. It is helpful but doesn’t always help you see the road ahead.

One advantage call center’s have over most is access to a lot of data—the raw material that form the basis of analytical work.

This data is used to construct information. The typical call center uses as many as 25 distinct metrics to group and analyze data: SL, CSAT, ASA, AHT, FCR, SSR, Response Time, Blocking Rate and many more.

Professionals overseeing call centers combine and curate this information to form insights that aid in tactical operations, improve performance, and identify emerging trends.

At this point information has been distilled into intelligence. Intelligence can be understood as the product of information that been processed and refined to provide a sufficient understanding of a situation to serve as the basis for action. The more intelligence we have, the better able we are to solve some employee engagement problems.

Intelligence allows a call center manager to:• Identify opportunity. A good example is retail stores. Most are great at using SKUs to manage inventory and identify top sellers. • Improve customer sales and service. Amazon does a great job using intelligence and predictive analysis. They are one of the best at improving our buying experience and selling us more “stuff”. • Provide better efficiency and production. Today we

are seeing the Healthcare industry improving their patient care and scheduling with intelligence.• Reduces costs. Most all industries gain some savings benefits with intelligence.

There are two sources of intelligenceBusiness Intelligence (BI) is computer-based

techniques that analyzes what has happened to date. It is a static snapshot of where you have been. All those call center metrics and many other measurements helps our employee engagement. That intelligence looks for efficiencies to improve future results.

Operational Intelligence (OI) is a form of real time information feeds. It takes live feeds and event data to deliver insight into operations.

Using call center intelligence from the two sources is like driving a truck. You have Business Intelligence which is using your rear-view mirror to see where you have been. It is helpful but doesn’t always help you see the road ahead. On the other hand, Operational Intelligence looks through the windshield. It is like using your speedometer and MapQuest/Waze to help enable our real time driving.

I have been working with an operational intelligence application that helps agents with self-improvement. The key is that with OI agents can self-govern and correct their own performance. This opportunity to manage themselves proves to greatly improves agent engagement.


The important parts of Operational Intelligence include:

• Expectations. It allows employees to know what is expected of them. It shows them what is a good performance. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured and benchmarked with your company’s input.• Measurement. The important KPIs are collected from multiple data sources and aggregated.• Awareness. Employees see their performance in real time. The more often they see their performance and KPIs, the more often they can adjust and improve.• Transparency. The employee performance can be seen through the whole company. It creates a culture of self-government and self- improvement.OI also means cost savings to your call center. We’ve

seen increases in agent utilization from 10-25%. That means being able to do more with the same number of agents. Increase in team sizes. Supervisors can handle bigger teams by up to two times their former size. One study showed that 50 agents with ten supervisors saw a yearly savings of $2.8 million in agents and team size.

There will be some challenges. If you add Organizational Intelligence to your center there will be many things to consider. First, employees need to understand how it will help them. Focus on having them

see how they will be able to do their job better. Show how it will make them more productive and eliminate frustration.

For leadership and management, they will have several tasks: implementing, training and managing the process. Fine tuning your KPIs will be another thing to do. Determining the costs and ROI are also to be considered.

No matter what intelligence you use, improving employee engagement empowers our teams. Employees will deliver more efficient and effective service. It also provides the ability to improve one’s skills.

If you consider looking to Operational Intelligence or fine tuning your Business Intelligence good luck in improving employee engagement. It will be worth the effort. As you take your center on new paths …. have a safe ride and have fun! CRM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.John Ruby is President and CEO of GCOM Worldwide. GCOM is a telecom consulting firm based out of Newton, NJ. It offers customized technology, voice and data telecommunications solutions that has provided contact centers clients with savings, value and innovative solutions for more than 30 years.


CRM MARKETPLACECalzilla Awarded 2019 Bronze Stevie Award for Sales and Customer Service

Callzilla was presented with a Bronze Stevie Award in the Contact Center or Customer Service Outsourcing Provider of the Year category in the 13th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. "This is a tremendous honor for Callzilla that reaffirms the mission of providing American and global companies with high-quality, omni-channel contact center solutions

from our nearshore service centers,” said Callzilla President Neal Topf.

“We’re grateful to our clients and to the Stevie® Awards. We look forward to continuing our exponential growth and expanding our relationships with companies,” Topf said. “Our clients recognize Callzilla’s mantra of providing effortless customer experience, satisfaction, and resolution as the guiding principles of how we serve customers.”

The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top honors for customer

service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals.

More than 2,700 nominations from organizations in 45 nations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide in seven specialized judging committees.

Astute Bot Wins 2019 BIG Innovation Award

The Business Intelligence Group awarded Astute the 2019 BIG Innovation Award for its digital self-service chatbot product. Astute describes the bot as a conversational interface, driven by natural language processing and narrow AI that allows consumers to have conversations with brands to complete a variety of interactions across digital channels like websites, apps, SMS, and social messaging. The omnichannel, always-on support allows consumers to decide how they will interact with brands.

“This year’s winners show just how deep a role innovation plays in nearly every aspect of business,” said Maria Jimenez, chief operating officer of the Business Intelligence Group. “We are thrilled to be honoring Astute as they are leading by example and making real

progress on improving the daily lives of so many.”

The 2019 BIG Innovation Award represents the 6th product award win for Astute Bot since its release. Other recipients of this year's BIG Innovation Award include Dow Chemical, IBM, Mastercard Labs, and Walgreen's.

"We are gratified that Astute Bot has received this level of recognition in the market," said Alex George, CTO

at Astute. "Our team is dedicated to helping companies create innovative experiences that drive both efficiency and customer loyalty."

The BIG Innovation Awards recognize those organizations and people who bring new ideas that change the way we experience the world. Nominations were judged by a select group of business leaders and executives who volunteer their time and expertise to score submissions.

Batman had Robin, Buffy had Willow24-7 Intouch has updated its professional and personal values statement that guides

to better reflect its emphasis on diversity. “Our 10 Things are at the core of our business, driving our decision making for what's best for our clients and team members,” said Greg Fettes, Co-Founder and CEO of 24-7 Intouch. “This update is an important representation of how important inclusion and diversity is to us and our teammates.”


Berube

Elisabeth Zornes, former general manager of global support for Microsoft Office has been appointed Zendesk’s first chief customer officer. Zornes will represent the collective voice of Zendesk’s 125,000 paid customer accounts in the role and lead the teams responsible for helping customers onboard and maximize the benefits of the company’s growing product portfolio. She brings 20 years of experience as a leader in customer support, operations and services, most recently leading global customer support for Microsoft Office consumers, enterprise customers, and partners.

Zendesk also announced its recruitment of Adobe executive Colleen Berube as chief information officer and former Salesforce executive Shawna Wolverton as senior vice president, product management.

“Never have we seen customer

expectations or technology changing as rapidly as it is today,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to be adding these proven enterprise leaders to Zendesk so we can help more companies around the world transform their customer experiences.

Colleen Berube joins as chief information officer, having formerly served as executive vice president and chief technology officer of Fisher Investments and executive in residence at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She brings more than two decades of leadership experience from pre-IPO to the Fortune 100 companies.

Wolverton comes to Zendesk with more than 15 years’ experience in product management and leadership. Most recently, she was the chief product officer at Planet, and previously was senior vice president for product management at Salesforce, where she oversaw all platform development.

Belatrix Enhances Chatbot and Virtual Assistant Service Offering

Belatrix Software launched a newly dedicated chatbot and virtual assistant services offering that allows partners to unlock the potential of chatbots and create powerful customer experiences. The launch come shortly after Belatrix announcement of partnering with IBM Watson to create robust chatbots for partners.

Belatrix has also recently published key research reports examining chatbots and virtual assistants. This research examines topics ranging from their impact on banks and financial services, to identifying the key success factors for organizations building or implementing a bot.

“Recently, we have been seeing increased interest in chatbots and virtual assistants from our clients who are exploring ways to leverage this technology in their businesses,” said Alex Robbio, President and Co-Founder of Belatrix. “Unfortunately many of the bots that we see in the market are rudimentary in nature. What our research and experience shows, is that the latest technologies enable us to build much more sophisticated bots. They are able to respond to contextual customer questions and provide intelligent conversational capabilities. This is an exciting time for Belatrix, as our dedicated chatbots and virtual assistants offering will help our customers add real value to their customer’s digital experiences.”

SugarCRM Acquires Collabspot Email Integration Products

SugarCRM acquired Collabspot email integration solution that provides improved integration with email. The move takes SugarCRM a step closer to its vision to deliver an intuitive and collaborative user experience while eliminating all data entry.

Collabospot integrates CRM systems with email providers like Google and Microsoft, synchronizing emails, contacts and calendars to provide a wholistic view of communication with customers and prospects.

Zendesk Hires First Chief Customer Officer, Expands Executive Bench with new CIO and SVP of Product Management

Wolverton

Zornes


Noble Systems Receives Frost & Sullivan’s Market Share Leadership Award for 6th Consecutive Year

“Noble Systems has maintained its lead in the Outbound Dialing Systems market for the sixth consecutive year, growing its presence in an ever-more challenging environment,” said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan. “Once again, Noble Systems’ achievement is marked by the company’s innovation in providing a broad range of agile solutions focused on the changing needs of the contact center market. Noble is also committed to delivering a superior ownership experience, which is reflected in having one of the lowest churn rates in the industry.”

Chris Hodges, senior VP sales and marketing at Noble Systems, states, “For almost three decades, Noble Systems has been committed to providing superior omnichannel technologies and services to help companies improve the customer experience, and we are excited to be at the front of the growing focus on agent engagement. We are honored to again

be recognized by Frost & Sullivan for our best-in-market solutions and will continue to deliver added value for our clients with the most complete customer communications platform available from a single vendor, and the ability to deploy our systems in premise, cloud, or hybrid models without sacrificing features or performance.”

CRM MARKETPLACE

NICE inContact Awarded Customer Experience Innovation Award

CXone has been named by TMC’s CUSTOMER Magazine a Customer Experience Innovation Award winner. The Customer Experience Innovation Award recognizes best-in-class companies setting the standard in delivering exceptional customer experiences through all channels. CXone had also received the 2019 Big Innovation award.

“Success in the experience economy hinges on a brand’s ability to build powerful, exceptional customer experiences and then replicate those experiences consistently across any and every channel – digital and voice,” said Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact. “As a complete and unified solution, NICE inContact CXone powers engaging connections between agents and customers, regardless of channel. CUSTOMER Magazine’s recognition of CXone demonstrates the value of a truly holistic approach to customer experience.”

GCOM Worldwide Recognized with Master Agent Status

GCOM Worldwide, a customized voice, data and technology solutions provider, has achieved Master Agent status with VisualCue Technologies, an operational intelligence software company with patented visualization technology. The new technology utilizes real time Workforce Engagement Management to improve CX agent efficiency and engagement. It focuses on what agents do and empowers them to improve their skills through customized benchmarks—resulting in improved production and lower turnover.

John Ruby, President and CEO of GCOM Worldwide stated, "We are very pleased with our new working partnership with VisualCue. Their amazing software has helped companies like Overstock and Orange Lake Resorts see real time performance increases from 5-25% per agent.”


SOCAP proudly acknowledges our 2019 Corporate Members

Abercrombie & FitchAmerican Honda Motor Co., Inc.Ann, Inc.AryztaBayer Consumer HealthBeech-NutBimbo Bakeries USABlount Fine Foods Corp.Blue Diamond GrowersCampbell Soup CompanyCanada Bread Company, LimitedChurch & Dwight Co., Inc.Cincinnati BellCoca-Cola CompanyColgate-Palmolive CompanyCombe IncorporatedConAgra BrandsCoty Inc.Crayola, LLCDanoneDe Wafelbakkers, LLC

Dean Foods CompanyDole Packaged Foods, LLCDorel JuvenileDTE EnergyE&J Gallo WineryEdgewell Personal CareEstee Lauder CompaniesFCAFerrara Candy CompanyFord Motor CompanyGeneral Mills, Inc.General Motors CompanyGold Eagle Co.Guthy-Renker CorporationHyundai Motor AmericaInterContinental Hotels GroupKAZKellogg CompanyKeurig Dr PepperKimberly-Clark CorporationLand O'Lakes, Inc.Lilly USA, LLC

Lindt & Sprungli (USA) Inc.L'OrealLowes Companies, IncMaple Lodge FarmsMars, IncorporatedMasco CorporationMcCain Foods USA, Inc.McCormick & Company, Inc.McDonald's Restaurants of CanadaMichelin North America, Inc.Mondelez InternationalMorton SaltNavistar, Inc.NestleNewell BrandsNiagara Bottling, LLCNissan North AmericaNorth American BancardOceanXPepsiCo Beverages and Foods

Post Consumer BrandsProcter and GambleRobert Bosch NASargento Foods Inc.Schwan's CompanySephoraSnyder's-LanceSunOptaT. Marzetti CompanyThe Clorox CompanyThe Emerson GroupThe Hershey CompanyThe J. M. Smucker CompanyTillamook County Creamery AssociationTravelzooUniversal OrlandoVera BradleyVoicebrook, IncWakefern Food Corp.WellPetWiley

24-7 IntouchAW CompaniesAlta ResourcesArise Virtual SolutionsAstuteAugmentAvcomm SolutionsAvtex Solutions LLCBago ConsultingBBC Technology SolutionsBPA QualityBright PatternBroadReach Communications, IncC3i SolutionsCallzillaCaras TrainingClarabridgeContact Centers Dominicana

ContactUS CommunicationsCustomer Care Measurement & ConsultingDonnelly Communications, Inc.ERCE-Write, LLCGC ServicesGCOMGM Voices, Inc.GridspaceHGSHKT TeleservicesHOLDCOMiCall Services, Inc.Inktel Contact Center SolutionsIO Studio

Karen E. Brill ConsultingLanguage Services AssociatesMorley Companies, Inc.NAC Consulting, LLCNational Center for Dispute SettlementNICE inContactNoble Systems CorporationPremiere Response/ American Customer CareRDI CorporationReact Consumer ResponseReputation StudioResolve Software GroupRethink StaffingRQA, Inc.SafetyCall International

SEI LLCService Check Inc.ServiceNowSkybridge AmericasSnowfly Performance The Hibbert GroupIncentivesStafford Communications Group, Inc.Stoffer ConsultingSYKES Home (Alpine Access)TeleperformanceThe Hibbert Group Transparent BPOTriad ServicesVDSVIPdesk ConnectZendesk

Business Partner Corporate Members

Platinum, Gold, and Silver Corporate Members

Become a Corporate Member today—www.socap.org


more caution.” Chief Information Officers today are looking more toward their internal clients to own and articulate their strategy. Goodman provides a useful guide on the role and implementation of technologies across 20 customer service processes. Using this framework, customer service executives can better situate their department needs within the overall enterprise.

Managing Front Line Staff

Much is changed in terms of employee expectations and Goodman pays attention to the demands placed on employees and the role of organizational culture. It is generally accepted that high employee satisfaction reduces turnover costs and improves performance. Goodman reinforces this efficiency perception with observations of the agents as the best source for innovation, engagement, and delight.

Turnover should not be understood as simply attributable to pay rate Goodman argues, but as much to a lack of recognition and career progress. In a data-rich section Goodman offers a benchmark of 80% of employees feeling successful at their jobs and proud of their brand as a determiner of success.

The Emerging Organizational Role of Customer Care

As business leaders and marketing departments shift their focus to the customer experience, Goodman makes the case for the customer service executive as an internal CE consultant. Too often a poor strategic fit between customer service and business marketing keep customer service operating at a tactical level and lead only by process-level goals.

Customer service, Goodman argues, needs to go beyond the traditional activities of phone and email

intake response and VOC. Customer service must include other customer interactions such as customer on-boarding often handled poorly by sales and response to social media that is often handled by public relations. As it does so, customer service, marketing, and public relations need adopt a common language and share some goals, metrics, and objectives such as loyalty, value, word-of-mouth, and voice of customer.

As an executive you cannot personally deliver excellent service to all customers. You must depend on the staff and the overall culture created by the entire service team. The strategic view of customer service Goodman advocates is not to look at the function as a cost to be minimized, but as a competitive differentiator. To do so, this book provides baseline calculations to measure the financial damage of lost customers to create a dollar value that can be usefully contrasted with the investment companies are making to acquire new customers. "The economic imperative for making strategic investments in customer service is now rather than later." CRM

book review cont'd

Customer service must include other customer

interactions such as customer on-boarding often handled poorly

by sales and response to social media that is

often handled by public relations.

continued from page 15

SOCAP International would like to thank the sponsors of the Customer Care Summit 2019

for the generous support that made this event possible.

SOCAP International’s Customer Care Summit 2019

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