How should we approach customer service in the current economy?

Niek makes some really great points.

The real key to success in today's economy is stick to the basics of workforce optimization.

1) Schedule your agents and enforce and measure agent adherence in order to maximize training and coaching time so that your agents can continue to improve their handling of customer issues.

2) Quality should be the top of your list - in today's economy, you can't afford to lose customers. Make sure that your customer interactions are being monitored...and being monitored against objective criteria that is calibrated frequently.

3) Make sure you are tightly connected to your marketing and sales organizations and accurately forecast your volumes. Don't forecast based on what your sales and marketing folks want you to forecast...forecast using real hard metrics.

4) Hold everyone accountable to meet realistic targets and measure those metrics. Accountability should go from the Call Center Leader all the way down to the agent.

5) Consider customer techniques to drive customers to lower cost channels such as the web, IVR, etc. For example, if you are service center that takes payments by phone, charge for the service in a scale that correlates to your costs. The web should be free or low cost, the IVR a slightly higher cost, and the agent the highest cost of all. One caveat - if your IVR and website need improvement, driving volume to those channels may cost you more because of increased customer complaints, increased call volume to support customers, and customer churn will really cost you.

Good luck! Feel free to email me at mbabb@ponvia.com for further discussion.

Well I agree that costs of staffing agents needs to be watched closely I also believe that in this economy customer service is more important then ever. I have experienced a lot of unhappy customers that can't get the answers they need because and auto-mated system is not working correctly to assist them with a challenge. They either aren't getting to a person at all or at times being misdirected or even disonnected. When people have very little to spend and are watching their own budget they are more likely to spend that money on a company or service where they can get assistance when they need it.

So to answer the question more directly, I feel that customer service should be handled as it always was - being available to help our customers as much as possible. Not necessarily only by having extended hours, but making voice mail, email or web contact available to leave a message a human contact can return as soon as possible. Training the right reps and making sure that our resources are used wisely to employ the best people to make that happen.

In a down economy it's much less likely that you'll get new business and more likely that you'll sell something incremental to your existing customers. So you might not sell as much in dollars or volume but your customers will become a very important part of any strategy to combat the recession. Consequently, customer service becomes relatively more important in a downturn than it is when times are good.

Aggressively. The down economy is the time to invest (not the same as "spend") in focused customer service experiences. While it might be tough to snare a busload of new business with the investment, it'll be far less expensive than trying to recapture those who might be lost because of degraded service. The genuine buyers have lots of competing choices in a slumping economy.

I'm with Dan on this,
If you have your customer service right in the good times, you won't need to do anything different.
It is outrageous hypocrisy to say you have good service in the good times, but you need to improve it in the bad times..think of the signal this sends.

As mentioned above service is the key to success and is in most cases the first contact with the company. This is when you must not only provide the best that you can, you must also look more deeply into the issues you are getting and engaging the parts of the company that they came from in resolving the issues creating the calls.

In line with what Michelle stated above, I would add product development in there as well. Service per unit cost expectations drive budgets and staffing models and not having a model that identifies excessive rates or failure analysis makes the issue spiral.

The customer is the one paying the bills and if you do not meet or exceed their expectations they will vote with their feet and their wallet. This is in my opinion the most important information to be had and if it is not used to solve the problem thay are calling for youu will lose customers and agents.

And to the advocates of IVR's and other automated systems, unless they expedite the access to a well trained and intelligent response they are a waste of time, yours and most importantly the customers!

Customer service is paramount all the time, whether the economy is up, down, sideways...it does not matter. I will skimp on just about anything but customer service if I have control of the organization's budget, finances, and/or HR.

My believe with customer service in any industry or business is an utmost importance to the bottom line and I think most can agree to that. Yes, Customer Service can not be leveraged during economic distress at least not with your own business. So to say your business will provide more customer service during bad time compared to the normal/good times is a strategy that will bite you back when you customers wondering why you weren't able to provide this quality of service, frequency, etc. during good times.

Some people may think this method is fine and people like it. In reality, business should tweet their customer service a little bit to help the customers that are leaving or not buying because you need to find out why and how you can help them stay in your business while maintain good relationships with the customers that continue to be a customer.

The strategy of imposing inverse relation with customer service and economic climate is a bad way to do business. If you give them more when the times are bad are you going to give them less when the times are good?

Keep 'em -- Or DIE!

As the recently departed genius Peter Drucker so keenly observed, ALL successful business share two simple skills. The ability to GET and KEEP customers.

In these tough economic times, when marketing dollars to GET customers are hard to come by, it is important, maybe even critical to some businesses' survival, to do whatever it takes to KEEP as many of one's customers as possible and prevent them (and their money) from bolting to your nearest, dearest competitors.

Imagine this. A mind-boggling 68% of the customers who leave one business for another, do so for one reason. They feel that the company they left was "indifferent" to them and their business. That is to say, customers leave because they feel that the "gift" of their business isn't appreciated by the company they're doing business with.

How can that be? A company isn't grateful for the very people who help them pay their bills, send their kids to college, buy that new car, take that vacation? Is that possible??? Most companies in fact probably do actually appreciate the business, BUT they're doing a totally lousy job of SHOWING IT.

So, let's assume a company wants to KEEP all their customers and they want to show their customers that they truly, madly, deeply appreciate their business. Where the heck to start?

I hate to use this old "saw" again, but the 80-20 Rule is the perfect place to begin. That is, start your love-fest with those 20% of your customers that bring you 80% of your business! Don't know who they are? Well, if there's a problem with losing customers, not know who your best ones are is a huge part of the problem. Hurry. Figure it out or risk them jilting you, not because they don't like your product or service, but because not only have you neglected to tell them you love them, but you don't even know who they are!

Now, how do you thank them? Unfortunately that would take too much space and time for what we have here. But, check out www.waymish.com for some clues.

I am in agreement with Dan. Approach should ALWAYS be providing the customer with a positive experience by making sure that their concerns are addressed. This can be done by simply LISTENING to them when contact is made. How customers are treated should not depend solely on the state of the economy.

I support the view that the level of service a company provides its customers must remain very high regardless of the economy. You cannot grow a company if you are losing existing customers at the same - or a faster rate - than you are adding new ones. But all customers are not created equal. I support Lee's point about the 80-20/Pareto analysis. But do the analysis on customer profitability and not just on revenues.

The “deadliest mistake in customer service” is to send your customer contact work overseas.

In the past two years a few of the companies that have moved offshore Call Centers onshore/nearshore cut across all product lines and include Delta Airlines, United Airlines, AT&T, Dell, HP, Priceline.com, Expedia, and Monster.com. Opting to ‘come home’ for their Call Center employees is making sense for more & more companies seeking to enhance their Service Levels & Brand Reputation while delivering a higher degree of overall Customer Satisfaction.

The Call Center Agent is your ambassador to your customers. The human voice of the Agent provides your company’s human face. Much of the time when a customer calls it is because something has gone wrong. If the caller cannot understand the Agent due to accent issues or communicative style - the problems are compounded. The caller can become agitated and the company may wind up losing a customer and future sales. In the present economic environment, just hearing a foreign accent could trip that trigger. Losing dollars chasing dimes is not a wise long-term Customer Service Strategy.

Your customers are demanding a level of caller experience that can only be provided to North Americans via a Call Center located in the USA or Canada – for Europeans via a Call Center in the UK/Euro Zone – and for Australia/New Zealand via a Call Center located in one of these two countries. Probe a little deeper – and your customers will also tell you that they’re opposed to shipping Call Center jobs overseas – and particularly to countries with poor human rights records - or lax labor standards such as India.

According to “The 2010 Contact Center Consumer Index” – an annual survey conducted by Avaya – “there is a strong and growing correlation between a customer’s Call Center experience and their loyalty to a company or brand. A single poor Call Center experience results in a 47% chance that the customer will move his or her business to a competitor”.

From the Jan. 2010 Issue of Site Selection: “Offshoring calls to India works in very limited situations. Interaction with clients and understanding the culture & environment of clients doesn’t work very well at all. The direction of the industry is to bring these customer facing jobs back to the USA.”

The latest Labor Market Outlook from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development in the UK: “UK companies are bringing back call centre operations to the UK from India. Most of the companies that we deal with are looking to keep call centre staff in the UK wherever possible because there is a significant increase in the level of service and customer satisfaction provided."

BusinessWeek reports that: “frustration with offshore Call Centers is so great that 72% of US consumers claim they would rather use an automated IVR system or the Web rather than speak with a foreign agent”.

The Washington Post reports: “25% of Indian Call Center workers surveyed say irate calls are commonplace” - as resentment swells over the loss of jobs to India – and frustration mounts over the inability of customers to understand – or be understood by the Agents they speak with.

New York News Day writes: “Of the calls patched daily between Indian agents and American customers - more than 200,000 calls per day — involve callers who are having had a hard time understanding – or being understood by the Agent”.

Top performing Contact Centers drive their Revenue & Performance through superior hiring tactics. We help employers gain better insight & more accurate predictions as to which applicants from a pool of Candidates would perform up to, or beyond their established standards. You can find out about a Free Trial of SPAS Call Center Agent Pre-Employment Screening Software at http://www.telesoftsystems.ca/64201.html

How has the economy's effect on customer spending habits and loyalty affected how we should target our service?

To adjust to changing customer values and habits, make sure you have up-to-date voice of the customer data, and study it carefully to revise your policies, processes, and skills accordingly. Don't just make assumptions based on what everyone else is doing in contact centers -- customize your approach for YOUR customers. Create customer experience personae for each of the customer circumstances that trigger customer service, as a guide for service interactions.

I love the advice in Bill Price's book, The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers From Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, & Control Costs. You'll see great advice in this book for eliminating stupid service elements, preventing the need for service wherever possible, making self-service user-friendly, and modernizing your approach to service excellence.

(see tips for Customer Experience Management on a Shoestring Budget in a Down Economy, on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/clearaction/cem-on-a-shoestring-presentation -- or article at http://clearaction.biz/blog/customer-experience-improvement-on-a-tight-budget/)

As we have a big issue of economy crisis. And the mean time people increases their product prices but they also make it to third class quality. So if you never do it. People will come to buy from you. It's acceptable they would not be able to increase their quantity but they will be satisfy to purchase from you, even we can't regret to this that our economy has down. But if some haven't got money then how he can purchase, it's really matter. In short never down to your product quality. Either increasing cost in manufacturing.

This isnt a f#&@cking math problem. It's a question about selfish behavior. Service is all ever really mattered. That's because people are all that ever really matters.

Stop trying to ration out your love to the customers that you think with reciprocate and start caring about making other people successful. You'll find yourself running headlong into outrageous success, regardless of the current depression the rest of your industry may be in...

Dan