Bill Price: Best Practices for Becoming a Frictionless Organization
4 Ways to Improve CX and Achieve Operational Efficiencies using the “Propensity to Complain”
We all know that "all customers are not created equal" because some represent significantly more value than others, but have you also examined their variations in propensities to complain (PTC)? Over the past 20-30 years, academicians have studied PTC and other factors describing what they...
Closing the Gap to Become Frictionless: 3 Examples Using the “Learn” Action
While many organizations do a pretty good job figuring out which actions to take in response to customer contacts, relatively few challenge the need for those contacts nor build the robust capability to maintain and improve these actions over time. From research that my...
How Reaching Out First to Your Customers is a Winning Move
Up until a few years ago, it was slow and expensive to contact a customer because you could only call them, email them, or send a letter. In addition, you guarantee reaching the customer as call screening and spam filters started to become norms....
How Frictionless Organizations Handle “I Want to Cancel My Account (or Service)”
When customers encounter friction anywhere along their journey, from search/browse through purchase and consumption, their loyalty suffers and many of them leave. This was one of the core findings of the research that my co-author and I recently set down in our 3rd book,...
Three Short Case Studies of Removing or Creating Friction
In my two previous posts, I introduced the concept of Frictionless Organizations and how they are able to produce superior returns by removing unnecessary or unwanted processes and steps for their customers1. Frictionless Organizations essentially design and deliver their products and services so the...
How to Galvanize a Business Around Customer Issues to Reduce Friction and Contact Volume
Why do our customers have to bother to contact us? It's amazing how many types of interactions customers have with companies that are inherently expressions of dissatisfaction such as "Where's my order?","I don't understand my balance", "My bill is wrong/too high", or "I'm missing my...
Is Being a Frictionless Organization Now an Essential Strategy?
Organizations have spent much of the last decade declaring that "Customer Experience is our #1 priority." Customer experience measurement exists in most companies and every customer process seems to have a survey. Yet, there seems to be plenty of evidence suggesting that customers are...
3 Ways to Obtain Customer Requirements for Support. No Surveys Required!
The foundational element to provide excellent customer service is to determine customer requirements for support. While many companies spend significant time and money to survey customers, we all know that survey fatigue and other priorities have reduced significantly response rates, calling into question their...
Towards an Energized Workforce: 3 Ways to Score Your Organization’s Success… or Failure
I recently ran across my post in CustomerThink from January 20091 as the U.S. was beginning to dig out from “the Great Recession”. In “Four Big Steps to Trim Contact Center Costs and Improve Customer Experiences” I recommended how important it was during that...
Reducing Customer Churn Using 4 Steps of Customer Contact Analytics
Reducing customer churn is a tall challenge for every company. Marketers are well aware that is far less expensive to retain a customer that is to acquire a new one1. Moreover, holding on to customers and creating a loyal base is the best way...
Should You Serve New and Experienced Customers the Same? No! And Yes.
The old idea that all customers are created equal and that one-size-fits-all was ripped apart by Peppers and Rogers in their seminal first book The One to One Future1. Since then, product design and product marketing teams have become incredibly creative producing hundreds of...
4 Ways to Focus on the Silent Majority — Customers Who Don’t Complain
Recently I read a disturbing a quote from a senior executive … “For every one person who complains there are 99 in favor … You listen to the 99 percent.” It reminded me of another quote from 10 years ago: “96% of unhappy customers...
How to Score a Perfect 10: Three Lessons to Delight Your Customers
We often lament when we encounter poor customer service and bad experiences, including my earlier column called Qantas Interruptus1. It is easy to share when things do not go well, when your expectations are not met, when employees or not helpful, or when companies...
5 Ways to Get Your Outsourcers To Love Your Customers as Much as You...
Today somewhere between 30-40% of sales, collections customer care, and technical support services are provided by third-party outsourcers, also called business process outsourcing or BPO providers. The largest of the BPO companies has over $4 billion in revenues, with as many as 300,000 agents...
“The Best Service is No Service” Turns 10, Going Strong!
By Bill Price, President Driva Solutions & David Jaffe, Partner LimeBridge Australia Ten years ago when we published The Best Service is No Service: Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs (Wiley/Jossey-Bass 2008) we suggested that organizations needed to work...
Qantas Interruptus: How to Ruin the Customer Journey
We all tend to use the tagline “analyze the customer journey” to discover opportunities to improve the customer experience, since it’s clear that companies need to make it easier for their customers1, anticipate snags and offer solutions2, and figure out how to delight them. My...
How to Increase First Contact Resolution with AI, Bots, and Big Data
Building on my April 2018 column “Using AI, Bots, Big Data, and Analytics to Reduce Demand for Support”1, one of the seven vexing challenges facing customer experience (CX) leaders, today I’ll address the second challenge to increase First Contact Resolution (FCR). The power of AI,...
How to Improve Customer Experience and Slash Operating Costs Using Robotic Process Automation
By Bill Price, Partner Antuit & President Driva Solutionsand Scott Tweedy, VP Driva Solutions As business leaders we are all aware that “digital is changing everything”1. As a result, many of us are in the middle of large-scale strategic and digital transformation projects in partnership...
Using AI, Bots, Big Data, and Analytics to Reduce Demand for Support
If we set as an overall goal “How can we create and sustain a consistent and awesome customer experience across multiple channels & touch points?”, there are seven challenges that have vexed companies for many years. None of them is easy to tackle, and...
Net Promoter Score: Four Problems, Two Remedies
Net Promoter Score or NPS has been around for about 18 years. It’s a simple way to get a pulse on how your customers are responding to your organization, or their loyalty as called by the authors of NPS. The NPS is a formula based...