How Are They Being Served?

The general wisdom being reinforced in Customer Service thinking now is that best practice is to respond to customer requests where possible using the same channel the customer has used to contact you (be it phone, email, social media or web enquiry) and to make the customer experience consistent across all channels. The expectation is that the cost of maintaining additional channels will be offset by cost reductions in self-service interactions and increased business won or retained; this particularly makes sense for larger businesses that can afford enterprise level software to automate these processes and specialist teams for service roles. 

KANA recently put out a post with an infographic to present the key findings of an APAC research project led by Independent Customer Service Analyst, Esteban Kolsky. You can download this file here.

As a software heavy weight with the enterprise solution to support this trend, it’s no surprise that KANA has gone to the trouble. It emphasises the continuing trend of customer service delivery to be moving across channels to web self-service (both PC and mobile) and social media, and provides a staggering statistic, that while email ranks number 1 aequal with telephone for customer service interactions, 4 out of 5 emails sent are not received! Significantly, however, over 50% of interactions are still happening by phone. This isn’t surprising to us at Well Done. 

Voice is still a great way to gauge if people are taking you seriously, understand what you mean or determine whether this is an organisation that you want to continue to deal with. Even on websites where we provide the option of streamlined self-service commencement, almost everyone wants to chat before setting up.  And don’t we all make the call (however inconvenient) when we have a tricky issue with a telco or utility rather than try to remember another log-in, trust an email or write a letter? For immediate results, a two-way telephone conversation is hard to beat.

This is also where a well scripted Live Call Answering Service can be a great way to leverage your firepower in the office at a fraction of the cost of employing staff. Well Done is an Australian owned and managed Customer Service Contact Centre Specialist company. We can answer your phone 24 x 7 and, with a robust set of FAQs in hand, we can handle many of your routine enquiries on the spot and free up your team to focus on more complex work. 

On a WebAssist Service, we may also be able to log credit card payments to your website or log into your systems to handle more complex service enquiries.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us on 1300 551 796 or make an enquiry on our website. We’d love to help.

TRUE LEADERSHIP

Local Buy invited Diamonds Captain Laura Geitz to make a keynote address at their annual Government Procurement and Fleet Conference in Brisbane this week and, with remarkable humility, she showed us what it takes to provide true leadership in a team.

At this point I should admit that I am a mad keen Netball fan, having seen what an incredible game it is, and what opportunities for personal development it affords our Australian teenage daughters. You won't see beer ads for this sport, but netball is Australia's largest participatory sport with 1.2 million people playing graded games across Australia each year. The Australian Netball Diamonds are ranked No.1 in the world and have a record unmatched in Australian sport, including winning 9 out of 12 Netball World Championships; 2 out of 3 Commonwealth Games gold medals, and an 84% win record across the history of all internationals. But I digress... 

A natural athlete, Laura Geitz came to netball relatively late at 13 but she knew that she had found her metier at that first game. Within a few years she was playing for Queensland and captain of the Firebirds.

She'd grown up a tomboy on the farm so it was a big shift when she was selected to play for Australia, and had to move to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra to follow her dream. She considered quitting at this point, but persevered and went on to be selected as Captain of the Diamonds in July 2013. Even though she had a vision for the team that she thought that this could be, she found being awarded this position a daunting and confronting honour which took courage and deep personal honesty to meet.

Business people see the cross-over in achievement from sport to other fields of endeavour fairly readily, and I particularly related to Laura's account of making the transition from being highly competitive and individualistic to achieving in a team. Laura could see how internal conflict could dull a team's performance and wanted more than anything in her captaincy to empower her players to step outside their comfort zones and enjoy giving the game their very best. 

And it worked. Laura immediately led the Diamonds to reclaim the Constellation Cup from the New Zealand Silver Ferns, their toughest rivals.

Laura's first hand account of leadership and sporting success aligns very much with the expert advice I heard from Allan Preiss at McArthur Talent Architects at the LGPro annual conference in Melbourne last month, and it demonstrates how a team, or an organisation, can achieve at a higher level when leaders empower and inspire each member to trust each other and take a risk together.