Tag Archives: Business and Economy

December 10, 2015 · 11:29 am

The Agent Or The Dentist?

Holiday time is supposed to be a joyous season.  This, of course, as long as you have no need to call customer service.  When that happens, it becomes a season of frustration and anger, at least according to the latest iteration of the Customer Service Report from the folks at Corvisa.  It doesn’t sound as if it will be a particularly happy time for the businesses in the receiving end of the calls either.  You can have a look at the complete report here.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

  • Consumers are getting fed up with poor customer service and, as a result, business livelihoods are at stake.
  • When it comes to customer service delivery, companies don’t get many chances to make a good impression.
  • Long hold times hurt the bottom line.
  • Robotic-sounding agents are undermining ROI.
  • Consumers don’t hold back when they’re angry, and often share their experiences with others.

I don’t know that there is anything particularly new about any of those findings, but the degree to which some are an issue might be. When 48% of respondents said they have stopped doing business with a company due to negative customer service experiences in the past year, it should give any business manager a reason to pause and think about half of the customers who call customer service walking away.  25% of Millennials say it takes only a single bad interaction to prompt them to jump.

The other point that hit me was the need to stay human.  I’ve supervised a business that had to deal with daily customer service calls.  There is a tendency to want to script everything so that every customer has the same experience and issues are anticipated and resolved.  The problem is that customers “hear” it’s a script.  We need to train agents with general guidelines and protocols and then let them deal with each situation in a more human way.

Customer service is still, for the most part, broken.  52% of survey respondents said they would rather shop with the crowds on Black Friday or go to the dentist than speak with customer service.  Does that sound like it’s working to you?

 

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December 9, 2015 · 9:51 am

The Right Question

We’re filling out a survey from our homeowner’s insurance company. I guess they want to make sure that we’ve got ample coverage in case a party gets out of hand and we need to rebuild Rancho Deluxe. One of the questions reads as follows: 

Percentage of the interior walls that are plaster

Hmm. Would that be the percentage based on the number of walls, the percentage plaster represents of square wall footage, or something else? After all, in a rectangular room, if one long wall is plaster, then the right answer may be 25% or it may be 40%. How accurate does this response need to be?

There’s actually an excellent business point contained in that silliness. It’s not enough to ask the right questions. We also need to ask them in the right way so we get the expected, actionable data. In the example above, while my answer isn’t a huge data set, when aggregated into the other data the company is pulling together, the sampling error will be larger than it needs to be since half the respondents can respond using one way to look at the question and half the other.

Obviously, it’s not just a lack of clarity that can affect the outcome and usefulness of your research.  Asking leading questions which are almost certain to elicit a particular response is bad as well (do you do XYZ every day?).  So can asking open-ended questions since there is no guarantee that anyone will focus on the specific area you’re researching.  Then there are the folks who overlap responses (how old are you – 18-21, 21-30 – how does a 21-year-old respond?).  Or ask loaded questions (how long ago did you stop beating your spouse?).

Asking questions is really important but asking badly structured questions is a waste of time. Clear?

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December 8, 2015 · 11:22 am

Another Nail

Those of us who were fortunate to work in TV used to have a pretty good business, way back when.  You’d find a peach basket, open the window, and watch the basket fill up with money.  OK, it was a little harder than that, but TV has always been a business that grows exponentially in good times and shrinks only a little in bad times.  Growth was as reliable as the US Dollar.  So when I read the piece I’m about to show you, a quote from “The In-Laws” (one of my all-time favorite movies) jumps to mind: 

What do you think will happen when they run off this dough… and there’s trillions of extra dollars, francs, and marks floating around? You’ve got a collapse of confidence in the currency. People are gonna panic. There’s gonna be gold riots, atonal music… political chaos, mass suicide. Right? It’s Germany before Hitler. You can see that. Jesus, I don’t know what people are gonna do… when a six-pack of Budweisers costs $1,200. That’ll be awful.

In other words, when the basic currency of a business has changed substantially, chaos ensues.  It’s my belief that we’ve reached that point in media, as this report states:

For the first time outside of a recession, linear TV ad spend has stopped growing, according to global ad revenue updates by MAGNA Global and ZenithOptimedia, both released Monday. While national TV ad sales grew .3% to $42 billion in 2015, MAGNA predicted it will decrease by .3% in 2016. ZenithOptimedia’s Advertising Expenditures Forecast also found TV’s share of global ad spend will decrease from 38% in 2015 to 34.8% in 2018.

The basic currency – the TV CPM which is tied to the TV rating point – has lost its stability.  There are trillions (OK, billions, anyway) of extra GRPs available.  Pricing pressure has always been downward, but now there are options available that seem to be making that stick. I think we’re in a brief period where live events will hold pricing stable, but when only about a quarter of viewers are watching TV “live”, how long can that last?

This was the most ominous sentence in the piece: A shift in viewer attention and changing advertiser investments may therefore contribute to a decrease in both supply and demand for linear TV impressions.  The shift has happened.  The pretty good business is rethinking itself.  There will be political money and Olympics revenue in 2016 to serve as a band-aid as it does so.  But by 2017, the times could be, in the words of the Chinese curse, interesting.

Thoughts?

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