Did you know that a call center can be certified as World Class? I found out from Ryan Bouwmeester through a comment he left here at the PhaseWare Files. Once I saw the website, I knew a post from them would be an excellent fit for our audience.

Today I have a post from the SQM Group that I think will be of interest to anyone in customer service and support.

SQM's World Class Call Customer Satisfaction Certification Program is designed to certify call centers performing at the world class call customer satisfaction performance level. Their customer satisfaction certification program is the most credible and rewarding certification program in the call center industry because certification is based on the customers' judgement of their experience using a call center to resolve their issue. Having customers' judge call centers makes SQM's certification the most credible and rewarding certification program in the call center industry!

In addition, their world class call customer satisfaction certification program assists call centers in their efforts to improve customer satisfaction, reduce operational cost and improve first call resolution.

SQM's certification program focuses on the customers' experience using a call center by conducting customer satisfaction phone, IVR or web based surveys within 10 minutes to 48 hours of the customer's most recent call. Surveys are conducted based on a random sample of customer calls. All customer surveys have 8 or more questions and take approximately 5 minutes to complete. For each call center site, a minimum sample size of 800 customer surveys is required. Each call center site is certified separately to provide distinction and recognition within their own company. If every call center within an organization is certified, SQM will certify the organization as world class call customer satisfaction certified.

Call centers that have greater than 75% of their calls meeting the SQM criteria of a world class call over a minimum of 6 consecutive months will be certified by SQM as a world class customer satisfaction performer. SQM's definition of world class customer satisfaction is when customers are overall very satisfied (top box response) with their call center experience, their call was resolved and they were very satisfied (top box response) with the CSR. Certification status is good for one year from the time the call center achieved certification. In order to maintain certification status, the call center must participate in SQM's certification program on an annual basis.

SQM began certifying call centers for world class customer satisfaction in 2006. In the first year SQM certified a mere 3 call centers out of all companies that participated in their studies. By 2009 the number of certified call centers had increased to 17. On average, approximately 5% of the call centers that participate in the SQM studies are certified as world class call customer satisfaction call centers. SQM is proud to announce that over 70% of their tracking clients improve their FCR performance year over year.

For more information on the SQM awards or certification programs, please visit their homepage at http://www.sqmgroup.com

Since 1996, SQM Group has been a call center specialist for benchmarking, improving and certifying sites, managers and CSRs for their first call resolution (FCR), employee satisfaction (Esat) and customer satisfaction (Csat) performance.

Phil Winters, an advisor to Peppers & Rogers Group, created a list of 10 customer management trends (Customer Strategist Phil Winters: 10 Customer Management Trends to Act on Today) that have emerged due to techological developments.

Some of these trends should not be a big surprise:

• Consumers have more control over their relationships with companies.
• Social CRM is being integrated into CEM (Customer Experience Management)
• Ongoing efforts to turn employees onto customer-centricity

Others may not have occurred to us yet:

• Buying decisions are being impacted earlier than ever in the buying process
• Data capture and use is more important than it has ever been
• Customer Intelligence use is becoming real-time 

With so many alternatives to nearly every product or service, customers are researching their buying decisions earlier, over more channels (such as Twitter, forums, and blogs), and are more sensitive to their experience with a company. Pretty much it's "One Strike - You're Out!".

Companies now have access to so much data that getting useful information out of it is becoming more and more difficult. Yet they also have to be aware of crossing a privacy line. According to Mr. Winters, though, that is less of a problem than first thought. When a well-communicated policy is in place, consumers are actually allowing companies to use more information than they otherwise might. In other words, as long as people know what is being done with the information they are more likely to oblige.

It seems that the biggest trick is the oldest one: figuring out what people want before they think of it. Then surrounding that product or service with a positive experience from the moment someone hears of it through post-purchase service. At no point can a company drop the ball. Everyone from the customer facing staff to the manufacturing floor and delivery service must be on the same page.

Read the list. Determine if your business needs tweaking in any of these areas. Don't fix what isn't broken, just remain aware of these trends as you go about your day-to-day routine.  Get ahead of the game by researching options for addressing these trends such as business intelligence or customer support software, a social media policy, or training for everyone in the company about their impact on the customer.

How can we escape the economic news when it is being sent out on the airwaves, printed, tweeted, blogged about, and communicated to death?

So Yes! We Get It! It's the Economy!!!

But...you're not stupid. If you have learned anything from this blog and others pertaining to customer service and support, knowledge management, self service, and customer support software solutions, it is that customer service is the differentiator. It is the customer retention rocket. It is the magnet that attracts new customers. It is the anti-negative-social-media vaccine.

Certainly, if your product is lacking, the best experience in the world won't help you. But if you build it and they come, customer service will be the part that keeps them there. Most products and services in this world are easily duplicated. Sometimes they are even engineered better than the original. But these days, when people can buy almost anything from anywhere with a credit card and the click of a mouse (or touch of a screen or, well you know....) it can be hard to stand out just because your product works.

It is when the customer has a question, wants to upgrade, wants to report a problem (when, for some strange reason your product doesn't work), or in any way interacts with your company that the difference between you and Joe and Josephine Schmoe in another state or down the street can make you stand out from the crowd. 

You could try crossing your fingers and hope that Joe and Josephine are one of those companies that bleeds the 63% of customers that defect after a bad customer experience. Maybe they will come to you. But you had better be ready to outdo everyone else those customers may have considered  when it comes to customer service. These people are not shy of moving on when they don't like the way they are treated. They left a company once! They can do it again!

Unless you captivate them by understanding and answering their problems, treating each as an individual, empowering your front line employees to help customers without micromanaging or policy policing. You can personalize interactions, keep scrupulous records (without invading privacy), answer before you are asked.

Yea, verily, excellent customer service is what keeps the world going around........

Ahem, sorry, got a little carried away. But you get the message, don't you?

I knew you weren't stupid.

Poor customer service is almost always a result of poor strategy and the belief in the paradigm that the customer service center is a cost center. Since Common Wisdom says cost centers must have costs driven down, you did just that. Now the part of your business that has a direct impact on customers is understaffed, underfunded, and under water. The pay is too low to hire good agents and the budget too small to allow for training and technology to streamline the work processes.

This results in poorly trained agents who are dealing with a system that holds them back from providing the customer with what he wants. That customer may already be mad when he calls the service center. Imagine how he will feel after he hangs up! I think you can take that customer off your list; he's had enough and he's gone.

Research shows that up to 30% of customers or more have a bad customer service experience. Of the customers who have had a bad experience, only about 2% will actually complain. The other 98% remain silent. However, all 100% are likely to leave. You may never know of a problem until it is way too late and a third of your customers is gone.

Another result of this cost-busting customer service approach is negative word of mouth (WOM) about your business. And a study has shown that negative WOM is disseminated twice as much as positive WOM. The internet makes the reach even greater and faster. On top of that, hidden costs show up in the service center as call volume increases due to the failure to resolve problems on the first call. In addition, marketing and sales become more costly because it is expensive to convince an unhappy customer (or someone who has heard bad things about your business) to buy from you.

Congratulations. Now the customer service center really is a cost center. But all is not lost, Padawan. You can turn things around. 

And tomorrow, I will tell you how. You won't even need The Force.

Here is a link to a post from the blog Service Untitled describing a customer experience by the writer. The post would have been very different if the service had been spectacularly bad. It wouldn't have existed at all if the service had been so-so or simply "the expected".

But the experience was exceptionally good. And that earned the company a mention from a third party that was not paid to do so.

How's that for the impact customer service can have on your business.

Leave Competition Behind with Excellent Customer Service

Randall Nelson, CEO of PhaseWare, appears in Business Week.

His words of advice: Be tenacious!

And we are. We are tenacious about bringing you informative blog posts with useful content about the practice (and art) of bringing superior customer service and support to your customers.

Whether you use our solution or someone else's I hope what I put in this blog has helped you succeed in providing your customers best-in-class support. In the next post I will continue with my series about multichannel support. There are increasing amounts of information about multichannel service. I hope to dig out the essentials for you to have as you contemplate whether or when this will be a direction you need to go.

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we recently celebrated, had a famous speech, "I have a dream". Mr. King's dream was far-reaching, inspiring, and historic. As I thought about this, I realized that I too have a dream, although certainly not in the same league as his.

I have a dream that PhaseWare's software will revolutionize the customer service industry and no customer will cringe at the idea of dealing with customer service departments. I have a dream that one day customers and businesses will discover the benefits of online self-service centers. I have a dream that customers will experience the joy of reporting issues at their convenience and not waste their precious time and cell phone minutes waiting for a company representative to talk to them at the company's convenience. I have a dream that businesses will be more cost-efficient because of less call volume and reduced service handling time.

I have a dream that all companies everywhere will turn to PhaseWare's Event Engine which allows nothing to be forgotten, where incidents are automatically sorted, and the right people are sent notifications at the right time. I have a dream that those businesses will see that Event Engine increases productivity and decreases errors as does the new Tracker On-Demand. This is my hope, that businesses are more effective because they can track of every issue, analyze recurring incidents, and keep tabs on customer information without having to reload the page every time.

This is the day that the dream can be realized. This is the day we say that customers can be free from frustrating call-waiting and businesses can be released from inefficiency. Now is the hour to discover liberation in PhaseWare software.

Today, I have a dream.