In support of its forthcoming activity at the Call Centre & Customer Management Expo from 11th-12th October at London Olympia, Portal has prepared a whitepaper discussing how customer service and contact centres can help businesses thrive in the "age of the customer". By transforming the customer services function in your organisation to a strategic function, you can gain valuable customer insight and deliver an improved customer experience.

1. How Customer Service
can help businesses thrive in
the “Age of the Customer”
A whitepaper from Portal

2. “The Age of the Customer”
There is general agreement that we are living in the ‘age of the customer’ but what does that mean?
,
It means that not only are customers more demanding (as a result of the difficult economic climate) but
for the first time in the modern age customers have the upper hand. This is because:
1. The internet is a vast repository of information that is useful in conducting product/service research.
2. Social media has allowed every individual, including your customers, to have a voice and
share that voice with the world.
3. As a participant in social networks your customer can tap into the voice and the wisdom of the people
in their network: what their network says about you now counts for more than what your marketing
and advertising says about you.
4. The smartphone allows customers to access this wisdom wherever they are and this means that your
customers are usually better ‘armed’ than your customer facing staff : customers know more about you
and your competitors; customers can quote a price and ask your frontline staff to match it; and
customers can record their interactions with your front line staff and share them with the world.
A Change in the Balance of Power
With this change in the balance of power, you have to focus, relentlessly, on creating superior value for
your chosen customers. You do that by excelling in three domains: generating customer insight; using
that insight to create more attractive value propositions; and crafting and delivering a customer experience
(across the entire customer journey) that matches the value proposition and leaves customers feeling
happy about doing business with you.
Creating superior value
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2 How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer”

3. If your customers are satisfied, they are unlikely to talk badly about you to their social network. If you go
further and create happy customers then they are likely to recommend you. Take the power of customer
reviews on TripAdvisor as an example, and how they impact the fortunes of businesses in the travel
industry.
Contact Centres and Customer Service
Contact centres are a key customer touchpoint and a valuable listening post to get access to the ‘voice
of the customer’. Many research sources suggest that if the customer experience around contact centres
is positive, it then drives up customer satisfaction and reduces the propensity for customers to look for
alternative suppliers.
The Customer Services function is incredibly valuable to your organisation, especially because of the
number of interactions that take place with customers. A modest sized contact centre (50 – 80 staff ) can
be handling something like forty thousand incoming calls a month and about the same figure in emails.
The bigger contact centres are likely to be dealing with hundreds of thousands of contacts each week.
Using data retrieved from customer interactions with your
contact centre you can learn about:
Customers Organisation Competitors
needs what’s working and what the competition
wants not working in: is offering in terms of
preferences products their:
behaviours pricing products
marketing pricing
selling offers
delivery service
billing etc.
etc.
Transforming Customer Services into a Strategic Function
Businesses could transform their Customer Services function into a valuable strategic function for the
business by using its daily contact with customers to generate actionable insight; insight into hidden
customer needs which could be met through new products, services and value propositions; insight into
what aspects of the business – touchpoints, policies, processes, people, organisation, technology – are
broken (from the customer perspective) and thus need to be examined and redesigned to create happy
customers. Today, the vast majority of Customer Services functions do not create value for the customer.
Because contact centres are largely focused on processing customer demand at the lowest possible cost,
whilst striving to hit certain industry standard performance targets, the vast majority of customer services
functions do not create value for the customer. It’s not unusual for businesses to make it harder for
How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer” 3

4. customers to call their customer services department by “hiding” their contact number, replacing human
beings with self-service technologies, outsourcing and offshoring. From the customer perspective it often
means struggling to find the right contact number, battling with badly designed IVRs (interactive voice
recognition), long hold times to speak to a customer service agent and then the effort involved in talking
with someone who does not share their language and culture. Today, there is a disconnect between
what customers want and what contact centres are delivering as a result of their production-efficiency-
productivity mindset and the associated practices.
This production-efficiency-productivity mindset does not create value for the business either. Within
the contact centres, turnover of agents is high and there is a considerable cost in recruiting and training
staff to replace those that have left. Then there is the revenue loss and cost associated with finding
new customers to replace the customers who leave because of poor customer service. Looking more
broadly there is the cost (which can run into millions of pounds) of market research commissioned by
the marketing department, which could be cut down considerably if the Customer Services function
was converting its customer touches into actionable insight and making this available to the Marketing
function. Finally, there is the revenue forgone because customer insights were not tapped, recorded,
shared and converted into new products, services and revenue streams.
Creating Value for the Business
How can the Customer Services function move beyond the production-efficiency-productivity mindset
and become a strategic function that helps the business as a whole to create value for its customers and
for itself?
1. The business must recast the Customer Services function as a strategic function that is
responsible for delivering great customer service (creating happy customers) AND generating
actionable insight that drives improvements in business operations AND leads to the development
of new products, services and revenue streams. This will only happen where the Customer Service
leadership team can articulate the value of taking this approach and where they can persuade the CEO
and leadership team to agree to it.
2. Welcome and encourage contacts from your customers as an opportunity to learn about them, to
educate them about the business and to cultivate an emotional connection between the customer
and the company. This means making the customer services number visible at all touchpoints including
the product, invoices, statements and the website. It also means giving your customers an easy option
to connect to a human agent if they get trapped in self-service technologies e.g. IVR and the website.
You need not worry about being inundated with new customer calls/emails provided that you are taking
action to eliminate failure demand1 and find smarter ways (from the customer and business perspective)
to deal with value demand.
3. Study and challenge the demand that is falling on the contact centres. This means identifying
and discriminating between value demand and failure demand. Examples of failure demand include all
1 Failure demand is simply the demand that falls on the contact centres because the business failed to do something or to do something right for
the customer elsewhere
4 How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer”

5. the calls that come in from mobile customers who are upset
about their bills because the advertising had led them to
Creating Value from
believe that unlimited data usage actually meant unlimited. Customer Services
Or the deluge of incoming calls asking: “I was expecting a
delivery today and it has not arrived. Why? When can I expect Make
to get the product?” Customer Services a
strategic function
4. Convert the contacts into actionable insight and share
this with the entire company. This involves: tapping into
the knowledge of the customer service agents; focusing on
Welcome contacts from
taking a record of why customers called – the root cause of
your customers and
the call and not just what they called about; converting call
learn from them
recordings and/or notes made by the contact centre agents
into insight through speech and/or text analytics; sharing this Study and challenge
learning and insight with all the people in the company so the demand on your
that they can make use of these insights. contact centres
5. Work with the business – marketing, sales, field service,
logistics, purchasing, finance etc. – to eradicate any Gather insight from
failure demand including sharing the numbers, root your contacts with
causes and costs of servicing this failure demand. If your customers
organisation is a normal organisation then this information is
not likely to be well received. It is also likely that the functions Work with the business
which are the source of failure demand are unlikely to have to eradicate the
the motivation to change their ways. An effective way of failure demands
handling this issue is to work with the Finance Director to
charge back the costs of servicing any failure demand to the
very functions causing it. Find smarter ways
to deal with value
6. Find smarter ways to deal with value demand. This demands
means being proactive and providing the information that
your customers need (e.g. order status) so that customers
do not contact the call centre. It also means putting in place
self-service technologies that allow customers to serve
themselves easily: online banking and print boarding cards at
home or via kiosks are great examples. Finally, you can simply
change your processes so that the customer has no need to
contact you. Giffgaff (sim only telecoms provider) has set-up
an automated top-up facility that ensures that customers
never run out of credit. Any smarter way of dealing with
value demand must improve the customer experience
(access, ease, convenience, control etc.) as viewed through
the eyes of the customer.
How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer” 5

6. A Fresh Approach to Customer Services
In order to succeed in making customer services a strategic function you
have to be willing to take a fundamentally fresh approach to the people
Rethink the
aspects of your Customer Service function.
role of the
managers, team
leaders & customer Rethink the role of the managers, team leaders and customer
service agents service agents
A strategic approach requires managers to change the emphasis for
their agents so that their role is to listen to customers, learn from
customers, capture that learning so that others can use it, educate the
Rethink your
customers and build emotional bridges by providing great human
approach to
hiring and retaining service.
customer service
agents Rethink your approach to hiring / retaining customer service agents
You need to use any contact with customers as an opportunity to
learn, educate and build rapport with customers. This is a different skill
Provide the to simply handling contacts quickly to meet AHT (Average Handling
environment Time) targets. As you offload the simple demands onto self-service
that your customer technologies you will ensure that your customer service agents end
service agents need up dealing with the more complex contacts. Some would call this
to flourish and “knowledge work” and this requires different skills to administrative
perform
work. This means that you have to think carefully about whom you hire
and how you retain your customer service agents.
Provide the
Provide the environment that your customer service agents need to
information,
tools and systems flourish and perform
that your customer If you are to get the best out of your customer service agents then you
service agents need have to provide an environment that allows them to flourish: to find
meaning in their work and to do it well. This means thinking about
the environment in which the agents work. That includes the physical
environment (the location, the design, the facilities, the space) and
managerial environment (the management style and the performance
metrics). There is ample research to show that there is a link between
the employee experience and the customer experience. Put differently,
if you want your employees to look after your customers and leave them
happy then you, the management, have to look after your employees
and leave them happy.
Provide the information, tools and systems that your customer
service agents need
Today many customer service agents are struggling (and under stress) to
fulfil a mentally and emotionally taxing role with one hand tied behind
6 How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer”

7. their back. The agents simply do not have the information / knowledge they need to get things right
first time – to provide accurate answers in a speedy manner. Furthermore, they often have to open up,
make sense of and use many different systems to deal with an incoming contact. This is a recipe for stress,
longer call handling times and mistakes. The strategic approach that we are advocating requires a fresh
look at the information, tools and systems that customer service agents use.
Conclusion
In summary, what many businesses fail to acknowledge is the real value that their front-line staff have in
contributing to customer insight.
By changing attitudes towards the customer services/contact centre functions and acknowledging that
your contact with customers brings a wealth of valuable data, your business can gain insight into its
customers that you may never find through paid-for market research.
That said, it is no small task and involves changing internal cultures and implementing new or updated
technology systems, but the insight that can be extracted from all your contact data could transform the
way you do business and allow you to thrive in the age of the customer.
How Customer Service can help businesses thrive in the “Age of the Customer” 7

8. About Portal
Portal helps some of the world’s best known
brands transform the service they provide
to their customers. With over 50 technically
accredited consultants and partnerships
with major technology companies such as
IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Webservices, it
builds solutions that help its clients to deliver
improved customer acquisition, customer
retention, increased customer satisfaction and
long-term customer loyalty. Portal’s experience
spans all industry sectors but it has particular
expertise in Public Sector, Banking and Financial
Services, and Manufacturing/Industrial/
Transport sectors. Portal is privately owned and
based in Bracknell, Berkshire.
Follow Portal on Twitter @chooseportal
Follow Portal on LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/company/portal
For additional information visit
www.chooseportal.com