Study: Customers Mostly Dissatisfied With Service

Oracle's Loïc le Guisquet believes modern CRM systems can solve nagging customer service problems.

PROFIT ONLINE: What were you hearing in the marketplace that prompted the pursuit of this research?

LEGUISQUET: Over the last few years in EMEA, we have seen customers make much more intense demands of the organizations they work with. Just a few years ago, your utilities and telephone service were delivered through a government-owned supplier—and trying to switch suppliers was impossible. Now it's easy to switch suppliers any time you're dissatisfied with the service you're getting. Consumers are happy to switch from one credit card to another on an almost yearly basis.

This pressure is compounded by common news of service failings. We've seen banks unceremoniously cancel customers’ credit card accounts. Internet service providers have suffered massive service blackouts. Car manufacturers are recalling thousands of cars to fix factory defects. This is always about how companies are struggling to provide the right levels of service to customers.

So in this environment, we're seeing expectations creep from one sector to another. If you get great service from your bank, why can't your online shopping or phone company experience be just as great? And companies need to keep pace with these expectations. We expected to find that some industries were ahead of others. But we were also interested in finding how greater changes in communications—with Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn now a common part of customers’ lives—were forcing companies to find new ways to meet customer communication expectations, embrace new technologies, and deliver on customer needs.

The bottom line of the findings is that customer demand is exceeding the ability of many businesses to deliver consistent, quality service.

POL: Did any of the findings surprise you?

LEGUISQUET: If there was one big surprise it was the huge demand by consumers to move to web based interaction and self-service. In our survey, the web was by far the most popular way to communicate with a business. About half of the people we surveyed said it was their preferred option and more than 70 percent put it in their top two. There are common complaints about the quality of service customers receive from call centers. But the call center has seized an increasing role in the customer experience.

POL: Why hasn’t customer satisfaction increased at the same rate?

LEGUISQUET: There are a few key reasons why things aren't improving in contact centers as quickly as we'd hope.

First, there's still too much dependency on legacy call center systems. These systems keep business from focusing on their core mission–serving customers–because they're shackled by inflexible tools that don't meet anyone's needs. The first step is to get rid of any bespoke systems. They're just not flexible enough and can't change fast enough for a fast moving business.

Second, almost half of the companies we spoke to felt that their customer service processes need improving. Clearly good processes deliver quality results and without them you'll just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

However, I'd say that the biggest issue is a lack of agent empowerment. You have to think of it from the agent's view: if systems don't give them the information they need, they have to say, "I don't know" or "The system doesn't tell me that.” This means they have no real ability to help the customer—and everyone ends up frustrated in that interaction. Systems can be so rigid that operators are forced to answer the same questions in the same way for each call.

Would that give anyone job satisfaction? Does it deliver customer satisfaction? No, this is what generates some of the most common customer complaints in our survey: having to explain their issue multiple times, being passed between departments, and agents not understanding the business they work for.

POL: How else can CRM software address common call center complaints?

LEGUISQUET: Ultimately, it all comes back to empowerment: making customer services flexible enough to allow a single agent to provide a greater level of service. To do this, agents need relevant information. That information might come from lots of different web sites, systems, and documents spread across the company. The question is, how do they get to the information they need? One way is to use a comprehensive but simple search engine, just like they do on the Internet each day.

But CRM analytics can also put knowledge, rather than raw information, into the hands of the agents. Oracle provides this to its CRM customers through a tool called Real-Time Decisions (RTD) that delivers customer-specific analytics to the agent desktop, advising them on how to best serve the customer they’re speaking with at that moment. This allows the agents to use this knowledge to make decisions, and then you have to support them with systems that let them really help the customer. So once again, we're back to agent empowerment.

But there are other ways to deliver better service beyond improving your call centers. One significant change we’re starting to see is the use of social networking concepts in business environments. Many of the people in the contact centers are already heavy users of MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr. They’re proficient with online chat and use rich web-based applications in their personal lives to connect to friends and family in new ways. These concepts will become increasingly important in business and Oracle intends to lead the way with these Social CRM applications with our recently announced Fusion Edge Applications.

I've already mentioned that web based self-help was the most popular service mechanism. What I didn't mention was that e-mail was the second favorite. By doing a better job of customer self-service and providing other options like email, businesses can deliver better customer satisfaction and relieve the pressure on their overloaded contact centers.

Oracle’s customers using our CRM Self Service applications are seeing great benefits in call center efficiency, customer satisfaction, as well as green benefits through massive reduction in paper use.

POL: Will self-service play an expanded role in the future customer experience?

LEGUISQUET: In EMEA we're seeing more and more organizations embracing self-service. But this isn't the self-service approach of 5 years ago where the customer simply submits a query that might eventually be answered by a contact centre agent. Today self-service is about delivering knowledge directly to the customer. You let them not only view their billing information, but analyze it, figuring out the right service or product to purchase in order to get more from their relationship with your business.

POL: How can CRM software prevent call centers from falling behind in the future?

LEGUISQUET: Ultimately it's all about embracing the right processes and deploying the technology to support them. This means ensuring the right customer service processes are deployed and understood. In turn, the processes are supported by properly trained staff that has the ability to make real decisions supported by customer knowledge.

And finally, customer choice is key to customer satisfaction. Give your customers the ability to choose when and how to contact you based on their own needs and preferences. I don't know anyone who wants to bend to the will of the company they are paying for service.