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PROGRAMME : European Customer Experience World 2011

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Day 1, Tuesday 24 May, 2011

08:30  Registration & Refreshments

09:00  Welcome & Introduction: John Murphy, Telefonica O2 Professor of Customer Management, Manchester Business School

09:10  Why Customer Experience is the Answer to Challenging Times: John Murphy, Telefonica O2 Professor of Customer Management, Manchester Business School

Dr. Murphy examines why satisfaction or loyalty measures aren’t enough to measure the effectiveness of the customer experience and, more importantly, predict customer retention. He will demonstrate the need to have a three-dimensional approach to measuring retention, introducing the construct of commitment and forms of commitment: Value based, Emotional, Continuance and Obligatory, and a framework in which all four work together.

Anything that cannot be measured cannot be managed. It is challenging but important that organisations have simple, relevant indicators that monitor the impact of their customer experience.

Many confuse strategic measures (a “dipstick” measure that provides a general overview) with tactical measures (measures that solve a specific problem) and tend to go overboard with data collection. It is vital to understand why an organisation needs those measures before creating a platform for measurement.

The C4 indicator, for example, measures customer experience to predict retention measuring commitment, satisfaction, loyalty and trust, and a framework in which all four work together. It measures these four constructs and creates a score that predicts retention. The indicator is strategic, providing a broad, macro overview of where the organisation needs to focus. Other measurement tools like Servqual or the Empathy index identify specific areas of improvement in specific environments.

Supporting Statistics:

  • 74% of customers would be prepared to pay more for a product if it came with better service.
  • 24% of UK customers stopped doing business with a company within the last six months due to a bad customer experience.

Key reasons:

  • 23% Unfair fees or charges
  • 22% Poor product or service quality
  • 19% Rude or disinterested employees
  • 12% Couldn’t get hold of anyone to deal with my problem
  • 7% Discounts for new customers but not for existing customers
  • 4% Inadequate return or refund policy
  • 5% Out of territory call centres
  • 1% Inadequate environmental policy
  • 7% Other
  • The longest time UK’s shoppers are prepared to queue is two minutes, down from five minutes only six years ago!
  • Two-thirds of UK customers have walked away from buying something because they weren’t prepared to wait.
  • 51% of UK customers don’t enter a shop when they spot a queue.
  • Only 2% of UK customers trust advertising as the primary source of information when choosing a product or service.

09:30  Plenary Session - Beyond "Better Sameness": Creating Experiences that Influence Behavior: Frank Capek, CEO, Customer Innovations

If you feel that the end result of your current customer experience is “better sameness” rather than a customer experience that truly influences behavior, this presentation gives you ways for transcend “better sameness”: case studies you can use to win support, technical detail on how to capture the right measurements in the right way; and a clear relationship between cause and effect.

Prevailing approaches to customer experience are fundamentally out of touch with practical business realities. It doesn’t matter how closely you listen to the “voice of the customer”. It doesn’t matter how satisfied your customers are or how willing they are to recommend you. It doesn’t even matter how easy you are to do business with or how differentiated the experience is. The ONLY customer experience investments that matter are those that positively and profitably influence behaviour.

Outcomes-Based Experience Design is focused on delivering specific experiences that directly influence the key behaviours most critical to business success; customers that:
  • Return more frequently,
  • Are willing to spend more.
  • Are willing to pay a premium.
  • Adopt new service offerings.

10:15  Plenary Session: Ensuring Organizations Have a Clear CS/CE Strategy: James Eadie, Olympic Portfolio Director, The Coca-Cola Company

  • Leveraging sponsorship properties to deliver better consumer experience.
  • Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games.
  • Delivering sustainable experiences.

10:45  Coffee & Networking Break

11:05  Plenary Session - Preventing "Help": Stefan Osthaus, Vice President, Worldwide Support & Customer Experience, Symantec Corp

Symantec’s customer experience leaders learned that, for customers, getting help when they need it makes or breaks the experience. This case study tells you how Symantec gets to the customer before they need help, and how to use a 10-Step launch for your customer experience strategy.

Before you invest the farm in improving your customer experience, you need to understand what matters most to customers. In this success story from Symantec, their customer experience leaders learned that for customers, getting help when they need it makes or breaks the experience.

In this session you will hear how a clear customer satisfaction and customer experience strategy has been successfully implemented in a real case study, and get a straightforward 10-step launch into your own strategy.

Hear how the popular Norton products division of Symantec performed a technology turnaround, followed by a diligent focus on providing help to customers.

Learn about the Symantec brand vision for increasing loyalty and brand advocacy.

11:35  Plenary Session: Why You Need the Voice of the Customer: Henning Hansen, President & CEO, Confirmit

It’s been clear for some time that the Customer Experience is key to improving organisations at a strategic level.

To understand how to improve the Customer Experience, you need to understand where you are now. And not where you think you are. It takes more than a quick annual survey, it takes a real Voice of the Customer programme, and one that is adapted to the customers you serve, today.

From streamlining business processes to identifying training opportunities and new sales channels, the Voice of the Customer feeds into almost every aspect of the business. Hear how leading businesses are taking Voice of the Customer programmes to a new level; implementing new ways of communicating with customers, sharing their views and taking action to ensure that they retain competitive advantage in a challenging environment.

12:05  Speaker Panel Q & A: Moderated by Chair, with morning Session speakers

12:35  Lunch and Round-Table Discussions

14:00  4 Streams

The following sessions are broken into four individual streams that run in parallel from 14:00 to 15:30
Each Stream looks at the “how to” of customer experience, with case study presentations and facilitator-led group interaction and Q&A.

Stream 1: Putting Social Media into the Customer Experience: Results That Matter: Leader: Mark Michelson, President/CEO, Threads Qualitative Research

Understanding The Customer Experience Through New Media. 

The singular challenge facing business today is how, when and where to add social media to the customer experience mix. Stream 1 includes the social media landscape; multi-channel strategy; listening and interpreting and social media scouring.

We know the customer experience is often dependent on expectations. For years advertising and PR have been able to control and guide messaging to the masses. Today’s social media puts the control in the hands of the customer. So how does one understand the customer experience using new media?

In this session we will explore how social media influences shopper and consumer expectations as well as their behavior, and how mobile media is changing the in-store experience for shoppers.

The old models of “build it and they will come” no longer work. Today’s shoppers demand a more enriching customer experience. From high tech to high touch – shoppers need more sensory involvement and customer service can often be the prime differentiator.

With the new age of both social and mobile media – the retailers’ advantage has been eroded. Pricing transparency is critical in a new age where shoppers armed with smartphone apps allow them to compare prices and buy from competitors on the spot. These converging technologies will require brick-and-mortar retailers to evolve from selling environments to buying environments.

Those businesses who engage the customer fully — on their terms and at all levels — will be the ones that customers talk about in social media, leading to continuous renewal of expectations and new experiences.

1. Scaling with the Social Customers’ Changing Expectations: Michael Wu, Principal Scientist of Analytics, Lithium Technologies

This session will show you an effective, long term, and cost-effective strategy for collaborating with your social customers. This strategy not only addresses customer’s changing needs in a scalable way, it also adapts to the rapid changes in the market. Finally, we will examine a few case studies involving different uses of the strategy with demonstrable ROI. 

The rise of social media has turned your customers and into “social customers.” Since they are connected, collaborative and communicative, they are empowered. These social customers have very different expectations from your organization, and they can be contentious if their needs are not met. Many companies try to address this issue with social technologies. But social is not new — humans have been social since prehistoric times. What is new is the way we communicate. First, we will try to understand some of the changing expectations of the social customers from a communications perspective.

Once we understand what the social customers expect, we need a scalable solution to address them. However, the only way any organization can scale with “social” is via “social.” This means that companies can never hire enough employees to deal with all of the voices of customers on the social web. The only scalable solution is to collaborate with your social customers and let them help you deal with all the voices out there. How can this be done effectively?

This session will show you an effective, long term, and cost-effective strategy for collaborating with your social customers. This strategy not only addresses customer’s changing needs in a scalable way, it also adapts to the rapid changes in the market. Finally, we will examine a few case studies involving different uses of the strategy with demonstrable ROI.

2. Support Customers Through Social Media: Gina Debogovich, Senior Manager Communities, Best Buy

  • Shift calls to social media channels
  • Engage in brand building online discussion
  • Harness the power of employees to champion the brand online

3. From Effort and Satisfaction to Loyalty: Warren Buckley, MD, Customer Services; Bian Salins, Head of Social Media Innovation, BT

So everyone wants to know the value of social media. In truth, every individual business that dares to take a risk will find out and know the answer. For BT, using social media for service has more than proved itself by driving down customer effort, increasing satisfaction and yes, has even set them on the path to customer loyalty. If you’re one of those asking – is it truly possible? Don’t miss the BT story and insight on how it can be done as told by Managing Director for BT’s Customer Service, Warren Buckley and Head of Social Media Innovation, Bian Salins.

4. Using Social Media to enhance the B2B Customer Journey: David Tarrant, Global Technical Community Manager, RS Components and Helen Trim, Managing Director, FreshNetworks

There’s a common myth that social media is not suitable for B2B businesses, but this is simply not the case.

This session will show how B2B business RS Components has enhanced customer experience through their online community hub DesignSpark. The session will cover:

  • How to integrate social media into the customer experience mix
  • Reaching customers at different touchpoints and stages of the buying cycle
  • Developing advocacy through social media

Stream 2: Measuring What Matters: Key Metrics: Leader: Greg Roche, Director, The Leadership Factor

In today’s time-critical and performance-management world everything is measured. But are we measuring the right things, or the wrong things? And what difference does measuring anything make anyway? This is a chance to learn from organisations that have improved their customer experience for the better by making sure they are measuring what matters.

1. Why the Public Sector Should Engage with Customer Experience: Sharon Bayliss, Assistant Director, Customer Experience & Commercial Services, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham

As funding decreases, the Public Sector has responded with cost reductions and cutting essential services. This case study details how the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham applied customer experience principles to raise income streams, using an approach based on and measured by four key principles.

  • Everyone is well aware of the financial challenges facing the Public Sector; as funding decreases the traditional approach has been to respond by cost reduction and cutting essential services.
  • This case study details how the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham applied customer experience principles to raise income streams.
  • Using an approach based on and measured by four key principles, the success of the initiative resulted in their appointment as LGC Council of the Year 2010.

2. Giorgio Cavalieri, Head of Customer Experience & CRM, Fiat Europe

It’s tough to build a convincing case to change and invest in customer experience with a disenchanted franchise network that is facing diminishing volumes and shrinking profits. Doing so in the middle of a company re-organization adds to the challenge. Fiat builds the case for action based not on customer satisfaction or brand differentiation, but on rejection avoidance and word-of-mouth as the clear "tools" for short- and mid-term business growth.

  • Customer Experience and CRM: Why together?
  • Managing the sales pipeline and the shopper experience versus managing the "buyer" experience
  • Providing performance visibility and speed in shopper feedback resolution
  • Obtaining and accelerating corporate and dealer network adoption
  • Results of two years of work and short term plans
     

3. Measuring employee satisfaction and turning it into employee loyalty: Nick Iles, Global User Experience Director, Unilever

We’ve all heard it. Happy employees make loyal employees. Do you try to measure employee satisfaction? Unilever measures employee satisfaction with Vovici across all countries for its internal services, pulling from an employee group of 165k globally. Listen to how this global giant measures and improves the satisfaction of its employees and in turn, drives productivity.

4. Egg-stracting value from Customer Feedback: Brian Tripptree, Customer Insight Manager, Citi UK Consumer

Egg uses customer feedback as a vital tool to identify and fix customer issues before they become future complaints.

In this session, Brian will discuss how Egg developed and evolved its customer feedback activities to support both general marketing and product driven surveys as well as event driven surveys triggered by a customer service interaction.

He will explain how the team at Egg uses Confirmit Horizons to deliver actionable insight about the Voice of the Customer into the business. This insight enables the Customer Experience team to shine a light on the processes, communications and interactions that are not working for customers and engage with senior management to make decisions and take action.

By ensuring that Egg asks the right questions, using the right channel at the right time, the company is able to:

  • Retain high value customers.
  • Monitor and develop agents; reducing staff turnover.
  • Develop an incentive scheme that rewards the people who really create outstanding customer experiences.

Stream 3: Catching People Doing What’s Right: Employee Engagement: Leader: Martin Howe, MA MSc Chartered MCIPD, UK Employee Engagement Advisor, The WOW! Awards

How do you create a culture that recognizes the great behaviours that lead to consistently fantastic customer service? By “catching people doing what’s right”. Three leading organisations share case studies that provide lots of hints, tips and insights into best practices that unlock the power of recognition and the release of all the added value that highly motivate employees delivery huge amounts of discretionary effort brings.

  • How do you successfully recognise the great behaviours that lead to consistently fantastic, customer service?
  • Can you change a culture from a focus on learning from mistakes, complaints and failures to one that leverages the power of recognition, by encouraging positive customer feedback to begin “catching people doing things right”?
  • Three leading organisations in their field share their story in case studies that provide lots of hints, tips and insights into best practices.

For many years Customer Service professionals working in the field of Employee Engagement have known in their hearts that there is a direct correlation between levels of engagement and service performance. Now, the publication of the McLeod report, “Engaging for Success”, represents the culmination of growing evidence from quantitative research that supports the business case for investing in engagement. Arguable the key driver is RECOGNITION.

1. Patrick Hargreaves, Customer Experience Manager, Yorkshire Water

  • How customer compliments serve a wider purpose for a household brand during unsettling times.

2. Keith Jones, Senior Operations Manager, Scottish Power

  • An innovative strategy for recognition and engagement for a team dealing exclusively with dissatisfied customers.

3. Toni Adams, UK Customer Service Manager, LOVEFiLM

  • How to meet the challenge of entrusting your customer service to an outsource provider.
  • How a strategic initiative can ensure the right behaviours are identified and celebrated even when communication is mainly electronic and digital. 

Stream 4: Turning Strategy Into Action: Leader: Mike Wittenstein, CEO, Storyminers

Probably the most difficult part of customer experience work is getting it adopted within the enterprise. This track will cover techniques, tools, best practices and technologies that can move you quickly from thinking about customer experience to doing customer experience.

1. The Six Steps to Developing a Customer Service Strategy and Implementing Change: Jacqui Wetherly, Customer Care Manager, Starbucks Coffee Company

  • Complacency – The realisation of the need for change
  • Confusion – Understanding the reality and the size of the change needed
  • Clarification – Making sense of the reality
  • Creation – Defining a common vision
  • Communications – Sharing our ambition and vision with our partner
  • Continue - How we become world class, sustainment and making it a reality for all our customers
  • Complacency - The realisation of the need for change: How do you listen to customers and employees?
  • Confusion - Understanding the reality and the size of the change needed: Who knows what? What is World Class Customer Service?
  • Clarification - Making sense of the reality: How do you solve the problem of inconsistency?
  • Creation - Defining a common vision: How do you create a common goal and set clear expectations?
  • Communication - Sharing our ambition and vision with our partners: Leading from the top; Customer Service is from the heart, not just skin deep.
  • Continue - How we become World Class, sustainment and making it a reality for all our customers: What does it take to turn strategy into action? What is the answer to consistently delivering World Class Customer Service?

2. Product & Service Innovation Through Effective Voice of the Customer Programme: Stefan Osthaus, Vice President, Worldwide Support & Customer Experience, Symantec Corp

How you do the right things within a realistic horizon for achievement? In this practical session you will learn how to determine the key loyalty drivers for your company and then build a realistic action plan to improve them to perfection.

3. TBD: Christopher Long, Acting Centre Manager, RBS

4. Closing the Engagement Loop: From Understanding Customers to Action on a Global Basis: John McKechie, Vice President, Customer & Sales Service, Stora Enso

The session will explore the challenges faced in rolling out a Voice of the Customer programme in an organisation whose operations span more than forty countries and has customers in more than eighty countries. You’ll learn how a leading paper, packaging and forest products group transformed its customer experience and satisfaction by implementing a Global Voice of the Customer programme.

The session will explore the challenges faced in rolling out a Voice of the Customer programme in an organisation whose operations span more than forty countries and has customers in more than eighty countries, speaking in excess of twenty different languages.

Mr. McKechie will share key insights into the challenges and the processes for creating a Voice of the Customer system that is focused on driving action and improvement from customer feedback. The audience will learn how to:

  • Ensure the right employees receive the right information from the right customers.
  • Maximise the value of the customer feedback by combining with financial and operational data.
  • Create action-driven customer feedback that follows standardised best operating procedures.
  • Meet the challenges of creating a customer centric culture in a large international organisation.
  • Learn from customer feedback by adapting internal processes to ensure improvements in customer experience.

 

15:30  All Streams: Coffee and Networking Break

16:00  Plenary Session - The Network Expert: Nicola Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist, BT Global Services

  • Discover how the behaviour of the multi-channel, multi-tasking connected customer can challenge traditional models for customer contacts.
  • Find out why more choice means the customer seek advice more often and from multiple sources.
  • What the contact centre of the future will look like.

16:45  Plenary Session - Summary/Call to Action: John Murphy, Telefonica O2 Professor of Customer Management, Manchester Business School

17:30  Adjourn

19:00  Drinks Reception/Dinner with surprise act

Day 2, Wednesday 25 May, 2011

08:30  Registration & Refreshments

09:00  Plenary Session - Introduction & Recap: John Murphy, Telefonica O2 Professor of Customer Management, Manchester Business School

09:30  Plenary Session - Why Customer Experience is the Differentiator and Why We Do Things Differently at Metro Bank: Anthony Thomson, Chairman, Metro Bank plc

Creating fans not customers – the Metro bank philosophy:

  • Launching the first new High Street Bank for over 150 years
  • The four myths of retail banking
  • The Metro bank model – turning banking on its head

10:00  Plenary Session - Customer Experience: The Next Wave: Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience¬†Transformist &¬†Managing Partner, Temkin Group

Perhaps the biggest question about customer experience is whether it has lasting value. Mr. Temkin address the long-term value of customer experience, and explores the competencies required to transform the organization to support a customer experience with lasting ROI.

  • Almost all companies want to improve their customer experience, but some question whether customer experience has lasting value.
  • They wonder if customer experience will become irrelevant, like so many other short-lived programs.
  • This presentation addresses the question of the long-term value of customer experience.

Four competencies are required to transform an organisation:

  • Purposeful Leadership
  • Compelling Brand Values
  • Employee Engagement
  • Customer-Connectedness

10:45  Coffee & Networking Break

11:05  Plenary Session - The Disney Approach to Quality Service

Disney Institute has paved the way for millions of business professionals and more than half of The Fortune 100 companies to benchmark and adapt proven best practices in customer experience; the same ones that have sustained the success of the Disney organization for over 85 years. Learn how to adapt Disney’s proven best practices to your own organization and role from a seasoned Disney leader, who will share personal experiences and insights.

Disney Theme Parks and Resorts have a long-standing reputation for incredible service and friendly employees, a reputation gained not by magic but by a consistently applied business philosophy. During this Disney Institute program, you’ll learn about the Disney attention to detail and how Disney Cast Members (employees) are trained to treat their Guests (customers) as VIPs.

You’ll learn how to:

  • anticipate the needs, wants and emotions of your customers in order to exceed their service expectations;
  • bring consistency to your organization by establishing quality standards;
  • design a delivery system that focuses on the employees, environment and processes that enhance quality service;
  • create a service plan that integrates quality standards and delivery standards that focus on exceeding family expectations.

11:35  Plenary Session: Transforming an Organisation Through Customer Experience & Corporate Strategy Alignment: Graham Webster, Director, Customer Experience, Telefonica S.A

Learn how and why Telefónica is “Turning Customers into Fans” by creating positive emotional relationships with their customers. Telefonica created a common Customer Promise approach across functions, including senior management commitment, to improve alignment and implemented an integrated delivery approach that engaged people to create and deliver improved customer experiences.

In his presentation you will learn about:

  • Why Telefónica is “Turning Customers into Fans” and the commercial rationale for this.
  • How creating positive emotional relationships with their customers is at the core of their strategy and how creating Fans to reduce churn is essential
  • The critical nature of senior management commitment and personal leadership
  • Senior Management Learnings
  • A common Customer Promise approach across functions to improve alignment with an Integrated approach to deliver the Customer Promise.
  • Engaging people to create and deliver improved customer experiences
  • Some Social Media activities being undertaken as this becomes increasingly important in the Customer Experience.

 

12:05  Speaker Panel Q & A: Moderated by Chair, with morning Session speakers

12:35  Lunch with Round Table Discussions

14:00  4 Streams

The following sessions are broken into four individual streams that run in parallel from 14:00 to 15:30
Each Stream looks at the “how to” of customer experience, with case study presentations and facilitator-led group interaction and Q&A.

Stream 1: Integrating Social Media into the Multi-Channel Experience: Leader: Mark Michelson, President/CEO, Threads Qualitative Research

Understanding The Customer Experience Through New Media.

The singular challenge facing business today is how, when and where to add social media to the customer experience mix. Stream 1 includes the social media landscape; multi-channel strategy; listening and interpreting and social media scour.

We know the customer experience is often dependent on expectations. For years advertising and PR have been able to control and guide messaging to the masses. Today’s social media puts the control in the hands of the customer. So how does one understand the customer experience using new media?

In this session we will explore how social media influences shopper and consumer expectations as well as their behavior, and how mobile media is changing the in-store experience for shoppers.

The old models of “build it and they will come” no longer work. Today’s shoppers demand a more enriching customer experience. From high tech to high touch – shoppers need more sensory involvement and customer service can often be the prime differentiator.

With the new age of both social and mobile media – the retailers’ advantage has been eroded. Pricing transparency is critical in a new age where shoppers armed with smartphone apps allow them to compare prices and buy from competitors on the spot. These converging technologies will require brick-and-mortar retailers to evolve from selling environments to buying environments.

Those businesses who engage the customer fully — on their terms and at all levels — will be the ones that customers talk about in social media, leading to continuous renewal of expectations and new experiences.

1. Social Media: Cutting Through The Hype: Craig Palmer, Practice Lead, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Europe, Asia and U.S.

This session will look at a number of real-life examples where organisations working with Cable & Wireless have adopted social media as a channel within their overall contact centre strategy. You’ll hear how to create a plan that convinces key executives that there is a tangible business case for the integration of social media. 

2. Complementing Customer Service with Social Media: Ben Kay, Head of Service, EverythingEverywhere Ltd

Mr. Kay’s presentation addresses successful implementation of social media: the business case and benefits, the value, the power of the social customer, partners who can support, integrating into customer service channels, the best channels, and examples of good, practical ways to engage customers using social media,

We all know that we should engage with our customers via social media, yet there are few examples of good (practical) implementations. We wrestle with the business case, and lose sight of the key benefits that social can bring. So how do we successfully implement social strategy? What existing channels exist to support a successful implementation?

  • A customer service approach to social – who, what, where and how?
  • Integrating social media into traditional customer service channels and beyond
  • Using partners to support your social strategy
  • The power of a social customer – Learning from mistakes
  • Determining the value of social investment

3. People Behind The Tweets: Heather Taylor, Corporate Community Manager, BBC

What it takes to be a social community manager – what skills do you need
and what your day really is like. What do businesses need to consider when
hiring teams and giving them the support that they need.

4. Where are the Social Media Cops – A Safe Environment for Users: Manish Sinha, VP Customer Care, Yahoo!

User contributions and participation are vital to successful engagement online, but managing the environment is necessary to ensure users do contribute and their participation is not hindered. This presentation looks at the ways in which people contribute and the steps companies need to take to ensure safety all round – for users, visitors, and the corporation.

Stream 2: Measuring What Matters: Key Metrics: Leader: Greg Roche, Director, The Leadership Factor

In today’s time-critical and performance-management world everything is measured. But are we measuring the right things, or the wrong things? And what difference does measuring anything make anyway? This is a chance to learn from organisations that have improved their customer experience for the better by making sure they are measuring what matters.

1. How to Stop Whining and Start Measuring Empathy: Nina Gyubbenet, Customer Operations Director, TELE2 Russia

How can you turn complainers into satisfied customers? How do you develop empathy in employees, much less be able to measure the increase? TELE2 Russia found answers to both these difficult issues and measured significant increases in customer – and employee – satisfaction.

“A Complaint is a Gift” The goal: Inspire all employees on all levels with “A Complaint is a Gift” philosophy.

The approach:

  • Welcome complaints and encourage customers to talk about their problems.
  • Handle complaints using the 8-Step Formula that solves the emotional and rational part of the problem .
  • Be the best in industry case-solving and feedback time standards.
  • Fine-tune the complaint escalation process and interaction with other departments to support fast and efficient complaint handling.
  • Anticipate problems and avoid errors.

By introducing this concept customer satisfaction increased by 30% points and dissatisfaction dropped by a factor of two!

The Empathy Project

This is the story of how the ideas learned in ECEW conference can be converted into practice.

Two years ago I attended ECEW and was really impressed by the presentation done by Jamie Lywood from Empathy Rating Index Company (ERIC) showing strong correlation between empathy, satisfaction and business profitability. The main idea was the importance of measuring interaction between agent and customer getting to the core experience of how it feels to be processed as a customer.

So the BIG IDEA I brought home from ECEW conference was the EMPATHY PROJECT. The Empathy Project goal was employee behaviour transformation from intelligent voice machine approach to emotional involvement, understanding and real help that increases both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

The Empathy Project goal was employee behaviour transformation from intelligent voice machine approach to emotional involvement, understanding and real help that increases both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

Through the Empathy Project, we:

  • Developed Key Competence Model for customer service employees in all channels
  • Measured empathy level in the beginning of the project and year after.
  • Developed on-going Empathy training for employees (train the trainer approach).
  • Learned how to measure Empathy.
  • Incremented Empathy into interaction evaluation model and into employee bonus model.

By introducing the Empathy Project our customer satisfaction level increased by extra 20% and reached 90%.

2.  It's Their Experience That Counts – Not Yours!: Colin Bates, Managing Director, Customer Champions; Shane Slater, Sales & Marketing Director, QinetiQ

QinetiQ recognised the importance of allowing their long-term, high-value customers to determine what is important to them in the customer relationship when defining the areas covered by QinetiQ’s customer feedback programme. The presentation will cover:

  • How the customer feedback program has been utilised for feedback across all customers.
  • How this feedback mechanism is integrated with other feedback channels.
  • How this unified programme is used to drive change.

The relationship with an individual customer can last for decades and be of extremely high value. Ensuring an excellent customer relationship over the long term when not only what you offer will change, but who provides it, is a significant challenge. The delivery of an excellent and consistent customer experience has to be the foundation of such a long-term relationship. 

The QinetiQ customer base contains both public and private companies, as well as UK and international organisations, but the largest single customer of is the Ministry of Defence. The Dept. of Defence determined how to evaluate the performance of their key suppliers. This evaluation not only impacts current programmes but is also used in determining suppliers for future business. QinetiQ recognised the importance of allowing their long-term, high-value customers to decide what is important to them in the customer relationship when defining the areas covered by QinetiQ’s customer feedback programme.

The presentation will cover:

  • How the customer feedback programme has been utilised for feedback across all customers.
  • How this feedback mechanism is integrated with other feedback channels to cover strategic, programme and transactional customer experiences. 
  • How this unified programme is used to drive change:
    • Strategic decision making in market positioning
    • Programme based
    • Customer specific

3. Practical Lessons from Sanlam’s Customer Experience Journey: Chantel Botha, Business Lead, Sanlam Personal Finance; Francois Ozrovech, Head Client Contact Center, Sanlam Personal Finance

This presentation tracks the journey taken by Sanlam Personal Finance to discover the best questions to ask customers that truly answer exactly where and how they could improve their customer experience, including how improvements to the experience were measured and quantified; the practical tools and techniques that were used; how they built the organisational culture needed to sustain a good customer experience, among others.

 

When looking at the leaders in customer experience, Starbucks, Zappos and the Ritz Carlton are at the top of the list. When first introduced to the subject of customer experience four years ago, Mr. Botha was looking at banks and insurers - companies that are similar to his business. He admired the folks at Starbucks but was convinced it was easier to dazzle customers with a cup of coffee and far more difficult to impress a customer with life or disability insurance experiences.

The challenge in his business is to make something as grim as a death claim a remarkable and positive experience, or something as boring as requesting an address change via email a memorable experience. The presentation will illustrate at a practical level some of the paths Sanlam Personal Finance redesigned, and talk about the measurable benefits of customer experience. It tracks the journey taken by Sanlam Personal Finance to find the best questions to ask customers that truly answer exactly where and how they could improve their customer experience.

The questions answered in this presentation include:

  1. How did they convince senior executives that there was a problem?
  2. How did they build the business case that got the necessary funding?
  3. How did they build the organisational culture needed to sustain a good customer experience?
  4. What practical tools, techniques were used?
  5. How were improvements to the experience measured and quantified?

Plus Tips for anyone involved in or starting the journey of creating a great customer experience.

4. Measuring Customer Service: Getting One Step Ahead of Your Regulator: Tim Hughes, Welsh Water and John Hughes, Customer Service Network (CSN), MBA, MIBC, MIM, CMICS

 

As regulators increasingly require industries to measure the service they deliver, and as research budgets continue to be scrutinized, the question is: How do you deliver a customer experience that allows you to reduce costs as well as ensuring there is meaningful company-led customer research that improves service in your business? The presenters describe how to do both successfully and gain early warning of customer service issues.

Stream 3: Catching People Doing What’s Right: Employee Engagement: Leader: Martin Howe, MA MSc Chartered MCIPD, UK Employee Engagement Advisor, The WOW! Awards

How do you create a culture that recognizes the great behaviours that lead to consistently fantastic customer service? By “catching people doing what’s right”. Three leading organisations share case studies that provide lots of hints, tips and insights into best practices.

1. Terri Bailey, General Manager, People & Development, Virgin Holidays

  • Overview of engagement measurement at Virgin Holidays
  • Company Values: how we live our values to engage our people
  • Linking performance management to reward, retention and engagement

2. Happiness at Work: Luxury or Necessity?: Clive Hutchinson, Company Leader, Cougar Automation; Uta Langley, Director, 2 the point training

This interactive session provides a number of practical, no or low-cost ideas that will increase your staff’s happiness at work and improve business results. Other topics include whether happy employees are truly more effective, and how employee happiness affects business results.

Your front line staff delivers the customer experience.

But:

  • How does their happiness influence your business results?
  • Are truly happy people really more effective at work or, as some believe, are they just off to the coffee machine?
  • This interactive session is practical and provides a number of noor low-cost ideas that will increase your staff’s happiness at work and improve business results.

3. What About the Employee Experience?: Craig Lee, Manager Customer Experience & CRM Programmes, Emirates Group

In the design and delivery of exceptional customer experience the employee experience matters most! 

  • The role of a designed employee experience
  • Creating the context
  • Recognising the employee "moments of truth"
  • The role of brand in energising the engagement

4. How public sector services benefit from recognising and celebrating excellent service in the midst of challenging economic times: Annette Rowe, Director

Sharing and aligning the challenge; using performance measurement and development to capture people doing the right thing; developing the right frameworks to recognise ‘what great look likes’, examples of how to integrate innovative and simple engagement techniques.

Stream 4: Turning Strategy Into Action: Leader: Mike Wittenstein, CEO, Storyminers

Probably the most difficult part of customer experience work is getting it adopted within the enterprise. This track will cover techniques, tools, best practices and technologies that can move you quickly from thinking about customer experience to doing customer experience.

1. Why do this intervention?: Dr. Ram Raghavan, Managing Director, Talengene.

There are 3 primary reasons why organizations do not succeed in transforming effective strategies into ‘reality’. The first reason is that the MD or Senior managers might not take steps to identify areas on non-alignment. It is about clarifying perceptions and creating a common understanding. The second reason is about ensuring that people responsible for implementing “Act” on it. They need to have the requisite skills, competencies and more importantly the right attitude to take it forward. The third reason is the lack of understanding of the market or customer needs. Designing a product or service which the customers don’t want will only result in strategic failure. It is about getting people on board, getting them to deliver to move in a desired direction.

  • Importance of alignment
  • Tactical to Purposeful
  • Linking Strategy and Behaviour
  • The employee factor
  • Customer experience
  • C4 Indicator
  • CUBE
  • LIFE approach to Strategy

 

2. Shop Direct Group in 2011: Ian Golding, Head of Customer Experience Implementation, Shop Direct Group

Since 2005, Shop Direct Group has been engaged in a transformational change programme. This presentation charts their metrics, innovative methods to engage employees in improving the customer experience, and includes a look ahead to their plans to take their customer service to the next level.

Since 2005, under the Customer 1st banner, Shop Direct Group has been engaged on a transformational change programme through the introduction of internal and external customer metrics, as well as innovative methods to engage employees in improving the customer experience. As a result, significant gains in customer advocacy have been made.

2011 will turn many of these tactical improvements into a clear customer experience strategy to take our customer service to the next level.

  • Shop Direct Group in 2011
  • Our brand transformation
  • Brand differentiation
  • Changes in Customer behaviour
  • Our customer experience transformation – the customer jigsaw!
  • Introduction of the Customer 1st Programme
  • Innovation in customer measures and employee engagement
  • Evolvement of internal customer related communication
  • Building and creating a ‘world class customer experience strategy’
  • Turning the ‘tactical into the ‘strategic’

Developing three strategic work streams

  • Customer service strategy – where we are aiming for
  • Customer service improvement – fixing the ‘here and now’
  • People advocacy – turning our own people into advocates of our brands

3. BOA Europe Credit Card Business: John Barrett, Head of Operational Strategy, Bank of America Europe Card Service

  • Overview of Bank of America Europe Credit Card business.
  • From “fighting fires” to being strategic.
  • Developing the strategy and making it actionable.
  • Having the right organisation in place to make it happen.
  • Demonstrating success and value to the bottom line.

 

15:30  Coffee & Networking Break

16:00  Plenary Session - Building a Customer-Focused Culture & Inspiring Employee Happiness and Engagement to Wow Your Customers: Jane Judd, Senior Manager, Customer Loyalty Team, Zappos Inc and Marlene Kanagusuku, Manager, Customer Loyalty Team, Zappos Inc

• What is the ROI on social media?
• Create more opportunities to communicate with your customers.
• People want to be heard.

16:45  Plenary Session - Summary/Call to Action: John Murphy, Telefonica O2 Professor of Customer Management, Manchester Business School

17:30  Adjourn

Day 3, Thursday 26 May, 2011

08:30  Registration & Refreshments

09:00  Workshop Open: Disney's Approach to People Management - Led by Nicole Lauria, Facilitator & Content Specialist, Disney Institute

Communicating and nurturing the culture of your organization is vital to the successful management of your employees. From recruiting to career management, employees want to know your expectations and how you are going to support them in meeting those expectations.

This program will help you to:

  • Select employees with the skills who are the right "fit" for your organisation's culture
  • Train employees to make their best contribution and provide them with opportunities to improve their performance
  • Communicate with all levels of your organization
  • Provide a supportive environment that celebrates success

13:00  Adjourn


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