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Key findings from Calabrio's State of the Contact Center 2022 Report with Customer Service and Experience Expert Shep Hyken.
In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
State of the Contact Center 2022 with Shep Hyken - Part 1
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[00:00:00] Dave Hoekstra: Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
[00:00:20] Dave Hoekstra: My name is Dave Hoekstra, Product Evangelist for Calabrio, and my guest today is Shep Hyken. Shep almost needs no introduction as he's been doing this for quite some time, but just to make sure for credibility purposes. Shep is a customer service and experience expert, and he's also the CAO, the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepherd Productions, where he engages audiences on any and all things customer experience.
[00:00:44] Dave Hoekstra: We're super excited to have Shep here today. To talk about the State of the Contact Center report. Just a little bit of background. Every year Calabrio does a survey with customers and managers and consumers across the industry to try and figure out where we are today in this wonderful world of contact centers that we do.
[00:01:04] Dave Hoekstra: And this year is no different. And this year we cameup with quite a few really key insights that, we want to talk about. So without really spending too much more time, Shep, thanks for joining us. Really glad you're here. And I'm just really interested who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself and then let's get into this report that we have to discuss.
[00:01:22] Shep Hyken: I think you've already told them a little bit about myself, Dave. So, but seriously, if you've been involved with Calabrio over the last few years, I was honored to be the keynote speaker and actually did several sessions and hosted at, I believe it was C3 back in around 2019, and yeah. San Antonio. Yes.
[00:01:41] Shep Hyken: And I've done a number of little projects with you andcorresponded and hung out a little bit since then. So, yep, that's a little bit about me. Very little. But I am a customer service experience expert. Been doing it for darn close to 40 years now. That's hard to believe. I was around before the internet.
[00:02:02] Shep Hyken: Remember the day and I walked uphill both ways to school and home I, something like that.
[00:02:07] Dave Hoekstra: I think you and I are in that same boat. I remember my first experience downloading an internet browser and saying, Oh my, I'm gonna have fun with this.
[00:02:16] Shep Hyken: Remember your first email address? Mine was a large number@compuserve.com.
[00:02:21] Dave Hoekstra: Yes. Mine was Juno. Do you remember Juno? I remember Juno, yeah. Yes. My, my first email address was Juno, where you had to tell it to download the internet. It would go fix and then it would connect, download your email and then disconnect you.
[00:02:35] Shep Hyken: My favorite noise was, Yeah, . Yeah,
[00:02:40] Dave Hoekstra: exactly. And what I remember about it is that you, it would download your email, disconnect you.
[00:02:44] Dave Hoekstra: So if you were waiting on an important email, you just had to keep connecting over and over again to try it.
[00:02:49] Shep Hyken: I remember. Haven't , we come a long way and we have, and it's amazing cuz I know we're probably gonna talk a little bit about, you know, traditional phone versus digital channels and I mean, it's really amazing what's changed. Actually
[00:03:02] Shep Hyken: I personally feel nothing has changed when it comes to customer support and customer service in that the customer has a question or a problem or even a complaint. They want resolved and then something happens, and at the end they are hopefully happy they've gotten their answer. Everything's fine.
[00:03:19] Shep Hyken: Now what's in the middle is change, but. The beginning and the end are exactly the same, so we know what we want the outcome to be. And that's exactly why I believe in the past hundred years, in the next hundred years, nothing's really going to change other than how we go about it. Nope.
[00:03:35] Dave Hoekstra: I mean, you go back to whatever the very first customer service interaction was.
[00:03:40] Dave Hoekstra: It was still about creating, you know, still about creating a great experience and for the vendor creating a brand loyalty. The ability for them to say, "Boy, I'd like to come back here and do this again". And that's kind of what we've, what we validated through a lot of this survey. A lot of this survey is kind of, kind of focuses on the concept of what Calabrio is calling a brand guardian, right?
[00:04:00] Dave Hoekstra: The, whether we're talking about the agent themselves, whether we're talking about the managers we're talking about the tools, right? The, what are the things that, that kind of help create that concept. So let's, I'll give you the floor to start with right off the bat.
[00:04:15] Dave Hoekstra: Let's talk about the report. What are, what's one of the things that really jumped out at you as the current hot button in CX and what we can do to address it.
[00:04:21] Shep Hyken: One of the biggest things that popped out at me and I actually created a video for Calabrio around this. As we looked at all the different findings, I was surprised at the disconnect between customers and brands as in the leadership and management of the brand.
[00:04:39] Shep Hyken: For example 78% of contact center managers think that their people provide emotional empathy to their customers. Yet only 58% of customers agree. And there's discrepancies like that make me realize that we've gotta make sure that our vision of what we want, our perception of what we want our customers to be thinking about us, or actually their perception of what we want them to think about, they need to start to match up.
[00:05:06] Shep Hyken: So, some pretty interesting stats and findings behind that specifically.
[00:05:12] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, I mean, one of the key ones that, that really jumps out at me is you know, for example, if we, in the state of the contact center report, everything is kind of laid out by key insights, right? And key insight number four in the report is that contact centers think they're doing a pretty good job, but consumers don't.
[00:05:29] Dave Hoekstra: Right? Exactly what you just said. So, for example,
[00:05:32] Shep Hyken: Look at the response times on that. Look at that. That's amazing to
[00:05:36] Dave Hoekstra: me. It really is, right? So quick response times. According to the report, 45% of consumers think that these contact centers are providing quick response times. Which, okay, that's probably what I would expect.
[00:05:49] Dave Hoekstra: But then when you ask the contact center manager, they think that 79% of the time they're meeting those expectations. That's a huge gap, right? That's you know, less than half of consumers, but more than three quarters of contact center managers think they're doing a good job.
[00:06:04] Dave Hoekstra: So where do you think this disconnect is coming?
[00:06:06] Shep Hyken: I think that they don't, I think they're better than they actually are. And what's amazing to me is when you find a company whose goal is to create an experience and then the customer reflects back their perception of the experience when they're in line and equal to each other.
[00:06:25] Shep Hyken: That doesn't happen as often as I think we want it to happen. So we, as companies need to know here's, I wrote an article about this just recently. I called it The Echo. And so you want customers to say something about you. By the way, this is a great exercise that you can do with your team, is sit down and say, What do we want our customers to be saying about us?
[00:06:49] Shep Hyken: And then we should go find out if they're actually saying it about us, because if they're not, we need to start putting into place practices, systems and processes that will allow us to get the customer to perceive what we're doing in alignment with what we want the customer to perceive. Make sense?
[00:07:06] Dave Hoekstra: Absolutely. And I think it plays into kind of the other key insight from the survey here. The, we asked the question you know, how's are you, is the consumer expectation that you are delivering multiple channels for communication?
[00:07:21] Shep Hyken: Right? This is a big delta. Big difference. 45% spread.
[00:07:25] Dave Hoekstra: 45% spread between what the consumer thinks and what the contact centers make.
[00:07:29] Dave Hoekstra: So let me just put it into real world terms. The contact centers think they're doing a great job delivering channels, but the consumer does not. The consumer is saying, You are not doing this as well as we hoped. So, okay let's break it down a little bit. Multiple channels for communication.
[00:07:46] Dave Hoekstra: What are the expectations that the customer is really looking at here?
[00:07:50] Shep Hyken: Sure. And by the way, let's define what those channels are, and I'll give you some examples. They're very obvious. Phone is a channel. Email is a channel texting, whether it be a chatbot or human to human text, that's a channel.
[00:08:03] Shep Hyken: And it's not so much that we might not be providing the channels for customer support, it's how well we're delivering in the channel. So I talk, in my speeches, I talk about creating consistency, and most of the time it's about creating, that experience where people come to work every day, putting forth their best effort, a consistent best effort.
[00:08:24] Shep Hyken: And then I started to say, Well, it's much more than that. The customer wants a consistent experience. Okay? And that means we want them to use the word always in front of whatever it is they want, so they always get back to me quickly. Would be a great one. Okay. Getting back to me quickly is just a common expectation, and this is what makes, by the way, amazing companies.
[00:08:45] Shep Hyken: Amazing is when you can put the word always in front of an expectation. And that means you're always meeting that customers and that's why they see you're amazing, not because you go over the top and above and beyond. So when it comes to delivering on multiple channels, we may be fantastic at keeping our hold times down to under two minutes.
[00:09:01] Shep Hyken:Okay? But if we're lousy at responding to email, and it's taking us two and three days to get back to somebody, that is what I call channel inconsistency. And that inconsistency might be what's causing this number to be such a big spread. Which by the way the number is 85% of contact that managers think they provide good service on multiple channels with communication.
[00:09:26] Shep Hyken: However, only 40. The 45% gap of customers believe that to be true. So I don't so much think it's that you didn't provide me the channel, although maybe it didn't, but whatever the channel. It's not working for me, so I'm gonna give you a bad grade on that. Exactly.
[00:09:42] Dave Hoekstra: And you know, it's funny because if you probably work with most contact centers that say, Oh, we do we, you can email us, you can call us, you can chat us.
[00:09:51] Dave Hoekstra: Right. So I honestly believe that the part of the, a lot of the discrepancy here is not necessarily that the channels aren't available, it's the word deliver. That really kind of matters here. It's, you know, how many times Shep have you emailed an organization and you just know it's gonna be a week and a half before they get back to you?
[00:10:12] Shep Hyken: Well, I just wonder why am I, why I'm even doing business with the company that's gonna wait a week and a half to get me?
[00:10:18] Dave Hoekstra: Exactly. And then you're, Then how happy are you when you do get an email? Back in eight hours, let's say, like the expectation is just so out of whack for email, for example.
[00:10:28] Shep Hyken: Yeah. And we've done some studies in our annual research that talks about how willing customers are to wait, you know, response times for different channels, for example, you know, how long, by the way, Dave, how long would you be willing to wait for on hold to talk to somebody? What do you think's reasonable?
[00:10:49] Dave Hoekstra: I mean, personally knowing what I know about a contact center, I don't mind a 10 minute wait. I mean, that's it's not so bad now that we have smartphones you can put on speaker and just kind of sit down and do other work, right? Back in the day where you had to hold the phone up to your ear, two minutes felt like an eternity.
[00:11:04] Dave Hoekstra: But, you know, I don't mind a 10 minute wait. As long as, again, this is, I don't know if this is playing right into your hands or not, but as long as my issue gets taken care of I don't mind waiting, you know, eight to 10 minutes.
[00:11:15] Shep Hyken: You are a very patient young man, . I'm an inpatient young man. Approximately 32% become frustrated after waiting for 10 minutes, which means two thirds of customers are willing to do that.
[00:11:28] Shep Hyken: Yeah. I don't know if I want to irritate a third of my customers. And by the way, what's a good email response time for you?
[00:11:35] Dave Hoekstra: Well, in my mind, a good email response would be a couple of hours. Yeah. But knowing what I know about the industry, I'm actually pleasantly surprised with maybe a 24 hour turnaround.
[00:11:46] Shep Hyken: Right. Well, interestingly about 59% of customers are willing to wait up to two hours before they become frustrated.
[00:11:55] Dave Hoekstra: Well, And this leads right into kind of, to me, what is the big hammer statistic on this particular insight, The gap between consumer perception and and provider perception of the availability of human agents.
[00:12:10] Dave Hoekstra: You know, according to the survey, 37% of customers think it is a good delivery. And 80% of those contact center managers, yeah, 80% of those contact center managers think that they are doing it well enough. And I, you know, we know we've gone through some staffing challenges in the last few years.
[00:12:30] Dave Hoekstra: Volume challenges, you know, channel challenge, like every challenge that could hit a contact center has surfaced in the last two to three years. It's still, I can't fathom a scenario where there's such a huge gap between and I'll ask you like, what do you think this gap comes from? Why do these contact center managers think that they're doing so much better than the consumers think.
[00:12:54] Shep Hyken: So I don't know why they think this, because really to me, it's easy to figure out. You should take a look at your verbatims, which are where your comments are coming from. Customers. You should take a look at the data from the feedback that you're getting. If you're using quantitative and qualitative, there's no excuse to not know this.
[00:13:11] Shep Hyken: The other thing I'm frustrated when I hear companies don't do this is, Go out and mystery shop their own company. They don't play Undercover Boss and call their company, email their own company, act like a customer and find out just what that experience really is. And they, it's important that they remain anonymous through this process because otherwise it doesn't work.
[00:13:33] Shep Hyken: By the way I think it's also important that leadership. C-level people come down and spend time in the contact support centers so that they can hear and see what customers are saying specifically about them. In my most recent book titled I'll Be Back, How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and again.
[00:13:51] Shep Hyken: I actually have a chapter in there where I talk about this gentleman named Bill. Who worked for Microsoft and he got on the telephone and he was talking to a customer, and the customer calls and says to the manager that man Bill was just so incredible and it was Bill Gates coming down and spending time on the floor talking to customers.
[00:14:11] Shep Hyken: I mean, why aren't more people doing that?
[00:14:13] Dave Hoekstra: Yeah I we have this discussion quite a bit. First of all, back to your point, I think the mystery shopper is a vastly underutilized tool. Someone who can give true, objective feedback about the process with, you know, unclouded. You know, I remember one of my very first call center jobs the QM process.
[00:14:30] Dave Hoekstra: Was actually two of the managers calling in and pretending to be a customer and seeing how we would react to those scenarios that came in. And of course, that's not gonna work every time I remember looking back and thinking, I should have known it was them. Why didn't I know it was them? I'm too trusting of an individual.
[00:14:47] Shep Hyken: Yeah. Didn't recognize the voice. Yeah, exactly. You know? I work with a lot of different companies and one of the companies that has always impressed me is American Express and I'm sure by the way, Discover MasterCard, Visa, great companies as well. And I do work with Discover and MasterCard as well.
[00:15:01] Shep Hyken: But. Jim Bush, the, at the time he was a senior VP worldwide of customer support. We talked quite a bit about this. What they strive to do is to create an experience that gets them a high NPS score, the net promoter score, and they make it part of the compensation of these front liners as well as the compensation of a manager and as it goes upstream, even Jim Bush said part of his compensation is based on high NPS scores.
[00:15:31] Shep Hyken: So think about that. Everybody's striving to make the customer happy.
[00:15:38] Dave Hoekstra: Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening to the conversation between me and Shep about the state of the Contact Center 2022 report from collabreo. We had such a good time recording it and we went so long that we actually decided to split it into two episodes.
[00:15:48] Dave Hoekstra: So this is gonna end this week's episode, but stick around for next week's episode where we finish out the conversation with Shep Hyken on the State of the Contact Center 2022 report. We'll talk to you then. Thanks everybody. We'll see you soon.