ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 22) IN THE CENTER able for Consumer Affairs in 2002, I posed a few key questions that focused on establishing a compass for our future work. What measurements do we use? What do they say about how well we are serving customers via our call center? How do we rank in our tire industry and against best-in-class automotive, retail or travel services call centers? Karen’s response was clear. She said, ‘Customers tell us we do well. But if you help me obtain some key resources, then we can be best-in-class. We need a consumer relationship system, digital call recording and professional call coaching.’” IDENTIFYING PRIME OBJECTIVES In undertaking the initiative to revamp our center operations, we set two prime objectives: 1) to improve customers’ satisfaction with our products and service, including their experience with us; and 2) to realize benefits from listening to their experiences with our tires. We felt Yokohama could derive value from customers’ reactions to our tires and that the center could better capture and report consumers’ insights that could be used to improve our tires. How well we listen and act on their insights ultimately flows back to them as increased value for their investment in our tires. Today we run an efficient, effective and state-ofthe-art Consumer Affairs contact center supported by contemporary contact management technology that includes a Web-based consumer relationship system (CRS) integrated with digital call recording. Our contact center representatives are organized now into two teams. Our core group handles regular customer inquiries and consumer response. A second team is dedicated to our new ADVAN premium customer care services. The ADVAN offering is a prestigious, premium, relationship-building service for automobile dealers and their customers who own the world’s fastest, most powerful luxury vehicles — Bentley, Lexus, Lotus, Audi and Porsche — which come equipped with Yokohama’s ultra-high performance iconic brand. This premium service is also offered to consumers who own ADVAN brand tires and to our tire dealers that sell the ADVAN brand. SETTING WORLD-CLASS PERFORMANCE STANDARDS national’s (SOCAP) member resources to identify a well-respected contact center management consultancy, Network Direct, with whom we soon engaged for ongoing guidance in setting up world-class quality assurance and performance standards. Network Direct has become our call center quality consultant for service improvement. We worked with Network Direct to emulate the best practices of bestin-class call centers. Today we use the group to assess call quality and calibrate our reps’ performance. Network Direct monitors each rep’s calls and gives coaching feedback for improvement within 24 hours. Our reps must meet a weekly performance standard for their contacts according to our Quality Assurance Guideline. With Network Direct we developed a call performance scorecard that provides the call monitors with set criteria for assessing the quality components of calls. Score components measure how well a rep performs in such dimensions as active listening, engaging with the caller, articulating courtesy (“virtual handshake”) and etiquette, conveying tone and enthusiasm, building rapport, answering questions, and expressing Yokohama’s policies and procedures correctly. When a rep’s weekly performance falls below the standard, we provide one-on-one coaching and refresher training sessions. Once a month, we also hold “calibration” group sessions in a roundtable format to reinforce the standards. The group monitors several calls and scores them. As a group, we review the scoring to educate on what master and consensus scores are and what quality satisfies each performance standard component. In addition, in 2007, we will extract a representative set of contacts from the CRS quarterly, and the Network Direct quality-on-call group will call these contacts and conduct in-depth interviews to precisely measure customer satisfaction and verify our service quality. RAISING THE BAR WITH ADVAN PREMIUM SERVICE At the outset of our upgrade project, we referred to the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals Intericmi’s insight In 2006, we launched our new ADVAN customer care service with high anticipation. Our most experienced and skilled representatives began interacting with ADVAN dealers and tire owners about their situations, needs and expectations. The service addresses each customer’s situation, providing added-value designed to surpass customer expectations. We make post-service calls to customers to confirm satisfactory resoluwww.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 22 http://www.icmi.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.