A Night and Day Customer Experience

I've just returned from a month and a half of heavy travel and am still playing catch-up with my emails, my blogs and my time zones. I ended April with a fantastic week in Las Vegas at Oracle's Modern Service Experience. This year's conference was easily the best yet, featuring events like keynotes from actor and social entrepreneur, Joseph Gordon Levitt (@hitRECordJoe), Customer Experience legend and bestselling author, @JeanneBliss, great customer/partner/Oracle collaborative presentations and a concert by Fitz and the Tantrums. Whereas all of these were impressive and exciting, the highlight for me was the time I spent face-to-face with our customers.

Flashback to last year at this same event:

I was fairly new in my role and it was difficult to hear the direct, pointed and very fair critiques of our Technical Support shortcomings. We received some pretty good bumps and bruises during the open feedback opportunities and, I have to admit, it was for good reason. What I kept returning to for reassurance was my firm belief that this feedback would ultimately lead to improvement for our customers.  Our Director, Marie Lockhart, and I took all that you said to heart and spent countless hours over the last year seeking to understand your pain points and listening to your suggestions on how to reduce your effort while improving your Support Experience. We also put our reputations on the line by making you a lot of promises for a brighter future.

Fast forward to this year:

From the moment I ran into my first customer it was clear that customer feedback was going to be significantly different. We knew that our CSAT had risen fairly sharply, from about 71% to over 91% during the last year, but we weren't sure how that might translate into the type of raw qualitative feedback we were going to hear in a relaxed social setting. I couldn't have been more pleased to hear the phrase "night and day" used by more than one customer to describe the changes they experienced during those twelve months. Our work had paid off, but we wouldn't have succeeded without you. If our customers weren't fair enough to give us the benefit of the doubt as well as being patient and generous with their time and ideas, we wouldn't have made the progress we did. Our ability to design experiences that fit our customer's needs is only made possible because we work with incredibly innovative customer support and customer experience experts who have the desire to work collaboratively with us.

Here are some quick highlights of your Support Experience enhancements from the last year:

• Replacement of auto-responses with our meaningful response 5-W model
• Developing a new internal training techniques
• Addition of  the Support Suggestion Box persistent icon on all cx.rightnow pages
• Introduction of our Hive operating model to reduce backlog
• Addition of mobile-friendly pages for on-the-run SR management
• Implementation of a wholly re-designed website optimized for ease of use

We expect a lot of ourselves and while we have made significant year-over-year progress, it's not enough for us. We expect it won't be for you either. We may still occasionally fall short of expectation, but we hope that those instances are fewer and father between, while also being less egregious. Being able to enact change that has this kind of tangible positive impact on our customers is my professional passion and I am fortunate to have a career that is truly fulfilling. The week of MSE was one of the most satisfying of my professional career, because it felt like we turned a corner and you were there showing us your appreciation. I can't thank all of you enough for the opportunity to repay your trust and patience. Our commitment for this year is to build on the positive steps from last year to provide you with further improved and innovative Support Experiences.

Stay tuned for my next blog to see what my other travel involved and how it relates to improving your experience with our Technical Support Team.

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