I recently had my worst customer experience.

My father passed away, and I wanted to close his cell phone service. I went to the store because I assumed you needed to show a death certificate. I dreaded the visit way before I went into the Xfinity store.

It took 10 minutes to learn that the Xfinity store couldn’t deal with the account because it belonged to Xfinity Mobile. They told me to call 611. It took another 30 minutes to battle the AI bot until I got to talk to someone. By that time, I was angry.

It took another 15 minutes to get to the right person to talk to and to find out that my father’s phone account was cloned. The fraud explained why the bill was so high.

Wait, there is a Big Finale. To finalize closing the account, I had to send the death certificate. It took another 10 minutes of bickering between the employees on who could deal with the death certificate.

60 minutes of service hell.

What could Xfinity have done differently?

It was a missed Golden Opportunity to turn an angry customer into a loyal customer. All I needed was a manager to navigate the system and solve my problem.

Today,

The topic is service outliers in real-time.

🤔Why “Service Outliers?

Why “Service Outliers?

Outliers are events that deviate significantly from the normal or average event.

In the context of customer service events, the outlier events stand out as atypical from most interactions and, therefore, require special attention or intervention. By addressing outliers promptly, retailers can mitigate the negative impact on customer experience.

In Behavior Analytics for physical stores, you search for customer service events that take significantly longer than usual.

Outliers indicate that something is wrong.

Service Outliers exist because the knowledge and responsibility of the frontline employees are not good enough to solve a particular problem. You may need a person who has more expertise, or you need decision authority.

There are two ways to think about Service Outliers. The first relates to service analysis to achieve excellence in customer service. The second refers to the response in real-time.

You analyze Service Outliers to get insights for improvement.

By setting predefined thresholds, you can identify and service customers who require extra attention, process improvement, or additional resources to solve their problems.

A proper response to an outlier event can turn an angry customer into a loyal customer. Even if you cannot solve the problem immediately, you send a message of “taking care of our customers.”

Customers will remember how you made them feel.

😃Behavior Analytics of “Service Outliers”

The framework differentiates between the behavior you want to influence and those that influence. You start by defining the outlier behaviors and capturing the relevant data.

The where, when, and what features are more technical.

In my example, the location zone is in front of a service counter in a telecommunication store. The location of the service will impact how the store’s staff can respond.

Next, you define an outlier event by the duration of the service. For example, if 95% of your service events are under 10 minutes, set that as a trigger threshold.

One thing to think about is how long it will take for the senior person to respond. You want a high enough trigger threshold.

Segmentation of outlier events is the key to long-term benefits from the analysis. But there is also an advantage to segmentation for real-time outliers. For example, technical scenarios require different expertise than those requiring a decision-maker.

In my example, the frontline employee could not work on an account that was not in the system, nor could he deal with a fraudulent account. These are two different challenges.

Service Outlier segmentation is important to understand how serious the problem is and what it would take to solve it.

You end with:

# Outlier events out of the sum of events within a period.

The final metric relates to reoccurrence. There is a difference if the outlier occurs in 1 out of 10,000 or 100 customer service events.

I’m pretty sure that there are enough people who are trying to close the phone service of their dead relatives.

I doubt my bad experience was unique.

😎Win-Win-Win Alignment: Get Excellent Customer Service in Real-Time

The second step is to design the response process in real-time.

The key is to get the “right person at the right time” to solve the customer's problem. If the problem cannot be solved immediately, you work with the customer and your organization to define the next step.

The word “problem” is misleading because a service outlier is an opportunity. The experienced manager can talk directly with a customer and deeply understand the friction point.

You are looking for triggers in the Escalation Process depending on the service zone, service duration, and the skill set and decision authority of the person responding.

For example, you may want to identify how long it takes store managers to respond.

Store managers are busy people. If it takes 3 or 10 minutes to respond, what does that mean to the quality of the service event? To store management?

The magic is in:

# Outlier events solved by the manager in real-time

While #Outliers tells you about the customer’s problems, the #Solved is a quantitative reflection of your customer service policies.

🤣PEACE for Profit (Get Started!)

You set up the structure to track Service Outliers and designed the Service Escalation process. It’s time to test.

You hypothesize that real-time responses by senior managers to outlier service events will increase customer satisfaction.

The immediate impact is customers will feel satisfied. In the long term, the expertise and seniority of the respondent allow the retailer to identify more profound problems.

The location of the service matters. A telecommunication store can have employees with different duties and responsibilities, for example, technical versus sales.

Time is payroll cost.

The duration of the customer service and the employee who provides the service has financial and compliance implications.

The Success KPI must be specific because you are quantifying what “excellent customer service” means to your stores.

For example,

You may want to achieve the outcome of a “99% success rate” or “get less than 1% outlier events within a week.”

🤑Amplify Store Sales

Service Outliers analytics provides a systematic way to build an excellent customer experience.

You are not dealing with customer surveys that are often biased and limited to a handful of customers. It’s empirical data coming from customer and staff behaviors.

So,

Pay attention to Service Outliers.

It pays off.

Ronny Max

P.S. RETAIL, CPG Executives – help 250 kids to get clean water!

I have been involved with Retail ROI for over seven years. It’s an incredible non-profit organization that does so much for children in different corners of the world.

This week is crucial for RETAILERS to sign up for RetailROI SuperSaturday. (Jan 13th in NYC).

There is NO financial ask. All you do is show up.

Every retailer that attends secures grant money from sponsors to help at-risk children worldwide. In addition to industry experts and insights, the keynote speaker this year is Run DMC’s Darryl McDaniels!!

Register at RetailROI.org

P. P.S. RETAILERS EXECUTIVES ATTEND FOR FREE! If you are attending, let me know. I want to donate $100 in your name. Thanks, Ronny.

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