Bose - Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy

Company: Bose, Framingham, MA
Company Division/Group: Bose
Company Description: Bose Corporation was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar G. Bose, then a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. Today, the company is driven by its founding principles, investing in long-term research to develop new technologies with real customer benefits. Bose innovations have spanned decades and industries, creating and transforming categories in audio and beyond.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy

Nomination Title: Creating Brand Ambassadors through innovation

Bose Corporation is a consumer electronics company based in Framingham Massachusetts, andour products and technologies reach millions of homes a year in countries across the globe. Music is a central part of our daily lives and Bose endeavors to enhance music listening experiences for our customers by reproducing sound as close to the natural instruments as possible.

One would think that a company that has survived in the consumer electronics industry, rising to #1 in many product categories, for 54 years would have done so on the backbone of a rock-solid customer satisfaction strategy. Yet entering July of 2017 we found ourselves without any clear owners of the customer satisfaction metric. It was a KPI that everyone was responsible for, yet no one owned.

We approached this problem by forming a new team within the customer service organization. We wished to make customer satisfaction the heart of decisions that would affect our customers and employees. Drive a consistent experience for our customers. Leverage customer satisfaction data to drive improvements to the customer experience. And empower our employees and partners to be voices of innovation to help us exceed our customers’ expectations.

One of the first actions we took to drive a consistent customer experience across all Bose touchpoints was to standardize the Quality Assurance program. QA standards were inconsistent globally and were nonexistent in some contact channels. We initially worked to standardize expectations for phone and email across all 12 languages supported at the time. We then worked to implement standards for all our non-traditional touchpoints including chat, SMS, social media, and forums. A little more than a year later we are confident of a consistent experience in 14 languages across 9 call centers.

We also wished for our CSAT analysis to be more than just analysis. We wanted to ensure it was a catalyst for change and as a result we designed the team to have few boundaries in the reach it could take to solve problems. It’s easy to uncover issues through analysis but resolving those issues in a large corporation is another challenge in and of itself. If shipping issues were uncovered in a certain geography the team was empowered to meet directly with global supply chain management, and work with them to find adequate solutions. Uncover a suspected email issue? Work closely with corporate IT to uncover root cause and help drive a solution.

We didn’t just stop at the customer experience. The team is chartered with improving the employee experience within our organization as well. We started by infusing the core elements of our brand into everything we do for employees. We facilitate Townhalls, employee onsite and offsite events. Organize social advocacy programs both internally and with our partner sites. We hold roundtables with our partner employees to gain insights on the ways we can improve their work experience and drive resolutions to those problems. We are passionate about our employee experience and feel strongly that happy employees help make happy customers.

Since July 2017 we have;

Consolidated 4 technical scorecards to 1 Global Standard

Implemented aligned standards in 9 call centers for phone and email

Created new QA standards for non-traditional contacts including social, forums, and chat

Leveraged CSAT data to uncover and drive experience improvement
-Reduced return label delivery failures from 8% to <1%
-Reduced shipping issues on 4.5% of deliveries to <3%
-Reduced agent behavioral customer DSAT from 13% to 4.3%
-Improved new site agent knowledge scores from 61% to 75%

Improved employee engagement by facilitating
- 4 Townhall events
- 6 employee engagement events
- 4 social Advocacy events and countless roundtables

We were able to accomplish this due to the hard work and passion that the team and larger organization have displayed over the past year. We areproud of our achievements and are excited to make our entry into the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.