“CCC is honored to have been named a Top Place to Work in Massachusetts based on the votes from our team members for the third year in a row,” said Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, CCC. “As we have grown as an organization we continue to learn together, innovate together, and strive to maintain an inclusive, people-first environment, where we emphasize the importance of community and the difference that together, we can make in the world.”

CCC remains committed to continuous improvement in creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) workplace. CCC’s DEI Employee Resource Group launched a pilot Girls Who Code team at the elementary school level in 2023 and piloted the first chapter north of Boston last year. Its speaker series most recently hosted Dr. Kenann McKenzie-DeFranza who talked about the importance of listening to understand each other, our customers, and our communities. CCC is a member of the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), whose mission is to accelerate innovation, growth, and development of an inclusive tech ecosystem in Massachusetts through STEM pipeline initiatives, talent development, leadership, and advocacy. CCC is a member of the North Shore Juneteenth Association, an emerging 501 (c)(3) organization of community leaders creating awareness about Juneteenth, educating the community about positive aspects of Black American culture, and dismantling racism by using events and programming as tools of change.

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With a singular focus on satisfying customers we serve in various industries, we are determined to keep finding ways we can improve their experience at every turn. This includes leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

With the recent AI technology boom, customer service as we know it is in the midst of a major upgrade, which will result in benefits for both customers and service representatives alike. I was fortunate enough to attend the recent Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco and was thrilled to see the next generation of customer service and what it will mean for our customers’ experience.

Traditional approaches to customer experience have been very tactical and reactive; the primary goal to address specific issue(s) when raised by a customer. But with the help of AI, customer service teams today have the potential to be more proactive, strategic, and capable.

Did you know that 85% of customers are unsatisfied with self-service options? Using clunky chatbots that deliver a list of links to sift through is no longer enough. With new AI technology, the chatbots of today comb through a company’s knowledge base and present a summarized response that specifically addresses customer questions, saving them from the hassle of scouring for a simple answer.

Enhancing the customer experience like this requires a significant amount of customer data and analytics, which is why we are investing in predictive modeling, customer health scores, resource centers, and agent-assist models. So, whether our customer is a professor working on their next lecture plan or an oncologist exploring the latest in cancer research, our service model—both the human and AI branches of it—is designed to better anticipate customer needs.

AI is blurring the lines—in the best of ways—between numerous customer experience touchpoints. It is enabling award-winning customer service teams like ours to not only address immediate challenges, but to continue anticipating what is ahead and suggest ways to help, which is critical to the success of customers.

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We regularly analyze customer experience (CX) metrics to identify friction points and improve workflows so our customers can have the smoothest and best experience possible. We have grown our team to over 50 colleagues distributed across 10 countries—all to ensure we are always accessible to our clients. Our Customer Service group embraces and leverages the best of modern technology to help our customers quickly and easily achieve their desired outcomes.

The single most defining component of our customer service organization, however, is not the technology we employ or the data we track or the accessibility of our team. Rather, it is the incredible group of people who show up every single day to make our customers feel valued. They are the folks behind the computer screens and phone lines who have an immense impact on our customers’ experience with our organization.

During Customer Service Week, I’d like to share a few glimpses into what these incredible people do every single day—the subtle ways they exhibit patience, care, and consideration to make our customers feel valued, and how they go above and beyond. For example:

• Jeanne helped a customer track down an author even though that author was outside of our company platforms. She then initiated the permissions request for the customer directly through the author’s publisher.
• Anda offered to personally cancel and re-enter each of her customer’s orders after he realized that he had entered them incorrectly.
• Lee helped her customer re-write a complicated permissions request to a publisher—a task well outside of the responsibilities of her role—and then offered to stay on the issue with the customer if the publisher required the terms to be modified in any way.
• Jennifer noticed that her customers were often unsure about how to submit a specific type of permissions request, so she created a step-by-step guide that her customers could use as she walked them through the process and also keep for later reference.
• When Christine’s customer needed something that fell outside of our company’s offerings, she researched the subject after her call and provided the customer a link to another organization that could help.
• Adrian helped a customer on a tight deadline place a special order and then reached out directly to the publisher to ensure his customer received what she needed before her deadline.

There are so many more stories just like these. These engagements comprise the heart and soul of what our team is all about. They are, individually and collectively, a tremendous asset to the organization, and I am reminded of that every day — especially during Customer Service Week.

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As consumers, it is easy to notice that lots of vendors have embraced AI technology and moved their customer service models away from live help. While there are apparent reasons to do this in certain circumstances (e.g., in highly commoditized, low-margin businesses that are trying to achieve convenience and speed), this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is critical that the priorities and values of an organization guide the customer service strategy—including when and how AI technologies are harnessed.

As a customer-driven organization, it is important to CCC to provide a full 360-degree customer experience. We want to ensure our customers always feel supported—in any capacity they choose. According to the 2023 State of Customer Experience Report, Customer Experience is “the new competitive battlefield”—and for the sake of our customers—we strive to offer the very best. Part of that experience is offering 24 x 7 live help.

Some Tasks Are More Nuanced: While the chat bots of today are incredibly useful for a number of tasks, some questions and requests are just too nuanced. As almost every consumer—regardless of industry—will agree, it can be frustrating trying to ask your question—either over the phone or via chat—only for a machine to give you a canned answer that is unrelated to your issue. If our chat bots cannot immediately answer a customer’s question, we like knowing that our representatives are standing by to help 24 x 7. They are easy to contact and there are no hoops to jump through to reach them.

Using a Chat Bot Should Be an Option (Not a Requirement): We pride ourselves on being a customer-driven organization and on providing the best possible customer experience (CX) for our clients. Chat bots can be incredibly useful—especially for straightforward questions and requests and when the best possible experience a customer can have is almost no experience at all. But, at times, customers understandably prefer to speak to a person on the other end of the line, and in those instances, we want to ensure they have that option. For CCC, providing options—whether it is chat bots, email support, or live over-the-phone help—means that we are providing our customers with their preferred experience at every turn.

We Care About Our Customers and Value Their Trust: We have found that when our customers are faced with a more complex need, they often prefer to speak to a person rather than a machine. Have you ever searched for a Customer Service number on a website only to be directed to a chat bot or other automated form? When there is no direct line of communication to Customer Service—or when that direct line is difficult to access—customers get frustrated and lose trust in an organization. In fact, this study from the Harvard Business School by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell demonstrates that customers even feel anxiety when they’re unable to connect with a real person. Customers want to know they are heard, they want to know they matter, and, at CCC, they do. Our customers appreciate how accessible our service team is. A customer-focused organization must always keep these lines of communication open—even if it comes at a greater cost.

Companies that have continued to offer live customer service distinguish themselves as reliable, honest, trustworthy organizations that put their customers’ needs above all else. They ensure that their customers, as their most important stakeholders, have direct and easy access to them at all times.

While our investment in AI technology has measurably improved the service we provide to our customers, we are not ready to hand over the reins just yet because our commitment to our customers goes beyond what AI chatbots can offer today. AI might be the future of Customer Service, but it is not our present. Our people are essential in delivering an outstanding customer experience.

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At the heart of this CX1 initiative is our Customer Service Team, the people on the front lines with our customers every day. In fact, CCC was recently named a gold winner in the Customer Service Department of the Year category in the Best in Biz Awards 2022 International.

In this blog post, I will be sharing highlights that demonstrate how our Customer Service Department—as well as other teams supporting them—have made a measurable impact on our CX.

Expanding & Training Our Team to Improve CX

Over the past 18 months, CCC has committed to further developing and refining our distributed customer service workforce. When we saw a higher demand for 24-hour global service, we teamed up with a customer service outsourcing partner and expanded our team into eight different nations in order to stay in line with what our customers need. We invested in training to ensure high-quality responses, recruited technical staff to meet a more complex and highly specific demand, implemented chat functionality for on-demand support, and created a tiered service approach to create workforce breadth. These combined efforts resulted in a 34.7% decrease in resolution times.

Streamlining Workflows to Provide Faster Resolution Times

By analyzing our robust customer experience metrics—which include inquiry-to-order ratio, customer satisfaction, resolution times, and queue wait times—we were able to identify friction points for our clients and put together teams to restructure those processes.

Launching New Self-Service Options

Through analyzing our CX data, CCC also discovered that 10-15% of our customers prefer self-service options. So we built three new knowledge bases that empower our customers seeking alternative service channels. In a little over a year, the articles within the knowledge bases have been accessed over 100,000 times. Not only does this provide clients with another avenue to get immediate answers to their questions, but it also enables our representatives to achieve impressive response times for other customers by reducing the total number of inquiries they receive. In fact, 80% of phone and chat inquiries are answered in 60 seconds or less and email is returned within one to 12 hours.

Because of a singular focus on our customers—and our determination to find ways we can improve their experience at every turn—we have improved our customer satisfaction score from 4.2 to 4.6 out of five over the last 5 years. This represents the most meaningful impact our CX1 initiative has had on our business. Our customers’ positive perception of us and their satisfaction with our service is—and always will be—our first priority.

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Winners in the 10th annual program were determined based on scoring from an independent panel of judges hailing from a wide spectrum of top-tier publications and media outlets from 15 countries. Each year, only editors, writers and contributors to business, consumer, financial, trade and technology publications, as well as broadcast outlets and analyst firms, serve as judges in Best in Biz Awards. The program’s uniqueness stems, in part, from this distinct composition of its judging panels, enabling it to best leverage the judges’ objectivity, experience and expertise to determine award winners.

This year’s judging panel included writers and contributors to such publications as Data Breach Today, HTMAG (Israel), Huffington Post, NDR (Germany), Panorama Magazine (United Arab Emirates), Small Business IT (Canada), TechRadar (UK), and other outlets from Australia, Brazil, Canada, India Indonesia, New Zealand, Nigeria, United Kingdom, and more.

“Customer experience goes beyond support at CCC – it’s a company-wide commitment,” said Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, CCC. “Every member of our team has a customer first mindset and takes this approach with colleagues, clients, and partners. This prestigious award reflects that.”

Last year, CCC won a silver Stevie® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year in the 15th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service and Tom Ogier, CCC’s Director of Client Engagement and Solutions, was named a silver winner for Customer Service Executive of the Year in the 2020 Best in Biz Awards.

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CCC recently made some pretty comprehensive enhancements to its Marketplace. Can you tell us about what Marketplace is and about these improvements?

AR: Marketplace is our innovative new e-commerce site. It’s where all our customers now go to purchase pay-per-use permissions. In creating Marketplace, we had to migrate customers and partners from our legacy ecommerce system. We started the migration process by talking to customers to find out what they wanted in their workflows. We showed them mock-ups of our ideas and treated their feedback as if it were gold. Marketplace is 100% a customer-driven product.

What was the impetus for the enhancements to Marketplace?

AR: The biggest driver in making these changes was our commitment to improving our customers’ experience with the product. We created Marketplace to provide more services and capabilities to our customers and to be able to respond more quickly to our market, yet we had to manage a seamless transition for tens of thousands of buyers. When we made the switch, we again looked to our customers for their input on our workflows and capabilities: “Are there any tripping points? How can we make this easier for you? Are there any capabilities we’re missing?” We wanted to uncover it all so we could incorporate as much as possible.

Can you give an example of one of these enhancements?

AR: Through one of our usability sessions—essentially informal customer feedback forums—we found that after our customers added an item to their project, they wanted to be navigated back to their search results so they could stay within their previous search workflow. We added this capability into our next product release and had it updated shortly after the initial launch.

By remaining agile, it’s enabled us to stay in alignment with our customers, which is incredibly important in providing the best possible customer experience.

Can you talk about the impact these enhancements are having on customers’ experience within Marketplace? 

AR: Because of the latest enhancements, our customers are experiencing more seamless workflows. We want their experience to be smooth and intuitive. If we can save our customers time and provide a better experience, then we know our efforts have been successful.

Can you share any behind-the-scenes examples of CX1 in action at CCC?

AR: Our product team and business analysts work closely with our customers. We’re acutely aware of what our clients want to see next and we work hard on the backend to deliver their requests. Just about all of our enhancements focus on user experience. In fact, we try to look at everything from the customer’s perspective. Our team is often guided by this simple phrase: “As a user, I want this capability so I can achieve this result.” It helps us pinpoint not only what we want to achieve for our clients, but what it will help them accomplish.

Any other customer-focused enhancements in the works that you know of?

Absolutely. Our product development work is never done. There’s always a way we can refine a process or improve a workflow or remove clicks to save our customers time. We’re currently working on enhancing our notifications within the user interface and adding more capabilities, such as the ability to delete projects. It’s a constantly revolving door of ways we can improve our customers’ experience. As soon as one enhancement is done, we’re on to the next!

Aaron Reid is a senior product manager at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and is responsible for CCC’s transactional e-commerce platform, Marketplace. He manages the prioritization of development efforts, customer outreach and usability testing, and the roadmap definition for Marketplace. Aaron joined CCC in 2015, initially working on CCC’s Republication Licensing Service (RLS) prior to taking ownership of and launching the new Marketplace. He holds an MFA in screenwriting from Emerson College and an MeD in elementary education from Salem State University. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, two sons, and three cats.

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A guide to authenticity in communications, Horn’s book lays out the “Spectrum of Lies,” from “Useful and Harmless” to “Gaslighting,” then builds a case for getting your story straight and sticking to it.

“You cannot build a sustainable anything – a sustainable business or relationship or marriage – based on lies. You have to have a basis for integrity and the truth.

“The issue is that the truth builds trust, and trust is the essence of every enduring brand. If you tell the truth, you learn to trust it and you deliver a consistent customer experience. You break that trust when you either veer from your core values or you slipped up and maybe you weren’t telling exactly the truth or left some facts out.

Make It, Don’t Fake It

Sabrina Horn founded Horn Group, a public relations firm that for a quarter century, advised thousands of executives and their companies—from the hottest startups to the Fortune 500. She was one of only a few female CEOs in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s.

In 2015, Horn oversaw her firm’s successful acquisition by Finn Partners, a global marketing company. Today, Horn is CEO of HORN Strategy, LLC, a consultancy focused on helping entrepreneurs and CEOs navigate the early stages of their businesses.

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Customer Experience

Customer Experience (CX) is much like it sounds; it’s the experience that your customers have with your brand along the entire buyer and customer journey. It encompasses everything from preliminary visits to your website to conversations with sales reps to how readily available key resources are to your clients’ experience with your product and far beyond. CX is the collective perception your customer has of your brand. It’s often the reason they choose – or don’t choose – your organization and it’s incredibly important.

My colleague Deb Mariniello recently offered her perspective on CX saying “[Our customers] don’t need to work with us, but instead they choose to…we don’t take that for granted. Our hope and expectation are that our Customer Experience initiative will help us continue to serve [our customers’] needs in a way that makes their jobs easier and their professional lives more pleasant and productive—and that they will continue to choose us.”

Customer Service

We think of customer service as the assistance we offer both before and after customers buy our solutions. This includes phone support, email, webpage chat bots, social media and more. Customer service is reactive, meaning that it’s the way your team supports customers after they’ve come to you with an issue. It’s the collection of interactions you have with your customers to help them navigate a challenge and accomplish their desired outcome—and it makes up part of the whole Customer Experience.

Customer Success

Customer Success is a proactive methodology that focuses on helping your customers get the most value from your product or service. That means anticipating future customer challenges and proactively finding solutions to alleviate them. In our view, a strong customer success strategy ensures customers achieve their desired outcome each and every time they use your product or service. Often, this means diligently analyzing your customers’ journey within your organization—and with your products or services—and anticipating and alleviating any potential hurdles. For example, do you expect that a future enhancement might cause confusion while users adjust to a new workflow? A good Customer Success strategy means committing the resources to address it, identifying the potential tripping points, taking steps to mitigate any confusion, and delivering a seamless user interface—without interruption. Ensuring that your customers achieve their desired outcome each and every time decreases customer churn and increases upsell opportunities. And like Customer Service, Customer Success is a component of the entire Customer Experience (i.e., your customers’ perception of your brand).

Creating value for customers starts with the product or solution, but the value grows with a comprehensive customer experience, service and success strategy. At CCC, we continually align our solution offering with how our customers will interact with that solution and with us.

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Before we dig in, can you explain what CX1 is and how CCC came to adopt it?

NM: Of course. Our CX1 program—which stands for Customer Experience First—is really about prioritizing our customers and ensuring their experience with our company is extraordinary from start to finish. While we’ve always been a customer-centric company, we implemented our CX1 program to formalize our way of doing business and to give us a little extra push to go above-and-beyond. Adopting CX1 has meant that each and every one of our colleagues is empowered to identify ways to improve the customer experience—and the program has been really powerful. When companies consistently put their customers first, it sets them apart from the competition. So that’s what we’ve set out to do: set CCC apart from the competition by creating a customer experience like no other.

During your 20+ years at CCC, how have you seen the company’s approach to customer experience evolve?

NM: I started my career here in Danvers, Massachusetts (USA), in Customer Support when there were just four of us on the team, handling all inbound inquiries from licensing to permissions to software support. I still remember listening to our voicemail box, writing notes out by hand, and returning customer calls. A lot has changed since those days. We’re well beyond the days of paper and pencil and rely on advanced customer service software and tools now. Our team has expanded along with our portfolio of data and software service offerings, and we’ve expanded geographically to meet customers’ needs in over 100 countries. While a lot has changed, I feel the priorities—the heart—of this company has not. Our customers have always been at the core of our business. Our enterprise wide CX1 program helps all of us serve them better.

What is your role within the CX1 team? Do you have a specific focus?

NM: I’m part of the CX1 Leadership team. As Senior Director of Product Management, my focus is on our product platform; specifically, I’m responsible for making sure back-office operations and capabilities provide the customer-facing applications with the services that they need. We want to ensure that our customer gets what they need on the first try. Since the launch of the CX1 program, there’s been a heightened awareness across the company that what we provide in the product really matters and, inversely, what we don’t do in the product matters. If there’s a gap in one of our products or services, we collaborate with other teams to bridge that gap to make sure the customer experience is a great one.

Can you share any recent examples of CX1 in action at CCC?

NM: Each of our product teams creates a roadmap to guide them through 12-week product development planning cycles. As much as we try to plan ahead, sometimes things come up in real-time that are too important to push off. For example, we recently learned that customers were challenged paying invoices due to small changes needed to the PO number or address information. So we made this a top priority, got it into the current roadmap cycle and made the enhancement as quickly as possible—all to improve our customers’ experience. Sometimes it’s the small changes that really matter; not just the complex things.

How has CX1 impacted the day-to-day operations of the Product Team?

NM: The development of the CX1 Dashboard has had a positive impact. Now, we can identify common roadblocks for our customers by exploring data related to Customer Support call traffic. These insights have enabled us to quickly enhance our products in direct response to customer needs. We’ve been able to adopt a self-reinforcing process where we look at the data from our customers, we investigate solutions, and we drive our efforts back into the roadmap for our products according to what matters most to our clients.

Wrapping up then, do you think embracing the CX1 philosophy has already begun to impact the customer experience at CCC?

NM: Absolutely. Our company recently held a “Demo Days” event for internal staff. It’s an annual continuing education program to share information with our colleagues on different areas of the business, introduce them to new products, and enable them to hear from our clients. A customer spoke at one of these sessions and it was so motivating to hear how they use our product suite on a daily basis to get their job done. When you hear stories like that, you’re able to make connections and think, ‘ok, if we improve this feature, that customer is going to see it.’ Having that personal context is a reminder that the work you do to study and enhance your products, making them the best they can be, really impacts your customers’ experience. And at the end of the day, that’s what is most important to us.

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