Customer Service Buzz

During Washington, D.C.’s recent “Snowmaggeddon” blizzard, I (like many of my colleagues) found myself working from home.  It was great for a day or two, and I felt very productive. But by day five, I felt, well…isolated.  I think this was different than your run-of-the-mill cabin fever…the isolation I felt was connected to my workplace engagement.

This naturally led me to think about contact center reps who work from home full-time.  Whenever I speak with companies who are considering a work-from-home program, people are aware that it is tricky to keep remote staff engaged, but no one knows how to get over that hurdle effectively. Read More »

“The best farmers prepare for a famine during a surplus.” 

My grandpa, Forrest Stokes, himself a farmer in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, spread this wisdom any chance he got: while budgeting finances, rationing fertilizer, or stealing Sweet & Low from Perkins.  It’s proof that repetition is the key to education, because I have never forgotten this important lesson—a lesson that at once teaches foresight, restraint, conservation, and preparation.

I’m reminded of it because, amidst record-high unemployment and recent mass layoffs (in other words, a labor surplus), it’s counterintuitive to be concerned about employee retention.  But many HR professionals are pointing out a perfect storm about to hit staffing departments: the loss of irreplaceable knowledge and experience as millions of baby boomers retire.  The Baby Boomer Brain Drain. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people entering the retirement sweet spot (ages 65 to 75) will grow by more than 80% by 2016 while the number of people in the prime of their careers (25- to 54-year olds) will grow a mere 2%.  Customer service will be hit hard by this trend, with a combination of industry growth and employee departures leading to 1.2 million job openings.   

A forewarned company recently called me for advice on how to handle the brain drain. 

Read More »

Customer perception is a funny thing – I was reading a New York Times article that found consumers perceived a discount from US$3.00 to $2.33 as bigger than a discount from $3.00 to $2.22. Sounds crazy, right? $2.22 is a lower price than $2.33, but when consumers look at numbers they connect certain types of sounds (like “o”) with more and other sounds (like “ee”) with less.

Interesting theoretical information, but what does it mean for customer service? I am starting  to think these findings, along with books like the recently published “Priceless”, mean we can influence (or even change) customer expectations – not just on prices, but also in service transactions, especially when we have nothing but bad news for the customer. Read More »

When you ask people what they dislike about customer service, what’s one of the first things they mention?

While some customers may mention the hold time or the length of the call with the customer service agent, more often than not people complain loudly about IVRs. They are viewed as a necessary evil for many customers and companies alike. Making the IVR an easier experience for the average person is a noble goal. But unfortunately, a negative IVR experience in the past can condition customers to the unfortunate habit of zeroing out at all costs (honestly, we’ve all done it before, pressing zero repeatedly to escape the touch-tones).

We’ve all heard of sites like GetHuman that help customers bypass IVRs by showing which numbers to hit to either:

1. get to any frontline staff as soon as possible or

2.  route to the correct department

Why are sites like these so popular? The reality is that most customers don’t always realise IVRs are for routing purposes, which actually benefit them.

Companies continually reinvest in getting IVRs right but how can we help customers with shortcuts? Or put another way, what if we brought an easier IVR experience to the customer?

Well, there’s an app for that. Read More »

Have you ever wondered what makes your best frontline supervisors tick? Can it be boiled down to the same thing that makes for a great frontline rep?

Most companies assume that star reps will make great supervisors, and promote them accordingly. Unfortunately, while these reps are great at handling customer issues themselves, not all of them want to share their knowledge and develop staff – a key activity for supervisors.

CCC has found that one in three contact center supervisors don’t want to coach.  That’s right – nearly one-third of your supervisors actively avoid coaching and development activities.  These ‘reluctant’ supervisors can even harm team performance with the poor quality, unfocused coaching sessions that they are forced to conduct. Read More »

I recently came across some data indicating Twitter’s user base has decreased by as much as 19% over the second half of 2009.

While many contradicting findings have been reported—and Twitter says usage is at its highest levels yet and expected to grow—if it isn’t already happening, user base consolidation likely will occur soon as growth cannot continue indefinitely.   Read More »

A week ago I contacted my publishing company to request a new login and password because I deactivated my old e-mail address.  The bottom of the email submission form page listed some basic e-mail turnaround times and operating hours. Not a terrible wait time, I thought, and thanks for setting expectations.

Fast forward 24 hours, the response read: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”  Sounds good right?  But…my User ID was my old e-mail address. Strike #1.  So for round 2, I was more explicit in my request.

Fast forward another 24 hours to the second response: “Go to our site, enter your User ID and we’ll send a new password to that address.”

Yep.  They sent me the same response (verbatim) two days in a row. And the worst part is that this type of email “resolution” is the norm in my experience, not the exception.

Call me the jaded contact center geek, but it seems that the usefulness of email as a service channel has expired.  I recognize some B2B interactions may be an exception to the rule – given more regular customer interactions – but for most service interactions, it’s a poor channel. Read More »

My husband drives a Toyota included in the recall that gained widespread media attention in the last two weeks.  After hearing about the company’s solution (replacing the gas pedal), my husband quipped: “Too bad; I was hoping they’d give me a new car!”  Obviously an irrational expectation.  But, I bet Toyota customers have a range of expectations given the current scenario – ranging from the “just-get-it-fixed” mentality to my husband’s “give-me-a-new-car.”

And so Toyota’s current situation got me thinking – how can the service center be best positioned to mitigate customer frustration in situations like mass recalls or large process breaks? The short answer is “reduce customer effort”, but when you are faced with a large number of customers needing assistance, a good approach is often to get ahead of the curve with proactive service. Read More »

For years I’ve been saying “No” (a firm “No” at that) but recent findings push me to temper this inference.

Like any good researcher, my shift in opinion comes with plenty of data—particularly important for a topic rife with some very loud assumptions. 

CCC’s been measuring customer service preferences for over 5 years, and we always came to the same conclusion about service with an accent: it’s a constant “noisemaker.”  A customer complains about the offshore location only when something else goes wrong on the call (let’s say it was a transfer).  Poor service is seen as a product of the accent—“I didn’t understand the rep” says the customer—but the real problem is the transfer (and the customer would be just as negative if he had been transferred by an onshore rep).  If the transfer hadn’t happened, then the customer would have had no issue with the accent. 

Customers notice it, they mention it in surveys, but our data showed us that if the customer received proper service, rep accent had no meaningful impact on the customer experience.

This conclusion was corroborated by data from our prominent offshore members and bolstered by my nagging faith in global brotherhood (the citizenry behind “We Are the World” couldn’t possibly devalue discussions simply because the service rep sounded different than the weatherman).

Then this happened.  The recession not only changed where we eat and how we shop, but what we value in the customer experience.  Read More »

Lately I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about how to write an effective post-contact customer survey. Although survey writing may seem simple (just write a few interesting questions and push go), a good amount of thought work must be invested up front in order to get useful data back from your customer survey. Below I’ve captured my top 4 tips for rewriting or creating a new survey:  Read More »