(This is a guest post by Victoria Koval of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales  leaders and their teams. It builds on Jacob’s popular post that discusses ways to eliminate the word ‘no’ from your rep’s vocabulary.)

Think about how many times and ways a customer says “no”… There is the “matter-of-fact no” ( I am not interested in this offer); there is the “no-without-no” (I’ll contact you myself when I am ready to make a decision);   there is the “passing-the-buck no”  (The decision is out of my hands now); there is the “maybe-yes no” (I’ll have to check my calendar) and the “restraining-order no” (For the last time, no).

While searching for more examples (and for my own amusement), I Googled “how to say no.” As I looked through the more than 206,000,000 results, I learned how to say NO in over 520 languages and how to come up with 100 Excuses to Say No (my favorite one: “because my subconscious says no”).

The all-mighty Internet taught me how to say no to bosses, relatives, friends, co-workers and pushy sales people, but it had little to say about how to push back on customers.  Is that because we’ve been brainwashed that the customer is always right?

Maybe…But, unless you’re running a charitable foundation, saying no is a critical skill, especially now. In the current economy, customers feel entitled to more discounts, more customization and less risk, and they don’t hesitate to ask for more.     Read More »

By Hannah Hellebush

In speaking with members we hear that many service center professionals are interested in the merits of rep-level certification programs. There are a lot of programs available—most offer an online course for frontline reps who become “certified” after the completion of a test. The courses take a few weeks to complete and are priced per individual rep.

Certainly, rep-level certification programs could potentially help in skills training and upskilling.  But many companies we talk to say it’s hard to measure the gains from these programs in terms of direct rep performance gains.  And of course, CCC has long held that coaching (not training) is by far the best skill development lever you can pull. 

So, I’ve got to wonder – if the jury is out on rep-level certification programs to drive performance, what are some other benefits the programs could have? Read More »

Having spoken recently with some of CCC’s European members (one from the Travel & Leisure industry and three from the Financial Services industries), one of the questions that invariably arise is: how should I use Twitter or Facebook or other types of Social Media for customer service? 

In my last post about Social Media, I didn’t address this specific question, only venturing as far as to say: 

Using Twitter [or Social Media in general] in the customer service realm is not about amassing the most number of followers or how many emails we send, it’s about measuring the number of customers we help and showing that to executives. Second, it’s using that customer feedback from Social Media to make real improvements, hopefully at the root-cause level, to our customer experience to boost satisfaction and loyalty.

That addresses what Social Media’s general goal/success measure should be, but that doesn’t address the question of how to take action in social media channels to achieve that goal. Read More »

I came back from vacation to discover I had racked up nearly 600 e-mails in my inbox.  I wasn’t sure where to start.  Should I look at my meeting invitations first, or clear out the spam?  Overwhelmed, I found myself reading e-mails haphazardly, picking up in the middle of conversations and getting confused.  Only later did I realize my fatal flaw – I tried to focus on everything at once, and ended up focusing on all the wrong things.

I see similarities between my situation and that of the frontline.  Measured and held accountable to 15, 30, or even upwards of 50+ metrics ranging from average hold time to FCR to adherence, frontline reps are inundated with long lists of their data points and trends. 

The result is that the staff feels micromanaged, and don’t know which metric to pay attention to.  They can’t focus on everything at once – there is simply too much.  So, they figure out which metric to focus on in an ad hoc way – maybe it was the topic of the weekly team meeting or it happened to be discussed during a coaching session.  And like me, sometimes they will focus on all the wrong things – metrics that are of lower importance to the customer or company, while ignoring critical metrics. Read More »

Review any service or support strategic plan from the past five years, and you’ll likely see the same priority repeat from year to year: Issue resolution.

No doubt about it, companies know issue resolution is important—CCC estimates that improving issue resolution can save millions of dollars each year and mitigate customer disloyalty by at least 219%.  But recent conversations with several companies suggest that when it comes to identifying first contact resolution (FCR) improvement opportunities, many companies are headed down the wrong path.

This is not due to poor data quality or improper data analysis; rather, many companies are merely scratching the surface when drilling into their FCR data, which is causing insufficient and even incorrect findings.  In fact, what typically comes to light as the primary obstacle to issue resolution is a laundry list of process and policy barriers. Read More »