Customer Service Buzz

Here’s a common sight on courses around the world: a golfer with a $500 driver and a horrible swing.  The unfortunate reality that these club-connoisseurs confront is that the lightest titanium clubhead in Callaway’s line can’t fix a broken swing. 

It’s an expensive lesson to learn, and many contact center leaders make a similar discovery following a new technology purchase.  They put a new technology over a broken process or let a fancy vendor presentation define a process for them – and are then frustrated by lackluster returns.

That’s why, whenever a member asks me, “What’s the next great technology we should consider for our contact center?” I provide the most annoying answer known to mankind: another question.  “Well, what are you trying to accomplish?”  To be successful, technology purchases and implementations must clearly align with specific business objectives.   Read More »

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words.  The result was, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” 

Some say Hemingway called this his best work.  Others say the entire anecdote is literary folktale.  In either case, it gave birth to the six-word story, a gauntlet that’s been thrown down in literary circles for decades.  SMITH Magazine gave Hemingway’s form a new, personal twist by inventing the six-word memoir – and the submissions have been plentiful enough to fill five books. 

The memoirs can be tragic (“I still make coffee for two”), profound (“Never really finished anything.  Except cake.”), instructive (“Found great happiness in insignificant details”), funny (“Started off normal.  Things went awry.”), universal (“Not quite what I was planning”), and hopeful (“More than yesterday, less than tomorrow”).  Famous authors’ self-reflections are expectedly self-aware: “The miserable childhood leads to royalties” (Frank McCourt), “The only way out is in” (Junot Diaz).  Comediennes are predictably censor-worthy (You’ll have to buy the book to read the contributions from Joan Rivers and Sarah Silverman).  Celebrities also chime in, like chef Mario Batali (“Brought it to a boil.  Often.”)

So today, we at CCC give birth to a new six-word challenge: What’s your six-word customer service philosophy? Read More »

“What level of cost savings can we expect after offshoring?”  It’s a question I get a lot.  The unsatisfying answer: “It depends.”  AT Kearney recently released a fascinating exploration into why.  In their Offshore Success Study, AT Kearney gathered data from 35 offshoring companies and analyzed what differences explain the drastic variability in performance across the high performers (who averaged 64% savings and often improved service quality) and the low performers (who only had an 18% average savings).

What’s responsible for this difference?  The Offshore Success Study finds that “execution strategy” – how you handle the transition – is more influential in determining success than variables like offshore location or process complexity.  In short, how you offshore matters more than where or what you offshore:

• Winners don’t focus on savings. The best performers emphasize improving operational performance rather than generating savings (and paradoxically achieve greater savings in the process!).
• Winners invest more to save more. Companies investing more in managing their offshore programs (bigger management teams, more internal on-site resources, strong cultural integration) achieve better performance and savings results.  The best performers had one onshore manager for 50 to 75 offshore FTEs (a ratio that may improve after the operation has stabilized).

So how do you become one of the ‘winners’ – one of those companies with the right execution strategy?  I would have three pieces of advice for someone transitioning to a new offshore location. Read More »

Needless to say (especially living in Washington, DC) it’s hard to find a conversation topic that elicits the same reaction from everyone.  But my experience working in customer service reveals one commonality across all ages, nationalities, races, and eye colors:  If you tell someone you work in customer service, they’ll tell you their latest call center catastrophe. Your former classmate was transferred four times before he found out why his computer screen went blue.  Your aunt could have swept the floors of Madison Square Garden in the time it took her cable company to pick up the phone.  And all your friend’s husband wants to know is what it takes to talk to a human being.  Like it or not, these stories reflexively pour out whenever we answer the inevitable question, “What do you do?”

Our industry certainly receives a disproportionate share of public scorn.  But thankfully, some comedians channel this frustration into something funnier than the typical cocktail party venting session.  Which brings me to my question: What’s the funniest customer service scene you’ve ever seen? (learn about my favorites after the jump)

Read More »

One of our biggest responsibilities in customer service is resolving customer complaints.  Many complaints are constructive customer voice, and some are more ‘noise’ than representative challenge.  But in either case, it’s our job to react and it’s our challenge to recover that customer’s loyalty. 

The stakes are high: escalated complaints cost a lot (in terms of staff time and customer compensation) and the rise of social media means these complaints can quickly reach the masses.  Thankfully, there are simple steps you can take to get ahead of complaints and save money resolving them.  To help here, I thought I’d tackle the two most common questions CCC gets about complaints:

• How do you define a “complaint”? 
• What’s the best way to respond to a complaint?

Read More »

I recently received a new credit card in the mail.  I looked at the ‘how to register’ details on the front of the card for the phone number, and a slight twist on this inevitable sticker changed my typical action.  Instead of providing me two equal options – a Web site and a phone number – the sticker provided the Web URL and then said, in the soft whisper of small font, “If you do not have internet access, call 1 (888)…”

They still provided the phone number.  I bet they would have taken my call without running background to check for broadband bills.  But they took a basic choice and subtly positioned one option as the obvious default. 

Harvard Business Review calls this process setting a “mass default” that directs customers toward the choice that’s better for the company and easier for the customer.  The “choice architecture”—the order of the options, the font size difference, the language preceding the phone number—nudges me to the Web and away from the phone. 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 »

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 »