Customer Service Buzz

A friend of mine, a librarian, just changed jobs.  At her old place of employment, she spent her last few weeks updating guidelines and refreshing handbooks, training her replacement so the transition would be seamless.  But, several weeks into her new job she still gets e-mails from her replacement asking questions (“What’s our inter-library book sharing policy for new books?” or “What if I get a request for a publication we don’t get?”)  She shared her frustrations with me, and wondered if there was anything she should have done differently to upskill her replacement before she left.

My answer? More or less, no.  The answer wasn’t a better transition plan, it’s a better knowledge management approach.  My biggest clue here was that she manually updated everything before she left – trying to cram all her tribal knowledge into the handbook after the fact, rather than updating the handbooks and guidelines in real time as things changed.  Of course she forgot to include things, especially if they weren’t everyday occurrences. 

The same can be said for the contact center.  There’s so much knowledge floating around about the latest product or the best way to handle a customer issue, but it’s not always in our frontline rep-facing knowledge base.  Or perhaps the information is in there, but is not up-to-date or is poorly written.

The answer for many service organization is to invest in the latest knowledge management technology.  And while technology plays an important role, I’ve come to believe the emphasis should be placed on the people and processes of knowledge management.  I’ve seen highly sophisticated knowledge management technologies fall short of their goals because the company had poor processes to support the technology. 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 »

I’m heading off on vacation shortly, and from the recent conversations I’ve had with members it sounds like I’m not alone in getting geared up for a summer getaway.  While I’m definitely taking a break from work (and away from my iPhone), I’m also planning on a lot of quality reading time on the beach. 

So, what’s in my beach bag?  I thought I’d share what I’m currently reading that’s related to customer service (some more directly than others, but all fuel my thinking in the space).  Read More »

When I talk to members about frontline rep coaching programs, they often want a set of proven rules and concrete, granular steps every supervisor should take to be a successful coach.  It’s akin to the instructions on the back of an instant cake mix box.  Just add an egg and some water – and voila! – you have a delicious cake every time.

While I’d love to tell you I can give you the five easy steps to coaching success, I’ve come to believe that coaching isn’t a science we can replicated identically among our supervisors. 

In fact, it’s more of an art form.  And in art, we can give folks the tools – brushes, colors, and canvas – to create a great piece of art, but we can’t tell them exactly what to do.  We can’t tell them how to hold their brush or precisely how to create the most eye-catching color.  Sure, we can give suggestions, but it’s up to the artist to figure out what works best.

So – just like in art we can give supervisors the tools they need to coach effectively, but we can’t mandate a set of discrete actions to success.  And, like Pablo Picasso’s innate artistic ability, some supervisors are naturals and coach effectively from almost day one. 

Many though, don’t have the innate skills required to coach effectively right out of the gate.  But, if there’s no five step recipe for success here, short of the time and resource consuming task of hiring a set of super-coaches, what can we do to help these supervisors approximate the behaviors of their highest performing peers?   Read More »

What’s your favorite type of hold music?  Do you like some smooth jazz or light rock?  Or maybe you prefer silence while you wait?  Me personally, I like to listen to some classical music while I’m waiting to talk to a customer service rep.

Whether it’s the recommendation to use nature sounds instead of actual music, a ranking of the top worst hold music songs of all time, or the innovative use of your own staff to record hold music – seems like everyone has an opinion on the matter.  From everything about deciding on the music itself to inserting messaging throughout – I’ve even heard members talk about letting their customers choose which kind of hold music to listen to or let customers choose to wait in silence.

But, there may soon come a time when all of these questions are rendered irrelevant.

Meet LucyPhone. Read More »

At CCC we recently completed our annual performance reviews, and it’s gotten me thinking about talent.  More specifically, our high-potential talent and how to keep them around.  Sure, some folks tell me career options are limited in the service world – and there’s ‘healthy’ attrition of individuals who aren’t good fits.  But our top frontline staff, the ones who can just get it done – don’t we want to do everything in our power to keep them?

And the news from one of our sister programs, the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), isn’t good.  In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, their study of over 20,000 ‘emerging star’ employees found some startling facts:

• 1 in 3 high-potential employees are disengaged from their job – and are far less productive as a result
• 1 in 4 intends to leave their current company within the next year
• 1 in 5 see a misalignment between what the company wants and their own personal aspirations

Sound scary?  Well, it definitely got my attention.  And it got me thinking about what we can do to swing these statistics back in our favor. Read More »

My friends and I have board game nights as a way to have fun without breaking the bank.  And while Apples to Apples and Phase 10 are our faves, there’s nothing like an old-fashioned game of charades. 

Whether we’re acting out Project Runway or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it’s always a hilarious experience.  In the heat of the moment, folks try wacky things to get their team to guess the correct phrase – it’s stuff that makes sense to the actor at the time (like jumping up and down to simulate flying), but looks like gobbledygook to their team.  It’s all about perspective, right?

And that got me thinking, what does the service organization do that makes total sense internally, but confuses the heck out of customers?  From recent conversations with some of our members, it sounds like our FAQs on our websites offers up some quick win opportunities.

FAQs are often the customer’s go-to information source, but they tend to be added on an ad hoc basis – cutting and pasting from press releases or internal documents.  The end result is a large volume of FAQs that are repetitive and hard to understand.  CCC data shows that between 2-5% of call volume comes from customers who were just on the company website but were either confused or unconfident in the information they found.

Just how hard are your FAQs to understand?  Well, there’s a simple, free tool you can use to find out.  Read More »

While reading The Economist last week, the cover story on developing countries and innovation caught my eye.  The gist of the article: developing countries are not just low-cost sources of labor, but are in fact increasingly the source of product and service innovation.  Everything from Kenya’s leading use of money transfer by mobile phone to Bharti Airtel’s partnership with competitors to share radio towers was mentioned. 

This idea got me thinking more specifically about the service organization.  No, not about offshoring or outsourcing implications, although Dan has written on that topic recently.  I actually started thinking about times when new ideas come from previous unexplored or even unlikely sources.  Just like the world is waking up to the insight potential within developing countries like Brazil and India – service leaders are beginning to realize the untapped ability of their frontline reps to bring new ideas to the business. Read More »

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a financial services member after walking her through our work on the key service interaction attributes that drive customer loyalty.  She asked me, “Do you ever get a chance to revisit and update your past research?”  The question got me thinking – both about the ideal state and the reality.    

Being a true research geek at heart, I wish I could spend all my days digging deep to re-examine a past topic – but I know that our member’s immediate business needs often mean we need to press on to explore new, emerging topics too.  Luckily, sometimes – like with our customer loyalty work – there is a perfect storm which allows us to dig deeper on a topic that is also of high interest to our members.

What our loyalty work told us was clear.  Two points stand out to me in particular:

1. Service organizations should focus on preventing and reducing customer effort: A staggering 96% of customers who put forth high effort in a service interaction are more disloyal – and only 9% of customers with low effort are more disloyal.

2. The best way to measure the customer experience is through an effort measurement: Measuring effort with CCC’s Customer Effort Score (CES™) is far more predictive of repurchase, growth, and positive word of mouth as compared to typical experience measures.

Since we debuted this research back in 2008, we’ve seen countless members start to measure effort and find initial ways to eliminate sources of customer effort.  But the question soon became, “What can I do (next) to reduce customer effort?” 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 »