My two girls are close in age to one another, and they often get invited to the same birthday parties.  But, there are those occasions where one gets invited and the other doesn’t, and what follows is usually something along the lines of:

Daughter: “I want to go to the party, too.”

Me: “I know you do, but you weren’t invited to this party.  You’ll get invited to other parties, though.”

Daughter:  “But I really want to go to this one.”

Me: “I understand, but we can’t just show up at the door and expect them to let us in with open arms.”

And strangely enough I’ve found myself having a similar conversation with a number of business-to-business (B2B) companies in recent months.  More and more B2B service organizations are trying to discover how to better partner with their colleagues (especially in Sales) and are finding that they haven’t been invited to the party.  How come?

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Rep scorecards.   Shortly after the creation of the service organization came the creation of the rep scorecard, and with good reason, too.  In an effort to boost frontline performance service executives measure and report everything from calls answered to quality scores to sales performance.  But how about issue resolution?  Do you report that on your reps’ scorecards, and more importantly, should you?  That’s the question my colleague and I aimed to answer when we renewed our friendly debate. 

Let it begin:

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Anyone else curious to know what those squiggly box things are?  Yeah, me too.  Turns out they’re called QR codes (that’s, Quick Response) and they’re origin can be traced to the mid 90s Japan when they were used for internal tracking of materials.  Since then the QR code technology has been opened to the masses and is most commonly used today for marketing purposes.

But can QR codes effectively be used in service?

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“Your wish is its command.”

That’s Apple’s new tagline for its natural language application, Siri, which is available on its new iOS.  If you haven’t heard of Siri yet a quick Google search will reveal that early reviews are a mixed bag: some find it useful, others find it frustrating (mostly because of recent outages), and still others just find it comical!

My question is this: will this fun app resurrect customers’ willingness to use natural voice IVRs to resolve issues?

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“You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success – or are they holding you back?”
~         W. Clement Stone

Do you want to work in an environment where your leadership trusts you to make decisions, where you have a clear vision of how your daily activity impacts the organization’s goals & where you’re encouraged to share ideas with your peers without a watchful eye peering down on your every move?  Of course you do!

And your frontline staff does, too.  Unfortunately though, as Mr. Stone poses in the quote above, many organizations are holding their frontline staff back because of the environmental conditions that are in place.  And these environmental conditions are creating an outcome that no one wants: employee disengagement. Read More »

Water cooler chats.  Break room talks.  Over-the-wall convos.  These are the traditional ways that our frontline staff interacts with one another.  And while these meetings provide great opportunities for our staff to share ideas & improvement opportunities, unless lunch & break times coincide with each other, staff members tend to interact with the same peers over and over.  And the increasing popularity of remote workforce, not to mention multi-site organizations, has narrowed the field for peer interactions even more.  Shouldn’t we, as executive leaders, be providing more opportunities for these kinds of interactions, not fewer?

The answer is yes, and here’s why and (as important) how:

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I’m a visual leaner, which means that I learn best by seeing or watching how something is done.  And a quick Google search tells me that about 2/3 of the population falls into this category of learners, so there are quite a few of us out there.

So imagine my disappointment when I tried to find some visual assistance (read: how-to videos) to repair my washing machine and only found the product manual on the company Web site.  I’ll get back to my washing machine in a minute, but first why don’t companies have how-to videos on their sites for customer support?

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Kids ask parents for it.  Adults ask each other for it.  Songs & poems have been written about it.  And you can only imagine the Google images that pop up when you search for it.  But are your customers going to give it to you?  Or will they respond, as the old adage claims, ‘with their feet’?

I’m talking, of course, about forgiveness. More specifically, forgiveness of a company after a poor customer service experience.

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Recently, my colleague Lauren and I had a, shall we say, “spirited” debate over the merits of social media as a long-term platform for service.  While I’m not sure who “won” this debate (we’ll let you decide that), I know we can both agree that social media isn’t going away anytime soon, whether service executives like it, or not.  Check out our debate below and let us know what you think … bright, shiny object or, a viable service channel for the long-term?

Pete:  Blogs, Facebook and Twitter are here to stay.  And not just for social purposes, but, as we’ve seen quite a bit in the past couple of years (here and here and here, just to show a few), as vehicles for customers to interact with companies and vice versa.  Now you may not like it (I recently heard a service executive say “I hate Facebook”), but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, so you’d better embrace it and learn how to operate in an environment that is the most unique arena for service I’ve ever seen.

Lauren:  Although these channels might be here to stay, I think that their reach tends to be overestimated. 

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Service executives often say that they want their reps to focus on the customer experience, yet when we talk to reps they tell us that their focus is on something else: getting a good call score from QA. 

And while senior leaders view the QA scorecard as a guide to providing good quality service, reps see the scorecard as some sort of code that has to be cracked in order to achieve high performance marks.      

One organization’s reps actually referred to their QA process as “The da Vinci Code”.  Once a rep cracked the da Vinci code good QA scores were easy to earn.  The problem with this is that reps were optimizing to the scorecard instead of the customer and they needed to redirect that energy to where it belonged: the customer experience.

But how can you make this happen?  It’s simple:

Eliminate the scorecard. Read More »