“People seem to want everything these days, and if we can’t/won’t/shouldn’t give it to them, they go ballistic.”

“Some customers call us still angry from their last issue and what they’re seeking feels less like resolution, and more like revenge!”

“We’ve got customers who think they’re smarter than our reps. And I think some of them actually ARE!”

At CCC, we’ve detected a distinct shift in the landscape  – a page-turn to a new chapter in our relationship with customers.  They’re becoming more demanding, or worse, even unrealistic about what to expect from us.

It’s the dawning of a new era, and it’s one we’ve all seen coming for some time: Read More »

At CCC, much of our research work involves studying and teaching best-in-class practices—in doing so, we help our member companies learn smart, innovative approaches to common challenges that service organizations face. It’s a simple but powerful model, and while many of the best practices we profile offer solutions for the organization, the concept works just as well at an individual level.

We’ve all been the beneficiary of a helpful tip or trick from a coworker, and while we may not think of an Excel shortcut, for example, as rising to the level of a “best practice”, in the service organization these are exactly the kind of useful pieces of advice that can add up to real savings. The biggest challenge is that it can be tough to identify—let alone replicate—these time-saving habits of high performers to improve performance among the entire front line.

To address this challenge, one financial services company we work with took a structured approach to learning from and sharing the collective wisdom of their frontline reps. While the full case is available on the CCC Web site, the key insights to help you uncover and teach time- and cost-saving tips and shortcuts are below: Read More »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this elusive concept of “ownership.”  You hear it all the time — reps need to “own” the call, they need to take ownership of customer issues, they need to own the resolution.

I love this idea, and it is central to our upcoming new presentation “The Next Frontier of Rep Performance.” But the more I think about it, the more I’ve been wondering — where, exactly, does ownership COME from?  To have it in abundant supply, you’d need to identify its source, right?

Now the confession:  Turns out I had it all wrong.

I used to think (and, BTW, feel free to join in here, so I don’t feel like I’m the only one on Lonely Island) that ownership is a gift.  It is something a company would have to “give” to its reps.  Read More »

Myers-Briggs, DiSC^®, Insights, HBDI.  All of these programs (and others like them) introduce the concept of individual personality styles & assist learners to not only understand their own personality style, but also those of the people around them.  The outcome of these programs?  The ability to understand how your own personality interacts with other personality types.

This skill, being able to recognize and “flex” to other personality types, can have tremendously positive results in service organizations including boosts to employee engagement & customer experience, improved coaching interactions, and financial benefits, too, like reduced callbacks and better selling success.     

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies in workshops around the world to train trainers on these techniques, and the enthusiasm for this approach to service is universally positive.  Companies rarely have difficulty justifying the implementation of personality-based service and the rollout of the training is not only engaging and exciting, it’s a heckuva lot of fun, too!  But getting this personalized service approach to stick has been a challenge for some.

So how do you make this behavior stick? 

Read More »

This is a guest post by Matt Kiel of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales professionals.

Don’t get me wrong: I love working with heads of Sales. But every now and then, something crosses my desk that reminds me of how much we can still learn from other functional executives.

And what could be more cross-functional than 2011 budgeting and planning? If you’re one of the many sales leaders reviewing recent budget projections and saying, “You want me to do what with what?!” then I’d encourage you to read on for a bit of good news from an unlikely source.

As it turns out, our sister research program that supports CFOs is strongly advocating that companies shift more resources to activities directly tied to sales growth in the near term.

Now, before you dismiss that idea as too farfetched for your penny-pinching CFO to get behind, consider these key findings that will help you speak their language: Read More »

This is the second in a two-part series on creating effective contact center organization dashboards.  The first post explores the topic of metric selection.

You probably know the saying, “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”  But in the hectic pace of the modern office, internal documents often suffer this exact fate.  If something looks like it will take a long time to read and digest, given everyone’s busy schedules it’s likely that it will be set aside to review at a “free moment”…that never comes along.  And, of course, the contact center operational dashboard is no exception to this syndrome.  So it’s important to make sure that your dashboard doesn’t take a lot of effort to consume, assuming you want your audience, particularly those outside of the contact center organization, to pay attention. 

So, here are five design tips to keep in mind to de-clutter your dashboard presentation and catch your audience’s attention: Read More »

 It’s planning season for many companies right now.  What do we want to accomplish in 2011?  What will be our goals?  One of the key tools that we use to make these decisions (and communicate the logic behind them) is the organization dashboard.  The way I see it, there are two basic things you must do to have a good dashboard: 

First, pick the right metrics. 

Second, ensure people to understand the dashboard. 

In this post, I’ll explore number one; stay tuned for dashboard presentation tips in my second installment in my next blog post.  For today, let’s think about metric selection. 

Poor Metric Selection Creates Ineffective Dashboard Consumption

Why does metric selection matter?  Well, one of the more common problems associated with dashboards is “metric bloat”, often brought on by uncertainty involving metric selection.  In other words, in the absence of knowing which metrics to choose, many dashboard owners will err on the side of over-inclusion.  Not only does this lead to headaches for dashboard compilation (absent a slick system on the backend that can compile all the data), but it also lessens to the effectiveness of the dashboard.  And although in part two we’ll talk about how to get readers to understand your dashboard, it’s what you do here in part one (metric selection) that will determine if people are willing to value it enough to look at in the first place.   Read More »

Stop for a minute and ask yourself this – is “getting coached” a good thing in your organization? If you’re being honest, chances are it’s probably not.

Last week Pete and I spent an entire day running our latest workshop, teaching trainers to instill better coaching practices in their supervisor and team lead populations. We had 30 companies represented across nearly every major industry. It was a great crowd, with very energetic discussion.

The very first exercise of the day involved creating a goal for coaching. And while many participants jumped in an added their thoughts, two things were abundantly clear:

 1) Coaching is a misused word and concept. The outcomes, methods, and intent of coaching around the room couldn’t have been more diverse. Naturally, we assume when everyone nods their head in agreement at the word “coaching,” it’s universally understood. Well, you know what they say about assuming…

 2) Most organizations have not defined a true goal and purpose for coaching. We’re telling our leaders to “coach” without a sense of what that really means. Good coaching does not involve performance management, nor does it involve a conference room.

Read More »

If you’re like most of your peers, you’re on the lookout for fast and effective ways to cut expenditures in today’s cost-constrained environment. On the top of many executives’ lists – relaxing their average speed of answer (ASA) to cut back on staffing requirements. It’s an instant win for many contact center executives, but not one they exercise freely.

The prevailing belief is customers don’t want to wait on hold, so we’d better pick up the phone fast.  Companies spend significant resources to determine what ‘fast’ means to the customer, closely benchmarking their service levels with their peers. Changing their goal from 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to 90% answered in 30 seconds becomes an agonizing decision without the right data.

So, what are customer breaking points?  Turns out there are greater tolerances for waiting time variance than often thought:

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• Customers preferences peak at 30 seconds, which seemingly indicates that they expect to wait that long, or possibly even that customers like to wait.
• Roughly between 30 and 50 seconds is when service levels impact the experience, though only marginally.
• Beyond 50 seconds the experience reaches a true impact point.

Read More »