Simply put, many of us are pushing internal changes through on disgruntled workforces that no longer have the stomach for it. We are morale-ly bankrupt.

Here are some of the facts…

First, more than half of our reps have probably experienced multiple, major changes in the past year – such as a new manager, a different role, a merger with another company, a new sales process, or a restructured team.  (This doesn’t even account for smaller changes.  For example, 81% of organizations we recently polled changed their QA scorecards at least twice last year!)

Second, these changes are stressful, and stress costs money. In fact, more than 60% of employees say that their level of workplace stress has increased in the past two years, and this may be creating an overall drag of as much as 9% on performance.

But why is the stress of change having such a debilitating impact?  After all, change happens right? Staff should be able to deal with it. But it turns out that it’s not so much the magnitude, but rather the frequency of change that is a problem.

Here are a few key facts from the CEC’s research that illustrate this point:

• The average employee today faces a major change every 7 months
• It takes more than 2 years for an employee to fully recover from a change
• This rate of change therefore outpaces the rate of recovery; staff do not typically have enough time to fully recover before the next big change hits them
• The accumulated impact of multiple changes appears to lead to a downward spiral in engagement capital over time.

So what can we do to pull out of this engagement tailspin? For starters, organizations should aim to drive up an employee’s agility (defined as their ability to proactively adapt, learn from others, seek feedback, and support peers), primarily through effective communication.

Then of course there are a few ideas from our new research on the Control Quotient that are relevant here.  Demonstrating trust in your reps may make them more likely to trust you in return during times of change.  Moreover, building a foundation of peer support and communication across the frontline will give your environment the strength to move through change.

Lastly, there is something to be said for choosing one’s battles carefully. Is it really worth undertaking four major change initiatives at once? Or would it be more prudent to focus on driving just one initiative – and doing it right?

CCC’s Anatomy of a World Class Customer Contact Organization is a great prioritization tool in this regard. We recommend members use it to identify the change initiatives that will provide the greatest leverage, while also providing a sneak preview of the degree of support – or resistance – an initiative will likely face. This is of course valuable data to have when we have to spend our “change dollars” wisely.

What other strategies are you employing to minimize the impact of change on your staff?

But wait. Don’t answer. Not quite yet.

Cause it turns out that it’s not your answer that counts.

Yes, it’s true that according to a global CCC survey, 56% of companies say they “sometimes” trust their employees.  44% say they “always” do. Exactly 0% say they “never” trust their people.

But here’s the thing. You can say you trust your employees all you want (and we’re not suggesting for a moment that you don’t) but what matters far more is how your employees would respond. And there’s clear evidence that they don’t feel trusted.

And how can you blame them? If we’re being honest, the entire corporate world has been built on the general assumption that employees CAN’T be trusted:

• If you’ve ever worked in a retail store, you know that it’s SOP for Security to check employees’ personal bags to make sure they’re not stealing.
• Look at all those surveillance cameras in banks. You think those are just for catching bank robbers?
• And if you’ve ever been in a casino (I happen to be a degenerate gambler, myself) you can relate to the words of Robert DeNiro in the movie “Casino“: In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else. The dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I’m watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all.

In our world, the eye-in-the-sky isn’t a camera…it’s a concept. Micromanagement.

What we’ve discovered is that so many of the things we do in customer service management (things that seem logical and prudent), inadvertently come across to our employees as micromanagement and distrust:

• 100% call recording
• Constant monitoring of average handle time (AHT)
• Quality monitoring and quality assurance (QA) conducted secretly behind closed doors

Now, we’re not suggesting that you should stop managing your staff, or that you should promote anarchy by just letting employees do whatever they want. But what we’ve been learning is that when employees don’t feel like they’re trusted to do the right thing, their performance suffers. Which means your performance as a manager or leader suffers as well.

That’s why we’ve assembled a wide variety of ideas and suggestions for how you can promote trust by alleviating metric micromanagement. Things like eliminating the “check-the-box” format of QA. Greatly de-emphasizing any discussions of handle time with individual reps, and emphasizing the one and only thing that truly matters in customer service — creating the best possible experience for each individual customer.

When frontline staff are encouraged to take greater control over their work interactions, when they are not needlessly micromanaged and they are entrusted to take on expanded roles in the service organization, the customer experience is improved, and overall service performance increases.

Turns out that what’s best for your reps = what’s best for your customers = what’s best for you.

It’s a matter of trust.

HOW ABOUT YOU?  What does your company do to demonstrate that you DO or DON’T trust your reps to do what’s best for each customer?

Related CCC Resources:

• Demonstrating Trust in Frontline Reps (Study Chapter)
• Adaptable Quality Framework (National Australia Bank)
• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance

Companies like IBM, SAP, and Deloitte all have used gaming technology to better engage employees in training and data entry and make the tasks seem less tedious and more resonant.

What they have found is that winning virtual badges (indicating an advance to the next level) and interacting in entertaining landscapes and backgrounds (unsurprisingly) actually is far more engaging (for millennials and boomers) than sitting in a classroom for hours on end listening to someone.  And in some studies, videogames even yield better knowledge retention (some research finds that if learning is not put into action within 2 weeks, staff lose that knowledge).

Companies are both hiring external vendors and building new games internally, and the industry expectation is that work-related videogames will become far more prevalent over the next couple of years.

As companies make this transition, a couple of things to consider:

• Foster only a healthy dose of competition: A risk of “gamification” is that the competition can get out of hand.  Ultimately both training and maintaining a supportive team environment are critical to driving frontline staff performance.
• Don’t go overboard with the “gamification:” Some traditional classroom training (e.g., new hire training) is still valuable, as is ongoing one-on-one coaching.  While gaming is more scalable, particularly for global organizations, and can be helpful for certain topics, it is important to use a variety of development techniques.

For those companies who have created work-related videogames, what has the focus of the games been?  And what have you seen in terms of the impact on your staff?

CCC Related Resources:

CCC Research: Identify the Right Opportunities for Training

CCC Research: Practice World-Class Coaching

Peer Networking: CCC Talent Management Forum

While that may have seemed like a clever strategy at age 12, as I reflect back today at age (insert higher number here) it’s obvious that as Mrs. Bierbauer often said, it turns out “I was only cheating myself.”

And so, while I may never fully appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Madame Bovary and Pride and Prejudice I do at least remember one story from the movie version of Tom Sawyer that keeps coming back to me as a lesson we should all apply in managing big Customer Service teams:

The best ideas are the ones that people come up with themselves — although sometimes we have to create the occasion FOR them to come up with those ideas.

Remember how Tom Sawyer, faced with the drudgery of whitewashing the fence in front of Aunt Polly’s house offered passers-by the “opportunity” to join in all the fun he was having with this most delightful activity.  One by one, others DID join in, and before long the whole town was fighting over who got the last brush and who got to help.

Mark Twain’s idea is exactly the same idea that progressive companies are using today to help solidify the connection between big corporate strategies (missions, visions, values) and the everyday behaviors of their frontline reps.  That alignment is critical (it’s one of the key elements of employee engagement) but you, as a leader, can’t make it happen. It only happens when you enable it to happen on its own.

The best example we’ve seen comes from the Canadian financial services company Sun Life Financial. They’ve come up with a relatively simple three-step process:

1. It  starts by nominating a committee of high-performing reps to de-construct the company’s big strategic goals into bite-size pieces that could be addressed and accomplished directly by their front-line CS team.
2. At the end of that step, there are several clearly-deliniated team objectives — each of which are linked directly to the corporate goals.  (Truth be told, the goals these volunteers come up with are almost exactly what their leaders would have suggested themselves, but the point is, they came “from the people” and not from management!)
3. Then (and, IMHO, this is the real “magic” to their process) every front-line rep meets with their supervisor to examine the goals the committee agreed on, and each is individually asked what they can personally work on to help accomplish these team goals.  It’s all about aligning frontline staff to service goals.

See how different this is than just telling reps what they need to work on?

The results for Sun Life have been very impressive, and it only makes sense that they would be, because the whole process is based on three elements that are universal in creating success:

a) Our individual work has to be connected to some larger accomplishment that matters in the world

b) It has to be our idea (NOT someone else’s)

c) But someone else has to guide us to arriving at that idea — cause left to our own devices, we probably wouldn’t

I hope you’ll join us for an upcoming series of webinars on this topic.  We’ll take you behind the curtain to look more closely at Sun Life’s process, and encourage you to pursue the same concept at your company.

LESSON:  Allow your frontline staff to help with the whitewashing.  It’s actually fun, if you let it be.

HOW ABOUT YOU:  Does your company enable frontline staff to align their own everyday behaviors to the organization’s bigger strategic goals?  Or, are people just basically “told what they need to do?”

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.

In a recent survey of over 5,000 customer service employees by CCC’s sister program, the Corporate Leadership Council, the percentage of staff who are highly disengaged is 25.5%.

And while we could debate the reasons why 1 in 4 employees are highly disengaged, the more exciting conversation centers around the solution to correct this worrisome trend.

The solution? Enable & foster the right kind of environment.

In a survey of more than 5,000 frontline staff, CCC discovered that employees who work in a specific kind of environment have 9% higher levels of discretionary effort & have 12% higher intent to stay with the company.

There are three keys to creating this “right environment”:

1)     Demonstrate trust to your frontline staff by eliminating metric micromanagement (think AHT-de-emphasis & elimination of the QA checklist);

2)     Align organization and corporate goals to individual frontline performance goals, and;

3)     Develop a strong peer support network for your frontline staff to share and vet best practice ideas and improvement opportunities.

And although these keys sound like HUGE changes to achieve what’s interesting is that these are mutually exclusive … you don’t have to do all three in order to realize gains.  In fact, each of these three is almost equally impactful and it doesn’t matter which one you run to first.  So how about starting by taking AHT off of your reps’ scorecard … hmm?

Related CCC Resources:

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance – Click on the link to learn more about CCC’s findings on the importance of the service organization’s environment and its impact on frontline staff performance.
• Upcoming Webinar – October 11^th – Metrics to Enable Control Quotient – Sign up to participate in an overview, including Q&A, on this powerful topic of the service organization’s environment and how to decrease rep-level metric micromanagement.
• Upcoming Webinar – October 20^th & 21^st –Aligning Frontline Staff to Service Goals – Sign up to participate in a virtual session to learn how to involve your frontline staff in the goal-setting process and align those goals to their individual development.

Last year, we shared a few creative ideas on how companies can show their appreciation for staff during Customer Service Week—these include friendly contests, giveaways, off-site trips, and other group activities throughout the week. Most companies schedule one or two events each day throughout the week with a goal of boosting employee morale and reaffirming the important role that employees play in the success of the service and support organization.

But while the focus of Customer Service Week has traditionally been the service employees themselves, some companies view the celebration as an occasion to recognize customers, as well. And with many organizations facing increased budget pressure this year, a greater focus on the customer can be one way to create a fun, meaningful week of celebration—without breaking the bank.

So how can companies incorporate the customer into their Customer Service Week celebrations? Below are some creative ideas to get your planning started:

1)      Ask reps for their opinion – Communicate the importance of rep ideas in improving the customer experience…but don’t stop there. Set aside time for reps to collaborate and discuss their ideas with one another. While this may seem like an additional task to complete, many will be grateful for the opportunity to have their voices heard. Creating a ‘contest’ to see who can come up with the best ideas can also drive interest and participation. One company goes as far as to help their reps create business cases to present to senior leadership, driving engagement and surfacing actionable improvement ideas in the process.

2)      Thank your customers – While it may seem like a simple idea that your reps already do on each and every call, take a few extra seconds this week to sincerely thank the customer for their business. Let him or her know that it’s Customer Service Week and that your organization is celebrating their customers and staff members. You can take it one step further by inviting reps to create a short video for your Web site or YouTube to thank customers.

3)      Showcase your successes – Recognize individual contributions and success stories over the past year, but don’t forget to use these anecdotes as prime examples of “what excellence looks like.” By sharing the wisdom of your high performers, you can ensure that this recognition also has positive implications for the customer experience going forward.

CCC Buzz readers—we want to hear from you. How do you plan to celebrate Customer Service Week 2011?

Related CCC Resources

• Improving Rep Satisfaction through Non-Monetary Incentives
• CCC Member Incentives Portal
• Rep-Owned Collaboration Forums (Fidelity)

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

Why:

In a recent study, The Next Frontier of Rep Performance, the Customer Contact Council found that in order to be successful in the increasingly demanding world of customer service, service executives have to create the right kind of environment for their staff to do their jobs.  And the biggest key to creating a strong workplace environment?  That’s right; it’s creating a strong rep peer support network.       

How:

Creating this strong rep peer support network can be done in a number of different ways, but one of the most effective that we’ve seen comes from a financial services company that has enabled a virtual support network for their staff to share and collaborate on best practice and improvement opportunities.   

And while the word “virtual” may have given you pause because you’re thinking that your company doesn’t have the time, budget, or resources to implement something like a virtual peer support network, the truth is that lots of out-of-the-box options already exist that aren’t cost prohibitive (Microsoft’s Sharepoint & GoogleDocs, for instance), and given the boost to performance that you could achieve (not to mention employee engagement) it’s certainly worth the investment. 

And the key to getting this right, as we’ve learned from working with this specific company, is that this peer rep support network can be created, and even encouraged by you, the service executive, but if you force this upon your frontline staff they’ll reject it and won’t use it.  Success relies on leadership helping create a safe place for sharing & collaborating and then largely getting out of the way & letting frontline staff own the space.  Success comes from relieving leadership of control of the forum and positioning frontline staff to input & vet ideas with one another as well as frontline staff who keep the forum alive & moderate responses.  Sound too “out-of-control” for you?  Turns out that the sooner you let go of your control, the better off you (and your organization) will be.

CCC Members: If you’re interested in learning more about this idea of a rep-owned collaboration forum, sign-up to attend the September 27^th or September 28^th Webinar when we’ll be joined by this financial services company to learn about their successful deployment.

Related CCC Resources:

• The Next Frontier of Rep Performance – Full Study
• Rep-Led Business Improvement Presentations
• Upcoming Event – Crowdsourcing Your Reps’ Best Ideas – September 27^th Webinar
• Upcoming Event – Crowdsourcing Your Reps’ Best Ideas – September 28^th Webinar

Given the unique issues that customer service professionals in the Financial Services industry face – including customer privacy and financial risk regulations – it can be difficult to know what CCC resources would be most helpful.

Wondering what others in your industry are reading? Here is a list of the CCC resources that your industry peers are downloading most often.

Top 3 CCC Resources for Financial Services Customer Service Professionals

1. Engineering a Low-Effort Customer Experience

What it is: A popular CCC download, this research outlines the most effective, up-to-date strategies for customer effort reduction.  In today’s competitive banking landscape, differentiating the customer experience may be a great way to win and retain customers.

Why your peers use it:

• To understand the sources of customer effort.
• To identify ways to reduce both the objective and subjective sides of effort.
• To coach frontline reps to employ techniques to reduce “in-the-moment” customer effort.

You might also be interested in: The Customer Effort Score – a customer experience metric that accounts for ease of customer interaction during a service request. CCC research has found that this is the most accurate measure of loyalty in a service organization. 

2. Coaching Starter Guide

What it is: A tool that helps supervisors and coaches identify rep development needs and address them through a behaviors-based coaching model.

Why your peers use it:

• To determine the objectives for coaching interactions. Given regulatory constraints in the industry, it is very important for service professionals to monitor rep behaviors.
• To decide the appropriate behaviors to coach on.
• To leverage example “starter” questions for coaching interactions.

You might also be interested in: Redefining the High-Performing Supervisor. This research provides guidance on the profile of most (and least) effective supervisors and identifies methods to replicate those behaviors.  This is a must-read if you are seeking guidance on how to engage your supervisors to improve service center performance.

3. Average Handle Time Root Cause Analysis and Recommended Opportunities

What it is: In an industry where there are so many metrics, it is crucial that Financial Services companies focus on the right ones. This tool can help companies identify the key drivers of Average Handle Time (AHT) and provide a blueprint for ways to reduce it.

Why your peers use it:

• To manage call volume by understanding the factors that drive AHT.
• To identify both short-term and long-term action steps to overcome AHT-related challenges.

You might also be interested in: Benchmarking Portal. A comprehensive look at CCC’s latest annual survey, this portal will allow you to compare your service center operations with those of your peers.  Financial services companies can use the portal to: prioritize opportunities for performance improvements, compare metrics, and identify areas in which to manage costs.

What other CCC tools or industry-related web sites do you have on your “must-read” list?

Of course, we should always be looking at other people in customer service — in different fields and business models — and see how they do what they do.

(I worked in the airline business for many years, and was always astounded at how little interest there was in ever comparing our service model with other customer service industries like hospitality, food-and-beverage or retail — no wonder the airline business is in such horrible shape — most airlines only benchmark against other airlines!)

But is there anything can we learn from other professions?  I mean, if you’re not in the business of serving customers, then whadda we in CS care what you do?

That seems like a logical position.  Or at least I thought so, until CCC uncovered some surprising research as part of our new study, “The Next Frontier of Rep Performance.” What we’ve been learning is that one HUGE key to customer service performance is for reps to have the ability to bounce back from a negative or emotionally-challenging experience with one customer, and then be able to start fresh (just seconds later) with the next customer.

Most reps tend to carry the negative “baggage” of a bad experience with them — either right into the next call with the next customer, or for that baggage to eventually wear them down, creating a sense of burnout that degrades performance.

So, how could a rep learn to “fully engage” with one customer, but to cleanly “disengage” after a bad experience?  The answer lies by looking outside our own profession — and to learn from people who have to deal with VERY challenging emotional issues every day.

Nurses.

My sister has worked as a hospital nurse for almost 20 years — most recently in the psychiatric ward at a big hospital in Michigan.  In her job, emotional outbursts happen by the hour.  People scream at her, and call her (let’s just say) all kinds of names — mostly because the majority of her patients suffer from a lack of self-control or self-awareness.  That’s why they’re there.

But in the process of treating them, she’s exposed to raw anger and abuse beyond what most of us in Customer Service will ever experience. So recently, I asked her (actually doing a research interview with my “baby” sister), “How do you guys handle all that emotion?  How can you be verbally abused by some patient, and three seconds later be all smiles with the next patient?  How does it not get to you at some point?”

Sister: “Easy.  QTIP.”

Me: “Really?  Q-Tip, like, whadda ya clean out your ears after some patient screams at you?”

Sister:  (thinking to herself) No, you dope…

Sister (actually answering): No, QTIP is an acronym we nurses use to remind ourselves that WE are each in control of our own emotions and our ability to handle difficult emotional situations. When something bad happens, it isn’t because of ME, and it usually isn’t even because of that patient.  It’s just about the situation.  And situations get fixed.  But the key to being able to engage fully with each patient, is, whenever bad things do happen, we remember to quit takin’ it personally.  QTIP.

Turns out this is a critical lesson for all of us in CS — and particularly those of you who manage big staffs of front-line agents.  QTIP.

What about YOU?  How do you teach your reps to be able to successfully engage, but quickly disengage as well?

In fact the changes are so significant and long-lasting that companies that once saw these trends as temporary are now embracing these changes as permanent.  And of course service and support organizations have not been immune to these changes.

Among the most major changes is the new influx of younger generations into the workplace.  With them come different expectations, motivations, preferences, and styles, leaving many organizations at a loss for how to effectively manage and motivate these staff.

But given the economic climate, older demographics also have changed their perceptions and expectations of the workplace environment, creating a complex management situation for many organizations.

In fact, organizations today are not just coping with managing the demands of individual demographics, but how the demographics interact with each other, too.  Suddenly retention, engagement, and team dynamics are quite complex, calling into question tried and true engagement and management strategies.

So what is the right way forward?  Here are a few considerations:

1. Understand the preferences and motivations of different demographics as they vary significantly.

CCC’s sister market research arm, Iconoculture, has conducted substantial generational research, finding that some of the biggest differences lie in different demographics’ definitions of success, perception of space and roles, and perception of technology.

Included in this post’s graphic are some broad expectations broken out by demographics that Iconoculture has surfaced.  Take these into consideration when building communication and development plans and creating incentives.

2. Flexibility is the new norm.  All demographics increasingly value work flexibility, enabling them to more effectively balance personal lives, families, and even exercise routines.  That means flexible scheduling and remote agent programs are growing in popularity.

In fact we are increasingly seeing interest in remote worker by B2B order management and technical support organizations, business models that previously ruled out the possibility of flexible work arrangements.

And of course the benefits of flexibility are numerous, included lower absenteeism and turnover rates and higher engagement.

3. Leverage new communication channels.  Monthly memos and mass blast e-mails from leadership may have been effective in the past, but staff increasingly value collaboration tools such as social networks and wikis to connect and share knowledge.

In fact, CCC’s latest research finds that different demographics are embracing these channels as virtual peer support opportunities, which can actually increase frontline staff performance.

What other demographic trends are you noticing in your service and support organization are you seeing?  And how are you addressing the changes?

CCC Related Resources:

• Attracting and Retaining Generation Y
• Remote Agent Program Development Process
• Creating Flexible Schedules
• Employee Engagement Survey