The latest trend in management?  Giving staff the tools to optimize their own productivity.

A number of companies are now investing in self-monitoring applications and tools to help staff gauge exactly how much time they spend perusing Facebook while on the clock, how much pesky chats from chatty colleagues interrupt their workflow, and identify what the most productive time of the day is for an individual.  (Read The Wall Street Journal article to learn more about the specific technologies and tactics like gamification and knowledge workload tracking.)

These efforts are another tactic to help staff optimize their own productivity.  No longer are companies simply relying on supervisors to manage, but really giving staff greater ownership to figure out ways to increase their own performance.

The new emphasis follows an interesting logic path: Staff want to take ownership and improve themselves but lack the ability (and tools) to do so today.

Read More »

With the first quarter of 2012 behind us, we thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of the one-off polling questions that CCC members have posted and responded to on our Customer Experience and Talent Management forums.

If there’s one overriding theme in the data here, it’s metrics—what to measure, how to measure it, and even who does the measuring are all important topics of discussion and debate among the membership.

We hope there is a little something for everyone in these numbers and that they serve as a good frame of reference for how service organizations are approaching similar challenges in some very different ways.

Without further ado, here are the numbers:

1.   Gathering Feedback on Phone Interactions

The post-interaction survey has become a hallmark of customer service, but the best method for administering that survey is still a question in some members’ minds. While new delivery channels like SMS-based surveying have become popular with a small group of members, the majority still prefer a phone-based survey, either before the customer disconnects or afterward with a follow-up outbound call. Read More »

Did you hear the recent controversy in the news about a contact centre monitoring and managing how much time their staff spends away from their desks?

For those of us in customer service, it’s called Workforce Management (WFM) and we use this each and every day to help manage our operations. It’s not even a controversy—it’s out in the open within the customer service industry and quite a common practice. But when a Norwegian contact centre was recently discovered to be tracking their staffs’ time away from the phone on bathroom breaks or on personal breaks, the mainstream press and blogosphere exploded with outrage.

Let’s not debate the exact particulars of this situation but suffice it to say that we all engage in monitoring of schedule adherence and staff occupancy to varying degrees. We’ve always asked our staff to log into & log out of the ACD with certain codes, so what’s all the controversy about? Read More »

When you rub elbows with customer service execs from 400 different companies every day you hear a lot of issues and challenges that group together into common themes.  Some of the most common:

• How can we reduce our costs, without damaging the customer experience?
• Is there a way to create a consistent customer experience across multiple channels?
• What’s the best way to create customer loyalty?

There are a few different ways to word these questions — i.e, loyalty, satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth. However, there’s one group of questions that inevitably start with the same exact words:

How can we get our employees…

(to create a better service experience?) (become more engaged?) (be more efficient?) (go the extra mile for customers?)

Of all those words, the one that jumps out is “get.” How can we GET our employees…?

Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing a lot of work this past year in the areas of human behavioral reinforcement and employee psychology, and what I’ve been learning is that…

…you…can’t. You (as a leader) can’t GET anyone to do anything that they don’t want to do. Read More »

“What is the future of the customer experience?”

Seems like the $64,000 question, right?

Well, I had the pleasure of attending a summit on this topic a couple of weeks ago.  Sitting in with customer service executives from around the globe and across many industries – like financial services, retail, and telecommunications – it was a great couple of days away from the office to give me time to think about the answer to that question.

We talked about everything from big data to integrating service into the customer’s more mobile lifestyle to expanding into new channels to using VOC to, of course, social media.  We discussed customer expectations today, and how to drive change throughout the organization.

And at the end of the day, after having a chance to reflect on all the rich conversations – I had a few takeaway thoughts I wanted to share with you: Read More »

When I have a question about the best way to do something, more often than not my first step is to ask a peer for help. Not only are my peers the most likely people to know what I’m going through and have the right answer, but they’re also the most convenient, comfortable source of knowledge to which I have access.

Unlike me, though, the typical rep in today’s service organization doesn’t have too many opportunities to learn from his or her peers; in fact, given the time constraints and scheduled nature of the call center, peer-to-peer learning—when it happens at all—tends to occur in an informal, ad hoc fashion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it highlights an opportunity to introduce some more structure to the peer support that’s already taking place. And with more structured support, we can not only help avoid some of the potentially negative effects of unstructured peer support (for example, reps unknowingly sharing bad information with one another), but also:

1)      Decrease the burden on supervisors, who reps most frequently turn to for support in the absence of a helpful, accessible peer.

2)      Tap into an existing need for reps to connect with and support their peers.

3)      Develop coaching skills in reps, preparing them to fill future supervisor, coach, and leadership positions.

In short—there are some BIG benefits to be realized by creating the right conditions for effective peer-to-peer support in today’s service organization. Read More »

I’m not ashamed to admit it (although I probably should be!) — during my school-age years, whenever I was forced to read some piece of classic literature, my first thought was always, “Lemme see if there’s a movie based on this book, cause I’d rather watch THAT instead of reading some stupid book.”

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. Read More »

There are many things about which B2B service and support organizations can be proud: order processing errors have decreased over the past several years, customers increasingly use self-service and self-help, and CRM utilization is up at many organizations.  With all of this progress, however, it is rare to find a B2B organization that is satisfied with its current level of frontline performance.

Certainly performance is adequate, if not quite decent.  But faced with mandates to decrease service and support costs while at the same time improve the customer experience, B2B service and support organizations are increasingly searching for the next opportunity to drive progress.

Which is why CCC’s latest research on frontline performance, The Next Frontier of Rep Performance, has resonated so well with B2B organizations, order management and technical support alike.

Read More »

What profession(s) can help those of us in Customer Service learn the most about how to improve our performance?  Who should we be observing and modeling ourselves after?

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. Read More »

By Corey Stout

A CCC member—let’s call him John—recently shared an interesting observation with our team: 

We are seeing that the Customer Effort Score (CES) is worse in our chat channel than in our phone channel, but our chat beats the phone in terms of CSAT.

John’s survey results sparked some rich discussion among our team about the correlation of CES and CSAT across different channels.

Read More »