It’s no secret that today’s workplace environment is very different than it was even a year ago—many staff are working in roles that are beneath their qualifications, many wages still have not recovered to previous levels, and many staff continue to defer retirement.

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.

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By Corey Stout

Although customer complaints about call centers reach the hundreds of millions each year, it turns out that reps should be the ones complaining.

According to a recent study by The Academy of Management Journal, less than 1% of calls result in some form of customer mistreatment (e.g., putting customers on hold unnecessarily or intentionally misleading them), while a staggering 20% to 25% of reps are subjected to negative customers.  

Although it is important to have complaint resolution methods in place as an outlet for frustrated callers, organizations must also ensure that they effectively protect reps from customer mistreatment as well. Without strategies in place to deal with abusive callers, organizations will have difficulty retaining, engaging, and even hiring employees. Reps need to feel like leadership is watching out for their best interest too.  

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By Kirsten Robinson

“No” isn’t a word that many people like to hear. Think about what happens when someone tells you that they can’t help you or can’t give you what you want. Chances are, you think, “why not?” or, “well, then maybe someone else can do it for me.”

You don’t want frontline reps to elicit this type of negative response from customers. Why? Because your customers’ impression of how your rep made them feel—rather than what the rep made them do—has the greatest effect on their perceived effort.  And high perceived effort results in disloyalty.

But, reps can’t say “yes” to every request. The good news is reps can at least influence the way your customers feel. Using positive language eliminates the negative emotional reaction that occurs when people hear the word “no”—and significantly improves the customer experience.

Osram Sylvania, a global lighting manufacturer, recognized the impact that words have on customer interactions. The company provides frontline reps with predetermined language guidelines that make it easy for them to phrase negative situations in a way that creates the lowest-effort experience.

We had the opportunity to speak with Valerie Jones, VP of Customer Service and Inside Sales, and Sue King, Training and Quality Assurance Manager, both of Osram, who gave us insights to their company’s positive strategy. To help reps implement positive language, they:

1. Identify the most common negative language scenarios.

2. Teach reps how to positively frame customer interactions.

3. Reinforce continuity through monitoring and coaching conversations

CCC members, see Osram Sylvania’s top scenarios for positive language guidelines and read excerpts from our conversation with Valerie Jones and Sue King.

Staff motivation is one of those topics that is always of interest—there is no company, organization, or function that would not want to improve here.

While many ways to drive motivation exist, most B2C and even some B2B service and support organizations follow the same approach: free giveaways, appreciation weeks, career pathing.

These certainly are not all bad investments, but do these short-term incentives really drive the long-term impact (specifically on performance) that companies seek?

CCC is working on some new research due out later this month and our findings suggest that something else deserves greater focus given its potential on performance.  Specifically, we find that giving frontline staff ownership has enormous implications both on how frontline staff perform and feel.  This is something that secondary research has validated as well.

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Curious to benchmark your service and support organization’s 2011 strategic plans with those of competitors?  Think frontline staff performance improvement.

Faced with growing contact complexity, continued tight budgets, and increased revenue generation mandates, optimizing frontline performance has become the underlying motivation for most major service and support initiatives in 2011.

To address this growing challenge, many organizations are following tried and true solutions: conducting engagement surveys, emphasizing coaching, improving access to technology.  Yet even the most progressive organizations that have optimized these areas do not find the performance gains they anticipated, suggesting that these traditional levers are insufficient.

So how to best maximize frontline performance?  CCC increasingly believes that companies must address the environmental factors that prevent staff from best handling the customer experience. Read More »

This post was written by Amy Gallo for our Finance and Strategy Practice.

In CEB View’s last Talent Matters post we discussed how difficult it is to work for a bad boss. But what if, instead of working for one, you are one?

Of course it’s not easy being the boss. Research from CEB’s CLC Human Resources program shows that the three areas that most managers – even great ones – struggle with are evaluating employee performance, providing effective feedback, and turning around underperformance. These are hard things to do and because the way you do them directly affects your team, any missteps are likely to create friction.

Fortunately, the recession seems to have improved many employee-manager relationships but boss-bashing is still a favorite pastime (as proved by last week’s traffic on the first “bad boss” piece). So, how do you know if your employees are just letting off steam or if you are truly difficult to work with? Unfortunately, many bad bosses are the last to know how awful they are to work under. This may be because you aren’t getting the feedback you need, you’re disconnected from your employees or you just aren’t watching out for the signs.

Here are five indications that you may be a worse boss than you thought: Read More »

By Corey Stout

Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who was the Accountant General of Burma from 1948 until 1967, led his employees and other cabinet ministers in vipassana meditation for an hour every morning and evening until he retired.

As Gustaaf Houtman writes in Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics, the introduction of vipassana meditation was transformational for the government of Burma. Since this mental culture drove employee engagement, levels of corruption in the Burmese government dropped while employee retention and productivity rose.

Although CCC does not goes as far as recommending that call centers mandate two hours of meditation per day, there is wisdom in Ba Khin’s professional and spiritual leadership: leaders who promote employee engagement—and, in turn, foster a positive work environment—can drive improved performance and retention.

Of course, there are the tried and true engagement levers that we have all pulled before. With all you have read and heard, you could create an employee engagement buffet of nonmonetary and momentary incentives, coaching, and development – not to mention a career pathing dessert to top it off!

Don’t get me wrong – traditional engagement initiatives are important, but I’m suggesting that in 2011 folks can get creative with their engagement strategies by taking a page out of Ba Khin’s book: Read More »

As I sat down to write this blog, I tried to brainstorm a few general corporate functions that everyone gripes about.  The list I came up with was rather short (and probably very unfair): HR, Payroll, IT support.  Maybe you could pile on here (feels good to vent, right?).  Well, here’s another function on the list that hits rather close to home: Quality Assurance (QA).

As the CCC team spoke with countless companies across our months of developing our new research on QA, there were some common themes that emerged in conversations—including the poor perception of the QA team within the service organization.  One member even told us that his QA team would probably feel better about meetings with other peers in the contact center if there were metal detectors at the door to the conference room…people were that upset with QA!

Now, let me set the record straight.  This has nothing to do with the individuals on the QA team.  Rather, this is a reputation problem for what this group stands for, day in and day out.  And that is…be the bad guy. 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? 

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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 »