Customer Service Buzz

A friend of mine, a librarian, just changed jobs.  At her old place of employment, she spent her last few weeks updating guidelines and refreshing handbooks, training her replacement so the transition would be seamless.  But, several weeks into her new job she still gets e-mails from her replacement asking questions (“What’s our inter-library book sharing policy for new books?” or “What if I get a request for a publication we don’t get?”)  She shared her frustrations with me, and wondered if there was anything she should have done differently to upskill her replacement before she left.

My answer? More or less, no.  The answer wasn’t a better transition plan, it’s a better knowledge management approach.  My biggest clue here was that she manually updated everything before she left – trying to cram all her tribal knowledge into the handbook after the fact, rather than updating the handbooks and guidelines in real time as things changed.  Of course she forgot to include things, especially if they weren’t everyday occurrences. 

The same can be said for the contact center.  There’s so much knowledge floating around about the latest product or the best way to handle a customer issue, but it’s not always in our frontline rep-facing knowledge base.  Or perhaps the information is in there, but is not up-to-date or is poorly written.

The answer for many service organization is to invest in the latest knowledge management technology.  And while technology plays an important role, I’ve come to believe the emphasis should be placed on the people and processes of knowledge management.  I’ve seen highly sophisticated knowledge management technologies fall short of their goals because the company had poor processes to support the technology. Read More »

I recently worked with a member to determine optimal service organizational structures and staff counts.  I began my research with our new benchmarking data for 2009, attempting to find relationships between center staff size and various productivity and quality metrics.

The most concerning relationship I found was a strong correlation between larger staff size and a higher average number of contacts to resolve issues.

While this was a quick-hit analysis, and not an intensive deep-dive, I believe it highlights one of the most difficult challenges larger centers face: decreased individual ownership of issues, leading to unnecessary repeat contacts.

While we don’t have a comprehensive model to understand why this relationship exists, my hypothesis is that larger operations, foster a “just a number” mentality among staff.  The outcome: reps believe if they don’t give 100% one day (but still passably handle calls, meet QA requirements, etc.) they’re doing their job, especially as it pertains to the thousands of customers who have issues.

I know you’re asking, “Brad, are you suggesting we get smaller?”  Let’s be realistic here – that’s not going to happen. But, I do think you should be asking, “How do I make my center feel smaller?” Read More »

My friends and I have board game nights as a way to have fun without breaking the bank.  And while Apples to Apples and Phase 10 are our faves, there’s nothing like an old-fashioned game of charades. 

Whether we’re acting out Project Runway or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it’s always a hilarious experience.  In the heat of the moment, folks try wacky things to get their team to guess the correct phrase – it’s stuff that makes sense to the actor at the time (like jumping up and down to simulate flying), but looks like gobbledygook to their team.  It’s all about perspective, right?

And that got me thinking, what does the service organization do that makes total sense internally, but confuses the heck out of customers?  From recent conversations with some of our members, it sounds like our FAQs on our websites offers up some quick win opportunities.

FAQs are often the customer’s go-to information source, but they tend to be added on an ad hoc basis – cutting and pasting from press releases or internal documents.  The end result is a large volume of FAQs that are repetitive and hard to understand.  CCC data shows that between 2-5% of call volume comes from customers who were just on the company website but were either confused or unconfident in the information they found.

Just how hard are your FAQs to understand?  Well, there’s a simple, free tool you can use to find out.  Read More »

At a dinner party recently, a friend who is a high school English teacher lamented that his students often google answers to their English homework rather than take the time to read.

Of course plagiarism is terrible and it’s critical to teach students skill development through hard work, but another friend questioned his logic: “Is knowledge of an English passage that important?  Aren’t search skills critical as well?”

You can imagine the direction of conversation from here—the table was evenly split among liberal arts and math/science majors—but applying this thought to a service and support environment, it’s an interesting question: Do we need to train staff in critical thinking or do we simply need to provide better access to the answers?
Read More »

“The best farmers prepare for a famine during a surplus.” 

My grandpa, Forrest Stokes, himself a farmer in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, spread this wisdom any chance he got: while budgeting finances, rationing fertilizer, or stealing Sweet & Low from Perkins.  It’s proof that repetition is the key to education, because I have never forgotten this important lesson—a lesson that at once teaches foresight, restraint, conservation, and preparation.

I’m reminded of it because, amidst record-high unemployment and recent mass layoffs (in other words, a labor surplus), it’s counterintuitive to be concerned about employee retention.  But many HR professionals are pointing out a perfect storm about to hit staffing departments: the loss of irreplaceable knowledge and experience as millions of baby boomers retire.  The Baby Boomer Brain Drain. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people entering the retirement sweet spot (ages 65 to 75) will grow by more than 80% by 2016 while the number of people in the prime of their careers (25- to 54-year olds) will grow a mere 2%.  Customer service will be hit hard by this trend, with a combination of industry growth and employee departures leading to 1.2 million job openings.   

A forewarned company recently called me for advice on how to handle the brain drain. 

Read More »