Service Untitled

An important aspect of customer is engaging customers on a human level. Engaging customers doesn’t necessarily have to be about killing dead air time (like the previous post I wrote on the subject discusses), but it does have to involve paying attention to and caring about customers.

When customer service representatives are on the phone with customers, it isn’t uncommon for them to hear customers complimenting them and making small talk. Customers will add asides (“I’ve called so many times!”, “I talked to John before I spoke to you.”, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that!”) – sometimes because they’re trying to be nice, other times just because that is just their personality.

Regardless of the reason, customer service representatives should work to respond to those comments. It not only shows that they’re listening, but just as importantly, that they care. For example, a representative could use his or her personality (and customer service common sense) to respond to these in these ways:

1) I’ve called so many times. “I apologize about the inconvenience. I will be glad to help you get this issue sorted out now so you won’t have to call back another time.”
2) I talked to John before I spoke to you. “Okay. John sits just a few cubicles over from me. Was he able to assist you with what you needed?”
3) I can’t believe I didn’t see that! “It’s okay! People miss it all the time.”
4) I’m sorry, I’m just not very technical. “That’s fine. It’s absolutely no problem.”

The point of responding to asides like that is essentially to have something better than the “yep” or the grunt that most representatives will utter in response to comments like that from customers. A lot of customer service representatives just aren’t sure how to respond to customers who talk about anything outside of the actual issue.

My advice is to always respond and to always use some personality while doing so. It’ll make the customer service experience smoother and more personal. It’ll show that the people providing the service are just that – people. People with personalities. People with senses of humor. And, most importantly, people that like other people.

Companies that provide decent customer service train their employees once they’re hired. They use a mix of formal and informal training to train their employees to provide quality service.

The best customer service companies, however, continue to train employees beyond their initial training. They are constantly working with employees and ensuring that they are kept up-to-date and continually improving.

Training employees constantly not only keeps them on their toes, but allows them to learn new stills. Companies that provide complicated products and services should definitely be training their employees to keep up with the latest trends, be aware of how to use the updated versions of the products, and so on and so forth. You can’t teach new employees everything in the first month and not everything that needs to be known happens in the first month, so it makes consistent and constant training a necessity.

The training should be formalized to some degree, otherwise it’ll be pushed to the wayside. Consider making it a requirement that employees get “re-certified” once each year. To go through the certification process, an employee might have to participate in a few hour class, work with a supervisor in a mentor situation for a few days, and pass a test. The process can vary from company-to-company and even division-to-division and still be effective. The overall and most important goal is to have a formal process that employees must go through every so often.

And perhaps most importantly: don’t leave customer service out of the yearly training or certification process. Employees should be evaluated when they participate in both real and mock calls, they should do some email support, and they should listen to some of their own and others’ calls to get an idea about what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. Feedback should be provided in a constructive way (it’s training, not a review).

Once you make constant training a focus of your company and actually follow through on it, you should begin to notice the results almost immediately. Employees will be more knowledge, customers will be happier, and the business will be better off.

dalas verdugo [sic] is the Community Director at the video-sharing web site Vimeo.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post praising the great design and implementation of the company’s help page and dalas was nice enough to take some of his time to answer a few questions I had about the process behind the page and about the company in general.

Question: Did any help sites or web sites inspire the design and look/feel of the help page?
Answer: Our main designer for the Help page was Sockyung Hong, and I know he follows web design very closely, so I’m sure he had influences for the look and functionality of the page, but he’s also very innovative in his own right.

Question: Were designers or customer service people the driving force behind the site?
Answer: The Vimeo team works together unlike any company I have ever been a part of. We’re very collaborative and since we usually have the same goals in mind, it seems like we’re always on the same page. We have frequent meetings to discuss the projects we’re working on and we usually put a document up that all of us can edit so we can refine the copy to be clear and helpful.

Question: How have users reacted to having profiles of two Community Directors on the left hand side?
Answer: I think the members of Vimeo feel very personally connected to Blake and myself, and so it makes sense for us to introduce ourselves right off the bat. From the start, I wanted Help to be very approachable, which is why we offer several ways to get in touch with us, including Instant Message. I wish more companies would offer direct contact with people who can answer questions.

Question: When designing the page, what did designers try to keep in mind?
Answer: We always want the information to be clear, with easy instructions. We try to answer many of the frequently asked questions up front.

Question: What has been added / removed from the page since it first went up?
Answer: Oh man, I can’t remember at this point. Our design philosophy at Vimeo is one of constant refinement, so we are always updating parts of the site when we see an opportunity to make it better. It’s usually pretty obvious at any given time what is causing friction for users, so we try to address those points of friction as soon as possible and keep Vimeo easy to use and understand.

Question: What are thought processes behind those refinements?
Answer: Generally, you just have to listen to your community, because they will tell you what the major problems they’re having are. When I approach writing Help documents, I figure out what to say first, and then I try to simplify my points more and more until they’re totally clear. It’s really about anticipating questions that people might have. If I write something out and then imagine a user asking a question about what I wrote, I go back and answer that question ahead of time. If that makes sense.

If we post something to the Help page and start getting questions about it, we go back and edit the Help page to clarify as soon as possible. If you remove points of friction for users, you have less help requests and less questions.

There have been several times when the amount of help requests about a certain feature have helped us to refine that feature to a point where its operation was so clear that the questions stopped coming in. So it’s a two front war. You have to answer people’s questions clearly, but when it becomes apparent that the reason they are asking questions is because your product needs refinement, you need to step in and fix your product.

Question: How can other companies get similar results?
Answer: Companies can get similar results if they hire competent, passionate employees who are tuned in to the website’s user base. A lot of the success of Vimeo relies on the personalities of the people involved, so step 1 is hire good people.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Good Design, Help, Help Page, Help Pages, dalas verdugo, Vimeo

I was recently reading an article in Inc. Magazine about Roger Berkowitz, the CEO of Legal Seafoods. He has an interesting way of gathering feedback from employees that is worth noting.

Several years ago, Roger formed what he calls the President’s Advisory Council, which is made up of two hourly employees from each of the company’s restaurants. Managers are not included in the particular council and once a quarter, the company flies the employees on it to headquarters to address a particular question.

The questions asked of the employees are direct and the approaches are pragmatic. They’re questions like “how can we improve training and benefits?” or “how can we make the restaurants more kid friendly?” These questions are simple, but they’re also great questions to ask frontline employees.

Roger runs the council by asking the question, giving groups 20 minutes to discuss some possible approaches, and then having each group make a presentation about how they can address that particular issue. The meeting is ended with an open forum where employees can discuss whatever is on their mind related to the company. According to the article, the employees have had great ideas and he works on implementing their suggestions into restaurants.

What is most important is that Roger acts on the ideas that are actually brought up. Big companies frequently find themselves creating committees that do nothing and creating a dangerous cycle and set of processes. It not only shows that he is a responsive manager, but also a guy that listens to what his employees have to say. He realizes that employee feedback is valuable and acts on that.