Service Untitled

Here is something you can do to make your company more competitive in about 10 minutes. Call your competitors and test their service.

An entrepreneur I met with recently  told me that his company regularly calls and emails its competitors to see how good they are. They measure objective things like how long it takes to get a human on the phone, how long it takes to get a product, how long it takes to get an email response, etc. These are all metrics the company tracks internally and can easily compare to how they’re doing.

They will also order products from the competitor to see what the experience is like — packaging, updates during the shipping process, product quality, etc. The company does this so they can see how they’re doing relative to the rest of their industry. If someone else is doing something better or cooler, the company can adapt accordingly and make changes. 

A lot of companies are in fiercely competitive industries. Some will buy a competitor’s product or service to try it out and see how it relates, but very few actually do that on a somewhat regular basis. They’ll do it once and forget about it. This results in a short term benefit, but no real long term benefit.

If your company isn’t doing this already, you should start. In the long run, it’ll save a lot of time and aggravation. Guessing how your competitors are doing is not nearly as valuable as having the actual data.

I briefly touched on what can be done to avoid employee / manager conflicts just under three years ago (wow!), but I was thinking more about the idea of accessibility of managers and supervisors today and thought it was worth a follow up post.

I’ve always tried to be very accessible as a manager. I respond to emails quickly and consistently, keep my door open, and try to be as available as possible to talk to employees and customers whenever they have comments, concerns, or questions. I’m by no means a perfect manager, but I do feel that being acessible and available is an important thing for a manager, especially one who works in the customer service field.

Here are three simple things you can do to be more accessible:

1. Have an open door policy. Physically keeping your door open can set a great example for your employees and your co-workers. I can’t stand “closed” office spaces with big doors and no interior windows and have always made it a point to keep my office door open as often as humanly possible. It is sends a less than subtle signal that you’re willing to talk and that you’re accessible (just like having a closed door all the time sends a very different signal).
2. Have “office hours.” The concept of office hours is common at colleges and universities, but kind of unheard of in business. Ideally, you don’t need office hours, but a lot of managers have crazy schedules filled with a plethora of meetings and other engagements that subsequently make it hard to get in touch with them. To deal with this, try to set an hour or two per day aside where you’re available to talk to employees who just want to walk in and express any questions or concerns they might have.
3. Schedule “town halls.” I stole this idea and this terminology from politicians, but that’s only because it is a good idea. Every month or so, schedule an informal “town hall” with a group of employees who are  (for example) half randomly chosen and half specifically selected where you either come in with a topic or idea that you want to discuss or simply open the floor to general comments, suggestions, questions, etc. This is a great way to get to know your employees better and to make them feel as if they’re more involved with the company.

There are literally hundreds of books on the subject of manager accessibility and leadership styles, but I’ve always found that these three things have worked well for me. What has been effective where you work now or have worked in the past?

How carefully do you track contact volume? The answer is hopefully “very carefully” because it is a key metric to track and something you should adjust staffing and processes for. 

A lot of companies don’t really track contact volume objectively. They track it based on their perceptions of how busy certain days and times are and go from there. If Mondays at noon are usually busy, then the company increases staffing accordingly. However, what people think isn’t always what’s true.

 The data, however, doesn’t make mistakes. It can certainly be misused or misunderstood, but assuming it’s collected properly, it won’t make mistakes. Some useful contact volume metrics to track are:

• The number of phone calls, live chats, emails, etc. coming in.
• The time each interaction takes to complete.
• How many people are working at a given time.
• How many contacts per hour each person working is able to do.

These metrics can be used to determine how many people should be working at a given time. Some companies need to staff more in the beginning of the week, others seem to be busier at the end of the week. The point of having (and using) the data is that you can adjust staffing accordingly and ensure that your company is doing all it can to make use of its resources.

What contact volume metrics do you track?

Every now and then your company will experience something that every rapidly growing company hopes and prays for: a slow day. A day when the phones aren’t ringing off the hook, the servers aren’t crashing, and things are relatively calm and relaxing.

Even though these days are rare, when they do occur, should be cherished. And with that in mind, there are certainly productive things that can be done during a slow day.

Coach employees. As long as things aren’t completely dead, coaching employees before, during, and after their phone calls or emails is a perfect way to pass the time. Supervisors can listen in on calls and provide constructive feedback to the employee immediately afterwards. Even if isn’t time for the employee’s formal quarterly review, informal coaching can be helpful and valuable.

Improve documentation. You know all those FAQs, tutorials, explanations, and things of that nature? Chances are, at least a few of them need updating. Use your down time to go through the documentation you provide (both internal and external) and make sure it is up to date.

Get ahead. This varies by company, but most companies have some sort of tasks that can be done to help get the support department ahead in some way. Slow days are a great time to get started on audits, monthly invoices, etc.

Try other tasks. Some companies will use their slow days to have phone people do email support or have programmers work with customer service representatives on day-to-day support (or vice versa). Slow days are a great time to expose people to things they may not have an opportunity to do everyday. (See some of my other posts on cross training.)

What do you do on slow days?

First contact resolution is one of the most important things in customer service. Customer service statisticians have found that solving an issue during the first contact (as opposed to over the course of two, three, or more contacts) saves time, money, and increases customer satisfaction in the long run.

Think about each way that first call resolution helps:

• Saving time. It is easier for a representative to fix an issue during the first contact than for several representatives to try and fix the issue over several contacts. With one contact, there is no need to “catch up” on what has been done, research the problem further, etc. When an issue is resolved on the first contact, one representative handles the issue and knows what it is about.
• Saving money. Less time spent by representatives on the phone, over chat, etc. saves the company money. Because customers don’t have to keep calling or emailing back to get their issue resolved, representatives are able to move on and help other customers instead of having to go back and keep addressing the same problem.
• Increasing customer satisfaction. The less time a customer has to spend trying to get a problem resolved, the happier they are going to be. There is also the psychological factor of the customer hanging up feeling his or her issue was resolved. It is a lot more satisfying for the customer to end the first contact with a resolution than it is to end the call knowing that time was wasted and that a resolution is no closer.

Customers contact companies to get questions answered or issues resolved. The faster and easier the question can be answered or the issue resolved, the better. Resolving issues on the first contact is the easiest and fastest way to ensure customers end the call feeling their time on the phone was productive and that they got the help they needed.

In the long run, increased first contact resolution will almost always reduce contact volume (and costs) and incrase customer satisfaction. It is worth spending a little bit more time on the phone or working a little bit harder on the email issue to get a customer’s issue resolved the first time around. Customers will appreciate the extra effort and the balance sheet will reflect it.

I am a big advocate of making things simple and I’m a strong believer in the idea that simplicity leads to consistency. Back in March 2008, I wrote about how to measure customer satisfaction for less than $250 and got some great feedback on the article and the idea. Since then, I’ve put the theory into practice multiple times and have seen it succeed. 

Consider a customer satisfaction survey as an example. A company I work with now uses the software the general method I outlined in my post. It takes one person at the company about 5-15 minutes to send out a survey and start getting responses. When the company used an in-house solution that was patched together, it required three or four people to be involved at different levels and still took well over an hour to start getting responses. 

The old method was put together quickly and inexpensively, but that doesn’t mean that it was the right method for the company (or for any company). As soon as the company bought the software and got it working, they never looked back. It is now simple for the company to do a survey every other week

If you make a job easy for everyone involved, it is a lot easier to get the job done consistently and correctly. Ask yourself these questions:

• What processes at your company could you make easier? 
• What processes at your company aren’t getting done as consistently as you’d like? How can you make them easier for people to do?

From what I have heard, seen, and experienced, most of the people who read my blog are customer service or business managers or executives. I also know there are also frontline customer service representatives who read my blog (thus explaining why I write posts that try to appeal to one or both groups and not just one exclusively), but a majority of my readership seems to consists of people who don’t actually answer the phones or reply to emails or do whatever for a majority of their day.

And I have a question for those people: when things get busy, do you find yourself jumping in and helping out?

Leaders who jump in and help have always impressed me. You surely have read about one super rich, super powerful executive or another who won’t hesitate to bend down and pick up a piece of trash he sees in his retail store or his supermarket or in his company’s parking lot. That is just their nature. But what about customer service managers who will jump in and help get the phone queue down or help reply to emails when there are a lot in the inbox? How common is this?

I wouldn’t say that managers jumping in to help is especially uncommon, but I also don’t think it is the norm. I’ve spoken to managers who will jump in and help out without a moment’s hesitation and I’ve also spoken to managers who wouldn’t pick up the phone themselves if the president was the waiting in the hold queue. Different companies have different cultures and different managers have different management styles.

What are your thoughts on this type of situation? Do you think it is better for a manager or supervisor to continue to manage and supervise when things get really busy or do you think it is better for a manager or supervisor to get in there and help out when things get overwhelmingly busy? I’ve always preferred and have tried to be the latter, but everyone is different. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

This recent op-ed from The New York Times talked about a little bit about the need for a huge call center to help ease the transition to digital television that is expected to happen on February 17. A huge number of people are going to be affected by this switch – most likely more than 50 million. To quote the story:

Nearly 1.5 million calls are expected to come into a special Federal Communications Commission call center on each of the two days following the transition, but this center will be able to handle only about 350,000 calls a day.

Needless to say, that is a lot of calls and a lot of confused television watchers. Assuming the call center is hope 24/7, that will be more than 62,000 callers an hour (more than a lot of call centers work with in a year or at the very least, a month). How can the FCC deal with that many calls? Chances are, they can’t. They would need a small army (read: a couple of thousand) call center representatives available around the clock and flying through calls in order to handle the rush. It sounds like they need to increase the size of their staff significantly and probably invest in better hardware/software to be able to handle the volume.

The FCC needs to invest in other methods of communication. Some ideas:

• A plethora of self-service options (online videos posted on their web site and on YouTube, searchable FAQs, an extensive knowledge base, illustrated guides, and so on).
• Live chat options so representatives can work with 2-3 (or more) people at once instead of just one at a time.
• An online / forum discussion board where people can get help from others.
• Community groups to help confused television watchers (this is suggested in the article).

There are a lot of possibilities and the FCC is hopefully prepared to do many of them. There is an okay, but not great web site called DTV Answers that provides some of the information, but there is definitely a lot of room to improve. To handle all of those people and something that affects as many people as this, they need an in-depth, interactive web site with all the bells and whistles. It doesn’t look like the government invested what they should have in making the switch simple.

What would you do to make the switch