Service Untitled

People who know me know that I hate paper. I think an excess of paper is an excess of waste and that documents and information stored on a computer are much easier to manage (and harder to lose) than the paper equivalents. I’ve also had bad handwriting since I learned how to write and out of necessity, have been able to type fairly quickly since before I was even a teenager (before that, I could get along).

As a result of my dislike of paper, I’ve always encouraged companies to digitize as many records and documents as possible. Put them online as forms to fill out, scan them, etc. Not only does this save trees and space in back rooms that would ordinarily be record rooms, it ensures sanity. Documents that are scanned in, tagged, cross referenced, and searchable through fairly advanced computer systems are a lot more manageable (and flexible) than the plethora of documents located in some filing cabinet somewhere in the basement.

I had to go to a company today and hand in a form. I was surprised, but also impressed when the lady processing my form put it through a document scanner and got out a stamp that said “scanned” and placed it in a box. She explained to me that they keep the paper records for a month in case there are any problems, but after that, they destroy them. She also explained that they not only do they save space by not having to store all of documents, but people throughout the company (with proper access, of course) are able to look at the documents right away - there’s no need to come to the records room, find them, and pull them out.

Remember my post about The College Board on Friday? They utilize document scanning as well. The essays that the millions of test takers do every couple of weeks for the SAT? They are scanned in and read by readers throughout the country. It’s infinitely more efficient than sending the essays to readers or than bringing everyone together to read the essays. Duke University (which I wrote about not that long ago as well) is investing in document scanning to make their admissions process more manageable. Both of these organizations have to deal with a lot of paper, so document scanning makes a lot of sense. Educational institutions, hospitals, HR departments, law firms, etc. all deal with a lot of paper and can benefit from document scanning.

Digitized documents are already the future to some extent. It isn’t a mysterious technology, it is realistic and necessary technology. And any technology that makes a previously drawn out process simpler, easier, and more efficient, ends up leading to better service. If document scanning makes it so organizations don’t lose my forms, have less trouble making use of those forms, etc., then it means better service.

Christoph Guttentag’s positive experience with Duke’s HR department got me thinking about internal customer service. Isn’t the customer service you provide to your employees just as important as the customer service you provide to your customers? They should be happy, too. They should like working for and with your company in the same way that your customers like working with your company. But companies tend to place internal customer service even lower on the priority list than regular, external customer service.

Headsets.com (discussed here) has an internal customer service policy where their marketing team promises to make web site updates within 24 hours of the initial request. While they obviously can’t do that for every request, they make an effort and a commitment to each other to get things done and to respect everyone’s requests and wishes. This isn’t always easy, but it makes working with the marketing team, and as a result, contributing to Headsets.com’s web site, a lot easier. They’ve made it easy and it’s paying off.

At other companies, internal customer service is almost ingrained into the culture. The whole idea of treating your co-workers with respect and doing what you can to make their life easier is a big part of many companies’ cultures. Solidifying the process and the cultural idea is always helpful, though.

I’ve also read about companies (I believe it was a hotel) that do things to make the behind the scenes experience enjoyable for employees. They’ll do employees’ laundry, have employee concierge services that run errands, daycare, etc. These are all becoming more and more common, especially at companies in industries and cities where there is competition for employees. All of these things make the company a better place to work. The best places to work tend to attract the best talent, which more often than not, leads to a return on the bottom-line.

In addition to the hiring and retention benefits of internal customer service, great internal customer service tends to make jobs less stressful and more enjoyable. When Mr. Guttentag can pick up the phone and easily get answers to questions about his retirement packages and what not, it makes his life easier. He doesn’t have to scramble for answers and think about what a pain it is to get an answer each time he has a question. The experience is hassle free and maybe even enjoyable.

Service like that, whether it be internal or external, sets the average companies apart from the great companies (or organizations).

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Little Things

I was reading about an interesting policy at a fairly progressive technology company based in a major city. They have about 400 employees or so and an interesting policy when it comes to buying their employees lunch. Quite simply, their policy is “we’ll buy you lunch if you eat with someone you’ve never gone to lunch with before.”

Since they are in a major city and are close to a whole bunch of places to eat, they encourage employees to go out and eat lunch. More importantly, though, they encourage employees to take another employees.

This policy (program is a better phrase, I think) is interesting because it introduces employees to each other. In a company with about 400 employees, an individual employee probably doesn’t know every other employee. This policy / program makes for a nice way to get to know other employees. You can go out to lunch with your friends for the first week or two, but eventually, if you want free lunches, you’ll have to start going out to lunch with people you don’t know.

The company makes the system easy by having a little page on their internal wiki where people can list what days they want to go out to lunch and if they need someone to go to lunch with. Employees can arrange it themselves or they can let the person who oversees the program (it is not their primary job, but something they do for part of their day) match them up. The company keeps track of who you’ve gone out to lunch with and will re-imburse employees for lunch (I think they pay like $20 per person, but you can obviously change this depending on what you’re comfortable with). It isn’t too complicated (it is for the most part on the honor system) and employees like the program.

This program is very much like the old time trick of putting a pizza or food spread next to the new guy’s desk. Doing so encourages other employees to go over, introduce themselves casually, and get to know their new co-worker. This works really well in smaller companies, but as companies grow, this becomes slightly more complicated. You can still do it for each department or team, but for the entire company, it’s hard to put a pizza next to the new guy’s desk and assume everyone will know where it is.

This program is a great culture and team builder. When employees know the people they’re working with, chances are they are going to be more productive and like their jobs more.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Hiring, Little Things, Team Building, Startups

A quick post today that was inspired by an email I got from a reader. He asked just how flexible his policy relating to changing and canceling appointment times should be - a terrific question.

Companies are afraid to create liberal polices for fear of them being abused. However, a mindset like that isn’t fair to the majority of customers that won’t abuse the policies (see this post about working for the 99% instead of the 1%). Very few customers will wake up saying “I’m going to try and pull one on Company X today.” The vast majority of customers will have legitimate for using the flexibility and will almost certainly appreciate the added flexibility (i. e. the very liberal return policy at Nordstrom).

Since the majority of customers won’t abuse the policy, design your appointment policy to be as flexible as you can. There is a delicate mix between operational efficiency and policy flexibility that has to maintained and this depends entirely on the company and the business.

For example, if your company is a one man plumber, you can’t have appointments changing all the time because there is only one person to send to customers’ homes. If your company has 50 plumbers on staff, though, it isn’t a big deal to change who goes where because chances are someone will be available. If customers come to you, the same thing applies. If you are a one man doctor’s office, you need to keep appointments fairly strictly. If you have five doctors and plenty of patients, it doesn’t matter as much. It is important to look at your business and what you can handle.

The most important part is to create a policy that you can realistically support. If you find yourself providing bad service as a result of this liberal policy, you should definitely change it.

When I work with companies to improve their hiring and training processes, one thing I like to suggest is getting in the mindset of having the entire new employee process very formalized. When I say very formalized, I mean that hiring managers should have it down to an exact science after the first employee or two hired using the new system. Part of having that hiring and training process down to an exact science means scheduling reviews and follow ups as soon as the employee is hired.

At a company I worked with, their official process was to have a follow up meeting after the new employee’s first shift, a one week follow up, and a one month follow up. Each meeting would be about a half hour, sometimes longer. The follow ups would be a mix of a review, critique and suggestions, and “how are you doing?” talks between the new employee and his or her immediate manager. The hiring manager would sometimes participate in the one month follow up and have a separate meeting with the manager to see how things were going and how the hiring process could be tweaked to get better candidates hired. The three (or sometimes four) meetings were added to the employee’s and manager’s calendars immediately after the employee was brought on board. That way, there were no putting them off and no saying “we’ll do it next week.” Both groups were required to have the meetings and there were no exceptions.

The schedule for the follow up meetings was then sent to the employee with the rest of the information once they were formally hired. Along with their login information, contact information for their boss, etc., they were made aware of the formally scheduled meetings. Everything was arranged by the company’s hiring manager and everything went pretty smoothly for both the employee and his or her manager. Taking the responsibility off of the managers and assigning the duty to someone else is very important. It ensures the job gets done and it ensures that no one is brushing it aside.

What makes this process most effective is that it quite frankly, a formalized process that is taken seriously. When companies write down processes and take them seriously (generally done by assigning someone specifically to follow through with it), they are more often than not, fairly helpful and effective. Not all processes and procedures are great, but simple ones like this are almost always a sure bet.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Hiring, Little Things, Employees, Training

I was exchanging emails with an executive from CARFAX not too long ago and he told me about an interesting program they have called “customer connections.” The program is pretty simple and its goals are even simpler: expose all types of employees to customers and to what the company is doing. It seems like a great culture builder and an interesting program for any type of company.

The way it works is that every employee, from the “receptionist to the President,” is required to have a certain number of customer connection hours every quarter. The hours are determined by the job title and position. Some people need more hours than others. For example, a software engineer (who usually doesn’t interact with customers) might need to have more customer connection hours than a customer support representative whose job it is to interact with customers every single day.

How employees can get hours is really interesting. They can attend consumer focus groups, listen in on phone calls with dealers or customers, visit dealers, work with staff as they answer consumer emails, attend a session with an industry guest speaker, etc. The point is to get that particular employee to step outside of their normal job and their normal element. It lets employees learn about who the “real” customers are, what challenges they’re facing, and how those challenges affect the rest of the company.

Some companies have programs like this, others don’t. I like this program because it’s more flexible than a lot of other ones. When companies have these sorts of programs, they are usually really rigid (”all employees must spend two hours answering support tickets every year). Even worse, a lot of these programs are ignored or brushed aside. Employees get caught up in other things and when things get busy, companies that aren’t serious about these programs brush them aside.

Furthermore, when there are more options available, it seems like less of a chore. You can do something different every quarter or you can keep doing the same thing - whatever works for you. Many educational institutions (secondary and upper level) require that students have a certain number of community service or school service hours to graduate. The programs there are very similar; students can get community or school service hours doing a number of different things and they have to have a certain amount to graduate. The best thing, though, is that the programs aren’t brushed aside. Students have to have the hours in order to graduate. No exceptions.

I talk about tools occasionally, but not enough. Just like self-service, tools are becoming more and more important to great customer service. As the products and the solutions to inevitable problems with those products become more and more complicated, customer service will get more and more complicated.

As a result of that, customer service representatives will start to need more and more powerful (not necessarily complicated) tools. Companies will obviously have to invest time and money into purchasing or developing these tools. And when companies have to invest time and money into getting something, they start to what is actually necessary versus what is completely superfluous.

It’s important to look at the value of tools beyond their actual development or acquisition costs, though. If your company is a large company with 500 people providing service on a daily basis, spending $100,000 on developing an internal tool probably isn’t a huge deal. However, if that tools disrupts the flow of the service process, requires a lot of new training, etc., the costs will start to pileup elsewhere and in other forms. Tools are rarely a one time expense - they are almost always a recurring expense.

Once companies come to terms with the cost associated with adding a new tool, they should also consider how that particular tool fits within the larger toolset. If customer service representatives already have to use 10 tools to get through a call or resolve an issue via email, you should look at the addition of a new tool very closely. Is there an overlap between this new tool and existing tools? Does it make the process slower? Will this tool negatively impact the customer service provided while representatives learn to use it? These are more qualitative measures, but they are just as important as the purely quantitative measures.

The question I encourage my clients to ask themselves before investing in a new tool is, “can we live without it?” Most of the time, the answer is yes (they already have for however long). The next question to ask is, “will the introduction of this tool make us look back and realize how dumb we were for not having it earlier?” If the tool is that good, then it’s definitely worth investing time and money in. Tools shouldn’t be added for the sake of improving the toolset, they should be added for the sake of improving the customer service experience.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Purchase, Tools

(The end of) customer service made it onto Time’s “Top 10 Ideas That Are Changing The World,” along with mandatory health, reverse radicalism, and a whole bunch of other seemingly more important issues. Regardless of the editors’ views about the importance of customer service as a global change factor, the one page article was interesting.

It focused on how self-service (think self check out, airline kiosks, grocery stores where people buy their own things instead of the clerk going to get it, etc.) is changing business. And Time rightly assumes, what changes business significantly (especially consumer business), does tend to affect consumers significantly. Self-service is here to stay (and become more prevalent) because it saves money for business and gives customers more control.

Time gives an interesting history of self-service. It started in 1902 when the first vending machine-esque cafeteria came about in Philadelphia. People were able to pick their own food and buy it without much help from humans. Piggly Wiggly became the first self-service grocery store 14 years later and completely changed that model around (for good). Self-pump gas stations followed in 1947 and are found in a vast majority of states today. ATMs came about in 1967. In 1995, Alaska Airlines (why them, I don’t know) sold the first airline ticket over the Internet. The timeline shows that self-service has been steadily getting more and more popular, spreading both horizontally and vertically across industries, for the last 100 or so years.

Physical self-service and the concept of self-service is interesting. It’s definitely here to stay, which makes it a natural topic of interest. The thing that is perhaps most interesting about self-service is that thinking of unique ways to bring self-service to your company is often pretty difficult. It takes some unique thinkers to essentially turn the way something is done around completely. In 1916, the idea of a self-serve grocery store was unheard of. No one thought it would work. Being able to see the potential in that and then being able to make it happen is no easy task. You definitely need unique thinkers.

What are some other examples of self-service that you’ve seen? What industries have room to provide more self-service? I would say essentially any industry where the average transaction price is low and/or simple has room for more self-service.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Time Magazine, Self-Service

The other day I talked about the different roles of support within a few companies. We know there are companies that provide regular reactive support, more proactive account management, and of course, very involved consulting. Once the roles are defined, the next question relates to which role fits best for your company. As a service provider, what level of role or roles of support should you fill in order to be competitive? The question actually isn’t difficult to answer.

Consider your product or service.
If you have a simple product or service or a product or service with relatively limited capabilities, you don’t need to provide consulting or sophisticated account management. Web hosting is an interesting example because there is a lot of potential since the scope is so broad. Budget shared web hosts don’t need to offer consulting or account management because their typical customer pays less than $20 per month. On the other hand, higher end web hosts or web hosts that cater more to the enterprise type companies do need more complicated account management and do need to have consulting services available. Since both companies serve totally different markets with different services, their needs are different.

Consider your price point.
As mentioned above, consider the sort of customer you deal with on a day to day basis. Consumers aren’t really used to (nor do they really have any expectations for) high end account management or optional consulting services. Small businesses don’t usually expect (and often can’t afford) consulting, either. Big businesses are more complicated and need more help. Those are all things you have to consider. If you know your customer base, it should be a pretty easy decision.

Consider what you’ve been asked to do.
If your support requests seem to be more along the lines of account management or your consulting requests seem to be more along the lines of support, you may need to adjust (and/or define) your offerings. You want to be delivering the service your customers need (and want) to them. As always, feel free to survey interested customers and ask them what level of service they expect and what level of service they would be willing to pay for.

Don’t hesitate to do it on a small scale.
It is okay to have account managers for your 10 biggest clients, a simple partnership with a consultant instead of a formal agreement, etc. You can start all of your programs and different service options on a small scale basis and expand as you have the time and other resources. You learn a lot by starting off small and then going ahead and doing it all out. You’ll need time to hire the right people, setup the right processes, etc.

It shouldn’t take very long or be very complicated to figure out what is expected of you as a support provider.

I read about a company that saw an increase in the number of elevations they were seeing. More and more calls were being elevated from level 1 to level 2. The reason, though, was mysterious to the company. They weren’t sure why the calls were being elevated and why level 1 technicians were unable to resolve the issues. Their question and concern was how to find this out and what is truly the cause versus what seems to be the cause. Of course, there are a lot of potential causes and potential solutions:

Have you asked the representatives?
A great place to start is by asking the representatives why they are elevating calls. A lot of them will be quite honest about why they’re elevating calls, especially if you make it clear what they say won’t harm them in anyway. If necessary, do an anonymous survey about why calls are being elevated. More often than not, representatives want to provide their feedback and because of the nature of their job, they know (and are) the frontlines.

Any trends?
Are there trends in the types of issues that are elevated? If you can identify clear trends (i. e. there are 50% more elevations between midnight and 8 AM), you can more accurately judge what is causing the elevations (the night shift is not as good as the day shift).
Product problem.
Never dismiss the potential of an actual problem or defect with the product or service. If a lot of customers are calling up about the same issue consistently, it is probably something wrong with the product.

Consider the talent pool.
Was the standard lowered on the type of level 1 representatives that were hired? Are new level 1 agents being paid less than they were 6 months ago? Did company Y (a competitor of company X) open up a call center 10 minutes away (and they could pay more)? The talent pool and any significant changes in it will more than likely change the number of elevations that occur.

Procedures in place?
Are call times limited? Are elevations factored into the customer service representative ratings? If representatives are elevating calls to get customers off the phone, there is obviously a flaw in the system. Make sure there are no policies or procedures in place that would actually encourage unnecessary elevations. You never want to put a policy or procedure in place that discourages elevations that are actually called for, but elevations should not be done frivolously.

These are probably some great ways to start. It never hurts to ask (customers or employees) and it never hurts to ask yourself the tough questions, either. See what you’re doing versus what you should be doing and hopefully, what needs to be done will be clear.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Elevations, Policies