Service Untitled

In my post on Wednesday, I touched on what I think is an important aspect of manager accessibility, a physically inviting workplace. Even though something like this seems out of place on a blog about customer service, a physically inviting workplace leads to employees feeling more comfortable and relaxed. Relaxed and comfortable employees tend to be happier and tend to deliver better customer service. Therefore, it’s relevant.

A simple step to improving the physical appeal of your workplace is to use glass doors.

Glass doors are a lot more inviting and show a much more open mood than big, solid doors. People can see that other people are working (hopefully) and easily tell who is in their office or not. Plus, they are just about as effective as blocking out noise and I think they’re more attractive.

Some companies go all out and have glass or otherwise transparent/translucent walls and really fancy office designs that are specfically laid out to encourage openness and free communication. If you want to do this, great, but glass doors are probably easier and less expensive to install and can still make a notiacble difference in the mood and level of openness in your company.  I’ve always advocated for them wherever I work and think they help.

A lot of companies underestimate the importance of the physical layout and design of their workplaces. The physical workplace is where people spend all their time and making it a nice place to spend that time is important to a great work experience.

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?

I was listening to Steve Odland (the Chairman and CEO of Office Depot) present at an event today and one of the things he talked about was how sharing information across the organization could lead to decision making empowerment and aptitude. 

Odland said that if everyone at Office Depot knew as much as he did (in terms of cause and effects, how actions fit in with the rest of the company, etc.), the company would be much more cohesive and efficient. People could confidently make decisions based on the full picture and not worry about something they’re not aware of existing and influencing whatever they’re deciding.

This idea can apply to customer service as well. The more each of your customer service representatives knows about what is going on at your company and with your products, the better decisions they can make. If you trust they can make these types of good decisions, then you can empower them to actually make the decisions and take action. 

Think about some of the ways you can share more company information with your employees. Send a weekly or quarterly summary about what’s been happening at your company. Consider having meetings with a couple of employees at a time where you answer questions and address concerns. Share your short and long term strategies with your employees and let them know what the management team is working on.

Things like this not only keep employees informed, but also helps make them feel more important and engaged with what’s going on at your company and most importantly, where it’s going.

Today’s post was written by Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson, two authors and customer loyalty consultants.

“When Business Week picks Amazon.com as the #1 best service company– an on-line fulfillment company—it’s proof good old fashioned service is dead.” The comment sounded like a “kids are going to the dogs” statement someone’s grandfather might make. But, it was coming from a non-computer savvy physician in one of our client focus groups.

Suddenly others in the room jumped into the discussion with jubilant praise for Amazon.com. “Their website is so easy,” “I always get what I order,” “Their prices are the best,” and “Returns are a breeze.” Their comments reflected excellence at the basics—the core expectations of all the shoulda’s and oughta’s. Then, someone told the story of a customer ordering a used book through Amazon.com, not getting the book expected, with zero success contacting the used book company. Amazon not only refunded the customer’s money before the flawed book was returned but took on the rogue used book dealer on behalf of the customer. Even the naysaying doctor was impressed.

Imaginative service creates devoted customers. However, imaginative service only works if the basics are met. Great service providers like Amazon.com provide only as much service as is needed—until more is required. A routine order and you get exactly what you hope for, no more no less. But, if there is an exception or problem, you witness greatness and creativity. We all like service with a cherry on top. But if what’s under the cherry disappoints, the cherry won’t matter. Are you focusing on sparkly service and letting solid service slip?

Writer Bio: Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson are customer loyalty consultants and the authors of Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers. They can be reached through www.taketheirbreathaway.com.

I was going to write a post today about the importance of admitting your mistakes, but a quick search revealed I had already written about the topic back in August 2007 (this is what happens when you write a lot of blog posts). There is a different, though – the post I wrote in August focused on the procedural aspects of admitting a mistake. Today’s post is going to focus on the reasons why you’d want to admit a mistake.

Customers are sometimes surprised by your honesty. Customers are used to hearing crazy responses, justifications, and denials when something happens that appears to be a mistake. When a company comes out and says, “Yes, we made a mistake. I apologize about the error.” and then fixes it, it can be surprising.

Honesty is disarming. When customers get the ridiculous answers and justifications, they tend to get more riled up and go into their own defensive mode. A customer service interaction suddenly turns into a debate/war/other hostile conflict. When a company or a person within the company responds honestly, it is totally different and the customer isn’t quite sure what to say most of the time. 

Honesty implies accountability. People like accountability in customer service. And accountability tends to be reassuring, especially to customers who were just witness to a mistake / screw up by a particular company. When people admit they made a mistake, it shows they are willing to own up to an issue and say what went wrong.

Of course, once you’re convinced that admitting your mistakes it the right way to go, check out my previous post on how to go about doing it.

This post idea came from reader and fellow-blogger Alan Hart. His question is “how do you get engineering groups to think abotu service while they are designing products?”

Communication between engineers and customer service people is essential and is something I have written about in the past (see here and here), but there is always more to talk about regarding this topic.

• The best way to make engineering groups aware of the challenges involved with customer service is to ask them to do customer service. Even if it isn’t that frequent (have each engineer answer support email one day a month). 
• Some companies require that all employees (engineers included) talk to customers or respond to customer feedback on a daily basis. 
• Another simple solution is to submit copies of customer feedback to engineers at the company. Let them review what customers are saying and call those customers if they have questions. 
• A less common, but still very feasible solution is to “embed” a member of the customer service team in the engineering team. Have the customer service representative participate in the product design meetings and provide feedback from a different perspective. 

All of these methods will provide an often needed “reality check” to people who might not talk to customers very often. The methods help engineers a feel for what customers are thinking and what the challenges are. Getting engineers involved means letting them know what’s going on.

What are three aspects of an overall customer service experience that you think are important? I’ve always thought the three most important priorities in any given customer service experience are (in order):

1. Resolving your problem / answering your question.
2. Working with someone who has a good attitude and is friendly, helpful, etc.
3. Getting your issue resolved quickly.

However, what I think is not what everyone in the world thinks is important. Regardless, I will try to justify my priority list:

1. I think resolving the problem is the most important because that is why people engage in the customer service experience in the first place. There are not many people who call customer service just to chat and kill time; the majority of the callers are looking to get a question answered or a problem resolved. That’s the purpose and that should be the number one priority of the overall customer service experience.
2. Working with someone who has a good attitude is crucially important, though. Even though the overall goal is to get the issue resolved, no one wants to feel degraded when they call customer service. A representative with the ability to resolve the problem and do so in a nice way is the best representative. Solving the problem doesn’t count as much if the employees are rude to the customer because the end result is still an angry customer.
3. Speed at which an issue is resolved or a question answered is also extremely important. If the service is really friendly and the issue is resolved completely, customers are typically more forgiving of longer wait times and slower resolutions, but that is only if the other elements are there. 

A customer service experience is certainly complicated. Different customers enter into different customer service experiences with their own unique priorities. As a company, it is essentially impossible to understand each and every one of these unique priorities, but you can make a judgement about what your customer service experience priorities are and then design the processes in your customer service department to support those priorities. 

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?