Service Untitled

I’ve talked about the importance of engaging customers on a human level before. It’s critical to an excellent customer service experience and it’s critical to making the difference between an above average and an exceptional customer service experience. The companies (and more so, the employees) that can engage customers at a more human level are the ones that are going to see their customer satisfaction scores coming in as 10’s as opposed to 8’s or 9’s.

I was at a nice restaurant this evening with some family members and the waiter engaged us on a human level. We’ve been going to this restaurant for quite a while and we’ve seen this waited plenty of times. We hadn’t been there recently, but he remembered us (he said “welcome back, good to see you again”) and when another person at our table asked him a question about how he’s been doing, he told us about a several month RV trip he took around the country.

The story about the trip was interesting - the waiter and his wife had taken their RV to about 40 states over about 6 months. They had seen most of the country’s major cities and national parks and had an overall great trip. He wasn’t rushed when telling it and took the time to answer any questions we had. It definitely brought the experience from a good to an excellent level. He engaged us on a human level and certainly made ordering our food and drinks much more interesting. When the story was effort, he remembered (very accurately) what we usually ordered to drink and to eat.

This waiter not only recognized as regular customers, but he responded to a customer’s question in a manner that went above and beyond. He engaged all of us and gave us something to talk about after he left. It was a great experience and one that only reinforces the positive views I’ve had of that restaurant since we started going there six or seven years ago.

For more on restaurants and customer service, check out this post that I wrote back in July of 2006 (though it’s still quite relevant). I apologize for not posting yesterday - I did not get home until pretty late and didn’t have a chance to write up a post for the day.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Personality, Waiter, Restaurant

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

I was talking to a customer service manager from a large company about what he called “positive escalations.” Positive escalations are situations in which a customer asks to speak to a manger because of a particularly good experience. They aren’t really common, but they do happen fairly regularly (hopefully). However, the manager told the supervisor not to take them, because they weren’t really necessary and the supervisors don’t have much extra time to take unnecessary calls.

I heard about this and thought it was pretty ridiculous. All supervisors should try to take positive calls. The calls should be recorded (if all calls aren’t already being recorded) and supervisors should take time out of their schedule to thank both the customer and the particular employee. Taking positive calls and hearing/seeing positive feedback is important. It helps morale, it makes people feel they’ve done a good job, and it helps employees learn what they should to do if they want to make customers happy and get positive feedback. It is a positive thing for everyone.

Receiving and sharing both positive and negative feedback is an important role for any supervisor to fill. Supervisors should set aside time in their day to talk to employees on a one-on-one basis and to talk to customers in a less confrontational manner (i. e random calls to customers, positive escalations, etc.). Those two things are just as important as the “primary” parts of the job like taking calls and dealing with scheduling. When supervisors receive feedback from customers, they should try to share it with their employees. Feedback (good and bad) is a great way to learn.

As an interesting aside (and quite ironically) positive escalations occur more in companies with average customer service than those with really terrific customer service (because the expectations are different - great service isn’t exceptional at an exceptional company, it is at mediocre company). If you think about it, it makes sense.

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

One of the most unique challenges that was my mentioned at my workshop was this one: technical people don’t like interacting with customers. I think I laughed out loud when I read the suggestion (the person who suggested it was someone I knew from before the conference), but I then remembered just how true it is (in some situations).

We’ve all seen the funny videos on YouTube and similar sites making fun of socially awkward customer service (especially technical support) representatives. They don’t know what to say or how to say it, but they do know their stuff technically. The question is: how do you get them to work with customers effectively?

My usual suggestion for companies dealing socially unadjusted technical support representatives is to work with them in the same way that they would work with foreign customer service representatives. Because the foreign reps don’t usually speak English as a first language, it is often difficult for them to communicate and interact with American customers naturally. The basic premise is the same; neither group is good at interacting with customers for one reason or another.

To reiterate the basic ideas and procedures:

Work with employees before placing them on the phone.
The key to getting employees adjusted is practice. Do lots of mock calls, mock emails, and the like. Provide constructive criticism and work with the employees to improve their skills. Some companies work with voice coaches, others work with specialized trainers; there are plenty of options. Effective training will usually help employees feel more comfortable working with customers.

Consider having them work behind the scenes.
If training and other types of practice aren’t proving to be effective, then it might be appropriate to look into placing that employee in another department. Having these types of employees work behind the scenes and work with other employees (instead of customers directly) is most likely a better use of their skills and talent. It depends almost entirely on the individual employee, but in general, those that don’t work well with customers may be better suited to work behind the scenes.

Hire with personality in mind.
If you aren’t doing it already, it might be useful to include personality tests or at the very least, personality focused questions, in the interviewing process. In the perfect world, you don’t need to and won’t hire people that don’t like working with customers. Ideally, everyone should enjoy working with, talking to, and serving customers.

Warning: consider how they work with others.
It is important to consider how the employees work with others. If they are totally social awkward or have trouble tolerating others, they probably won’t work well within your company. Everyone has to be able to work with others to some degree and if they can’t, it will be tough for them to fit into any sort of company. Even people who work behind the scenes need to be able to work with others on their team and within the company. Teamwork is a huge part of every successful company.

For more reading on this topic, check out my interview with Robert Stephens from the Geek Squad. He has some unique solutions for the problem.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Hiring, Training

I have always been a big fan of giving autonomy to managers within organizations.

When managers actually are and actually feel responsible for what they’re doing, it has the effect of motivating them to do well. Giving relative autonomy to employees also makes it quite easy to reward those who succeed for great performance and help those who don’t. If you give everyone equal opportunity to succeed, some will and some won’t. Chances are, the ones that do succeed are the best ones (either by luck or by actual talent).

In customer service, there are a lot of ways to give employees and managers autonomy. The general idea is to make people responsible for their own successes and for their own failures. That perspective will hopefully lead people to success instead of in the other direction.

The successful customer service departments that I see are usually given a fair amount of autonomy. Executive leadership lets the customer service manager run the show and make most of the decisions related to customer service. They do work much closer to the frontlines (see this post) and know what it takes to be successful.

This can also be done with various customer service teams: let them innovate and make changes. A lot of times, the changes they make and the things they do are good ideas that can be used elsewhere. The autonomy gives the room and the ability to make those sort of changes that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to do.

To encourage people to do well (once you give them the space to do well), provide bonuses based on specific milestones and metrics. I’ve seen the bonuses range from fairly small to extremely large. If everyone knows what is expected of each other and what will come as a result of either good or bad performance, it makes the entire process much easier.

I’m not sure who said it, but there was a business leader that said something along the lines of “hire smart and experienced people, step back, and let them do their thing.” I generally agree with this idea and I’d like to see it happen more often in customer service.

How do you give managers and employees autonomy within your customer service department?

I was talking to an executive at a large, rapid growth company (it isn’t an oxymoron believe it or not) today. One of the company’s key challenges is dealing with the problems associated with “knowledge sharing” as they grow.

When the company was small, everyone knew what the other was working on and the solutions they were tacking. There were end of shift meetings and the entire company could fit in a small conference room. Now that the company is 250 times bigger, they have trouble doing that now.

This is an issue that seems to be common among growing companies. Once employees pass the 100 or 200 employee mark, it becomes difficult to share best practices and solutions. Those good ideas that used to be easy to communicate among a small group are now impossible to effectively communication across an international company.

There are several things companies and employees within them can do, though. I shared these two ideas with the particular executive:

Use internal blogs.
Well run, internal blogs (more about them here) are a great way to keep employees up-to-date about what is going on from shift to shift. Employees in general or teams can post some things they learned throughout the shift or an explanation about how to deal with an especially challenging problem they saw. If this is done every day or a couple of times a day by different people and is easily and effectively searchable, it can serve as a valuable resource to all employees.

Use the “coolideas” email idea.
I’ve never written about the cool ideas email idea because I just remembered it happening today. I worked with a startup that had a simple email address (something like coolideas@company.com) that all employees, ranging from customer service representatives to senior engineers, were encouraged to email their ideas, problems to tough solutions, and best practices to this email address. There were signs all over encouraging employees to do so and they did. The email had a designated keeper / organizer (the office manager did it) who would talk to employees if further explanations were needed and who added the ideas to the company’s internal wiki. The idea worked really well and the company benefited tremendously.

The executive thought both ideas (especially the coolideas one) were good ideas. The most important part  of grasping the idea of knowledge sharing and how to do it is understanding the need for effective tools.

Effective tools can make or break the process, regardless of how motivated the employees are share to the ideas. The tools need to be easy and fast use to use (like an email address). If it’s easy enough for employees to share their best practices and ideas, they are a lot more likely to do so.

At the Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit a little under two weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress project and the company Automattic) used a great metaphor to explain how good communities function - he described them as a party.

I’m really surprised more people didn’t latch on to this metaphor when they wrote about the summit. It seemed to be very well received at the time and I still think it is a fantastic metaphor. It is almost certainly a metaphor I will use when I find myself having describe the function of communities to my clients.

Before you dismiss this as some buzzword loaded rubbish (which is what I sometimes do when I hear comparisons like that), listen to my interpretation and summary of Matt’s right on metaphor.

Parties that are successful bring the right number of people together. Those people end up having a good time and having fun. They will hopefully come for whatever their purpose is and achieve that sort of goal (having fun, learning, meeting people, etc.). When people achieve their particular goals and have fun, they leave feeling happy.

Good parties almost always have good hosts. It is their job to keep the size of the space appropriate for the number of guests, plan the party, get people involved, and keep things rolling. The host not only needs to be the organizer of many things, but sometimes the life of the party and cheerleader. Sometimes this is is necessary, but not always.

One or two bad guests can ruin a party and make it miserable for almost everyone. A space that is too large or too small for the number of guests can make for a bad party. A party with a terrible host will likely be bad. Sometimes parties are really great or really bad for no apparent reason.

Now replace every use of the word party with community, every use of the word guest with member, and host with community leader. Matt didn’t take his metaphor quite as far as I did above, but as I thought more about parties and as I thought more about communities, I couldn’t help but see the striking similarities.

Think about some of the points listed above and how they tie into communities:

• If communities are too big or too small, they may lose their desired effect.
• Great communities have members that have fun and achieve their appropriate goals and purposes.
• Great communities seem to have great community leaders / facilitators behind them. There are ones that don’t, but a majority of the time, they do.
• If you take part in a community with 50 forums or 150 community features for 10 members, it is the wrong sized space. 3 forums for 5 million members is the wrong sized space as well.
• Community leaders have to keep communities engaged and entertained. They also have to deal with the administrative side of running a community - keeping the community clean, dealing with troublesome members, organizing things, etc. Again, this isn’t always necessary, but it is needed most of the time.
• Bad members can sour a community very easily. Dealing with them is a big challenge, but they’re necessary.
• A community with a bad community leader will have a hard time being successful.
• Communities are sometimes ridiculously successful or unexplainably terrible for absolutely no reason.

If you don’t understand or appreciate this metaphor, then I’m not sure if you really get communities and what they’re all about. This is one of my favorite non-technical metaphors for sometime relatively technical like an online community. Big thanks to Matt Mullenweg for thinking of it! (Apparently, Lee Lefever also/originally came up with this idea.)

I can’t quite remember if I read it in a book or magazine, but I did read a story about how Enterprise (the car rental company) has a policy that encourages its employees to provide exceptional service to customers. The policy is simple, but if used, has the potential to be extremely successful.

The policy encourages Enterprise employees to stop and assist customers that they notice have a flat tire or are pulled over on the side of the road. If the employees pull over and assist the customer, they get $100. The policy is as simple as that.

I imagine there is a sticker or something on the license plate indicating the cars are from Enterprise. I can imagine how pleasantly surprised a customer would be if he or she was having car trouble and someone from their car rental company pulled next to them and offered to help.

While I’m not 100% sure how often this actually happens in reality, it is a good idea in theory. Having policies and procedures in place that actually encourage and provide a motivation to employees to provide better service are far more effective than most.

Do you have policies for your employees to follow that are specifically designed to impress and wow customers? If not, you should think about ways that customers could use the help and then encourage your employees to provide it.

This is part two of three of the interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In this part of the interview, Tony talks more about the company’s very generous policies, how they’ve dealt with their growth to date, and more about the company’s incredibly strong customer service culture.

(more…)

This thought came to me fairly randomly - partially based on an experience with a friend who had been very honest (and was later rewarded) and partially based on a discussion with a colleague about out of the ordinary interview techniques and content (a subject that has always interested me). So, keep that in mind - this is very random. I’m not quite sure if it is even legal.

How does my idea work as an interesting addition to a job interview?

While you are interviewing a potential employee, instead of asking 20 questions about ethics, honesty, morals, etc., place a $5 or $10 bill somewhere in a hallway that the candidate will have to walk by him or herself. See what the candidate does with the money - does he or she pocket it, leave it there, or turn it in?

Exactly where you leave it probably doesn’t matter, as long as the candidate will be very likely to see it and it isn’t completely obvious: leave it right outside the building’s door, in a hallway, near the reception desk, etc. If it is right outside the interview room, it may be too obvious. Make sure it isn’t in an area that is too busy or someone else might beat the candidate to it.

I have used my (terrible) graphic skills to draw out a diagram (see above, click for full size) of how this could possibly work. The diagram leaves two possible locations for the $10 bill - about three quarters of the way down a hallway and near a reception desk. If it is placed near the reception desk, the receptionists have to be distracted and not paying attention to where the bill is.

I think this serves a purpose, though. It identifies three types of employees:

• Indifferent or oblivious employees will either not notice or leave the bill. They aren’t bad, but aren’t good, either.
• Dishonest employees will put the bill in their pocket and walk out the door without saying anything.
• Honest employees will hand the bill in to someone at the reception desk or the interviewer.

This could really work for retail or hospitality (i. e. restaurant) companies that have issues with employees stealing. What do you think? Could this work? Is it even legal? Has someone done it before?

Click here for a full size version of the diagram above.