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.

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.

Given the economy, this is an oddly timed post for a lot of companies, but believe it or not, there are still many companies that are growing quickly and that still need to hire people. These companies need to know how to hire the right people and to do so quickly. Rapid growth is not an easy thing to deal with, so the more prepared companies are, the better. Here are some quick tips on how to prepare for a big hiring push:

Train other employees on how to interview.
During periods of normal growth in most companies, human resources handles a majority of the interviewing and of the hiring. When they need to hire more people, more people need to be trained on how to do the interviews. Human resources should work with supervisors, senior employees, and other managers on how to interview potential employees and then begin using them to do the actual interviews.

Hire an administrative assistant to take care of the busywork.
Scheduling interviews, responding to applications, following up on paperwork, etc. is an annoying, but essential part of the hiring process. The HR department should hire an assistant or someone similar to take care of this. That way, the actual interviewer can focus on the real work of reviewing applications and hiring.

Have checklists for the entire hiring process.
The entire hiring process should be completely laid out before any hiring push. Everything from application submission to the candidate’s first day of work should be outlined on some sort of chart or document or checklist. With a system in place, there is less guesswork, which makes it much easier for a busy HR department to get its job done correctly and efficiently. Each candidate should have a paper and/or digital file and each part of the process should be kept together, so it can be easily referenced and addressed.

Formalize processes.
Again, with the goal of making it easy for additional people to help, formalize existing processes to make sure people will be able to step in and help.  No more ad hoc interviews, no more informal scheduling, etc. Write the processes down so other people can help out. 

Continue to refine.
As the hiring push continues, the person in charge of HR should be focusing on how to refine the existing processes and to make them more efficient.  If they can come up with something that saves 10 people 20 minutes a day in one hour, it is a lot more efficient than them spending an hour interviewing a candidate. Think about the long term and the scale of the operation and keep that in mind. Doing so will make the hiring push a lot easier in the long run.

When you read the title of this post (and my last post of 2008), I’m sure you instantly said to yourself, “of course.” But what if I qualify the question and instead ask, “do you talk to your customers with no intention of selling them anything and without them asking for you to call them?” Chances are, you’ll need to think about that question in more detail.

Interacting with customers in an informal way is an essential part of customer service. Great companies talk to their customers frequently. They ask how they’re doing, what they think of the company, and if they have any feedback to share. More often than not, interesting and useful feedback comes about from calls like this. If useful feedback doesn’t come about, that’s okay, too (you’re still making a positive impression on the customer).

You generally get the most out of these calls when you get on them with a few things at hand:

An informal agenda. These calls or meetings should not be ultra-formal “get things done” meetings with a notetaker and a stop watch (complete overkill). However, you should have an idea of what you want to talk about and what you think the customer will want to talk about. The idea is to let the customer talk and for you to respond when necessary. Be sure to have an agenda that reflects that.

Some information about the customer. Don’t go into the call with just a name and a phone number. Check how long the customer has been with your company, what type of services they use, their support history, and so on. See if they have referred any of their friends or colleagues to your company. Check out what they’ve purchased, how many account managers they’ve had, etc. The more you know about the customer, the better. If you know something about them, you can tweak the content and direction of the call accordingly.

Do a couple of these calls a week and make sure different people do them. The CEO can do one, the VP of Engineering can do another, and so on. If these people don’t regularly work with customers (and even if they do), they’ll get a lot out of these calls. Make it a New Year’s resolution to have ten senior managers / executives call at least two customers a week. That’s over 1,000 customers a year and it will make a difference.

Happy New Year!

HP announced a series of changes to their online support offerings earlier today and one of those updates was the expansion of the free online classes they offer.

HP’s offering is interesting because they don’t limit the classes to HP products exclusively, but instead offer instructor-led classes on a variety of subjects, ranging from digital photography to creating business cards. The instructors are experts in their particular subject areas and the “students” can ask the instructor questions as the classes are going on.

I like what HP has done with these classes. A lot of companies will offer webinars that teach customers about their products specifically, but very few expand the scope beyond that. HP is smart for offering to teach its customers how to get the most out of their PCs and technology in general. If customers know how to get the most out of their PCs, they are going to be a lot more interested in upgrades for their existing PCs or in the mood to buy more powerful PCs (hopefully from HP) when they are looking for a new computer.

There are lots of companies that could benefit from similar views. Web hosting companies could have classes on web design, clothing retailers could have classes on fashion, supermarkets could hold cooking classes, and so on. All of these classes complement the core product or service and still help to improve the company’s brand (assuming the classes are good, of course).

Setting this up for your own company would not be overly complicated. You likely have someone with the expertise (and hopefully, the attitude) to design and run such a class in your support team. After that, it is matter of getting the technology in place and promoting it among your customers. Try it with one or two classes and survey your customers to see how much they like it.

HP has had good luck with their classes to date; 93% of students surveyed responded saying they would take another class and 92% of students surveyed said they would recommend the class to a friend. Hopefully your implementation will have similar (or even better) results.

I’ve written about testimonials before, but I did want to add to that discussion and point out a great page that shows off some testimonials and quick feedback. That page is the support page at 37signals and it is very well done. Just look at the screenshot below:

They have a broad mission statement (great customer service is a promise we keep every day), list some critical information (URLs, support hours, etc.) and then have a series of testimonials and quotes from what I imagine are customer emails. The testimonials are simple: they are short quotes from emails / tickets and the header is just emphasizing one or two words from the actual body of the email. The person who submits the email is credited with their first name and initial of their last name.

A simple testimonials and support overview page like this is well worth the time it takes to create. It can instill customer confidence and can be a morale booster to your support department. Chances are, a well run support department could get 10-20 comments like this in a day or two and adding them to a page would be simple. It’s easy, efficient, and effective. With customer service and business in general, it’s hard to ask for anything better than that.

The business world is filled with an overwhelming number of questions and uncertainties. As statisticians analyze the uncertainties, the number of questions they ask seems to grow exponentially.

Business consultant and author Fred Reichheld thinks he has found the question that all companies need to ask in order to determine just how loyal their customers are – and he has humbly called it the ultimate question.

Reichheld talks about this ultimate question and what it should mean to you and your business in in his 200 page book entitled The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. The book, first published in 2006 by Harvard Business School Press, primarily focuses on three key areas: the “ultimate question,” a scoring method called “Net Promoter,” and the importance of “good profits.”

The “ultimate question” is the simple and common question of “How likely are you to recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?”. Net Promoter is a scoring method that subtracts the proportion of detractors from the proportion of promoters. Good profits are simply profits that come from people that actually want to use your products and services (as opposed to those who might be locked into contractors or dissatisfied for one reason or another).

Like many things in customer service, the premise behind the book and the Net Promoter concept is laughably simple: if you deliver an experience that makes people genuinely want to recommend your company to their friends, family, or colleagues, you’re going to grow. Just like many business books, The Ultimate Question takes this relatively simple concept and adds strategically placed healthy servings of jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms to help justify the three hours and $20 that the book will cost. After the first 50 pages, the book starts to drag on and get redundant, but there are plenty of examples and tidbits to make it worth reading until the end.

With that said, I’d still recommend reading the book because it clearly articulates some very important aspects of business and customer service. Recihheld’s core points make sense and the examples he provides are interesting. After reading the book, any competent customer service manager or executive can easily conduct a Net Promoter survey and make use of the results. He clearly explains what Net Promoter is, why it should matter to your business, and how to make it work. Even though I don’t agree with Recihheld’s view that the “would you recommend” question is the only question that needs to be asked (I think you need more information than that), I still think that the “would you recommend” question is a great question to ask and that Net Promoter has its merits.

Net Promoter isn’t exactly new to the business world and that may very well be one of its biggest strengths. A whole host of companies in a variety of industries make use of Net Promoter and many of them are fairly transparent about their scores. It’s interesting to see what your Net Promoter score is and then compare that to some of the big companies in your industry. The average Net Promoter score is around 10 and it’s possible to have a score anywhere between -100 and 100.

I’ve conducted Net Promoter surveys for several companies and have always found the results to be useful when they are coupled with other questions. Net Promoter doesn’t tell you everything, but there is really very little to lose in asking your customers how likely they are to recommend your company to a friend or colleague. You might be in for a rude awakening, but you’ll almost certainly come out of the process knowing more than you did before. Once you have the results from your first Net Promoter survey, you’ll be faced with the true ultimate question, the question of how to improve.

Bottomline: Despite being slightly redundant, The Ultimate Question clearly articulates the importance of and how to measure customer loyalty. You may not agree with all of Reichheld’s points, but a majority of them make sense and are applicable to almost any business.

Pros: The book fully explains Net Promoter and why it matters. It provides a plethora of advice and action items that managers and executives can use to start tracking customer loyalty.

Cons: Some of them Reichheld’s methods are more academic than they are practical and the second half of book gets annoyingly redundant.

Interested? You can purchase the book on Amazon.com for about $20. You can also see some of my other posts about Net Promoter here.

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Many companies, especially startups, move very quickly. They’re always in the process of developing and launching new products, hiring new people, and so on and so forth. They stay very busy constantly and seem to never have enough time to do all that they need to do.

One of the things that these quickly moving companies usually don’t have enough time to do is properly launch products from a customer service perspective.  They get the product ready in terms of development, marketing, etc., but they never stop to tell customer service and the first time customer service hears about it is when customers start calling or emailing.

Needless to say, this isn’t the best way to do it. It creates a lot of confusion, is bad for morale, and upsets customers. Having a more formalized process that keeps customer service in mind is a much better way to handle product launches.

These are some things you’ll want to keep in mind before launching a product:

1. Have customer service representatives (and their managers) been made aware of the product by product management? Are they familiar with the products, features, and how they work?
2. Have they been certified on the product, or at least trained on it? This includes not only using the product, but supporting it as well.
3. Has marketing given the customer service department a heads up about promotions, discounts, special pricing, and expected volume?
4. Has engineering or product development briefed the customer service department on expected problems, known bugs, possible areas of concern, etc.?
5. Are there tools in place that customer service representatives can use to support the product?
6. Have knowledge bases and other documentation (internal and external) sites been updated / created as necessary?
7. Has the corporate and/or product web site been updated as necessary?
8. Have existing customers that might be interested in this product been made aware of its launch?

These eight things are just a start. There is obviously plenty more that should be done and what needs to be done varies from product-to-product and from company-to-company. If a checklist and a process exists, it’s far better than nothing. Creating a process lets companies work through it like it’s second nature. Product launches can be consistent and most importantly, they can go smoothly.