You can read part one of the interview here and part two here. To read this part, click “read more.”

Service Untitled: Interesting. Do you have something equivalent to personal service level stats or email employees or live chat since it’s kind of a different way to track it than phones?
Rob: I mean we’re mostly looking at their production of how many emails they’re responding to over a course of an extended period of time. We don’t look at it as like today they only did this many but this day, they did that many because some days you just get a mix of emails that are very different. But they have to have an expectation of doing on average, a certain number of emails an hour. And we have some people that are just very prolific with doing emails and others that are not but there is an expectation and they have to meet it.

Service Untitled: And something similar for chat probably?
Rob: Yeah. Chat is more like the phone. Now it’s easier with the phones because the phones that are on the hardware have specific statuses that you utilize to do all of the measurements. And so it’s slightly different for live chat but it’s basic in terms of the way we monitor it. But it’s roughly the same thing. We’re looking at production and we’re looking at people’s efficient use of time and making sure they’re customer–facing. And I think that’s the key thing for us is that people are customer–facing. It’s not necessarily how much time they’re spending there per interaction. Well some person may take ten calls an hour, another person may take six but they’re both on the phone the same amount of time and that may just be the average of how it works out because some people are just a little chattier than others and that’s fine. And it’s the same thing with live chat. There’s subtle differences in individuals.

Service Untitled: So empowerment is obviously critical to customer service. How do you empower customer loyalty to your members?
Rob: I mean that’s pretty easy. We don’t restrict their decision making. If they have something that they need to get to done for a customer, they don’t have hoops to jump through to make a decision. They make the decision and if there’s something they need help with, we’ll provide them help but we’re not going to stop them from making the decision and we want to make sure that people feel comfortable making the decisions without second–guessing themselves. Do what’s in the best interest of the customer. You know if you do something and you’re unsure about it but you wanted to take care of the customer, maybe talk it over with your team lead afterwards but don’t slow down the process of providing the best service you can to the customer. So I mean we don’t have like a bunch of system restrictions that they can’t do x you know. They can’t upgrade the shipping or they can’t upgrade the customer into a VIP or the can’t refund the customer for something that was a service issue or they – they can do whatever they need to. They can make whatever request they need for UPS to get a package delivered to a different address or have something picked up from a house. I mean every type of situation where we could possibly be interacting with the customer, we take the barriers away from them being able to do their job and provide as much of a trusting environment as possible.

Service Untitled: So by doing that, have you guys kind of avoided the bureaucracy that tends to occur if companies get bigger?
Rob: I mean yeah I would say so. I mean when you put a bunch of people together, there’s always going to be a little bit of people stuff you know with just relationships and stuff but I mean in general, it’s such a flat organization in terms of the way we interact with each other. And we’re not control freaks you know.

I’ve always thought about it this way. If you don’t trust your employees, then you’re not hiring the right people. And so we have to trust them. We have to put that in their hand and we want to you know – I go more on the whole thing of you know trust someone until they proved themselves that they can’t be trusted and then just to put them in an environment where you immediately, it restrict them from being themselves. So we just work in a different way I guess.

Service Untitled: How does Zappos handle escalations to managers? If someone calls up and they’re really angry and they demand to talk to a manager, how do you guys handle that? Is it like every other call handles it or do you do it differently?
Rob: I don’t know how other call centers handle it really. I mean it depends. The first thing that we would want to do is first find out before you transfer it to the managers, well who the person is and what their issue is so that you can – you might be able to resolve it and they don’t know that. I would be really interested in knowing the data on this but sometimes we have people who call and demand a manager or supervisor because they don’t think that the person they’re going to get on the phone can help them. You know their experience I guess in other places is that what they want can’t be done by the first person that answers the phone. It’s different here so sometimes it happens when someone demands a manager or supervisor, they quickly find out, “Wow, that was a lot easier than I thought.” Some are escalated and sometimes it’s our own fault and so if they really want to speak with a manager, we’ll absolutely get them on the phone with the supervisor or manager as quickly as we can and have it resolved. I guess I kind of don’t know what else there would be to say about that one. I mean what do other call centers do that make it – do they make it complicated? I don’t know.

Service Untitled: Some call centers work pretty hard to escalate calls
Rob: Then what does the manager do? I mean that’s one of your functions of your job.

Service Untitled: Exactly.
Rob: The thing is we’re all accessible. Our CEO’s email is readily available. We all have the same mission. We’re here to provide the best possible customer experience and if they need to speak with somebody who they believe is more relevant to their problem, then we owe them that.

Service Untitled: I think that’s fair. So how do you compensate employees for going above and beyond? Obviously people want to be happy at work but they also have bills to pay and extra money helps that. What are some things that agents can do to earn additional money?
Rob: Well I touched on it earlier. The only program we have in place for earning more money in our department is by learning new skills and pursuing different opportunities that we constantly are promoting to be available for them. And we have rotations so that these skill set jobs is never stagnant, it’s never the same group constantly. There may be slower periods of churn within those groups as we have people learn those skills but there’s plenty of opportunity for them to go out and earn more pay and we do our very best to promote those opportunities and coach new employees when they get in so that they can be able to take advantage of those opportunities and learn those skills and then also as a side benefit, you get further training, more skills, and you also get paid more.

So that’s how we do it. And this is kind of around the company like we don’t have like a bonus program. We don’t have you know, at least in the call center, we don’t have like sales goals or you know stuff like that. We don’t have commissions or anything like that. We looked at other things, but I would rather discuss what we have than things that we don’t have.

Service Untitled: That makes sense. So what are some of the training opportunities like? Is one, for example, learn how to do email support? Learn how to do live chat? Or is that smaller than that or bigger than that?
Rob: It’s both. It’s all of the above. It could be smaller than that. Email and live chat are two of them. And each one depending on the length of the rotation and the skills required and the difficulty of the job are paid differently. So some are a little bit more difficult and you get paid more for learning that skill and excelling at it. So it varies from team to team.

We have like mentoring which is when new employees come in and they go to their four–week new hire training process. They come in to the call center and they sit with employees and listen to phone calls, and they have a mentor who helps them out, who takes the calls and then talks about it and gives them a little training. So that’s another one – it’s kind of a very soft skill, people–to–people training thing that they do not very frequently. It’s fairly infrequently so that’s a pretty popular one for people when they’re brand new. They want to pass on learning.

And we have an ambassador program. It’s another one which is pretty popular because it’s interacting with new employees. It’s kind of like a big brother–big sister kind of a thing. New employees get assigned to a veteran employee and they give them tours of the office to introduce them to more people in the call center and they help them with the studying for some of the test and quizzes that they go through when they’re new employees, and help just kind of talking them through questions that maybe they might have been nervous to ask someone else or whatever may be the case. But just to introduce a new friend and a new connection in the call center. So that’s another one.

And then they just run all over in little areas. And you know for the most part, the concentration of these different skills and functions obviously are built around business needs of what we’re trying to do to accomplish with our customers and to provide them the best service. And that changes too over time. So we’ve had new ones. Like right now we have, our live chat one has been a hugely popular skill set to learn recently. We have almost 70 people on the team and two years ago, we didn’t have a full time team. So it’s created a huge amount of opportunity for people to learn something new and that team so far has no signs of stopping growing. So it’s going to be growing at the same time people are rotating through and learning it. So it will end up being able to provide a lot of experiences for people. And who knows what the next one will be.

Service Untitled: So if I was a phone person and I got live chat training, I can do live chat for maybe a month or two and then go back to phones? Or you want to stay in live chat or whatever I want to do?
Rob: You would stay in live chat for longer than that. The minimum rotation for a team like live chat would be roughly four months and it usually would be a little longer – especially when we’re growing a team like that, we can’t rotate people out as quickly because if we rotate people out and say, “This is the day you have to rotate out,” we may not yet have somebody who’s ready to take over. And so it’s a balancing act of all of that movement because we have to have a specific number of people working the job to meet customer demand. We don’t want rotations to mess up the customer demands part.

So it’s kind of an art and science at the same time of that piece. And it’s different for a growing team. Like for other groups, we have a team that handles all of the customers that call through on the mobile phone number so they’re on a mobile app and they call a phone number that gets routed to people that have specialized training and handling confusion on the mobile app or whatever may be the case that the customer is calling about. It could be about a shirt. But that team is very small. And so if we were doing something on that team, we would probably hire a new person in, make sure they have the training and then one person, when the person that was rotating off would rotate off afterwards. So that’s an example of how it would work there. For the live chat team, it would be a little different than that.

Service Untitled: And so if someone does something like mentoring, does that result in an hourly pay boost or is that a one–time bonus after it’s completed? How does that work?
Rob: The whole skill set progression program is all an hourly pay increase so they all have whether it be from 25 cents on up to 75 cents maybe for certain skill sets that they could earn an hour, a per hour pay increase. And now, one of the things that goes with that is they could be asked at any time to actually come back and do the job in a time of need and they will be asked to share knowledge and answer questions and be a further presence of sharing that information wherever they go after that. So they’re an advocate for that skill set wherever they go, and they can use that in many different ways, and we find that very valuable to mix the workforce like that. It shares a lot of knowledge and it helps people provide better service experiences by continuing to circulate that knowledge and information.

Service Untitled: And it also makes itself, if someone is out sick on live chat, you can take someone who knows about it that might be on the phones and help out.
Rob: Absolutely. If we need to do that, we absolutely will do that. And they’d be happy to do it. They know that and they would love to help out. It’s great to be able to have that option available.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 1 of 4 After interviewing Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh  and seeing the company’s...
2. Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 2 of 4 This is the second of a four part interview with...
3. Tour of Zappos HQ Zappos is a company we’ve talked about a lot on...

You can read part one of the interview here. To read this part, click “read more.”

Service Untitled: So how do you motivate Customer Loyalty team members? And then how do you keep that motivation up over time? A lot of companies institute programs and then see enthusiasm over time drop off.
Rob: Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. I think the biggest thing that we’ve been able to offer our employees to keep them engaged is opportunities to learn and grow and do different things. And you know we have a wonderful culture that we’ll strive to continue to make as solid as possible for our employees, and each and every one of us has a part in doing that. We invest a lot in the new employee’s right from the get–go so they see that there’s this tremendous investment in them, and there is a lot of enthusiasm for people when they first start in the call center.

One thing that people talk about with trying to keep motivated is how do you recognize performance? And we do a lot of different things to recognize performance that are both formal programs and informal programs that are related to specific job function and things that are expected of our employees. And then in terms of earning raises, we have a program where you know, there are a lot of different jobs within the call center. Examples would be there’s kind of a continuous training team. There’s a team that does work for leadership development. There’s a team for live chat and one for email. So those are very specific skill sets, and that’s what we have, the skill set progression so people can learn different skills. They work on a team for a specific amount of time depending on the role. It could be three to six months or more. And they can earn pay increases based on their performance for learning and growing in which pursue growth, and learning is one of our core values. So we try to keep things in the context of our value system in every case of everything that we do obviously. And we also want to make sure that the way we motivate fits within that, and the way we recognize fits within that. And we are very good listeners to our employees and we talk to them, and we listen, and we understand where we can make improvements to further engage them and further encourage them to stay involved.

And there’s always an ebb and flow you know. There are peaks and valleys in every person’s employment. It doesn’t matter what jog, whether it be a call center or other jobs. You’re going to have peaks and valleys. And we understand that. We don’t want somebody to fall off a cliff and not do anything at all of course. But you know, you reengage them and find a way to motivate them and keep them inspired. And I think a lot of what helps us is just we’ve got this great culture and environment that it really makes the job of helping lead a little bit easier because there’s just I don’t know. It’s hard to describe some of it but part of that magic that I guess I feel like we have here at times is what keeps people engaged you know.

Service Untitled: What are some of the ways that you recognize good service? What are some of those formal and informal programs where you recognize good work?
Rob: I mean it could be as simple as I overhear somebody do something awesome and I make sure I make a point of going over there and thanking and telling them specifically why I thought they did a great job you know. I thought you did a great job connecting with the customer because you talk to them about that wedding or that trip or whatever it may be the case. You know people are very creative that. And you can reward people just that way and recognize that way but we also have the Zollars which is like our – it’s not real currency but it’s Zappos currency where you can use that to buy stuff in a Zollar gift store. And then there’s specific efficiency metrics that we have that are more just people using their time wisely, attendance, performance on the phone with their quality when they’re new. In the incubation, there’s call reviews that they go through. The team leads do a great job of making sure they’re very in–tune and constantly coaching to the goals that they set with their team members. The formal programs are related to the key metrics that we measure so you know, quality of service with our customers, which we get feedback directly from customers on. And the efficiency metrics that we measure in attendance which is an important metric for call centers. So we have formal programs for those and then we try to keep as much free space for people to do stuff in an informal way and encourage that and help our leadership team understand how to do a good job with that because a lot of times, I think it has more value. If you tell somebody, “If you do this, you’ll get this recognition,” sometimes that doesn’t have as much meaning as somebody doing something because it’s what they want to do and somebody notices that they’ve done it.

Service Untitled: So you mentioned that there’s a metric that you track – holistic performance like attendance and things. Can you talk about what that entails? I ask because I know that doesn’t  track call time so what are some of the things that you do track to kind of determine agent quality and performance on a large scale?
Rob: Well we measure with surveys. We get quality of service feedback directly from our customers. Attendance is a very specific metric that we measure and it measures punctuality and attendance. We don’t measure call time but we have a metric called Personal Service Level which is a measurement of how you use your time. The best way to describe it is you have ten hours and you’re at work and the only thing you’re supposed to be doing is taking calls for that ten hour day. Our goal is that 80% of that time is actually spent on the phone talking to the customer. The other 20% falls in the category of your after–call work so writing notes, making sure you do all those backend system work, follow–up to make sure everything is properly taken care of. You could take an extra break if you wanted to for a few minutes. You go down and get a snack, walk around, have a quick conversation with a friend. It could be whatever. It really doesn’t matter. We just ask that 80% of that time is customer–facing. We don’t measure the call time and in fact, actually we measured it as PSL number or we managed to it but the longer your calls are, the easier it would be to hit the expectation so it actually encourages longer call time by the nature of the way it works.

But call times don’t trend very high. I mean I think that you know… It’s not long. There are appropriate amounts of time to be staying with customers so I don’t know why we would ever consider doing that necessarily but those are the three areas that we have like the most specific metrics. We used to have a quality assurance program where we would listen to phone calls and fill out a form and evaluate the call and give a score. But it did not work for our culture and who we are. Actually it was not, it didn’t end up being a very positive thing for our employees or anyone really. And ultimately, if it’s not positive for them, it’s not going to be positive for our customers. So that’s a pretty traditional call center kind of thing that we don’t do.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 1 of 4 After interviewing Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh  and seeing the company’s...
2. Tour of Zappos HQ Zappos is a company we’ve talked about a lot on...
3. Chick-fil-A recipe for excellent customer service Today in the Jonesboro, Arkansas Regional Chamber of Commerce presentation,...

Click “Continue Reading” to see the questions and answers.

Service Untitled: So tell me about your role and what you do at Zappos.
Rob: I am the director of the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team. So that’s our contact center here in Henderson, Nevada. And I started in the company as a temp worker in 2004. It was one of my first jobs out of college actually and I started answering phone calls for the call center so that’s where my history with Zappos started. I’ve been in the call center the whole time I’ve been here which and it’s almost eight years now. On a day–to–day bias, it could be all sorts of things but you know just making sure that the call center is prepared for all different seasons for all of our contacts for your customers and making sure we have all the proper training and development for our employees and that we’re hiring properly, and just treating our customers and our employees as best as possible and helping develop and strengthen and promote our culture is definitely a big part of it. And yeah, it could be a million different little things but the main things are making sure our teams are prepared to help drive and improve our culture and then be able to provide the best possible customer experience. Those are the two big things that we focus on and that I help with.

Service Untitled: Great. So you guys are open 24/7 right?
Rob: Yes. All of our contact channels have people working on them 24/7.

Service Untitled: Okay. How do you handle 24/7 when it comes to scheduling and training and communication and things like that?
Rob: Well it’s really not – there’s nothing perfect about communication, training, or anything in any company probably. You can do it really well and you always are trying to get better and I think that’s kind of where we fall. We’re always trying to improve. But the 24–hour thing, the scheduling is handled 24/7 the same way it is at any point in the day. It’s all about contact volume. So in terms of the basic scheduling of folks because you know how many people you need to be able to meet our service level goals whether it be one in the morning or one in the afternoon. So the staffing model is the same.

We have some different shifts that work anywhere, you know start from noon to 9, 1 to 10, and these are the afternoon to evening hours and then 3 to midnight is the last non–graveyard shift. And then traditional graveyard shift is, we have folks that start at 7 and then others that start at 8:30. And so we consider that to be the graveyard of those folks that work past the midnight hour. And it’s still a fairly small group actually. It’s not a huge group of people that worked the traditional graveyard hours. And communication is, we do it in all sorts of different ways which is what we do for the folks during the day. And then we just make sure that the leadership team makes an effort to engage and interact with them. So we come in and hang out with them and do our best to have them, have that connection and that communication there.

The training, some training happens at night. Some happens during the day. We have a program that we call the Day Tripper Program and so folks from the graveyard will actually come in and spend some days during the actual daylight hours and get some extra training and extra experiences in the call center that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to experience on their graveyard shift. And we do vice versa. We also have a program for people from the daytime to spend time with the graveyard shift and kind of better understand what they do there.

Service Untitled: Is there different leadership and supervision also on the graveyard shift? Or is it the graveyard team run by themselves and report back to the people on the day shift?
Rob: It’s kind of a combination of both because we have team leads which is kind of our first line of leadership. They have teams of anywhere between 12 to 14 folks on average around the call center. And our graveyard it’s about 20 folks. And we have two team leads for the graveyard shift and they work that shift. That’s their shift. So they’re working overnight with that team full time, and those team leads have the supervisor who works late in the day, in the evening, and has other teams that are working up until midnight or 10:00 or 9:00. They have plenty of time to hang out. And then the manager that oversees that has other areas in the call center that they’re responsible for but then they have their piece and making sure that they stay connected with the team. So we do special events to have all of us go hang out with them and spend time with the graveyard. We do special team building events for them where we can all get together and hang out. So they’re pretty well–connected I would say for not working during the day.

Service Untitled: That’s very neat. When new employees start, what does the training process look like?
Rob: We developed our training process over years. We didn’t say we’re going to have this and we just started it this way. It certainly was very basic in the beginning. But right now we have four weeks of new hire training. And the new hire training is not specific to the call center employees. The new hire training process happens for everyone that’s hired in our office this year in Henderson. And so whether you’re hired as a buyer or an accountant or a software engineer, whatever it is, you go through this new hire training process. Its four weeks long, mandatory. And this class is mixed. It’s not just call center employees and other – And another group that stays in another classroom that are non–customer loyalty team members. It’s all mixed together so the class could be 20 folks that are coming to the call center and 30 folks that are going to various departments around the company. That would be a large class but just as an example. So that four weeks incorporates the call center training so everyone learns how to answer the phone, everyone talks to customers.

There’s a lot of cultural training so they understand their core values, who we want to be. There’s talk of history. They get introductions from a lot of the different leaders in the company so they meet the people that can be good contacts and points of reference for them around the organization, and then they also get a better understanding of what each department really does on a daily basis. So they go through that four weeks and then everyone that’s not in the customer loyalty team goes back to their job except for during the holidays when everybody contributes time on the phone. So that’s another side benefit for us as when we have peak season is those folks come back on the phones and help out with our customers.

And then after that four weeks, the employees that are going to the call center come in to the Customer Loyalty Team, we have three weeks of uh, we call it incubation but it’s basically kind of a more intensive on–the–job, hands–on call center training where they’re listening to, they’re getting more feedback on their phone calls. They’re taking more phone calls so they’re getting more and more practice and getting more used to doing that full time. They get a lot of feedback and they get extra training in kind of the finer details of call center stuff that we do that isn’t built in to the original four–week new hire process. So they do that and from day one to the end of training is really a seven–week process for our call center employees.

Service Untitled: Before the marketing guys get on the phone in December, do they get a refresher course or additional training? Is there a disconnect obviously between someone who does calls all day long versus someone who haven’t taken a call in six months?
Rob: You hit it right on the head. We actually have refresher courses which is exactly what we call them. So that’s what we do. It’s a few hours long. It just gives people the opportunity to kind of see what’s changed, what’s been going on in the call center. Most of the changes are pretty basic. The biggest thing is there are folks that haven’t been on the phones very often. They get nervous about it and really, that’s the hardest part I think for people is just the nerves. You know the biggest departments besides CLT in Las Vegas here is our merchandising team. They know product very well, so for them, that part of the job is not difficult. There’s some technical things that they may have to do that they’re not as familiar with but they’re prepared for it. They get refreshers. And during the holidays, it’s such a busy time of year, so many of the calls are you know, they’re fun, even more fun just because people are usually in a good mood for the most part and a lot of new orders. So not necessarily as complex of a mix as an employee is going to take at a different time of year. So during this time, we’re in its peak in terms of our volume, but it’s not quite as difficult as it would be post–holidays with returns and exchanges.

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Tour of Zappos HQ Zappos is a company we’ve talked about a lot on...
2. How to establish a customer service culture Customers frequently offer feedback; sometimes it is solicited, and sometimes...
3. Empower employees to deliver better customer service The front line employees are often the representatives who will...

Click “read more” to read the interview. You can also read part one, part two, and part three.

Question: What are the one or two things that are unique to American Express call centers?
Answer: Our 160 year heritage is all about service, and it is interesting when I speak to new hires or tenured employees, I remind them that it is a very competitive situation especially in the last few years. Our competition wants to eat our lunch and our customers are becoming increasingly more demanding.

After 23 years here, our competition cannot replicate the level of service we provide, customer service is part of our DNAnswer: We hire for it, we train for it, we reinvest in our people through constant upskilling. What do we have? People have worked here for 30, 35, 40 years and our competition can’t replicate this. I’m not sure our competitors are even measuring their customer service, but our customers have spoken and for the past three years American Express has been the recipient of J.D. Powers and Associates award for highest customer satisfaction with credit cards companies and that speaks volumes. I believe about the quality of the service and overall experience, our scores continue to improve where some of our competitors are deteriorating which is a validation of the first point.

Question: Do you have anything you want to add or anything that is relevant to mention about customer service for American Express?
Answer: I’d just reiterate that one of our core areas of focus at American Express is to provide superior service. We’re not looking only at our competitors in the credit card industry. We really look as being among the leading service provider in any industry and aspire to be the world’s most respected service brand. Right up to our CEO, we feel that customer service is really a business driver and a lot of businesses feel that it is a cost. We feel customer service is an investment, which is the real business differentiator for our organization.

Question: How do you approach design and how do you use your phone menu? A lot of companies have a whole bunch of different ways they do that.
Answer: We use the phone menu to identify how we should route each call. We immediately give the customer the option to opt out of the voice response if they wish. Or they can continue to stay in the voice response menu. We simply use it to make sure the call is routed to the appropriate customer care professional.

Question: Do you use social media in servicing?
Answer: Yes, we do. I am really proud to say that we started it in Fort Lauderdale last August. We have a small, but mighty social media response team and have a Twitter handle. We have customer care professionals who monitor that handle and reach out proactively to answer any questions that may arise or any comments that need answering. If there is anything that looks to be specific to a customer, a member from the Twitter team contacts the customer and takes the conversation offline. If a customer direct messages us, we direct message them back. It is working nicely and we are getting a positive response. This is very new to us, but a lot of issues have been resolved through this social media handle. We haven’t looked at any specific measures yet, but we’re evaluating what types of inquiries are satisfied through this handle and issues resolved seem to one that is popping up the most.

Question: How do you gather and then use customer feedback?
Answer: Through our listening posts. Social media is one of them and written commentary surveys are another listening post from each transaction. In Ft. Lauderdale, we have a small Service Recovery Team that contacts customers who rate us as “poor” in written surveys. This team does the outbound communication and apologizes for the lack or lapse of service and has a conversation with the customer on how American Express can improve their level of service. We are constantly evolving and improving our processes to satisfy our customers.

Question: Does that Service Recovery Team actually try to resolve the problem or are they more about feedback?
Answer: They absolutely do aim to resolve the issue if it hasn’t been resolved. In most cases, a customer is willing to provide feedback as they don’t want the problem to happen again. The Service Recovery Team will write a personal handwritten thank you note to the customer with a phone number to contact them if they have any other questions. The note thanks the customer for taking the time to speak with us and hope everything has been done to their satisfaction. Recommending they hold on to the phone number if there is anything else we can do to assist them. Those are my words, but they will write something along those lines in the note.

Question: In your role do you actually interact with customers and why?
Answer: I absolutely do. In one of two ways, customers will escalate to me either through the Internet or through the customer care professional if they are not satisfied, as they know I am the leader here in the Customer Care Center. The other thing I will do, as I was doing earlier today, I will sit side by side with the customer care professional with a headset and listen to their conversation with the customer and provide them with feedback about their performance. Their leaders do that as well, but I do that regularly. I will walk around certain times of the week with a headset and with the leadership team. If a customer care professional needs a second voice or someone to escalate the call to, we will talk to the customer and see if we can resolve their issue.

This is the final part of the interview with Doria. You can also read part one, part two, and part three.

No related posts.

In this part of the interview, we talk about how customer service ties in with the different types of American Express cards and how American Express approaches the important topics of empowerment and taking ownership of issues.

To read this part of the interview, click “read more” below. You can also read part one and part two of this interview if you haven’t already.

Question: Tell me about how you engineer the different types of service for each different card level. How does your organization or American Express think about what a Centurion card member gets or a Platinum card member?
Answer: What we do in training is make sure that our customer care professionals do several things and do them exceedingly well. To get back to your last question first, we want the CCPs to assess the card members mood. Maybe a child is crying in the background or we hear a lot of noise in the background, and it is their job to make sure it is still a good time to speak with a customer. A CCP might say “It sounds like you might be in an airport, so I will try to get this done relatively quickly.” Our CCPs are perceptive and assess the mood of the customer so that they can best service them during that call. Gauging the mood of the customer is an extremely important part of the CCPs job. Is the customer very friendly, or is the customer in a rush? If a customer is upset when they call, our training focuses on bringing the customer level of “excitement” down, making sure we use the right words, that we apologize for any lapse of service or perceived lapse of service. Ultimately, we want to make sure we are delivering exceptional customized service to each customer.

Getting back to your original question, the different levels of a card doesn’t lend itself to any specific difference in the quality of customer treatment; it might in terms of the benefits associated with the product. For example, a co-branded product with one of our partners might have different benefits than our charge card products and our CCPs are trained to know the difference in products and services for each card and educate the cardmembers appropriately.

Question: How do you empower customer care professionals to go above or beyond standard operating procedure to deliver superior customer service?
Answer: That is an excellent question and something we instill in our employees. There is nothing prescriptive about what we are doing, it is more intuitive. Before I came on to this call I was out in the Atrium and one of our Centurion CCPs said he was having a great day, “I love my job and felt so empowered to serve our customers.” I asked him, “What does that mean?” He said, “It is as simple as knowing my leader will support me to find a solution for a customer.” We want to be sure we are empowering our professionals, providing the environment, training and support to empower them to leave a positive, lasting impression on our customers and effectively serve them.

Question: In a call center environment where different representatives are taking calls and handling them one after another, how do you approach the question of ownership?
Answer: We have ten Customer Care Principles. Every month, we celebrate a small group of customer care professionals in each service center who have delivered exceedingly well and have gone above and beyond principles. One is ”I own my customer’s problems from end to end” and even if it doesn’t fall within their world they will exhaust all resources to find an answer for the customer. For example, a Platinum cardmember who may have a problem reconciling their membership awards account. The The CCP handling the call would asks if the customer “could bear with me for a moment while I go back and look at prior statements and figure that out, I can settle this for you now instead of transferring.” We have moved away from transferring since customers don’t like that at all. The voice of the customer is the most important in determining a positive experience with our customers. They want that first contact resolution,. so, as a result, it may take a few minutes but we make sure we are delivering providing quick answers and solutions on that first call.

In the fourth and final part of this interview, Doria and I discuss what’s unique to American Express call centers, how American Express uses social media and gathers customer feedback, and how Doria interacts with customers in her own role.

No related posts.

This part of the interview includes information on how American Express decides to hire new employees versus promote them from within, more information on the compensation and motivation methods the company is using, how they use Net Promoter, information on the company’s “Relationship Care” program, and more.

To read this part of the interview, click “read more” below. If you want to read part one of the interview, click here.

Question: How do you approach hiring new people versus promoting from within? Are the customer care professionals who work with Centurion card members hired for that position or do they need a certain amount of years’ experience before they can move up to a role like that?
Answer: For a position as a Centurion CCP, we tend to do more hiring from within. I can’t think of a situation where I have hired an external person for Centurion in the last couple of years. Professionals typically progress and work their way through the organization to build experience. For the remainder of our servicing roles, we also hire externally. There is a lot of movement within the center with customer care professionals from one area moving to another to develop skills across a variety of disciplines.

Question: Tell me a little bit about the compensation method and those new things you said recently put in place and seem to be working?
Answer: Four years ago we stepped back and realized the behaviors we were incenting were not based on the voice of the customer. We recognized that great service doesn’t come down to what we think about our performance internally. It’s all about what the customer thinks after every interaction. We instituted new measuring actions of our customer interaction and after each interaction we will ask the customer how we performed. Do they feel we have done a great job? Would they recommend us to a friend? This information is important because we adjust each customer care professionals’ incentive plan based on the customer’s feedback. So it was a real cultural shift for us. We retired traditional call center metrics to focus on the voice of the customer – what we call “Recommend to a Friend” has become a primary metric for our customer care professional performance so is tied to their incentive pay now.

Question: How does Net Promoter work?
Answer: For the customer care incentive plan, we ask our customers if they would recommend us to a friend. And that’s the score that we use with the customer care professional incentive plan. Since we introduced our new Relationship Care ethos, we know that our ”Recommend to a Friend” score has increased by more than 10% as a result of infusing Relationship Care into the equation. I cannot share the absolute score, but we’ve seen a really nice lift in customer results as a result of that this metric.

Question: When you ask a “recommend to a friend” question, do you ask on a zero to ten scale or on a yes or no scale?
Answer: Zero to ten scale.

Question: Tell me more about Relationship Care.
Answer: Relationship Care is what we call our servicing ethos and very simply put, it is really about making sure we take advantage of whatever our interaction is with that customer to create incremental value to them during the time American Express is on the phone with them. CCPs don’t just respond to a customer’s question or solve their problem, they go the extra step of offering the customer tailored information about how they can get more out of their card, like taking advantage of a benefit they’re not utilizing. As an example, you might want to contact us with a change of address because you’re moving and our CCPs take that opportunity to remind you of a benefit through their program so that the customer can maximize the value of their card.. With one of our co-brands, that would be specific to a home improvement service or benefit like Home Depot. It’s taking that interaction and thinking how we can add incremental value by reminding the customer of a benefit or bringing a new benefit or service during that discussion.

During any given interaction, we have access to of data about that customer and we can use that data and remind them of appropriate benefits. When they are traveling, we remind them about club access in the airport or baggage insurance that the cardmember may have forgotten about as benefit readily available through their card. It gives us a deeper connection and engages the customers more. Over time, the customer wants to stay with us and has a continued loyalty with our brand. It’s a powerful way of servicing for us, and American Express continues to provide extraordinary care and service for our customers which hasn’t wavered for 160 years. Our aspiration is to become the world’s most respected service brand. And over extenuating circumstances, over the course of time with many customers, we have been a go-to company. We have reached out and helped them out over difficult situations. Our servicing ethos has always been there; we’re just continuing to enhance it.

Question: How do you train for Relationship Care? How do you train someone that when a customer says I am moving and need to change my address to start suggesting home improvement and all that?
Answer: It all starts in customer care professional classroom training. It’s why we “hire for the will and train them for the skill.” Let’s me give you an example of how this plays out. As the customer care professional looks at the screen during the call, there will be specific messaging. The messaging might say this particular customer travels extensively. So the customer care professional would take the opportunity to remind them of a free airline club access their card entitles them to. Or, if the customer is moving, the CCP could mention the opportunity to redeem Membership Rewards points with Home Depot or Lowes. So technology is providing relevant information so the customer care professional can focus on the conversation with the customer and on providing outstanding service.

Question: On a similar note, you obviously have a traditional call center where someone calls in and will probably not speak to the same person two calls in a row. How do you manage that when someone calls in and make people feel they are dealing with a small team and make it a personalized experience a little bit?
Answer: This is why the incentive program becomes so important because each and every person in the center is fully aware of Relationship Care and the importance of it in customer interaction. Over and over when a customer contacts us, it is not just a transaction, but an opportunity to deepen our relationship with a customer. Our CCPs interaction with customers is no longer measured by average handling time but on providing a superior customer experience, as measured through customer feedback.

All of us are aligned in providing the same level of consistent service. It doesn’t matter who receives your call. If Douglas calls today and he is a Platinum card member, he will have the same consistent customer experience whether Susan answers the phone or Doria answers the phone.

Part three of the interview will include talk about how American Express empowers its representatives and how it encourages them to take ownership over issues and will be published next week.

No related posts.

This is a pretty lengthy interview, so I’ve divided it into four parts. Part one includes an introduction to Doria and her background with American Express, a quick overview of the different service centers that American Express has around the country, and some information on how American Express hires and trains its customer service representatives (called Customer Care Professionals).

You can see part one of the interview by clicking “read more.” A preview of part two is also included at the end of this part.

Question: Tell me a little bit how you got started at American Express, what your role is, and what you do at the company?
Answer: Believe it or not, I have been with this great company for 23 years. I started as a publisher for Departures Magazine. I then moved to our merchant business in the US, and then moved to our merchant business in Latin America and Caribbean. Five years ago, I joined the service center as General Manager here. My role is to ensure, through all of our customer touch points at the center, that we are delivering extraordinary customer care each and every day as assigned by customers. It is important that we are gathering feedback on all of our transactions with the customer and then feeding it back to our customer care professionals so that we continue to raise the bar every day.

Question: Is the Fort Lauderdale call center the main American Express customer service center?
Answer: Actually no, it’s not. We have four service centers here in the US. Fort Lauderdale is largest and oldest, but one of four.

Question: Where are the other ones?
Answer: We have a service center in Greensboro, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix. We have a global network, and one of the neat things about the organization is that for the first time in the history of the company, it is managed globally.  So instead of a US service network and an international service network, since the beginning of year we have had a global service network we call World Service.

Question: Is there a rhyme or reason to how calls are routed and how call centers are staffed? Divided up by divisions? Just a little bit of everything goes to each place?
Answer: It varies. In my center, we primarily serve our Centurion and Platinum card members. We have some of our credit and collections team here that serves our high balance customers; we have the dispute process team so if a cardmember has a billing dispute with a merchant we serve them here in this center. We have a large co-brand servicing team here as well as in Greensboro and a smaller one in Phoenix. We have business contingency plans for each one of our card products that allow all of us to essentially back each other up.

Question: How many representatives do you have in your center?
Answer: Here in Fort Lauderdale, we have about 2,500 customer care professionals. I also oversee another site here in South Florida where have approximately 400 customer care professionals handling billing and payments (or sending out statements and processing remittances.)

Question: How do you go about staffing them and hiring and training? Interview? Things like that?
Answer: At American Express, service is at the core of our brand. Since our founding 160 years ago, customer satisfaction has been a top priority for us – we want our customers to have a great experience with American Express at every touch point. Bringing the right kind of front-line employees into the organization is a critical component of building strong and lasting relationships with customers.

And a few years back, we actually revamped the whole employee process. We began to think differently about how we hire, train and compensate our employees. We now look for people who have hospitality, sales, and retail experience because we really believe if they have that service background in their DNA, we can train them on any one of our processes. We created new structured development opportunities and clearly defined career paths for our customer care professionals so that they are gaining more and learning more as they progress in their role. We invest more in our new hire program with twice as much time devoted to training as many of our competitors so that we are better positioning our customer care professionals. We’ve invested in technology tools that are easier to navigate so customer care professionals can spend time developing a relationship with customers and spend more time providing answers and solutions on each call. And last, we evaluated our compensation plan to make sure we were incenting the right behavior. Now, our customer care professional incentives are driven by customer feedback. It’s something that we started four years ago.

Question: What are hiring processes like from application to when they start the learning process?
Answer: First, an applicant applies for an open position through our website. Then we do an assessment to determine math computation skills, how they would handle certain customer interactions, etc. Then we do a phone interview to learn about the applicants service attitudes or ethos. The next step is a face-to-face interview and then a meeting with the hiring leader.

Question: I would like to hear more about orientation process if you could talk a little bit more about it.
Answer: A year and a half ago, we actually revamped our entire new employee orientation process. We want to ensure that on the very first day, our customer care professionals know that they joined a great company. In each one of our service centers, we welcome our new hires and they go through a scheduled day of events. In Fort Lauderdale, for example, I am the first person to talk to the new hires as a group. We share our servicing ethos, our Relationship Care ethos, the history of our service center and the company. Throughout the day, we take them through the usual benefits enrollment.

Other senior leaders address the new hires during the day and we communicate how important the customer care professionals role are to the company. At end of day, we have a networking session where leadership teams and all of the Vice Presidents will stop by. During this time, new hires can enroll in employee networks, the backup child care center and other programs. Most important, the first day reaffirms their decision to work with American Express, and our decision to hire them. We try to create that “wow” experience, just as we try to create the same with each and every customer interaction. We want them to walk away that first day knowing that they joined the greatest company in America.

Part two will be posted next week and will include information on how American Express decides to hire new employees versus promote them from within, more information on the compensation and motivation methods the company is using, how they use Net Promoter, information on the company’s “Relationship Care” program, and more.

No related posts.

- Driver: Extroverted, egotistical, project driven, and makes decisions based on results. An example of this “Thinker” would be Donald Trump, and the “You’re fired” line.
- Analytical: Introverted, project driven, and makes decisions based on facts. An example of this “Thinker” would be Dr. Spock from Star Trek.
- Expressive: Spontaneous, good negotiator,and learns by doing. An example of  this “Feeler” would be Jimmy Buffett who lives life to the fullest and is not detail driven.
-Amiable: Peacemaker, introverted, loyal, and decides based on emotions. An example of this “Feeler” would be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

Throughout the book, the author describes what each personality can bring to customers, fellow employees and the sales staff; how they react as managers and what an owner can do to enhance everyone’s best talents.

The book starts out like a regular retail sales training book, but highlights some great ideas. It is divided into eight chapters beginning with the financial and physical aspects of retail stores, and honesty in on employee hiring, training, building, and coaching. The author also emphasized the importance of marketing to help create a successful business and touches upon social media including Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and of course, the company website.

In the beginning of the book, the author suggests a company start with evaluating their financial situation based on the Profit and Loss statements, which may require a company to increase prices, limit discounts, cut waste, eliminate overtime, and hand out paychecks personally in order to have a personal knowledge of one’s own company’s expenses. Interviews for new employees should be no longer than 20 minutes and some sample interview questions such as asking a candidate to describe a typical day at his/her last job, or describe when you went out of your way for a client can help to increase the 51% chance of choosing an outstanding employee.

The importance of helping employees by using written job descriptions, handbooks for the “don’ts” of the business, and training that covers the “do” procedures will ensure employees function as you want. Great employees do the right things when you aren’t there.

Mr. Phibbs used an example of an older woman coming into a store looking for carpeting. Jane’s pet had recently died and the carpeting needed replacement. The woman was retired, on a fixed income and now had a new puppy. The saleswoman found a selection Jane loved and worked up an estimate. The price was $4,200, a higher price than the woman had expected, but the salesperson offered her interest free financing for 36 months. Less expensive products were offered, but Jane kept coming back to her original choice, and just wanted to think about it.

“As I was getting out my business card, I asked Jane if there was ‘anything else’ concerning her about purchasing the carpet. She told me she didn’t think she could move the books out of her bookcase and the curios out of her cabinets, and that because her children were scattered over the United States, she didn’t have anyone to help her. I told her I would come over a week before the installation and give her a hand with moving her furniture. Jane replied by asking me, ‘How much would it cost me?’ and I answered, ‘Lunch-peanut butter or tuna fish are my favorites.’ She laughed, asked me how much of  deposit I needed and got out her checkbook. That is the essence of great retail; being of service to someone else. Help her to see that you have both the answer and the way to make her life better.”

The advice and step by step descriptions of  the six stages of training emphasizes there are no shortcuts to becoming top sales personnel, and exemplary customer service is always an integral part of the success. When the entire staff is able to work together, the business grows and the company makes more money. The author states there is no such thing as a level playing field in retail since stores like Wal-Mart will always be able to offer lower prices, Best Buy will always have more inventory, and a mall will be able to offer better parking than a downtown shopping district, but you can find unique ways to make your store more attractive and train your staff to consistently deliver exceptional results every day.

Bottomline: I enjoyed reading the book. It is chock full of logical, practical advice. The real world examples show just how training and an awareness of different personality types can make a profound difference between success and failure. In a very tough economic crisis, businesses need to be unique and figure out what truly differentiates their business from a multitude of other retailers out there selling similar products. Phibbs shows the reader a practical step by step approach.

Pros: The book gives the reader a lot of detail into the “do’s and don’ts” of building a unique retail store. There are step by step examples to jolt you into a challenging way of thinking about store design, products and staff, and most suggestions are applicable to any business.

Cons: Even though I found the descriptions of the different types of personalities interesting, it became very drawn out and confusing. Parts of the book seemed to be more of a psychological dialogue aimed toward personality quirks than a guide to building a better business.

Interested? The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business is available on Amazon.com for $13.57 (paperback) and $9.99 (Kindle).

No related posts.