Service Untitled

There are a lot of small web startups and companies out there where customer service seems to come naturally to them. They provide fairly good to amazing service quite consistently and have never really thought about customer service in much detail. They never read a book on it, they don’t read a blog like Service Untitled, etc. It just comes to them without too much effort.

I’m not sure how this is or why it is, but a few things I’ve seen and noticed are:

The key people care about their customers.
There is a difference between knowing/caring about customer service and caring about your customers. The key people (usually the founders and early employees)  in the companies where customer service comes naturally may not really know about customer service as a business function, but definitely know and care a lot about their customers.

These companies are more often than not transparent and open.
Companies that seem to get customer service are more often than not open and transparent. They communicate openly with their customers, partners, employees, etc. and let them know what’s going on.

They respond quickly and mean it.
When these guys and girls reply to their emails or answer the phones and say they are sorry about your inconvenience or something of that nature, they almost always mean it. They care and want to make you happy.

They have passion.
If there is one thing about the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, is that they are passionate about what they are doing. If they don’t have the passion (and it’s usually fairly easy to tell if they do or don’t), they aren’t going to make it. The said entrepreneurs need a passion  for their product or service, for what they are trying to do, and most importantly, for the customer. Customers (or whatever you want to call them - users, patients, clients, etc.) make the world go around companies profitable, so you better be passionate about them.

It doesn’t stay that way.
Call me a cynic, but I’ve never seen it stay the “customer service comes naturally way” for long. Small companies that seem to have a natural talent for customer service need to start working on it more as they get larger. Once you start hiring people you don’t know to support your customers, a lot changes. At that point, you need to start working on formalizing hiring and training procedures and dare I say it, write policies.

By the way, many of the same things apply to people who are great at providing customer service naturally:

• They care about the people they are helping and want to help them.
• They are open and honest.
• They are genuinely empathetic and caring.
• They are passionate about what they do (helping customers).

What do you think about this? Does customer service come naturally to you and your organization? I am positive the last two words of “It doesn’t stay that way” is making startup entrepreneurs cringe, but they are a necessary evil.

Yesterday I stated (rather boldly) that you could boost your bottomline by being proactive with your customer service. I stand by that and will even support that statement today.

Here are the ways the 5 companies/situations I mentioned could help the companies either make or save money:

1. If Lexus can fix the problem for an in-warranty car before it becomes serious, it could save them thousands in part replacements.
2. The web hosting company not only builds a better relationship with their customer, but prevents possible outages and downtime, which can be costly to web hosting companies.
3. The email company could identity a problem and fix it before it becomes a disaster (no email for a week!) and/or can see if the customer is having trouble, has switched to a new provider, etc.
4. If the customer is evaultaing the software and can’t get a feature to work, the chances of them purchasing goes way down. Proactive customer service can help make that purchase more likely. Plus, if only a knowledge base link is sent, the interaction isn’t that expensive and could probably be automated.
5. If the customer isn’t using the more powerful or unique features of the software, they are more likely to defer to a competitor. Explaining what those features are and even guiding the customer through how to use them can help keep customers and let them get the most out of your product.

And the Dell/HP scenario with the bad hard drive? There are benefits for the companies there, too:

• It takes a lot less time to backup a hard drive before it dies than it does to spend all the time trying to get the data back after it dies.
• The customer learns a lesson about the importance of backups and how close they could be to total data failure without actually having the negative experience (which they very well might blame HP or Dell for - even if it isn’t their fault.)
• If the computer is out of warranty or the item isn’t covered in warranty, the company can sell the customer a new hard drive.
• The company builds a relationship with the customer and helps promote the image/feeling that the company is there for the customer and aims to make their life easier.

All of these boost the bottomline.

What do basically all proactive customer service expeirences have in common?

• They help improve customer loyalty and the customer relationship. This is the huge one from a customer service perspective.
• They help fix problems or address concerns before they become more serious, costly, and/or time consuming.
• They combine high touch and and high tech.
• Employees are able to spend their time helping customers before they get mad, angry, upset, frustrated, etc.

It’s been a while since I’ve added a new category to Service Untitled. However, yesterday there was a new category added and it’s all about proactive cusotmer service. It is something that I am going to try and talk a lot more about.

Little Things, Big Differences are about improving customer service with minimal change, today. Becoming proactive is about changing customer service with a lot of (but well worth it) change, tomorrow.

Now, go be proactive.

Scaling customer service is something that comes up time and time again. I was talking to an executive at a very interesting company today. The company is fairly large (close to 2,000 employees) and as they have grown larger, it becomes harder to scale their customer service.

1. Customer service is not technology.
The executive I spoke to is very technical by training. He was surprisingly well versed about the challenges related to customer service and how to handle them. A lot of technologists (and people in technology companies) have a hard time accepting the fact that scaling customer service is different than scaling technology. You can’t just buy new servers or put three or four really smart people at it and it’ll get done. Working with people is hard and customer service is all about the people.

2. Scale the management team.
The metaphor I used was as companies hire another 100 frontline people a month, they still keep the same number of managers and executives. This does not work! Set a ratio (1 senior executive for every 100 frontline employees) and stick with it as you grow. Keep hiring and promoting managers and executives as you grow.

2.5. Don’t promote exclusively from within.
Many, many companies refuse to hire people into management and other senior positions. For a lot of reasons, this makes sense. For an equal number of reasons, this doesn’t make sense.

• When you promote from within, you deplete your internal talent. You need people to continue being shift supervisors and if you always promote your best shift supervisors to VPs, it won’t be good.
• Some people are good at their job, but not good at the new job. I’ve seen situations when fantastic CSRs get promoted to more manager type positions and they do terrible. Some people just aren’t good in management or leadership positions. Others are.
• When you hire people from elsewhere, it brings an outside and new perspective to the company.

3. Use mentor based training.
Mentor based training is great. It scales from 3 or 4 employees to 50,000 employees. Use formal, mentor based training as your company grows and it should work out okay. The post explains the best practices for mentor based training and it works!

4. Invest in hiring and training.
As a company grows, it needs to invest heavily in hiring and training. Increase the size of your HR staff, dedicate more managers to hiring, hire better recruiters, improve the employee referral program (important!), and so on. Encourage executives and existing staff members to offer jobs to qualified people. Don’t limit that pool to just job seekers, either. Offer jobs to people are prominent in your industry (journalists, consultants, speakers, etc.), people who already have jobs, and people in similar jobs, but different industries. You’ll get a lot of nos, but that’s okay. (No is only the beginning of the conversation). It’s necessary to do that as you grow and something that will be well worth it in the end.

5. Don’t let the message get diluted.
This company has done a tremendous job at articulating their corporate culture, which is very customer service focused. If they keep that message present and continue to make it an important aspect of their company, I am confident that they will do okay.

A majority of this week has been dedicated to the interview with Dick Hunter of Dell. The interview (which I highly suggest reading) is done now, so it’s back to your normal programming.

When going through my usual search checks, one of the questions asked was “What is the most difficult part about providing great customer service?” That’s quite a question and one that cannot be answered easily.

To answer this question, I thought back to some of my interviews. Mike Faith of Headsets.com said the hardest part is providing great customer service day in and day out. Robert Stephens of the Geek Squad said the hardest part is providing the same quality level as you get bigger.

I think those are both good answers. Staying focused on customer service and then keeping quality levels up as you get bigger is very tough. I don’t think one is harder than the other - they are both extremely difficult.

Scaling customer service.
There is a whole section on rapid growth on Service Untitled. Companies that experience a lot of growth have a lot of trouble scaling appropriately. Even companies that are growing at an average pace often have trouble scaling. They don’t know what to do, have trouble hiring the right person, and so on. They just keep growing and can’t do much. Robert Stephens told me it was easy for the Geek Squad to provide great customer all the time when it was just him. However, when there are 15,000 people providing customer service as well, it gets much more difficult.

Staying focused.
Staying focused is another problem that companies of all sizes and growth levels experience. Staying focused on anything, including customer service, can be very hard. When there are bills to pay, people to train, customers to serve, etc., focusing on providing great customer service (consistently) is a very difficult thing to do. Mike Faith said that staying focused and working to always improve is a constant struggle and something they have to work on day in and day out. Not all companies are willing to make that kind of commitment.

How do you work to scale your customer service and stay focused? Needless to say, those are two topics we’ll be re-looking in the future.

This is the fourth and final part of the interview with Andrew Field of PrintingForLess.com.

In this part of the interview, he discusses the company’s team structure, some of their employees’ unique set of job responsibilities, the employees benefits at PFL, the company’s growth, their dog policy, and some parting advice.

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This interview is one that I’ve been excited to post for a few weeks. It’s just taken a long time to get it all written down, edited, and so on (my fault!). However, I think it’ll be worth the wait.

PrintingForLess.com is an interesting company that I first heard about from Robert Scoble, and then more from Christian Long. Their coverage sparked my interest and I setup an interview with the company’s CEO and founder, Andrew Field.

The company is fairly big (about 165 employees) and its average order is about $470. Their common orders range from$60 box of business cards (shipping included) to 2,500 8 x 11, full color brochures. They’ve been growing very fast.

The interview will be four parts. In the first part, Andrew tells me about PrintingForLess.com and its history and how they discovered that customer service was a great way to do things.

Click “read more” to read the interview.

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I was talking to an executive at a mid-sized (read: ~100 employees) rapid growth company the other day. The company has been having problems with its customer service. They have the basics down - people pick up the phones and do respond to emails, but they have room to improve when it comes to the little things. Their customer service is usually at a level of acceptable, but it isn’t at the point of “great” just yet.

However, this company, especially the executive I spoke to, have one of the most important first steps down: They want to improve their customer service. Wanting to improve your customer service and being dedicated to improving it is one of the biggest challenges. If you aren’t convinced that you want good customer service at your company, it is far less likely to happen.

This executive showed some things that definitely proved to be good news:

• He was obviously dedicated to improving the customer service experience. As stated above, this is critical.
• He wanted to know how he could go about improving the customer service experience. Just wanting to isn’t enough, you need someone that is prepared to do what it takes to get great customer service started.
• He listened carefully. I talk a lot, but the executive listened carefully. He wasn’t, dead though. By his responses, comments, etc., I could tell he was understanding what I was saying and the points I was trying to make.

Those are just a few things that executives looking to improve their company’s customer service need to do/show. They have to be open minded about how to improve the customer service at their organization and they need to be willing to remain dedicated to customer service.

Here is how to get to a point where you want to improve your customer service and the customer service experience:

• Read about customer service. You can read about customer service at Service Untitled, some of the blogs I link to on the right, in books, in the newspaper, and more. Reading about customer service will not only educate you, but the stories will convince you how powerful (and useful) customer service can be.
• Talk to a customer service expert. Talk to someone who deals with customer service and realizes how powerful great customer service can be. This could be a blogger, an author, a consultant, and/or an executive. Many of them will talk to you (or at least exchange a few emails) and let you know what they think customer service can do.
• Look at your competitors. Almost every industry I can think of has at least one company that uses customer service as a primary differentiator. Retail has Nordstrom, web hosting has Rackspace, hotels have the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton, airlines have Southwest and JetBlue, etc. Look at how successful these companies are.
• Try to model yourself. When you find the customer service-orientated company that is one of your competitors, study what they do. Read articles about them, talk to their employees, and so on.
• Be creative. These will all help convince you that customer service is important and that you want to improve customer service. Be creative and think about how you can go about convincing yourself customer service is important and that it is well worth the time and effort.

And remember, customer service is hard. There are lots of things that are easy to copy, but consistent customer service across an organization is very tough. It won’t happen right away, but you’ll start seeing changes sooner than later.

Oh, and read the Executive’s (Quick) Guide to Customer Service. It’s worth the one page read.

This is a guest writer post by John Federman, the CEO of eStara, a leading provider of online conversion solutions for enhancing multichannel sales and support initiatives.

As mentioned here about two weeks ago, a number of companies are implementing alternative contact solutions, like click to call, to control the volume and quality of calls sent to their contact centers.

Analysts agree that click to call is an effective means of reaching out to Web site visitors to engage them in conversation. For this reason, thousands of companies around the globe are deploying these solutions to enhance multi-channel sales and support efforts.

Basic click to call functionality is very easy to set up. It requires no additional software or hardware, and calls are routed directly to your existing CRM and telephony infrastructure. By pasting a JavaScript code into a Web site script, a standard click to call button is embedded on a Web site, and customers can start talking with your agents immediately either via their computer, or by entering in their phone number for an immediate call back.

If volume is not a concern, then this is the way to go.

However, if your business is growing and you’re attracting a lot of customers, you face the very real possibility of being overwhelmed with customer sales and support requests.

This is why most companies would prefer not to have every customer inquiry result in a phone call or chat, and invest heavily in providing self-service tools like FAQs and knowledgebase systems. However, in those instances where customer contact is desired or required, click to call not only helps offer quality service, but enhances the customer experience and increase sales conversion as well.

But not all click to call deployments are equal. Before deciding which solution is right for your business, it’s important to understand the deployment options for click to call functionality. These include:

Dynamic/Rules-Based Deployments – Unlike the static click to call buttons described above, dynamic/rules-based deployments are visible only when specific conditions exit. Dynamic buttons are triggered by a series of rules that are predetermined by the business during implementation. Business rules can range from:

• Number of items in a customer’s shopping cart
• Total shopping cart value
• Amount of time a customer has spent idle on a page
• Incomplete transactions
• Preferred customer status
• Hours of operation or call center availability

Because there may be uniform reasons of when customers abandon your Web site or require customer service, rules-based deployments provide a way to automate a call offering to prevent these things from happening and offer customers a chance to speak with a live agent based on their perceived needs.

Proactive Deployments — Like dynamic deployments, proactive deployments offer more flexibility than static click to call buttons, and give contact center agents more control over when to engage online prospects. Using real-time Web analytics, and rules-based triggers, contact center agents can determine if, and when to engage customers to call or chat based on their online behavior. With proactive deployments, the agent can control when and where they decide to offer the click to call invitation to offer a customized online shopping, or service, experience for each consumer.

Integrated Deployments — Integrated click to call deployments can either be static, dynamic or proactive, but leverage unique data integration and collaboration technology to create a truly seamless experience for customers as they transition from an online session to a phone call.

This is done through a process called “cross-channel data passing.” Cross-channel data passing ensures a continuity of customer experience by transferring information about the customer and the context of their online session directly to the call center at the time of call initiation. The call center software can be configured to display this information directly on the agent’s desktop screen, or it can use the incoming data values to trigger lookups into the company’s own databases to retrieve related details (customer records, purchase history, billing information, etc.)

Rather than having the customer start all over again, the contact center agent can use this information to verify account status, identify problems with the online transaction, and more efficiently troubleshoot whichever issue prompted the customer to call.

Additionally, integrated deployments also open up a new level of collaboration between online customers and contact center agents. Using data passed when calls are initiated, agents can push relevant pages to customers, or initiate co-browsing sessions to guide customers through the sales or support process.

Conclusion — Nothing is more frustrating to a consumer than having to “start all over again” when they transition from the Web to a phone conversation. Click to call offers one solution to this problem by integrating the power of Web analytics with the convenience and comfort of the telephone. Given the range of options available, it’s critical to have a full understanding of your business goals and how customers behave on your Website. Doing so allows you to offer the right form of contact at the right time to maximize the benefit of click to call offerings, and not only reduce call center costs, but turn your call center into a revenue generator.

John Federman is CEO of eStara, a leading provider of online conversion solutions for enhancing multichannel sales and support initiatives. Mr. Federman is responsible for eStara’s strategic direction, growth and corporate vision. He brings more than 20 years of experience with innovative information technology and media companies to eStara, and has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Continental Airlines, DaimlerChrysler and Dell Financial Services, to enhance their multichannel sales and support operations.

I have talked about remote employees in the past. I constantly encourage companies to utilize remote employees and try to make them work. However, rapid growth companies often don’t have a choice, it is sometimes a nessecity to hire remote employees.

In general, the advantages/disadvantages for rapid growth companies hiring remote employees are the same. I discussed them in this post and will outline them again below:

Advantages:

• Happier employees.
• Bigger talent pool.
• Cheaper.

Disadvantages:

• Harder to monitor.
• Possible problems.
• Communication.

The rapid growth company I discussed last week is in a relatively small area. The company isn’t in the middle of nowhere, but then again, it wasn’t San Francisco. The cost of living in the area was not really high, but it wasn’t low, either. They are having problems keeping up with the hiring they needed. The bad thing is, though, that they only have one remote employee and aren’t exactly sure about the concept and how it works for their company. And worse thing, is, they really need help.

Firstly, there are some jobs that remote employees are great at and others they are not so good at. Pretty much any job can be adapted so they it can be done effectively by a remote employee, but many are harder than others.

Great:

• Customer service (live chat, email, phone*)
• Programming (some cases and some setups)
• System administration
• Phone* / email sales for lower end products
• Billing / bookkeeping

Not so good:

• Some types of programming
• Phone* support
• Jobs that deal with confidential information
• High end sales (where presentations have to be given, clients have to be taken out to dinner, etc.)

* How well a remote employee can do phone support depends on the technical setup of the company. Some companies have it setup so it works really well, others don’t.

It really depends on how the company is and how much the company wants remote employees. Many companies need them, or they will have to accept less qualified candidates and/or pay them a lot more. I believe that making your company “remote employee” friendly is worth it.

For companies that are growing quickly and need them, it is a good idea to hire someone with experience working remotely to help get everything setup. This person can work remotely or in the office, but they need to know what it is like to be a remote employee and be able to see things from an outside perspective. Usually, having this person work remotely helps because they will know exactly what it is like to not be in the office.

A key thing when it comes to having remote employees (as well as in-house employees) is to keep them in the loop. You have to let them know what’s going on and make them feel as if they are included. Otherwise, it won’t help anyone.

What are your experiences having or being a remote employee?

I had a conversation yesterday with a lady who runs customer service for a company that is growing very quickly. The amount of customers they are signing up is amazing and the company is really stressed out over all of this growth. It is definitely tough to handle what is essentially exponential growth happening monthly.

With such growth, the number of customer service inquires goes way up. They are growing several percent per week in terms of increased number of phone calls and tickets. That is a lot and a lot to keep up with. The staff is growing and they are having trouble finding good employees as quickly as they need to.

It is a classic example of rapid growth.

One of the issues they are debating now is whether or not, and if so, how to cut phone support. She told me they are getting the same 25 questions over and over again and it is frustrating for the staff, time consuming, and expensive. In the same time they a representative can one phone call, they could do 5 emails, or 3 chats.

So, how do you handle it? Here are some ways that I suggested to her that they could cut back on phone support:

• Offer call backs. Call backs have a lot advantages. Some of them are discussed here in a guest writer post on Service Untitled. They allow a little bit of pre-screening for calls, save money, and are easier to limit.
• Limit phone calls per account type. I suggested (and they had considered) limiting the amount of phone support calls per month for each account type. For example, a premium account could have 4 per month, and a basic account could have 1.
• Charge for phone support. This could either be done by itself or in addition to the above. If a customer needs extra phone support (for technical support - sales and billing would be free), they could pay. I suggested a lower fee (like $10 or something per call). This model serves main purposes:
• Helps recover some costs - $10 is better for the company than free.
• It makes the customer actually try to fix it themselves or try other solutions (like reading an FAQ) before picking up the phone.
• It isn’t so expensive where it will cause a customer to get really frustrated and cancel instead of paying the fee for phone support. 
• Suggest more alternatives to phone support. The company has their phone number clearly posted on their web site. This is great and I commend them for it. However, they can work on making it clear to customers that phone support is probably the least efficient way to solve their problem and they should try looking at FAQs, tutorials, and such before calling. This is probably the least effective solution, but it can help a little. Do note that it is not encouraging the company to hide their phone number or create impossible to navigate menus.
• Ask some customers. Though I didn’t suggest it at the time because I just didn’t think about it (the lady I spoke to reads this blog), the company should ask some of its best/oldest customers what they want. Some may be furious if they had to use a callback system, others may think it is a good idea. It isn’t something that should be done by a survey, but by having a few members of the management team call the customers and discuss it with them.

There are lots of ways to cut back phone support without cutting back customer service. They really depend on the company and how the company likes to do things. It is an interesting challenge that is not that easy to solve. It likely requires experimentation.

Another thing that we discussed was customers basically asking the company to teach them how to use the software. They already offer lots of guides, webinars, an extensive knowledge base, and all of that, but some customers simply demanded more. More about that tomorrow. I will also touch a bit more on remote employees and how rapid growth companies really need to consider using them.

Next week I will publish the interview with Robert Stephens, the founder of the Geek Squad and a VP at Best Buy.