Posted by Hoyt Mann on Sun, Jul 25, 2010 @ 02:03 PM
When a new employee is hired, you don’t just hand them a name tag, show them their work space, and say, “Good luck!” waving good bye as you walk out the door. Now the rookie is standing there, shell shocked, and wondering what they are supposed to do next.
No! You train your newbies how to do their jobs. You introduce them to the chain of command. Above all, you train them how to work or deal with your customers no matter what emotional state the customer could be in at the moment.
However, customer service training should not stop at the entry level of employment. Such training should keep happening at all levels of employment, but how do you make them productive?
You don’t want your training sessions to just be one of those seminars where everyone groans, rolls their eyes, and thinks that it’s just a waste of precious time. So, the first thing is take inventory of your company’s standing with customers. Now we all love to hear how wonderful we are, but that doesn’t fix problems and no matter how good a company you have, you will have problems. As long as there are people running the business, there will be problems. Check out the blogs, social networking sites, comment boxes, everywhere that your clients leave comments about your company and figure out where your weak spots are.
Then take note of what your employees struggle with when certain customer relations situations arise. Ask your frontline employees if there are issues that need to be handled. They just might (and probably do) know of problems that you don’t, which means you need to get to know your employees.
After you get all your information together, let your staff/team/employees know what they’ll be learning and when. Give them a rough outline of what they can expect in their training. Now... how you conduct the training is entirely up to you. People learn in different ways.
- You can have a guest lecturer come in and address the issues and talk about how to resolve them with a Q & A after the presentation.
- You can do role playing scenarios along with lectures, or
- you can have videos, the format is up to you.
You also need to decide whether you want management training with regular employees. Sometimes it’s nice for the regular employees to see that management must abide by the same policies as they do; but sometimes management needs special training of its own apart from the rest of the group. Again, format is at your discretion. You must know your audience and what format works best for them.
Remember, these are just basic ideas and options for training employees in customer service. You can do so much with the training and be outrageously creative, but it is no good unless your employees learn from it.
Make the training count.
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Wed, May 19, 2010 @ 07:22 PM
I was on a fascinating Twitter chat for #custserv last night with @JeffreyJ Kingman and @MarshaCollier. The topic was "Do Employee Incentives Raise Bar on Customer Service?" Here is the entire chat if you want to read it. It includes other tweets using the #custserv hashtag but all of it is pretty good stuff.
I was thinking during this chat that there are both big and small things to consider while making sure your customer service representativeshave what they need to keep it together.
I came up with these 4 articles about various facets of employee management to pass along to you. Please leave comments with your thoughts!
Re-Evaluating Performance Evaluation
Telemarketers Talk Themselve Sick
One Employee Serving One Customer at a Time
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Tue, Nov 10, 2009 @ 08:22 PM
I just read a post in the Call Centre Helper from July that does an excellent job illustrating the problem of what Mark Angel, CTO of KANA (recently acquired by Accel-KKR LLC), calls the "two-fingered salute". For the uninitiated, this salute is the practice of using ALT+TAB to switch from one application to another (and another and another) because the customer support system is a hodgepodge of non-integrated (and likely non-integratable) applications that all do a different part of the customer support documentation.
This practice is still prevalent for those companies that have not implemented a customer support management solution that will do all of those actions within a single application. This business of ALT+TABbing back and forth is a frustrating, time wasting activity that can not only end up costing customer satisfaction points but also employee retention. Why make things so difficult for that one person who interacts with a company's biggest (and really only) asset - the customer?
Well, much of it probably occurred over time as different applications were licensed for managing specific types of data. After awhile the system started to look like those old fashioned furnaces with all those air ducts running off in different directions, creating an impression of a metal octopus.
Or, the company created the mishmash by dealing with several different vendors for the varying parts of the solution in an effort to save money. Maybe nobody knew exactly what they were looking for but just knew they had to have it. Yesterday.
Mr. Angel's article gives a good summary of what should be done about this ALT+TABitis. It all comes down to mapping the process, streamlining it, making sure all the different areas are playing nicely and then get them a sandbox that will give each area what it needs while making sure every area can interact with the others in one, easy to use package. Ahhhh....Customer Support Nirvana.
In my estimation, those people who answer the phones all day, answering question after question, troubleshooting their little hearts out, empathizing with irate customers, deserve to have an application that won't give them (and consequently the customer) fits. Justifying the cost of such a system is easily done by determining just how much money is going out the window due to lost patronage, inefficiency, and the expense of replacing customers as well as agents.
First determine what exactly it is the software should do. And make very sure the customer support center is in on it. After all, who knows the process and the customers better? When all the requirements are in place, then go shopping for the perfect gift for those agents who only want to help people.
It will be the gift that keeps on giving because the company will benefit through retention of customers and employees.
Happy Company Survival Day.
(Yes, I just made that up.)
For more information on determining the process and deciding on the solution, you are welcome to read our white paper, "Hone Your Customer Support Desk Tool" on our website under Resources.
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 @ 08:27 PM
Your agents are excited; they will get a new system that they helped choose. Your legacy systems are all tuned up. Now what?
You must determine what you want to do with all the wonderful new data you will have access to with your new system and all its bells and whistles. How do you come up with that?
Ask yourself, and anyone else who is qualified to give an answer, the following questions:
- What are the service goals of the help desk?
- What metrics must be measured to let the help desk know whether it is meeting its service goals?
Once these are defined, it is possible to determine data requirements and strategies.
Data is gathered from both external and internal sources (surveys, call records) to give a clearer picture of customer needs and shape the strategy for service improvement. Gather real time metrics and make them visible to your help desk personnel. This will provide both timely feedback as well as incentive to reach service goals. No longer will your help desk be forced to wait until a weekly or monthly report is issued to see whether goals are being met.
(Data gathering, storage, and retrieval strategies are also important for answering regulatory requirements.)
OK, now we have all this lovely data. What a mess! You need to format some reports so you can make sense of it all.
Reports on system performance can include:
- an evaluation of hardware activity
- security events such as attempts at unauthorized access
- diagnostics of system problems
Reports on help desk performance can include:
- average speed-to-answer
- average handle-time
- call volume with peak and valley
- first call resolution rates
- service level requirements
- metrics on types of calls handled and number of calls abandoned
Reports on customer assets can include:
- version and configuration data
- system status
- network configuration
- service level agreements
Any report you can think of that will help answer the question: how are we doing and where do we need to improve?
Now we're cookin' with gas. These reports will let you know where and when the bottle necks are, where staffing needs to be adjusted, how many calls are for simple routine stuff that could have been answered by a self service application. Find out all the things that are holding your help desk back from peak performance. Eliminate them.
Excellent support agent experience nearly guaranteed. Add in training, easy information retrieval; take out the call clutter and install a self service application. Put it all together to make happy support agents.
And happy support agents create excellent customer experiences.
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Sun, Jun 14, 2009 @ 10:34 AM
I'll cut to the chase here. After all, your call center is too busy for you to spend your time reading a long blog entry. I hope you do read this whole thing but if you have no time to fool around here is the post in a nutshell:
The way to Customer Service Excellence is to:
- Keep your employees with you, don't let them walk.
- Give your customers an experience that keeps them with you, don't let them walk.
That's pretty much it, everything else is in support of those two points. But why is employee retention #1?
Because these are the people who will make or break your relationship with your customers. These are the people who will help fulfill the second point: customer retention. These are the people who will get better the longer they stay with you. If they leave, you have to train new ones and they won't have the depth of experience that your former employees had. This damages not only the budget (recruiting, training) but the customer's experience as well. The customer doesn't want to be the guinea pig for a beginner.....they want their problem resolved quickly and correctly. Another thing customers don't want: to be the victim of an unhappy customer service agent.
Everybody sells widgets and widget services just like yours. So why would they come back to you rather than go to Joe-Bob's Widgets and Bait Shack? Or, more likely, the widget store most convenient to them?
Because they have a relationship with you. After all, relationship is CRM's middle name. Who would you go see for your service: Joe Blow who happens to have what you need but you don't know anything about him or the company where everybody knows your name as well as your needs and desires?
Who fosters that relationship? Certainly not your website, your self service center, or the product itself. It is the way people feel after dealing with your company. Oh, not for routine or simple interactions. But when that make or break call comes in, a good customer service agent can make lemonade of the problem and sell it to the customer; and the customer hangs up smiling because they have a relationship with you that makes them feel good.
And this can feed back to point #1:
Happy Customer = Happy Employee
This is not a chicken and egg issue, you absolutely must have a happy employee who can build that relationship and create a happy customer. But the employee's knowledge that the customer is happy validates their reason for being in the support center: to help people.
A happy employee is one who either has or can learn practices and habits that allow them to form the relationship needed to keep your customer. A happy employee is also one who is confident in their performance and feels that you trust him to be able to act appropriately without micromanagement. Too many rules spoil the customer experience.
Train your people about the products they will support, make certain they know what they can do to help a customer, give them the best tools to do it and let them go.
- Let them know of career advancement opportunities if they want.
- Provide motivation and recognition that really means something, not a coffee cup with the company logo on it.
- Make sure the tools they are using are as efficient and easy to use as you can find.
Put this into place and the second requirement is nearly met.
To increase customer satisfaction, not only is a good relationship essential, but providing a way for the customer to help himself and multiple ways to reach out for help will seal the deal.
- Access to a customer self service center for quick answers to routine questions, possible help from other customers in a forum, and access to a knowledgebase geared to your specific product.
- Access to multiple channels of support so each customer reaches out in the way most comfortable for them.
- Access to a live person on the phone if the above fails to satisfy their needs.
There are others points that can be made about offering excellent service but, as far as I am concerned, they are supports for the two I discussed. This includes obtaining and using customer feedback, adopting tools and technology, and transforming customer service into a profit center rather than a cost center.
They all hinge on the first two.
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Tue, Feb 24, 2009 @ 09:31 PM
One component, perhaps the most important one, of the customer experience is the customer support agent. Make them happy and they, in turn, will make your customers happy.
What makes them happy?
- Consistant guidance from management, all the way up to the executive suite.
- Access to information needed to properly help their customers.
- Feeling empowered to do what is right for the customer.
- Timely information about issues in the field that have occurred too recently to be in the knowledge base.
- Business processes that don't include unnecessary steps from way back when "that's the way we've always done it".
- Support from their immediate superior if their actions have been called into question even though said actions saved a customer relationship without causing future problems with that customer or others.
The grocery store where I do almost all my shopping has customer service at the very heart of their business. Every single person you run across in the store will greet you and tell you to have a good day and ask if you are finding everything all right. And they do it without being intrusive. I have even had my groceries sacked by the store manager during busy times.
There is a cashier there that I recognized from a different grocery store. I asked her "weren't you at...". She said yes but she got to this store as fast as she could after the chain opened in the area.
I had seen her in action at that other store. Her main concern was that people got helped, did not have to wait too long, and to keep things moving but not rushed. She was very competent. Knowing that other store fairly well, I would venture to say that they did not appreciate what they had in her. In fact, I think it highly likely that any improvements she put forth were quashed and that other employees complained that she was "bossy" or "difficult" or who knows what.
I know she likes this new store much better. And I bet they know perfectly well what they have and they will hang on to her as long as they can.
And when I can, I get in her line because I know I will be expertly taken care of. So I am a loyal customer because they had the sense to hire someone like her.
So surround yourself with employees like that and watch them keep your customers coming back.