Why you should rethink the way you teach customer service.
First things first…
What is a profiling-
based customer response program?
Almost every customer service training program has a section
(usually outright named “Customer Profiling”) that follows the stations of the
profiling cross:
1: Lists the type of customers you’ll encounter (usually
broken up into “Happy”/ “Irate”/ “Newbie”/ “Scared/ Anxious”)
2: Describes the common characteristics of these customer
types—these are illustrated with either a smiley
or the dreaded “White Gumby”
(white Gumby really gets
around, by the way. I’ve seen him? (her?) On almost every awful PowerPoint
Presentation in the last 5 years.)
3: Explains what these customers may be feeling or what may
have led them to become this type
4: Gives a few basic hints or tips on how to “manage” or
“handle” that type of customer—usually very obvious stuff: “Just hear them out.
Then acknowledge their concern and provide empathy.”
Most training designers and managers that propose and
support “profiling” programs do it from the desire to make things more
consistent, reliable, and streamlined. They tend to believe that most workers
just want a solid, reliable system they can click into place and use over and
over to “handle” the most irritating, overwrought, aggressive customers, or the
most clueless, befuddled callers.
Dovetail these beliefs with an operational
viewpoint on bottom line (what’s the quickest, cheapest, and most effective way
we can raise our customers’ satisfaction?), and a(nother) profiling program is
born.
With many companies expanding their footprint to more and more countries,
it is important that your training program be scalable, and many training
executives believe that individualized responses are anything but.
All of this is understandable.
So why is customer service STILL
so poor in so many outsourced call centers despite these foolproof, airtight
profiling programs?
Where’s the miss?
The flaws of profiling based customer
service training:
1: Failure to adapt
to huge social changes in the last 10 years.
With the technology customers use every day (cell phones,
tablets, social media, the internet, television, even call centers!) becoming
more and more adaptable, an inflexible, limited “one size fits all” customer
approach is unappealing to most people. Think about it—your website lets the
customer log in 24-7 from any device, allows them to create an account, log in
and find answers, talk to their peers on forums, download documents, post
reviews and comments, and customize their homepage.
Why doesn’t this extend to your handling customers over the
phone or chat/ email? Why are you teaching your trainees to use the same stuffy
“I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you” with both a seriously
angry customer and someone who likes to playfully kvetch to build rapport?
2: It actually
decreases empathy, rapport, and engagement with the customer.
We trainers know that one of the most difficult habits to
break with our trainees and reps is “key word listening”—or what happens during
the following exchange:
CU: “I got the kit; I’m just waiting for my
grandson to get the radio transmitter off the dish.”
CSR: “Uh sir, were you informed that we will be
sending you a kit to mail us back the equipment?”
Key word listening
is pretty much what profiling- based training teaches. It teaches reps to
listen for key words/ tone/ usage/ para-verbal noises (sighing, huffing, um’s
and uh’s) and apply those to the profile matrix, looking for a match, and then
applying the “prescribed” phrases.
But…different people use language differently—that’s one of
the things that makes English so delightful for us English Majors and such a
bear for non-native speakers.
How do you list all the possible ways a customer could try
to build rapport? Show anxiousness? Show defeat and disgust with the company
and its policies? Show their playful side by using “hot damn!”? (Robot hears
curse word. Robot apologizes.)
Consider the following example:
CU: “I’m all about the
PDF, hee hee” (customer is trying to build rapport as she describes her
software requirements)
CSR: [silence, keys typing]
Compare with this:
Customer: “So, what
can we do about this? If I pay all $200 today, I can’t buy food this month.”
Employee: “Oh, I
understand girl; I’m right there with you. Hang on a second… let me see what we
can do.”
(Submitted by a customer, from the website http://notalwaysworking.com/)
3: It won’t fix the
root cause issues that led to misapplied solutions anyway.
Cultural differences, language misunderstandings, even personality
issues can all affect the way your representatives and trainees handle
customers once they get onto the phones or onto the chat tool. Using just written words on a PowerPoint slide
to suggest how to handle customers may result in misinterpretations and
misunderstandings.
We all have different ideas about what “explain things
calmly” (or other proscribed scripts to “handle” customer types) means—to some
that means with a flat affect and no emotion, to others that same thing might
mean “be a broken record until the customer accepts your statements.”
Telling people (with no reinforcement, discover, or “aha”
moments) that they “should” do A
when faced with B rarely works. Come
to think of it, does it ever work?
4: It insults the
intelligence and work ethic of your trainees.
I really, really believe in setting a bar of achievement
that your employees will rise to, not creating a “fool-proof” system that “even
a monkey could do.”
I won’t name names, but pretty much everyone I’ve worked
with at the executive level has absolutely zero
confidence in the abilities of the front level employees to make any kind of
independent decisions. Yes, I can absolutely see why it’s scary to let bubble-
gum- popping, ADHD, 3- months- and- I’m- bouncing- to- another- center- front
liners make decisions that could cost you customers.
But guess what? Customers revile being treated like a number,
told that the rep can’t do anything, being reminded of “the policy” and
listening to scripts more than they hate high prices, broken URLs, or shoddy
products.
You’re already losing
customers with your ham- handed treatment of them as “irate” or “confused”
(or as one EQ- challenged boss once put it “You got 4 types, okay? Lazies,
crazies, daises, and hazies.”)—no one likes to be a number, a “type” or a
label.
Here’s some ire directed at a major telecom company for its
use of scripted lines:
…. “So
after 30 minutes of painful scripting they tell me it's a line problem. Well duh!”...
Now of course if I were living in some kind of call center
Utopia where agents had uniformly great judgment, there were enough supervisors
to go around, no other departments ever got it wrong, and the product itself
never caused the majority of the complaints, it would make total sense to give
the front liners the directive to “use your best judgment” when dealing with
irate, at- the- end- of- their- rope, crazy customers.
But I live in the real world.
So how do you address this?
Create a customer service training program that does the
following:
- Takes its core activities from real calls, real customer verbatim statements, real situations you’ve encountered, and real tools.
- Encourages, through training, practice and coaching, the representatives’ own good judgments and actions and corrects the flawed or incorrect judgments and actions.
- Uses multiple ways to expose representatives to “the customer”—customer service review websites, role playing, listening to call recordings, games….anything but sitting through a theoretical lecture on “The Irate Customer and how to handle them.”
In short, training should be about teaching your reps to
bring out and practice their own strengths in dealing with each customer as an
individual, not a type.
None of us likes being a number, a statistic, or a “unit”,
so why are we training our reps to treat our customers that way? Join the
revolution and start thinking about customer service in a whole new way!
No comments:
Post a Comment