You're doing it wrong: call centers.

Source: http://bjoernvold.com/

 

Recently, a viral video recording of a customer service call gone terribly wrong made the rounds of the Internet.

http://gawker.com/youve-never-heard-a-customer-service-call-meltdown-qui-1299857467

When it was posted on Gawker, comments ranged from sympathy with the poor agent to agreement with the caller.

I enjoy reading comment sections, and since my profession and interest is call center training, I read through almost all the comments for this article. There were 2 that really stuck out in my mind:

1: "It's not surprising that customers snap and have meltdowns like this — the way they treat you, I feel dread when I have to call any of the big companies. Transferred five times, on hold for 45 minutes, and suddenly I'm back at the starting point, forced to endure the whole recording urging me to use their website instead + the "speak your account number" system that never, ever understands me. I've been brought to tears by customer service — notably, AT&. […] Melting down accomplishes nothing. If you can connect with them, they might hook you up. Then when it's all over, three hours later, you can let out the tears."

2: "He didn't handle it admirably, but I have sympathy for the guy who lost his mind. It happened to me once when I tried to cancel my automatic payment with Sprint. After being disconnected at least 10 times, and being on the phone for 2 1/2 hours, I got a person who told me Sprint couldn't do that. I had to contact my bank to stop the payment. Something broke inside of me that day, my friends. I was actually crying with despair. […]"

(comments from Gawker.com)

Where did we go wrong? Why, with all the technological updates, customer experience blogs and experts, and mature call center staff,even overseas, are we still reducing our customers to quivering balls of tears?

It genuinely saddens me to read lines like “Something broke inside of me that day” and angers me to think that companies have the nerve to call experiences like the 2 above ‘service’ of any kind.

What are the issues identified by these comments?

1: It’s very clear that people HATE the IVR auto options, yet companies keep tinkering with them to make them “better”. My bank has a speech recognition system that asks me to speak my account number and PIN. Uh, bank? Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want to speak confidential information like that aloud?

We need to make the IVR better at recognizing speech, but we also need to offer a clear option for “human” in the *first* set of options, not after a Keystone- Kops- like chase through the phone tree from hell.

2: Lack of communication between platforms. The IVR doesn’t take notes. Department A doesn’t know what Department B does, nor do they care. Chat queues aren’t connected to voice queues, and can’t see any of the notes on the account from previous calls.

 This was one of the most common headaches I encountered in my call center production floor days. Nothing is more annoying to customers than having to repeat all the information they just gave “the robot lady”, and yet many companies still do not integrate their IVR and their CRM (or they don’t fix the issues with accounts that don’t “screen pop”).

3: Lack of awareness of common customer service requests. Stopping an auto pay should not take 2.5 hours and ten phone calls. Customers should not be “letting the tears out” after routine concerns like getting a new phone number, tracking down a missing bill, etc. Either major corporations are not aware of the top call drivers and don’t train to them, or they don’t care. Not sure which option is more chilling.

4: Understaffed and under trained call centers-. Yes, everyone is excited about the new social learning engine that will allow “the swarm” to collaborate on the customers’ issues. But that technology is still in its infancy and in the meantime, 3 hours-in-total calls, dropped calls, no supervisors, long holds….they’re clearly still an issue. We need more training, more supervisors, and more agents, plus better, more flexible staffing.

5: Lack of connection between the high level decision makers and the front liners. Just ONCE I would like to see the CTO or CFO of a megacorp take an irate phone call. Some of the corporate communiqués I’ve received are so out- of- touch as to be almost funny. “Customers will love our new Self Service option- it will save them time and money!” Yeah. Something like that. Only not at all.

 I’ve also worked with a company (that shall remain nameless) that insisted that all the product and service issues be dealt with by using “better scripting and delivery”. Hon, there’s no good way to explain charging 60 dollars a month for download speeds of 3.0 Mbps, with a cap of 200 MB okay? There just isn’t.

I think it’s clear that companies have a duty and a responsibility to step up to the plate and start getting serious about the quality of their call centers. I understand that customers sometimes don’t get it that if they want 30$ Internet, the cost cutting has got to start from somewhere, but I believe we can avoid the blatant “We don’t care about you” mistakes.

 

Let’s all step up our game.

Only connect: customer experience as customer caring

source: folsol.blogspot.com

 

I could write a book about how bad call centers, especially outsourced call centers, are.

Instead, I would like to share what I have learned about customer care in the Philippines frommy own 2+ years in outsourced call centers, in a positive way.

The customer’s experience in the Philippines is very different from the US—in some terrifying ways (which I will cover another time) and in some surprisingly pleasant ways.

Advice to a stranger.

Because of the cultural edict to help and serve others above themselves, most Filipinos will break themselves in half trying to help you, even if you are a stranger. Yes, it could be annoying to have strangers tell me how to do something, but it could also be helpful. I think about the commercials in which strangers in the US helping each other is portrayed as Mother Teresa level sainthood and a real novelty, and I have to say that we could probably use a bit more of this.

Translation to best practices in the contact center:

Encourage your reps to anticipate potential issues that other customers have suffered, and warn the current customer about them.

Have other customers experienced slow uploading when they chose this package, and wound up upgrading a month later? It might be worth your while to mention it.

Have other customers signed up for the monthly text message reminding them that their payment will be taken out of their checking account the next day, and they loved it? Again, might be worth mentioning.

It all comes around.

If I asked my driver to wait, he gets a tip. When I asked my tailor to complete a rush project for me, she got not only my business, but the business of my wealthy, idle ladies- who- lunch friends.

In the reverse, I lived in a service apartment, with a maid service for a year. In that year, I must have given the maids almost 100 books (paperbacks that I intended to read only once), and just as many DVDs (cheapies that I bought to watch once, on a whim, or got one episode into and didn’t like).

When I was in terrible pain and couldn’t walk one night to get medicine, the maids came up to the room, got the money, and went to the store to get medicine for me. That was great "instant karma" for my good deeds.

Translation to best practices in the contact center:

Many times it can feel like an ER in the production floor: you help a frantic customer out and never really know the ending of the story—what happened? Did the patch work?

I would try to develop a practice of ‘catching them in the act of doing good’—when you audit calls, note the highlights and good deeds, not just the grammar mistakes.

 When you hear an agent struggling with a cranky customer, give them a thumbs up, an extra few minutes on break, or a much needed coffee for free. Make sure they get “instant karma” for doing the right thing and helping others.

Whatever you call it, customer service, care, or experience should be about making the customer’s life easier.

There were many times in the Philippines where life was much harder than in the US—getting a new ATM card was a Himalayan outing. However, there were many things that made life much easier—little mini shops that sold OTC medicines by the pill, so that if you were short on cash you could buy just as much medicine as you needed, and not be stuck buying the whole $10.00 bottle, as I was the other day in the Detroit airport when I had a headache and needed relief, fast. Shoe repair shops inside the grocery store, so that you could drop off your shoes and go shopping in one errand. A huge variety of public transportation choices: light rail, dollar vans, cabs, buses, and mini buses (“Jeepneys”) as well as private cars with drivers, and rickshaw-like contraptions for short trips when you were just too tired to keep walking. 

 It was all about variety and convenience.

Translation to call center best practices:

If it’s at all possible, offer choices to your customers. Try to make those choices genuinely different, and genuinely appealing. Letting the customer know they can use UPS OR FedEx to mail back their broken modem at their own expense really isn’t much of a choice, now is it? Coach your agents to try to offer choices, workarounds, or ‘hacks’ whenever they can, to make life genuinely easier for the customer.

Look around you in your own life: what connections do you make that you can bring to the customer experience?

Woolie Boolie gets a comb: using your own stories in training.

source: wehearit.com

 

As a trainer, one of the top 3 of the most effective tools in my tool kit was the personal story. 

I always got a very positive response to a personal story—about almost anything. They not only enjoyed it, they clamored for more, sometimes to the point of getting downright nosy. (Especially on the topic of my dating life, which was a cabinet of curiosities to them).

How can you use your own stories (sometimes stuffily called “personal disclosure”) to greatest effect?

A few ground rules:

The story should be short, well rehearsed, and punchy.

If you are a natural story teller (few of us are), great.

Otherwise, write it, prune it, rehearse it, and test it. It should be about 30 seconds long, be devoid of any fillers or ‘go backs’ (“Wait, hang on, the thing is, she was my best friend since first grade, that’s really vital to the story. Okay, where was I?”).

 

It needs a punch line—something unexpected or dramatic works best.

There should be one lead- in line, a little “build up” to the punch line, and then the punch line.

“When I was living in Manila I used to work on jigsaw puzzles all the time, and I would always have one out and half complete.” (Lead- in)

“Well, I started noticing that the puzzle was more done than I remembered when I would sit down and work on it. At first I chalked it up to the fact that I was always having a glass or two of wine while working on it” (Build up)

“But then I caught on: the teenage girls that cleaned the room every day were actually working on the puzzle while I was at work!” (Punch line)

The story should show you in a slightly funny or self deprecating light. Failing that, it should highlight one of life’s “universal truths”, such as how we are all silly, puffed up, or wrong- headed on occasion.

The time you found yourself on the verge of tears when you couldn’t find an item called ‘A goodie basket’ in the department store, only to find out that your boss wanted you to buy the goodies and assemble one. (me)

The time you raised holy heck to find out who stole same goodie basket only to find out it was being stored for safe keeping in a coworker’s locker. (still me)

Things like that.

The stories should be treats, not the meat and potatoes of class.

Like many things (snow, whiskey, choral singing) a little goes a long way with personal stories. Always better to leave them wanting more than wishing you would just be done with it.

The story teller should know his or her limits, audience, and self.

Having an extensive grab bag of stories to reach into is helpful—most trainers are natural leaders and story tellers, they wouldn’t have gotten into the biz otherwise—but what’s really key is knowing your strengths. If you can’t do imitations to save your life, don’t stake your story’s life on them. If your class is full of highly technical, highly educated, and rather sharkey tough guys, don’t tell the story about the time you looked for your glasses, only to find them on top of your own head, punctuated with nervous giggles at your own silliness.

Finally….it had better be real. Surreal is even better. But it has to be authentic—don’t “pray at” your audience in the hopes that they “see themselves” in your little morality tale. Use stories for fun, humor, and adding life to your classroom, not making a heavy handed point.

 

 

 

Passion Pit: must you be truly passionate about customer expereince to excel in providing it?

Source: http://weheartit.com/

Passion is what keeps you going when things are hard, unexpected challenges arise, or you get bad news.

 BUT: You don’t really need to live, breathe, and eat “customer experience” day in and out to become very successful in the field. It sounds a bit counterintuitive—how can you succeed at something that you’re not completely involved in? 

·         Competence

When working in collections, there were two types of successful collectors: naturals and grinds.

Naturals were born salesmen with lovely voices and an uncanny sense of what to say when to close a deal. They got jazzed over hitting big payments and putting up huge numbers on the board day after day. They thrilled to the roller coaster ride of it all.

Grinds usually came from academic or other white- collar backgrounds—they were educated in a wide swath of subjects, and were always finding angles to improve their game—jotting down telephone numbers that didn’t ring through on the automated dialer system and then manually calling them later, creating more detailed notes in the accounts, learning more about Accurint in their spare time.

Overall, both groups had competence- they were skilled at their job. Naturals came by it more easily, but both groups were focused, prepared, and knew their market.

·         Work Ethic

Passion is the spark and the fire, but good work habits like application, patience, and perseverance—those are the things that you really need at your job. I’ve seen many a reality show in which a sniffling participant argues that they want the prize more, so they should get it, which is often a cover for their lack of competence or work ethic. Wanting something or loving something to death is not enough to bring it to fruition.

·         Curiosity

My top reps at a Philippines based outsourced call center would surf Wikipedia in their ‘avail’ times. It was one of the few sites not blocked, and it gave them an irresistible look through a window into the outside world.

 In many of my jobs, including retail, I made myself a better salesperson by reading everything I could get my hands on about the company and the products.

Was I “passionate” about denim washes? No, but as a naturally (and insatiably!) curious person, I was willing to direct my curiosity to a area where it would pay off in competence down the line.  

·         Vision

Exceptional “psychic” customer experiences come from knowing what your customers might need down the line. It’s great to be passionate about providing great service in the here and now, but what about extension brands, products, and services that they’ll need and want later down the line?

How can you take your 1-store operation from using all paper processing and tracking to a 3-store chain that’s completely digital and eco-friendly?

You need more than just “passion” to accomplish moves like this.

Passion can take you far-- but without these other traits, you'll be flapping your melting wings as you soar ever closer to the sun, oblivious to the dangers....