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?