Re-cap: 2015 Contact Center Expo & Conference

The 2015 Contact Center Expo and Conference took place in Orlando this week. More than 1,500 contact center professionals from around the world attended for educational growth, networking, and to share best practices.

Here’s a re-cap of some of the conference highlights along with links to additional resources.

Conference Overview

You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference if you didn’t attend.

 

Conference Highlights

Here are just a few highlights from the conference:

 

2015 Contact Center Awards

ICMI threw an incredible Cinco de Mayo themed party to celebrate the 2015 Contact Center Award winners and finalists.

These awards recognize best practices from individuals and organizations. Award winners included UPMC Health Plan for best large contact center and VF Imagewear Customer Support for best small to medium contact center.

You can see a list of all the winners and finalists here.

#ICMIchat Live

ICMI hosts a weekly Tweet chat on Tuesdays at 10am Pacific (1pm Eastern). 

These lively chats touch on a wide range of topics from customer service to training to workforce optimization. There’s a new topic each week and anyone can join in by following the #icmichat hashtag on Twitter.

On Wednesday, I joined a few #ICMIchat regulars for a panel discussion in the Expo hall. We touched on a few topics including technology, agent experience, and customer effort.

The panel included:

It was fun to have a conversation in front of a live audience. A few were even live Tweeting:

Erik Wahl’s Keynote

Conferences like this always bring informative, inspirational, and entertaining keynotes.

Graffiti artist Erik Wahl’s keynote stood out on this front. He challenged participants to be a force for positive disruption.

One of the most amazing parts of Wahl’s presentation was his ability to quickly create incredible paintings live on stage.

Here’s his first painting:

Wahl created a moment of uneasy tension when he picked an audience member at random to play a special game of “Fear Factor.”

She was given a sealed envelope and was told the game involved coming up on stage, opening the envelope, and reading her instructions out loud. She was then to do whatever the instructions said.

That’s a pretty scary moment in front of a huge crowd, but Wahl turned the tables a bit. He told the audience member that she could select anyone she wanted to take her place.

Ultimately, she decided to go for it. In a fun twist, the instructions in the envelope informed her that a painting of U2's Bono that Wahl had just created on stage was her’s to keep!

On a personal level, I gained a lot of new ideas, contacts, and information. This is a great conference and I'm already looking forward to next year.

New Report: Contact Center Leaders Don’t Get Engagement

Happy agents lead to happy customers.

This pithy saying is a widely held belief among contact center leaders. The logic flows that if you engage your contact center agents, they’ll deliver outstanding service.

A new report from ICMI reveals a severe disconnect between this belief and what contact center leaders are actually doing.

The data suggests that most contact center leaders don’t get engagement.

This post examines the disconnect, uncovers some root causes, and makes a few suggestions for correcting the problem.

The Big Disconnect

It’s hard to find any disagreement that it’s important for contact center agents to be engaged. Here are two findings from ICMI’s study:

  • 99% of respondents believe that agent engagement drives performance
  • 88.8% believe that agent engagement is a priority in their organization

Now, here’s where the disconnect begins. Only 7 percent of contact center leaders said that agent engagement was a top priority. 

The disconnect is further revealed by what contact centers measure. Here are the top five agent metrics in contact centers today:

  1. Quality - 74%
  2. Average Handle Time - 73%
  3. Customer Satisfaction - 58%
  4. Adherence to Schedule - 58%
  5. First Contact Resolution - 43%

These metrics suggest that compliance and efficiency are the true priorities in today’s contact centers.

Justin Robbins, ICMI’s Senior Analyst, shared with me that only 19 percent of contact centers measure agent engagement.

 

Root Causes

A lack of clarity makes engagement hard to manage.

Many reports, like ICMI’s, omit a definition. The assumption is the term is clear so it doesn’t need to be defined.

Unfortunately, there’s a lack of consensus. There’s even disagreement among the top employee engagement consulting firms, like Gallup and BlessingWhite.

Here’s the definition I prefer:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

This definition helps identify some additional root causes.

Engaged agents want to serve their customers at the highest level. Unfortunately, many contact centers make this difficult.

The ICMI report also looked at what would motivate contact centers to invest in giving agents better tools to serve their customers. Unsurprisingly, the top choice was cost.

 

Engagement Solutions

These issues always come down to dollars and cents.

That’s why employee engagement initiatives fail. They’re reduced to surveys on touchy-feely subjects like morale.

You’ll need to make a stronger business case if you really want to engage your agents.

Start by going back to the definition of employee engagement. There’s no soft stuff here. This is all about results:

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee is deliberately contributing to organizational success.

Next, get out your calculator and add up the cost of making it hard for agents to do a great job. Here are just a few options to consider:

  • What’s the real cost of agent turnover?
  • How much could we save by improving first contact resolution?
  • Could we reduce customer churn through better service? If so, how much?

There’s real savings here. 

Even a 10 percent reduction in turnover, repeat contacts, or customer churn could add up quickly. Measure those items and you’ll be much more likely to find the budget you need to improve agent engagement.

10 Ways to Make Customer Service Easy

Customer service leaders have one real job. They should make it easy for their employees to serve customers.

That can be a tall order. 

Customer service employees have to navigate a jungle of obstacles. Angry customers, defective products, and corporate silos are just a few reasons why customer service is hard.

A good customer service leader takes a figurative machete to those obstacles and clears a path through the brush for their team.

If you’re a customer service leader, here are ten things you can do.

#1 Define Outstanding Service

Don’t assume everyone agrees on what outstanding customer service looks like. Work with your team to create a shared definition. This definition, called a Customer Service Vision, acts as a compass to point everyone in the same direction. (You can use this handy worksheet to help you.)

 

#2 Measure Progress

Everyone says customer service is important to the business, but it’s not really important until its measured. You can engage your team by setting SMART goals around key metrics. Good goals should make it easy for employees to understand what's important, and what's not.

 

#3 Act on Customer Feedback

Here’s a dirty secret: 95 percent of companies collect customer satisfaction data, but only 10 percent actually use that data to improve service. This is a potential gold mine of data to help you fix problems that irk your customers and frustrate your employees.

 

#4 Enlist Your Employees

There’s a good chance that your employees know the biggest obstacles to serving customers. They probably have some pretty good ideas for solving these problems, too. Unfortunately, many employees don't share this information. The simple solution? Ask them. They’ll be happy to share.

 

#5 Hire for Fit

Customer service gets a lot easier when you love your job. Pay special attention to hiring for culture fit. Figure out what's in your organization's unique secret sauce and then design your hiring process to find people who will love being there. Your goal is to find people who will love to do what you are asking them to do.

 

#6 Train Better

There’s a lot of crappy training going on. Some managers don’t have the time. Other managers just don’t know how. Avoid letting employees get lost on the learning curve and you’ll make their jobs much easier and more enjoyable.

 

#7 Encourage Quiet Time

Many customer service jobs require constant multitasking. Unfortunately, this causes a problem called Directed Attention Fatigue or DAF. The symptoms are identical to ADD, which isn’t great for customer service. The only solution is rest, which is why many companies are creating quiet rooms to help their employees recover.

 

#8 Fix Broken Products

It’s hard to serve with a smile when your product stinks. A recent analysis on the CX Journey blog showed the number one difference between engaged and disengaged baseball fans was success on the field (i.e. product). Work with other departments to put out a better product and service gets a lot easier.

 

#9 Fix Broken Systems

In his book, Strategic Customer Service, John Goodman estimates that as much as 60 percent of service failures are attributed to broken systems. It could be an unmonitored email box or chronically missed delivery appointments. A failure to fix these problems is like tying your hands behind your back and then trying to win an arm wrestling contest.

 

#10 Empower Employees

There’s a huge lack of empowerment in customer service. A recent report by ICMI revealed that 86 percent of contact centers don’t empower their employees to provide outstanding service. One reason managers don’t empower employees is it’s easy in theory, but difficult in practice. The good news is you can use this handy guide to help you.

How Phone.com Uses Support Tickets to Spot Training Topics

Here’s a common challenge for customer service leaders:

You want to give your reps training and support to allow them to do a better job of serving their customers. The challenge is learning what exactly they need to be successful.

You might be sitting on an untapped gold mine.

Phone.com has implemented a program where they search support tickets for training topics. The goal is to give front line customer support agents the tools, resources, and training they need to serve customers more effectively.

If you're unfamiliar with Phone.com, they provide telephone service to small businesses. (Full disclosure: I’m a happy Phone.com customer.)

I first learned about this program from a post written by Jenny Dempsey on the Communicate Better Blog

Dempsey is Phone.com’s Customer Success Manager. She was kind enough to share with me some additional details.

moneytree.jpg

The Phone.com customer support team is organized into three tiers:

Tier 1 handles most inquiries. They can resolve a wide range of issues including billing, technical support, and account set-up.

Tier 2 is comprised of supervisors and leads. They might get involved with a more complicated issue or a problem that needs to be escalated to a supervisor.

Tier 3 is the advanced engineering team. They work on the really difficult technical problems.

When a Tier 1 agent is unable to solve a problem, they create a support ticket that gets routed to a Tier 2 or Tier 3 agent. The ticket essentially documents the issue and requests assistance.

This is a fairly common process for many technical support teams.

Phone.com’s Tier 3 team noticed they’d occasionally receive tickets for issues that could have or should have been resolved by the Tier 1 agent. The Tier 3 team started bringing these issues to team meetings so they could be discussed.

Bringing these tickets out in the open revealed a number of root causes:

  • Product documentation is sometimes out of date.
  • Tier 1 agents haven't been trained on some newly discovered solutions.
  • Individual Tier 1 agents sometimes need additional reminders, coaching, and feedback.

The initial approach was informal. It came from Tier 3 agents being empowered and engaged enough to share feedback with the rest of the team.

The program has since been formalized a bit. Customer support leaders actively solicit tickets that represent training opportunities. They conduct a root cause analysis, and then implement whatever training, documentation, or coaching is needed.

They’ve even given the program a fun name: Opportunities for Awesome.

The program is still in the early stages, but this is a best practice that promises to deliver a number of benefits:

  • Fewer escalations - Tier 1 agents can learn to solve more issues on their own.
  • Faster resolutions - Customers won’t have to wait for escalated tickets.
  • Happier customers - Less wait time equals happier customers.

How Training Reinforces Old Skills and Discourages New Ones

“The training was life changing.”

That’s how Matt felt about the week-long leadership course he had just attended. It was the most inspirational training he had ever experienced.

Now, Matt’s head was full of new ideas. He was excited to use what he learned to help his team achieve unprecedented levels of service.

Fast forward a few months and Matt's excitement had waned.

I asked Matt what he had implemented from the leadership course. My question was met with a prolonged silence.

Finally, Matt said, “If I have to be honest with you, I haven’t used anything.”

Matt’s story isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s typical. Companies spend thousands of dollars to send employees to training and nothing happens.

They hope for better customer service, better leadership, and better results. All they really get is a big training bill. Even worse, the training might actually reinforce old habits rather than build new ones.

Let’s explore why this happens and what you can do to change it.

The Vortex

Matt was buried in work when he returned to the office after the week-long training. He faced a mountain of phone calls, emails, status meetings, updates, and project work. 

This is hardly unusual. Most of us face increased workloads after attending training. Like most of us, Matt worked hard to grind through it.

This whirlwind of post-training activity is called the Vortex. It heightens fatigue and stress levels and sucks up all of your attention. 

We revert to our old habits when fatigue and stress levels rise. This delays the application of anything you learned in training. Unfortunately, this delay happens at the most critical time for learning.

The Vortex consumes the time we know we should spend applying what we've just learned. We push aside the new lessons for a later date when we're more caught up. That date rarely arrives.

 

Learning & Forgetting

A 2006 experiment by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke revealed how we easily forget what we learn.

Students at Washington University in St. Louis were asked to memorize poetry passages. Some students were then asked to study the passages for additional periods while other students were immediately tested on their recollection of the passage.

All students were tested again five minutes later to see how much of the poetry they could recall.

The students who spent more time studying fared a little better, recalling an average of 81 percent of the poetry vs. 75 percent for the students who had studied once and then were tested.

An interesting thing happened a week later when the researchers tested the students again.

The students who studied once and then were tested retained 14 percent more than the students were spent more time studying!

This experiment shows us two things about learning and forgetting.

First, testing is critical to long-term memory. Testing can come in many forms. It might be a knowledge quiz, but it could also be opportunities to apply new knowledge to a real problem.

Second, we forget information quickly. The students had all forgotten roughly half of the poetry passage after just one week. Now, imagine how much content from a week-long or even a day-long course would be forgotten after just one week!

Unfortunately, the post-training Vortex ensures any on-the-job application will be delayed and much of what we learned will be forgotten.

 

Improving Training

The ideal learning environment involves intense practice, smaller chunks of learning, or both.

Training should also focus on helping learners solve current problems. In this way, the new learning isn't a distraction from the post-training Vortex; it's a solution.

There are many ways to achieve this, but you have to think beyond the traditional event-based training module where participants attend a class or take an e-learning and that’s it.

Here are a few examples:

A flipped learning approach trains content by video or e-learning and gives participants practical opportunities to apply what they learned.

I’ve had success training contact center agents via a series of one-hour webinars. Each session focuses on one specific skill. The sessions are scheduled two weeks apart to give participants time to apply what they learned in between.

An action learning approach can also be highly effective. Here, participants work on a real-world problem. They’re given access to self-paced learning and real-time coaching as they need it. 

The key to all of these approaches is less study time and more immediate application.

Changing the traditional event-based learning model takes guts, but it can be highly effective. Your participants will retain more, apply more, and achieve more.

For more information on how learning can be improved, check out this short video on LinkedIn Learning.

Improving Email Response Time: Interview with Leslie O'Flahavan

The results of the 2015 Toister Performance Solutions email response time survey were released last week.

Customer service writing expert Leslie O’Flahavan joined me for a Google Hangout interview to discuss the results and offer some tips to help companies respond faster and better.

You may want to review the survey results before watching the interview.

Here’s the video plus some additional links and discussion below. 

Discussion & Links

The survey suggested a new response time standard for businesses: one hour.

A 2014 survey revealed the average business currently responds within one business day. Many businesses will risk disappointing their customers by prioritizing cost savings over responsiveness.

O’Flahavan raised the point that organizations trying to meet the new standard may end up compromising quality for speed. (You can see an example of that here.)

She gave us this great quote in the interview:

You have to figure out where does quick overlap with good.

O’Flahavan offered several suggestions for businesses to improve both speed and quality. One was a warm confirmation email that can be used to respond to more complicated problems and inquiries.

This is a message from a real person that essentially says, “We’ve received your email, we’re working on it, and here’s when you can expect a response.”

This tactic does a few things:

  • It lets the customer know their message has been received
  • It creates a stronger connection than a automated response
  • It buys the company some time to respond properly

You can also use this email to direct customers to other channels such as phone or a website that may be faster or more appropriate. 

Companies often face a challenge of coordinating email with other service channels. It wasn’t referenced in the interview, but O’Flahavan provides an excellent example in this recent blog post on her Writing Matters blog. 

Finally, we discussed co-workers. 

The email response time survey revealed that people also expected co-workers to respond within one hour.

O’Flahavan laid out a number of ways this unreasonable expectation might cause some workplace problems. For example, people are less present in meetings because they’re trying to respond to email on the sly.

Wasted time is another potential problem. I recently discovered several surprising email stats including this one: the average person wastes 24 percent of their day on useless email.

Do you have a question for Leslie? She’s very responsive to email.

You can also reach her here:

Employees Waste 24 Percent of Their Day on Useless Email

No, the title of this post is not an exaggeration.

Email is a huge time suck. Many of us feel stuck on a perpetual hamster wheel of back and forth communication.

Here’s how I calculated that scary number:

A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker spends 28 percent of their day responding to email. 

A 2012 study from Mimecast found that 86 percent of the emails we receive are useless.

So, 86 percent of 28 percent = 24 percent of our day wasted. Ouch.

What’s causing this problem? There seem to be a few culprits.

One challenge is time pressure.

My latest research on email response time expectations revealed a new one hour standard for replying to email sent by customers and co-workers.

Those expectations pressure us into responding quickly without putting much thought into what we’re writing. 

A 2014 analysis by Front revealed that people average 4.5 emails per conversation. All that back and forth is pretty inefficient.

People expect fast responses, but actual response times are much longer:

  • Most businesses still adhere to a one business day standard (source: TPS).
  • The average response time for individuals is 27 hours (source: Front).

That triggers a lot of “Did you get my email?” calls, texts, IMs, and emails. More clutter.

Here are a few more examples of email time sucks:

  • 19 percent of email is spam (source: Radicati)
  • Reply all abusers
  • Updates on the status of cake in the conference room
  • Checking email constantly
  • Email alerts that remind you to check email constantly

So, what can we do about it?

Check out my Google Hangout with customer service writing expert Leslie O'Flahavan. Most of the interview focuses on how businesses can do a better job of responding to customers, but she has some terrific advice for co-workers towards the end of the 30 minute interview.

Get Ready to Respond to Customer Email Within One Hour

Update: This study was repeated in March 2020. You can read the latest results here.

There’s a new standard for email response time.

You can toss out the old school one business day standard. That's so 1999. Even 2014’s four hour response time standard is old news.

The Toister Performance Solutions 2015 email response time survey revealed that customers now expect businesses to respond to their emails in just one hour.

Over 1,000 adults in the U.S. ages 18+ participated in the survey.

Here’s the breakdown of the survey results along with an invitation to tune in to an exclusive interview with customer service writing expert Leslie O'Flahavan.

 

A Big Challenge for Business

This isn't good news for most companies.

A separate 2014 Toister Performance Solutions survey revealed that 66 percent of companies currently take 1 day or more to respond. (Take the survey yourself and see how you stack up.)

One business day is still favored by many customers, with 43.4 percent of survey respondents selecting this option. The problem with this standard is 43.9 percent of customers expect a faster response.

That means the one business day standard could be alienating nearly half of your customers.

The new one hour standard reflects the longest response time that will meet at least 80 percent of customers’ expectations.

emailresponse2015biz.png

The survey looked at response time expectations by age, but found no significant difference between generations. It seems we all want it now.

More bad news?

In 2014, just 4 percent of survey respondents said they expected businesses to respond within 15 minutes. That jumped up to 14.5 percent this year.

You can see where this is going.

 

High Expectations for Co-Workers

The survey also revealed that people expect their co-workers to respond quickly too.

The most popular selection on the survey was four hours, but nearly as many people responded “one hour” as did “one day.”

Using the 80 percent rule, the new expectation for co-worker response time is just one hour too.

This is really bad news for workplaces already beleaguered by email overload. 

 

Learn How to Respond Faster

Check out my Google Hangout On Air interview with customer service writing expert Leslie O’Flahavan. 

Leslie and I discussed ways that companies and customers service agents can respond faster without compromising quality.

Image courtesy of Leslie O'Flahavan

Image courtesy of Leslie O'Flahavan

Leslie O’Flahavan is principle of E-WRITE, a company that helps customer care organizations write well in any channel: email, chat, social media, and SMS.

You can connect with Leslie on Twitter, the E-WRITE website, and of course via email.

You can also watch a video of the interview here.

 

Extra: Some Good News

The survey did reveal some good news.

We still give our friends a bit of leeway when it comes to response times. The standard is unchanged from 2014. It’s still one business day.

Are Your Customer Service Reps Suffering from TMI?

The chain restaurant branded itself as a fun place to eat. In reality, it often wasn’t.

Servers struggled to provide fun service because they had too much to think about. The company had a litany of service steps, procedures, and brand promises to follow.

It was enough to make your head spin:

  • Four service focus areas
  • Four separate cornerstones of guest experience
  • Sixteen steps for serving every guest
  • An internal customer service slogan
  • A customer-focused mission statement

It was a challenge to keep all of it straight. Even the chain’s executive team didn’t agree on what was most important. Servers often found themselves just trying to be efficient.

These servers were inundated with Too Much Information, or TMI. It’s an epidemic that affects many customer service employees in a wide variety of industries.

TMI’s Impact

TMI causes employees to divert critical brain power away from focusing on their customers. It’s harder for them to build rapport and critical opportunities to serve are missed.

TMI comes in many forms. We know that excessive feedback can impact performance. So too can having to memorize too many product facts, procedures, or processes. 

In many organizations, customer service TMI comes in the form of too many service steps, standards, and principles. One contact center asked its agents to follow 35 steps on every call. A credit union asked its tellers to follow 21 steps with every member interaction. 

TMI can even have a negative impact on customers. The venerable McDonald’s brand has suffered in part due to a dizzying array of menu options. Their menu has bloated to 121 distinct items (not counting different sizes), up from just 26 in 1980.

 

Reducing Noise

TMI creates noise that makes it hard for customer service employees to prioritize service. The solution is to cut out the noise.

Home Depot is a success story that I profiled in my book, Service Failure

Between 2007 and 2010, they embarked on an ambitious simplification program in an effort to improve customer service. Marvin Ellison, Vice President of U.S. stores, said in an interview:

First, we simplified things for the stores, giving them three primary things to focus on: remaining in stock, store appearance, and customer service.

One example was 200 weekly reports and emails that were sent to each store. These were merged into a one-page scorecard. Information and tasks had previously overwhelmed both managers and employees. Now, their top three priorities were clear.

The results were impressive. Home Depot increased their American Customer Satisfaction Index score from 67% to 75%. Their net promoter score increased from 48% to 68% during this same time.

The restaurant chain improved service quality by taking a similar approach.

First, their executive team and store managers all agreed that the company’s mission was the most important description of outstanding customer service. This gave everyone a clear customer service vision to follow. 

They also paired the sixteen service steps down to eight guidelines. These guidelines emphasized fun service over efficiency, which was the hallmark of the restaurant’s brand.

 

Reducing TMI

Cutting through the information clutter requires organizations to identify what’s truly important. Here are three steps you can take.

Step 1: Articulate a customer service vision. This is a clear definition of outstanding customer service that is shared by all employees. It should serve as a compass to help point employees in the right direction. You can download the customer service vision worksheet to create one for your organization.

Step 2: Measure what’s most important. Companies measure a lot of stuff, but often ignore what should be their top priorities. If service is your top priority, then make those metrics front and center. Better yet, set a goal around service. You can use the SMART goal worksheet to do this.

Step 3: Focus on the priority. Employees understand something’s importance by how often you talk about it. Simplify your messages to focus on the top priority. Written communication, team meetings, and one-on-one conversations should all be focused and concise. 

Customer service TMI comes from the top. Elite customer service leaders know this and obsessively protect their employees from TMI to help them stay focused.

New Discoveries: Crack the Customer Code Podcast

I have a confession to make.

My friend Adam Toporek recently asked me to be a guest on the Crack the Customer Code podcast that he co-hosts with Jeannie Walters. I was honored to be a guest so of course I said yes. 

Here’s my confession: I had never even listened to a podcast!

Podcasts didn’t seem like they were up my alley. I couldn’t imagine sitting at my desk and just listening to something.

I didn’t want to be a podcast neophyte when I recorded my session with Toporek and Walters, so I downloaded a few of their previous episodes. I queued them up on my phone and listened to them one day while I had some driving to do.

Three things immediately struck me:

  1. Their podcast is awesome! It's crisp, informative, and entertaining.
  2. I really do have plenty of podcast time (more on that in a moment).
  3. Podcasts actually work for me!
Image courtesy of Crack the Customer Code.

Image courtesy of Crack the Customer Code.

Crack the Customer Code’s brisk, informative format makes for easy listening. Each episode features topical discussions between Toporek and Walters, a guest interview, and a segment on customer heroes and zeroes.

Listening to the podcast in the car made it easier to pay attention. It was a nice substitute for the music or talk radio that I’d normally listen to. The engaging content made my trip seem a lot faster.

It also got me thinking about all of the “podcast time” I really do have. I travel a lot. Planes, trains, and automobiles all have a lot of built-in podcast time. 

Soon, I was checking out other podcasts. I started listening to a podcast from my local online newspaper, Voice of San Diego. I even discovered Serial and got hooked. 

Check out the Crack the Customer Code podcast if you have some “podcast time” on your hands. I haven’t missed an episode yet.

You can also listen to my episode here or find it on iTunes or Stitcher.