Insider Perspectives: FCR's Jeremy Watkin on Outsourced Service

Jeremy Watkin, Head of Quality

Jeremy Watkin, Head of Quality

Outsourcing your company's customer service is a leap of faith.

Companies like Oregon-based outsourcer FCR can be hired to handle a wide range of customer contacts including phone, email, chat, SMS (Text), and social media. It's often faster and less expensive for small companies and start-ups to use a third-party like FCR than it is to set-up an internal customer service team, but there needs to be a lot of trust.

Will the outsourcer take great care of your customers and do a good job representing your brand?

Jeremy Watkin, FCR's Head of Quality, recently shared with me some of his secrets to outsourcing success. Watkin is the co-author of the Customer Service Life blog and was named one of ICMI's Top 50 Thought Leaders on Twitter. (If you are on Twitter, do yourself a favor and follow him!)

This is the second time I've interviewed Jeremy for the Inside Customer Service blog. We spoke back in 2015 about the impact of team size on corporate culture.


Q: Many people perceive outsourced customer service as inferior. How is FCR trying to change that perception?

"There may be a stigma around outsourcing where the perception is you're hiring second rate folks, but that's really not the case for us. 

"FCR's contact centers are located in small communities in Oregon where there's often high unemployment because other industries like lumber and fishing have declined. These employees tend to be smart, well-educated, and very dedicated.

"We offer our colleagues [FCR's term for "employee" or "agent"] good, well-paying jobs with opportunities for career growth, and the chance to support well-known brands. It's exciting for many of our colleagues to know they get a chance to provide technical support for a cool start-up. It's really interesting to see how colleagues take a lot of pride in the clients they support."

 

Q: Do your colleagues support multiple clients or are they dedicated to one account?

"FCR used to have a shared model where colleagues would support multiple clients, but we've moved away from that. We've found that we can provide better service by having colleagues totally dedicated to one particular client.

"One thing that's really cool about our model is we diversify the clients we serve at each of our contact centers. The way it works is we try to balance seasonal needs, so one client might be ramping down after a busy season while another client's busy season is just starting. This allows us to keep more colleagues employed throughout the year while reacting quickly to our clients' seasonal needs."

 

Q: How do you adapt to the unique service cultures of each client you serve?

"Having colleagues dedicated to a single client helps a lot.

"Another thing that I see that really helps us is FCR is very transparent with our clients. We invite them to visit our contact centers and spend as much or as little time with their team as they want.

"It actually works best when colleagues strongly identify with both FCR and the client they're serving. You'll see colleagues with client swag at their workstations and it's obvious they take a lot of pride in supporting that brand. 

"Many of our clients will also bring in their own trainers when we launch with them to help our colleagues get immersed in their culture. This helps us get to know their service philosophy and adopt their brand voice and style guide if they have one."

 

Q: How do you keep your colleagues engaged with your clients?

"I have a unique perspective because I came from an FCR client to work here. 

"When I was an FCR client, I realized that using an outsourced model meant someone else was managing people who do support for my company. So one thing that we started doing that's really unique for outsourcers was an employee engagement survey. We actually surveyed the FCR colleagues who were supporting us to see what we could do better.

"A lot of our clients now do that.

"Many of our clients act on feedback from our colleagues to improve their products, processes, or services, and take time to empower our colleagues to serve their customers at the highest level. That helps people feel even more connected.

"I've never had an agent or a colleague refuse to talk when I ask about the pain points they're experiencing. We like to run focus groups with our colleagues when a client does a site visit so our clients can hear first-hand what colleagues are hearing from customers. This might help confirm what our client is already seeing in their customer service surveys or reveal a brand new insight. Our colleagues really appreciate being heard like that."

 

Q: A lot of outsourcing relationships are based on cost savings, but FCR is known for providing clients with extra value. How do you do that?

"I spend a lot of time talking to clients and looking for ways to improve not only our service, but the client's overall business.

"For example, I might identify a best practice that one of our client teams is using and share that with our other programs. One of our teams had someone who was a wizard when it comes to generating reports in Zendesk [a customer service software platform]. About half of our clients use Zendesk, so we were able to share those insights with all those other teams.

"Another area where we try to add value is through customer service surveys. We try to marry our quality monitoring process with our clients' surveys so we identify what's driving satisfaction or dissatisfaction and share that insight with our clients. We're also able to share a lot of best practices we learn with all of our clients, so when we work with one client to solve an issue, all of our clients can benefit."

The Best Time to Manage Customer Expectations

We've all seen a customer blow up at an unpleasant surprise.

Many of those situations come down to expectations. The customer expected one thing to happen and something far worse happened instead.

You might know that you can often prevent the customer's anger by effectively managing expectations. The key is to prepare the customer for the worst-case scenario ahead of time using carefully selected language

If only it was that easy!

This post examines the importance of timing when managing customer expectations. Let's start with a common situation where customers get upset—air travel.

Photo credit: Jason O'Halloran

Photo credit: Jason O'Halloran

Airlines Struggle with Expectations

There's a lot of reasons why airline passengers are grumpy

The boarding process is one of them. Passengers swarm the boarding gate and block access while other people try to squeeze past and board. Frazzled gate agents try to keep up with a barrage of requests.

A passenger inevitably tries to board with three large bags, despite the policy that you only get to bring one personal item (which must go under your seat) and one carry-on that fits in the overhead bin.

Handling this situation is a huge challenge for gate agents.

Most shirk the responsibility and leave it up to the flight attendants to sort out. They'll say they're too busy or they just want to avoid the inevitable blow-up.

Some try to address it as passengers board, which inevitably causes the passenger with three bags to fly off the handle.

They'll say:

"They let me bring my bags on the last flight!" 

Or, 

"The other airline doesn't have a problem with my bags!" 

Or, 

"Then how come I saw three other people board with even more bags than me?!"

It's a tough situation. Most gate agents make it worse with poor timing.

 

How Bad Timing Ruins Expectation Management

Passengers boarding an airplane typically face high anxiety.

They get caught up in the herd mentality and start squeezing in, even if their boarding group won't board for another five minutes. Many passengers are anxious about flying in general, so this only makes it worse.

Research shows we're less open to suggestion when our emotions are running high. That's why trying to manage expectations at the moment a passenger is boarding the plane usually backfires.

Think about situations where you have to manage customer expectations. If their emotions are spiking, it's probably difficult.

Here are some more examples:

  • A hotel guest learns about a $20/night resort fee at check-out.

  • An online shopper learns an item she ordered is out of stock after she places the order.

  • A customer spends an hour in a furniture store picking out the right fabric for a new sofa, only to learn the store's eight week delivery time is too late for his needs.

All of these messages would be better received if they were delivered when the customer wasn't experiencing an emotional peak.

 

Deliver News Before the Emotional Peak

The best time to manage expectations is when emotions are relatively neutral.

This requires proactive service, where you anticipate a challenge before it happens. The specific technique is called The Pre-Emptive Acknowledgement, which is one of my all-time favorites.

For example, the general manager of one of my favorite inns called me a week before my trip to let me know my favorite room wasn't going to be available. (You can read about her master class in expectation management.) It worked out in part because her call came before the emotional peak of checking in after a long day of travel.

What should airline gate agents do?

Gate agents are much more successful when they speak to individual passengers just before the boarding process starts. This allows agents to connect with people one-on-one before emotions start running high. Passengers are much more open to checking their extra bags in this situation.

How can you make timing work for you? Think about how you can better manage expectations with your customers by addressing issues before the emotional peak. 

Here's a short video clip that provides another example.

The clip from my training video, Managing Customer Expectations for Managers. You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the full course, but you can get a 30-day trial.

Insider Perspectives: Fonolo's Shai Berger on Skipping the Queue

Shai Berger, CEO, Fonolo

Shai Berger, CEO, Fonolo

Waiting on hold is a terrible customer experience.

You dial a customer service phone number, slog through an endless menu of options, and then wait for what seems like forever. All the while listening to hyperactive marketing messages or sleep-inducing music.

No wonder research from Mattersight reveals that 66 percent of customers are frustrated before they even start talking to a customer service representative!

One solution is to provide your customers with a callback option. This allows customers to receive a callback when an agent is ready, freeing up the customer to do other things in the meantime.

I recently spoke with Shai Berger, CEO and co-founder of Fonolo, a leading callback solution provider. He regularly shares practical advice on the Fonolo blog and on Twitter, so I wanted to get his perspective on how companies can make the case for investing in customer-centric technology like callbacks.


Q: How did Fonolo get started?

"My co-founders and I aren't from the call center industry. We started Fonolo by approaching a problem from a consumer perspective. We couldn't understand why call centers were still putting people on hold.

"This was in 2008. Callback solutions had been around for a long time, but the way they were packaged made it difficult for a lot of contact centers to implement. We were able to make it easier for call centers to implement callbacks by offering a cloud-based solution."

 

Q: Why would a contact center consider offering a callback option?

"Customers don't like being on hold, but its not always preventable. 

"If you really don't want your customers waiting on hold, you can just hire more agents. The problem with that approach is it might be cost-prohibitive. There's a hard cost associated with adding more agents. It's much harder to tie wait times to hard costs.

"If a company is severely understaffed then you really do need to hire more agents. Callbacks can help when your call center is at or near capacity or you get spikes in demand when you're suddenly very busy.

"Demand spikes tend to have a cascading effect. Hold times stretch longer, so you have to juggle around your agent lunch and break schedules, which means there might be fewer agents available later in the day when you need them. It sometimes feels like you can never catch up.

"Callbacks can help smooth out these demand curves so your agents are handling calls at a more predictable rate."

 

Q: How do callbacks improve the customer experience?

"There are a number of factors that influence a customer's perception of wait time. We call it 'dentist chair time,' where an unpleasant experience feels much longer than it really is. (Side note: here's a list of factors that influence wait time perception.)

"These factors work in other areas of customer service, too, such as a physical store where you see people standing around while customers are waiting in line. It makes customers feel like they're being ignored, which makes us more angry about waiting.

"Offering a callback option often means the customer spends the same amount of time waiting to speak to an agent, but that time is spent differently. The customer doesn't have to wait on hold, so the time seems to go faster. We feel better as customers because it seems like the company is being more gracious and our time is being respected."

 

Q: From an operational perspective, how do contact centers integrate callbacks into their phone queue?

"There are really two questions that contact centers need to address.

"The first is when is the callback going to happen? One approach is to use an algorithm to predict when an agent will be available based on historical call data. The problem with this approach is you must have a very predictable call volume or else a customer will receive their callback before an agent is ready or there will be agents available while the customer is still waiting for a callback.

"The other way to time the callback is to hold the customer's place in the queue. This way the callback happens when the customer gets to the front of the queue, which is our preferred approach at Fonolo.

"The second question contact centers need to address is who goes first, the agent or the customer? 

"If the agent goes first, the customer doesn't get a callback until an agent is available. This is great for the customer because they're immediately connected, but it also creates some idle time for the agent.

"If the customer goes first, you use your agents more efficiently by eliminating idle time, but you risk calling customers back and then immediately putting them on hold. This creates a really frustrating customer experience."

 

Q: I can see a lot of penny-pinching executives making callback customers wait for an agent to become available so they could reduce idle time. What's the argument against doing that?

"For many companies, it's a cultural issue. If they're customer focused, they don't want a customer to have to wait on hold again when they receive a call back. The culture in these companies is pointing executives in the right direction.

"We're lucky in that our product appeals to both sides of the equation. A cost-conscious contact center can still save money by implementing callbacks the right way.

"For example, callbacks can lower abandon rates, or the percentage of customers who grow tired of waiting and hang up. If a company is selling a product or service, lower abandon rates mean higher sales."

 

Discussion question: Have you ever used a callback option when calling a contact center? If so, what was the experience like?

Book Review: Chip Bell's Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles

This is a special Friday blog post. 

I just couldn't wait to tell you about Chip Bell's new book, Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles.

I've been lucky enough to see Chip speak at a couple of conferences I attended. His good humor and enthusiasm are contagious, and I could almost hear his voice as I read this book.

Kaleidoscope is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to deliver innovative customer service that's truly memorable. You can apply these concepts whether you're on the frontlines of service, a customer service manager, or an executive looking for a way to differentiate your organization.

It's organized around nine key concepts, and each one is backed by stories, specific ideas, and action steps for implementing them.

  1. Enchantment: Add a Little Sparkle

  2. Grace: Honor Your Customer

  3. Trust: Keep Your Covenants

  4. Generosity: Serve It Forward

  5. Truth: Nurture Total Candor

  6. Mercy: Let It Go

  7. Alliance: Stay...On Purpose

  8. Ease: Take Care of Flow

  9. Passion: Be All There

One of my favorite concepts is "Grace." 

We often encounter customers who seem overly demanding or may have suspicious motives. The concept of Grace tells us to assume their intentions are innocent, treat them with respect, and find a way to help them rather than view those customers with cynicism.

A client of mine recently shared this wonderful story about Grace.

The client is a college and one of the college's employees noticed an elderly couple wandering around campus. She approached the couple to introduce herself and offer assistance.

It turned out the couple had been touring area colleges, looking for the right place to make a substantial donation. They were big believers in education, but were frustrated that they had been ignored while they toured other campuses. This little bit of grace they received on my client's campus sparked a relationship that led to a donation, and now a hall is named after the couple!

Kaleidoscope is available on Amazon in Kindle and beautiful, full-color hardcover. 

A Master Class in Expectation Management

Things can go wrong in a hurry if you don't manage customer expectations.

My wife, Sally, and I recently stayed at The Albion River Inn. It's perched on a cliff overlooking the mouth of the Albion River, about 150 miles North of San Francisco. There are sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and no TV in the rooms.

It's a rare opportunity to relax, recharge, and take a social media vacation. We visit every two years and stay in the same room every time. Room 14.

Not this year.

Room 14 was undergoing maintenance when we arrived, despite the fact that we had reserved this specific room well in advance. 

Were we furious?

On the contrary. We were delighted. That's because Chelsea Strupp, the Inn's general manager, had just delivered a master class on managing customer expectations.

Here's what she did, why it worked, and how you can use the same technique with your customers.

View from room 12 at the Albion River Inn. Photo credit: Sally Toister

View from room 12 at the Albion River Inn. Photo credit: Sally Toister

Strupp's Master Class

We received a voice mail from Strupp about a week before we were scheduled to arrive.

She explained that room 14 was undergoing maintenance and was taking longer than expected. She acknowledged our many stays in this room and said she could make the room available if we really wanted it.

But she also had another offer. Strupp said that she would upgrade us to room 12 at no additional charge if we were willing. 

Sally and I looked online to see pictures of room 12. It looked gorgeous, so I called Strupp back and accepted her offer.

When we arrived at the inn, we were delighted! Room 12 had a better layout (for us) than room 14 and a wood burning fire place. (There's a gas fire place in room 14). 

Despite the fact that we had stayed in room 14 on every visit since 2005, we now have a new favorite room!

 

Why Strupp's Invitation Worked

Strupp did three things very well.

First, she anticipated a potential issue. She and her staff monitored the status of room 14, saw our upcoming reservation, and decided to take action before it became a problem that impacted our stay.

Customer service guru Shep Hyken makes a key distinction between proactive service and anticipatory service on his blog:

Being proactive is noticing something and responding to it... Anticipatory customer service, however, is about being one step ahead. It’s intuitive. It’s not just noticing something. It’s anticipating something.

Second, she acknowledged our value as guests.

In her voice message, Strupp told us that she understood we liked to stay in room 14 because we had stayed in that same room on many visits. This made us instantly feel as though she understood and valued us.

Third, she provided options.

Strupp told us she would make room 14 available if we really wanted it. But she also offered us an upgrade at no charge. In doing so, she made it seem like she was offering us a gift rather than taking something away.

 

How You Can Manage Expectations Like a Pro

You may not have a ready supply of beautiful upgrades to give to your guests, but you can apply the same principles when managing customer expectations.

  1. Anticipate customer needs.

  2. Let the customer know they're valued.

  3. Offer alternatives.

Steps one and two are crucial because they prevent most customers from ever getting angry or upset. 

Imagine what would have happened if we first learned room 14 wasn't available when we were checking in. There's a great chance we'd feel like something was being taken away from us, which could trigger a slew of negative emotions.

Step three is also key. If at all possible, you want your customer to feel like they are getting something better.

Here are a few examples:

  • Offer an upgrade or something extra if that's possible.

  • Suggest an alternative product, service, or experience.

  • Give the gift of attention by going out of your way to make the experience better.

Here's one example that combined all three:

I was visiting Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon to conduct some customer service training. Parking is a bit of challenge there, but my one of my clients offered a wonderful solution.

He explained how my visitor badge allowed me to ride the Portland Aerial Tram at no charge. It offers amazing panoramic views of Portland and takes riders from Portland's South Waterfront directly to OHSU's main campus. (Upgrade!)

My client then explained that I could save time and money by using public transportation to get to the tram instead of renting a car and paying for parking on campus. (New Experience!)

Finally, my client took an extra minute to map out my transportation options, which gave me the confidence to select the correct bus, trolley, and light rail lines to get me arround town. (Attention!)

You can learn more by watching my Managing Customer Expectations training video. You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the entire course, but you can get a free 30-day trial.

Lessons from The Overlook: Find the Right Partners

Note: Lessons from The Overlook is a monthly update on lessons learned from owning a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply some of the techniques I advise my clients to use. You can find past updates here.

Chances are you rely on partners to help serve your customers.

It might be a vendor, a supplier, or a delivery company. Your organization may even outsource the customer service function to another firm.

Choosing the right partners is essential.

My wife, Sally, and I own a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. Called The Overlook, our cabin is a two hour drive from our home in San Diego. 

Needless to say, we must rely on several partners to keep our guests happy.

We count on partners to book guest rentals, keep the cabin clean, make repairs, and keep the utilities running. 

Here's how we do it and how you can too.

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

But first, what's a partner?

I use the term partner to describe just about anyone who is not an employee that helps you deliver customer service. This could be a specific person or a company.

Here are just a few examples:

  • Delivery companies

  • Repair technicians

  • Suppliers

  • Contract or contingent labor

  • Marketing agencies

  • Business process outsources (ex: outsourced contact centers)

  • Cleaning and janitorial services

  • Technology providers (communications, software, etc.)

Great employees are essential to outstanding customer service, but your partners play an important role, too!

Now, here's how to find a partner that will treat your customers right.

 

Step 1: Identify Key Characteristics

It's helpful to decide what qualities make a great partner before you start searching.

Some people make one of these big mistakes when finding a partner:

  • Focusing solely on price

  • Exclusively choosing well-known companies

  • Picking partners because they are nice

There's nothing wrong with any of those qualities, but I recommend you dig a bit deeper. Look for partners who can align with your customer service vision.

The customer service vision for The Overlook is:

Welcome to your mountain community retreat.

So naturally we searched for partners who fit three criteria:

  • Are they welcoming?

  • Are they part of the Idyllwild mountain community?

  • Are they responsive?

That last part was key because we want our guests to feel like The Overlook is a retreat. To us, this implies relaxation. It's hard to relax when you need something and the owners are two hours away, so we need partners who can be responsive!

 

Step 2: Screen Potential Partners for Vision Alignment

The next step is to screen potential partners to see if they can truly align with your customer service vision.

For example, we contacted several companies to discuss managing our property. This is an essential role since the property manager oversees guest bookings, day-to-day customer service, cleaning, and maintenance.

One of the companies was a big-name property manager that had a centralized contact center and dedicated sales team. That's fine, but we wanted to know if this company was truly part of the local community, so we called the company's local office directly. The local manager never returned our call, which told us we'd probably get poor service from this person.

The property manager we did select, Idyllwild Vacation Cabins, was a different story. The owner, Martha Sanchez, agreed to meet us at the cabin to show us how she would manage the property and to give us tips to make it more appealing to renters. (Very welcoming!)

We also asked around the community and discovered she was well-known and had a good reputation.

And Martha is extremely responsive. She gave us her cell phone number and we soon found she is always quick to return a call or text.

 

Step 3: Develop a Partnership

Ditch the "customer is always right" mantra.

A true partnership is a two-way relationship. This means you need to invest in your partner's success just as much as they're investing in yours.

Go out of your way to be helpful. Make it easy for your partner to serve your customers. And be sure to live your customer service vision when it comes to working with your partner too.

That's why we try to be welcoming to our partners. We want them to accept us as part of the Idyllwild community, so we work hard to build positive relationships. And we're always responsive because we know our partners have a job to do too.

Jon Millhouse, our real estate agent at Town Real Estate, is another great example.

He went out of his way to give contractors access to the cabin so they could bid on a few upgrade projects without us having to drive all the way up from San Diego. And he did this even after the sale was final and he was no longer obligated to help us!

It turns out Jon is also an incredible photographer, and he let us use his photos for our website. You can find Jon's photography here.

 

Bonus Tip: Don't forget your neighbors

The Overlook is located in a quiet residential neighborhood. The people who live on both sides of our cabin live there full time.

This makes them essential partners!

Not long after buying the cabin, we went over to each neighbor's house to introduce ourselves. We brought some homemade fudge and a card with our contact information.

Lucky for us, our neighbors couldn't have been nicer! 

They immediately realized how we could help each other. Our neighbors offered to keep an eye on our place and let us know if anything seemed amiss. In return, we told them it was our intention to ensure our guests didn't cause any problems and asked them to let us know if there were any issues (noise, damage, etc.) so that we could address it immediately.

Many businesses have neighbors who share an office building, a retail center, or some other space. It's always a good idea to build good relationships with your neighbors so you can help each other.

Insider Perspectives: UL's Nate Brown on Implementing a Vision

Nate Brown, Director of Customer Experience

Nate Brown, Director of Customer Experience

A customer service vision is essential to customer focus.

If you've not heard this term before, a customer service vision is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that points everyone in the same direction. You can read this backgrounder for more information.

Implementing a customer service vision can be tricky.

Employees may struggle to relate to it, remember it, or incorporate it into their daily activities. Leaders don't always realize the thoughtfulness that goes into creating a great vision or the effort and commitment required to make it stick.

Nate Brown is facing this challenge head-on, and is making great progress.

He's the Director of Customer Experience at UL EHS Sustainability, a company that provides software to help organizations manage environmental health and safety in the workplace. Brown also writes the excellent Customer Centric Support blog and is one of ICMI's Top 50 Thought Leaders to Follow on Twitter.

Brown shared some of his insights and lessons-learned with me.


Q: Why did you decide to create a customer service vision for your team?

"I attended your workshop on getting agents obsessed with service at ICMI's Contact Center Expo conference in Long Beach last May (2016). You talked about the importance of creating a customer service vision, and it sounded like exactly what we needed.

"I had thought a lot about making my team's day-to-day work in the contact center relevant to the company's mission. UL EHS Sustainability is a division of the safety science company UL. The mission statement is Working for a safer world, which makes sense because we're a global safety science company that provides a wide range of services such as consumer product testing and helping manufacturers build safer products.

"UL EHS Sustainability provides software to help employers create healthier, safer and more sustainable workplaces and my team provides technical support, so my team was initially focused on the technical aspect of their jobs. We needed a way to connect our work to the mission."

 

Q: What did you come up with?

"Our customer service vision is Supporting our customers and each other in a manner that is effortless, accurate, and friendly. 

"The thinking is if we can do these things, our customers will be able to use our software better which ultimately contributes to UL's mission.”

 

Q: How did you develop the customer service vision statement?

"I initially thought about what I'm trying to drive through our quality management program. Those three words, effortless, accurate, and friendly described what we were already doing. So I took those concepts and put them together in one clear and concise statement.

"For example, I'm a big fan of The Effortless Experience and we've been trying to implement concepts from the book in our contact center.

"Once I developed an initial draft, I shared it with the managers on my leadership team to get their input. It really resonated with them, so we then rolled it out to the entire team on a conference call.

"We talked through the vision and I asked everyone to tell me what they thought. I didn't get any pushback or suggested changes, which I think is because the customer service vision is grounded in what we were already doing."

 

Q: What are you doing to integrate the vision into your employees' daily activities?

"This is definitely a work in progress, because I'm still working on getting it out in front of employees on a regular basis. We've only had this vision for eight months and it needs to be more widely adopted, but here's what we've done so far:

"We now introduce it to all new hires and then include it in one-on-one coaching. We're trying to get people to see how they can put each part of the vision into practice.

"For example, one part of the vision is effortless. In the past, an employee might answer a customer question by sending a knowledge base article. Now, that same employee might include the article in the email along with some commentary that customizes the solution to the customer's needs. We also are striving for ‘next issue avoidance’ which takes the resolution beyond the surface level issue and resolves that question the customer may not have known to ask.

"Another word in our vision is accurate. We have a big initiative right now to upgrade our knowledge base so that it's fully up to date and easier for our employees to use. If we support the team with the right tools, we can make it easier for them to support their customers with accurate information. I’m starting to see more and more that a great indicator for the health of a support organization is their ability to collect, share and curate knowledge.

"Our marketing department has just gone through a huge re-branding process and one of their guiding factors was trying to create an even more approachable brand, so this naturally ties into the friendly aspect of our vision. We're encouraging agents to develop rapport with their customers to help create a better experience."

 

Q: What advice would you give to other leaders who are trying to implement a customer service vision?

"The toughest lesson for me is to be more patient. Awhile ago, my boss challenged me to be more of a marathon view versus a sprint mentality. What he meant was that we all want to achieve immediate results, but it takes time for these initiatives to take hold. I've only been in this role for a year now and we've accomplished a lot during that time, but there's still a lot more left to do.

"I've really been influenced by John Kotter's book, Leading Change. It explains that change is a process and you have to have checkpoints along the way to keep things moving. You also have to clarify the benefits of what we're trying to accomplish so everyone will get on board.

"One of the things I'm doing now is creating our 2017 strategy. The customer service vision is the glue that provides consistency from one year to the next. It's wonderful for our contact center to have that ever-present north star."

 

Q: You mentioned strategy. How has having a customer service vision helped you become more strategic?

"Organizations generally don't look to the contact center to be strategic, but it's so important for customer service leaders to control their own destiny.

"Our customer service vision tells us we need to fight for both a better customer and agent experience. We're going to advance that vision in 2017 in a variety of ways, including a customer experience program that includes all functions of the business.

"I can also show our executive leaders how we're aligning with our brand. The new corporate brand identity focuses on being a friendly brand that feels young, energized, and engaging. That's exactly the way we're supporting the customers who use our software. It’s going to be an awesome year!"

How to Share Customer Service Tips with Your Team

A customer service leader recently asked me for some best practices for sharing my Customer Service Tip of the Week with her team.

If you aren't familiar with this, the Customer Service Tip of the Week is one tip sent via one email once per week. Here's an example of one tip, The Five Question Technique.

The customer service leader shared a few potential challenges:

Her intended audience was too large to use the "Forward to a Friend" feature that's included in each email.

She thought about having employees subscribe themselves to the tips, but worried that many wouldn't read them.

Does this sound like you?

I shared a few suggestions and I think she ultimately came up with a good plan. Here's what I shared with her plus some additional ideas I've received from other customer service leaders.

Ask Your Employees to Subscribe

People are more likely to pay attention to something when the same message is reinforced in multiple ways.

So a natural starting point is to ask employees to subscribe themselves to the Customer Service Tip of the Week email, even if you plan to share it with them as well. It's fast, free, and easy.

How easy? Just click here.

You can also ask your employees to visit www.toistersolutions.com/tips to sign themselves up or go to the website yourself and do the sign-ups for them.

Will everyone read every email? Probably not. But many employees will read many of the weekly tips, and that's a good start.

 

Discuss the Tips in Team Meetings

Many customer service leaders have daily, weekly, or monthly check-in meetings with their teams.

Customer service leaders often tell me the Customer Service Tip of the Week makes a great discussion topic. Here's how it works:

  1. Introduce the current tip.

  2. Lead a conversation to discuss how it can be incorporated.

  3. Review success stories at the following meeting.

Discussing the Customer Service Tip of the Week with the team makes the weekly email more valuable to your employees. 

They're more likely to read it before the meeting if they know it's going to be a topic of conversation. They'll also be more likely to reference it throughout the week if they know you'll be looking for success stories at the next meeting!

 

Share Tips on a Case-by-Case Basis

Let's say you've been coaching an individual employee on rapport-building skills.

Can you keep a secret? My weekly tips have a pattern that rotates every three weeks:

  1. Week 1: the topic is rapport

  2. Week 2: the topic is exceeding expectations

  3. Week 3: top topic is solving problems

That means every third Customer Service Tip of the Week focuses on building rapport! 

So you can wait for the next relevant rapport-building tip and use the "Forward to a Friend" link in the email to send the tip to the employee along with some of your own suggestions and commentary.

What if the employee receives the tips already? No matter. Your additional email reinforces the concept.

Tip from the pros: Never click on "forward" in your email client (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) to forward a Customer Service Tip of the Week email. 

Why?

Because each email contains an active unsubscribe link that's attached to the original recipient. That means your recipient can unsubscribe you from the email by clicking that link. 

The "Forward to a Friend" feature in every email eliminates this problem.

 

What Did the Customer Service Leader Do?

She asked me if she could include my weekly tips in her division's monthly newsletter. 

Of course I said yes and simply requested that she cite my company, Toister Performance Solutions as the source and include my website (www.toistersolutions.com/tips) in the newsletter as well.

You can do the same thing to if you'd like to share these tips with your employees!

Insider Perspectives: Keynote Speaker Teresa Allen on Executive Buy-in

Teresa Allen, Keynote Speaker

Teresa Allen, Keynote Speaker

Customer service initiatives won't go anywhere unless your company's top brass gets fully behind it.

That can be a tall order for many customer service leaders. Executives don't always feel they have the time or see the value of fully committing company resources.

I asked Teresa Allen, a veteran customer service trainer and keynote speaker, to share her perspective on getting executive buy-in.

Allen is the author of Common Sense Service and the owner of Common Sense Solutions, a national customer service training and consulting firm. She currently ranks #1 on the Global Gurus list of the top customer service experts in the world. She's also one of ICMI's Top 50 Thought Leaders to Follow on Twitter.


Q: What do customer-focused companies do differently than other organizations?

"The common thread is a fearless leader who considers customer service part of the company mission and culture. 

"Providing great customer service gives you permission to sell to your customers. It's marketing, not an expense, but senior leaders need to believe that. It's got to be a top-down approach. 

 

Q: Why are these fearless leaders so scarce?

"I generally see two different types of organizations.

"In one type of organization, the top executive is out there every day talking to customers, soliciting feedback, and leading the charge for exceptional customer service. They have often risen from the sales side of the business and have seen the link of service to sales revenue and profits.

"In another organization type, executives are not keyed into the value of a customer service culture.  They look at it as an expense item instead of a revenue generator. In some cases, this is because customer service has never been their world. They may have come from a finance or legal background and thus have never been directly exposed to the customer side of the business.  In this environment, building a service culture can be a real challenge, because a customer service initiative will never be fully successful unless top leadership of the organization are supporting it and driving it.

"Developing a customer service culture can't be a revolution. It has to be an evolutionary process. Executive buy-in combined with hiring of service minded individuals is key.  Training should be designed to support the company’s service objectives across all departments and positions until gradually everybody in the company is on board."

 

Q: What are some ways that customer leaders can encourage more executive buy-in?

"Customer service leaders in organizations are often not able to prove outcomes, particularly as that relates to the bottom line. If I invest in improving customer service, can I show that it's driving sales and profits?

"Net promoter and customer effort scores are nice metrics, but a good NPS score doesn't prove value to many executives. I can almost hear the Jerry Maguire refrain, 'Show me the money!'”

"Customer service surveys can be helpful if executives use them to drive results. Whenever I get contracted to do a customer service program, I always ask my client to forward any available customer service survey data.  It's okay if they send me the numbers, but what I really want is the comments. I want to look for what I call red lights, yellow lights, and green lights. The red lights indicate pain points that can lead to serious loss of business, the yellow lights are comments illustrating areas to be cautious about, and the green lights are compliments and kudos on exceptional service that serve to strengthen customer relationships.

"Organizations should market to their strengths and train to weaknesses. Companies can evaluate those green lights and find a way to use them as a marketing business building tool. The red lights should be incorporated into the next customer service training program so the problems get solved.

"I ask the leaders I work with, 'How are you sharing this data?' Sadly, I often hear that it is only held by the marketing department.  Survey data is valuable far beyond marketing.  It should be shared with employees so improvements can be made as well as to recognize team members who are growing the success of the organization through exceptional customer service."

 

Q: Assuming you can get an executive to sign-off on investing in customer service, what are some ways to keep him or her involved?

"Whenever I deliver customer service training or keynotes, I always ask someone from the executive team to introduce the program and tell everyone why it’s important to the organization.

"It would be great if the CEO or President did this, but that's not always possible since they're often very busy people. But some executive should be there, such as the vice president of human resources or the vice president of sales or marketing.

"Customer service can't be perceived as the training ‘flavor of the month.’ With regular executive emphasis and follow through, customer service will be viewed as an integral success strategy and will be more likely to be taken seriously by the organization as a whole.

"When an executive makes a real commitment to being customer-focused, it provides a mandate for the company to do things differently. For example, managers must take the time to hire the right people who can help the company deliver outstanding service.

"A customer focus can also help guide future investments. One executive frustration is the constantly evolving digital service technology that can come at a high cost. While many organizations are investing in these high-tech bells and whistles, recent studies show human interactions can actually be equally if not more important. The more complex an issue, the faster a customer wants to connect with a human who helps to solve it. [Side note: You can see data backing this up here.]  

"The human touch is big!  This means that training representatives in face-to-face and telephone customer service and communication skills is still critical. You can help steer more investment into the right service initiatives if you can show executives this is what customers really want and combine that with solid ROI data."

Three Ways Excuses Inhibit Learning

The workshop participant arrived 30 minutes late.

"Sorry," she said. "I was stuck in traffic. It was terrible this morning." She found a seat and sipped her fresh cup of Starbucks coffee as the class continued.

This wasn't the best way to start a two-day workshop, but we've all been unexpectedly delayed before. The important part is that we learn from experience and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

She was late again the next day. This time, she had a muffin in addition to her Starbucks cup.

Unsurprisingly, the woman struggled with the content. 

It wasn't because she lacked the ability. It wasn't even because she had been late to the class — she could have caught up with the material if she was really motivated.

The participant's challenge started with that lousy excuse about traffic. Here are three ways that excuses prevent learning.

Excuses Reinforce the Status Quo

We must have a strong desire to change in order to learn.

The training participant told herself the traffic was out of her control, so she saw no reason to do anything different on day two. She stuck to the same routine and accepted the same result.

Excuses inhibit our ability to change. 

Customer service professionals must constantly find ways to do things better. We can't do that if we let excuses stand in our way. For example, if we tell ourselves that an angry customer wasn't our fault, there's no reason for us to learn from the experience. 

 

Excuses Limit Options

Learning involves finding new ways to do things.

The training participant had stopped at Starbucks on her way to class each day, which contributed to her lateness. Her excuses prevented her from realizing that she could leave earlier to make time for a Starbucks stop, skip her morning coffee, or brew her own coffee at home.

Customer service professionals must constantly find innovative ways to serve their customers.

Things break, processes fail, and customers have unusual needs. We'll be blind to possible solutions if we allow excuses to stand in the way of our ability to attempt a solution.

 

Excuses Extinguish Passion

Learning is fueled by desire.

The workshop participant had no real desire to be in the class. She paid little attention to the content, half-heartedly engaged in activities, and returned late from every break. Her habit of making excuses allowed her to believe that the training wasn't effective, even though her colleagues embraced it whole-heartedly.

Customer service employees must go the extra mile to overcome challenges.

There's no reason to expend additional energy doing that if you let excuses hold you back. In this sense, making an excuse instead of making the effort is the easy way out.

 

Let's get real: Think about excuses you make. What would happened if you stopped making excuses and started finding solutions?