Using the Employee Engagement Cycle

This post originally appeared on the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) website as part of their Expert's Angle series.

Call centers with customer-focused cultures achieve their success by getting a high level of agent buy-in. One way to do this is to ensure that your culture is aligned with the five steps in the Employee Engagement Cycle. This is a framework that identifies critical points where a call center can influence employee engagement.

Read on to learn about each step in the cycle. At the end you’ll find a questionnaire you can use to evaluate your own call center’s alignment.

Recruiting

Recruiting new employees represents an opportunity to find people who are passionate about our products or services. Even more important than previous job experience or call center skills, we want people who will love to do what we want them to do. These employees will serve our customers better, work harder, and are less likely to leave the company than someone who is just here for a paycheck.

Call centers can hire for passion by identifying a set of specific traits that the ideal employee should possess. For example, a company that connects people with music teachers hires people who love music. A software manufacturer hires people who work with computers in their spare time. A company that sells accessories for boats and RVs hires people who love boating or camping.

On-boarding

The on-boarding process is more than just new employee orientation or that pile of new hire paperwork. On-boarding really refers to the period that begins when the employee accepts the job offer and ends when the employee is fully trained. This is a critical time when the employee decides whether they made a good decision to join your company. This is also when they learn about your call center culture and the behaviors that are expected to go along with it.

One medical device manufacturer used the on-boarding period to help their new employees unlearn habits they picked up in other call centers. For example, in their previous job a new employee may have referred to an out of stock product as being “on backorder” and simply quoted an expected time when the item would be back in stock. Here, an unavailable product wasn’t acceptable since a patient might need it for an upcoming surgical procedure. Finding the right product was the top priority, and employees were expected to go to great lengths to find a solution, even if it meant contacting another client to see if they had one that could be borrowed. Most new employees were never expected to do all that in their previous call center jobs, so the on-boarding period was an important step towards creating new habits.

Development

Companies that spend time hiring right and instilling cultural values in new employees can still lose their way if those values aren’t consistently reinforced. In many cases, the cultural norms taught during the on-boarding period don’t match the reality of the new employee’s day-to-day working environment. One way to avoid this problem is to ensure that all employee development includes a culture component as a way of consistently reminding employees about culture.

A software company successfully reinforced its culture throughout their call centers by insisting that all employee development programs be connected in some way to their company values. For example, when they instituted a customer service training program, a module was included that showed call center agents how to serve their customers in a way that was consistent with the organizational values. After the training, call center supervisors reinforced the values when providing an agent with feedback about their performance or coaching them on how to handle a particular call.

Evaluations

Annual performance evaluations don’t have a lot of fans these days. They are often treated as little more than a stack of annoying paperwork designed to give employees seemingly arbitrary ratings on a set of generic qualities such as “teamwork” or “dependability.” Annual performance reviews can become much more impactful when they are used to reinforce company culture

In one example, a company’s values were incorporated into performance evaluations and employees were evaluated in part on how aligned they were with the culture. The evaluation form contained a set of behavioral descriptions for each value to help differentiate between positive (or “aligned”) performance and negative (or “misaligned”) performance. This turned the evaluation into an opportunity to discuss culture, set goals for future performance, and align employee performance with desired norms.

Exits

We’ve all seen the impact of employees who actively work against the company’s best interests. These employees’ behavior becomes so toxic that it impacts other employees’ performance, and they may even attempt to recruit others to join them in their state of discontent. If left unchecked, toxic employees can lower morale, reduce call center performance, and cause increased turnover.

The best solution to dealing with toxic employees is to make it clear their behavior won’t be tolerated. Give them the choice of aligning their behavior with cultural expectations or leaving the team. Employees who refuse to be a positive part of your culture should be removed from the team as quickly as legally possible. It’s never an easy step to take, but I’ve observed countless managers who immediately saw improvements in morale and productivity after letting a toxic employee go.

Conclusion

Here’s a quick quiz if you’d like to evaluate your call center’s cultural alignment. It can be used to foster internal dialogue around better aligning the steps in the Employee Engagement Cycle.

Never reward employees for outstanding survey scores

The Westin Portland is one of my favorite hotels. Their warm and attentive associates always make me feel welcome and you can’t beat their location in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon. I’ve stayed their many times over the years and have come to feel like the hotel is my home away from home.

When I started writing my customer service book in 2011, I interviewed then General Manager Chris Lorino to learn some of the hotel’s service secrets. One of Lorino’s strongest beliefs was that you should never reward employees for achieving outstanding survey scores. He felt it was important to build a team of people who naturally wanted to serve guests at the highest level. In Lorino's opinion, a reward system would inevitably get in the way.

Both leading research on employee motivation and Lorino’s own success as a General Manager suggest that he is absolutely correct.

Rewards vs. Recognition

It’s important to differentiate between rewards and recognition. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that employees shouldn’t be rewarded for outstanding service, but go ahead and recognize them all you want.

Rewards are if-then propositions. The prize and the criteria for earning the prize are spelled out ahead of time. For example, if you average a certain score on your customer service survey, then you will get a gift card.

Recognition is unexpected reinforcement of results that have already been achieved. An example would be giving an employee a gift card out of the blue to thank them for achieving a high average score on their customer service survey.

Eyes On the Prize

The biggest problem with rewarding employees for good customer service is it takes their attention away from providing outstanding service and re-focuses them on winning the prize.

We’ve probably all seen examples of the behavior changes this can cause:

  • Directly asking customers to provide the top score on a survey
  • Selectively encouraging only highly satisfied customers to complete a survey
  • Submitting phony surveys to bolster scores (yes, this happens)

The Goal is not the Goal

What’s the purpose of conducting a customer service survey?

When employees are rewarded for achieving a certain score they may act as though achieving that score is the ultimate goal. However, most customer service professionals will tell you that the survey is really a tool that can be used for continuous improvement.

Here are a few ways that focusing solely on a survey goal might prevent continuous improvement:

  • Employees may care less about service failures if the average looks good.
  • It lessens the need for analysis to identify customer pain points.
  • Employees may stop trying if they feel there’s nothing left to prove.

Let’s imagine a survey of 100 customers where 90 are satisfied and 10 are unhappy. If my employees are focused on achieving a specific target, they may feel great about a 90% customer satisfaction level. However, they’ll be much more eager to find out how to win over the other 10% if their true focus is continuous improvement.

So, how do I motivate the team?

If you want to learn more about the science behind rewards and employee motivation, check out Daniel Pink’s fascinating book, Drive. Pink's biggest point is that the true motivating factors are purpose, autonomy, and mastery. Let's look at each one in a customer service context:

Purpose
The very best organizations have a clear and compelling customer service vision that describes the type of service they're hoping to provide. It's amazing what happens when the whole team is unified around a common objective. 

Autonomy
Nobody wants to be micromanaged. Give people the resources, training, and authority to get the job done right and then get out of their way and you'll see people taking responsibility for the results they achieve.

Mastery
We all want to be good at what we do. Help bring out the best in employees through coaching, training, and continuous feedback and you'll find that people will step up to the challenge of becoming the very best they can be.

Contact Center Conference Spring 2013 Re-cap

Last week was a real treat. It was the first week this year that I didn't travel, but I still got to attend an amazing conference in my hometown of San Diego.

Here's my re-cap of Contact Center Conference Spring 2013.

Conference Overview
If you didn't attend, you may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference:

Conference Themes
I always look for the topics that people are buzzing about at a conference. There were at least three major themes I encountered at Contact Center Conference Spring 2013.

Theme #1: We can do much more with our quality assurance data
Contact centers generally gather a lot of quality assurance (QA) data from monitoring calls and other interactions, but several speakers made a compelling case for using this data much more wisely.

John Goodman, author of Strategic Customer Service, suggested call centers should take at least 50% of their QA staff away from monitoring calls and refocus them on analyzing the root causes of service failures so they can help prevent problems from happening. 

Rebecca Gibson, a Contact Center Solutions Consultant at Interactive Intelligence, made the case in her session that contact centers should correlate the behaviors we monitor with the results we're trying to achieve. This approach enables the QA function to focus on behaviors that actually contribute to good performance rather than a generic set of standards.

Theme #2: We're still not where we need to be with social media
This is such an interesting topic because the importance of social media is widely recognized, but best practices and standards for contact centers are still in their infancy. 

Kristyn Emenecker, VP of Product Marketing at inContact, cited a FastCompany article that estimated Dave Carroll's viral video about United Airlines breaking his guitar may have cost the airline nearly $180 million. The lesson was that today's unhappy customer has the potential ability to tell thousands or even millions of people about it, but smart companies can proactively use social media to create positive impressions with their customers.

Contact Center Consultant Michael Pace gave a nice overview of how to get started and posted his presentation on SlideShare: 5 Steps to Building a Social Customer Service Team. One particularly interesting stat was that 55% of the top 50 brands don't respond to comments on Facebook and 71% ignore compalints on Twitter. Yikes!

Theme #3: Focus on FCR, not productivity
I spoke with several contact center leaders who were trying to focus their teams on First Call Resolution (FCR) while de-emphasizing more traditional metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT).

This is a theme I've personally championed. See my article: Call Center Metrics that Can Hurt Service.

This type of initiative is not without its challenges. One call center manager told me he wanted to take down the display boards that broadcast metrics like wait times, calls in queue, etc. so his team could focus on one customer at a time. This move was vetoed by an executive who felt they had paid for the displays so they might as well use them. 

If you attended the conference, what was your biggest take-away?

Good people giving poor service at American Airlines

John Goodman noted in his book, Strategic Customer Service, that 60% of service failures are caused by poor products, processes, and marketing messages. My travel experience on American Airlines last week illustrated this concept perfectly.

I flew from San Diego to Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport (DCA) with a layover in JFK. There was a tight connection due to some weather-related delays, but I made my flight. I worried about my bag making it too, but the captain assured us that they were able to wait for all passengers and baggage to make it onboard before departing.

Service Failure #1: My bag didn’t make it on to my flight to DCA.

The baggage counter employee told me that my bag was still at JFK and was being routed to DCA on a Delta Airlines flight scheduled to land around 10:30 pm. She told me they could deliver the bag to my hotel at midnight, which was okay since I had until 11:30 am before I needed to meet my client.

Service Failure #2: The clock struck midnight with no sign of my suitcase.

I tried to look up my bag’s status on the American Airlines bag status website, but it was useless:

Next, I called the 1-800 line for lost baggage and spoke with a very kind person named Kimberly. Unfortunately, she couldn’t give much of an update since she her database contained very little information. She did confirm that my suitcase wouldn’t be delivered that night and suggested I check again in the morning.

I called again at 7 am and spoke with another nice person named Bob. He couldn’t tell me when my bag would be delivered either, but he did tell me it had arrived the night before on the Delta flight. He suggested that I go to the airport and pick it up there if I wanted to ensure I received it as quickly as possible.

Service Failure #3: My suitcase never made it to DCA because the Delta Airlines flight from JFK had been cancelled.

It was clear by now that the American Airlines system used to track and retrieve lost and delayed baggage was broken. A broken system is only as good as the weakest link in the chain and will continue to fail until that link is repaired.

Fortunately, Raleigh was working at the baggage counter when I arrived around 7:30 am. He had clearly been around the block a few times and knew that the system wasn’t fully reliable. Raleigh set more reasonable expectations than the other employees, telling me that my suitcase was now scheduled to arrive in Washington, D.C. at 10:30 am, and wouldn’t be delivered to my hotel until sometime after noon. He also cautioned me that they wouldn’t know exactly where my suitcase was until Delta handed it back to American since their systems didn’t talk to each other.

Raleigh gave me his direct phone number and assured me he would do everything he could to ensure my bag was found and delivered to my hotel. He was apparently violating some minor policy by giving me the direct line for the baggage counter, but really good customer service employees know when to bend the rules.

It was now only 8 am and the stores at the local mall didn’t open until 10, so I had some time to kill before going out to get new clothes. I was a little stressed since that didn’t leave me much time before my 11:30 am client meeting, but felt I had enough time to make it work.

As I walked through the terminal I saw an oasis - a Jos. A. Banks clothing store, open and ready for business.

Two associates named Fekadu and Alena helped me pick out an outfit for the day. They had everything I needed, all the way down to socks and underwear. Both were incredibly helpful and empathetic to my situation and. I actually felt good as I left the store with my new clothes.

Fortunately, my client meeting went well and my suitcase was in my hotel room when I returned later that evening.

I still have another hurdle or two to cross with American Airlines. I’ll expect them to refund my baggage fee for the delayed bag plus reimburse me for the clothes I purchased. Hopefully, that part of the system isn’t as broken as the baggage and retrieval part was. If it is, I’ll have to give my new friend Raleigh a call and see what he can do.

The impact of great ideas poorly executed

Years ago, I received a handwritten thank you card from someone I had interviewed for a Training Coordinator position. This really stood out for three reasons.

First, I'm a big proponent of using the handwritten note to create more personal relationships with your most important customers. 

Second, very few candidates for this position had bothered to send any form of follow-up correspondence, so the card made this particular candidate even more distinctive.

Third, well, it's better just to show you. Here's the front of the card:

The message inside was the standard "Thank you for interviewing me, I'm very interested in the job." However, it was the post script that really caught my attention:

For my readers who aren't familiar with San Diego, the Hillcrest neighborhood has a large LGBTQ population. I'll never know why this person felt the need to make a joke about this in a thank you card. However, this comment did make it easy for me to rule out this candidate for the position.

This card also serves as an excellent example that it's sometimes a better idea not to do something at all than to do it poorly.

Why your customers often see what you don't

The classic nine dot puzzle is one of my favorite customer service training exercises. Give the puzzle a try if you haven’t seen it before:

  • Connect all nine dots using four straight lines
  • You cannot lift your finger off the screen (or, if you prefer, your pen off the paper)

Why is the puzzle so hard for most of us to solve?

The secret is our instincts affect how we view potential solutions. Most of us see a box that doesn’t exist. As a result, we try to solve the puzzle by staying within the box. (See the bottom of the post for the solution.)

It’s a useful training exercise because it helps customer service professionals realize that we tend to see the service we provide through a certain frame. The trouble is customers view our service through their own frame and their frame is frequently different than ours.

Last week, I wrote about an experience where two employees took very different approaches to replacing a disappointing bottle of wine. The two employees each had their own way of framing the problem. The first employee looked at the problem as a bottle of wine that needed to be exchanged. The second employee looked at the problem as a customer who was disappointed with their product.

As you can imagine, I was much happier with the service I received from the second employee since her frame was the same as mine.

Adopting the customer’s perspective is not always easy. It sounds great in theory, but it is much more difficult in practice. Chalk this up to the Dunning Kruger Effect, a phenomenon I recently wrote about by comparing customer service to professional baseball.

There are a few ways you can help your employees change their frame and see things from the customer’s point of view:

  • Create a Customer Service Vision that defines outstanding service
  • Have your employees use your product or service and evaluate their experience as a customer.
  • Review customer feedback to understand what drives satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Are you still trying to solve the puzzle? You can view this short video to see the answer.

Two different approaches to the same problem

Customer service problems can and will happen. I wish they didn’t, but they do. And when they do occur, how the company resolves the problem can make a big difference.

I recently experienced two very different problem solving approaches from the same company. The first approach made the problem feel much worse. The second was wonderful.

The Situation
My wife, Sally, and I recently opened a nice bottle of wine to go with a special dinner she had made. Unfortunately, the wine had a strong vinegar taste that made it undrinkable. This was a fairly expensive bottle that we had bought at the winery three years ago, so naturally we were disappointed.

We’re planning another visit to the winery in a few months, so I decided to send them an email and ask for a discount on our next purchase.

Approach #1
Don’t respond.

It shouldn’t shock me that companies don’t respond to emails in this day and age, but it does. Three days later, I emailed the winery a second time. This time I did receive a response. It was very uninspiring:

Jeff,

I forwarded the email to my tasting room manager.  You should hear back from her soon. 

The Hospitality Team

Can you spot the problems with this message? I see at least three:

  • Who is it from? I'm pretty sure "The Hospitality Team" isn't their real name.
  • Who is the tasting room manager? Let’s give this person a name too so I know who will be contacting me. Maybe they will become my new BFF.
  • When exactly is soon?

“Soon” turned out to be two days later. Sheesh – I really need to get a dictionary because I thought soon meant, well, sooner than two days. 

The email I did receive was underwhelming:

Dear Jeff,

I left a voice mail for you today. Please give us a call to verify the address that we can send the call tag. Or if easier, just email back.

Best regards.

Mary Ann

This was a little better than the first message. But it was still poorly done.

First, the person’s voice message and email were focused on her needs rather than mine. Mary Ann wanted to get back the empty wine bottle. I wanted to get a discount on a future wine purchase and to have my frustration acknowledged by a caring and compassionate customer service professional.

Second, it’s a good rule of thumb to use the customer’s preferred method of communication. I had emailed because it was more convenient, but Mary Ann had called me and left a voice message with most of the information she wanted me to have. 

I did end up calling AND emailing, but did not receive a response.

Approach #2
Solve the problem swiftly with caring and enthusiasm.

I was contacted by someone else named Elizabeth the day after my last email to Mary Ann. Notice Elizabeth’s very different approach:

Hi Jeff!

I just wanted to reach out to you regarding your bad bottle of wine.  I apologize you didn't receive the response from our tasting room manager, but we would be happy to organize getting a new bottle to you!  What address do you prefer to receive shipments to?

And just so that we can continue to improve on our end-- out of curiosity, where and when was the bottle purchased?

Again, we apologize that the bottle was a disappointment.

Regards,

Elizabeth

I replied to Elizabeth’s email with my shipping address plus an explanation that I had purchased the bottle at the winery. She quickly responded to let me know she received my message and apologized once again. A new bottle arrived the very next day.

It’s too bad I didn’t encounter Elizabeth first. I had emailed to ask for a discount and she had responded by overnighting me a replacement bottle which feels like outstanding service to me. It’s the hassle in the middle I could have done without.

Learn from the pros by visualizing outstanding service

Last week, I wrote a post comparing customer service to professional baseball. I’d like to continue the sports metaphor by sharing an activity that customer service professionals can borrow from professional athletes.

You can prepare for big moments by visualizing yourself succeeding.

It all starts by clearly describing what success looks like. All organizations should have a clear definition of outstanding customer service. (If yours doesn’t, you are welcome to use this vision tool to create one.) The next step is taking this definition down to an individual level so that you can articulate how you personally contribute to outstanding service.

Finally, it’s time to create a drawing, collage, or other form of visual art that depicts you providing outstanding service. Don’t worry about the artistic merit of your visualization. What’s important is that you can see yourself succeeding.

Example #1

This example comes from a company that sells flowers and plants to florists. A customer service rep at one of the company’s wholesale locations focused on helping customers make their small businesses more successful. He used his product knowledge to help florists select items that would sell well in their stores. Here is his vision drawing:

Image courtesy of Mellano

Example #2

The second example comes from a research hospital. A customer service rep who worked in a department called research stores helped keep researchers supplied with the equipment necessary to conduct their experiments. His vision was to help researchers solve problems by sharing solutions he had learned from others. Here is his vision drawing:

Image courtesy of Gerald Smith

Create your own visualization

You can use this simple exercise to try this visualization technique yourself.

  1. Create your drawing
  2. Look at it at the start of each day for 30 days
  3. Try to make your vision actually happen

How customer service is like professional baseball

Baseball’s spring training is now underway so I thought I’d offer a simple analogy to describe how customer service is like professional baseball:

Many of us think we’re experts, but only a few of us truly are.

Both baseball and customer service are easy to understand at a fundamental level. Even the most casual baseball fan knows that it’s a good thing when your team scores a run, three strikes and you’re out, and the seventh inning stretch is when we all stand up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Customer service basics such as prompt, friendly, and attentive service are also universally known.

The trouble with having a little knowledge is it tends to make us susceptible to believing we have a lot of knowledge.

Sometimes referred to as the Dunning Kruger Effect, researchers have consistently found that the less knowledge or skill we have in a particular area, the more we overestimate our ability. This has proven true in arenas as diverse as grammar skills, humor, or multitasking.

You see this happening all the time with baseball fans. Go to a game and you'll hear no shortage of opinions about what’s wrong with the hometown team and what should be done to fix them. Yet none of these rabid fans get so much as an interview when their team is hiring a new coach.

The same holds true in customer service. Everyone has an opinion about what it takes to provide amazing customer service but we’d see more great examples and fewer service failures if customer service really was simple. 

In reality, customer service, like professional baseball, is hard. Very hard. We have to deal with faulty products, dumb policies, crabby co-workers, and domineering bosses. If we’re lucky enough to work at a company that is largely free of these problems, we still have to contend with a wide range of customer expectations and needs. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying it's not always easy.

There’s one more part of the Dunning Krueger Effect that is as true in customer service as it is in baseball. 

While nearly all of us overestimate our ability, the very best underestimate their ability. They never stop trying to improve. They worry that the competition has somehow figured out how to do it better. For them, good enough never is.

I hope this is the reason why I work hard every day to provide my clients with the best possible service.

Unfortunately, I also know this means that I really don't know what I'm talking about whenever I get a brilliant idea about how the Padres can win more games.