Three terrific thought leader panels from ACCE 2013

ICMI's ACCE 2013 conference for call center professionals was a customer service extravaganza and a terrific learning experience (see my re-cap here). 

One of the best features of the conference was the Thought Leaders Discussion Table. It consisted of a rotating group of panelists who engaged in fifteen minute, freeform discussions on a variety of call center topics ranging from technology to social media. 

I was fortunate enough to moderate the first three panels:

Panel #1
Panelists included Tiffany LaReau of Human Numbers, Todd Hixon of Intuit, and Bob Furniss of Bluewolf. They kicked things off right with a great discussion on social media.

 

Click here if you can't see the video.

Panel #2
Panelists included Katy Wild of Freeman, Ben Paganelli of VIA Unlimited, and Lou Paduto of Satori Software. Incidentally, Lou and I will be co-facilitating a webinar on reducing call center stress on Thursday, June 20.

Click here if you can't see the video.

Panel #3
Panelists included Clare Wenham of New Voice Media, Tristan Barnum of Telcentris, Ruben Moffett of TantaComm, and Dave Bethers of TCN. And yes, astute readers will recognized that a story from Clare Wenham helped inspire my post on how companies are training customers to complain via Twitter.

Click here if you can't see the video.

How a corporate policy crushed service

We often concentrate on the individuals serving us when we think about service quality. But what happens when dumb corporate policies hinder employees’ ability to serve?

This is one of those stories. 

My wife, Sally, recently bought a Tumi briefcase. They’re more expensive than typical bags, but they have a reputation for outstanding quality.

Unfortunately, this bag didn’t live up to that reputation as a zipper pull tore off after just a few weeks.

Sally brought her bag back to the Tumi store so it could be repaired under warranty. She was told it could take up to four weeks because they had to ship the bag back to their repair center in New York.

Losing her briefcase for a month wasn’t an option, so Sally spoke to the store manager in hopes of finding a more acceptable alternative.

Could they give her a loaner bag? No.
Could they give her a new bag? No.
Could Sally get the bag repaired locally and send Tumi the bill? No.

These policies were clearly created by a spreadsheet jockey. They appeared to be the model of efficiency from an aggregate, corporate point of view while completely missing how nonsensical they were in this type of situation.

The store manager was very friendly and I think she really wanted to help. But she was also determined to adhere to the corporate repair policy.

Sticking to these policies cost Tumi a few things:

  • Sally won’t buy a Tumi product again.
  • I was in the market for a new suitcase but ruled out Tumi too.
  • Negative word of mouth.

She eventually left the store without getting her bag fixed. The broken zipper pull was an annoying reminder of Tumi’s poor service every time she traveled.

Sally took her bag to Index Urban in San Diego last Saturday to get repaired. She knew she’d have to pay for the service, but it was worth it to get her bag back in just a couple of days.  I went with her because I still needed a new suitcase.

John, the owner, greeted us when we came in. He wrote up a repair bill for Sally’s bag and then helped me pick out a new suitcase. I went with a Briggs & Riley. They’re expensive like Tumi’s, but unlike Tumi they come with a real lifetime guarantee. And, I know I can take it back to Index Urban if anything does happen because they do repairs onsite.

We were happy customers at this point, but John sweetened the deal by throwing in monogrammed luggage tags for both of us.

The repair technician was off until Monday and John promised to give Sally a call once the technician had a chance to look at the bag. He surprised her with a call early Monday afternoon letting her know the bag had already been repaired. Even better was John waived the repair fee because he felt bad about our experience with Tumi!

Unlike the Tumi store manager, John wasn’t constrained by inflexible corporate policies because he was also the owner. Here’s how that paid off:

  • I bought a suitcase.
  • All of our future luggage purchases will come from Index Urban.
  • Positive word of mouth.

We can’t all be the owner, but I wonder how much better service would be if more employees were empowered to act like John? I do know that Tumi would still have two customers.

Connecting rapport to five star service

Does rapport really matter in customer service?

I’m not talking about fake, going through the motions rapport. A wooden greeting at a retail store doesn’t quality. Neither does a robotic contact center agent reading scripted pleasantries.

I’m talking about genuine, “Hey, I like this person,” rapport.

There’s an objective way to find out. By combing through customer service surveys and online reviews, I was able to find proof that rapport influences customer’s perception in a positive way.

What is rapport in customer service?

The first challenge was defining rapport.

According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, rapport is a “relation marked by harmony, conformity, accord, or affinity.” In a customer service context, this involves connecting with customers in a way that causes them to see you as a real, likeable person.

Terms like rapport can be a bit squishy, making it hard to observe, quantify, and even train. One way to operationalize the definition of rapport is to count how often people mention someone by name in the comments section of your customer service survey.

I put that theory to the test.

Rapport improves customer perceptions

I started noticing a very specific trend around names while helping a client analyze their customer satisfaction data. Their survey had an overall satisfaction question where customers were asked to rate their service on a three-point scale:

  1. Below Expectations

  2. At Expectations

  3. Above Expectations

A definite pattern emerged when I separated the comments section by rating.

Individual employees were mentioned by name much more frequently when customers gave their service an “Above Expectations” score. Here’s the distribution for one of the groups I worked with:

clientnamedreviews.png

A much higher percentage of positive reviews mentioned an employee by name.

Another trend stood out. When customers mentioned an employee by name in a negative review, the employee was often mentioned as a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak encounter.

“Denise is always so nice and helpful,” said one negative review. The customer’s gripes were about wait times and procedures, yet they still appreciated Denise’s efforts to make things better.

Just for fun, I looked for other places to see if ratings were affected by whether customer’s knew employees by name.

The Yelp reviews for my favorite Italian restaurant, Antica Trattoria, showed a similar trend. Their overall rating is 4.0 stars with slightly more than half the reviews giving 5 stars.

However, you’ll see a familiar pattern if you look at the reviews that mentioned an Antica Trattoria employee by name:

anticayelpreviews.png

My friends at Zendesk, a leading customer service software provider, provided analyzed nearly 2,000 customer surveys to see if this trend held true for other companies. It did!

Look at the difference when a survey mentions an employee by name in the comments, versus surveys that do not.

Barriers to Rapport

If rapport is highly correlated to outstanding service, why doesn’t it happen more often? One explanation might be that customer service professionals face a number of barriers that can make rapport-building difficult.

  1. Speed. It’s hard to build rapport when employees are in a hurry.

  2. Skill. Many people simply don’t know how to build rapport with customers.

  3. Sales. It’s really hard to like an overly aggressive salesperson.

  4. Task-focus. Rapport takes a hit when tasks are prioritized over service.

  5. Customers. Some customers are jerks and resist rapport.

There’s also a concept called emotional labor. It takes effort to be nice to people. For some customer service reps, this is exhausting.

How to Build Rapport

You’ll have to remove these barriers if you want your employees to build more rapport with customers. Here are three simple steps to help your employees become rapport-building champions.

Step 1: Look at the Data

Review your customer satsifaction data to see how rapport might be impacting service quality. Do you see evidence of greater rapport in your top box survey scores? Are some employees consistently mentioned in customer service surveys while others are not?

Step 2: Observe

You can learn a lot by assessing the current situation before doing any tinkering. Watch your employees serve customers. Can you observe any of the barriers to rapport mentioned above?

Step 3: Engage the Team

Share your observations with your employees and ask them to help you find solutions. You might be surprised at how many good ideas your team can come up with. You’ll also notice they are more like to implement ideas that are their own.

In many cases, employees just need a little bit of training to help become more adept at building rapport. One of my favorite exercises is called the five question technique.

This short video from my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning explains how the technique works:

Have companies defined outstanding customer service?

In his famous book, Built to Last, Jim Collins observed that companies that endure over a long period of time possess “cult-like cultures.” This is certainly true in customer service. Think of the companies best known for outstanding customer service and you’ll almost certainly find a strong, customer-focused culture.

These cultures are anchored by a clear definition of what outstanding customer service should look like. It gives employees, managers, and executives clear direction when making decisions that impact customers. Without a shared definition, it is very difficult for companies to provide consistent service since everyone has their own idea of what's best.

I recently conducted a survey to discover whether companies have created their own unique definition of outstanding customer service. 

Is outstanding service clearly defined?

Only 62 percent of respondents were positive that their organizations have defined outstanding customer service.

Has your organization created its own definition of outstanding customer service?These results indicate employees at a large number of companies may not have clarity when it comes to how they should treat their customers. 

Does company size matter?

Yes. The larger the company, the more likely it is that outstanding service has been clearly defined. The chart below shows the responses from small, medium, and large companies (based on number of employees).

Percentage of companies that have defined outstanding service, arranged by number of employees.

What do you think is the explanation for such a big gap between small and large employers?

Are employees aware of the definition?

Respondents that indicated their company had defined outstanding service were asked to estimate their employees' awareness of this definition on scale of 1 - 5. The responses indicate awareness is generally high when a shared definition exists. There wasn’t any variation among companies of different sizes so I'm showing the aggregrate data.

If your company has a definition of outstanding service, how aware are your employees?

This question was tricky because respondents were asked to estimate their employees’ awareness of their company’s definition of outstanding service. Do you think the results would be different if we actually quizzed employees in each of these companies?

In my own experience, and this is purely anecdotal, leaders tend to overestimate how well their employees know the company's definition of outstanding service. 

Conclusions

If your company doesn't yet have a clear definition of outstanding customer service, I suggest you create one right away. You can use my customer service vision worksheet if you're not sure where to begin.

If your company does have a clear definition of outstanding customer service, you've taken the first step on the journey to a customer-focused culture. You can use this guide to keep your company moving in the right direction.

ASTD 2013 ICE Conference Re-cap

I attended the ASTD 2013 International Conference & Exposition in Dallas, Texas last week. This is the premier conference for Training and Development professionals with an estimated 9,000 people in attendance. This conference is always important to me since training is at the core of what I do to help clients improve customer service.

Attending a conference like this can feel like drinking from a fire hose so I’ve put together a summary of my top take-aways from the conference.

Conference Overview
You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference.

Another great resource is a collection of David Kelley’s curated resources from the ASTD 2013 Backchannel. 

Conference Themes
These are the top three themes I took away from the conference.

Theme #1: Where's the Performance?
The whole point of training should be to help people perform their jobs better. This topic was conspicuously lacking at the conference.

The conference was certainly rich in content. There were wonderful sessions, keynotes, and vendors sharing the latest trends in learning. The place was abuzz with technology. You had to literally run and hide if you wanted to avoid networking with amazing people.

The missing piece was why any of this should matter. How can we do a better job of helping the employees we serve improve their performance?

Theme #2: Problem-centered Learning
Most training courses today are built around a specific collection of content. A problem-centered learning approach builds training around a specific problem. The content is only introduced (or discovered by participants) as they need it to help solve a problem. 

For example, let’s say you wanted to learn about geography. You could take a course that taught you all sorts of geographic facts. Or, you could try playing a round of GeoGuessr where you are shown a random location and must try to locate it on a world map. The game-based approach challenges you to develop your geography skills by examining clues in the picture to narrow down the location. (Warning: this game is addictive, especially if you try to beat my high score of 27,151.)

This theme promised to move us closer to performance if we can build training around real work challenges. For example, a customer service training program could be designed around around finding ways to improve customer satisfaction ratings. This could make the training much more useful than simply providing a set of generic customer service skills.

Theme #3: Technology
ASTD released its newly updated competency model in 2013. One of the biggest changes was the introduction of Learning Technologies as an area of expertise for the Training & Development Profession. This recognizes the growing influence of technology in how we deliver training and support our employees’ performance.

Two big technology themes at the conference were social and mobile learning. Social learning is a broad term, but at the conference it primarily meant using social technology like Twitter to help foster learning. Mobile referred to learning from a mobile device such as a phone or tablet. In many ways, conference attendees were doing both since we could access most of the session materials from a mobile application and many of us were exchanging ideas and resources via Twitter throughout the conference.

Another area where I see technology growing is the use of webinars for training. Most webinars today are delivered in a boring death-by-lecture format, but they can actually be highly engaging and interactive if facilitated correctly.

For example, I recently facilitated a customer service training program entirely via webinar for a call center client. The highly interactive class was split into one-hour sessions so participants could apply what they learned before focusing on a new skill. The sessions were highly rated and, more importantly, they used what they learned to improve customer service.

If you attended the conference, or tuned in via Twitter, what were your take-aways?

Three tools that make training more effective

So you've decided to send your employees to training. Maybe it's customer service training, or a time management workshop, or perhaps it's a life-changing transformational leadership development experience.

Whatever it is, you are probably about to waste a lot of time and money.

The goal of training should be to help people improve performance. Many training programs focus instead on delivering information. In many cases, it may not even be the right information.

Fortunately, a some simple adjustments can change all this. I've assembled a few of my favorite tools to help your next training event deliver results.

Learning Objectives Worksheet
Many training programs fail to achieve their goals because, well, there are no goals. You can fix this by writing goals that target the specific performance areas you are trying to improve. This worksheet uses the classic A-B-C-D model:

  • Audience: Who is being trained?
  • Behavior: What will they be able to do?
  • Condition: Under what conditions will do it?
  • Degree: How well must they do it?

Download the Worksheet

Workshop Planner
Preparation and follow-up are the keys to a successful training program. This tool helps you perform a simple needs analysis and then create an action plan to maximize the training's impact. And, it's all done on one page.

Download the Worksheet

Employee Development Worksheet
Many Individual Development Plans (IDPs) fall short because they focus on activities rather than results. It really doesn't matter how many books you read or conferences you attend or training classes sign up for. What matters is whether you can use those books, conferences, and training classes to improve performance.

The employee development worksheet helps create a targeted IDP that gets results. 

Download the Worksheet

ACCE 2013 Conference Re-cap

I attended ICMI's ACCE 2013 conference in Seattle, WA this week. This was the 10th anniversary edition of the premier global gathering for contact center professionals.

If you are like me, you find it hard to keep track of all the brilliant ideas, inspiring speakers, and helpful contacts you come across at a conference like this. And, it's sometimes just too difficult to choose between going to one session or another! 

With this in mind, I’ve put together a brief re-cap of some of the conference highlights.

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

I owe a special note of thanks to Voiance Language Services for giving out copies of my book, Service Failure. They made me feel like a star. When people asked how to get my book I was able to send them over to Voiance’s booth in the expo hall!

Conference Themes
Three themes really stood out for me.

Theme #1: Multi-channel customer engagement
Contact centers are interacting with customers in more ways than ever before. We’ve moved beyond phone and email to engage customers with chat, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, text, mobile, and other means. Some customer conversations span multiple channels which makes keeping track of everything even more challenging.

Kathy Hutchens from Sharp Rees-Stealy and David McCann from Varolii co-presented an interesting session on this topic. They talked about ways that Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Centers engaged customers through multiple channels by learning and acting upon customer preferences. Hutchens gave the example that picking the right channel for appointment reminder notices reduced appointment no-shows by 25 percent.

Many participants told me their companies are still struggling to determine who owns some of these channels. I think this Tweet may have said it best:

Theme #2: Technology + People = Success
Technology was a hot topic. It dominated the exhibit hall. Many participants were in search of new technology solutions for their contact centers. It was even a hot topic on the call center tours.

The most successful uses of technology also accounted for the people using it. For example, technology is making it easier than ever before for contact centers to utilize home-based agents. I toured the Starbucks call center where I learned some of their best people practices for making home-based agents successful.

The tour featured a coffee tasting hosted by some of the contact center employees (known as Partners as Starbucks). One of our hosts was a home-based agent who participated via conference call. Their home-based agents regularly participated in these types of events to maintain their connection to the team.

Theme #3: Resource Constraints
Many contact centers don’t have a lot of resources. This puts a lot of technological solutions out of reach, but they still have to find a way to get the job down.

One example came from Tamara Taylor and Dorian Anid at Abbot Vascular. They were part of a session on creative solutions at small call centers. Taylor and Anid used Microsoft Access to create their own CRM system after their request to buy a technology solution was denied. Their homemade system has helped reps work more effectively, but it is also enabling Taylor and Anid to gather data to make a business case for a more robust solution.

I also participated in a roundtable discussion about gathering voice of the customer feedback. The discussion was hosted by Josh Chapman from Cars.com. Chapman’s company employs a lot of sophisticated tools and third-party research firms to gather useful VOC data. This makes sense for Cars.com, but what about a small contact center with no budget for VOC? The roundtable participants discussed a simple solution where the contact center could leverage their company’s existing Survey Monkey account to start a rudimentary VOC program at no cost. It was a small step, but would still yield data they could use to improve customer satisfaction.

On a side note, Josh Chapman was one of several people honored at ICMI’s Global Call Center Awards Dinner. He won the Customer Service Business Leader of the year award and created a memorable moment where his wife tuned into the ceremony via Facetime to see his acceptance speech. 

If you attended, what were your biggest take-aways?

Speed kills first contact resolution

Nobody likes having to contact customer service for help resolving a problem. It’s doubly aggravating to contact them a second time because the issue wasn’t fixed. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it is to contact customer service 16 times on one issue.

First Contact Resolution, or FCR, measures the percentage of customer problems that are resolved on the very first contact. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a high FCR rate is a good idea. Customers are happier and companies are able to work more efficiently.

Surprisingly the metric has been slow to catch on. One factor holding back its adoption is speed.

A recent poll conducted by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) found that FCR ranked fifth among metrics shared with frontline call center employees. Two speed-based metrics and another efficiency-based metric ranked ahead of it.

Source: ICMI

The two most popular metrics for front line employees tell call center agents when to work faster. Many reps will speed up their interactions when there are a lot of calls in queue. This in turn allows them to improve service levels (the percentage of calls answered within a set amount of time).

Schedule adherence is an efficiency metric. It calculates the degree to which call center agents are working their assigned schedule. Agents may be less likely to spend time fixing a difficult problem if they feel pressured to immediately take the next incoming call.

The impulse to work faster can hurt FCR. Employees take short cuts, speed up their interactions, and try to multitask their way through an avalanche of work. All of this can make it harder to spot the important details that are the difference between First Contact Resolution and Endless Back-and-Forth. You can see an example of this in my breakdown of an email service failure.

I recently attended the Contact Center Conference & Expo where FCR was one of the hot topics. However, I was only talked to a few people who were actually measuring FCR in their contact center.

One of those people was Kathie Gerrard from MTS Allstream, a business communications provider in Canada. Gerrard told me that their FCR initiative really took off when they stopped emphasizing another speed-related metric, Average Handle Time (AHT).

 “A few years ago, we identified FCR as a key performance indicator and began to set improvement targets. Although we’ve seen improvements in our FCR results, we’ve found that monitoring average handle times contradicts FCR. AHT metrics encourage reps to shorten the length of the call instead of focusing on resolving the customer’s issues.”

MTS Allstream still tracked AHT behind the scenes even after they stopped emphasizing it with their reps. Gerrard told me that they haven’t seen a significant increase in AHT since shifting their focus to FCR. Her observations suggest that the extra time required to resolve a customers’ problem completely is often negligible. It’s the pressure to wrap things up quickly that actually causes the service failure.

Gerrard also told me MTS Allstream had widespread executive support for their FCR initiative. This isn't always the case. Another call center manager I spoke to at the Contact Center Conference & Expo told me his executives resisted moving to FCR because they had invested so much money in technology that measured speed and efficiency. They understood and felt comfortable with metrics like calls in queue and average handle time.

How do you get your executives on board? Show them the money. Here are a few ways that FCR can lead to financial results.

  • Reduce Waste: 23 percent of the average call center's budget goes to repeat calls. (Source: SQM Group)

  • Increase Revenue: 66 percent of customers will spend more for excellent customer service. (Source: American Express)

  • Retain Customers: 19 percent of customers are at risk of leaving if their problem isn't resolved on the first call. (Source: SQM Group)

Slowing down to speed up is counter-intuitive, but the numbers don't lie. Speed can kill first contact resolution.