Advertising great service is like Al Capone's Vault

Beware of advertising great customer service.

Beware of advertising great customer service.

On April 21, 1986 an estimated 30 million people tuned in to watch Geraldo Rivera host The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults. At the time, it was the largest-ever audience for a television special.

A secret vault purportedly belonging to the infamous gangster Al Capone had been discovered at Chicago’s Lexington Hotel while the hotel was undergoing renovations. Rivera was on hand to oversee the opening of the vault.

Speculation about what the vault might contain ran wild. Would there be treasure?Historical artifacts? The bodies of Capone's victims?

A medical examiner was even on hand just in case human remains were found. The IRS was standing by too in hopes of recovering some of the $800,000 in taxes that Capone still owed.

What would they find?!

The great reveal finally occurred live on national television. All that was found was an empty bottle and some debris. The much-hyped show was a bust. 

Companies should be wary of creating their own Al Capone’s Vault when they advertise great customer service.

United Airlines launched its Flyer-Friendly advertising campaign in September. You can view the television spots on United’s website while a carefully edited stream of positive Twitter messages scrolls to the right. 

In reality, United is far from actually being Flyer-Friendly. Bruce Temkin wrote an outstanding analysis on his blog that showed United’s customer service rankings are still quite poor.  On a personal note, my most popular blog post of 2012 was a collection of text messages from my wife as she endured a comically inept delay while traveling on United.

United isn’t the only company to advertise amazing service that doesn’t exist. DHL ran an advertising campaign promoting their superior customer service despite lagging far behind their competitors. They ran these ads right up until they pulled out of the US market for express shipping because their poor customer service and operational woes left them unprofitable. 

Circuit City, Chase, and American Airlines have all tried similar tactics. “We have great service” is also an advertising staple for small companies. Rarely are these claims actually true.


A better way to spend your money

Advertising is generally directed at acquiring new customers. Companies with lousy service have to constantly solicit new customers because their current customers keep leaving.

These companies would be much better off redirecting that advertising money towards fixing their customer service. 

Here are a few reasons why:

It’s easier to sell to customers you already have. A recent blog post by Colin Shaw shared this staggering statistic: 

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% – Marketing Metrics.

A 2013 study commissioned by Zendesk found that service quality has a clear impact on customers’ buying behavior: 

  • 52 percent of customers increased their purchases due to good service
  • 59 percent of customers stopped buying altogether due to bad service

The same Zendesk report found that many customers are more than willing to advertise your customer service on your behalf:

  • 95 percent share bad experiences
  • 87 percent share good experiences
  • 58 percent share their more experiences more often today than five years ago

Today’s customers are pretty smart. They’ll quickly figure out if your advertising claims are true or false. Don’t be Al Capone’s Vault. 

How to get better service while Christmas shopping

A few simple tips can help you enjoy your holiday shopping.

A few simple tips can help you enjoy your holiday shopping.

The movies make Christmas shopping seem so delightful. Christmas carolers spread joy while everyone sings along and sips hot chocolate. Families cavort in their yuletide glee. Kris Kringle helpfully suggests that you can get better skates over at Gimbels. 

Reality is often a bit different.  

First, there are the crowds. As I noted in a post earlier this year, crowds are like kryptonite for customer service. There’s something about throngs of people that makes everyone a little less friendly. 

Crowds lead to lines, which sour our moods even more. I recently read an article in the New York Times that suggests people overestimate their time spent waiting in line by as much as 36 percent. Ugh.

There’s also the pressure to get the right gift at the right price right now. This pressure leaves us little time for hot chocolate-sipping, cavorting, or unscheduled trips over to Gimbels.

It’s a recipe for disaster, yet we do it every year. Will this year be any different?

Before you brave the masses, consider these tips that can help you actually enjoy your experience. 

 

Be the best customer

If Christmas shopping sucks, working retail during the holidays sucks a lot more. You may spend a couple of miserable hours at the mall dealing with rude shoppers who get in your way, but the people serving you spend all day dealing with the same folks. Then they get to stay late and clean up the mess, only to come back tomorrow and do it all over again. And again.

It’s natural for retail associates to feel a little downtrodden at this time of year.

Why not help spread some holiday cheer instead by being the best customer? This is the person who exercises just a little bit of patience. Who smiles and says, “Thank you.” Who sincerely wishes the people who serve them a happy holiday. 

This person is like a breath of fresh air to customer service employees. Employees will go out of their way to provide this person with better service, if for no other reason than to avoid all the miserable people competing for their attention. 

“I’ll be right with you, Ms. Crab. It will be just a moment, Mr. Grump. I’m helping another customer right now.” And that VIP customer will be you if you take a moment to spread some holiday cheer.

 

Don’t follow the crowd

Holiday shopping crowds are pretty predictable. Going shopping the day after Thanksgiving, Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and Friday after work are all for crowd-loving masochists. 

You can get much better customer service if you avoid the hordes. Get to stores when they first open and associates are fresh. Order online whenever you can. Do your after work shopping earlier in the week.

Try to avoid the crowds when you do venture out. Plan to park in the back of the lot rather than slowly stalk pedestrians in hopes of getting that perfect front row parking space. You’ll get in a few extra steps, which conveniently cancels out all of those delicious holiday treats. Plus, you’ll be a lot less creepy. 

Choose neighborhoods that are a little less crowded. There are three Best Buy stores within 15 minutes of my house, but one of them is always a lot less crowded than the other two. I go there to get the same stuff with much better service and far fewer hassles.

Don’t eat at the mall. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory is delicious. It’s just not wait-for-two-hours delicious. Avoid the crowds and fuel up before hitting the stores. (Save room for a hot chocolate so you have something to sip while you enjoy the caroling.)

 

Be reasonable

There’s something about the pressures of holiday shopping that makes customers unreasonable. 

Unreasonableness only amplifies negative experiences. It causes people to search for a scapegoat for their self-inflicted problems. People begin to dwell on anger and blame rather than accept what is and move on.

Yesterday, I had lunch with my wife and parents in a busy restaurant in Los Angeles. The fact that they were going to be busy should have surprised no one. They were located near the epicenter of the LA Auto Show, a Clippers game, and the American Music Awards. 

Even so, the restaurant was a little unprepared for the onslaught and their service was slower than it should have been. Orders took a long time to come out of the kitchen. More than a few orders were wrong. We noticed the manager intervening with a lot of guest issues.

One diner decided to handle things by storming into the kitchen and yelling at the cooks, her server, and anyone else within earshot. The manager finally got her to return to her table, where she huffed for a few more minutes before she and her dining companion stood up and walked out. 

The epic injustice, as overheard by everyone in the restaurant, was that she had been waiting 45 minutes for her food to arrive. This doesn’t qualify as great service and can’t really be defended. However, her very un-pragmatic approach amplified the problem. The net result was she never got her meal and she likely had to wait quite a bit longer to eat since every other restaurant in the neighborhood was just as crowded.

My table experienced similar slowness and an undercooked entree to boot. We handled things a bit differently by calmly and politely raising the issue with our server and then the manager when he happened to stop by our table. They took the offending entrée off our bill plus an additional 10 percent for our trouble. We spent the extra time enjoying each other’s company rather than dwelling on the restaurant’s service problems. 

Well, we did laugh about the lady who stormed into the kitchen and yelled at everyone. How can you not be amused by that?

 

Happy Holidays

The holidays should about giving as much as they are about receiving. This principle should be extended to service and civility. Give the people who serve you and your fellow customers good cheer and you'll likely get quite a bit more in return.

If you’d like even more holiday shopping tips, you can read my posts from 2012, 2011, and 2010.

Three essential steps to improving employee performance

Are your employees maximizing their potential?

Are your employees maximizing their potential?

Most of us are trying to improve employee performance at some level. Individual contributors try to do their jobs better. Leaders try to elevate their teams. Executives try to guide their entire organizations towards success. 

Most of us go about it the wrong way.

The wrong approach is an impatient one. It starts and ends with solutions. We spot a problem, swiftly generate ideas to solve it, and then quickly move on to the next thing. 

The challenge here is the problems never seem to go away. They keep happening over and over again. Or worse, the solution generates a new set of unanticipated problems. Nothing truly gets better.

How many idea-generating discussions have you been a part of in the past month? Now, count how many discussions you’ve had during the same time to talk about the results that were achieved. 

For most of us, the ratio of ideas to results is disconcerting.

This post is about the right way to improve performance. It’s a proven methodology that works time and time again so long as you have the discipline to follow it. 


Step 1: Clearly define the desired performance

You can’t deliberately improve performance if you can’t describe what success looks like. 

This is a huge problem in my field, customer service. A whopping 38 percent of companies have no definition of what outstanding service looks like. Even among the companies that have taken the time to define outstanding service, the number of employees who are actually familiar with the definition is often quite low. 

How can we get better at something if we don’t know what “better” is?!

This isn’t just a customer service issue. The same holds true for many aspects of workplace performance. There’s an alarming lack of clarity around what we really mean when we discuss hot topics such as teamwork, employee engagement, and leadership.

One of my favorite performance improvement questions is “What does success look like?” 

You need to have a clear answer to this question if you want to improve performance. Better yet, find a way to put numbers to it and make it measurable. You’re welcome to use my SMART goal worksheet  to help you out. (They don’t call ‘em SMART goals for nothing!)

Having a SMART goal can change the conversation from a very wishy-washy, “We want to get better at customer service” to a much clearer “We want to achieve an 85 percent rating on the December customer satisfaction survey.”


Step 2: Identify current performance

Where are we right now? Surprisingly, a lot of people struggle with this question. 

Current performance isn’t documented, measured, or clearly articulated. We just know we want to do better.

Can you imagine using your car’s GPS system or your smart phone’s navigation feature if it couldn’t find your current location? Any direction it sent you would essentially be random.

That’s often how people try to improve performance. They stick to generic solutions that may or may not be appropriate.

Often, that generic solution involves some form of cookie-cutter training.

I’m a big fan of training. I absolutely love it. I’m certified in it. My company has been recognized as a Champion of Learning by the American Society for Training and Development for four consecutive years. My customer service training program is really, really good.

And, as much as I love training, I hate to waste it.

So, before you jump to a generic solution, try to pin down current performance.

  • If you want to improve productivity, what’s your productivity now?
  • If you want to improve service, what do your customers say now?
  • If you want to employees to be more engaged, how engaged are they now?


Step 3: Analyze the gap

If you are at A, and you want to be at B, what's holding you back?

This is an amazingly clarifying question. Sometimes, the answer is related to knowledge or skills which can be fixed with training. In other cases, there’s something else that’s getting in the way.

If you want to find the obstacles inhibiting performance, try taking a walk. In Lean, it’s called “Gemba” or “go and see.” It involves observing the performance to look for obvious barriers to success.

I recently had a client who wanted to improve the sales closing rate in their inbound call center. It was 33 percent and the client wanted to raise the bar to 40 percent. My client initially asked me to conduct some training, but after spending five minutes in their call center a new solution quickly emerged.

The call center reps received their highest volume of calls in the morning. They didn’t have enough staff to handle the volume, so customers sometimes had to hold for as long as 30 minutes. This made the reps anxious to quickly get through each call so customers weren’t kept waiting.

The simplest solution was adding staff to help their peak volume. Within 30 days of changing their staffing levels, the closing ratio was up to 45 percent. The additional sales more than made up for the cost of hiring more people.


It ain’t always easy

I’m a big fan of quick wins. It makes me look like a genius when I can spend five minutes with a client and show them how to increase their closing ratio from 33 percent to 45 percent. If only it were that easy.

Believe me, results may vary.

Most of my clients are really good at what they do already. They're trying to take things to the next level, which means the solutions are usually a bit less obvious.

There is one constant. I start with the same three steps whenever I help a client improve employee performance. You can do the same thing now that you know these steps too.

5 Ways to Train Contact Center Agents Faster

Faster (and better) training is possible!

Faster (and better) training is possible!

Note: this post originally appeared on ICMI.com.

New hire training represents a significant investment for many contact centers with typical training times ranging from two to six weeks or even more. Fortunately, there are ways to train new hires faster and improve their on-the-job performance.

I shared one of my biggest secrets in an article I wrote for ICMI in June called “Boost performance with scenario-based training.”  Here are five more ways to speed up the training process without compromising results.

 

#1 Keep a trainee observation log

When I ran a call center training department, my trainers all kept a log of detailed notes on their new hires’ daily in-class performance. When a new hire struggled with a particular concept, the written notes helped the trainer clearly describe the specific challenge. For example, a note describing a new hire having trouble with upselling might read, “John frequently confused features and benefits while role-playing upsell offers.”

The detailed notes made it easy for the trainer to create a strategy to get the learner back on track. John’s trainer might decide to spend a few extra minutes with John reviewing the difference between features and benefits. A little extra practice or instruction was often all that was needed to for the concept to click. Without that extra intervention, many new hires would continue to struggle and fall farther and farther behind.

Keeping a written log of trainee observations had a few additional advantages in my training department. If a trainer called in sick, someone else could easily cover their class by reviewing the log to see where they left off. The log also helped trainers get a second opinion when they faced a particularly challenging situation. I had two shifts of trainers working in two locations, so the trainer could email me the written notes if I wasn’t able to personally observe the class.

 

#2 Group new hires for live calls

The transition from new hire training to taking live calls can be a challenging one. They know how to do the job, but they may not have the speed, accuracy, or confidence to handle a heavy load of calls without asking a lot of questions.

One way to speed up this transition is to group new hires together and have them take calls under the watchful eye of a dedicated coach. This allows the new hire to be productive by handling contacts from a normal queue while still having instant access to intensive coaching when needed. Generally, a few shifts in the “new hire section” is all that’s needed for an agent to become ready to join their assigned team.

 

#3 Conduct passport tours

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for new call center agents is that they don’t fully understand their company’s operations. A passport tour is a simple training technique that takes learners to various parts of the company so they can get a first-hand look at how everything fits together. New hires collect a signature on their “passport” for each stop along the tour.

This technique was a huge help when I worked for a catalog company. New hires would tour our merchandising department so they could touch and feel our products. They visited the fulfillment center so they could see how orders were picked, packed, and shipped. They visited the returns department so they could see how and why merchandise came back to us. All of this first-hand knowledge helped new hires quickly grasp how everything fit together.

Some companies have far-flung operations, but you can easily create a virtual passport tour by using a smart phone to shoot short video tours of key operations. You can also use web-conferencing technology like GoTo Meeting or Adobe Connect to have people from remote operations provide your new hires with a guest lecture.

 

#4 Have new hires score their own calls

Many contact centers use their quality assurance form as a template for new hire training. This makes sense since you want to train agents to the same standards you use to evaluate a successful call.

You can take this a step further by having new hires score their own calls. These could be either live calls or recorded role-plays. Self-scoring invites agents to view their performance more objectively and helps them learn to analyze their own performance so they can quickly make adjustments.

 

#5 Encourage social learning

Many contact centers have social learning tools such as chat, blogs, and wikis that allow agents to share knowledge with each other. In some contact centers, these tools can mean the difference between solving a problem in five minutes or thirty minutes. Unfortunately, these resources can be underutilized if agents don’t know how to use them or aren’t even aware they exist.

You can encourage the use of social learning by designing training exercises that require new hires to make use of these tools to solve complex problems. They’ll learn the answers to difficult challenges, but more broadly, they’ll understand how to use those tools to quickly solve similar problems in the future.

Improve your service instincts with this simple technique

Honing your instincts can help you choose the right path. 

Honing your instincts can help you choose the right path. 

Anyone can say they’re good at service. 

It’s easy to describe what we would do in a hypothetical situation. What really counts is what we actually do in the moment of truth when we’re serving a customer.

It’s in that moment that customer service is largely instinctive.

Our personalities, training, and experience combine to guide our instinctive behaviors while serving customers. We don’t pause to recall five step acronyms for handling upset customers; we just try to make the person feel better. We don’t stop to ponder the various communication components that enhance our likeability; we attempt to be likeable. We don’t browse through our mental database of hero-worthy actions; we simply seize the moment to go the extra mile.

These instincts serve us well when they guide us in the right direction. They can also be a liability when we instinctively make a wrong turn. 

Research from my book, Service Failure, reveals that our instincts often do push us in the wrong direction.  Here are a few examples:

 

Changing instinctive behavior

It’s hard to alter our instincts in the moment when there’s imminent pressure to perform. However, we can influence our instincts before or after experiencing a moment of truth.

An experiential learning model developed by David Kolb and Ronald Fry provides a simple way to hone our customer service instincts.

kolb.png


All of us have experience to draw from. It’s the addition of the three other steps that inspires learning.

  1. Reflect upon what went well and what didn’t in your experience.
  2. Decide what to do differently the next time you encounter a similar situation.
  3. Experiment with your new approach.

This cycle leads back to experience which gives you an opportunity to start the process all over again.

A client recently asked me for some advice on getting their frontline employees to stop saying “No problem” in place of “you’re welcome.” In the midst of discussing this challenge, a member of my client’s management team caught herself reflexively saying “No problem” in response to a co-worker. It was then she realized this was an instinctive response for her too.

Here’s how I used the experiential learning model to advise my client:

  1. Reflect on the reasons you should avoid saying “No problem.”
  2. Decide what you’ll say instead the next time a customer says “Thank you.”
  3. Experiment with your new phrase at the new opportunity.

That’s it. Setting the intention to try something different can help guide our instincts the next time a customer thanks us.

 

A Note for Leaders

If you are a manager or supervisor, you can use this experiential learning model to help your employees hone their customer service instincts. There’s just one caveat:

Avoid telling employees what to do.

It’s much harder to change instinctive behavior if you just tell people what to do. That’s because telling someone to do something doesn’t require their brain to process the information. You can get much faster results by playing the role of a coach or guide when using this model.

Here’s how:

  1. Ask your employee to reflect on their experience.
  2. Help your employee decide what to do differently in the future.
  3. Encourage your employee to experiment with their new idea.

As a leader, it’s important to add a fourth step and follow-up with employees to understand their experience when trying a new approach.

Contact Center Conference Fall 2013 Re-cap

The Fall 2013 Contact Center Conference was a hit.

The Fall 2013 Contact Center Conference was a hit.

 The Fall 2013 Contact Center Conference was in Phoenix, AZ this week. Phoenix is a great city to visit and the weather was perfect. 

There are a lot of contact center conferences throughout the year so it’s impossible to attend them all. And, it can be tough to keep track of all the great content even if you do attend. That’s why I put together this short re-cap.

 

Conference Overview

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

 

Resources

Here are some additional resources that you can use to get even more content and perspectives from the conference.


Conference Highlights

It's impossible to attend all the sessions. There were even a few great ones scheduled at the same time I was scheduled to present The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture. However, there were three sessions that really stood out for me:

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff’s session on building a business case for multi-channel customer service. Her session took us through seven steps, but I was really impressed that step one was social listening. She suggested that businesses start by finding what their customers are saying about them on social media and where they are saying it. This in turn can provide business intelligence that can reduce contact volume, improve products, and ultimately win more business. I also found a nice YouTube video where Petouhoff explains the nuts and bolts of calculating the ROI of providing customer service via social media. 

Bruce Belfiore’s session on what agents really think. Belfiore is the CEO of Benchmark Portal, a company that specializes in benchmarking call centers.  He presented the results of a research study to find out what contact center agents are really thinking. Overall, it seemed that agents are fairly satisfied, but the survey did identify a few areas for improvement. Chief among them are the transition from training to the call center floor, providing realistic job previews during the hiring process, and senior leadership inspiring trust.

Fred Van Bennekom’s session on customer service surveys. Van Bennekom shared many examples of ways that surveys can be deliberately or inadvertently manipulated to provide false data. The biggest problem revealed is that companies get fixated on achieving a certain score rather than using the survey to drive continuous improvement. When that happens, companies start finding creative ways to get customers to give a positive rating. Van Bennekom outlined an excellent example on his blog.

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

New Training Video: Leading a Customer-centric Culture

I’m excited to announce my new customer service training video on Lynda.com. If you aren’t familiar with Lynda.com, it’s a fabulous subscription-based library that’s full of video training courses on wide range of topics.

My course is called Leading a Cutomer-centric Culture. It’s a short overview of the three steps required to build a customer-focused culture. The class is based on my service offering, The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture.

You can view the first video in the course below or on the Lynda.com website.

A subscription is required to view the entire class, but they offer a 10-day free trial so you can check it out. The free trail gives you unlimited access to Lynda.com’s entire library! 

7-day free trial

The Biggest Myth in Customer Service

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This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Blog. You can also read my latest Salesforce blog post, "The Hidden Influence of Excellent Customer Service."

There are a lot of myths in customer service. There's the notion that the Net Promoter Score is only about asking one question (it’s not). There’s the popular saying that the customer is always right (they aren’t). There’s even an unspoken feeling that no complaints mean things are going well (not necessarily).

Dive a little deeper and you’ll find it easy to debunk these myths. In fact, that last myth about complaints was neatly debunked in a recent post on the Salesforce blog.

There’s still one myth that persists and it’s the biggest one of all: customer service is easy.

It seems like nearly everyone believes this. Customers certainly do. They’re shocked when things go wrong, but never consider how they may have contributed to the problem. Every service failure story ever told starts with the assumption that the customer was pleasant, reasonable, and should have been easy to serve. I’m not saying customers are entirely to blame for poor service, but let’s not let them off the hook when they’re rude, unreasonable, or make an error.

Executives believe service is easy. They classically overrate their company’s ability in this area. A famous 2006 Bain study revealed that 80 percent of executives felt their companies delivered outstanding customer service. Only 8 percent of their customers agreed. (View report PDF)

Managers ascribe to this myth, too. Many fail to define great service, provide adequate training, or even bother to discuss service with their employees on a regular basis. They are so consumed with putting out fires and keeping up with an avalanche of administration that proactively developing a customer-focused team becomes a low priority.

Customer service consultants perpetuate this myth by doling out pithy advice that all sounds very common sense. They write blog posts on how to deal with angry customers in five easy steps while forgetting what it actually feels like to be yelled at by a total stranger. It seems oddly reasonable to this group that a customer service rep would absorb a profanity-laced tirade and then pull a card out of their wallet to remember the S.M.I.L.E. procedure for handling angry customers.

Many employees have bought into this myth too. There’s a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect where the less knowledgeable or skilled you are at something, the more you overrate your ability. This holds true in customer service, where the worst performers will often loudly proclaim they’re the best. 

This effect is illustrated by a simple experiment I’ve repeated many times. I ask employees to rate their customer service ability on a scale of 1 – 5, with 5 being best. The average score is 4. Then, I ask them to rate the team’s customer service ability on the same scale. The average score is a 3. In other words, customer service employees consistently think they’re really good even though some of them are not.

There’s something else about the Dunning-Kruger effect that’s interesting. Everybody overestimates their ability except for one group: the very best. The best underestimate their ability. The best customer service employees never give themselves a 5 when I do my little rating experiment because they think there’s room for improvement.

That’s the secret shared by only the very best customer service employees, leaders, and companies. They know that customer service isn’t easy at all. It’s hard. They constantly worry whether they’ll be good enough and continuously try to get better.

Here are some things you’ll never hear a customer service champion say:

  • “We just hired a few good people and that was it.”
  • “All we did was send everyone to a two hour training class.”
  • “Our entire initiative consisted of hanging up a banner with this new slogan.”

Instead, you’ll hear:

  • “It starts with hiring good people.”
  • “Training is important, but we constantly reinforce that same message.”
  • “The new slogan summarizes how we go about our business every day.”

I recently asked a long-time client for advice I could share with new clients. They had improved their Net Promoter Score from 23 to 60 over a three year period. It was an impressive result and I wanted some of my new clients to be able to learn from their experience.

Without hesitation, my client said, “Tell them it’s a long process.”

That was it. I had been working with this client for three years and they still weren’t satisfied. Their exceptional improvement, glowing reputation, and stellar business results were a sign of excellent progress but not a final destination. They still worried about getting better. There was a long list of challenges to overcome and improvements to be made.

My client understood that customer service isn’t easy. It takes a real commitment.

Communicate Better Blog Coffee & Customer Service Hangout

Image source: Flickr / Pete Simon

Image source: Flickr / Pete Simon

Last Friday, I participated in a fun “Coffee & Customer Service” Google Hangout with Jeremy Watkin and Jenny Dempsey from the Communicate Better Blog. It was a fun and informal video chat where we discussed my book, Service Failure, and took a few questions from their blog readers. 

The Hangout was originally posted on the Communicate Better Blog. The Hangout is also embedded below.

Additional Resources

Below are some additional resources that correspond to some of the topics we covered.

Yes, I like wine. We talked a little bit about wine. The book I mentioned is Judgment of Paris, the true story of a 1976 wine tasting where French judges picked two Napa Valley wines ahead of some of the best wines from France. Many people might be more familiar with the 2009 movie Bottle Shock, although the Hollywood version is a little fictionalized. Finally, my wife and I really do have a wine blog called Share the Bottle.

 

Why do organizations still struggle in consistently delivering better service? (asked by Flavio Martins)

One reason – only 62 percent of companies have created a clear definition of outstanding customer service.

 

What are some best practices for aligning people from the top level to the front lines around a customer service mission? (asked by  Flavio Martins)

A great starting point is my customer service alignment assessment.

 

Curious as to how companies that utilize franchising model can ensure consistent and quality customer service. (asked by Kemetia Foley)

I immediately thought of Time to Make the Donuts, a terrific book written by William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin Donuts.

 

Jenny Dempsey is very committed to customer service. 

During the webinar, we talked about the concept of an attitude anchor that can help you stay in a good mood or fix your mood when you find yourself in a bad one.

During our conversation, Jess Pierson made this suggestion on Twitter:

There were a few Tweets back and forth joking about the concept until Monday morning, when Jenny Dempsey shared this:

Now, that’s commitment!

Day 3 Re-cap: ICMI’s 2013 Call Center Demo & Conference

This week, I’m attending ICMI’s Call Center Demo and Conference in Atlanta, GA. It can be tough to keep track of everything going on at a conference, so I’m posting daily blog updates to share my own perspective. Today's post re-caps the third and final day. You can also read my re-cap of days 1 and 2.

 

Conference Overview

Here are some links you can use to familiarize yourself with the conference:

 

Resources

You can also follow the conference via the Twitter backchannel or ICMI’s own updates:


Day 3: Wednesday, October 23

The morning kicked off with Sarah Stealy Reed sharing some of ICMI’s call center research. Here are a few highlights:

  • The average call center requires 5 different applications to serve customers
  • Only 21.1 percent are using a simplified desktop
  • 60 percent support social (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), 32 percent support chat

ICMI has a lot of great research reports on their website. You can also tell them what content you are interested in seeing by taking their Community Interest Survey, open now through October 28. 

Sarah also invited call center professionals to contribute content to ICMI so they can share their best practices and ideas with their peers. Check out ICMI’s editorial calendar to learn more and submit your ideas.

Chip R. Bell was next up to deliver the morning keynote. He was funny, entertaining, and very informative. He was sharing insights from his book, Wired and Dangerous, which is available on Amazon.com if you didn’t pick up a copy at the conference.

There were a lot of great Tweets summarizing Chip’s key points. Here’s one that nicely sums up his presentation:

The rest of the day featured some outstanding breakout sessions plus plenty of networking. 

My favorite was on serving customers via emerging channels. Sarah Stealey Reed moderated a panel discussion with Ian Hunter of USAN, Kim Martin of Voxeo, Chad McDaniel of Execs in the Know, and Jason Wolcott of Digital Roots. Erica Strother live blogged from the session.

The session also generated quite a few Tweets:


Now what?

The whole point of going to a conference is to take back new ideas and contacts that can help you do even better. What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?