Book Review: What Great Brands Do

Buy on Amazon

Denise Lee Yohn’s new book isn’t just for marketing people. 

The central message of What Great Brands Do is that developing a well-respected brand goes way beyond marketing. A strong brand serves as a central theme for how the entire business is run.

Yohn lays out seven key principles in her book:

• Great brands start inside
• Great brands avoid selling products
• Great brands ignore trends
• Great brands don’t chase customers
• Great brands sweat the small stuff
• Great brands commit and stay committed
• Great brands never have to “give back”

I found myself taking pages of notes as I read the book. Perhaps it was because many of Yohn’s branding philosophies align squarely with my own thinking for customer service. It may also be her engaging writing style that uses a blend of real-life examples and practical exercises to help the reader understand each concept.

What's the connection to customer service?

Customer service is ultimately part of a company's brand. What a company promises must ultimately match the service its customers receive for a brand to be authentic. As I pointed out in a recent blog post, you can't advertise your way to great service.

This book is highly recommended for any business leader. It’s available in hardcover and e-book format from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Five Tips to Attend a Conference Like a Pro

Two of my worlds will be at conferences next week.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is holding their International Conference and Exposition in Washington, DC May 4 - 7. ICMI's Contact Center Expo & Conference will be in San Diego May 6 - 9.

Attending a conference can be an overwhelming experience. Four years ago, I wrote a post outlining five steps to attending a conference. My favorite? Step 1: set goals so you can focus on finding what you're looking for.

Here are five new tips to help you maximize your experience.

Tip 1: Set goals

Ok, this is a repeat from my last list. It's just that it's the best way to maximize your experience.

• What problems can attending this conference help you solve?
• What speakers or attendees do you want to meet?
• What would make this conference easy to justify to your boss?

Failing to set goals for a conference is like going to a buffet and filling up on bread because it was the first thing you saw and there was lots of it. Save room in your brain and your schedule for desert. 

Tip 2: Follow on Twitter

Most conferences have a hashtag that allows you to tune in on Twitter. This has become the town square for conference attendees. People talk about their favorite sessions, share resources, and exchange ideas.

Twitter is also a great way to stay awake during information-rich, interaction-poor PowerPoint dump sessions. 

Here are the hashtags for the ASTD & ICMI Conferences:

• ASTD: #astd2014
• ICMI: #ccexpo14

Check out the hashtag stream for #astd2014.

Tweets about "#astd2014"

Tip 3: Split Up

Attending a conference with a co-worker attached to your side can be stifling. Sure, there's safety in numbers, but now is not the time to spend even more time with someone you spend enough time with as it is.

Split up and do your own thing. Here's why:

• You can attend more sessions if you divide and conquer.
• It's easier to make new connections if you aren't all huddled together.
• You spend too much time together as it is. 

Tip 4: Make Real Connections

There are two ways to network at a conference.

The wrong way is to swap business cards with everyone you meet and then never talk to those people again. This is what most people do. 

A much better approach is to make meaningful connections with people who can actually help you (and vice-versa). Here are a few people to look for:

• People who have already solved a problem you're trying to solve.
• Vendors who are selling a solution you actually need.
• People in similar situations who are willing to benchmark.

The key to making this thing work is you must follow-up after the conference. Reach out via LinkedIn. Send them an email. Make a phone call. Whatever you do, continue the conversation.

Tip 5: Fewer Sessions, More Conversation

The best conferences I've ever attended all have one thing in common: conversation.

Conference sessions can be great. I highly recommend attending a few. Just give yourself permission to skip a session or two in favor of a meaningful conversation with someone you meet at the conference.

I almost always gain far more from talking to an expert one-on-one about a real world challenge than I do trying to keep up with a presenter monotonously droning through 150 densely packed slides in an hour. 

Connect with Me at ICMI!

The logistics of my two favorite conferences forced me to choose one over the other. That means I'll be at the Contact Center Expo & Conference in my hometown of San Diego.

Here's how to find me if you'll be there too:

Tuesday, May 6

• 8:30am - 12:00pm: Pre-conference workshop: High Performance Management 

Wednesday, May 7

• 11:00am - 11:30am: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Voice of the Customer
• 11:30am - 12:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Online Chat
• 5:30pm - 6:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Training

Thursday, May 8:

• 12:00pm - 12:30pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Social
• 1:30pm - 2:00pm: Thought Leader Panel (Expo Hall): Multichannel
• 2:30pm - 3:45pm: Incentive Programs That Drive Performance (Panel Moderator)

Why Managers Don’t Make Customer Service a Priority

A recent study found that 93 percent of executives said customer experience was one of their top priorities. 

Saying something is a priority doesn’t necessarily make it true. Something is truly a priority if it receives time, money, and attention over other alternatives. 

It’s in these departments that many customer service managers fall short. And, when they do, it’s typically a problem caused by the executives they report to.

No Time for Service

According to a recent Forrester survey commissioned by Desk.com, executives believe the biggest challenge faced by their customer service managers is not having enough time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Look at some of the challenges the typical customer service manager faces on a daily basis:

• Too many direct reports
• Staffing shortages
• Hiring and training to fix staffing shortages
• Endless meetings
• Escalated customer service challenges

The first three issues are fundamentally tied to a lack of budget. 

The fourth issue, endless meetings, is a product of coordinating with other departments such as operations and marketing. These departments typically don’t view customer service as their top priority because it’s not baked into their job description.

The fifth issue, escalated customer service challenges, is a by-product of the first four issues. More issues get escalated when customer service managers aren’t able to spend enough time preventing problems from occurring.

Customer service managers want to spend more time on service, but they often don’t have that luxury.

No Money for Service

Customer service gets short-changed when it comes to investment.

That’s because customer service often represents a cost to executives who are focused on trimming budgets. Many customer service managers tell me they struggle to get the money they need for adequate staffing, training, or technology investments.

Here’s an example:

A company acquired a competitor that used a different system to manage customer billing. The decision was made save a substantial amount of money by delaying the integration of the two billing systems.

Having two separate systems also caused a substantial number of billing issues.

Executives can easily determine how much money they saved by not investing in the system integration. It’s much harder to calculate the real cost of the billing issues. To do so would require someone to spend time analyzing several factors.

• How many billing errors were caused by having two systems?
• What was the cost of these errors?
• What was the cost of fixing these errors (employee time, goodwill discounts, etc.)?
• How many customers were lost due to these errors?

Customer service managers in situations like these often find it difficult to make a successful business case. The data is hard to find and they have very little time to try to find it.

The inevitable result is they can’t get executive approval for the budget they need.

No Attention to Service

There are a million things competing for a customer service manager’s attention. 

• Endless deadlines
• Special projects
• An endless sea of emails and reports
• Customer escalations
• Employee issues such as hiring, monitoring, training, and coaching
• Meetings (most of which are pointless)

All of this requires managers to constantly multitask. 

The real impact of multitasking is divided attention. A manager whose attention is divided amongst a million little tasks has little capacity for paying attention to customer service.

I’ve talked to countless managers who feel like they’re stretched thin, barely keeping their heads above water. They want to focus on customer service. It’s just that they don’t have the ability to focus on improving customer service right now.

They would give customer service more attention if only their executives would give them the time and budget they need to do so.

How to Prioritize Service

There are a few things managers can do despite these challenges.

The first is to set aside a special time to jump start the effort. Think of it as spring cleaning for your customer service team. Here are a few sample activities:

• Create a customer service vision
• Analyze voice of customer data to pinpoint problems
• Conduct customer service training

The second thing managers can do is tackle one small issue at a time. Set yourself up for success by only taking on as much as you can handle.

The third thing managers can do is to integrate continuous improvement into daily work as much as possible. Things tend to lose their priority when they’re treated as side projects. You have to live and breathe customer service on a daily basis if you want it to be a priority.

Seven Ways to Be More Responsive to Email

Most of us are drowning in email.

The daily onslaught of email and inboxes containing 100+ messages make it hard to keep up with the old one business day standard. My 2014 email response time survey revealed that we may need to re-consider this standard.

Customers, co-workers, and even our friends expect us to respond even faster. 

I recently hosted a webinar that revealed seven ways to improve email response times. You can watch the full webinar here. 

This post is a re-cap of some of those tips. They’re geared for both personal use and for contact center teams.

Tip #1: Establish and Monitor Standards

This helps ensure accountability, whether you are doing it individually or as a team. Many people have standards, but far fewer actually monitor them. Checking regularly to ensure you are being responsive can help you identify and fix any problems.

Tip #2: Set Expectations for Emailers

For individuals, this involves setting your out of office message when you won’t be responding to emails in a timely manner. It’s amazing how many people don’t do this. Most people will understand if they receive an automated message that says you’re out of the office,

For businesses, this involves using a confirmation screen or an auto-response email that gives customers an estimate of how long it will take to receive a reply. It should also provide an option for a faster response, such as a phone number.

Tip #3: Staff to Demand

This tip is mainly for contact centers. Small teams typically have fairly consistent staffing, but email volumes are uneven. You can fix this by looking at your historical email data and aligning your team’s schedule with typical email volume.

Tip #4: Create Focus Time

Timothy Ferriss’s best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, makes a compelling case for dedicating time to focus on email. Most people chronically check email between tasks which actually slows us down. Blocking out time to concentrate on email, and then shutting your email program down, is actually much more productive.

Tip #5: Manage Your Inbox

Many an email message has gotten lost in a cluttered inbox. For individuals, managing your email box effectively requires you to make decisions about each message so nothing is left in your inbox for more than a day. For teams, this involves making sure someone takes ownership of the general inbox so nothing falls through the cracks. 

Tip #6: Keep it in Play

Some issues take longer to respond to than others. People tend to be pretty forgiving if you send a quick email to let them know you are still working on it and provide an estimate of when you’ll get back to them. 

Tip #7: Reduce Email Volume

Many people produce poorly written emails in their rush to slog through their inbox. The result is a lot of unnecessary email which in turn slows us down. You can reduce your email volume by taking the counter-intuitive step of slowing down and crafting more complete messages that will eliminate a lot of back and forth. (The webinar provides some fun examples.)

These tips are just scratching the surface. What else can individuals or teams do to improve email responsiveness?

Why Your Customer Service Training Needs to Flip

Flipped learning is hot topic in training circles. 

It has the potential to fix one of the most fundamental problems that plagues corporate training. Employees attend a training class, learn new skills, and then… Do nothing. 

Flipped learning changes that. It’s a trend that could be huge for customer service training.

What is flipped learning?

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the idea is to “flip” the traditional approach to instruction and application. 

Traditional training takes place with a facilitator in a classroom. Learners are then left to implement the skills on their own. E-learning takes place outside of a traditional classroom, but employees are still typically on their own when it comes to applying new skills on-the-job.

Flipped learning reverses this. 

Employees learn the skills or information on their own through e-learning or recorded video. The facilitator then works with employees to help them implement their new skills.

There’s a great overview article in the February 2014 issue of Training and Development magazine that provides even more background.

Why flip customer service training?

Flipping your customer service training offers three major benefits.

Save time. 

Flipped learning allows employees to learn specific lessons individually, so you don’t have to schedule everyone to be in the same place at the same time. Individual training also moves faster. For example, my Delivering Next Level Service course is 8 hours in the classroom, but my video-based Customer Service Fundamentals course is only 2 hours long.

Save money.

Flipped learning offers more bang for the buck. Here’s an illustrative example for a team of 25 people. It compares bringing in a consultant to facilitate a two-day training program versus subscribing employees to a video-based training library like lynda.com.

The example assumes you don’t have to pay other employees to cover your team while they’re in training or pay for a facility rental. These items could inflate your classroom training costs even higher.

Improve results.

Flipped learning offers superior results because it prioritizes implementation. 

A Zenger Folkman Group study found that 50 percent of learning occurs when employees try to implement new skills on the job. Traditional training approaches devote little to no attention to this phase. 

A flipped approach provides a facilitator, coach, or supervisor during the critical implementation phase to help ensure employees are successful.

Getting Started

There are two major obstacles to flipping your customer service training program.

The first is finding good content. Don’t settle for a monotonous voice droning on over a crappy PowerPoint. Here are three keys to look for:

• Engaging content that keeps your employees tuned in.

• Application exercises and activities to help employee apply what they learn.

• Content delivered in small chunks so employees can learn as they have time.

Fortunately, there are some quality options out there. 

For a professionally produced course, check out my new Customer Service Fundamentals course on lynda.com.

If you’d prefer to go the do-it-yourself route, there are some easy-to-use tools like Techsmith’s Camtasia that are very popular. (You can view a sample tutorial on setting SMART goals.)

The second challenge is implementation. 

It’s critical that employees have someone to coach them through implementing their new skills. This can be a supervisor, trainer, or a coach, but you can’t skimp on this part or the training will fail.

Here are some examples of implementation tools and activities that can help

• Select a specific customer service challenge for employees to work on

• Observe employees using the new skills on-the-job and provide feedback

• Discuss newly learned techniques in team meetings

• Have employees subscribe to the Customer Service Tip of the Week email

• Organize “lunch and learn” review sessions

These ideas are just scratching the surface.

Whatever you do, it ultimately comes down to leaders working closely with their employees on a daily basis. If you do that, the promise of flipped learning is incredibly powerful: Better learning and more results for less money.

Customers and Co-workers Expect Faster Email Responses

Note: This study was repeated in April, 2018. The new study includes response time expectations for Twitter and Facebook messages. You can read the latest results here.

The results of my 2014 email response time survey reveal it may be time to re-think our response time standards. Customers, co-workers, and even our friends expect faster responses to email than ever before.

Previous years’ surveys have indicated these email response times are acceptable:

At first glance, the 2014 results seem similar to the 2013 survey. For example, 78 percent of respondents expect co-workers to respond to an email within 4 hours or less, up slightly from 74 percent in 2013.

A small problem appears when you look at the distribution of responses. While a majority of people (59 percent) are happy with a 1 day response time from a business, there's still a large portion of people (41 percent) that expect a faster response.

In a new wrinkle, I decided to see what response times would meet at least 80% of the respondents’ expectations. This seems like a fairly reasonable benchmark to use when establishing response-time standards. 

This new perspective suggest some new response time standards may be in order:

This chart suggests the following response time standards are now appropriate:

• Responding to a customer = 4 hours
• Responding to a co-worker = 1 hour
• Responding to a friend = 4 hours

The survey also looked to see whether there were significant differences between response time expectations for different generations. The short answer is there weren’t. Millenials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers all have similar response time expectations. 

This data does bring up several important issues:

• How can we meet demand for increasingly fast email responses?
• Are there strategies to reduce the volume of email we receive?
• Are our co-workers insane?

I will be attempting to answer these questions in a webinar I’m hosting next week called Seven Ways to Improve Email Response Times. 

The complimentary webinar is next Tuesday, April 22 at 10am (Pacific).

Update:

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it here plus read a re-cap.

Event management for Seven Ways to Improve Email Response Times powered by Eventbrite

Why Your Employee Engagement Survey is a Waste of Time

Let’s start with what most of us agree upon:

• Employee engagement is important

• Engaged employees are more productive

• Engaged employees provide better customer service

The benefits are there. Unfortunately, the way most companies conduct their employee engagement survey is a waste of time.

The are five primary problems.

Problem #1: “Employee Engagement” is not defined

There’s a lot of agreement on the importance of employee engagement, but not much agreement on what “employee engagement” actually means. Even the big consulting firms like Gallup and BlessingWhite disagree. 

This can spell big problems for your survey efforts. 

Without a clear definition of engagement, your survey questions will be random or poorly designed. Some companies rely on the employee engagement consulting firm they’ve hired to supply the questions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those are the right questions.

If you want to measure employee engagement, start by defining it. For what it’s worth, here's my preferred definition:

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees are deliberately contributing towards organizational success.

Problem #2: Infrequent Feedback

The typical employee engagement survey is done every 12 - 18 months. 

To understand how ridiculous this is, consider what would happen if you waited that long to measure anything else that was important to your business. Can you imagine...

• Reviewing your financials only once per year?

• Waiting 18 months to peruse your KPIs?

• Asking customers for feedback only once per year?

How could you measure engagement more frequently without constantly bugging your employees? One solution is to divide your employees into 12 random groups and survey a different group once per month. This way, you get monthly feedback (just like your financial performance) while each individual employee only completes the survey once per year.

And, lest we forget, you can also try talking to employees directly. 

Problem #3: The Data is Easily Manipulated

The annual engagement survey doesn’t capture a year’s worth of employee sentiment. For most employees, their most recent experiences will have a far greater impact on their survey scores than what happened six months ago.

Managers know this. Some deliberately hold morale-boosting events just before the survey goes out. Others withhold negative actions, such as employee discipline, until after the survey window is closed.

The result of a survey conducted every 12 - 18 months is skewed data. One fix is to survey random samples of the employee population more frequently (as suggested above).

Problem #4: It Feels Like a Side-Project

Many employee engagement surveys feel like a side project that distracts leaders from their real work.

It’s failure by design. Look at this typical cycle:

1. Employees are surveyed

2. Senior leaders review a results report

3. A blue-ribbon committee is convened to study the issue

4. The committee reports back to senior leaders

It's now several months after the survey. Employees are wondering if their voices were even heard. Leaders lose focus and move on to something else. The whole thing feels like a Dilbert cartoon.

Companies with highly engaged employees instill passion in their workforce through consistent, purposeful efforts. Engagement is something they do all the time, not just occasionally.

Problem #5: No Action is Taken

It all comes down to this. If you’re going to ask for your employees’ opinions, you had better do something with that information. 

If not, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Re-cap of Customer Service Meet-up at Phone.com

Last night, Jeremy Watkin and I co-hosted a customer service meet-up at Phone.com. It was a small, informal gathering of customer service professionals from various industries within San Diego. 

Our goal was to facilitate dialogue and the exchange of ideas around the types of customer service challenges we have in common.

Jeremy’s the Director of Customer Service at Phone.com, so he and his team were kind enough to host us. They even provided pizza, beer, and wine!

The evening kicked off with Jeremy sharing a little bit about Phone.com’s approach to customer service. He told us that everything ultimately boiled down to one philosophy: communicate better.

Jeremy Watkin providing an overview of Phone.com's awesome customer service philosophies.

This works for them on a few levels.

• On a product level, because they’re a telecommunications company. 
• On a service level because they’re constantly striving to improve customer service.
• On an internal level, because they rely on teamwork to get things done.

Of course, Communicate Better is also the name of the blog that Jeremy co-authors with Phone.com’s Jenny Dempsey.

Jeremy also gave us a brief tour of their contact center before we re-convened for some open discussion. 

Here were a few of the big topics we discussed.

Voice of Customer Data

It seems like every organization struggles with this on some level. Here are some of the challenges we discussed:

• Combating negative reviews on external sites like Yelp and Angie’s list
• Using customer service data to generate actionable insights
• Getting executives to worry less about the number and more about improvement

Jeremy mentioned I recently facilitated two webinars on this topic. One was on designing customer service surveys and the other was on analyzing and acting on survey data.

Service Standards

The concept of customer service standards generated a lot of great discussion. There’s a delicate balance between consistency, authenticity, and flexibility. 

We all agreed that it’s a bad idea to make customer service standards that are too rigid and scripted. This takes away the employee’s ability to adapt their service to each individual customer. 

Check out my recent post on the Zendesk blog if you’d like to read more about the potential downfalls of service standards.

Balancing Quality and Efficiency

This was another interesting discussion. Customer service leaders are constantly feeling pressure to increase productivity while still creating amazing customer service experiences.

We did an impromptu networking activity where people had to introduce themselves to three people in three minutes and learn three things about each person. This simple exercise turned out to be very difficult and only one person was able to successfully complete it AND remember the three facts about three people.

The challenge is we’re just not naturally great at being both fast and engaging with customers. We can learn it, but it takes time and practice. 

The top customer service organizations value both quality and efficiency, but they prioritize quality. In other words, helping the customer is more important than serving the customer quickly.

Will there be another meet-up?

It all depends on interest and volunteers. Is there an audience for this sort of event? A few people suggested their organizations might be willing to host the next event, so we may have the volunteer side covered.

If you’d like to learn about future customer service meet-ups in San Diego, please take a moment to add your name to the interest list below:

The Fight or Flight Response in Customer Service

Updated: March 16, 2024

The customer pounds his fists on the counter.

He bellows with rage, spittle flying out of his mouth like angry rain. “This is your fault! You screwed up! You need to fix this!”

The customer’s tirade feels like an attack. He means the company when he says “you,” but it feels personal.

“Don’t take it personally,” is awful advice.

That’s the most common tip for serving an upset customer. But it doesn’t work. Taking it personally is a natural reaction.

Here’s what to do instead.

Why don’t take it personally is bad advice

Your defense mechanisms automatically kick in when confronted with a physical or psychological threat. You instinctively fight off the threat or flee it.

This instinct is called the fight or flight response. It helps in many situations. 

For example, let’s say you’re accosted by a growling, snarling dog. There’s no time to plan your reaction. You instinctively confront the dog or try to get away.

Customer service is one place where this instinct doesn’t serve us well.

Try to imagine that furious customer. He’s pounding his fists on the counter and yelling. Taking it personally is a natural reaction.

Your instinct is to either confront the furious customer or try to get away.

What triggers the fight or flight response?

An angry or upset customer can trigger your instinctive flight or flight response. Here are a few examples:

• Yelling at you

• Making derisive comments about you or your company.

• Accusing you or your company of wrongdoing.

The infographic below illustrations our physiological reactions to a “fight or flight” situation.

Source: Jvnkfood

How to overcome the fight or flight response

Recognize that the fight or flight response is a powerful instinct. Pithy advice like “don’t take it personally” isn’t enough to handle it.

I have two suggestions for overcoming this challenge:

1. Identify your triggers. Try to be aware of what triggers your fight or flight instinct. Recognize the instinct as it starts to happen.

2. Pause. Catch the instinct before it takes over. Pause and make a better decision.

This short video from my Working with Upset Customers course shows you an example. You’ll see two scenarios from a coffee shop.

Scenario 1 is at 1:25. Here, the coffee shop barista does a poor job controlling his fight or flight response.

Scenario 2 is at 2:56. This time, the barista identifies the fight or flight response kicking in and takes a brief pause.

Recognizing your natural instincts from Working with Upset Customers by Madecraft and Jeff Toister

Training your team to serve upset customers

Serving upset customers is difficult. Your employees need training, coaching, and practice to develop these skills.

Here’s an exercise you can use to train your team on the fight or flight response:

1. Show your team the recognizing your natural instincts video.

2. Ask them to identify their own “fight or flight” triggers.

3. Have your team practice becoming aware of this response while serving customers.

You can use these resources to provide even more training:

1. Guide: How to deal with difficult customers

2. Course: Working with Upset Customers

Two Great Customer Service Events in San Diego This Week

Monday Morning Extra!

I don’t typically post to my blog on Mondays, but I wanted to let you know about two terrific customer service events in San Diego this week.

There aren’t a lot of educational and networking opportunities for customer service professionals in San Diego, so it’s good fortunate to have two in one week!

CXPA San Diego Local Networking Event

The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) is coming to San Diego. 

Learn the three secrets to building a customer-focused culture from yours truly. You’ll also have the opportunity to network with other local Customer Experience professionals.

• Date: Tuesday, April 8
• Time: 5:30pm -8:00pm
• Cost: $20

Register Now

Customer Service Meet-up at Phone.com

This is a great opportunity to meet other customer service leaders in town. We’ll be holding roundtable discussions about our biggest customer service challenges.

You’ll also get a behind-the-scenes tour of Phone.com’s award-winning customer service operation.

• Date: Wednesday, April 9
• Time: 4:30pm - 6:30pm
• Cost: Free

Register Now

ICMI’s Contact Center Expo & Conference

But wait, there's more!

This fantastic conference for contact center professionals is coming to San Diego May 6 - 9. This conference regularly draws 1,000+ participants and is full of outstanding educational and networking opportunities.

I’ll be facilitating a pre-conference workshop on High Performance Management, which means I get to share my super special speaker discount with you.

Use the code SPKR at checkout and save $200 on your conference registration!

Learn more and register