New Training Video: Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service

Customer service surveys are everywhere.

Chances are, your company either uses one now or your thinking about implementing one in the near future. 

So, here’s the real question: Is your survey helping you improve customer service?

Perhaps you want to improve your response rate, generate more actionable insight, or just come up with the right questions.

Or, you might be thinking about starting a customer service survey but aren’t sure how to get started.

My new course on lynda.com can help you.

It’s called Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service. This training video will walk you step-by-step through the process of implementing a customer service survey. 

Topics include:

1. Designing impactful surveys
2. Writing effective survey questions
3. Analyzing survey results
4. Using data to improve customer service

You can watch a preview here.

(Side question: why does video always freeze when you're making a weird face?)

A lynda.com subscription is required to view the entire course. Fortunately, I’ve got you covered. You can drop my name and get a free 10-day trial.

Here are more customer service courses on lynda.com:

• Customer Service Fundamentals
• Leading a Customer-centric Culture
• Managing a Customer Service Team

You Can't Throw Bodies at a Service Problem

Let’s say you’re Brian Roberts, Comcast’s CEO. 

Your company has suffered a series of high profile customer service failures under your watch. There’s cancellation call from hell, the customer who received a bill addressed to A**hole Brown, and the unforgettable sleeping technician. 

Your company has rung up a string of dubious honors under your watch. Just last month, Comcast was ranked dead last in the Temkin Customer Service ratings, received a miserable 56 rating on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and was named the unhappiest company on Twitter.

How would you fix this?

Roberts has decided to throw bodies at the problem.

Comcast is about to go on a hiring spree. They’re opening three new contact centers. Beefing up staff in their stores. All told, they’ll be hiring 5,500 new customer service employees over the next three years.

Misdiagnosis

Lazy managers blame service failures on staffing shortages.

This is a convenient excuse. It saves the trouble of defining the problem. Finding the root cause. Taking a hard look in the mirror.

Adding staff doesn’t fix the underlying problem.

Processes will still be broken. Unfriendly policies will still be in place. A toxic culture will still exist. Above it all, leadership will remain the same.

Hiring employees might even make things worse.

Labor costs go up. Leaders will be spread thin hiring and training, causing them to spend even less time addressing service problems. Toxic cultures will become amplified as more employees quickly become disillusioned.

Remedy

It’s a better idea to fix the problem first. Here are just a few things companies could do:

• Develop a customer-focused vision.
• Act on customer feedback.
• Re-focus employee roles on service instead of cajoling customers into sales.
• Change policies that cause the most complaints.
• Fix broken processes that create waste and customer angst.

One company experienced an internal customer service issue with their payroll department. Checks were frequently late and there were too many errors. The leader adamantly believed they were simply understaffed.

They weren’t.

A short process improvement exercise revealed a host of quick fixes. They weren’t recording and tracking errors so they could learn from them. They didn’t prioritize their work. They operated inefficiently.

A few quick fixes cut payroll processing time by 25 percent. Errors went down to almost zero. No additional employees needed.

Here’s a more famous example.

Dan Hesse took over as Sprint’s CEO in December, 2007. He immediately set out to improve customer service. The result? Fewer complaints, which led to fewer contacts. By mid 2009, Sprint had reduced the number of times a customer called each year by 50 percent. 

Bottom Line

It’s great to hire employees when the company is adding new customers, expanding to new markets, or new skills are needed.

But, hiring people won’t magically make your problems go away. It might make them worse.

Zendesk 2015 Q1 Report Reveals Live Chat Insights

A new report from Zendesk reveals new insights into live chat.

Zendesk is a leading provider of customer service software. Their 2015 Q1 Benchmark report analyzed live chat data from 2,261 companies.

This post summarizes a few of Zendesk’s more interesting findings. For example, live chat delivers the highest customer satisfaction rating among contact center channels with a 92 percent average. 

You can download the full report here.

Faster Problem Resolution

Implementing chat in a contact center can lead to faster problem resolution.

Companies that introduced Zendesk’s Zopim live chat software saw a significant drop in API and Web Form contacts. These are channels that customers typically find when searching for support on a company’s website. 

Moving to chat allows customers to resolve their problems faster. Zendesk recorded an average chat duration of 10 minutes and 35 seconds. Most companies take an hour or more just to respond to contacts submitted through an API or Web Form.

The grainy graph below shows the percentage of contacts by channel prior to implementing live chat in green. The percentage of contacts after implementing live chat is show in yellow.

Source: Zendesk

Slow Reply Times

There’s still room for improvement when it comes to reply times.

When a customer initiates a chat, they typically have to wait for an agent to respond. In some ways, this is like being on hold when you call a customer service line.

Predictably, customers prefer a faster response.

The average time to first reply is 1 minute and 36 seconds. However, Zendesk noted that customer satisfaction begins to drop once first reply time crosses the 50 second mark. 

Another large drop in customer satisfaction happens just after the two minute mark.

Source: Zendesk

An Emerging Channel

Zendesk’s data also shows that live chat is still an emerging channel.

Most companies are seeing very low chat volume:

62 = Average monthly chats per company

Individual agents aren’t handling a high average volume either:

22 = Average monthly chats per agent

Companies with a low volume of chat contacts face a number of challenges:

• Live chat agents typically need to support other channels too
• Training can be difficult when volume is so low
• Scheduling is tricky at low volumes

Whats Next?

Live chat offers two advantages over phone that companies could capitalize on.

First, it has the potential to deliver higher customer satisfaction. It’s a perfect channel for today’s multi-tasking, keyboard addicted consumer. 

Second, chat’s can be more efficient to serve. A typical agent handles two to three chats simultaneously. This means chat agents have the opportunity to serve more customers per hour than phone.

The key to getting this right is response time.

Live chat has to offer a response time of less than 50 seconds to be competitive with phone. Otherwise, the channel will simply continue to divert contacts away from slower channels.

Three Customer Service Perspectives We Naturally Miss

It wasn’t until day two of our vacation that I noticed the band-aid stuck on the smoke detector in our hotel room.

It grossed me out. 

My wife, Sally, had a different reaction. She immediately knew why it was there. Her unique perspective allowed her to instantly see something I couldn’t.

Do you know why the band-aid was on the smoke detector? Just for fun, leave your guess in the comments section below. I’ll provide the answer in a couple of days.

But for now, this band-aid serves as a reminder. 

There are customer service perspectives that we often miss. This miss happens naturally. It’s instinctive. We’d benefit greatly if we could overcome it.

Photo credit: Jeff Toister

You Perspective

We lose out on many opportunities to serve because we naturally start from the Me Perspective:

• That angry customer is being mean to me.
• These customers are preventing me from getting work done.
• That customer is making it hard for me to follow the rules.

This is instinctive. We naturally see the world from our own perspective. It takes effort to stop viewing things from our Me Perspective and take steps to find the You Perspective:

• Why are you angry?
• How can I help you get something done?
• How can I help you get what you want?

The Me Perspective is “That band-aid on the smoke detector grosses me out.”

But, imagine what we could learn if we thought about the person who placed it there. “Why did you put the band-aid on the smoke detector?”

They Perspective

There’s a danger to the You Perspective.

If we aren’t careful, we can confuse the opinions, tastes, and preferences of one customer with those of all customers. When thinking of all (or many customers):

• Do they tend to get angry about this?
• Do they find it difficult to get things done?
• Are they able to get what they want?

In my book, Service Failure, I wrote about a wine bar that can be a bit polarizing.

A few customers don’t like it. The employees use colorful language. There’s a chummy group of locals who enjoy loud conversations across the bar. The place is definitely not romantic. The wine bar might want to make some changes if they listened to the You Perspective of a few customers.

However, the They Perspective reveals that their regular customers have a few things in common:

• They enjoy the employees’ fun personalities.
• They like meeting other wine enthusiasts and making friends at the bar.
• They appreciate having a wine bar that’s more social than romantic.

The very things that turn a few customers off are exactly what makes the wine bar special for a large number of loyal customers.

So, back to the band-aid. 

Sally instantly knew why the band-aid was there because she had seen it before. This wasn’t the work of one random customer. It was part of a larger pattern. She had the They Perspective.

We Perspective

There’s value in looking inward.

The challenge with the Me Perspective is we only look at ourselves. But, customer service is often a team endeavor. That’s where the We Perspective comes in.

• A delivery driver relies on the dispatcher to set appointments for the right time.
• A restaurant server relies on the chef to provide a great meal.
• A doctor relies on the office staff to keep things running efficiently.

Chronic problems often exist because we don’t step back and look at the whole system. There are a few obstacles:

• Customers don’t always complain
• Employees don’t always pass along complaints
• Dangerous icebergs are mistakenly viewed as one-time problems

This short video explains how overlooking customer service icebergs can be dangerous:

Back to the band-aid. The hotel could ask a few questions:

• Have we seen this before?
• Are we aware of similar issues?
• Is there something we can do?

What You Can Do

A lot of pithy advice tells us to ignore our instincts. This is unhelpful. Instinctive behavior is just that. Instinctive. It’s what we naturally do. The Me Perspective is one of those things.

What you can do is be aware of it. 

Sense those moments when you are thinking of yourself and not your customer. Then, take charge of your perspective and re-frame. 

• You Perspective: What help do you need?
• They Perspective: What help do they need?
• We Perspective: What can we do better?

Back to the band-aid one last time. Can you figure it out? Enter your guess in the comment section. I’ll respond with the answer in a couple of days.

Three Social Customer Care Trends You Need to Know

Social customer care should be entering an age of maturity.

The dominant social media channels have been around for awhile. Facebook is more than ten years old. Twitter is now nine. 

In reality, best practices are still evolving.

Here are three trends from the 2014 Customer Experience Management Benchmark (CEMB) study that’s co-produced by Executives in the Know and Digital Roots. These trends all seem to indicate that companies are still trying to find their way.

Trend #1: Channel Priorities

You can tell a lot about a company’s social media priorities by who owns it.

The CEMB revealed that customer care is an owner or co-owner of social media channels in only 50 percent of companies.

Why is this happening?

One explanation could be that corporate CEOs still don’t understand social media. A 2014 Domo study revealed that 68 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no presence on social media.

Another explanation is an apparent lack of social media adoption by customer care representatives themselves.

The Twitter backchannel was a virtual ghost town at ICMI’s 2015 Contact Center Expo & Conference. Only a few highly active participants regularly chimed in. 

Likewise, when I conducted an informal poll in my conference sessions, less than 10 percent acknowledged they were Twitter users.

We can't win the social customer care game until we're actually playing the game.

Trend #2: Wavering Commitment

Many companies are experiencing a commitment problem when it comes to social customer care. They're just not as invested in social like they are in other channels.

According to the CEMB, the growth of social media customer care has slowed.

And, fewer companies are training their social media agents.

Even worse, many companies are almost completely ignoring social media as a customer care channel.

Here are two stats that really jump out:

• Only 14% of companies measure CSAT via social (Source: CEMB)
• The Top 100 brands ignore 78% of Tweets (Source: Freshdesk)

Brands would love us all to have social media conversations about how great they are. They encourage us to share our positive thoughts using their carefully selected hashtags. 

But, they can't have it both ways. If they want us to engage with them, they'd better engage with us.

Trend #3: Strong Alternatives

Other customer care channels are a much higher priority than social.

The CEMB report revealed that social media is the preferred customer care channel for only 9 percent of customers.

Phone is still the top channel. According to ICMI Senior Analyst Justin Robbins, self-service is the fastest growing channel.

My own 2014 study of customer care via Twitter revealed that most customers view Twitter as a secondary channel, not a primary one. They only take to Twitter when another channel has failed them.

Another Twitter study I did earlier this year suggested that the impact of an upset customer ranting online may be overestimated. Or, viewed another way, a customer who receives poor service via any other channel is just as dangerous.

What’s Next?

Sadly, I could easily cut and paste the conclusion from a similar post I wrote a year ago.

It’s about time more companies figure it out. Key areas for improvement include:

• Faster response times
• Fewer ignored questions
• Consistent service quality across all channels

The few companies that get it right can really stand out from the rest that don’t.

There are a few additions, too:

• Customer care teams must gain a seat at the table.
• Customer care professionals must personally engage with social.
• Organizations must provide their agents with adequate training.

Perhaps most importantly, organizations must strive for consistency across all channels. A service failure can be just as damaging over the phone, in person, or via social media.

Unfriendly Signs Are Bad For Business

Imagine you stroll into your local self-serve frozen yogurt shop and see this sign:

Image credit: Jeff Toister

The business hung the sign because a few people would come into the shop, load up on samples, and then leave. This sign was the response.

But what does this sign really say?

It’s unfriendly. It discourages you from lingering. It almost feels threatening, as in “You’d better find a flavor you like or we’ll charge you!”

There’s a better way to handle this.

• Do nothing. What’s really the cost of a few free samples?
• Talk to people who abuse sampling on an individual basis.
• Have employees give out sampling cups to encourage friendly interaction (and sales!).

I’ve previously written about unfriendly signs here and here. These were two places I haven't returned to. 

These signs usually point to a bigger problem. A lack of trust. Poor customer engagement. And lost business opportunities.

It’s a self-serve yogurt place, so the cashier usually stands behind the register waiting to ring up customers. There’s typically a lot of downtime in between. 

Why not encourage sampling?

The cashier could suggest a new flavor or recommend toppings. He could do a lot of things to engage with customers. This might actually justify the tip jar that otherwise inexplicably sits in front of the register.

Shep Hyken recently wrote about a similar experience on his blog. He made this excellent suggestion for business owners:

Don’t make a rule because just one or two customers (out of hundreds or even thousands) abuse your system. In other words, don’t penalize all of your honest customers for the sins of a few.

ATD 2015 Conference Re-cap: Training is Changing Fast

The Association for Talent Development’s 2015 International Conference & Exposition may have finally caused a tipping point in how we train employees. 

I’ll address this more in just a minute.

But first, here’s an overview of the conference in case you missed it:

The conference was held in Orlando, FL and featured nearly 10,000 training professionals from around the world. There were keynote presentations, breakout sessions in 10 topical tracks, and a massive expo hall with more than 400 exhibitors.

You can read more here:

• Conference Website
• Conference Program
• Twitter Backchannel

Image courtesy of ATD

Training is Changing

Rigid, formal training will soon be a thing of the past. The classroom may soon be gone or at least unrecognizable. E-learning may look very different.

In it’s place? Problem-centered, self-directed learning where participants train themselves.

In customer service, this has huge implications on the way we deliver training over a number of topics:

• Training new hires
• Developing customer service skills
• Product knowledge training
• Educating customers
• Developing customer service leaders

I’ll dive deeper into the how and why over the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are a few resources to start exploring.

• Re-cap of Sugata Mitra’s amazing keynote on self-directed learning
• Overview of Flipped Learning for customer service
• Example of how companies are re-framing their approach to learning

On a personal note, I was one of nine recipients of the CPLP Contributor Award, which recognizes holders of the Certified Professional in Learning and Performance credential for outstanding volunteer efforts to support, promote, and advance the CPLP program.

Five Simple Rules of Customer Experience

You want your customer to have a great experience.

That’s a given. So, how do you make that happen? And, what the heck is customer experience anyway?

Here’s a great definition Annette Franz posted on her CX Journey blog:

Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship lifecycle.

As Franz explains, customer experience is more than just one interaction. It's all the interactions. And, what's most important is how the customer feels about the company over the course of those interactions.

Giving customers a consistently great experience can be difficult. 

There are traps along the way. Most of them are beyond your frontline employees’ control. In his book, Strategic Customer Service, John Goodman identified the top three causes of service failures:

1. Defective products, systems, or processes: 50 - 60%
2. Customer errors or unreasonable expectations: 20 - 30%
3. Employee mistakes or bad attitudes: 20 - 30%

Customer service training can help, but it won’t fix systemic problems or customer errors. Something else is needed.

A process called customer journey mapping allows you to look at customer experience holistically, through the eyes of the customer. The only drawback here is the process can take time.

A shortcut would be handy.

If you’re pressed for time, you can start by focusing on these five simple rules of outstanding customer experience.

Rule #1: Keep Your Promises

Let’s forget the wow factor for just a moment. Companies have a tough enough time keeping their basic promises.

A basic promise is the fundamental customer expectation that you get what you pay for.

Imagine you check into a budget hotel. They promise few frills, but they do offer a clean and comfortable room, free breakfast, and free wifi all for a low rate. 

You’d be wrong to expect luxury linens or a five star restaurant at this hotel. But, you’d be right to be disappointed if your room was in poor condition like the one in this video:

There’s no excuse for this. Get religion about avoiding broken promises and you’ll eliminate most of your poor experiences.

Rule #2: Make It Snappy

Customers hate to wait.

Here are just a few examples:

• Consumers now expect businesses to respond to email in just one hour.
• Waiting is the #1 reason people complain on Twitter.
• Customers notoriously perceive they’ve waited longer than they actually have.

Can you really blame them?

You can enhance your customers’ experience if you can reduce the time they spend waiting for your company to get things done. 

Consider these examples. Which would you rather experience?

• A repair technician arriving sometime in a four hour window or at a precise time?
• An online order arriving in five days or two days?
• A one day response to a credit application or an instant notification?

If you can shorten wait times, you’ll likely improve customer experience.

Rule #3: Make a Great First Impression

First impressions have an enormous impact on what customers remember about their experience.

Beware! The first impression doesn’t necessarily occur when a customer comes into contact with one of your employees. 

In many cases, it happens much sooner. Here are just a few ways a first impression can go wrong before your employees even get a chance to help:

• Struggling to find parking before visiting your store.
• Getting aggravated by a phone menu before reaching a live person.
• Searching your website in vain for the answer to a simple question.

The list goes on. 

You can avoid a lot of customer headaches if you identify the likely first impression in your customer’s journey and make sure it’s a good one.

Rule #4: Make a Great Last Impression

The last step in your customer’s journey is another critical moment.

Once again, it’s not necessarily the last contact your customer has with an employee. This makes it essential to identify where a customer’s journey is most likely to end. That ending should be a happy one.

Here are a few examples of how things go wrong:

• A helpful CSR promises to fix a billing error (great!), but the error is still there when the customer receives their next bill (fail).
• A hotel guest has a wonderful experience (great!) until a valet attendant loses their rental car key and causes them to miss their flight (fail).
• A customer buys a dress for a special event (great!) but notices the dress is torn as she is getting ready for her event (fail).

A failure at the end of the journey becomes the story your customer tells. But, here’s the good news:

Even if a problem happens somewhere else along the journey, you can create a positive experience if the journey ends on a high note.

That makes it critical to detect and solve problems before it’s too late. 

Many people instinctively think to do a survey, but customers are getting tired of surveys. Ironically, the survey itself could create a poor last impression.

The good news is I can think of at least five ways to collect customer feedback without using a survey. Pay particular attention to #5 - ask customers directly. 

Rule #5: Do One Thing Really, Really Well

Most of our experiences as customers are utterly forgettable.

That's okay! You don’t need every moment in your customer’s experience to be memorable. You just need one.

Customers tend to remember their peak experience more than anything else. The peak is defined as the part of the experience that’s the biggest difference from the norm.

The peak could be good or bad. A bad peak can be difficult to recover from. A good peak can etch a feeling of goodwill into your customer’s memory.

So, how do you create a good peak?

In their book, Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that companies must sacrifice excellence in some areas to be outstanding in others.

Here are just a few examples:

• In-N-Out Burger provides awesome service and terrific food. The trade-off is you can expect to wait twenty minutes in the drive-through line for a cooked fresh to order meal.

• Alaska Airlines provides great service in comfortable planes for a low price. The trade-off is they typically fly to underserved markets, so you can’t fly them everywhere you go.

• Amazon offers great prices and fast delivery. The trade-off is it can be hard to get a wealth of product information on many items (with the exception of books).

The key is these companies sacrifice something that’s less important to customers in favor of doing something great that customers will really notice.

If you can find one way to be awesome, you’ll probably create a memorable experience for your customers.

Conclusion

Mapping your customers’ journey is ultimately a good idea.

Until you do, focus on these five simple rules and you’ll stand a great chance of creating an outstanding experience for the people you serve.

Webinar Re-cap: Five More Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service

On Tuesday, I hosted a webinar called Five More Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service.

The title was a riff on a session I facilitated at ICMI’s recent Contact Center Exposition & Conference called Tackling Five Hidden Causes of Poor Customer Service (see a conference re-cap here). 

The webinar revealed five additional obstacles that I’ve uncovered through my research. Below are links to additional information on each obstacle. You can also watch the webinar here. 

Obstacle #1: Too Much Feedback

We often think that employees don’t get enough feedback on their performance. A few studies suggest that employees might be getting too much!

Even worse, all that feedback is hurting their performance. The short version of the story is excessive feedback gives people too much to think about.

Obstacle #2: Fight or Flight

“Don’t take it personally,” might be the worst advice you can give to a customer service employee.

The advice is well-meaning. We don’t want employees to get into an argument with a customer or do their best to just get away.

Unfortunately, taking it personally is an instinctive reaction called the Fight or Flight response. We’re hard wired to do exactly what we shouldn’t do when we’re faced with an angry or upset customer.

Obstacle #3: Caffeine

Most of us have a caffeine habit. 

One or two cups of coffee in the morning (or energy drink, soda, etc.) followed by a pick-me-up in the afternoon. 

You probably already know that caffeine can be addictive. Studies show that the problem might be worse than you think. That daily caffeine habit might be the root cause of a lot of poor customer service!

Obstacle #4: Empowerment

Employee empowerment is often viewed as a panacea for a lot of problems.

The truth is not many employees are being empowered. A recent study from ICMI found that 86 percent of contact centers don’t fully empower their employees.

Real empowerment is scary. It turns out there’s a whole host of things customer service leaders worry about when it comes to employee empowerment. We ran a poll in our webinar and discovered the number one concern: consistency.

Obstacle #5: Learned Helplessness

Employees may eventually stop trying when they aren’t fully empowered.

This is a condition psychologists called learned helplessness. It happens when a person believes that any effort to change things is futile. The result is they stop trying.

Engaging employees in problem solving can help. Customer service employees love to help their customers, but they often perceive obstacles in their way. Help your employees take ownership of tough situations and you’ll see motivation soar.

More Obstacles

Customer service isn't easy.

These are just a few of the many obstacles customer service employees face on a daily basis. You can read about ten more ways that customer service is hard in my book, Service Failure.

How to Stop Saying Dumb Things to Customers

Customer service employees often say things they shouldn’t.

Case in point, my local movie theater has apparently stopped providing cardboard trays at the concession stand.

When I asked an employee about it, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know, somebody at corporate made that decision.”

Ugh.

Here are a few more cringe-worthy examples:

• “I don’t make the rules.”
• “Yeah, we’ve had a lot of complaints.”
• “We don’t like it either, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Customers can’t stand this. It makes customers feel disempowered and conveys a message that the employee doesn’t care.

Many employees don’t like it either. They often know they shouldn’t say these things. Or, they realize their error as soon as the words leave their mouths.

Heck, I said something dumb to the first customer I ever served. I knew better, but in the moment I couldn't prevent the words from leaving my mouth. (You can read the story by downloading this free chapter from my book, Service Failure.)

So, why does it happen?

Employees put their foot in their mouth like this for three reasons.

1. There’s a problem the employee can’t fix or prevent.
2. The employee is protecting his or her ego.
3. The employee doesn’t know a better way to handle it.

Fortunately, there’s a way to help employees help themselves.

Say This, Not That Exercise

I first read about this activity in the wonderful book, The Effortless Experience. 

It’s designed to help customer service employees craft better responses to common customer complaints. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Gather the team.
2. Brainstorm a list of common customer complaints.
3. For each one, identify an example of what you shouldn’t say.
4. Now, come up with a better way to respond.
5. Capture the ideas in a one-page document and disseminate to the team.

I’ve facilitated exercise myself and it’s a lot of fun. 

For example, we could imagine what would happen if the movie theater manager facilitated this exercise:

Situation/Question: “Why don’t you have any cardboard trays? They were perfect for sharing popcorn!”

Don’t say this: “I don’t know, somebody at corporate made that decision.”

Say this: “We found the trays were creating a lot of extra waste, but I can give you this small bag to make it easy to share your popcorn.”

Employees enjoy coming up with examples of what not to say. It helps them realize there are plenty of things they want to say to customers, but shouldn’t.

Participants also like working together to come up with what you should say.

A lot of great ideas come out of this activity and employees take more ownership in the results because they created the ideas themselves.