Management, Human Resources, and Life in a Customer Focused World

You.

That’s the premise that the writer of Purpose Built has in one of his blog posts.

There’s a line in the post that strikes completely true. It has held true at the majority of the companies that I have worked for, interviewed at, consulted with, and talked to over the phone.

“I don’t engage with customers that is the (insert department name here) problem.”

On the face of things, this isn’t a huge issue. You support the networks. You fix bugs. You manufacture the products. You . That’s what the Customer Service department is for! That’s what the Call Center is for! That’s what … the “chosen ones” are for.

The problem with this attitude and perception is that organizations who view things this way take a very narrow focus on things. Everything thing that you do “directly impacts their opinion and experience with the company.” (taken from the same blog). I love it. It’s simple, yet truthful. Your network keeps the customer’s up and running; your bugs prevent the customers from having a perfect experience; your product is what the customers buy; etc etc and … etc.

You.

Did you know that?

One thing that most people don’t think about is how they sound to a customer. Sure, people think about how they sound in terms of professionalism, sales and expertise. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about how you sound to a customer.

As an example, I was at a drive thru fast food place a few days ago. We weren’t sure what we wanted, so we asked the agent to hold on. She seemed pleasant and friendly. Once we began ordering, we paused and she asked “Is that all?” Within five seconds, my response was “No, we need to add a bottle of water.” At that point, the transaction went down hill. She had apparently already hit total with the preconceived notion that we were done. She began trying to solve her issue and was sighing and frustrated with the machine. The problem, however, was that it SOUNDED as though she was frustrated with us, as the customer. She likely didn’t realize how the sighs, the “ughs”, and general sounds of irritation came across the speakers.

When you’re talking to a customer, think about how the extra stuff sounds to them. Sighs, uh-ohs, noise in the background, peers laughing and talking, etc…these are all things to mentally file and try to make sure that the transaction and interaction are positive, rather than turning negative for no real reason.

Customer service is something that comes from the obvious locations — the agent picking up the phone when you call technical support, the sandwich maker behind the counter when you walk into one of the many sandwich shops around town, and the manager at a video chain. These are examples of the obvious. Even though, all too often, the customer service is lacking, at least they’re being handled.

Customers such as people currently trapped away from home in foreign countries are much more difficult to handle. With the ash spewing forth from the Icelandic volcano, there is not much that anyone can do to go above and beyond … is there?

British Minister Gordon Brown disagrees. Rather than standby, he has gone above and beyond. “The UK sent three Royal Navy ships yesterday on missions to rescue thousands of Britons stranded by the European flights ban.” (FT.com, 2010)

Yesterday, I was walking through a local grocery store. Walking may be a stretch — I was hopping on one foot, pushing a grocery cart and hobbling along with a crutch to support my leg. For me, there was no real other way to get around. Employees of the store and customers alike watched me with amusement (well, it IS funny to see honestly), but there weren’t any offers of assistance. After about ten minutes of this, I paused and was looking around for a product. A seemingly random stranger stopped and asked me, “Do you need some help?” My response was no, but thank you .. Even though it’s agony for me, I’m one of those people that would rather not impose on others if at all avoidable. Her response was, “Alright. Please let me know, though. I work here and would be glad to help you out.” This was a woman who, on her off time, thought enough of her customer service to offer to help someone who appeared to be struggling in her store.

Even if you’re not in the position to seemingly do anything, think about it. What can do you do to help bring something to the table that may be outside of the norm, yet could make a true impact on your business’ customers. It’s important to realize that your action, or inaction, directly reflects on the organization in which you work. Maybe you can use your Twitter account to respond to a customer complaint that you saw. Perhaps your Facebook network has a complaint that you can try to address. Perhaps you overhear some one complaining about your company at Starbucks.

Whatever the case may be, think about how an unexpected action may reflect on your organization …

I’ll be posting a few more thoughts over the next few months once again, but first I thought I’d let everyone know that I’ve done a slight site redesign for the blog to make it easier to read and navigate. In addition to that, I’ve also redesigned my personal / professional website. Please feel free to take a gander over there as well!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I read something that I felt was truly worth repeating.

The vast majority of customers we spoke with made the task pleasant and enjoyable.

This is a quote from Tom Vanderwell while he was doing surveys with people at a store’s checkout line.  It applies to every thing you do, honestly.  The majority of your interactions with people are pleasant and enjoyable, but a single bad apple tends to make your day gloomy and dark — forcing you to consider that the rest of the day might suck! This, however, isn’t the case.

In his post, Tom gives a great suggestion:

Each time you have a pleasant, friendly customer – jot down a hash mark or write the customer’s name on your sheet. When one of those negative customers comes along, look down at your sheet and refresh your memory of all the pleasant customers you’ve talked with.

Unless you’re in a truly horrid job and dealing with truly horrid people, I guarantee that you will begin to realize that your day isn’t really that bad.

Human Resources is one of the areas that is a challenge.  The definition of Human Resources tends to be one that is nebulous because each company uses it differently. In some companies, HR is simply the people that handle internal complaints and concerns including hiring, firing, harassment, etc. In others, HR’s role is expanded to include performance management, training and development.
One of my readers posed the question:

How can HR be more Customer Focused?

The answer to this is that it, again, depends on your definition of HR.
If it is the first, then there isn’t a huge impact that HR can have on being “customer focused” in my opinion. The biggest area where they can make a difference to the customers is by being responsive and quickly addressing the internal problems.  This, indirectly, helps fix problems that could otherwise negatively impact a customer.
If it is the second, however, a HR professional can be leveraged.  Their skills in training and development as well as performance management can be put to use developing both on- and off-line training for customers.  They can also focus on trying to understand where the current customer offerings are missing opportunities and help identify the best areas of ROI.
Human Resources is, admittedly, a challenging area that is a strong support role for the company with a difficult transition to becoming a leading customer focus role.  Anyone else have thoughts on great ways to turn HR into a customer focused organization?

The QAQNA blog posted a link to the 10 worst presentation habits.  Initially, these were written by Carmine Gallo, an author on communication, who also wrote about 5 ways to ruin your next presentation.

If you present or use powerpoint for anything (training, business pitches, customer quality reviews, etc), please read both of these.  They’ll help you out significantly.  Some of these I’ve been guilty of, but I certainly make an effort not to fall into any of these traps too terribly often.

My personal failure is “Failure to rehearse“. I  always feel awkward rehearsing, so tend to wing it a bit too much.  I’ve been working on that thought!

My personal pet peeve is one of the ones that QAQNA’s writer, Tom Vander Well, has as well - “Reciting bullet points“.

Come on, people.. I learned how to read when I was little.  If all you’re going to do is read what is on the slide, just email it to me. Save both of us some time!

Someone recently asked me:

“When’s the right time to centralize different divisions or receptionists into a centralized center?”

This is a question that a lot of companies struggle with and mirrors the simple question of

“Should I start a contact center?”

The easy answer is: It depends.

I know. It’s a co-out. It is, however, true as well. The fact of the matter is that businesses have different expectations, requirements and designs. Some companies manage their personell through different budgets and are not interested in consolidating the numbers. Others would prefer to have centralized costs that can be evaluated for actual talk costs and values.  Some organizations have a large, matrixed management structure where the agents or administrative professionals handling calls are best managed by the small groups. Others take a different approach and want a singular management section that handles the service fashion.

Not only that, the question becomes what are your goals? Would it make a difference? Are there cost benefit savings? Is there a customer satisfaction improvement aspect? Are you trying to reduce headcount? Improve efficiency?

There are hundreds of reasons for putting a contact center together — and there are probably just as many not to.  You need to evaluate your process goals, your cross training potential, and your concepts.  In my opinion, if you have multiple locations taking calls and any of the groups have downtime where others don’t? You have a very obvious area of efficiency that can be gained.  If you have multiple locations regardless, you should consider looking at a centralized option.

Hire someone to come look at your numbers.  Ask a friend that has experience with this sort of thing if you need to.  It’s worth looking at.

Customer Service in Different Countries was the blog posting that made me chuckle a little… The reason it did so was that one of my friend living outside the US has been regaling me with some problems that she’s been having.  She doesn’t live in one of the 11 countries surveyed by Accenture.  They did surveyed about 650 senior executives in different industries from 11 countries — The posting above calls out “the percentage of business customers who switched to other vendors due to poor customer service”.  The highest was China (a wopping 55%) followed by Sweden (a huge 46%) while Argetina and Mexico were very low at 7% and 13% respectively.

SU feels

that business customers in Argentina either don’t care about customer service and do not let it influence their business choices and/or we can say that business in Argentina provide great customer service and the business customers don’t find it necessary to switch vendors because the service is so good. Both factors are probably at play here.

I’m not so sure that I agree. I believe that, sure, those are partially correct in some areas, however I think that culture and monopolies also have a great deal to do with it.  I started this posting referencing a friend — well, she lives in Belgium.  The entire country has had a single electricity provider for as long as … well .. electricity has been around.  If you wanted electricity, you simply had to purchase it from them.  Somewhat recently, a new company has come into being and is now trying to take away the business.   The monopoly that existed is now starting to crumble, however they still hold significant sway over things.  And their customer service proves it.

Two weeks ago, my friend notified her current electric company that she’d be switching to this new upstart at the end of the contract.  The contract ended.  The new electric company, however, wasn’t quite in place yet to give her electricity.  Belgium’s law states that electricity is a basic right, so the electric company couldn’t completely turn their electricity off but they were able to put a 1500 Kw limiter on the line.  This prevents the simultaneous use of any electricity that totals more than 1500 Kw. I don’t know about yours, but my fridge alone draws somewhere around 800.  This doesn’t count lights, stove, microwave, TV, or anything else.  Basically, this electric limiter prevented her from doing any cooking or laundry until the other electric company could get the service up and running.

Now here comes the crux of things. The new electric company couldn’t, by law, touch the limiter because it wasn’t theirs, so when they were ready to turn the electricity on 24 hours after the limiter went on… they couldn’t.  The monopoly electric company simply kept saying “Sorry, sorry,  sorry”… three days went by, two scheduled technicians didn’t show up… more time without electricity.

To cut an even longer story short(ish), it boils down to the fact that the company didn’t have to do anything. They had no perceived incentive to offer good customer service.  They were losing the customer anyway.  They could simply cause the end user some trouble for their efforts.

Customer service shouldn’t be painful.  It should be good.  Maybe if this company gave their customers good service all the time, even in the face of adversity, my friend wouldn’t have switched.  Maybe.

Service Untitled wrote a post about the “Difference in Roles” in a service organization.  His three definitions are Support, Account Management, and Consulting.  I think that he’s missed his naming/definitions a little bit, but let’s play along for the moment.

Support is the least involved and consulting is the most involved, with account management in the middle.

Based on his descriptions, I agree with those definitions. That having been said, all too often, these roles are blurred and not nearly as defined.  At the organization that I’m currently consulting at, the overall call center comprises of over 150 employees that have some with defined roles (you’re Software Support; you’re outbound Sales; you’re Account Management) and others without.  One of the key teams that I’m involved with manages outbound sales, inbound technical support, in and outbound billing, inbound customer support, and inbound/outbound technical consulting.  Based on the three definitions, they’d do all three at the same time, although the Account Management is not a 1:1 ratio.

My experience differs somewhat from Douglas’. I’d separate the roles as follows:

Client Services: This comprises of both technical support and customer relations support. This role may be support or it may be account management, but it takes on the entire realm of responsibilities for helping the customer through.  This role would be required to work with the customer’s to solve any immediate problems as well as identify possible areas of opportunity for future sales or immediate up-sells.   This plays into the shifting focus from sales or service to sales and service. If the customer requires a higher level of knowledge than they’re able to handle, they would pass it over to the other roles.

Pre-Sales: The pre-sales role would be the role in which agents are responsible for working with the customer’s to identify what the best solution is and then helping them purchase it.  In part, this falls under Douglas’ “consulting” role, but is more limited.  They need to understand the customer’s needs well.

Consulting: In this role, I agree with him.  The consulting role, if taken to the level that it should be, is extremely complex as it requires the understanding of your customer’s needs, a comprehension of sales and balance, and also the capabilities of what products might work with your systems.

The structure would be the same as Douglas, though, in order of difficulty.  Client Services, pre-sales, and then consulting.