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

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.

In January 2008, I wrote a post that still brings in a good amount of traffic (KPI (Key Performance Indicators) - Are they what they used to be?). In this post, I defined six KPI that I find to be the ones that are quality and quantity focused. A while back, I was in a discussion with the Manager of Quality Assurance for SupportSoft.com’s new work from home project and he asked me “In your opinion, which is more important for a manager in a call center — quality or quantity?”

The answer I gave him was pretty straight forward - neither.

A center simply can not provide enough service if the focus is 100% on quality unless it is very over staffed, but at the same time, focusing solely on quantity, results in a significant decrease in customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Because of this, there needs to be a good balance struck.

A while back,  a contact of mine from an “addiction treatment, publishing, education, research, and recovery support” contact center, asked me a question.  I didn’t have an answer for her since I’d never dealt with headset problems or complaints in the past, but she was able to eventually get the information she needed.

Her question was:

I am wondering if you might have some experience with this….It hasn’t been much of an issue for us, but staff that is making outbound calls have had some problems with sound blasts when calls connect. There is concern that this could actually do damage to their ears. Are you familiar with Sound Shield or any other types of systems or headsets that somehow filter or block noises over a certain decibel?

She was able to get some information that may be of help to people reading here.  What she’s found is below — I don’t endorse any of it as I haven’t actually had any experience with selecting headsets:

I have now been told that acoustic shock protection is now standard in many headsets, so we’ll look into that.  Just as an FYI, I did find a few articles with some information about this.

This article highlights a particular type of headset. and another about the dangers of hearing damage to headset wearers…

This one is about some type of software…

This article specifically mentions a product called Sound Shield.

Four more articles about Sound Shield..
http://www.headsets-australia.com/soundshield-acoustic-devices.html
http://www.polaris.com.au/SoundShield.asp
http://www.stretchnow.com.au/products/clearheadsets/soundshield.html
http://www.acousticshock.org/?id=statements

Historically speaking, call centers have all too often been split — you’re either a selling agent or you’re a service agent. These two hiring profiles were polar opposites and even when sitting together in the same area they held themselves apart by force of personality and title separation. This was the paradigm that most call centers and companies using a contact center were stuck in. Although this is still often the case, there are more and more situations where it is not. The major shift is that more and more centers are being profit centers rather than cost centers. In this sense, the center must look to where they can successfully increase revenue or decrease costs. Generally, this means looking at how to up-sell products to a customer or use affinity sales to branch the customer calling up for a mop into also buying a bucket from your company.

The center where I’m currently consulting, for example, blends this. Although there are agents who say “I was hired on to do service and I can’t (won’t) do sales”, they work side by side — and in conjunction with — those that are more sales oriented. Another organization I used to work for was the same way. In both cases, management decided to allow the agents their personal preference. If you felt you were only service, then you wouldn’t have to do sales. For those that had the personality, interest or skills in doing sales, they were given that opportunity and rewarded accordingly. New hires were expected to do both. This new change was conveyed in the interview process.

Salaries are tied into this as well. Those agents who are truly service only will, in time, lag behind. This is already evident in the differing salary ranges. Those that generate revenue for the company have a higher payscale than those that don’t. If one considers that, in general, the skills for customer service are the same as taking orders, then the diference in range is $1.01 per hour. Add outbound sales to the mix and the increase shoots up an incredible $4.33 per hour (over $9000 per year!).

I don’t forsee that this will change. The more you can offer the company in terms of revenue opportunity, the better off you are and the more valuable your skills are. If you’re just service right now, look at learning how to sell .. the sooner the better.

Some suggestions:

• Cold Calling for Women: Opening Doors & Closing Sales (Useful for men as well as women!)
• Telephone Sales For Dummies

Those are two books that some of my agents have found to be quite useful. The other that I often suggest to people because it is quite interesting is Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball, but it doesn’t apply to a normal contact center environment. If you’re an account manager and can work through a longer cycle time, then it might be worth reading.

I just reposted a post I wrote with some information about the compensation levels for call center functions at an agent level for 2007.  The same report (the U.S. Contact Center Compensation Survey by the Mercer Human Resources Consulting group) detailed some call center management pay for the same year (2007).

For Team/Group Managers, some of the same exact groups had the following median compensation (includes base pay and annual bonus/incentive):

• Inbound order entry - $61,400
• Inbound with selling - $65,500
• Customer service - $69,200
• Internet support - $63,700
• Collections - $69,900
• Full account management - $73,700
• Technical support - $63,100
• Outbound with selling - $71,900

Compensation levels vary from $61,400 to $73,700 — a range of $12,400.  This equates to approximately from $29.50 to $35.43 per hour, a $5.97 variance.

The areas that I expected to be the highest (outbound with selling) wasn’t — the agents have a much large difference between the highest non-selling and that level (over $3 per hour) but the team/group manager was highest at the Account Management level.  After considering this, it makes sense — full account management requires a much greater level of quality management and focus on standardized processes.  A customer that has assigned account managers will expect greater service and, in turn, a company needs to pay for it at the manager level.