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.

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!

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.

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.

Basically, his point is that a company with a physical dress code expects that their employees adhere to it. Coming to work in shorts and a T-shirt when the dress code is slacks and a button down isn’t acceptable.  In the same vein, a company can expect a certain voice “dress code”.  An example of this might be using slang when the company wishes to portray themselves as professional or not including certain phrases that are required by the organization.  The first would equate to the earlier short vs slacks example while the second would be more like wearing a uniform or certain color to work.

I’ll have to use this in the future .. it’s a good way to explain something to an agent that simply doesn’t want to follow the defined guidelines.

A new study from Accenture (NYSE:ACN) ACN found that 59% of people had actually stopped doing business with companies in the past year due to poor service. That’s based on a survey of 3,500 consumers on five continents. Just under half of those polled said their service expectations were met only sometimes, rarely or never.

59%! That’s an amazing number.

Even more surprising, 6% of retailers don’t have any set schedule at all in tracking customer satisfaction. That’s according to an annual survey of 137 retail firms by the National Retail Federation and IBM (NYSE:IBM)

Can you imagine not tracking your customer satisfaction at all? At least come up with an unscientific polling method …

ForeSee Results is a firm that measures online customer loyalty for retail Web sites. In 2007, its aggregate customer satisfaction rating fell by 1.3% to 74%. The rating declined for nearly half of 40 online retailers last year due to higher consumer expectations, ForeSee Results’ CEO, Larry Freed, said on a recent conference call.

That’s not too surprising. We, as a society, are beginning to realize that just because we’re doing business online doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the same level of expectations of service and quality as we would when going into a store.

In a recent survey of 2,000 mobile phone users in the U.S., 96% said they wouldn’t hesitate to switch carriers to get a better experience. In fact, 72% had already made a switch due to a negative experience.

Another call center technology firm, Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) DOX, found similar results in its survey of more than 2,000 consumers in the U.S. and Britain. About four in five consumers were satisfied with their service levels. Yet one in three said they would switch to another carrier to get better services for mobile games, entertainment and ads.

Cell phone companies are very hard hit by this.  There’s a lot of competition and being satisfied with your carrier is crucial.

What does all this mean? It means focus on your best agents and get them to realize that they are TRULY a crucial part of the business, rather than just an after thought as is all too often the case.  Make sure that they have the training, support, technology and budget needed to do the job right.  It will pay off in spades.

To the technician in the blog post above, it meant nothing. The person was simply an object to be worked on, as though he were in a factory and the child was nothing but a generic “widget”. There’s a difference — if you’re in a factory, then you don’t deal with customers on your constant stream of objects. If you CHOSE to work with customers, then come on… DEAL with it. YOU made that decision. YOU should have the courtesy to actually do what it is that you’re supposed to — help the customer.

Rich has an interesting point. Although I only partially agree, the fact is that metrics alone is not the way to measure your call center. Measure your center by understanding what it is your customers are looking for and then focusing on those aspects. As he said, a customer that doesn’t get a resolution when the phone is picked up because the agent is rushing through is a customer that will be extremely dissatisfied. The point of the call isn’t to get the customer’s question rushed through … it is to get the customer’s question answered. If it’s not, then reconsider why you’ve got a call center.

Customer satisfaction. Isn’t that why you’re answering the call? Look at the reasons — the REAL reasons.

Possible Reasons

1. My product doesn’t work. I need help. — What is this really? It is an unsatisfied customer who, if resolved, will be satisfied.
2. My bills wrong and I want it fixed. — Again, what’s the customer looking for? They’re currently not happy. They want to figure out what it should be and hope to walk away satisfied.
3. I can’t find X. Where do I buy Y? — Again! Satisfying the customer is the goal behind the reason for the call. The customer can’t find something. Help them find it. They wan to buy something. Help them buy it by telling them where that can be done.

I’m sure there’s reasons that customer’s call up because they’re not looking for satisfaction, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Because of this, think about why your call center is currently running and focus on the necessary aspects of managing it.

“If you have the customer’s phone number (from a voicemail or a callback request), put it into your system and see if anything comes up. If you have their email address, look it up. If you have their name, see what you can find.”

Phenominal.

“Once you’ve found the customer’s account, see if there is anything obviously wrong with it that could be causing a problem. Check to see who they are. When did they last call? The goal is just to glance at the screen and get a basic idea of who this customer is and what their story is about.”

Perfect.

If you’re going to call the customer back anyway, take the time to know who they are. This is very important and really quite simple.

As a story of a situation where this has not happened, I have a company that delivers water to my house. The only reason I am still with them is because their water is some of the only water that I can actually drink (I hate water… but it’s good for you!).

They are supposed to deliver to our house every 2 weeks, take the empty 5-gallon jugs of water and replace them with new ones. It doesn’t sound too hard to me. The problem is that since the beginning of the year, they haven’t hit one delivery date. I call up the next day and ask for a new delivery. About 1/2 the time, I get water the next day. The other 1/2, I have to call up a SECOND time. And so forth — sometimes it takes over a week to get the water that should have been there on a pre-scheduled, every 2 week basis.

So! Lately, I’ve gotten completely irritated with it and have been escalating to their route representative. I did that 3 months ago. I talked to him twice, but it didn’t get resolved. So I escalated to their Central Texas area manager a month ago. The way this works is that the contact center sends my information over to him by email and then he calls. When he called me, he didn’t know what I was calling about.

He should have asked for information if the call center didn’t provide it. He should have known exactly how many times I’d called up before, exactly what it was I was calling about, and what he was going to do about it.

To make things worse, they missed my delivery three weeks ago again. So I called up once more and escalated to him a second time. He called back — and left a single message saying “I guarantee you’ll have water tomorrow, thank you.” Come on!? That’s the best you can do after you’ve already talked to me? Ridiculous. But fine. I’ll accept that your service sucks, your water’s good.

Well, that was the case until this Monday. When, for yet another time, they missed my delivery. 2 delivers, 2 escalations.. don’t you think they’d get it right? Now, I’ve escalating to the Vice President level and am waiting for a call back. I wonder if he’ll call and have no idea who I am, why I’m calling. Granted, he was supposed to call yesterday — and didn’t. I called their call center again and they’ve said I’ll get a call today. If not, I guess I’ll go talk to their area President.

Well, I rambled some, but the idea is still the same. If you have a customer with a problem and you’re calling him back, at least know why they called and why you’re calling them back — if not more than that. More than that, as Service Untitled said, would be a great experience.

A few days ago, I was on hold with a company for fourty minutes on their 877 phone line.  The conversation lasted about 45 seconds to tell me that the servers that I needed were unavailable and that they didn’t have an ETA in order to fix the problem.

Here’s some ways that they could have improved on service:

• Change the IVR to reflect known problems — this is a really simply solution.  It increases abandon rates, but also increases customer satisfaction. The customer doesn’t wait 45 minutes to find out “Oh, our servers are down in that area”.
• Hire an additional agent — Unless the company usually has under a 15 minute hold time, hiring an additional agent may easily make fiscal sense.  I was thinking about this more last night.  Assume that an agent costs a company $20 per hour after full markup (salary, benefits, time off, administrative, etc).  Assume that the 800 number costs $0.20 per minute.  Assume that an agent can handle 30 calls per hour (1 call / 2 minutes).   One customer that waits on hold for an hour would cost your organization $12.  Two costs you $24. Three costs you $36.  For $36, one additional agent can easily help drop this wait time!    Take 30 calls per hour out of your system and you’ll be bound to save more than the $20 per hour that you’re paying the agent.
• Posted on their website — The main login section of the website was still up and running.  Going to the server resulted in a “We are having technical issues, please call our tech support line” message. Of course, the technical support line’s phone number wasn’t listed.  An ETA wasn’t listed.

The one thing that they did right, albeit the fact that the conversation with the agent only lasted a minute, was not place me on hold and transfer me to someone else.  This was not the case with the writer of the Big Picture Spectatular.  From his latest escapade with customer service:

• At StubHub I dealt with Nick, Arthur, Christopher,  John Whelan (Vice President, Customer Service) and  a friendly female voice who put me on hold 3 times while she checked with her manager and the ticket seller about various things.

• At CIBC Visa Aventura I dealt with Kulbir.

Simply having one contact do the work, regardless of how long it takes, helps significantly.  I’ve recently seen a paper (I can’t find it or remember which it was, sorry) that showed anything over two touches quickly causes a lowered level of customer satisfaction.

So.. things to think about — customer service is meant to be customer service. Keep it simple.