An article from 2/16 on the USA today web site I just stumbled across.

http://tinyurl.com/bpym2f

Many of these companies will need to tackle customer acquisition and retention very aggressively, and crisp execution in customer service and support will simply have to be part of that strategy. “We’ll deal with that later” will no longer suffice. Experienced Service professionals should continue to volunteer what they know with the leaders of these young, emerging businesses if they want to help them be successful and ultimately benefit the industry as a whole.

My friend Charlie pointed me to this Business Week story today on Customer Service in a down economy, and what winning companies are doing vs. those that are floundering.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_09/b4121026559235.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story

Of course I couldn’t agree more with the article’s main message. Making smart choices and investments in customer service delivery wins every time in terms of customer loyalty and retention over the long haul. Now, where have I heard that before?

One item that stood out for me wasn’t so much what it said but what it did not say in driving home the point.

“… Smart players have learned from previous downturns. Companies used to go after customer reps with the same blunt ax used elsewhere. Now managers are starting to understand the long-term damage created by such moves, from eroded market share to diminished brand value. The International Customer Management Institute, a call center consultant, has done studies that show eliminating just four reps in a call center of about three dozen agents can increase the number of customers put on hold for four minutes from zero to 80″

That seems obvious – less people answering the phone has a multiplier effect and hold times rise. But what the author doesn’t point out here is the effect of added pressure and workload on the representatives that ARE on the phone and the effect it has on morale, absenteeism, attention to detail when using the systems, and most importantly their demeanor when speaking to customers. And lest we not forget the distracting “are you kidding me!?” reaction you’ll get from managers and supervisors.

Hold times and abandon rates are exceedingly easy to measure. An underwhelmed customer at the end of a service interaction, even with real-time transactional customer satisfaction surveys, is impossible to measure.

So what are some ways to address this challenge? Two come to mind:

1. Promote “Active Listening” skills among managers while remembering the “Employee & Customer Satisfaction Mirror” written about in the Service Profit Chain by James Heskett. It basically says that if you want your employees to treat customers well, then managers must consider how well they are treating the employees themselves.

   If employees feel respected and part of something they will carry that with them in to their work and the customer experience improves. You don’t need a lot of money to devote quality time in getting to know the people that work for you and their thoughts on how to improve things. Make sure they understand that they are there because they are valued and their opinion matters. DO NOT SKIP employee meetings and one-on-one’s because of tight schedules. Compliments are free.

2. This has two parts. First, revisit your hiring practices to ensure you are maximizing the ability to weed out underperformers in the interviewing process. Secondly, use the down economy as an opportunity to get better performing staff and shed the weak ones. Remember that lots of really talented and hungry customer service and support staff that would kill for the opportunity to work again and show you what they are capable of can be gotten for the same expense or less, and they’ll come in with a fresh positive attitude.

   Don’t fall for the old adage that those people will just take off for something better when the chance comes or the economy improves. If you are truly taking to heart the lesson in item #1 above you may be surprised. The reason people leave their current jobs is often because of a bad manager.

I love Frank Caliendo. He’s an impressionist that does the absolute best impression of John Madden you’ve ever heard. At the beginning of this You Tube clip he pokes fun at Madden for explaining things that you already know.

“uuhh… if ya can’t see, theeennn ya don’t know what your lookin’ at”

I think sometimes in the world of Service, and probably business in general, we forget to consistently communicate what success is because we think it’s as obvious as “seeing”. It’s not. At least it’s not to everyone.

Truly Great leaders in service roles get to where they are because they understand the big picture and the critical role they and their team play in helping the organization get there. An often repeated mistake is one that is rarely repeated – defining success for the team.

In Service & Support, where bright, creative, often expressive and downright amiable people pleasers dominate the landscape we tend to just assume everyone knows what it is that we’re trying to accomplish. And on the surface things like promptly answering the phone, responding to an email, or reproducing a problem in the lab are all the right things.

But those are tasks that support a larger organizational objective. You can try and wrap it all up in to “Increase shareholder value” but that doesn’t exactly resonate. You can attempt to come down one level and suggest “increase the intent to repurchase rates!” but that isn’t very sexy either. It’s not easy stuff. But it’s necessary.

Here’s how I defined it to one of my teams a couple of years ago. My company sold mobile computing devices and over 60% of the business, if not more, was sold in to hospitals, clinics, practices, etc. We’d get break/fix calls from large IT shops for a hospital network down to a nurse that doubled as an office manager.

So what was success? Success was coming in every single day and doing absolutely everything in your power to make sure that the care-givers in those hospitals and clinics had nothing standing between them and the father, brother, sister, or mother that needed their attention. It wasn’t hold times, or case closures. It was “Guys, there are people out there who are depending on our stuff working so the level of care they can give to people is the best it can possibly be. Do not lose sight of what matters here. It is about helping people and when some nurse is on the phone for 20 minutes with a broken product that’s 20 minutes she’s not helping a patient that could just as well be your friend or family member. Success is helping care givers do a better job by making sure their tools work for them ALL the time. ”

Don’t lose sight of the obvious. Define and communicate success often and with passion, and then LIVE it.

A friend recently described the best Support person as being the very definition of a “Renaissance Man” because they can do just about everything. “Put an Engineer on the phone with a customer and they’ll be in tears but a really great Support person can relate to the customer AND solve the problem”. How true. When building out an early stage Customer Service or Technical Support team it’s important to consider two things in addition to their technical or category specific skills.

1. The technical ability that’s required can usually be taught or augmented. The interpersonal skills cannot, nor can the ability to see that Sales has a tough job getting unhappy customers to buy, or the Product Manager is trying to satisfy a lot of different needs all at once. When building a team of Support professionals consider how well rounded a person is. I see a lot of job postings that ask for an enormous amount of technical skill. While some of that is required it’s not as critical as you may think when you are just building out a team. Relationship skills are a very important part of it. Having an intimidating set of technical requirements may be unintentionally excluding some terrific candidates from even applying.

    

2. Complimentary skill sets can be very powerful early on. When you consider just how much needs to get done at the beginning of the organization it’s a good idea to have the first few Support staff come in with complimentary skill sets. Item #1 above talks about the need to consider relationship skills along with technical ability. While true, that doesn’t mean having a very analytical, process driven, metrics-aware member of the team isn’t valuable. A good support team has to build systems, processes, customer escalation paths and resolution, customize case management systems, eat Twinkies, play video games, remember not to shave… wait. I’m getting off track. Where was I? Oh.. They have to write customer facing KB articles, attend meetings with Engineering, Marketing, Sales, etc. Being able to convey the right things to internal staff and external customers and partners in the right ways at the right times is important.

When looking to fill the next Support position take a step back and look at what’s causing the most pain in Service these days. It may be that the skill needed is different than you might think. It might not be in the end, but it’s worth considering for sure.

I was at lunch with the Director of Service for a large, multi-million dollar a year medical device manufacturer. We were discussing the challenges he’s having with his Service and Support organization and he kept bringing up the frustration he had over his Time to Closure for customer support cases. He was really pretty focused on it.

So I asked him point blank “Is that something your customers are complaining about?” His answer was “No, but I don’t want it to be”. Fair enough.

The more we spoke I realized that he had painted himself in to a corner. Over time he had convinced his leadership that this was the single most important metric and that it was the representation of success.

But is that the metric that matters?

The shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. The shortest distance between a customer with a problem and a customer with a resolution is Google.

If the goal is to ensure that customers are getting the answers they need to be successful with the product or service, and the answers are being produced by the Service team, then why isn’t the best metric the one that measures information generated and made available to customers?

Service Teams are Factories – They produce, store, and distribute Information

I can’t count the number of times I would say this to my teams. Set aside whatever it is that the company produces to generate revenue. It can be toasters or telephones.

Service is a manufacturing arm of the company. They produce a product called “Knowledge” and distribute it through multiple channels. The product is information that enables a customer. Focus on that metric. What information did the Service team produce this week, how much of it was distributed, and to whom? How many customers “bought” it or were able to use it successfully? Use KB article generation to do it but get it built, get it out the door, and get it in the hands of customers.

Bad Fruit

Grocery stores take bad fruit off the shelves by putting it on sale when it’s nearing the end of its shelf life. Then they toss it. The information generated by Service is no different than produce. Take out the bad stuff with a relentless focus. What did you make? What was consumed? What was removed because it was no longer good for customers? Explaining to leadership that a recent software update obfuscated the need for 13 different KB articles and therefore they were removed or flagged as being outdated is an important and valid metric, don’t you think?

Are you suggesting Aging Reports are not important?

Obviously not. What I am suggesting is that the creation, distribution, and REMOVAL of information is what will get customers the information they need to be successful more readily and with greater accuracy. When a Support manager arrives in the morning aging reports should absolutely be something they examine. But so should the Knowledge Base. “What did we produce yesterday that can help a customer today?”.

Figuring out how to tell a customer “I don’t know”

I’ve always been fascinated by an almost reflexive need on the part of many technology Service professionals and organizations to dance around the truth when they aren’t sure what to do next or how to help the customer, all in the vein of sounding informed so they can keep the customer. And this phenomenon has never been more prevalent than in the world of technology – or the legal field I would imagine. Joke! Don’t’ sue me. I just had two back-to-back outstanding examples of the wrong way to do this and the right way to do this, respectively.

I recently discovered a hot water leak in my foundation. While the warmer and decidedly cozier hard wood floor is nice in February, it’s not gonna look too pretty when the foundation cracks. Last week the first plumber arrived to confirm the problem was indeed in the slab, he informed me that “…his company doesn’t fix those. Too dangerous I guess. I think it’s cuz’ people are getting sued when the foundation problems get worse later on. You’ll have to call someone else.” While I appreciated his desire to be honest, perhaps pure conjecture on his part wasn’t the best approach to take. He left with $73 of my cash and my floor was still warm.

This morning the second plumber from a different company arrived. He was a younger, portly guy with a thick Texas accent. After I walked him through the house and explained the problem we were standing in my master bathroom and he looked me square in the eye and said “Sir, I’d like to make sure I’m straight with you. I’m not as experienced in this specific area of plumbing. I know some, and I think we’ll have to … ” he went on to describe a few basic steps then finished with “… but I don’t want to give you bad advice so I’d like to call my manager and ask him to come on out here with me. I’ll call him now and be right back”. An hour later there were TWO master plumbers on my front porch.

“… but I don’t want to give you bad advice so I’m going to call my manager and get someone more experienced out here as soon as I can”

Wow. Devastating, disarming, perfectly pitched total candor delivered absolutely perfectly by a plumber.

They won me as a customer by sending someone who didn’t know how to fix the problem but had the character (or the smarts) to recognize it.

Of course neither extreme is desirable. When I was a lowly young Support Engineer, knee-high to a grasshopper, I doubt you would have caught me with a sippy cup answering every question posed to me with “I have no earthly idea how to help you. I’ve only been here two weeks, haven’t been trained much, and likely will spend most of this phone call placing you on hold while I go ask someone else. But I sure am willing Mr. Customer. …. Hello? Are you still there? Uh, yeah, sure, I can get my manager.”

Ahem, a modicum of decorum is always preferable after all!

Most of the reasons are obvious I suppose. No Service professional wants to be perceived as not knowing what on earth they’re talking about lest they are viewed by managers or co-workers as performing poorly, particularly when they are new on the job. Human nature also dictates a good deal of this behavior along with a person’s level of self-confidence, education, and upbringing. A lack of “good process” or “no training” is easy to blame, and sometimes rightly so. But most often those things are doing their job well and you can’t prepare for every scenario, after all.

I also believe that most of the time the desire to “make the customer happy” is genuine on the part of whoever it is that’s helping you. A very real and necessary component of good service and support is making certain the customer feels comfortable by conveying that a) you are listening to them, b) you are knowledgeable on the topic at hand, and c) that you have the skills, tools, and facilities to help them with their problem even when any one of the items above is in doubt. And most importantly, d) that you WANT to help them. “I don’t’ know” is just plain counter-intuitive to conveying those messages but done right it’s a winning strategy more than a losing one.

So why is that tech companies, or any company really, never take the time to develop, formalize, train or discuss the right ways and the wrong ways to say “I don’t know” and the steps to take after you’ve said it?

I’ve spent a LOT of time in young technology companies where the product is complex, the processes are incomplete or non-existent, and the answer to the question being posed is really just not known by anyone because it hasn’t been created yet. It’s a very common occurrence. I managed an outsourced call center vendor for a period of time and would regularly visit them for a few days at a time for meetings, training, process improvements, etc.. The call center vendor would offer me whatever sitting space I felt like grabbing, and I would always choose one right in the middle of the call floor so I could be in the action and really hear what was happening on calls. Every visit I would get questions on “how should we handle this?” and every visit I was guaranteed to hear a question I had to really think about, or just flat out invent the answer right then and there. The most valuable thing I got out of that experience was an understanding that small companies are not equipped to handle EVERYTHING AT ONCE. It takes time, effort, consistency, and almost a strange kind of organizational humility to pull it off.

Not knowing is NOT the problem unless it’s a persistent indication of the wrong hire in the wrong role, or an organization’s leadership being completely devoid of knowing how to implement training and reliable measurement criteria for knowledge acquisition and continuous improvement. Call quality reviews usually bring these issues to the surface, but nothing made me squirm in my seat more than hearing an otherwise terrific Service team member completely fumble what should otherwise be a very simple statement.

Arguably it should be the very first thing you teach a new employee that is going to be supporting a sophisticated product or solution, including field engineers, systems consultants, Tier 3 staff, and yes, managers. Anyone who is comfortable in their own skin will have an ease about them that makes saying those words not only ok, but even liberating. But for some of the team it can be utterly paralyzing, perhaps even damaging, and for no reason whatsoever.

Instead what most often happens? Companies welcome the new employee, hand them a manual and a laptop, and tell them to get cranking.

“…getting the entire team to spend some time crafting, refining, and ultimately agreeing on the right way to say it can be a tremendously valuable exercise.”

Customer Service and Support managers should have occasional and informal sessions on why it’s ok to not know the answer to a question and what to do about it. These talks will usually bring out gaps in process, product documentation, knowledge base articles, etc.

Clearly, these are hugely important things to take notes on and follow up with later. But it’s important to not let the conversation get too far off track. The goal is to practice the right and wrong ways to inform a customer that the next step is unclear to the person helping them, but that it’s in no way an indication the company and the rest of the Service team aren’t prepared to solve it. Try a role playing exercise where team members can’t possibly know the answer to the question posed, and watch in delight at the absolute train wreck that ensues. Service Managers be warned – you had better be very well practiced at it before you put anyone else in the spotlight. Another tack to take is to practice what you preach by saying to everyone “I’ve been noticing that as a team we’re not handling these situations correctly, and I’m as guilty as anyone. So here’s what I’d like to do” and then set up the session.

It CAN be done correctly (script it if you have to) and even getting the entire team to spend some time crafting, refining, and ultimately agreeing on the right way to say it can be a tremendously beneficial exercise. Overall, deliver it with a relaxed but confident overarching message “candor will win over the customer every time, whether it’s a plumber or a processor”.

Jay