Whenever I speak to someone about my business I find myself, ahem, as many good salespeople will, repeating a few nuggets I think help leave an impression. One of them is that any technology company in Austin, or anywhere for that matter, that attain any level of buzz or success does so as a direct result of the vision and execution of their founders. But it’s also true that the service or support staff at any one of these outfits will have played a major role in that success. It takes a lot of smarts, guts, commitment, and just plain good luck to get a company off the ground. Just remember that on some random Wednesday night at 2am a service or tech support guy somewhere in Austin is on the phone with a customer, or on a plane going to visit one. It’s what I call Austin’s “Silent Excellence of Service”. It’s always happening quietly behind the articles published in the Statesmen or Austin Business Journal regarding the funding of this company or the interview with the CEO of that one.

Glamorous? Not really. Product guys tend to get the press and the hype, and deservedly so. But the often overlooked heroes are the thousands of very bright and serious minded service & support teams that make customers successful with a product. Austin’s service culture is outstanding. I would go so far as to submit that while there are oodles of reasons to start a technology related business in Austin, the one that rarely gets any attention is that you can build out a highly competent customer facing service & support organization in very short order due to the large amount of talented people and resources located right here.

What is lacking can hurt though. This week I’ve had two responses to inquires from ‘young’ Austin tech firms indicating they aren’t ready for a support team yet. Perhaps. But while it’s possible to build out a support team quickly, it’s typically done as a reaction to product success. Wrong approach. Why? The need to develop and nurture a near maniacal devotion to your product happens with customer #1, #2, #3, and so on. It’s the only way you build out a reputation for service excellence and customer success. Unfortunately too many business wait until they’re already at customer N and are feeling the pain that comes with failure to prepare. Congratulations. It’s August and the lawn is dead. So they begin reacting, and embarking on what I call “Reactive Service Models”.

Reactive service models are awful. They cost more in hard dollars, and by the time a business has realized they aren’t executing they are losing the soft dollars embedded in opportunity costs, diluted brand value, reputation, and more.

There’s no excuse for not finding some good service & support folks and beginning to build out a service roadmap that aligns with your product roadmap. Consider: If you meet your success criteria 18 months from now, what will the customer experience be when they need help? Will you have everything in place to support that experience? How much will it cost you to build it out in 2 months vs. 18? A little time invested now goes a looooong way.

Jay

1. Double productivity
2. Halve the cost
3. Create a “Wow” customer experience

That sounds neat, doesn’t it? Here’s the rub. They want to do this leveraging a virtual support team comprised of independent hourly contractors scattered throughout India, Dubai, etc. because they feel it’s cheaper and aligns with their overall business model.

This could be made to work provided the business processes are very consistent, precise, and well thought out. They aren’t. And of course someone would need to closely monitor all of it, enforcing rules-based customer service that usually results in an adequate, if underwhelming customer experience. But we’ll have halved the cost so we can check that off the punch list.

Tribal Knowledge

Tribal knowledge is the aggregate ‘stuff’ shared within and across people in a small team. It’s the stuff everyone knows but no one has written down anywhere, or if they have, only fellow tribesmen know where it is.

In my experience in the support business there’s a reflexive need to move away from tribal knowledge because it means that you haven’t institutionalized your business processes or captured critical information inside the heads of your service team. It makes training new people difficult, costs more when someone leaves, etc. I agree it’s necessary to suppress it in the looooong run.

Personalities

It’s a mistake to ignore or underestimate the fundamental personality make-up of successful support staff. Good service people are, by nature, amiable and expressive. They *like* speaking with and helping others. More importantly, they thrive within interactive environments. That’s where all of the learning happens, after all. It’s also, coincidentally, where great service experiences are produced.

Tribal Knowledge tends to accelerate a strange kind of “service gestalt”. As a business grows tribal knowledge risks becoming more of an albatross, but it’s serves a critical role in small & medium sized organizations. I remind customers that:

• It’s essential to understand your customer’s needs for service from the outside in, not your need for service from the inside-out. That understanding comes from positive customer interaction which is subsequently chatted up among peers.
• You can’t outsource what you don’t have within, be it a business process or a culture. A core team of great service folks must be nested close to the product (and customers) before you can outsource in order to reduce costs or scale for growth.
• Rarely can you process your way in to a truly outstanding customer experience. You have to build a team that takes pride in it both as individuals and as a whole and are consistently recognized and respected for it.

Wanting some empirical evidence I visited the “Austin Emerging 100” site, opened up Excel, and browsed the “About Us” pages on every one of the companies listed looking for the executive staff titles. My approach was simple. Browse the “Management Team” page for each company and enter in Excel each executive title listed with a company name. I then tagged each listing with a business function (e.g. “Sales”, “Engineering”, “Service”, etc.)

The results were startling. I captured 458 executive titles out of 95 companies that were still in business from the list. Of the 458 titles, only 3 contained the word “Customer”, and only six had anything to do with service or support if I included the very few Directors and Managers listed. In fact, if I included ALL of the titles that involved professional services, field service, client implementation, etc., it was still only 5% of the total.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Smaller companies simply cannot afford to spend precious capital on service needs when there are few, if any, customers early in their life cycle. Yet most of them know it’s an important component of success. But it begged the question:

“If every company has a customer service or support function and only six are dedicated to customer service, who in the list of458 titles owns the rest?“

Between polls, asking those I know, calling a handful of businesses, etc., I was able to come up with the answer. They report to the “VP of Underscore”. It’s all over the map. Some report to VP of Operations, others report to the VP of Sales, the VP of Engineering, the COO, etc. Few of these folks have customer service as their core competency or discipline and they’ll continue to run things until the activity level gets above the knee caps as their customer install base grows. That’s when they and their company begin to “react” and are often at a loss as to how to put together a service strategy and implementation plan that aligns with their product success strategy. It proved my theory and Bootstrap Service continues to grow as we target businesses in need of specific service expertise without having to hire someone full time. Ask me who the ideal executive is for my sales efforts and I’ll respond with “the VP of Underscore.”

p.s. The irony is that the “About Us” and “Management Team” links are next to the “Support” links on 90% of the web sites. Go figure.

This was a standard week for me in many ways. It was spent meeting new people and learning from them. It’s not hard to find people with interesting insights, knowledge, and know-how. With just a little bit of effort and an open mind a variety of people offer genuinely enlightening discussions. And to a person they are all pleasant and full of smiles and a willingness to help. We all have far more in common in this human experience we call life than we have differences. When I consider what threads were common through all of my introductions and discussions this week it was optimism and an eagerness to tackle the future.

I started Monday with a thank you note for an approval to move forward on building the first set of Support capabilities for a new software company in Austin that booked their first customer and is anxiously anticipating approvals on their 2^nd an 3^rd –future- customers. Wednesday I had a nice frosty beverage after work with a former colleague that was about to accept a Sales position to open some new markets in Texas. Thursday was spent in Dallas speaking with the leadership team of an absolutely terrific company that is profitable, happy, love what they do, and want the Service team to be better than they already are.

Friday afternoon was spent down at the UT campus with the chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering talking about careers for students in Service. I was met with warmth, smiles, energy, and optimism. Oh, and Dr. Amblers distaste for Volvo service capabilities. ;-P I’ll likely end up giving a talk with some of them in the fall semester regarding the importance of the customer experience after the sale of a product, or how and why serviceability matters when you’re a design engineer.

I could focus on my check engine light unexpectedly coming on in the car this week. I could focus on the two prospects that decided to hold off on the RFP I sent. I could focus on any number of seemingly negative developments in my life or the life of others this week. But that mindset won’t get me or anyone else anywhere. And as I consider what has been common throughout my career that brought positive results vs. unwanted outcomes, it’s my frame of mind with family, friends, coworkers, and of course customers.

In the world of Service your mind matters. Focus on positive customer outcomes that are entirely attainable, build a plan, work the plan, refine the plan, and get cranking. Focus on the frame of mind and the metrics will follow.

You can view the home page at this URL:

www.customermanagementiq.com

You can view the article directly here:

http://www.customermanagementiq.com/article.cfm?externalID=767

“These people are supporting us! …everything that has to do with the experience when they come in should be at the highest level that we can put it at. That’s been our approach traditionally and it hasn’t failed”

CEO of Southwest Airlines? Apple? Nordstrom’s? Nope. If you don’t know I’d understand. It’s Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful Dead during a 1993 pre-show interview in Las Vegas. Sting opened for them. But even if you don’t give two hoots about the Dead or their music, there’s a lesson in their approach that many businesses can learn from.

This past weekend the surviving members of The Grateful Dead returned to the stage in what’s generally viewed as a very successful first show. It’s interesting that a 40+ year old band can still garner an audience of devoted fans and sell out 20 shows in short order.

What’s their secret? Music, of course. But there’s more to it than that.

Watch this fun, chatty, ten minute interview with an articulate Jerry Garcia and you’ll understand some of the reasons The Grateful Dead were pulling in over 50 million a year in touring revenue alone. Except for the 2-3 minutes he discusses his health, Jerry is always focused on the experience of the audience. Jerry Garcia and his band-mates respected their audience, viewed them as intelligent and selective, and most importantly, never took them for granted.

One of my favorite exchanges comes in the last 30 seconds:

• Interviewer: “You still get nervous?”
• Jerry Garcia: “… I wouldn’t have any emotional attachment if I didn’t. I think it’s a bad idea to take a crowd of 30 or 40 thousand people for granted, ya know what I mean?”
• Interviewer: “It just seems like they’re ready. They’re gonna accept you”
• Jerry Garcia: “I think that’s a convenient illusion”

Do you respect your audience? Ahem, excuse me, I mean your customers?

Maggie Fox at SMG has some interesting observations about the viral nature of social media and the time-crunch that’s occurring as a result. In a Customer Service and/or Tech Support context this is worth noting. Remember that a response to a customer can now be published to thousands in seconds.

Whether that’s a good response or a bad one is up to the company providing it. It may also simply be the result of an excruciatingly long time before a customer gets a response. Saying nothing can be as harmful as saying the wrong thing.

Bottom line – Customer Service is now Marketing and PR. Your company has to be prepared to manage this by ensuring your service & support organization is rock solid in terms of process, technology, and talent.

Jay

I have no idea whether or not it will be of value to anyone, and I’m not endorsing either organization, but thought I’d pass along the webinar registration link and brief summary at the bottom of this blog post if anyone has interest.

Seeing the newsletter reminded me of the long debate I had with my team leads at our support center about what we should say to a customer, or what we should try to collect from a customer, inside the first 30-60 seconds of answering the phone. It’s amazing how complex a simple sentence or two can get when you are trying to both concisely convey and extract information at the same time – all as the first step in, ahem, “delighting” the customer.

It can get interesting and challenging as you progress out in to the first 2-3 minutes of a call depending on your industry or product. Call control is a huge consideration and one major advantage to scripted or structured calls is control. Nothing is worse than answering the phone “Thanks for calling Acme, Inc. My name is Jay, how can I help you?” because you’ll have some poor support person on the phone for 20 minutes before he/she gets a customer name or a phone number. Though they may extract the dog’s name, the cause of an ex-husband’s demise, or a lesson in how not to speak to co-workers. “How may I help you?” irks me greatly.

• I’ve found that what order to ask customer questions during a call will be heavily influenced by the case management and/or CRM systems that are employed. The length of time it takes to enter or retrieve information may not jive with the flow of the conversation. Ideally you want to be fluid and sound knowledgeable vs. stuttered, or as if you are only just discovering what info you have on the customer, if any at all. The flip side is that customers just can’t stand being forced to answer 37 questions, particularly if they call you fairly often.
  
  (Come to think of it, SaaS apps like Netsuite and Salesforce.com still haven’t offered up any truly inventive solutions to this problem. Any case form data entry is only partially organized, and more than that there isn’t a really kick-butt facility to build out your call flow in harmony with the case data entry/retrieval workflow. Their tab paradigm requires too much pointing and clicking and any screen pops you want to build all have to be done with JavaScript or something. None of it is a natural act. But I digress…)
  
• Keep both new and existing customers in mind when designing these things and use your AVR prudently. Try to avoid too many phone tree menus, e.g. “If you need help programming the VCR, Tibetan Buddhists that have already received enlightenment should press 8 then the # sign. Press 9 if enlightenment continues to elude you.”
• Another good option for previous customers is to provide them with the auto-assigned ID generated by the CRM system to their name. Typically you can look up a customer by that vs. just “John Smith” and all of the duplicate entries. Doesn’t work as well in the consumer space but holds up in business-to-business market if they call you back and provide the “Customer ID Number” for faster data retrieval. Of course, more sophisticated organizations may bind their phone system’s AVR to the case management systems, but for the smaller companies I tend to work with that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Here’s that webinar info:

Here’s a link to the eWeek article:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Salesforcecom-Puts-Twitter-in-Its-Service-Cloud-351280/

Clearly, this is another example of a company getting in on what everyone now recognizes as an industry buzz with some momentum. And the offering certainly gets very very close to what I’ve been talking about, though my example was more targeted at a specific workflow challenges.

I had a similar experience not long ago. I had tossed out a Twitter update lamenting the fact that the Flock web browser had no native support for Linked-In despite including just about everything else. Low and behold, Flock responded the next day and indicated that Linked-In had yet to open up their API, which was a gating factor in Flock including it in their offering. It was a great example of how companies are out there mining for dissatisfied customers and getting ahead of them with no direct inbound request from the user themselves.

But I’m a hands-on-the-keyboard implementation guy and once you get past the edgy buzz and fuzzy value, I still think the far more boring and practical implications have miles to go. Off the top of my head are questions like:

• What happens after someone discovers a product mention out in the Social Media Cloud?
• Is a case created automatically?
• What kind of workflow happens as a result?
• What determines which team in the organization handles the mention?
• How new or old is the data and what aspect of the system is able to discern from a Twitter update last week that was already handled vs. one today. (Closing the loop is always the hard part)
• What kind of performance management reporting is being generated that offers any kind of meaningful, actionable information? If you aren’t learning, then what are you doing, exactly?

The one I find the most intriguing is that any time you have a “case” or “incident” there’s typically a need to bind it to a customer entity. I wonder how companies will bind the case when they don’t know who the entity is beyond “twitter.com/their_profile”? It has interesting implications for the CRM players, who’s entire notion of customer management is built around the idea that you KNOW who your customer is. Certainly during my time at Motion, where the entire Sales channel was built off a network of distributors and resellers, the biggest challenge was knowing who owned the product and where? The distributor model made your view of the customer very opaque.

It quickly becomes a “Customer Master Creation” problem. And now a Company profile as well as individual Contact profiles will need to provide facilities for capturing the Facebook site location, Twitter, etc. You might as well have their status updates fed directly in to the CRM system and trigger workflow off of those. Interesting.

Most importantly, how on earth does a company justify the soft costs and hard costs that go with this? What P&L eats the line item? Does inside Sales own it? Customer Service? Marketing? Is it shared? The reality is that it will end up in the Service organization at some point as being yet another channel that has to be monitored and maintained, and heaven forbid a Twitter inferno starts over something innocuous. The last thing in the world you need is a VP of Sales, or the CEO, screaming bloody murder because Service wasn’t able to contain a Twitter update gone awry and now it’s perpetuating like mad.

Unless you have mechanisms that leave you in defensible positions you’ll find a lot of resistance to incorporating this stuff in to the Service teams. If I were running your service or support organization I’d want to define very clearly and very early on what metrics determined success or failure before I took on the headcount and ownership.

Perhaps SFDC has addressed many of these questions already. I’ll have to go read up on what the Salesforce.com offering is in more detail. I have some friends who work there and I’m curious to see what they perceive the value is along with the elegance of the implementation. I’ll circle back and share what I learn, if anything.

Jay

As a Support Manager, most of the emails that arrive in the in-box require that you take action. By contrast, a VP might find that 50% of the email they get is “FYI” or “CYA” related. In highly tactical roles you react to inbound requests from employees, partners, and customers and a seemingly insignificant unread email can lead to real problems later. My advice is always the same – Stop chasing bunnies in order to provide good service.

It’s ironic that as leaders in our discipline we spend lots of time crafting, implementing, measuring, and refining repeatable processes that support customers, yet often fail to do anything of the sort for ourselves and how we manage requests as individuals.

• Use your calendar with maniacal focus. I know it seems counter-intuitive. “Dude, I wish I could schedule my day like that but the phone won’t let me. I’m entirely interrupt-driven”. Rubbish!

  Each day will have time devoted to reports, reviews, meetings, and customer requests. Plan those times and include two 30 min periods for flex time. On my calendar I call them “Struts” because they helped stabilize my day and allowed for the “VP of Whatever” to walk up and hand me an emergency or indulge the unplanned cubicle-drive-by from co-workers.

• Turn off the Outlook blue reminder box and envelope notification in the system tray. Schedule time to read and respond to email & voice mail 3-4 times a day. Remember that you are NOT helping your customers or your team’s reputation if you are responding to a ten second old email rather than tending to the issue you are in the middle of working on. Besides, you lose focus and make careless mistakes.
• Do not answer your phone unless you’re waiting for an important call. Let it go to voice mail whenever possible, knowing you’ve planned time for retrieving them, scheduling the call backs, and giving customers your undivided attention. Or forward to your iPhone/WinMo where you can set ringtones to alert you to important calls vs. standard ones.
• Get efficient. Example: Outlook 2007 includes a handy “Quick Parts” tool as well as Message Templates. Many responses are similar and it’s senseless to re-write “Hi Mr. Customer, I just got your email regarding …”

  Craft as many as you need and keep shortcuts to them close by. Speak to response times that are appropriate for the request, and then set-up Outlook rules that copy or forward it to the right team member based on the body of the message. It’s all about being efficient and setting expectations properly. Doesn’t hurt to get crafty with some Outlook macros as well. You’re technical. You can handle it. ;-P

• Take the email you just sent and drag it to your calendar. Always ask yourself WHEN will I be able to do this and HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE? Some take five minutes. Some take an hour. By adding them to your calendar and regularly reviewing it, you’ll start to develop a radar screen that tells you when you’re out of time and risk dropping the ball on a customer.

  When it fills up and there are more to go, and delegating no longer seems plausible, it’s time to ask your boss for help with priorities. Never spend time complaining to your manager that you’re overwhelmed or can’t keep up. Bring an organized set of items and get the priorities validated. By doing so you’ll have set their expectations and kept them from being surprised when something falls of the to-do list.

• FOLLOW UP FOLLOW UP FOLLOW UP!! – If you employ the methods above, you MUST make sure you follow through. So use Office automation tools, build out processes for yourself, and leverage your calendar to make sure you’re doing that. I always assume I’ll forget something so I leave constant reminders for myself. Place copious amounts of notes in your case management system so you set a good example for the rest of the team on how to capture relevant information.