Through the Eyes of the Customer

3 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty in the Call Center

When you receive a phone call from an old friend – someone whose friendship you  value – how do you talk to that friend?  What’s the tone of the conversation?  Do you open a procedures manual and read from a script, or do you open your personality, and speak from the heart? 

Yesterday, I called the telephone company that I’ve been doing business with for years.

A phone call from a customer is a big opportunity for any company to increase its emotional stock in the mind of that customer; it’s a chance to create a small, albeit incrementally powerful memory;  it’s a chance to stoke the customer’s emotions to leave them thinking, “I’m invested with the right company – they’re good people – I  like  them, and they like me.”

Corny?  Perhaps.

But real?  Absolutely.

But here’s  how my  conversation went with my phone company yesterday:

“Thank you for calling Company XYX.  This is Mary – may I have your account number please?”

I gave Mary my account number.

Then she asked me to verify my billing address.  I gave that to her too.

Then she asked how she could help me.

I described an issue with my monthly bill.

Mary looked at my account record, and explained what caused the issue.  Then she told me that she would have to transfer me to the finance department. 

“Before I transfer you, Mr. Watson, is there anything else I can do to provide excellent service for you today?” 

“No, thank you.”

When the “finance” person answered, she greeted me by name.

Then she asked me for my account number.  I gave it to her, too.

Then she asked me to verify my billing address.  I did.

Then I explained my situation and request.  Again.

Then she explained what  caused the situation,  and what she would do to correct it.  Then she said, “You will notice the change to your account within 24 to 48 hours. “

I said, “OK, thanks.”

She asked, “Is there anything else I can do to provide you with excellent service today?”

I said, “No thanks.”

That was the end of the interaction between my phone company and me.  I felt processed, and nothing more.  There was nothing to cause me to feel that I know these people, or they know me.  No relationship, no loyalty, just another trivial transaction in the wind.

So, what can a call center do to take advantage of these live, human-to-human touch-points as a way to build  loyalty?

First, change your perspective.  Instead of viewing inbound calls as transactions to be processed, view them as what  they are – conversations  with human customers.  Yes, it’s important for the representative to be efficient in order to handle to volume of calls, but call center reps don’t have to be robots.  Handle customer calls as you would any purposeful, free-flowing conversation with a friend.

Second, ditch the scripts.  While scripts might enforce consistency, they don’t enforce customer loyalty.  When Jim Bush took over as VP of Worldwide Customer Service at American Express, one of the first things that he did was to get rid of the scripts used in the call center.  Tell  the  representatives what to accomplish with the calls, but don’t tell them what words to use in the  process.  When they’re not chained to a script, a representatives personality is free to engage with the customer on a more conversational, human level.  Customers feel this stuff, and they are drawn to  it.

Third, hire for personality; not for call center experience.   You can easily train a person to give them the call center skills that are necessary, but you cannot change an employee’s personality.   And over the long haul,  personality always trumps teachable skills.  Especially when connecting with customers.

An experience with a call center can be like an experience going out for  dinner:

A cashier in a fast-food restaurant quick, efficient and quickly forgotten by the customer.  They have very little impact on our loyalty.

A good waiter is someone who we remember; they converse with us; and they provide us with a memorable dining experience that we'll talk about online and offline.   We remember them, and can't wait to go back again.

Does your call  center process transactions, or create loyal customers?

Your Customers Want to See Your Human Side. Don't Let Technology Hide it!

There’s something about the neighborhood bank, where friendly tellers know your name, give lollipops to your well-behaved children, and dog biscuits to your dog at the drive-up window.   Retail bank branches do things to build personal relationships with their customers, and to bring out the human side of banking.

But not all is human at the neighborhood bank.   When I called my local branch this morning, I was surprised to hear a very non-human automaton greet me with in a contrived tone that didn’t sound anything like those nice people inside the bank.

Here’s what I heard:

“Thank you for calling Key bank’s Millcreek branch, where we strive for excellent customer service, and appreciate your business.  To insure that your call is properly directed, please listen to the following menu.”

That's definitely not the voice of anyone at my branch. They're so much more genuine than that voice!

Now, this isn’t a rant about not getting a real person when I call.  I understand that a recorded voice is far more efficient and cost effective for everyone.   But it is a rant about the voice on the other end of the phone, and the way that voice speaks to me. 

When the bank goes out of its way to be human in so many other ways, why not incorporate that same humanity into the out-going message that every customer hears, when he or she calls the branch?

Your phone greeting is a very big touch point.  If you have real people that work at the branch, why not have one of those real people record the greeting in their own voice, with their own demeanor?  Extend that same personality that’s inside the branch, to the outside of the branch.

Think about JetBlue and Southwest Airlines for a minute.  Those are very big, very regulated companies in a very regulated industry.   But when it comes time for the pre-flight safety information speech before takeoff, their flight attendants don’t just recite it in an institutional-sounding manner get through it.  Instead, they do it in their own, down-to earth human style, and often incorporate a little bit of humor.    It extends the personality of the airlines.

This approach makes the flight attendants real.  It makes them human, just like their customers.  And that’s the subtle stuff that helps to build a loyal relationship.   How are your customers greeted when they call?  Is the greeting an extension of your company’s personality, of an antiseptic-sounding voice that at best, leaves no impression at all?

 

Why Employee Satisfaction is the Key to Customer Satisfaction.

There’s a great debate going on in the LinkedIn Group for Customer Experience Management.  The question that started the debate is:

"Does Employee Satisfaction Come First, or Customer Satisfaction?"

The answers have ranged from:

“Customer satisfaction should come first because the survival of the business and the satisfaction of the employee (pay cheque) depend on the customer. When a customer becomes a company brand ambassador everybody in the organisation wins.”

to…

“I heard a comment that hits a nerve for me, and I would love to hear others’ views. The comment was around understanding or differentiating between internal customers and external customers. My personal view is that there is only one type of customer – the external one who buys your organization’s products or services.”

to…

"ESAT=CSAT...You have to remember what it is like on the front lines in order to best support the experience."

to…

“You cannot wait to get the employee experience right, because this is all to do with culture, and this can take years to change. You must work on both. You cannot deliver a great customer experience without delivering a great employee experience, they go hand in hand. It is not really a question of what comes first.”

Since this is my blog, I get to have the last word (until you leave a comment!), and the last word is this:

Customer Satisfaction is inextricably linked to Employee Satisfaction.  When Employees are eager to go to work in the morning, engaged when they’re there, and excited about the work that they’re doing, they’ll transfer those positive emotions to every customer with whom they engage.

For statistical proof, read the examples of Zappo's and HCL on the Spoken Communications blog post.

Call it Karma if you wish, but it’s real, and it works. Happy employees make for happy customers.

What do you think?

 

2 Core Principals that Drive more Customers to Self Service Support Channels and Lower the Cost of Support!

Companies love when customers go to the Self Service Portal for support. 

Companies love it because resolving an incident through self service may cost $1, compared to $7 via email, compared to $15 or more, with a live agent over the phone.  There's money in self service, if you can just get your customers to go there. 

So what’s the secret?  How do companies who are successful at coaxing customer away from the phones, and into self service, make it happen?

There are essentially two factors to consider:

1. Make it easy for the customer.

2. Make it valuable for the customer.

Easy begins by making the self service portal easy to find.
Don’t bury access to the portal deep on your website.  In fact, treat it like a marketing “call to action.”  Make the link to the portal as clear as day to see; and place it in more than one place on your website, so that the customer can’t miss it!  Obvious, right?  But too many companies get it wrong!

Make it easy to navigate.
A site that’s hard to navigate is a sight that won’t get much traffic.  When designing your self-service sight, design with the theme of making the customer’s life easy.  Finding your way around the self-service portal can be a big part of the customer experience, so do it right!

Make it easy for the customer to find their answer.
This means putting the right content in the portal; Identify those 20% of the solutions that solve 80% of the problems, and make them very findable.  Employing a “recommendation engine” can also help.   If the customer has to manually search for the answer, you'll lose too many at hello - too many won’t invest the time or effort, and the'll go straight for the phone.  But if the search can be automated – by interpreting some key words from the customer’s question, or using other search algorithms to find and present precisely relevant content, you’ll have made life a lot easier for the customers, by saving them the hassle of searching.

OK, so you’ve made the Self Service Portal easy to use.  But remember that line from the movie “Field of Dreams?”   Just because you build an easy Portal with easy access to the right answers, doesn’t mean that the customers will come running.  They won’t.  Customers want value, and customers want convenience.  The more reasons you can give your customers to go to the portal, the more they’ll go there first.

That leads us to the second factor – Make it valuable for the customer.

 

Making it valuable means making the Self Service Portal the "go-to" place for the customer - the default source for anything and everything that they might get from your company.

Example:
A particular software company (real story, by the way) wanted to increase the percentage of customers utilizing their Self Service Portal.  So, in addition to Knowledge Base content and other support tools, they relocated other resource to the portal: software downloads, sales chat, and their customer forum to the portal.  Weekly reports were previously delivered through email, but clients now could access their reports anytime, through the Portal (which was easier for the clients to manage).

Within six months, the percentage of support requests initiated in the Portal increased from 12% to 69%, and the customers loved it!

So, by making Self Service easy to use, and by focusing it on more of the customers' interests (beyond simply support), more customers to come to your on-line support party.

  

 

How Functional Silos Can Kill the Customer Experience ... and 3 Steps to Avoid Catastrophie)

 
I hate to sound negative in a blog post - after all, nobody likes to listen to a whiner.

But my recent infuriating experience with FairPoint  Communications was caused by such blatant disregard for the basics, that I'd feel  irresponsible if I didn't call them out.

Here’s how it began…

I had no dialtone on my office phone.  So, I called Fairpoint Customer Support at 866-984-2001.

A recording instructed me to call a different number -866-984-1611 - if I needed technical support, or wanted to report a problem.

 STEP # 1:
Even if you operate out of functional silos, don't make it ugly for your customers by making us take extra steps.  Connect your different departments through seamless phone transfers, and simple information sharing.  Make it easy for me, by linking that second number to the first, so that all I have to do is “press X” for technical support.   Fairpoint is a phone company after all, so they should be able to do that, right?

Matt, the tech support rep, was a nice enough guy, who quickly told me that there were no outages reported in my area, and that therefore, there may be an isolated issue around the utility pole  outside my home.   He told me that I would need to speak with the repair group, and he would transfer me there immediately.  (Great, he’s going to transfer me.  At least I don’t have to dial a third phone number, myself.)

After a brief silence, Donna answered the phone.  Here first question to me was:

“Sir, can you tell  me what phone number you’re reporting an issue with, along with your name and address?”

My response:  I just gave all that information to  the last person that I spoke to.

She:       “I realize that sir, but I need to have that information as well, because I don’t have any of the information that you gave to customer service.  We’re a different group.”

Do whatever you can, to appear like one single harmonious company to the customer, even if you don’t operate that way internally!

STEP # 2:
Don’t force your customers to repeat their stories.  Every company on the planet should know by now that customers hate that.  As customers, we don’t want to have to think  that we’re dealing with multiple companies.  The fact that you don’t share information internally shouldn’t be the customer’s problem.

Invest in some very basic CRM or Call Center technology so that you can share customer information across your functional silos. 

The first two minutes of my conversation with Donna was spent re-telling all the details that I explained to Matt.  Each time Donna asked me for more information, I reminded her that I already gave that information to the last Fairpoint representative I spoke to.  Sure, Donna probably thought I was a pain.  But she was very blunt about it not being her fault, and couldn’t I understand that?  She had a point – the fact that I had to re-tell my story wasn’t her fault.

STEP # 3:
Donna was forced to do her job with inferior tools.  This made life ugly for Donna, and ugly for her customer.   But instead of denying responsibility, Donna should have simply commiserated with the customer, by showing some empathy:  “I apologize, but our systems are not able to transfer that information to me, so I’m going to have to ask you to repeat it.”

Nothing elaborate; just  a simple acknowledgement to let me know that she appreciates the inconvenience I’m subject to.   If your systems and processes cause any inconvenience to your customer, train your customer-facing employees to openly acknowledge it, and show some empathy. 

A little empathy goes a long way to create good will, and clean up a customer service mess.

 

Emotional Framing, and 3 Ways to Increase Customer-focus in the Call Center

Sometimes, business keeps the call center from doing its real job.

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, there was an inspiring editorial about a call center in a V.A. hospital in upstate New York. 

According to the article, at this Veterans’ hospital in Canandaigua, N.Y., “a staff of about 120 runs a national phone and Internet chat service for veterans in crisis. Its mission is to connect veterans to help as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

The editorial inspires by describing how the contact center helps deserving veterans who desperately need it. There’s no other motive, beyond helping the caller.

When we think of disabled war veterans, we don’t think of them as “customers.”  We think of them as good citizens who in the course of serving their country, were struck mentally or physically by the harsh realities of war.  The circumstances can be very emotional, and therefore raise the importance of helping the caller.

Companies often frame their contact centers as cost centers.  They manage their call centers using cost and efficiency metrics.  With this increased focus on cost and efficiency, there’s often a lesser focus on the customer.  The lesson from this V.A. hospital call center is that any call center must first focus on helping the customer.  And only when the customers’ needs have been addressed; when their lives have been made better in some way, does efficiency matter.  

So, what can a company do to increase customer-focus in the call center?

3. Hire and train for empathy.
Many of the call center agents at the V.A. Hospital in Canandaigua are themselves veterans, and therefore have an intimate understanding of the callers’ situations.  In your business, this may mean making your call center agents “customers.”  You can accomplish this by brining your agents as close to the customer experience as possible, by enabling them to use your products or services in their own lives, or spending time with the customers that do, so that they can understand first-hand what it’s like to be a customer.

2. Celebrate and spread emotional stories.
There are plenty of customer service moments when a problem is solved, and a customer’s life is made easier through the efforts of the call center agent.   Share and retell these moments in daily or weekly team huddles.  By broadcasting these emotional successes on a regular basis, empathy for the customer grows stronger.

3. Make your metrics more customer-focused.
Make customer satisfaction scores a higher priority on your contact center scorecards, than efficiency metrics.  If you measure first for efficiency, you’ll manage for efficiency, and you’ll lose customer focus.  Put greater emphasis on customer satisfaction than on efficiency. Without satisfied customers, efficiency doesn’t matter.

When the customer engagement is framed in an emotional context, the call center's core purpose becomes clear.  And that core purpose is to help customers who need help. 

 
A Postcard of the Veterans Hospital in Canadaigua, New York, where service stands tall and centered.