Name: Monica Postell

Web Site: http://twitter.com/#!/mlpdelray

Bio: With a background in performance improvement and instructional design, Monica Postell works with Impact Learning Systems in designing and deploying training and development programs that foster real customer loyalty.

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The Zen of Customer Service

November 25th, 2011

Humor me. Take a long, slow breathe in as you read this. Now, take your time and exhale slowly blow­ing a steady stream of air. That wasn't Zen; it was just breath­ing but it felt good, didn't it?

To me Zen con­jures up feel­ings of tran­quil­ity and images of quiet, con­tem­pla­tive sit­ting (in a gar­den much like this) and of har­ness­ing the mind to med­i­tate on the mean­ing of life…or cus­tomer service.

If a com­mon zen med­i­ta­tion is "Who am I?" Then per­haps the cus­tomer ser­vice med­i­ta­tion might be "How can I BE the customer?"

I never expected to quote Chuck Nor­ris much less in a cus­tomer ser­vice post but here goes: "Zen begins and ends at the most human level, how peo­ple think of them­selves and oth­ers." That's a quote from his book "The Secret Power Within — Zen Solu­tions to Real Prob­lems."  He may have been talk­ing about mar­tial arts and Zen, but what he said surely applies to cus­tomer ser­vice.  How CSRs think of them­selves and oth­ers def­i­nitely shapes how they deliver cus­tomer service.

So how do we move our minds to BE the cus­tomer and act accordingly?

Here's a zen story that's thought pro­vok­ing. (And not because it involves beat­ing some­one with a stick!) The story goes that a young man wanted to mas­ter the art of sword fight­ing. Being a young, indus­tri­ous fel­low, he found him­self a mas­ter sword fighter and appren­ticed him­self to him with the agree­ment that the mas­ter would teach him the art of sword fight­ing. For the first few years all the lad did was cook, clean, and act as the master's ser­vant. Even­tu­ally, he reminded the mas­ter of their agree­ment and asked him to begin teach­ing him. The old fel­low agreed.

But the lessons had begun.  Just as the stu­dent began to cook the rice early the next morn­ing, the mas­ter sud­denly appeared behind him, whacked him with a wooden sword, and dis­ap­peared with­out say­ing a word.  The stu­dent then began sweep­ing out the rooms.   And at a cer­tain moment, when he least expected it, the mas­ter was there right beside him again, hit him again with the sword, and dis­ap­peared.  This went on all day, every day.  No mat­ter what the stu­dent was doing, he could never be at rest, know­ing that at any moment the mas­ter would again appear and hit him with the wooden sword.

A few years went by this way and even­tu­ally the stu­dent learned to suc­cess­fully dodge the master's blow no mat­ter which angle it came from.  The stu­dent felt he had accom­plished some­thing, but the mas­ter was not sat­is­fied with him yet.

Then one morn­ing, the stu­dent spot­ted the mas­ter busy cook­ing some veg­eta­bles over an open fire.  The stu­dent decided to turn the tables, picked up a big stick, and crept up on the mas­ter.  When the mas­ter stooped over the cook­ing pot, the stu­dent raised the stick and swung it down on the mas­ter — who in an instant grabbed the cover off the cook­ing pot, spun around, and used it to catch the tip of the stick.

In that moment the stu­dent had the kind of sud­den insight Zen is famous for:  He saw into one of the secrets of the art of sword fight­ing, that sen­sory aware­ness has to be devel­oped to the point that one can antic­i­pate move­ment as well as thought.

In Zen,the learn­ing expe­ri­ence is sub­tle and grad­ual. In cus­tomer ser­vice, the learn­ing expe­ri­ence is sub­tle and grad­ual as well. As much as we'd like to see CSRs leave new hire train­ing as  fully real­ized cus­tomer ser­vice pro­fes­sion­als, no amount of train­ing will make that hap­pen if the individual's atti­tude isn't already customer-focused and service-oriented.

It seems to me that the lessons learned in cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing can't solely be about how to put a call on hold or use sys­tems tools effi­ciently and effec­tively. And con­sid­er­ing that the vast major­ity of learn­ing occurs after train­ing, I have to won­der about the lessons learned on the job.

So I'll leave you with two ques­tions on which to meditate:

• What would the impact be if  your CSRs left train­ing feel­ing good about them­selves, cer­tain of who they are and what they hope to accom­plish on every cus­tomer interaction—whether it's inter­nal or external?
• What does your orga­ni­za­tion do on the job to sup­port the impor­tance of act­ing with integrity, being your best self, and serv­ing rather than ser­vic­ing customers?

2 Comments "

Give to Get Better Customer Satisfaction

March 15th, 2011

There’s a cus­tomer ser­vice skill that I par­tic­u­larly like because of its power to impact cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. It’s called “give to get." In essence “give to get’ sug­gests that rather than act­ing like the Grand Inquisi­tor, I should pro­vide some infor­ma­tion – like what’s in it for you or why I need what­ever I’m ask­ing about – before ask­ing for it. I find it fos­ters coop­er­a­tion, nets bet­ter results, and truly encour­ages col­lab­o­ra­tion if I do that rather than demand­ing infor­ma­tion from cus­tomers with­out explanation.

It strikes me that the con­cept also applies to cus­tomer ser­vice, tech­ni­cal sup­port, and sales sit­u­a­tions in which you’re try­ing to pro­mote a solu­tion to a prob­lem. Scott Anthony wrote about the “curse of knowl­edge” in a  Har­vard Review Pub­lish­ing blog.

“Chip and Dan Heath described the curse of knowl­edge nicely in their 2007 book Made to Stick (highly rec­om­mended to all inno­va­tors). The basic prob­lem: peo­ple who have deep knowl­edge about a topic some­times assume other peo­ple have that same knowl­edge. That can lead to major missteps.”

Mr. Anthony writes mostly about prod­uct inno­va­tion but he gave an exam­ple in his blog post that illus­trated my point — that you have to “give to get” when you’re work­ing with customers.

"Dur­ing my meet­ing at Gillette, one group mem­ber described how "of course" the last place you should shave is around your mouth. As I tend to shave my chin last, I asked him why."

"Well, that part of the face has the most nerve end­ings," he explained. "So you need to give more time for your shave prep [lotion or gel] to work."

Know­ing a lot about your prod­uct can actu­ally cause prob­lems in tech­ni­cal sup­port and cus­tomer ser­vice if you don’t know how to share that infor­ma­tion. It’s dan­ger­ous to assume the cus­tomer has the same depth of knowl­edge or expe­ri­ence with the prod­uct or ser­vice that you do. For exam­ple, I don’t know all the pric­ing plans my phone com­pany has to offer or how the fea­ture pack­ages change from one plan to another. What I do know is that I’m always asked for a lot of information.

As con­sumers we’re pretty used to being asked “for your secu­rity” ques­tions. “For your secu­rity, I’ll need the last four dig­its of your social secu­rity num­ber.” Like well-programmed cus­tomers we usu­ally coop­er­ate in the inter­est of for­ward progress on the call. Just once, wouldn’t it be nice if a com­pany adopted a “give to get” phi­los­o­phy and offered us a “no strings attached, just because you’re our cus­tomer” free­bie piece of use­ful infor­ma­tion or advice?

2 Comments "

Look What Happens When You Expect The Best

October 14th, 2010

You just need to prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice in order to expect the best.

Hello, my name is Mon­ica and I'm a So You Think You Can Dance fan. I might as well admit it; I'm pretty much hooked on all real­ity TV dance shows. Fri­day night I was in the audi­ence of the Sea­son 7 So You Think You Can Dance road show with sev­eral thou­sand appre­cia­tive teenagers and a few thou­sand equally loud pre­teens. Regard­less the dif­fer­ence in age (and attire) we were all there for the same rea­son: To see our favorite dancers do what they do so incred­i­bly well, dance! And dance, they did, with seem­ing aban­don now that the judges weren't around to cri­tique them.

In a per­fect blend of tal­ent and train­ing, over and over the dancers flew through the air trust­ing they'd be caught. One of the num­bers involved all the male dancers in black and white and Lau­ren, this year's win­ner of America's favorite SYTYCD dancer, in a con­fec­tion of pink tulle. What got my atten­tion (aside from the cos­tumes) and kept me on the edge of my seat was the coor­di­na­tion of effort the dance required and the trust the dancers, espe­cially Lau­ren, had to have in each other. At one point I was seri­ously wor­ried. Lau­ren was danc­ing away on a spindly chair atop a long table and, to add a degree of dif­fi­culty, was being pushed from one end of the table to the other, spun, lifted and shoved to the other end again not by just one han­dler but by just about every­one in the ensem­ble at one point or another. One wrong move and, splat, some­one could get hurt. But the rou­tine was flawless.

Wow, I thought, this takes "expect­ing the best" to an all new high. Why were they able to make those death defy­ing catches look so easy? Well, duh, they trusted one another because they prac­ticed and prac­ticed and prac­ticed until they got each move down per­fectly. Their hard work allowed them to expect the best of each other.

In the audi­ence, I too expected the best. I expected the dancers to have mas­tered the chore­og­ra­phy. And I wasn't dis­ap­pointed. In fact, the dancers took mar­velous rou­tines I'd already seen on TV and kicked them up a notch… maybe a dozen notches… maybe two dozen! I was more than delighted (as the peo­ple sit­ting near me no doubt were aware).

As I sat there in my nar­row sta­dium seat, I had a minor epiphany about ser­vice deliv­ery and expect­ing the best. Here's what occurred to me:

• Cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives, tech­ni­cal sup­port reps, field engi­neers and sales asso­ciates who "expect the best" of them­selves and their cowork­ers are in a great posi­tion to not just sat­isfy cus­tomers but to sur­prise and delight them.
• To expect the best, you need to "mas­ter the chore­og­ra­phy". You need to under­stand what to do, why to do it, and how to do it per­fectly. Then you need to prac­tice doing "your dance" under the guid­ance and coach­ing of a "mas­ter" until you per­fect every more.
• You also need to under­stand you're not work­ing alone. The goal has to be to syn­chro­nize your actions with the work of oth­ers in your orga­ni­za­tion. This requires under­stand­ing what other peo­ple do and how what you do impacts your cowork­ers and ulti­mately your cus­tomer. That's called the "rip­ple effect" and I'll save that topic for another post.
• Finally, cus­tomers expect you to "know the chore­og­ra­phy" of your job. When you mas­ter your job, are in sync with the rest of the orga­ni­za­tion and under­stand how you fit into the over­all pic­ture, you can kick your ser­vice up a notch. You have a chance to sur­prise, delight, impress and give the cus­tomer a supe­rior experience.

So there you have it. I bet you can't wait to see what I'll come up with after watch­ing Danc­ing With The Stars!

6 Comments "

Don't Keep Your Customers in the Dark: Add Value

September 29th, 2010

As a cus­tomer, how do I know what I want… if I don’t know what’s pos­si­ble? It's as though I'm blindfolded.

I was on a flight recently. We’d just been advised to turn off all elec­tronic devices so I had to close my Kin­dle and was forced to choose between quiet con­tem­pla­tion and read­ing the airline’s Sky Mall cat­a­logue one more time. Per­haps because I was 3 hours into a less than customer-focused flight expe­ri­ence, the idea of enrich­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence came to mind. And I went with it.

The idea of “adding value” popped into my head. At first glance, adding value cer­tainly sounds like a good thing—not so much the “adding” part as the “value” part of the con­cept. I sub­scribe to the the­ory that reduc­ing cus­tomer effort—making it quick and easy for me to do busi­ness with you—builds loyalty.

So it seems to me that adding time to an inter­ac­tion isn’t help­ful unless I see some ben­e­fit to what I’m get­ting. There needs to be some clearly per­ceived value. I under­stand that there’s some­thing in it for YOU… you’re sell­ing me some­thing extra or mak­ing sure I don’t have to call you back. But as a cus­tomer “added value” is only good if there’s some­thing in it for ME. One size does not fit all.

At Impact, for exam­ple, our cus­tomer ser­vice, sales, field ser­vice and tech­ni­cal sup­port train­ing pro­grams all include a model for adding value. For us it’s not about tack­ing some­thing on. It’s about tak­ing the blind­fold off and con­nect­ing an offer, an idea, a resource, or tid­bit of infor­ma­tion to a spe­cific customer’s prob­lems, needs or inter­ests. The goal is to reduce cus­tomer effort.

Using tech­nol­ogy, you don’t even have to be present to pro­vide added value to your customers.

I expe­ri­enced this kind of added value right after Oprah announced her newest book club selec­tion. I wanted to know what the book was about so I went to Ama­zon for a descrip­tion. In addi­tion to the book descrip­tion (hmm, could this be added value?) I found a very inter­est­ing feature—Readers’ Forum. In this forum, read­ers post ques­tions to other read­ers. One caught my eye. In it, a woman listed books she’d read and liked and asked for sug­ges­tions of other books she’d like. Wow! I’d read and liked those books too so I read on. There were lots of inter­est­ing sug­ges­tions and faster than I can say,“1 click add to cart” two books were on whis­per­net on their way to my Kin­dle. Was that added value? For me, yes, it was. Did Ama­zon ben­e­fit as well? Of course it did.

Clearly I am the cen­ter of Amazon’s uni­verse. I know this because of the way they treat me. They know I like to read, they know what I like to read, and they know I’m a busy per­son so they proac­tively make sug­ges­tions based on my past pur­chases and inter­ests. Pur­chas­ing a book is super easy and deliv­ery to my Kin­dle pro­vides a happy dose of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. It def­i­nitely nets out to low cus­tomer effort and high cus­tomer satisfaction.

So, the ques­tion is, what can you do to add that kind of value to your cus­tomer inter­ac­tions? Discuss.

1 Comment "

Is Customer Effort the Next Customer Experience Metric?

August 26th, 2010

"Stop Try­ing to Delight Your Cus­tomers" arrived in my inbox and unleashed an imme­di­ate flurry of calls, emails and ideas among our merry Impact band — social learn­ing at its best. The gist of the Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cle by Matthew Dixon, Karen Free­man and Nicholas Toman of the Exec­u­tive Board is that their research points to a fal­lacy in the idea that cus­tomers must be "delighted" to remain loyal.  Instead "to really win their loy­alty, for­get the bells and whis­tles and just solve their problems…quickly and eas­ily." Amen, Here Here, Cheers, and Skol to that!

As much as I appre­ci­ate good man­ners, friend­li­ness, and respect­ful eti­quette, what I really want is some­one or some way to cut through the quick­sand, time suck­ing bog that I tend to find myself in when I have a cus­tomer ser­vice or tech­ni­cal sup­port problem.

Not every­one will agree with me but I'm drawn to self-service options. I some­how expect those options to be  ready for me and fast. Yes, quick and easy, ready and just wait­ing to serve up the infor­ma­tion I need. Unfor­tun­tely, my ques­tion never seems to be one of the FAQs and my con­fig doesn't usu­ally match the sys­tem specs in any of the help arti­cles ren­der­ing them use­less to me. Or at least that how it feels. Do you ever won­der what hap­pens to all those 'no' votes you leave in response to the ques­tion: "Was this answer help­ful?" I do.

So then I'm forced to another com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel. It could be chat. It could be a web form. It could be the tele­phone. Appar­ently, I'm not alone. The Exec­u­tive Board's research showed that 57% of the 75,000 peo­ple they inter­viewed had expe­ri­enced hav­ing to switch from the web to the phone to get an answer or help. I'm also not alone in hav­ing had to re-explain an issue or pro­vide infor­ma­tion mul­ti­ple times — 56% of cus­tomers sur­veyed expe­ri­enced that. Being trans­ferred is another poten­tially loy­alty cor­rod­ing expe­ri­ence espe­cially if you're trans­ferred to some­one who isn't there. And few things say "We don't care" quite as effec­tively as mak­ing the cus­tomers call back repeat­edly in order to resolve an issue.

Per­son­ally, I sup­port reduc­ing cus­tomer effort – espe­cially when I'm the cus­tomer — and think it's an excel­lent met­ric for mea­sur­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Here are some ideas for reduc­ing cus­tomer effort and improv­ing my cus­tomer experience:

1. Power to the front line! If you're a man­ager, make it pos­si­ble for front line employ­ees to use their train­ing, knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence and com­mon sense to do what's right and help me.
2. If your sys­tems don't enable you to accom­plish #1, start now to fig­ure out what needs to  change so sys­tems help rather than hob­ble efforts. As just one exam­ple, I'd be pretty excited if a rep said, "Ms. Postell?" and when I said "Yes" said "I have all your account infor­ma­tion here. How can I help you today?" That's instead of ask­ing for all the infor­ma­tion I'd already keyed in to the IVR.
3. If you're a rep, here's a 1.0 sug­ges­tion that still works: Take notes. This is espe­cially help­ful if you have to explain my sit­u­a­tion to some­one else…so I don't have to repeat the whole story.
4. Encour­age every­one who talks with me to use pos­i­tive lan­guage and talk about what they can do, what my options are, and what is good about what they can do for me. I'm really not inter­ested in excuses and lengthy, time con­sum­ing explanations.
5. Add value to our con­ver­sa­tions. Give me infor­ma­tion so I won't have to call back. Teach me some­thing. Help me be more self-sufficient and con­fi­dent in what­ever I'm using of yours. 

What else would you sug­gest? I'd love to hear your ideas as soon as I get back from show­er­ing off all this grit­ting sand.

2 Comments "

I Want to Be a Customer Service HERO

August 11th, 2010

I'm inspired. I want to be a HERO, but not just any kind of hero. I want to be a Highly Empow­ered and Resource­ful Oper­a­tive.

I learned about this cool des­ig­na­tion from a Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cle (July/August 2010) by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler enti­tled "Empow­ered".  In the arti­cle the authors described the way employ­ees at com­pa­nies like Best Buy, Black & Decker, and E*Trade have proac­tively taken the ini­tia­tive to use read­ily avail­able tech­nol­ogy to do things like improve inter­nal train­ing, avert cus­tomer ser­vice prob­lems, and strengthen their brands.

What I really liked read­ing is the recog­ni­tion that there are lots of smart, ded­i­cated peo­ple out there with great ideas who are capa­ble of mak­ing things bet­ter for cus­tomers and cowork­ers if given a fight­ing chance (aka if empowered).

"The cru­cial part of the solu­tion is the HERO Compact–a three-way agree­ment for man­ag­ing tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. In the com­pact, HERO's agree to inno­vate within a safe frame­work, man­agers agree to encour­age inno­va­tion and man­age risk, and IT agrees to sup­port and scale up HERO projects."

Although the focus of the arti­cle was on inno­v­a­tive tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions, the authors had me at "highly empow­ered and resource­ful oper­a­tives". No ques­tion, Bestbuy's Twelp­force is a mar­velous inno­va­tion and a credit to the employ­ees who fig­ured out how to make it work. Think­ing about some of our clients, I have to say that not every orga­ni­za­tion has the tech­no­log­i­cal where­withal, the social media inter­est, or the need for that sort of inno­va­tion. But what orga­ni­za­tion wouldn't want a cadre of "resource­ful oper­a­tives" advo­cat­ing in the inter­est of both the cus­tomer and your com­pany. Couldn't there be non-technological innovations?

So that brings me back to the def­i­n­i­tion: highly empow­ered and resource­ful oper­a­tives. One of the article's cen­tral mes­sages was that to be HERO's oper­a­tives have to be highly empow­ered. Empow­er­ing and enabling employ­ees is one of the keys to launch­ing and sus­tain­ing a suc­cess­ful cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy. The ques­tion is "How"? Here are a few sug­ges­tions listed in no par­tic­u­lar order:

• Remove head from sand. As the arti­cle said, "New tech­nolo­gies and social media have made it pos­si­ble for a sin­gle dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer to inflict last­ing dam­age on a brand.…Companies have to respond to cus­tomers' esca­lat­ing power…Employees are ready to do so."
• Encour­age inno­v­a­tive prac­tices by giv­ing employ­ees a forum for bring­ing ideas to light and by giv­ing your per­sonal sup­port to ideas that can make a dif­fer­ence in the customer's experience.
• Tap into the mother-load of CE knowl­edge: your front line rep­re­sen­ta­tives, team lead­ers, and man­agers. Talk with them and see what ideas they have or  find out what they're  (gasp!) already doing.
• Set up a social media pol­icy and train employ­ees in per­mis­si­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tions and activ­i­ties so all their cre­ativ­ity is used for the good of cus­tomers and the company.
• Assess the risk asso­ci­ated with any pro­posed inno­va­tion and see what you and your peers can do to man­age the risk.
• Loop in an IT cham­pion to enable the inno­va­tion if it involves technology.
• Stand back and get ready to cel­e­brate the teams' successes.

I'd love to hear about the HERO's at your com­pany. Who are they and what was their inno­va­tion? What was/is the impact on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence or orga­ni­za­tional effec­tive­ness? Oh, and is there a dress code? Do they get to wear red patent leather lace up hero boots to work? Maybe I should save that one for another blog post.

2 Comments "

How Telephone Sales Training Affects Job Enrichment

July 27th, 2010

For me, job enrich­ment is all about pro­vid­ing men­tal stim­u­la­tion and oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow pro­fes­sion­ally so your employ­ees – espe­cially the tal­ented ones that you and your cus­tomers appre­ci­ate so much – stay both happy and with you.

I just returned from facil­i­tat­ing the class­room por­tion of our blended Get­ting to the HEART of Tele­phone Sales™ train­ing for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island. I was work­ing with a newly formed team recruited from exist­ing cus­tomer ser­vice reps and it struck me, “Wow, this is a ter­rific exam­ple of job enrichment!”

Before I explain how, I have to com­mend Diane Comella, Team Leader, and Al Means, Senior Trainer, for the really smart and very effec­tive man­ner in which they chose to do the train­ing. I know in large part it’s the rea­son the class was so engaged and excited about their new roles. The class com­pleted one online mod­ule a day fol­lowed by review and prac­tice of the sales skills and a seg­ment of new prod­uct train­ing. Infor­ma­tion was deliv­ered in man­age­able chunks – just like we all know is best for learn­ers but is often not the way things work out due to time and dead­line con­straints. So Kudos to Diane and Al.

Back to job enrich­ment… You may have noticed that the course these for­mer cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives took was a tele­phone sales course – not a stan­dard com­po­nent of a cus­tomer ser­vice cur­ricu­lum. And, no, they aren’t being asked to cross-sell or upsell some unsus­pect­ing mem­ber who’s call­ing with a ques­tion about an expla­na­tion of ben­e­fits. Not at all, the team is mov­ing into a role that requires a more per­sua­sive approach than they were used to. The train­ing fit was nat­ural because our tele­sales pro­gram is about ser­vice ori­ented sell­ing and they’ll be Engage­ment Spe­cial­ists charged with proac­tively work­ing with mem­bers to encour­age them to take full advan­tage of their plan’s fea­tures that pro­mote good health. Pro­mot­ing stay­ing healthy – that’s a Win/Win for everyone.

Com­ments from the class kept bring­ing me back to why job enrich­ment is so impor­tant. Many men­tioned how much they appre­ci­ated the oppor­tu­nity to be a part of the new team. These are excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice reps with plenty of expe­ri­ence who are now ready for a new chal­lenge. They don’t want to jet­ti­son all their great cus­tomer ser­vice skills. What they want to do is grow.

Sev­eral par­tic­i­pants said the value of the pro­gram was “it can be used in all aspects of our lives.” Enrich­ing a job can enrich a life. And then there was the tran­scen­dent com­ment I couldn’t help but love, “I feel as though this pro­gram made me a bet­ter rep and per­son!” How much more enriched can you get?

If you have exam­ples about the impact of job enrich­ment at your orga­ni­za­tion, please share! Leave a comment.

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