Name: Peggy Carlaw
Web Site: http://about.me/peggycarlaw
Bio: Peggy Carlaw is the founder of Impact Learning Systems, a leading training company specializing in improving communications between front-line employees and customers. Peggy is co-author of several books published by McGraw-Hill, including Managing and Motivating Contact Center Employees and The Big Book of Sales Training Games.
Posts by :
- The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games
- Training Games by Thiagi
- Customer Service Training Helper
- Training Games, Inc.
- Customer service training
- Customer service training for technical support professionals
- Customer service training for field service engineers
- Create a map of issues showing their relationship—for example, ordering a contract and answering questions on the phone or sending a follow-up link.
- Determine how often customers call back. If they only call back 1-2% of the time, it’s probably not worth addressing. If customers call back 20-25% of the time, there will be cost-savings that are definitely worth pursuing.
- Train your staff. Provide issues maps as job aids to help your staff determine what to do when a customer has a particular issue. Be sure to include role plays so employees get lots of practice introducing the proactive service measure into the call.
- Have a Blackberry? Maybe you use Crackberry. Kevin Michaluk launched this user supported site and according to MyCompete, Blackberry.com traffic increased 49% in 2010 while Crackberry.com increased 107.4%.
- Intacct uses crowdsourcing to encourage customers and partners to create, refine, and vote on ideas for improvements to the Intacct system through their
Customer and Partner Portal. Their fall release included 31 new features that were crowdsourced from the 8,000 users who participated. - Have you bought anything from Best Buy? Then you probably know about the Twelpforce, a user supported community for all things tech purchased at Best Buy. There were over 80 postings the day I checked.
- Brainstorm new opportunities collaboratively with customers, employees, vendors, and partners
- Get focused feedback on your products, services, promotions, etc.
- Run photo contests with user-generated pictures and videos to use in your marketing materials
- Post challenges to get new designs for packaging or feature updates
- Collect “voice-of-the customer” testimonials to help your sales team close business
- What your customers say about your products and your company
- Why they’re buying your products—and why they’re not buying them
- The technical difficulties your customers face when trying to find information or place an order on your website
- Which calls could be handled more quickly and less expensively by a self-service option
- How your customers are reacting to your promotions
- What your customers say about their online shopping experience
- Reasons for low sales conversions that are beyond your sales team’s control
- What customers most frequently complain about
- The customer representative is knowledgeable and is able to resolve your issue on the first call?
- The representative is unsure how to help you, puts you on hold, and then asks you to call back so that a supervisor can help you?
- 20% of callers don’t have their issue resolved on the first call.
- 68% of those with unresolved issues are at risk for defecting to another company.
- CSAT rates are, on average, 35-45 % lower when a second call is made for the same issue.
- For every 1% of FCR improvement, companies are likely to see a 1% improvement in CSAT rates.
- When an issue is resolved on the first try, only 3% of customers are likely to go to a competitor.
- Complex Products or Issues: FCR is much easier for, say, an online retail store, where a customer is calling to get more information on dress sizes, than a web-hosting company that deals with technical domain issues and server problems.If you have a complex problem or have a support center that deals with highly technical matters, focusing on FCR may not apply. If that’s the case, focus on having highly trained, independent-thinking reps who can work efficiently to solve customer matters—even if it takes multiple calls. Your focus then will be on reducing the time or the number of calls until the issue is resolved.
- To measure FCR, you have to first define “fix.” When tracking metrics of any kind, you need to clearly define your tracking parameters. For FCR, what does “fix” a customers’ issue mean to you? Did you solve a URL issue, but still leave open other questions that need to be tackled? Define issues, problem by problem (or in a set of problems, as the case may be) before you set out to track and improve FCR rates. Additionally, you’ll need to define what “contact” means. Is e-mail a contact? Is a web-generated request a contact?
- It takes two to tango. When looking at FCR, you may find it hard to control your rates if you have a customer base with a low level of experience. Depending on your industry and product, your customer’s understanding of the product will affect how long it takes for the representative to resolve the issue. If you sell B2B technical equipment, your customer will likely have a base understanding of the product and may just need a little assistance. But if you are selling technical services to the B2C world, the learning curve may be steeper and the time to resolution longer.
- Technical skills of your representatives. The training you provide to your representatives can make a dramatic difference in your FCR rates—particularly if you have a technical service or product. Hopefully your management team understands that an investment in technical customer service training is well-worth it when considering the ramifications of low FCR rates.
- Self-service’s impact on FCR. More and more customers rely on web forums—and on your website—to help them resolve issues. This means that customers who would have called you previously (most likely with easier issues) are now figuring out answers themselves. Customers who do end up calling, therefore, are often those who couldn’t resolve the issue and present more complex problems that could be harder to resolve on the first call.
- Your representatives’ comfort level with internal tools. You may think that a hefty investment in a slick CRM system is just the ticket, but with any internal tools you have in place, make sure you train your reps thoroughly on how to use the tools at their disposal. If a representative is fumbling or taking a long time to figure out how to use a system, most likely, it will take longer (or not be possible) to solve a customer issue on the first try.
When to Use Customer Service Games in Training
February 3rd, 2012
Customer service games can add spice to a training program. I ought to know, I wrote the book! Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many games used just because–well, I’m not sure why. The game was fun, but didn’t increase learning or help participants perform better on the job.
Customer service games are fun, motivational activities. The key is to use them in conjunction with skill learning and skill use. When relevant to participants and their jobs, the games build confidence, lift morale, spark enthusiasm, stimulate creativity, and ultimately achieve results.
Games can be quick, fun energizers that raise participants’ awareness of customer service issues. Games can also be full-scale activities that teach a skill and offer participants the opportunity to practice the skill in an informal, onthreatening environment.
There are a number of ways you can use customer service games: as stand-alone training activities, as warm-ups to a more intensive training session, or in combination with one another to constitute a segments of a comprehensive customer service training event.
Following are some resources for customer service game:
And if you need to plan a more comprehensive training event, check out one of these:
Tracking Customer-Focused Metrics
January 17th, 2012
For years, contact center managers have been measuring operational metrics like average handle time, average hold time, turnover, sales per representative, average time to respond, and so on. But are these the most important metrics to measure?
What’s important to measure depends on who you are
Customer service and support managers want to measure the operational metrics listed above along with others like transfer rates and queue length to help them run an efficient organization.
Executives, on the other hand, want to measure customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, market share, and profitability by product or service line so they can see how effective the company is at maximizing the shareholder’s return on investment. The two do not always jive.
The disconnect between efficient and effective
A company could go out of business if their only concern is having happy customers at all costs. So while it’s important to be cost-effective, this doesn’t always mean seeking the lowest cost. Take for example, the usual focus on average handle time. Of course, customers want to keep a call as short as possible, too. But they care more about getting their questions answered accurately and getting their problems resolved.
And guess what? Most customers don’t mind taking a little extra time to hear about something that will save them from having to call back in the future. So there’s a disconnect between keeping a call short (efficient) and taking enough time to resolve the caller’s issue and give information to minimize a call back (effective).
To meet the goals of the executive team, there’s a trend among customer service and support managers to re-examine their metrics in light of the larger objectives of the business.
What is the customer’s point of view?
Start examining your metrics from the customer’s point of view. Consider escalations, for example. Managers seek to drive escalations down. Of course! Who wants their supervisors or Tier 2 engineers tied up on simple problems. But what will satisfy the customer? A speedy escalation if that’s what it takes to get the problem resolved.
A customer-focused metric then, would be to track “appropriate” vs. “inappropriate” escalations. Inappropriate escalations are those where the agent should be able to handle the problem, but can’t, and therefore escalates the customer to the next level. Too many inappropriate escalations point out a training issue. Once you identify inappropriate escalations as a problem, you can then provide additional training and give your staff the tools they need to handle their level of calls. The result will be fewer inappropriate escalations, happier customers, and lower costs.
How about call quality scores? Many centers we’ve worked with tracked behaviors that did not affect customer satisfaction (such as using the customer’s name three times during the call) and left out things that did, (such as providing an accurate answer). Why not conduct a focus group with customers this year to find out what you should add to your form and what you can stop tracking.
What else should you track?
There’s a real business case for first-contact resolution because it’s one of the prime drivers of customer satisfaction and it keeps costs down.
As Richard Snow from Ventana Research puts it:
“First contact resolution can be even more useful when linked with other metrics and actions. Applied to agents, for example, it lets companies identify best practices and adjust process and training so more agents can resolve more issues the first time. Linked to customers, it can tell who are the difficult customers and how they can be handled in the future. It can help identify why issues occur and what can be done to generate fewer calls. It can influence behavior, because agents will strive harder to resolve more calls at the first attempt. It can influence call-routing rules, so that more calls are routed to agents who resolve more issues the first time.”
If you have first contact resolution within benchmark levels, then go for next issue avoidance, also called proactive service. This is another one of the top 10 trends for the upcoming year.
Conferences, webinars, and customer service forums are all a-buzz about customer satisfaction, retention, and net promoter scores—the same issues executives pay attention to. This year, be sure your center metrics are well-aligned to deliver solid business results.
Post #8 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
Upselling and Cross-selling by Customer Service and Support Teams
January 16th, 2012
As the economy recovers, many companies are looking for opportunities to claw their way back to pre-recession sales levels. And companies that fared well want to be sure to keep their customers as competition in the playing field grows.
Who’s upselling and cross-selling now?
While sales teams have long had goals for upselling and cross-selling, more companies than ever are asking their customer service reps to do the same. And they’re asking their support engineers to recommend product upgrades and contact customers to renew warranty agreements. This growing trend is particularly true in the financial services, telecommunications, high technology, and services industries.
Why is upselling and cross-selling an important trend for service and support departments?
Most industries are dealing with the problem of selling a commodity, since competitors are able to quickly copy what was, originally, an innovative product differentiator. In fact, the Corporate Executive Board in their ECSB Insider report 67 percent of business owners feel that more suppliers are now offering competing products than five years ago. This makes new sales more difficult and buyers less loyal since they have multiple places where they can purchase similar products or services. While it’s important to increase market share, it’s also easier to focus on your existing buyers who already trust your organization and find value in your offering. Plus, the more products and services people buy from an organization, the more likely they are to remain engaged rather than take their business elsewhere.
There’s a benefit for customers, too. Purchasing more at once saves them time and shipping costs, and maybe even money if there’s a quantity discount. Upgrading to a new product version saves on repair costs. Purchasing a maintenance contract reduces risk, helps with budgeting, and smooths cash flow.
What’s required for success?
According to MarketSoft Corporation, a provider of cross-selling technology, nearly three quarters of all businesses say they have cross-selling programs, but as many as 70 percent of such efforts fail to increase revenue in any significant way. Why?
Despite advancements in technology to identify sales opportunities through segmentation and behavior analysis, if the agents speaking with customers don’t want to sell or don’t introduce the sale in a way that benefits the buyer, there will be no sale.
When presented with an upsell and cross-sell initiative, many customer service and support representatives are not happy! They perceive themselves as service professionals, not salespeople. In fact, some companies have lost as much as 25% of their department when embarking on a cross-selling program. Giving representatives a script to read at the end of a call won’t work. I’m sure you’ve been on the other end of those types of calls! What’s needed is a training program to help agents understand how selling—appropriately—is offering service. It truly is! When a customer service or support rep thinks ahead about what products and services might serve customers, then presents the offer in a way that shows it meets a need the customer has, cross-selling is offering the customer “total” service.
Amadeus-Forrester, in their recent report titled “Cross-Sell Your Way to Profits” predicts cross-selling to grow 30 percent by 2015, ten times faster than general sales. Are you ready to be part of this trend?
Post #6 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
Tailoring Customer Service and Support to Different Personalities
January 15th, 2012
Fess up, now! There some customers you just love to talk to and others that you can’t wait to get off the line, right? Of course there are some customers who are just downright cranky and rude, but barring those grouches, there’s a reason why you relate better to some people than to others. To sum it up, it’s easy for us to do business with people who are like us. For example, if I want to get to get a quick answer and a customer service rep has one for me, I’m happy. However, if I get a CSR who want to chit-chat about unrelated topics, I quickly become quite annoyed.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, developed a theory of psychological types. The idea is that if we can identify others’ preferences and then modify our behavior, we’ll all get along better, prevent misunderstandings, and accomplish more. In the example above, if the sales or support agent can identify my personality type, then the agent can temper his or her need to build a relationship and get down to business. I’ll then leave the call as a satisfied customer.
Of course, this is overly simplified, but the theory works so well that a number of companies have created proprietary instruments and training programs around it. NASA even got into the game, using The Process Communication Model, to help predict how astronauts would jell in a capsule together.
Salespeople have long known about the power of adjusting their personality to that of their various customers. These concepts are now moving into the customer service and support realm and rapidly becoming a trend.
For example, on the high-tech front, ELoyalty uses speech recognition technology to compile personality profiles of callers and match them with a representative who works best with that personality type. Each time a customer calls back, the system uses the existing profile to deepen and enrich the profile. According to eLoyalty, one banking client saw the attrition rate among customers struggling with the most serious issues drop from 7% to 1%. Another saw their J.D. Power rating improve.
Other systems you may be familiar with are Meyers-Briggs, DiSC™, or Insights. One we particularly like is WorkTraits. It assesses not only personality traits, but core convictions and has some great back-end tools for use on the job. When paired with training, role plays, and job aids to help agents identify caller types and know what to do when selling or providing service, great results can be achieved.
Are your agents treating your customers the way they want to be treated? Look into one of these systems today. And don’t be surprised if you see WorkTraits wrapped into a course here at Impact soon.
Post #4 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
Proactive Customer Service and Support
January 9th, 2012
You’ve heard of First Contact Resolution, right? Hopefully, you’re taking concrete steps to resolve as many issues on the first contact as possible. Following right on the tail of first contact resolution is proactive service. Also called proactive support or next issue avoidance, it’s a trend worth focusing on.
What is proactive service?
When customer service and support reps offer proactive service, they anticipate and preempt additional contact. Here’s an example:
Mrs. Pedowitz calls her insurance company to get a copy of the contract that explains her health insurance benefits. Knowing that members often call back for help understanding the complex contract, the CSR, Jesse, offers to answer questions about services Mrs. Pedowitz frequently uses. At the end of the call, Jesse offers to e-mail her a link to a summary booklet that is written in easy-to-understand language.
Should you follow the proactive service trend?
According to Enkata, a leader in cloud-based customer experience analytics, proactive customer service has been shown to reduce call volumes by 20-30% in 12 months, cut operating costs by up to 25%, and improve customer retention by 3-5%.
Sound good? Of course! So what’s involved?
How to get started with proactive service:
Is it really that easy?
It would be except for the fact that contact centers are often focused on short-term profitability metrics like average handle time (AHT). And first contact resolution or next issue avoidance are diametrically opposed to lower AHT. While customers want calls to be short, imagine how much time they would save (and you too) if they didn’t have to call back for something that could have been proactively handled on the first call.
Just think! If you could prevent 20% of the calls currently coming into your center, your reps would have more time to spend with customers in order to guarantee their satisfaction with the level of service and support provided by your company. Sound like a winning strategy? We think so.
Post #3 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
Crowdsourcing Customer Service and Support
January 8th, 2012
If you’re not already crowdsourcing your customer service and support, it’s time to consider doing so. Why? Smart businesses are always looking for ways to help their customers. And when you can help your customers and minimize expenses, why not?
What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is using your “crowd” of users as the “source” to help other users. It allows the number of customer issues you can handle to grow without your needing to incur additional labor costs. By letting users participate in the customer service and support process, it puts them center stage, engages them with your company, and increases loyalty. And by monitoring the crowd, you get new ideas.
Who’s Crowdsourcing Customer Service and Support Today?
Pretty much any company with a user forum. Here are just a few:
But What If We’re Not a Big Company?
You may notice the companies referenced above are larger companies. However the cost of software has come down making crowdsourcing customer service and support more affordable for the SMB market. Check GetSatisfaction, NapkinLabs, or UserVoice for affordable software to help you get started.
How to Use Crowdsourcing for Customer Service and Support
In addition to providing a forum for customer service and support, you can consider some of these ideas from NapkinLabs:
Check out the Success Stories from GetSatisfaction customers for more ideas. For example, Intuit’s Mint, a leading online personal financial site, used GetSatisfaction for crowdsourcing and within 90 days, saw a 75% reduction in support tickets.
What to Expect When Crowdsourcing
When you start? Not much. You’ll need to promote your community to your users just like you’d promote your product or service to your prospects. And you’ll need to assign someone to moderate the community and answer questions until you get enough users actively participating. It will take 1,000 or more users to get a community active because according to the 90-9-1 principle, 90% of members will be lurkers logging in now and then to ask a question, 9% will contribute on occasion, and 1% will be power users.
According to John Bernier, a Manager within the Emerging Platforms group at Best Buy and former lead of Best Buy’s Twelpforce initiative, when they started Twelpforce in 2009, they weren’t sure what to expect. However, they found that with some good foundational guideposts and training tools, the crowd began to organize and govern itself. Leaders popped up as coaches or mentors, and pretty soon they had a really good support network in place.
Crowdsourcing can reduce the burden on your staff, save money, and engage your customers. Will you be part of this growing trend?
Post #2 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
Monitor Your Customers, Not Just Your Agents
January 7th, 2012
Companies are reframing customer service as a strategic method for gathering important information to inform marketing direction and product development. While you can obtain valuable insights by monitoring your social media channels, adding insights from your call center will provide a greater breadth and depth of information.
According to Bruce Temkin of the Temkin Group, “The contact center has always housed a large percentage of important interactions with customers, but companies learn very little from these key touchpoints. That’s changing. Newer technologies allow companies to extract deep insights from unstructured content like recorded calls, emails, and chat sessions. Leading companies will learn what drives satisfaction and loyalty, and use the information to change the products they sell, how they market their offerings, and how they service customers.”
How to Employ This Customer Service Strategy
Whether you monitor live or recorded calls, whether you use state-of-the-art speech recognition technology like Envision’s SpeechMiner or VIP’s Speech Analytics software, or whether you train a special team of customer service strategy analysts to listen to your customers just like you train quality analysts to listen to your agents, understanding the customer’s point of view is invaluable in knowing in which direction the company needs to move.
Some things to listen for include:
Whether you go high tech or low tech, start listening today. Your customers will thank you for it!
Post #1 in the Top Ten Customer Service and Support Trends for 2012 series.
FCR and Customer Satisfaction: A Match Made in Heaven
December 9th, 2011
When you call a support center to get help on an issue or have a question answered, will you be more satisfied with the company if:
It’s pretty obvious, right? If a company can resolve your problem on the first try, you’ll think more favorably of the company and rate your customer satisfaction experience higher.
First-Call Resolution (FCR) is one of the simplest—and most effective ways a company can improve customer satisfaction.
The statistics back the correlation between FCR and customer satisfaction
Numerous studies between FCR and CSAT rates show the link. For example:
And the stats go on … but you get the point. To improve your customer service, work on your FCR rates. There’s definitely a business case for addressing resolution rates!
But, for many companies, improving FCR is a complex issue. What’s going on?
Just improve your FCR and you’ll have happier customers! Easier said than done, right? Let’s examine some of the most common barriers to FCR.
The lesson? Improve the factors you can control that help improve FCR
The above list is just a brief sample of the many barriers that companies face when confronting low FCR rates and undesirable CSAT scores. However, even if you have a very complex product, and even if you’re dealing with a customer base that comes to you with a lower-level of understanding, you can still offer stellar customer service and get your FCR rates as low as possible for your industry and product type. The key? Your customer service training program. When you choose to focus on the quality of service your representatives offer your customers, and the technical training your employees receive, you are likely to see a natural increase in your FCR rates, and your loyal customers will continue to reward you with business. Heavenly!