Impact Learning Systems

Get to the HEART of Customer Service

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.

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    Call Center Best Practices

    May 11th, 2012

    Call cen­ters that han­dle ser­vice and sup­port calls are, unfor­tu­nately, often viewed as cost cen­ters. Although these cen­ters usu­ally don’t bring in rev­enue directly, they do con­tribute to the company’s goals in many valu­able ways, most notably in rein­forc­ing the company’s brand and in increas­ing cus­tomer loyalty.

    To raise the vis­i­bil­ity of your call cen­ter as a valu­able con­trib­u­tor to your company’s growth and bot­tom line prof­its, fol­low these six best practices.

    1. Know Where You’re Going

    What are you try­ing to achieve? What are the goals of your com­pany? How can your cen­ter sup­port them?

    • Meet with your senior exec­u­tives. How do they want the com­pany to be per­ceived in the mar­ket place? Are they try­ing to grow mar­ket share, reduce attri­tion, cut inter­nal costs?
    • Con­fer with the finance depart­ment. What is the life­time value of a cus­tomer? If it’s small, you can hire less skilled work­ers, have a longer queue length, watch han­dle time closely, and afford to lose a few cus­tomers; if the value of a cus­tomer is large, each one is valu­able. What does an aver­age call cost now? You need to know the answers to ques­tions like these in order to weigh the impact of hir­ing reps at var­i­ous skill lev­els and to deter­mine the appro­pri­ate ser­vice level and aver­age han­dle time for calls.
    • Inter­view the ser­vice man­ager. What is the cost of a main­te­nance con­tract? How many con­tracts are lost because sub­scribers are unhappy with the sup­port they receive?
    • Meet with the mar­ket­ing depart­ment. What cam­paigns are com­ing up? How can the cen­ter help sup­port the department's goals? It doesn’t reflect well on your com­pany if a cus­tomer calls in about a pro­mo­tion or other infor­ma­tion they received if the agent knows noth­ing about it.

    Gath­er­ing and ana­lyz­ing the answers to ques­tions like these is the first call cen­ter best prac­tice. The results of your analy­sis will inform who you hire, which qual­ity and ser­vice stan­dards you set, and whether or not you’ve suc­ceeded in your mission.

    1. Hire the Right People

    One of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of call cen­ter man­age­ment is find­ing and keep­ing the right peo­ple for the job. Regard­less of how dif­fi­cult it is to attract and retain qual­ity agents, how­ever, it’s cru­cial that you take great care in hir­ing for your cen­ter. Even though you may be in a rush to fill seats, attend­ing to Best Prac­tice #2 will save you con­sid­er­able pain down the road. Not only is it expen­sive to replace employ­ees who have been mis-hired, but it’s demor­al­iz­ing for the rest of your team to see high turnover. You can learn more about the effects of turnover and the best prac­tices for improv­ing it here.

    You’ll deter­mine the most appro­pri­ate peo­ple for the job when you ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion gath­ered in Best Prac­tice #1: Know where you’re going. Can you accom­plish your goals with recent high school grad­u­ates? Do you need not only skilled engi­neers, but out­go­ing ones as well? Can you hire for atti­tude and teach prod­uct knowl­edge and tech­ni­cal skills? Ana­lyze the attrib­utes of your top per­form­ers and make a list. Then work with your human resource team to iden­tify ways to screen for those attrib­utes. Don't accept sec­ond best if you want to receive the ben­e­fits of this best practice!

    1. Train for Success

    Equip­ping your staff with the knowl­edge and behav­iors to meet your company’s busi­ness goals is an invest­ment that pays off many times over. Many call cen­ters have high turnover and don’t want to invest a lot in train­ing. How­ever, if you adhere to Best Prac­tices #1 and #2 so that you know who you’re look­ing for and you hire only those peo­ple who have a good chance of suc­cess, train­ing will be a worth­while invest­ment to make. Keep in mind, research shows that effec­tive learn­ing depends not only on the learn­ing event itself, but even more so on what hap­pens after the learn­ing event is over. This brings us to Best Prac­tice #4.

    1. Coach for Con­tin­u­ous Improvement

    Giv­ing feed­back to call cen­ter agents isn’t a lux­ury. It isn’t a maybe. It isn’t a one-of-these-days-I’ll-get-around-to-doing-it aspect of your job. Mak­ing sure your reps get con­sis­tent feed­back and recog­ni­tion for a job well-done is one of the two or three most crit­i­cal things you’ll do as a call cen­ter man­ager. Sev­eral stud­ies have shown the dra­matic results of pair­ing coach­ing with train­ing. One, for exam­ple, as reported in Pub­lic Per­son­nel Man­age­ment found that train­ing alone increased per­for­mance by 22.4 per­cent. But when train­ing was fol­lowed up with coach­ing, the fig­ure soared to 88 percent.

    There are other rea­sons why giv­ing feed­back is so impor­tant. It shows your staff that you’re on top of things, that you’re keep­ing your­self informed, and that you’re ded­i­cated to a course of con­tin­ual improve­ment. Call cen­ter employ­ees who receive ongo­ing feed­back are more engaged in their job, and more engaged employ­ees cre­ate more sat­is­fied cus­tomers. What’s more, this call cen­ter best prac­tice shows your staff that you care about them, about their per­for­mance, about the cus­tomer, about ser­vice lev­els, and about run­ning a world-class call cen­ter. You can learn best prac­tices for super­vis­ing call cen­ter employ­ees here.

    1. Man­age the Mood

    In call cen­ters where morale is high, agents approach their work with energy, enthu­si­asm, and will­ing­ness. They want to come to work, or at least are enthu­si­as­tic about their work once they get there. Turnover is low. On the other hand, when morale is low in a call cen­ter, employ­ees become bored, dis­cour­aged, and lethar­gic, and turnover is high. Attend­ing to this best prac­tice will reduce costs and improve cus­tomer satisfaction.

    How to cre­ate a moti­vat­ing environment?

    • Be sure it’s pos­i­tive. Smile. Be encour­ag­ing. Praise. Don’t tol­er­ate uncivil behavior.
    • Pro­vide the best fur­ni­ture and equip­ment you can. Paint the walls a bright color or put art on them. Keep com­mon rooms clean and tidy. Be sure noise, light­ing, and air qual­ity are con­ducive to employee comfort.
    • Make it fun to suc­ceed. Rec­og­nize great performance—that which goes beyond what’s expected. Rec­og­nize agents for behav­ior or actions or ideas they ini­ti­ate. Cre­ate rel­e­vant con­tests, ones that focus specif­i­cally on job per­for­mance. Avoid overzeal­ous com­pe­ti­tion. Involve man­age­ment in recog­ni­tion programs.
    • Help employ­ees man­age stress. Be clear in what good per­for­mance looks like. Pro­vide as much con­trol over work­ing con­di­tions as pos­si­ble. Be sure employ­ees have the tools, resources, and infor­ma­tion to do their jobs. Pro­vide breaks from repet­i­tive or monot­o­nous tasks. Allow agents to step away for a few moments to calm down after deal­ing with a chal­leng­ing call.

    1. Watch Your Numbers

    Best Prac­tice #6 is to focus on call cen­ter met­rics. The goal of your call cen­ter is to help your orga­ni­za­tion meet its busi­ness goals. Met­rics mea­sure how well you’ve done that. Look at met­rics related to qual­ity (call qual­ity, data-entry qual­ity, fix qual­ity, cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and loy­alty, etc.) as well as met­rics related to quan­tity (aver­age speed of answer, num­ber of esca­la­tions or trans­fers, the time it takes to resolve the customer’s issue, etc.). The goal is to cre­ate the high­est cus­tomer loy­alty at the low­est cost.

    Fol­low these six best prac­tices and your cen­ter will be well-run, cost-effective, and seen as a valu­able con­trib­u­tor to help­ing your com­pany achieve its goals.

     

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    Call Center Coaching: 5 More Tips to Ensure Your Success

    April 20th, 2012

    Our pre­vi­ous post on call cen­ter coach­ing titled, “Call Cen­ter Coach­ing: 5 Tips to Ensure Your Suc­cess,” gave tips to help you improve your man­age­ment style in a sup­port or call cen­ter environment.

    We’re pleased to present the next 5 essen­tial skills that will help improve your coach­ing ability.

    1. Spend some time each day prais­ing your agents. Tak­ing time to give feed­back is an essen­tial skill of man­ag­ing. Offer­ing praise and con­struc­tive feedback—and know­ing when and how—will help your agents improve—often dramatically.

    When you praise your employ­ees, gen­uinely and on a reg­u­lar basis, you help val­i­date their work and demon­strate your sup­port. Call cen­ter envi­ron­ments can be harsh—especially if you have an abun­dance of upset or dif­fi­cult cus­tomers—so it’s your job as a call cen­ter coach to ensure your agents feel supported.

    When you find ways to praise your agents, you’ll notice that they’ll be more recep­tive to your con­struc­tive feed­back. Think of giv­ing praise as a foun­da­tion of sorts—by build­ing a base and giv­ing your agents con­fi­dence, you’ll then be able to refine their skills through con­struc­tive feedback.

    You may find it help­ful to develop a reminder sys­tem to ensure you give praise every day. For exam­ple, cre­ate an alpha­bet­i­cal form of all of your agents and high­light each name that you’ve given praise to that week. Repeat on a weekly basis. Or, select an aspect of a team’s work that they’ve done well and send the group a col­lec­tive e-mail con­grat­u­lat­ing them on a job well done.

    They’ll appre­ci­ate the sentiment.

    1. Be obser­vant and present. One of the best ways to build sol­i­dar­ity and show sup­port is to be in the trenches, so to speak, with your agents. Spend time each day on the call floor and observ­ing how your agents work. Take note of items that need to be addressed before a more seri­ous prob­lem emerges. Inter­act with your agents and give them praise and feed­back as you make your rounds.

    You don’t want your team to feel uneasy or as though you’re “spy­ing” on them, so make sure you com­mu­ni­cate that you’re there to sup­port, not crit­i­cize or micro­man­age them.

    1. Get to know your team mem­bers. One of the best ways to build rap­port with your agents is to inter­act with them on a daily basis. It’s great to be on the floor, observ­ing and work­ing along­side your agents, as we dis­cussed in point 3, but take it a step far­ther by interacting—meaningfully.

    When you get to know your agents on a per­sonal level, you set a tone of open com­mu­ni­ca­tion and dia­logue. Your agents will feel more com­fort­able approach­ing you with issues, and you’ll find it’s eas­ier to solve prob­lems once you under­stand the unique per­son­al­ity of each agent.

    Inter­act­ing with your agents fre­quently doesn’t mean you need to need to take them out for beer or invite them over to din­ner, but it does require you take time to learn their back­grounds, pre­vi­ous accom­plish­ments, and interests.

    1. Get feed­back. In the world of call cen­ters, you reg­u­larly work with all sorts of feed­back, such as CSAT scores, res­o­lu­tion rates, and other call cen­ter met­rics, to name a few. Met­rics are essen­tial to run­ning a cen­ter efficiently—no doubt about it—but it’s also equally impor­tant to under­stand what’s going on with your agents that may be influ­enc­ing your met­rics. This is where agent feed­back comes in. As a call cen­ter coach, how often do you solicit feed­back from your agents on how you’re doing, what cus­tomer issues they’re deal­ing with, or whether they have sug­ges­tions for change?

    How you ask for feed­back will vary based on the topic, but send­ing out ques­tions via email, cre­at­ing a sug­ges­tion box, or ask­ing directly are all great meth­ods. When you solicit feed­back from your team, make sure you ask open-ended ques­tions (so you’re not get­ting “yes” and “no” responses) and be sure to thank your agents for their input. Need a sur­vey to deter­mine your employ­ees' views of the work­place? Down­load one here.

    1.  Empower your team. Our final call cen­ter coach­ing tip to add to your arse­nal is empowerment.

    Empow­er­ing your agents means that you demon­strate respect and equip each employee with a sense of respon­si­bil­ity. You’ll find that empow­ered agents will take more own­er­ship in their work, have increased moti­va­tion, and look for ways to improve at their job.

    Every call cen­ter envi­ron­ment is dif­fer­ent, and the level of auton­omy allowed varies based on expe­ri­ence, but you can make your agents feel empow­ered by fol­low­ing these tips:

      • Com­mu­ni­cate to your agents that they are professionals.
      • Del­e­gate appro­pri­ate por­tions of your job (with super­vi­sion) to help empower and spread the responsibility.
      • Allow your agents to take some risks.
      • Give your agents respon­si­bil­ity to make deci­sions that affect their work—don’t hand­i­cap them by mak­ing all of the deci­sions for them.
      • Ask agents how they would do some­thing instead of sim­ply telling them what to do—first get their input and ask them to think the prob­lem through.
      • Teach agents what you know.

    Effec­tive call cen­ter coach­ing can improve your call cen­ter met­rics, cre­ate engaged employ­ees, reduce turnover, and help your oper­a­tion be more cost effec­tive. Most of all, devel­op­ing and refin­ing your man­age­r­ial skills will result in a team that works for you, not against you, which is a win-win for all involved.

     

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    Call Center Coaching: 5 Tips to Ensure Your Success

    April 13th, 2012

    Man­ag­ing staff—in any form–is hard work and requires a well-stocked reper­toire of peo­ple skills, busi­ness acu­men, and the abil­ity to jug­gle mul­ti­ple projects and deal with pressure.

    For those of you who man­age call cen­ters and sup­port cen­ters, you are tasked with watch­ing oper­a­tional costs in addi­tion to deal­ing with a team of agents. Your man­age­r­ial skills can mean the dif­fer­ence between an effec­tive call cen­ter or one that’s fail­ing. Good man­age­ment requires a heavy-dose of both intu­ition and tech­nique, and each cir­cum­stance requires a per­son­al­ized blend of skills. When prac­tic­ing call cen­ter coach­ing, there are a mix of meth­ods that we’ve seen work par­tic­u­larly well. Below we out­line 5 top call cen­ter coach­ing tips to add to your tool­box. We’ll tackle another 5 in the next post.

    1. Set spe­cific and mea­sur­able goals. The abil­ity to set tar­gets for you and your team to meet will give you focus and moti­va­tion. Choose goals that are real­is­tic. A quick test to see if yours pass muster? Ask:

    What will be improved?

    By how much or how many?

    By when?

    If you can’t spec­ify how you’ll mea­sure your goals, go back to the draw­ing board.

    1. Cre­ate action plans. Set­ting goals is one thing; imple­ment­ing them is another. Allow us to intro­duce you to the Action Plan.

    For exam­ple, say you set a goal in Step 1 of com­plet­ing a coach­ing course so you can become cer­ti­fied in the Sup­port Staff Excel­lence pro­gram. That’s your goal—completion of the course. Your action plan will define how you reach your goal. Here's how you might write that action plan:

    “Set aside two hours every week on Mon­day and Wednes­day to go through the sup­port cen­ter coach­ing cur­ricu­lum. Next will be to pick three new skills from the course every week and apply it at work. Based on the study sched­ule, I’ll be ready to take the test by Octo­ber 15th.”

    1. Be pos­i­tive. Your lan­guage and tone matter.

    Pos­i­tive think­ing has been cred­ited with every­thing from stress reduc­tion to bet­ter health. In a work envi­ron­ment, stay­ing pos­i­tive is just as pow­er­ful. So how do you apply the “power of the pos­i­tive” to your call cen­ter coach­ing? To start, exam­ine your lan­guage. Take these two examples:

    “Unless you make those call­backs to the cus­tomers right away, there’s no way we’ll be able to give them the infor­ma­tion about the promotion.”

    “We can still make this hap­pen. If you can make those call­backs to the cus­tomers within the next few hours, we’ll be able to get them the pro­mo­tional infor­ma­tion before it’s too late.”

    If you were a call cen­ter agent, which phrase would you be more apt to respond to: the sen­tence with the neg­a­tive slant, or the sen­tence with the pos­i­tive? Which would you find more moti­vat­ing? Think about your lan­guage and all of the con­ver­sa­tions you have daily with your agents and fel­low man­agers. How often are you com­mu­ni­cat­ing using pos­i­tive lan­guage ver­sus neg­a­tive? Try this: Next time, before you ask an agent to do some­thing, or give feed­back, re-phrase your words so they’re pos­i­tive and see what type of reac­tion you receive.

    1. Lis­ten. Really lis­ten.  Listening—effective listening—is a pow­er­ful skill that’s rarely used. Espe­cially in a high-stress envi­ron­ment, it’s easy to get caught-up in rapid-fire mode and neglect the very fun­da­men­tal coach­ing skill of hear­ing and under­stand­ing. How­ever, lis­ten­ing is an art form worth spend­ing some time per­fect­ing. It will help your man­age­r­ial abil­i­ties and pro­duc­tiv­ity, and will help you strengthen rela­tion­ships with your col­leagues (it’s also use­ful to try at home with your family!).

    In call cen­ter coach­ing, try the fol­low­ing tips to improve your listening:

      • Focus: When someone’s speak­ing to you, don’t check e-mail or your phone. Look the per­son in the eyes and give them your full atten­tion. This com­mu­ni­cates respect and you’ll more fully absorb what they’re telling you.
      • Don’t inter­rupt: Do you enjoy being inter­rupted? Chances are, you find it annoy­ing. The per­son whom you’re talk­ing to finds it annoy­ing as well.
      • Pause before you respond: Often­times, when you take a moment to for­mu­late your thoughts before you respond, you wind up say­ing some­thing different—usually some­thing a bit more appro­pri­ate. The few extra sec­onds it takes to col­lect your thoughts before you respond will not dra­mat­i­cally impede every­thing else you need to cram in for the day.
      • Paraphrase—show you under­stand: Finally, to make sure you under­stand what the other per­son meant to say, repeat back the key points and ask the per­son to con­firm that’s what he or she really meant.
    1. Lighten up a bit. You may find it sur­pris­ing that one of the key tools in effec­tive call cen­ter coach­ing is humor. Why is it so impor­tant that it belongs in the “canon” of effec­tive coach­ing skills? Because humor is closely tied to atti­tude and your abil­ity to read a sit­u­a­tion. Be care­ful, of course, about when it’s appro­pri­ate to crack a joke or lighten the mood, and make sure you don’t offend or insult some­one at the expense of a few laughs.

    Know­ing how and when to use humor will make you more approach­able, more like­able, and more human to the peo­ple you work with.

    For more quick tips tips on call cen­ter coach­ing and improv­ing your man­age­r­ial skills, watch for our next post in the series, "Call Cen­ter Coach­ing: 5 More Tricks to Ensure Suc­cess." And for a more com­pre­hen­sive look at call cen­ter man­age­ment skills, down­load our free, 8-page white paper, "Best Prac­tices for Improv­ing Call Cen­ter Super­vi­sory Skills."

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    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:

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    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. 

     

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    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. 

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    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. 

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