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.
- The AP Business Unit's Customer Allegiance Scores for Field Service at Kalamazoo, Michigan increased 151% from 18.4 to 47.3 in the year following training.
- The department Betsy trained ranked as the 7th most improved department worldwide for CAS scores. Only 3 other field service departments were included in the top 25.
- Conduct customer satisfaction surveys to identify weaknesses and strengths (this is different from looking at your loyal clients—here, you’ll be asking more comprehensive questions, on a scale, about your services)
- Do frequent price comparisons in your industry to gauge whether your product is priced too high or low
- Conduct a cohort analysis among customers who started using your service at the same time and track them for a period of 6 months to a year. By looking at a group that started using your service in the same month, you’ll start to see patterns emerge if you change your product, pricing, or if your competition makes a big move
- Identify the reasons why your customers leave. If they switch service providers, ask for their input so you can track the decision-making process and adjust accordingly
- 6% increase in “listens and acts on my input”
- 2% increase in “is easy to do business with”
- 2% increase in “responds quickly and professionally”
- 7% increase in “process efficiency”
- 5% increase in “I would recommend MAKO to a colleague”
- Encourage employees to have ownership: The employee-owned culture at New Belgium means that employees participate in major decisions—they vote on everything from new technology purchases to new staff positions.
- Reward employees for loyalty: How about a custom-made cruiser bike after a year of service and a trip to Belgium after 5 years of service? (To name a few.)
- Create policies employees can be proud of: The company has a strict policy of environmental stewardship and does things such as turning waste into livestock feed and using wind-powered electricity.
- Lead by example: The founders of New Belgium are committed to sound business practices and stewardship in their community. They believe in what their company stands for, and they hire employees who reflect the company’s values.
- Be Humble. Even if the customer is wrong, is acting inappropriately,or is demanding a solution you can't provide, your strategy should be to proceed with humility. This simple measure puts the customer at ease and can change the direction of the conversation. Being humble does not mean you have to apologize for something that’s not your fault and it doesn't mean you have to get on your knees and grovel. It simply means that you understand that your role is to serve customers, even if they are difficult or unpleasant. Of course, if a situation warrants an apology, be sure to offer one.
- Express empathy.Empathizing allows the customer to feel that you heard and understood his or her concern. This can go a long way in getting the customer’s coöperation that you need to resolve the situation. Here are some ways to express empathy:
- I can appreciate…
- I can understand…
- I know what you mean…
- Yes, I wouldn’t like that too much either…
- Remain poised. Ultimately the very best thing you can do for both yourself and your customer is to remain poised, calm, and confident. This allows you to focus on a solution and shows the customer that you’ve got the situation under control. If you are upset, you’ll only aggravate the customer further.
- It is important to let the customer vent, at least briefly. In many cases, the opportunity to express their frustration is all customers need; then they’re ready to work with you on finding that solution.
- Focus on a solution. If there is a problem, don’t beat it to death. Sometimes details such as why and when the problem occurred are not important. The best rule is to focus as soon as possible on finding a solution. To do this, put aside the emotions, discern the important details of the situation, and focus on what CAN be done (instead of what CAN’T be done) to resolve the issue or problem.
- Avoid defensiveness. Remember that your job is to serve customers — even those who challenge you — not to defend yourself against them. If a customer makes a disparaging remark, or blames you for the problem, don’t take it personally. Stick to the facts and carry on with finding the solution.
- Be professional. Avoid slang and jargon and maintain a calm tone of voice.
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!
Thermo Fisher Scientific Improves Customer Allegiance
December 5th, 2011
The Anatomical Pathology Business Unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific understands the importance of customer satisfaction on profitability. To ensure satisfaction is at its highest, they measure customer satisfaction for field service according to a Customer Allegiance Score (CAS). In addition to measuring overall satisfaction and willingness to recommend the company to others, CAS measures the ease of scheduling on-site visits, on-time arrival, courtesy, Field Service Engineer (FSE) knowledge level, timely service completion, thoroughness of documentation and level of preparedness to solve the problem.
When Betsy Trescher joined the Anatomical pathology (AP) Business Unit at Thermo Fisher Scientific's Kalamazoo, Michigan location as the Instrumentation Technical Trainer, 90% of training efforts were focused on technical skills. She quickly saw that in order to improve the CAS score, attention would need to be paid to FSEs' planning, communication, and documentation skills—not just technical skills—and she began searching for a solution.
While traveling with the AP Unit's FSE, Erik Ledford, she noted his excellent approach to customer service. Betsy and Erik started to develop a program in-house, but after some initial design meetings, realized they wouldn't have time to develop a quality program. They searched for an off-the-shelf program that aligned with Erik's philosophy and approach. They chose to work with Impact Learning Systems because our program, Getting to the Heart of Field Service™ addressed all the issues in their CAS survey and could be customized to include real-life AP Business Unit scenarios.
One challenge in implementing the training was that the FSEs were spread out geographically. To overcome this challenge, Betsy asked FSEs to complete one online module every 2–3 weeks. Once they'd completed all modules, she used Impact's Trainer's Manual to conduct a 1-day class in 6 key locations throughout the country, training on Saturday so that customers weren't impacted. One year later, Betsy is embarking on refresher training to be sure that results are sustained.
And what were the results?
According to Betsy, "A number of seasoned technicians said they learned something new. The most common skill they mention is how to deliver bad news in a good way. For example, we've removed the world 'back-order' from our vocabulary. It's made a huge difference in customer perception!"
If you'd like to improve your customer allegiance — whether through the field service, technical support, or customer service you offer your customers — give us a call. We're the leaders in the field and have a track record of providing measurable results for our clients.
Sales Skills: Training (Nurture) or Personality (Nature)?
November 8th, 2011
The age-old debate—nature versus nurture is a common theme that pops up for managers who are seeking the right sales candidates. It’s an important question: Do people have an innate personality ability to sell (nature) or is it a skill that can be taught (nurture)?
If proper coaching is one of the biggest factors in sales, then a company should rightly focus their efforts on sales training and examine how management lead the sales team.
But if great sales ultimately comes down to personality, then perhaps HR and management should start screening specifically on innate traits—and maybe even incorporate personality tests into the hiring process.
To examine the debate in more detail, we decided to conduct our own sort of “virtual focus group,” if you will, by combing through the great World Wide Web and doing a comparative analysis on the topic by looking at sales websites, blogs, articles, and forums. Below we present a summary of the most common themes that we found in our research.
When that glass is half-full …
A person’s sense of optimism was a common theme that we found throughout our survey on the topic. In the sales world, your staff will face rejection—repeatedly. The ability to see the positive in situations and carry on, even in the face of adversity and frustration, is an important trait for salespeople. One article even cited a study that found a positive correlation between sales and a person’s level of optimism.
This brings us to our next question—is optimism nature or nurture? Again, a survey on the topic found it to be split—many people believe that whether someone tends toward optimism or pessimism depends on personality traits and on how a person was raised and has learned to respond to situations.
For the purposes of this discussion, however, let’s focus on how your team’s disposition is as-it-stands. You can test for optimism through an interview process or written test. If you spend enough time screening a candidate, his or her outlook on whether that glass is half-full or half-empty will become apparent.
Empathy and sales skills
A person’s level of empathy is a close runner-up to optimism. When a person is empathetic, he or she will see sales as fulfilling a need, versus simply pushing a product. Empathetic people will more closely listen to a prospect’s desires, ask the right questions, and figure out how to frame the item or service correctly that so it addresses what a buyer is after.
Empathy, similar to optimism, is a trait that seems to be a result of nature and nurture. You can teach people to be more empathetic, but certain people tend to have an innate ability to listen and operate more intuitively.
Motivation
Motivation is a sales skill that you can foster through incentives and coaching, but at the end of the day, a person needs to want it—sales people have to possess a certain amount of drive. Motivation is a personality trait that a good coach can capture and build.
It’s one thing to hire candidates who are motivated, but your team will be more effective if you can coach them with the right incentives to keep their motivation high. Therefore, when looking for candidates, find people who are self-directed and respond to enticements, and then work on training and coaching to keep the fire hot.
Self-Confidence
A person’s self-confidence tends to be a combination of nature and nurture. Some people will remain wildly confident, even if they’ve been in environments that break down other people’s self-belief. Others need to be constantly given reassurance and guidance.
When building your sales staff, look for confidence, but don’t confuse confidence with arrogance. Confidence, in sales, is a skill closely tied to persistence. If your staff members immediately give up after the first “no,” chance are, they won’t make it very far in the sales world. Additionally, you want team members who believe in the product and can be assertive, when necessary.
So … is it nature or nurture in the sales world?
What can we conclude from our online survey on the nature versus nurture debate? It appears that successful sales people need to come to the job with certain hard-wired personality traits, such as the ability to see things optimistically, pick up on social cues and be empathetic, and have a certain amount of drive. Which answers the “nature” side of the equation.
However, the other side—“nurture” is equally important. A person who possesses all of the necessary personality traits still needs the proper guidance and coaching to help him reach his peak. Moreover, if you take a candidate with small doses of optimism, empathy, and drive, and give them careful coaching, you’ll uncover the hidden sales superstar.
Interested in learning more about sales, training, and motivation? More posts can be found here.
7 Steps to Developing a Customer Experience Strategy
November 4th, 2011
According to Michael Maoz from Gartner, executives are trying to re-engage with customers through customer service, and customer experience in particular. Eighty percent of executives believe that customer strategy is more important than it was three years ago. Ninety to ninety-five percent of executives expect customer experience will be part of their specific competitive differentiation in the next two to three years.
The article, "Developing a Customer Experience Strategy in a Cloudy World," featured in TSIA's "Inside Technology Services" provides 7 steps to guide you in developing your own customer experience strategy. Good stuff!
Churn to Retention: How You Can Make the Switch
August 16th, 2011
We live in a world of cutthroat competition. If you want to grow your business and stay ahead of your rivals, your mantra better be Sell. Sell. Sell., right? Focus on your sales team, and throw your weight around the new– business acquisition model.
Yet…It’s common knowledge around conference tables that retaining a client is much more cost effective than the price of obtaining new clients. Companies study their customer churn rates with the same intensity they put toward their quarterly financial statements.
Industry average churn rates vary, but estimates in the telecommunications sector state that annual churn rates range between 10 and 67 percent. Other industries claim to have a churn rate of 50% every five years. For many companies, the cost of acquiring, rather than retaining, customers is 10 times higher.
Low Satisfaction, Yet High Retention?
You may have seen some of AT& T’s stats prior to them losing exclusivity of the iPhone: their customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates were at 23%, yet their churn rate was 8%. (You can bet they sent a Christmas card to Steve Jobs.) Pretty remarkable, especially when you look at their competition’s rates. Verizon’s CSAT rate was around 49%, with a churn rate of 7%.
How did they do it? Why did 77% of dissatisfied clients keep renewing their AT&T wireless plans? Analysts attributed retention to two factors: AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity and the wireless carrier’s family and corporate plans. (To put the rates in context, in the non-AT&T world, one survey found that 70% of customers leave because of poor service.)
You can bet that the industry will be closely monitoring how AT&T revises their retention strategy, now that the iPhone isn’t exclusively in their back pocket, so to speak.
Churn Rate: Does Your Company Need to Shift its Attention?
Companies complain about their high churn rates and bemoan how expensive it is to acquire new clients. CEOs walk around carrying coffee cups emblazoned with “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.” Yet, when you study how the majority of companies allocate their dollars, clear patterns emerge: sales teams are given a far greater share than customer service representatives. Compensation plans and organizational structures are weighted toward new clients, rather than existing ones.
Retention: New Focus for Your Company
The simple answer is to focus on customer retention. How? Well, if 70% of customers who leave claim it was because of poor service, you can certainly start by figuring out how to deliver value to the people purchasing your products. Narrow in on your retention strategy by understanding what you’re doing right and remedying what you’re doing wrong. Some research may be in order.
First, find out what you’re doing right. Yes, go for the good news first. Identify what “loyal” clients look like and reach out to them for some research (offer an attractive incentive or discounts—customers will bite). Determine what they enjoy about your product or service, and take notes on what influences them to be loyal to your business. You’ll see patterns emerge.
Then, figure out what you need to fix. Figuring out how to improve the customer experience will take a holistic approach. Here are some ideas:
Finally, Allocate More of Your Budget Toward Your Priorities
If reducing your churn rate is truly a company priority, shift a proportionate amount of your budget toward retention, instead of acquisition. Invest in your customer service training for your customer-facing agents, and make low-churn a company cornerstone.
Differentiate Yourself With Customer Service
July 26th, 2011
Companies that are vying for the burgeoning cloud computing and hosting business have some fierce competition against industry heavyweights. Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Yep. That's some stiff competition. You may not compete with the likes of these behemoths, but you've still got your own market leaders to go after, right? So what can you do without spending all your heard-earned capital?
If you’re the Texas-based company, Rackspace, you focus on customer service.
Taking on the Amazons of the world
Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Rackspace and discussed the 12-year old company’s strategy for not only staying afloat, but charging ahead in the highly competitive industry of hosting and cloud computing. The company has wrestled with the ups and downs that strike many technology companies, including hiring and retaining top programming talent, stretching cash in a capital-intensive business, and staying ahead of the technology curve.
Rackspace’s Chairman, Graham Weston, has managed to pull his company back from the brink of disaster and drive the business toward 30 percent annual sales growth by making customer service the mantra of his business. In fact, the company’s main brand platform is “fanatical support.”
Whoa. Really?
Not “the most advanced hosting service” or “the fastest technology,” but support that goes so far and above typical customer service it’s best described as fanatical?
Yes. And it’s working.
Putting fanatical customer service into action
As an example of Rackspace’s commitment to customer service, compare what happened when Amazon had their cloud-hosting service crash versus what happened when Rackspace lost cloud power. From the article…
Amazon sent its customers a two-week credit and an apology letter. A sincere gesture, for sure, and appropriate for a company of Amazon’s size.
When Rackspace lost power, its employees personally called thousands of customers to apologize, explained what was occurring, and issued refunds. The company was insistent on personal communication while they worked out system kinks, and their customers were pleased by the effort.
Rackspace has also been known to do things such as send customers pizza when they know the customers are stuck at the office late, or call them and sing “Happy Birthday” over the speakerphone. The customer service culture, in short, is deeply intertwined in Rackspace’s business model.
Applying Rackspace’s customer service lessons to your company
So what can we learn from Rackspace’s approach? The company proudly advertises their customer service philosophy, and they’ve created a webpage dedicated to proclaiming their tenets. Here’s what they do:
Transparency and listening skills: The company’s employees are trained to be transparent and listen to the customers. Rackspace understands that customers want a company that can hear and understand.
Resourceful: Rackspace empowers their customer service representatives to solve problems and be resourceful—their customer service training goes one step further than simply solving issues from a manual.
Skills: They take their customer service training for technical support seriously. Rackspace invests, really invests, in their employees to make sure their staff are knowledgeable and experts at guiding customers through problem solving and technical support issues.
Accountability: Rackspace understands that customers want to work with a company that takes responsibility for problems and is accountable.
Timeliness: They pride themselves on prompt, attentive service.
How does your company measure up?
Regardless of the field you’re in, choosing to make customer service the hallmark of your brand will set you apart, even if your technology isn’t the best, or you’re not first to market, or you don’t have the most inexpensive product. Assessing your current customer service delivery, making needed changes in people, processes and technology, and investing in customer service training, will help you shine through a crowded, competitive marketplace.
Successful Upselling and Cross-Selling: Your Must-Have Checklist
July 5th, 2011
Last year, we wrote a blog that offered 3 tips for cross-selling and upselling success. The theme of the post was uncovering opportunities and we stressed that successful selling is closely tied to reading the customer. Once your reps have learned the art of uncovering opportunities, they’ll be able to create moments where it’s appropriate to offer additional services.
Unless you sell just one product or item (which, if you have customer service representatives or a contact center, we’re guessing you don’t), there are a myriad of ways to put your additional products and services in front of the customer. Below we offer a handy checklist.
“Super-Size”your customer. McDonald’s, well, let’s just say they get the art of the upsell. “Would you like extra large fries for only 20¢ more?” will not be a sentence your reps will utter, but you can certainly use the same tactics. For example, “For only $5.00 more, you can get 2,500 postcards.” Break it down for them—they’ll see the value.
Point out additional features. Assume that your customers don’t research all of the add-on features or services you offer. Take the car salesman. You may not know you want those backseat cup holders, but he does.
Upsell on quality. For example, “Have you seen our PD3X printer? It prints four times faster, and only costs an additional $150.00.” Train your reps to look for every opportunity to offer the next step-up in your products—especially when they sense it would be useful for your customers’ needs. (This is where it’s a good idea to be familiar with a customers’ purchasing history.)
Extend your breadth of products or services. Say you have an online running shoe store, selling a specific style of shoe—that’s your niche, and it works. Well, you should probably also sell socks, right?
Accessorize. Supplies and accessories are an easy-in. If you sell TVs, offer cable cords and USB cords that connect to the TV. You don’t need to become a full-service one-stop shop, necessarily, but certainly offer the relevant supplies that go with your products.
Add on a service. Ever thought about what a warranty is? The warranty is just a simple way to upsell. Depending on your product or industry, find ways to add value with additional service or insurance. The airlines do a great job of this. Trip-cancellation insurance—ever bought it? If so, you were upsold on service.
Throw in that gift! C’mon, who doesn’t like free address labels when they purchase an additional 50 envelopes? Gifts work. People love free things, even if they’re “paying” for it with the upsell.
Employ the Costco effect. One thing that America does exceptionally well is bulk. There’s something puzzlingly satisfying about getting a ten-pack of undershirts for $7.00 apiece, versus a three-pack for $10.00 apiece—even if you have no idea what you’ll do with so many spare undershirts.
Offer a contract. If you offer service or products somewhat frequently, why not get a guarantee on future services by writing up a retainer or purchase contract? Say you hire a janitorial service occasionally for your office. If they offered to clean for $10/hour, instead of $12/hour if you sign a six-month contract, you just might go for it, right? Congrats—you were just upsold with a purchase contract.
You may have read the above list but still feel that your customer service team could use some extra help and motivation—after all, selling is an art, and customer service representatives often don’t want to feel like salespeople. At Impact Learning Systems, we offer training programs for upselling and cross-selling that will give your team more confidence and help them master the craft of upselling and cross-selling.
What's Wrong With Customer Service?
June 24th, 2011
Bob Cowen at Snowfly alerted me to the July, 2011 issue of Consumer Reports Magazine. On page 16, there's a list of the best and worst companies in 21 different business categories (hotel chains, on-line retailers, phone companies, tech support, etc.) compiled from 3 years of subscriber surveys.
If you work at one of the companies in the "best" column, congratulations! You're doing things right. If you're working at a company listed in the "worst" column, this is a wake-up call that presents an opportunity to make some changes. If your company isn't listed, keep reading to be sure you qualify for the "best" side of the list next year!
Abide by the GetHuman Customer Service Standard
The GetHuman Customer Service Standard, provides specifications for making the phone systems used in customer service and support easier, more effective and more efficient for customers. Call your own company's number. Is the IVR helpful? Can you find your way to a human being? Or do you end up in IVR-loop hell?
Hire the Right People
The skills people display when they're interviewing are not necessarily the skills they need to have in order provide top-notch customer service and support. Yes, it costs to use standardized assessments during hiring, but the costs of hiring and training a rep who isn't suited for the job are much, much higher! Check out the assessments for contact center reps and supervisors from by FurstPerson and ImpactAchievement and compare the cost against replacing a rep who isn't performing up to par at your company.
Make Training an Ongoing Event
Most companies provide customer service training for new hires. However, the skill level they leave class with degrades significantly over time. One major computer manufacturer we worked with, for example, had average scores of 72% for first call resolution (FCR) and 81% for customer satisfaction (CSAT). Thirty days after we trained a pilot group of 30 representatives, the pilot group had moved their scores to 82.4% for FCR and 94% for CSAT. However, without on-the-job reinforcement and a continuous improvement program, within 60 days, the scores of the pilot group started falling back to the center's norm.
Don't Forget the Supervisors!
One of the things I love about contact centers is that they frequently promote from within. However, we've observed that unless they've had a strong mentor or training in proper call center coaching, most agents promoted to supervisor tend to supervise as they were parented —and that doesn't work out very well. Supervisors need to learn how to create a climate for success, set team and individual goals, coach to measurable performance standards, and handle difficult employee situations.
In summary, if you hire the right people, provide continuous training to keep agent knowledge and skill level high, and train supervisors so they have the skills to inspire and motivate agents to provide stellar service, you, too, can make it to the top of the list next year.
Internal Customer Service Drives External Customer Satisfaction
June 17th, 2011
MAKO Surgical markets a family of knee implants for a minimally invasive procedure called MAKOplasty. Some of you may be walking around pain-free thanks to MAKO.
Like many medical device companies, Mako Surgical has specialists who are present in the operating room to consult with physicians. These specialists, who provide the face-to-face contact with customers, are backed up by a team of internal employees: Field Service technicians repair equipment onsite; technical support technicians, clinical support technicians, and customer service representatives provide support by phone.
Why Focus on Internal Customer Service?
While many companies seeking to improve customer satisfaction would think of only training their customer-facing employees, Rachele Rivière, Customer Relations Manager, and Tom Klug, Sr. Director of Customer Support, realized that without good communication and a common vision of service between the internal support staff and the MAKOplasty Specialists, it would be difficult to achieve high customer satisfaction scores.
Rachele and Tom selected Impact Learning Systems to help their teams improve in specific areas such as listening and acting on inputs from customers, responding quickly and professionally, treating customers as long-term, valued customers, having efficient processes, and providing quality service so that the customer would recommend MAKO to others.
How MAKO Improved Internal Customer Service
The MAKO support staff completed Getting to the Heart of Customer Service™, Getting to the Heart of Technical Support™, and Getting to the Heart of Field Service™ all designed to improve customer communication skills while creating a common service language and improving operations. Managers completed the supervision course, Making It Happen™, and Impact provided a trainer to facilitate a class-room practice session.
What Were the Results?
Providing consistent internal customer service has impacted customer perceptions of MAKO. Six months after training, they’ve achieved the following results:
If you have internal teams that need to work more in harmony to better serve your customers, let us know. We’d love to help them develop a unified vision of service and skills to take your customer satisfaction to a new level.
To Improve Customer Satisfaction, Memorize These 3 Principles of Employee Satisfaction
June 14th, 2011
If you’ve ever coveted a J.D. Power award for Customer Service Champions, or if keeping the customer service satisfaction (CSAT) score high at your company falls under your job description, this post is for you. Improving CSAT scores, and ultimately, driving business by creating products and services that keep satisfied customers coming back for more is no easy task. Providing adequate training for your customer service representatives is necessary, for sure, but there’s more to the CSAT picture than simply a well-trained employee.
How about a well-trained, happy employee? Now that’s a step in the right direction. Let’s look at three principles for improving employee satisfaction, which will positively influence customer satisfaction.
Principle #1: Understand the link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction
A widely researched topic in the customer service industry connects customer loyalty and employee satisfaction. Case studies and company profiles repeatedly show that for employees to provide not just good customer service—but great customer service—they must first be driven by loyalty and enthusiasm from their employer. In other words, you can’t force devotion or commitment on your employees, but you can foster it by creating a culture that invites pride and ownership in the job and company.
To see the concept visually, the below graph, courtesy of MetricNet’s research on call center metrics, aptly illustrates the connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction:
Principle #2: Create a great work environment
So it makes sense that happy employees make for happier customers. The research backs up a fairly intuitive concept. But to create an environment filled with smiling, customer-serving employees, simply offering your agents a great parking spot if they are chosen as employee of the month isn’t going to cut it. Neither is offering $.25 cent sodas out of the company soda machine. We could write a book on creating a great work environment (actually, we did!…and we wrote a training program, too), but for brevity’s sake, let’s take the example of one company, New Belgium Brewery in Colorado, that has a 97% employee retention rate. Why? The employees, quite simply, like their jobs. The happy staff at New Belgium are also productive, motivated employees that sell a product customers like.
What exactly makes New Belgium employees so happy? Yes, they get to sample the beer they produce, but the management at New Belgium has taken deliberate steps to foster a loyal workforce through the following principles:
Principle #3: Create an environment that encourages low turnover
We’ve written previous posts about how customer service starts with your staff, and we’ve mentioned the importance of adequate employee screening, training, and paying fair wages. It’s a topic worth repeating.
Turnover, quite simply, is expensive, a huge drain on time and company resources, and leads to overall low morale. There are many contributors to high turnover, including inadequate training, poor employee screening methods, and a rushed hiring process. If you think paying lower wages will save your company money in the long-run, first consider the costs of employee turnover. According to recent data, replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 30% to 150% of an employee’s annual salary and benefits. So if you have an employee making $40,000 a year, you could be paying between $12,000 and $60,000 just to hire a replacement.
Even with a focused customer service skills training program, there are greater forces at play when improving employee satisfaction and creating a culture that drives high customer satisfaction rates. If you, or other powers-at-be in the company are downplaying the importance of employee satisfaction, examine your employee culture before attempting to fix your customer satisfaction rates.
Do Your Customers Make Unreasonable Demands?
June 10th, 2011
Whether or not you believe that "the customer is always right", it's true that sometimes customers make unreasonable demands. So, what is the best way to deal with customers who make unreasonable demands?
Start by using positive language, telling the customer what you can do for them, rather than what you can't. Avoid slang and jargon and maintain a professional tone of voice. Challenging situations demand even more from you—attitudinally speaking—than ordinary customer interactions. Common sense and a positive attitude will help you stay calm while dealing with unreasonable customers. Here are a few additional guidelines to follow when dealing with challenging customers and situations:
If you are unable to fulfill a demanding customer's request because of company policy or legal or ethical reasons, be sure to explain why you are unable to, show empathy, and let the customer know what you can do by providing an alternate solution if there is one. By explaining why you’re not able to fulfill a request, you help the customer to understand and accept the situation. Avoid giving a dry, rote, “That’s not our policy.” Instead, speak in a positive, confident tone of voice, and explain why you are not able to fulfill the request. It is especially important to incorporate the above-mentioned guidelines when saying no.
It's important to recognize that appropriately handling customer demands has direct effects on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the customer experience. Just because customers may be perceived by you to be irrational or unreasonably demanding, your job is still to help find a solution. If you follow these guidelines, you'll be more likely to conclude the call with a satisfied customer.
Average Handle Time — Does It Matter?
June 7th, 2011
Metrics. Numbers. Data. If you feel inundated by numbers and are wondering how to sort through the various metrics you need to be tracking for a call center or your customer service department, you’re certainly not alone. In this post, we’re going to discuss average handle time, specifically, and give you the ins and outs of what it’s used for, when to apply it, and how to improve your average handle time numbers.
Straightforward and simple
The average handle time simply tracks how long calls last (called talk time) and how much time is spent in the post-call wrap-up (called wrap time). Typically, a low average handle time is seen as positive and indicates efficiency. And, among the other metrics typically tracked, such as first-call resolution, escalation rates, or even the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), average handle time is much more straightforward—it simply averages the amount of time spent helping callers over a specific number of calls.
Forecasting: Average Handle Time + Volume = Call Load
Average handle time is popular because it is so straightforward, and it seems to be a clear indicator of efficiency, but perhaps the better use of the metric is for forecasting the workload at a call center. By combining the average handle time with call volume, you will arrive at your call load, which serves as a useful guide for planning and management purposes.
Great. So reduce average handle time, be able to forecast, and reduce costs, right?
Not so fast. Measuring average handle time is indeed imperative for forecasting, and by making your call center more efficient, you will see reduced costs and (hopefully) a rise in profitability, but if you are solely focused on being quick and efficient, you may be sacrificing quality. In particular, if you have a center handling complex issues and a secondary goal is to build relationships with your customers, capture additional information, or create add-on sales, then simply trying to drive down your average handle time could work against your organization’s overall goals (and the ever-important CSAT score).
Be cautious, therefore, if you really push average handle time or incentivize your representatives to keep the number low. In doing so, they may miss chances to cross-sell, up-sell, or build rapport with the customer.
Focus on the process, not simply the result
So where does this leave us? Focusing on average handle time does seem important, but we’ve also advised not to rely on the metric too much and jeopardize call quality. Like most contact center metrics, average handle time is a dependent variable that works in conjunction with other processes in place. When you focus simply on controlling one element of service, such as average handle time, you can throw a wrench in other, equally important steps. However, by taking a holistic view of the complete process—from your overall customer service strategy goals to your customer service training process and all of the metrics that you use to monitor your center, you’ll start to see patterns and be able to fix the underlying issues without jeopardizing your overall customer service.
The Foundation of Customer Satisfaction? Teach Your Team to Build Rapport
June 3rd, 2011
The numbers are in—the edict has been passed down through the channels and the ball is now in your court. “Increase customer satisfaction scores.” Or, “Drive more sales.” Or, the nebulous “Build better rapport with customers.” Sound familiar? If your job involves managing a call center staff, undoubtedly, you face pressure to do better and motivate your staff to be more personal, or more helpful—whatever that “key” element is that your representatives need to do in order to increase customer satisfaction and sales.
So what’s missing? What is the secret element that your representatives seem to be missing when dealing with customers? You understand that, ultimately, to increase customer satisfaction, your staff needs to connect with customers and build rapport, but how do you make building rapport a reality and actually train your staff to be effective?
Identify the underlying motivation
At the heart of every call placed to a customer service or support line is an underlying need to resolve an issue, to gather information, or to complete a step in a process (for example, calling to have credit approved for a loan). It goes without saying, in other words, that people don’t simply call a company’s help or support line because they want to chat.
Whether the motivation to place a call is to avoid a hassle, or to take a positive step, you first need to train your staff to recognize and work with the emotional driver behind the call. Are callers motivated to move away from a hassle (for example a non-functioning copy machine), or toward a positive outcome (for example, signing up for theater tickets). By asking your customer service representatives to identify and start with the core motivation your callers present, your staff will begin the call with appropriate goal and tone in mind.
For example, if you operate a credit card support center, you probably deal with a lot of callers who are late with a payment or who are calling to dispute a transaction. The tone your staff needs to establish is therefore, “Let’s help you solve your financial issue easily and ease your stress.” On the other end of the spectrum, if your company offers home financing, and your callers reach out to you to move toward a positive outcome, your staff will need to establish a tone that projects “Great! Let’s help you get your financing approved so you can find that dream home.”
Robots don’t build rapport
If your call center representatives work from a script—as many do—it can be easy for a call to sound like a conversation between a person and a robot. However, even with a script, it’s important to still encourage your staff to act naturally and be conversational, warm, and personal with customers. Remember—your customer representatives are often the only human aspect of your company that many people will have contact with, so encourage your representatives to use the script as a guideline for points to cover in the call, but not to rely on the script as their only means of conversation and interaction with the customer.
The “mirror” example
A great analogy to help build rapport is to have your staff think of a mirror when they speak with a customer—reflect back the tone, language, pace, and action of the person they’re speaking with. Studies have found that you build rapport rapidly when you use mutual language. By paraphrasing and using the chosen language of the person you’re communicating with, it’s easier to establish trust and build rapport.
Now, obviously, if your representative has an irate customer who is rude, uses foul language, or has a harsh tone, mirroring does not mean that your representative should match the caller’s tone. By “mirroring,” we mean that you should teach your staff to use the same words (for example if a customer says “credit card statement,” your representative should use the word “statement” instead of “credit card bill”) and general pace of the customer. Some customers will be very non-engaging and want the call to be brief and to the point. Others may enjoy chatting and desire small talk. Advise your staff to take into account words, tone, and the customer’s pace.
Build rapport through listening
Do you know what most people are interested in? Themselves and their problems. It may sound selfish, but especially in the context of a customer support center call, people do not call you because they want to hear more about your products. Customers call you because they want to talk about their needs and because they want their issue resolved.
By teaching your staff to listen to your customers—truly listen to your customers—your customers will come away from the call feeling validated and respected. Keep in mind that true listening involves more than not talking—listening means that you keep your mind focused on what the customer is saying, paraphrase back to the customer what you hear, and are able to formulate a solution or guide the customer based on what you hear them say. If you can help your staff master the skill of attentive listening, you’ll be well on the way to building customer rapport.
Explain the question
Finally, to help build rapport, teach your staff to “explain the question.” Customers appreciate knowing why and what you’re doing with the information you ask. So if your representative asks for a customer’s address, have them explain why the address is necessary—“Can I have your address so I can confirm that your account information is up-to-date,” for example. By taking that simple step of adding the “so that I can …” you won’t come off as though you’re interrogating the customer—you’ll instead project that you value them, and your customers will be more receptive to providing the requested information.
Building rapport – a win-win
Building rapport with customers is a multi-faceted process, but by investing the time and training, you will be taking positive steps to make your customers feel valued. Valued customers are satisfied customers—and that’s a win-win for you, your customer, your company, and your numbers.
If you are interested in learning more about building rapport and improving customer satisfaction, , Impact Learning Systems offers training programs that get to the heart of customer service and result in measurable positive outcomes for companies.