Customer Service Week is once again upon us (starting Monday, Oct. 7), and contact centers everywhere – at least those that actually care about customer service and their agents – are getting ready to celebrate.
The key to an effective CSW celebration is to party just hard enough to show agents how appreciated and valued their work is, but not so hard that it interferes with the very service you are celebrating. Rewarding staff with tequila shots can greatly diminish service levels and cause agents to pass out during customer interactions before first-contact resolution is achieved.
Following are 20 fresh ideas that are almost but not quite guaranteed to make your Customer Service Week celebration a success:
1. Officially change the name of the contact center to “The Customer Love Hut”.
2. Give each agent a special comb that fixes ‘headset hair’.
3. Get rid of all the shackles, cattle prods and any other devices used to enforce agent adherence.
4. Replace “Dress-Down Friday” with “Undress Monday”.
5. Pay some actors to play your company’s executive team and have them visit the contact center to thank staff for their great work.
6. Install a Xanax dispenser in the breakroom. And in the restrooms. And at agents’ workstations.
7. Offer agents free treatment for Xanax addiction.
8. Walk up to each workstation and personally tell every agent how extremely important they are to the organization. If you have too many agents to do that, just tell your top performer.
9. Let agents work in their underwear or pajamas for the week to make up for senior management rejecting your proposal to implement a home agent initiative.
10. Remove the ‘Calls in Queue’ display board from all the bathroom stalls.
11. Give each agent one “Get Out of Call Free” card for use during an interaction with a highly annoying/abusive customer.
12. Permit agents to take one free swing at their supervisor during a coaching session.
13. Give out an “I’m Dedicated to Service” badge to any agent who has stuck with the job for more than 48 hours.
14. Install thick padding on all workstation desks, walls and computer monitors to protect agents against head injuries.
15. Wait till the week after CSW to tell everybody the center is being outsourced.
16. Give each agent a fresh new supply of the paper clips they use to cut themselves on paydays.
17. Instead of hanging pictures of your top-performers on the wall, hang your actual top performers on the wall to give them a well-deserved break from the phones.
18. Give each agent three baseballs to throw at a senior manager perched in a dunk-tank. Better yet, forget the dunk-tank.
19. Present each agent with a commission check for all the revenue they’ve saved the company by not telling customers how they really feel.
20. Officially change agents’ title to “Customer Engagement Officer”. Tell your company’s actual CEO to deal with it.
I’d love to hear YOUR fresh ideas for celebrating Customer Service Week. Feel free to share them in the 'Comments' area below.
Special ‘Customer Service Week’ Offer from Off Center
In the name of all that is customer servicey, from now through Customer Service Week I’m offering a whopping 50% off the regular price of my Full Contact book on contact center best practices, as well as all of my ‘Contact Center Tunes’ song parodies. To receive your discount, be sure to type in the following code in the ‘Discount Code’ box provided when you are making your purchase: csw13
This offer will end at midnight ET on Sunday, October 13, so act soon! (Now would be good.)
When it comes to social customer care (providing service and support via social media channels), there are two key practices that contact centers must embrace: 1) monitoring; and 2) monitoring.
No, I haven’t been drinking, and no, there isn’t an echo embedded in my blog. The truth is, I didn’t actually repeat myself in the statement above.
Now, before you recommend that I seek inpatient mental health/substance abuse treatment, allow me to explain.
Monitoring in social customer care takes two distinctly different though equally important forms. The first entails the contact center monitoring the social landscape to see what’s being said to and about the brand (and then deciding who to engage with). The second entails the contact center’s Quality Assurance team/specialist monitoring agents' 'social' interactions to make sure the agents are engaging with the right people and providing the right responses.
The first type of monitoring is essentially a radar screen; the second type of monitoring is essentially a safety net. The first type picks up on which customers (or anti-customers) require attention and assistance; the second type makes sure the attention and assistance provided doesn’t suck.
Having a powerful social media monitoring tool that enables agents to quickly spot and respond to customers via Twitter and Facebook is great, but it doesn’t mean much if those agents, when responding…
- misspell every other word
- misuse or ignore most punctuation
- provide incomplete – or completely incorrect – information
- show about as much tact and empathy as a Kardashian.
- fail to invite the customer to continue his/her verbal evisceration of the company and the agent offline and out of public view.
All of those scary bullet items above can be avoided – or at least minimized – when there’s a formal QA process in place for social media customer contacts. Now, if you’re thinking your QA and supervisory staff are too busy to carefully monitor and evaluate agents’ Twitter/Facebook interactions with customers (and provide follow-up coaching), then what the Zuckerberg are you thinking even offering such channels as contact options? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and again, and again): If your contact center isn’t ready to monitor a particular contact channel, then it isn’t ready to HANDLE that channel.
Customers don’t applaud organizations for merely being progressive. If Toyota came out with a new automobile that ran on garbage but that had a 20% chance of exploding when you put the key in the ignition, customers’ response wouldn’t be, “Deadly, yes, but I might make it across the country on just banana peels!”
Social customer care is still new enough where organizations offering it are considered progressive. If your contact center is one such organization, are your customers applauding the strong and consistent social service and support your agents are providing, or is your center overlooking the quality component and losing too many customers to explosions?
For more insights (and some irreverence) on Social Customer Care, be sure to check out my blog post, “Beginner’s Guide to Social Customer Care”. Also, my book, Full Contact, contains a chapter in which best (or at least pretty good) practices in Social Customer Care are covered.
In this age of social media, sound bytes and ADHD, people love quick and catchy stats. Unfortunately, in the contact center and customer care space, there seem to be only a handful of snazzy stats in circulation. The same ones just keep getting regurgitated over and over (yes, that’s redundant), especially on Twitter.
This is perplexing considering how dynamic customer care is and how much contact centers have evolved. It’s actually worse than perplexing – it’s depressing. Every time I see someone tweeting the old chestnut , “Satisfied customers tell only 3 people about their experience, while dissatisfied customers tell 8-10 people” (or some variation of this), a part of my soul dies. I even wept a little just now while typing that stat.
Rather than just complain about the lack of statistical variety being promoted by self-proclaimed customer experience experts in the Twittersphere, I aim to remedy the situation. Following are several fresh and captivating stats about customer care and contact centers that I believe you and everybody else will feel compelled to talk and tweet about:
- 86% of customers would be willing to pay more for better customer service. 100% of contact center managers would be willing to pay more for even mediocre customer service.
- 70% of contact centers list Average Handle Time among their key performance metrics at the agent level. Of those centers, 100% need a clue.
- Only 17% of contact centers really mean it when they say “Your call is very important to us”. Of the remaining centers, 38% feel “Your call is somewhat important to us”, 24% feel “It’s surprising how unimportant your call is to us”, and 21% feel “It’s hilarious that you are still holding for a live agent.”
- 73% of contact center managers claim to know how to accurately measure First-Call Resolution. The remaining 27% of managers are telling the truth.
- Engaged customer service agents are 35% more likely to provide a positive customer experience than are customer service agents who are already married.
- The top three criteria contact center managers consider when selecting work-at-home agents are: 1) Past performance; 2) ability to work independently; and 3) body odor.
- Every time a caller must provide his/her name and account number to an agent after having just provided that exact same information via the IVR system, a puppy dies.
- 97% of contact center agents fantasize daily about sending a hungry Bengal tiger to the home of abusive callers. The remaining 3% of agents fantasize daily about sending a hungry Siberian Tiger.
- 81% of contact center agents are empowered to do exactly what their managers and supervisors tell them.
- Each year, over 150 customer care professionals die from overexposure to acronyms.
- 50% of managers feel their contact center is highly unprepared to handle social customer care; the remaining 50% do too.
- The three people that satisfied customers tell about their experience are Sue Johnson, Dave Winthrop, and Bud Carter. All three are tired of hearing about these experiences.
- 42% of contact center managers say they will not hire an agent applicant unless said applicant has a pulse and/or can work at least one weekend shift a month.
- Four out of five agents represent 80% of all agents. In contrast, the remaining agents represent only 20% of all agents.
- The average agent-to-supervisor ratio in contact centers is 20:1. The odds that this is enough to provide agents with the coaching and support they need to succeed is 2000:1.
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100% of managers destined for greatness and wealth purchase a copy of the Full Contact e-book. 0% of managers understand why the author of said e-book looks so angry and aggressive in the photo on the book cover.
True contact center success comes when organizations make the critical switch from a “Measure everything that moves” mindset to one of “Measure what matters most.” Given that we are now living in the Age of Customer Influence, “what matters most” is that which most increases the likelihood of the customer not telling the world how evil you are via Twitter.
No longer can companies coast on Average Handle Time (AHT) and Number of Calls Handled per Hour. Such metrics may have ruled the roost back when contact centers were back-office torture chambers, but the customer care landscape has since changed dramatically. Today, customers expect and demand service that is not only swift but stellar. A speedy response is appreciated, but only when it’s personalized, professional and accurate – and when what’s promised is actually carried out.
AHT and other straight productivity measurements still have a place in the contact center (e.g. for workforce management purposes as well as identifying workflow and training issues). However, in the best centers – those that understand that the customer experience is paramount – the focus is on a set of five far more qualitative and holistic metrics.
1) Service Level. How accessible your contact center is sets the tone for every customer interaction and determines how much vulgarity agents will have to endure on each call. Service level (SL) is still the ideal accessibility metric, revealing what percentage of calls (or chat sessions) were answered in “Y” seconds. A common example (but NOT an industry standard!) SL objective is 80/20.
The “X percent in Y seconds” attribute of SL is why it’s a more precise accessibility metric than its close cousin, Average Speed of Answer (ASA). ASA is a straight average, which can cause managers to make faulty assumptions about customers’ ability to reach an agent promptly. A reported ASA of, say, 30 seconds doesn’t mean that all or even most callers reached an agent in that time; many callers likely got connected more quickly while many others may not have reached an agent until after they perished.
2) First-Call Resolution (FCR). No other metric has as big an impact on customer satisfaction and costs (as well as agent morale) as FCR does. Research has shown that customer satisfaction (C-Sat) ratings will be 35-45 percent lower when a second call is made for the same issue.
Trouble is, accurately measuring FCR is something that can stump even the best and brightest scientists at NASA. (I discussed the complexity of FCR tracking in a previous post.) Still and all, contact centers must strive to gauge this critical metric as best they can and, more importantly, equip agents with the tools and techniques they need to drive continuous (and appropriate) FCR improvement.
3) Contact Quality and 4) C-Sat. Contact Quality and C-Sat are intrinsically linked – and in the best contact centers, so are the processes for measuring them. To get a true account of Quality, the customer’s perspective must be incorporated into the equation. Thus, in world-class customer care organizations, agents’ Quality scores are a combination of internal compliance results (as judged by internal QA monitoring staff using a formal evaluation form) and customer ratings (and berating) gleaned from post-contact transactional C-Sat surveys.
Through such a comprehensive approach to monitoring, the contact center gains a much more holistic view of Contact Quality than internal monitoring alone can while simultaneously capturing critical C-Sat data that can be used not only by the QA department but enterprise-wide, as well.
5) Employee Satisfaction (E-Sat). Those who shun E-Sat as a key metric because they see it as “soft” soon find that achieving customer loyalty and cost containment is hard. There is a direct and irrefutable correlation between how unhappy agents are and how miserable they make customers. Failure to keep tabs on E-Sat – and to take action to continuously improve it – leads not only to bad customer experiences but also high levels of employee attrition and knife-fighting, which costs contact centers an arm and a leg in terms of agent re-recruitment, re-assessment, re-training, and first-aid.
Smart centers formally survey staff via a third-party surveying specialist at least twice a year to find out what agents like about the job, what they’d like to see change, and how likely they are to cut somebody or themselves.
For much more on these and other common contact center metrics, be sure to check out my FULL CONTACT ebook at https://offcenterinsight.com/full-contact-book.html.
This week being the one-year anniversary of the launch of my ebook, Full Contact, I thought it would be fun to share the book’s Introduction, which is far too well-written to only be enjoyed by the six people who have actually purchased Full Contact.
(Don't miss the special offer at the end of this post. It's especially special.)
In high school, I was voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices”. It was a peculiar honor, especially since I graduated high school years before either ebooks or the term “contact center” had even been invented. My senior class was a prophetic lot.
Of course, such a lofty and obscure prediction places a lot of pressure on a person. Throughout college I wondered if I would ever live up to the expectations of my peers. At my university there were no classes or study groups on contact center practices; no dean of Customer Management. I tried to engage my college friends in contact center-related conversations, but they all felt that frat parties and frisbee were more important than first-call resolution.
Feeling that college ill-prepared me to fulfill my ebook destiny, I took a job as an agent for an insurance contact center right after graduating in 1991. However, I soon found that having to adhere to schedule in a cramped cubicle nine hours a day left little time for me to discover best practices or to write.
Things started to look more promising when I secured a job as an editorial assistant with ICMI in June of 1994. The fact that I didn’t have much contact center experience or knowledge didn’t bother ICMI founder Gordon MacPherson; he had been looking for somebody with good writing skills and a fiery ambition whom he could shape and mold. When he read on my resume that I had been voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices” back in high school, he knew that I had what it took to become a top-notch editor for their pioneering publication of the time, Service Level Newsletter.
I learned a ton in my editorial position at ICMI. Gordon – and later, Brad Cleveland – enthusiastically taught me the key principles of contact center management. I got to interview top experts the world over and write articles and research reports on the most pressing issues, biggest challenges and hottest trends facing contact center professionals. Over my 16 years at ICMI I learned about and witnessed first-hand the most effective practices with regard to workforce management, metric selection, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction measurement, customer relationship management, agent hiring and retention, email/chat management, IVR and web-self service, outsourcing, home agents, and a lot more. I learned how to say key contact center management terms like “shrinkage” and “Erlang” without giggling, and was able to memorize over 700 industry acronyms without the aid of performance enhancing drugs. You name it, I wrote about it, conducted research on it, and – eventually – spoke about it at industry events.
But what I didn’t do while at ICMI is make my high school classmates’ prognostication become a reality. True, I have written well over 200 feature articles, nearly the same number of case studies, dozens of research reports and countless industry-related blurbs and bytes, but I have never written an ebook on contact center best practices.
Until now.
Full Contact is a composite of the most effective and innovative practices, processes, approaches, applications, strategies and initiatives – in what I consider to be the most critical areas of contact center management – that I have uncovered in my nearly two full decades as a researcher and journalist in the industry. The book contains not my opinions (though, yes, I do have a penchant for speaking my mind); rather it contains proven practices and tactics – those that separate the world-class contact center operations from those that merely get by, or don’t.
I realize that just because I have finally written an ebook doesn’t mean that I have lived up to my high school classmates’ expectations. After all, I wasn’t voted “Most likely to write an ebook on contact center best practices”; rather I was voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices”.
Thus, I strongly encourage all of you to purchase multiple copies, and to persuade your colleagues to do the same. Rave about this ebook online. Tweet and blog about it. Give it as a gift for birthdays and holidays, or simply to show that special somebody in your life that you care enough to want to help them learn how to accurately forecast contact volume and schedule accordingly to achieve a strategically chosen service level objective. That’s love.
Then and only then will I be able to attend my upcoming 25th high school reunion with my head held high.
Warm Regards,
Greg Levin
Get Full Contact at Half Price. From now until next Friday (Nov. 11), I’m offering Full Contact at 50% off the regular price. The discount code is fc1111 – be sure to use it when you stop by the gift shop on the way out: http://www.greglevin.com/full-contact-ebook.html
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