Trying your best

Tip:the phrase "trying your best" starts with "trying". Magic in customer service doesn't just happen, it has to be made to happen,and that only comes from trying. Give every customer your best and you'll be the one reaping the rewards for years to come.

How taking your time actually improves efficiency

The world today is measured in transactions per minute, resolution time, and other time bound metrics that determine whether others believe we are doing things well -- but what if I told you that taking more time to do something is actually better for efficiency in the long run? Contact centers, hotel front desks, even banks, can all benefit from taking more time rather than less.

The rationale is simple: If you rush, you make mistakes. Mistakes are costly, in both time and money, because they distract resources away from new transactions, and this can have a massive ripple effect all the way to the bottom line.

When I say mistakes, I mean more than just plain old errors (ordering the wrong product, mis-keying the customers contact details, or sending the wrong repair technician); I also mean all the little things that could and should have been done to totally satisfy the customer and resolve the issue completely. Everything from providing the customer with all the information they'd need so they don't have to call you back, to preemptive actions that could eliminate a recurrence of the problem in the future (like taking a few minutes to type a proper entry in the call log, or to fix a misspelling of the customers street).

Quite often people feel that by cutting edges they're actually doing everybody a favor because they can serve "more" customers, but the reality is that back-jobs and call backs chew up everyone's time and do no one any favors, so as the saying goes, "a job worth doing is worth doing well".

The conflict comes when management doesn't understand this, and people with spreadsheets and statistical models get to determine the path your company takes for delivering customer service. If you're old enough to remember the good old days when shop assistants would take a few minutes to talk with their customers beyond the basic "next please!", you'll remember the fantastic experience and great rapport that was built, and the loyalty that was generated from taking the time to do things right. We need to bring this back if we're to succeed in such a competitive marketplace and meet the demands of our well-informed customers.

I'm not saying that you should stretch every transaction out just for the sake of taking more time; this will just back fire on you; and I also realize that this "taking extra time" will be tough to do in your own job because of of the metric constraints I mentioned earlier. Yet if you put it into perspective, even just taking an extra 60 seconds with a customer can have a dramatic effect on their experience.

If your supervisors or managers push you, explain to them where you're coming from (even show them this article), and if they still don't get it, then, unfortunately, it means they aren't serious about customer service and maybe you should find a company that is, after all, businesses that don't embrace these cultural changes won't be around for much longer anyway!

Remember: with a customer, every second counts!

A pitfall for social networking in customer service

I was recently talking with a group of people who are beginning to develop strategies for using social networking to gain improvements in customer service. It's a hot topic in the industry at the moment, and people are keen to learn from others on the ups and downs of integrating this approach. More importantly, they were looking for pitfalls, and there are plenty of them!

The pitfall I want to talk about today is that of "replying in kind". It's best described in this scenario: if I send a "tweet" to a company asking a question about their products or services, generally, it's perfectly fine for them to "reply in kind" by sending me back a tweet. It makes sense because it's leveraging the benefits of the technology such as rapid response, resource optimization, and multi-tasking. Where this becomes a potential pitfall is when these immediate benefits are outweighed by a major negative for non-voice/non-video electronic communication - "miscommunication".

We discovered the plights of this pitfall when email hit offices en masse in the 80s and 90s, around the time local area networking boomed; and it's still being felt today by anyone who makes the social faux pas of misinterpreting a single sentence in an email, and then blasting off a furious response, only to discover they had misread the intention of the sentence altogether.

Electronic communication misses out on the regular social cues inherent with face to face or even verbal communication, and makes it extremely difficult to build a fundamental aspect of social interaction - rapport. It also tends to make more complex transaction times longer because it's harder to get your exact message across to the other party.

Replying in kind without detecting the point at which the conversation should switch to a voice/video medium can turn loving customers into critics and cynics, and can even trigger a shift away from using the social networking channels altogether, based on these potentially negative experiences. In the end, you lose all the benefits you were chasing by using social networking in the first place.

I tend to go for the "rule of three" when trying to decide when it's time to shift to a phone call. That's three transactions from either party. This includes the customer's original query, your reply, and a possible follow up by the customer. Unless that third transaction is a "thank you" because the issue is resolved, then, pick up the phone and start dialing.

For certain industries, this is going to be a real challenge; particularly, those which involve customer identification and confidential information. Due to restrictions placed on the verification process for a customer's identity, quite often email and social networking mediums simply aren't robust enough to deal with what can quite often be a lengthy process. If certain inquiries will require such steps, it's best to warn customers upfront and then switch to voice communication where possible, or incorporate the steps into a web form where it can be done securely online rather than through Facebook, Twitter, or even email.

A few things to remember:

1. The aim of the game is speedy resolution of the customer's issue - nothing else matters.

2. If the technology is hindering you from achieving that aim, then it's time to shift back to normal communications for that transaction.

3. The primary benefit of these social networking tools is that it makes it simpler and easier for your customers to get in touch with you, not necessarily easier for you to deal with them.

It'd be a great shame to see the uptrend in social media usage wither away, just because companies start to use technology as a tactic to deal with customers "at arms length".

As a customer service representative, you need to make sure you do your part in detecting that point in time when you should switch, and do it promptly unless you have the express permission or insistence from the customer.

Even the giants go back to basics

Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications body, formerly government owned until 1997 when it began several stages of privatization, is a behemoth. It's emerged from it's days under the Post Master General and morphed and adapted to the changing technologies and markets over the decades, but the end result is a mix of organizational structures, processes, and internal politics. This has naturally led to ongoing customer dissatisfaction, and now the giant is making moves to shake itself of the reputation for being disengaging to its customers.

The eternal problem for "big" companies is that the more complex they become, the easier it is for customers to get lost in the system, and this is a huge trigger for dissatisfaction and churn in the customer base.

Recently Telstra recently tapped Gerd Schenkel to revamp its websites in an effort to make it easier for customers to access information and services online, a feat being mastered by the banking industry. Telstra is eager to engage its customers through online strategies that make dealing with the massive company and its various internal units more straightforward. Not a small task, but well worth the effort.

Now, they've announced the appointment of a Chief Customer Officer, who'll head the companies newly formed sales and customer service divisions and focus on turning around operations and streamlining internal processes with a focus towards improving customer satisfaction with Telstra services.

It's a smart moving combining sales and customer service because it recognizes the flow of value from sales to service, and having it centrally managed gives the opportunity to bring consistency, remove barriers and roadblock, and ensure a consistent theme of "customer first" across all angles. What it says to the general public is that regardless of whether you're about to buy from them, or have already bought from them, we're here to serve you. All too often, companies focus on the sales side and make customer service its distant cousin.

The new Chief Customer Officer doesn't have an easy job ahead of him, but if Telstra, or in fact, any company, is truly serious about customer satisfaction, it absolutely must build it into the organizational structure for any efforts to have a chance of making a difference. Sweeping powers and authority, overarching accountability, and central principles are all key to this challenge, and at the very least, Telstra seems to be making genuine moves to make a real difference, rather than implementing superficial steps that appease no one but the PR department!