Quick quotes on the importance of customer service in call centers

1. Executive Interview : Customer Service - Interview With Steve Callahan Page 1 of 3
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Only with a few companies. Delta has it right for their top tier employees, so does American Express, and
so does Hilton and Marriott. I don't think most financial service companies (insurance, banks, credit cards)
Forums get it. Retailers try, but there are only a few decent "frequent buyer" programs (Best Buy is a poor
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example).
Site Map In your opinion, which industry sectors provide great service and which ones are poor?
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Contact Us Great service? Not industry specific really. In the end, "great" service depends on the person talking to
your in person or on the phone. That means that the same place can give great service on second, and
truly lousy the next, unless they have an exceptional talent management system. Not too many do.
FEATURED SUPPLIERS Can you recall a really good experience recently - where you were WOW'd by the service you
on ContactCenterWorld.com this
week: received?
Unfortunately, with the economy the way it is, the job market putting people in "underemployed" roles,
Avaya
and the general negative feelings about politics, housing, crime, education, et al., I haven't been WOW'd
a lot. I suspect there are companies that are thinking their tokenism is "WOW" service. They are wrong.
TopPlace2Work Talking about bad experiences, where do companies go wrong with the service they provide?
Airline mistakes - how easy to give every a free $3 snack if they had to sit on the runway for an hour. But
the don't. Restaurants having the manager come to the table to apologize, personally, for a poorly done
Blue Ocean Contact Centers meal or a long wait. Hotels doing an upgrade, or simply providing some extra service, if there are
inconveniences. Every mistake still remains, even a decade later, an opportunity for an "heroic recovery".
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It is not so much the mistakes that happen, it is how the people (there's that talent management theme
again) recover from them. Unfortunately, when the staff are as exhausted as the customers, it is so much
harder for the heroics to occur.
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Have you noticed any differences in service from people from different cultures? DESIGNER
Global Benchmarking Study of This is an intriguing question and very context specific. Is another generation (say Gen-Y) a different MONERIS SOLUTIONS
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culture? In general, we appear to make culture synonymous with ethnic or national origin, yet I feel our GLOBAL CONTACT
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attributable to the social systems within which staff are trained; however, I would resist a categorical CRM industry
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approach to the question of service. It oversimplifies the issue and distracts from the focus on staff
development within the context of the services being offered.
If you had to give just 1 tip regarding the use of technology in relation to improving customer
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service, what would your tip be?
Make technology as rich as possible in terms of functionality, access, and information at the point of
service deliver - the customer service staff's desk. All of the focus on various and sundry bells and
whistles costing millions of dollars are often more the result of the human equivalent of a raccoon's
attraction to shiny objects. IT needs a new toy, the maintenance staff don't want to write COBOL forever.
Wake up - empower your front line with the tools they need to do the job, train them on what they need to
do, give them the ability to make exceptions, and then schedule their time so that they aren't burnt out.
Then get out of their way and let them do their jobs. People in general, especially in service roles, want to
do a good job - they want to "delight" the customer. They are usually just overburdened with to many
uncontrollable constraints.
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2. Executive Interview : Customer Service - Interview With Steve Callahan Page 2 of 3
If you had to give just 1 tip regarding staff in relation to improving customer service, what would
your tip be?
Take the initiative to be an advocate of your clients. Put the requirements for training, scheduling,
documentation, procedures, and systems needs in the context of how it will enable superior service. Help
management understand WHY things have to improve so that a clearly communicated ROI in terms of
service improvement, customer retention, and over time market share, can be attributable to what may
appear initially as trite requests. Have the courage and fortitude to persist - companies need more
"heroes" at the front line, and to get them, it is going to mean taking the risks to get that point across.
If you had to give just 1 tip regarding business processes in relation to improving customer
service, what would your tip be?
Simplify. Look at those forms, hard edits, procedural requirements, escalation for approval processes,
handoffs for functionally specific steps in a process, et al. Make it easy for the person delivering the
service to "WOW" your customer. Dehydrate for necessity, and then reconstruct for simplicity.
In your opinion, how should contact centers measure the level of service they give? Please
explain in detail.
Two specific ways, one quantitative and one qualitative. First, for the quantitative measure, use first call
resolution. What percent of the calls get answered by the recipient - not documented, escalated, routed
for approval, sent to research, or transferred to another area / person. And by the way, the denominator
includes hang ups and fast busies (adjusted for short duration disconnects - ie, wrong numbers). It isn't
resolved if I didn't get to you. This last adjustment is how you automatically account for abandon rate and
wait time - it impacts your denominator and doesn't have to be tracked separately. Second, for the
qualitative measure, track caller satisfaction. To the extent possible, get those after call surveys, do
scheduled sample outbounds by an objective external party to callers within a given month, send survey
forms asking for feedback with refrigerator magnets or coupons for a coffee in appreciation of them taking
the time to answer (yes, before they answer, its an investment). Contact centers need only measure did I
address your need, and how did you feel about how I treated you in addressing your need.
Lastly, can you share with us one of the worst customer service experiences you have
experienced recently.
No, I won't share a specific experience because that gives too much attention to irrelevant details.
Everyone has their list of terrible experiences, from the fast food without the sauce, to the 3 hour hold
time, to the commitment made but not met. Any research into customer service experiences should focus
not so much on eliminating the negatives but on multiplying the positives. Find the people, however few,
that were "WOW'd" by their experience with your particular company, and then incent them (discounts,
gift certificates, checks, whatever) to participate in focus groups to define what it was that really
impressed them. Tape the sessions, share them with the staff, and then ask the staff - "how do we
increase the % of contacts that end up with this result". They know what the barriers are, and they will tell
you what you need to do to get more "WOWs". Just don't ask if you're not serious. They answer is out
there, and it doesn't necessarily take $xx millions in investments. It starts with doing what you are asking
your service reps to do - just listen.
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Date Published: Friday, December 17, 2010
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