Refine & Redefine

OI on oops! The Case of the Missing ‘Sorry’

In ‘OI on oops!’ series we talk about real life customer service bloopers and how to avoid them. We start with my own experience that I had last week whilst ordering for a lunch delivery to my office…

“Recently I ordered for a delivery of a sandwich and an iced tea from an internationally renowned quick service restaurant chain’s outlet located in the shopping suburb in Mumbai. The order was delivered almost an hour later. The ice tea was tasteless – the mix was inadequate. I called the restaurant, informed them about the ice tea and asked them to deliver it again. Without any hesitation I was promised an ‘ immediate’ delivery of another glass of iced tea. So far, so good!

But, the delivery reached me after another hour – by which time I had already consumed the sandwich. If this wasn’t enough, the delivery boy asked for the earlier glass of iced tea back (the glass was made of styrofoam). When he was informed that the earlier glass had already been trashed with its contents poured in the sink, he insisted on getting the glass back and asked if I could remove it from the bin. On my refusal to submit to such indignity, he offered to take it out himself. I could not allow him to do that either. I spoke to the restaurant manager and without sounding apologetic he says, “Let my delivery boy remove it from the bin.” This was utterly disgusting. You deliver a product of bad quality late, you further deliver the replacement product late again and then you expect the customer to give back the styrofoam glass as proof??!! Having lost my patience, I asked the delivery boy to leave… my mouth was already bitter with the taste of a bad experience with this brand and I know the next time I think of home delivery, I will not think of this brand.”

Let’s start by listing the negative interactions that I had with this internationally ‘ renowned’ quick service restaurant chain.

1. The delivery was an hour late.
2. The second delivery that was supposed to be their apologetic gesture was an hour late too.
3. They definitely didn’t trust the customer and wanted proof.
4. Asking a customer to go through the trash can or even offering to do so themselves is beyond-thinking-doubt a wrong step.

To show that you care about your customer’s experience means delivering on time, trusting your customer, apologizing for the mistake and showing that you care enough to delight your customer inspite of the mistake made.

Sending the second iced tea with an add-on item from their range of side orders like a cookie or a packet of chips would have resolved the issue. It would not only have re-affirmed their apology but it would surely have increased the prospects of turning the irate customer into a loyalist. An opportunity to gain a customer who advocates you over your competition should never be missed. All it required from the brand was to say ‘Sorry’ and mean it with their actions!

A very apt quote comes to mind - Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. – Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways

Hello 2013

A new year always brings an opportunity for a fresh start. At Onion Insights, we have started this year by signing on as the Brand Showcase Partner for the Retail Leadership Summit (RLS) 2013. RLS 2013 will bring the thinkers and doers of the Indian Retail space on one platform. This is a part of our on-going support to the Retail Industry by sharing original ideas and practices on how Retailers can better their Customer’s Experience.

Another new start will be with our blog. We will be updating our blog more frequently than before by sharing our thoughts, pen our opinions and get your views – starting now. Of course, the core would revolve around Customer Experience.

This year our calendar too reflects on fresh starts. It focuses on 12 ways to refine and re-define your customer’s experience – one for every month. Overcoming challenges with innovation is what good business is all about and we hope that our 12 steps will help you provide a quality experience to your customers while boosting your bottom line. Here is a brief synopsis of the steps:

Step 1: Lead by example – Actions speak loudly. Make sure your actions reflect your views.
Step 2: Involve Your Customers – Ask the people to whom it matters to make your business matter.
Step 3: Engage Your Team – Involving people more means less contradictions to your views (devious isn’t it?!)
Step 4: Set Expectations – Written words create belief, and belief creates the product. Write. Believe. Act.
Step 5: Solicit Feedback – Ask and then ask again. Nicely.
Step 6: Be Customer Focussed – Processes, policies and thoughts should focus on customers. Tunnel vision helps.
Step 7: Provide Tools – Use technology. But don’t forget the Emotional Quotient.
Step 8: Empower Your Team – A “Yes, I can help” fixes customer complaints faster than “I will ask if I can…”.
Step 9: Measure What You Want Done – Galileo Galilei said, “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.” It still works.
Step 10: Recognize Performance – Never forget praise, and make it loud!
Step 11: Say Thank You – To everyone you can think of!
Step 12: Have Fun – Smile, enjoy and spread the cheer… it brightens faces and workplaces!

As a special offering to all our readers, we have made our calendar images available to everyone in the form of wall papers for your deskptops, laptops, smart phones. Below are the links provided for the downloads!

Signing off and hope we have been able to kickstart 2013 on a colourful note for you! Happy New Year!

Check your screen resolution and click on the link to download wallpapers for each month.

1. Standard Square Monitor Wallpapers – Resolution 1024x 768
2. 13inch Macbook Pro – Resolution 1280 x 800
3. 15inch Standard LCD Square Monitors – Resolution 1280 x 1024
4. 11inch Macbook Air – Resolution 1366 x 768
5. 13inch Macbook Air / 15inch Macbook Pro – Resolution 1440 x 900
6. 20inch+ Widescreen Monitors – Resolution 1600 x 900
7. 21.5inch iMac / Full HD 1080p – Resolution 1920 x 1080
8. 15inch Macbrook Pro with Retina Display – 2880 x 1800
9. BlackBerry Curve
10. BlackBerry Torch Slider
11. BlackBerry Bold
12. iPad 2 / iPad Mini
13. iPad with Retina Display
14. iPhone 4S / iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4th Gen
15. iPhone 5 / iPod Touch 5th Gen
16. Samsung Galaxy S3 / Galaxy Note 2

The Three Challenges for
Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service in my opinion is something a company MUST be prepared to do if they intend to also participate in social channels to market their products and services. If a brand launches a Facebook page, Twitter handle or sets out to conquer any other platform for marketing purposes they will get customer queries, and support questions. Smart brands have found ways to support these customers on these channels.

A few years ago when I was working on launching BlackBerry’s Social Customer Service program I was looking for examples and the most commonly referred to were Dell and Comcast. Just a few years later a quick search and you will find many more success stories including; Xbox (which recently became the first brand to reach 1 million tweets), Zappos, JetBlue, Starbucks, Best Buy and AT&T. Yet, a quick look at some stats, show how that while customers expect to receive responses to their complaints and questions, many companies are just leaving them waiting.

Social Customer Service is challenging. It is a large shift for many customer service departments who have often been running in the same manner, with the same tools, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and processes for 50 years. Taking what was always 1:1 to a very public model is scary and daunting. There are plenty of reasons why companies have failed to adopt social customer service. To triumph in social customer service you will need to be prepared to tackle three challenges: 1) Maintaining stakeholder support, 2) Accepted success measures, and 3) Scalability

Maintaining Stakeholder Support

If you are building out a customer service team for social media you will need not only initial support but ongoing support from your executives and partner departments. Social media customer service relies on teamwork with product, marketing, issue management and other teams. These relationships are crucial to ensuring customer feedback, complaints and concerns are dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

Understanding the needs of your partners, and stakeholders will help your social customer team provide value to the business. Which teams want to know when issues are bubbling up? How do they want to receive customer feedback? By providing continuous value with your partners and stakeholders you will maintain their support which will result in resources, budget and backing when you need it. You will need to create a sustainable practice of communication with your executives, your partners and team. Share success, challenges and roadmap through roadshows, reports, and regular meetings.

Accepted Success Measures

When you first launch a social media customer service team you will probably get away with saying “Look how many followers we are getting!” and “Isn’t this great what feedback we are getting from our customers?” This will suffice for your executives for only a short time. Eventually they will want your team to be measured against KPIs. A traditional call center would measure teams and individuals against a variety of KPIs all of which would be tracked on a scorecard. KPIs could include: Time to Response, First Call Resolution, CSAT, Average Handle Time, Average Hold Time, Quality Assurance and the total quantity of interactions.

By creating a score card for your team before your organization asks for it will allow you to show success and your continued progress. When possible find ways to include KPIs your customer service department is familiar with and uses. Some tools in the market will help you manage a number KPIs, but some KPIs such as “Average Handle Time” won’t make a lot of sense in the social space where a customer tweets to you and then walks away from twitter for a coffee break and in reality those aren’t terribly good KPIs to drive a positive customer experience. Instead look at CSAT, Time to Response, and Resolution. Consider working with your Quality Assurance team and developing a QA program that works for your social customer service reps.

Scalability

As you first build out the team you will have the newness and excitement on your side. You might be lucky and build a good sized team in a short period of time. If you measure success and performance you might have fewer challenges in building out a team to manage the influx of customer questions and complaints. But the organization won’t likely keep throwing resources against your team so you will need to find other ways to scale in the long-term.

We hear a lot about the inability to scale social customer service. However, I suspect similar conversations happened when companies started answering the telephone. How will we ever have enough people to answer the phone every time a customer wants to talk to us? Yet, social customer service has one added benefit….it can create an archive of answers that is searchable and when we help one customer we have the potential the help ten, a hundred or a thousand. When responding in social channels keep this in mind, and use the conversations with customers to drive content creation for your self-service options (forum posts, blogs, knowledge base and how-to videos). In addition use the conversations to fix what is broken. If you regularly get questions about a feature…maybe it isn’t as intuitive as you think it is!

The right tools can help you manage your engagement, success and content. Finally setting expectations with both customers and internal partners is crucial- what are your hours of operation? What questions will and can you answer? How quickly can they expect a response? Certainly the need for Social Customer Service will grow and the team will need to revise process, expectations and find additional ways to meet the customers needs. Finally never underestimate your army of employees or advocates!

While there are challenges to adopting social customer service there are businesses that have risen to the challenge to help their customers on social channels.

Source: Social Business News

Image Courtesy

Five Ways to Create a Customer Service Culture

The reason an organization can deliver good or bad customer service comes down to one thing; what is happening on the inside of that organization. To sum it up in one word: culture.

The culture inside of the organization is impacting your customer service. It’s more than just hiring the right people, and it’s more than customer service training. At the same time, it’s simple. It’s just setting an example of customer service behavior at the top, and pushing its way, through all employees, toward the customer.

Starting at the top means that leadership and management must set the tone. Then, they must practice what they preach. They must treat employees like they want the customer treated – even better, just to accentuate the point. (If that last sentence seems familiar, it may be because you recognize it as my spin on the Golden Rule, which I refer to as the Employee Golden Rule: Treating employees the way you want the customer treated.)

This is where the customer focused culture begins. It starts with people who want to do the right thing. From that point, we can layer on customer service training (and other types of training) that focuses on creating an amazing place to work.

So how can you accomplish this? Here are five ways that you can create a customer service focused culture.

1. Hire for the culture. It’s an old adage that says hire for the attitude and train the skill. This is a little different. Even with the right attitude, will the new employee fit in to the culture you are trying to build or sustain? Look beyond the attitude to the personality. Make sure there is a cultural fit.

2. Train for the culture. If the employee has the right attitude and personality that meshes with your culture, get him/her up to speed and entrenched in your culture as quickly as possible. They must understand what the company stands for; it’s goals, mission and vision.

3. Everyone must be on the same page. I call this alignment. Understanding the company’s goals, mission and vision is one thing. Employees must be able to articulate the essence of these statements. I love the concept of the “mantra,” which is a sentence version of the goals, vision and mission that succinctly sums up what the company’s culture is about.

4. Allow people to experiment. This is another way of saying people are empowered to try and do new things and is especially true in the world of customer service. The outcome should be favorable for the customer, not hurt the company (financially, legally, etc.) and enhance the relationship with the customer.

5. Create a learning environment. If you really let people experiment, and they are truly empowered, there will be much to learn from the successes and failures of your employees. Celebrate it all. Encourage people to learn from their successes and their failures. Share these lessons with everyone.

If your company is amazing to work for, if people love coming to work, and if there is a contagious enthusiasm because people really love how they are treated, what they do and who they are doing it for, then don’t you think the customer is going to feel it? That’s what a customer service focused culture is about.

Source: B2Community

Image Credit

The six elements of customer service evolution

Customer expectations are evolving and customers are more vocal and willing to share both when something is good and something is bad. Customer service is also evolving, frankly, in order to keep pace with customers; but is the pace fast enough? The pace of the change; driven by customers, is accelerating because the social web (commerce and network) has enabled and empowered customers.

Try and think back 10-15 years ago; did you make purchases online? Other than ask friends, did you read online reviews? What levels of service were tolerable, did you accept? When you needed to contact a company did you consider sending a text? You might have sent an email, but when something really needed to happen, you picked up the phone. You might have even sent a letter, you know, the kind requiring a stamp.

In the chart below, I worked to encapsulate and share my view of the top-level changes within customer service. I intentionally did not assign dates to the past, nor the future; the past could be yesterday or last year, the future tomorrow or 2015. This is a not an all or nothing phenomenon, your organization may have certain elements well within the futures bucket and others stuck in the past.

Element One – People

The people involved in customer service, historically, had been the people with customer service somewhere in their title, yes that simple. Organizations need to change this, if they want to grow and prosper (survive?). Products and services are becoming more complex, other parts of the organization absolutely need to become part of the customer engagement process. I am not simply talking about transferring phone calls; it is much bigger than that. I am talking about collaboration and knowledge sharing. You might even call it social business, but I do not want to get ahead of myself.

Element Two – Process

Gone are the days of a paper manual with defined processes for as many scenarios as management can think up. Actually, for some those days are not actually gone. Customers are no longer interested in listening to the script, following the guided path nor being pushed towards the efficient route . If the ‘people’ part of the evolution is accurate, then organizations will also need a way to coordinate activities with other parts of the organization. Yelling over the cubicle does not count as collaboration and sticky notes do not count as knowledge management.

Element Three – Technology

A technical discussion could be approached from many different directions. With respect to this conversation, the more interesting technical element has to do with the channel match which needs to occur between the desire of the organization and the needs of the customer; i.e. the channels of communication used by each. Not only do organizations need to adapt to the changing channel usage by their customers, they need to realize that customer ‘channel hop’ – changing their mode of communication even mid-stream within an interaction happens. Organizations need to consider active pull, versus push to optimize their channel strategy. Active pull means that the value offered on channels you would like people to use is valuable to them, not just you. Real-time, synchronous channels are more expensive, but studies show that satisfaction rates are also higher on these channels.

Element Four – Duration

Historically, the length of time spent by either side of an interaction was limited to the specific activity performed, or issue discussed. Customer Service metrics are often tied to duration, like average handle time. While not every interaction will take on a life of its own, interactions will create a string of communications and form the basis of an ongoing relationship between customer and organization. Enhanced, more sophisticated activities like co-creation and ideation will now take place as well, during product use when it can be most beneficial. This is not about creating life-long friendships, your customer does not want to be your BFF either, this is about working together to mutual benefit. Take the time required to solve the problem, and make sure the customer’s concerns are heard.

Element Five– Centricity

As noted above, metrics and KPIs have been driving Contact Centers since the beginning of time . The truth is handle time and concepts such as first call resolution will continue to be used, but they will not be the only driving force. As a matter of fact, these metrics will move further down, possibly even to tertiary consideration. As opposed to simply figuring out how quickly they are able to get the customer off of the phone, customer service professionals will consider more than just the current case and will be given latitude to do the right thing and stay on the phone to help the customer. Insights towards customer need by the agent will be augmented by business intelligence both real-time and in aggregate.

Element Six – Approach

Few people appreciate being caught off-guard, unprepared or surprised. Customer issues are more often than not identified first by the customer. What if the customer service teams could identify potential issues and do something about them before the small issues become very large issues? This can be accomplished simply with operational metrics made available to agents (insights). Spending a few more minutes on the phone with a customer, to really understand the root cause of an issue is worth the time and effort. Or, how about proactive notifications of outages, or product issues (positive call deflections)? Further, taking the time to collaborate with the internal organization, providing superior value to customers, will also reap rewards in the form of loyalty and future business.

Is it possible to put it all together?

Yes it is. It is going to take work? Yes it will. I do not believe you can accomplish it all at once, nor should you try. That said, understanding how all the of the elements are interrelated is an imperative. Some of the elements are within the control of the IT department; some are in Sales and Marketing, while you can control some as well. In the end, it not really about control; Customer Service is about doing what is best for the customer. What do you think?

Source: MYCustomer.com