Stop Thinking of Your Call Center as a Cost Center

 

Today’s podcast guest, Blake Morgan, started as a conference organizer in the call center world, so it’s hardly surprising that her views on customer experience dig into the call center.

 

But, as she stresses in our interview and in her new book, More is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder And Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences, there’s a lot more to delivering great customer experiences than having great staff in the call center.

 

The “call center” itself is no longer even an accurate term; a shrinking number of customers want to make phone calls. Instead, we talk about “contact centers”, which handle email, phones, social media, even text messages now.

Nevertheless, some key elements of the call center model are still important. Specifically:

1. Recognize that your contact center is every bit as important (if not more so) than your sales and marketing departments.

Your contact center reps may be the first people your potential customers ever speak to.

They may also be the last, especially if things have gone wrong, and your reps don’t have the skills, knowledge or freedom to make them better.

2. Not just anyone should work in a call center.

It is skilled work, which takes a lot of finesse to get right. Not everybody can cope with all the criticism from customers, nor with the high pressure, fast paced demands.

Hire carefully for your contact centers, and train well.

3. On the flipside, everyone senior should spend time working in customer service.

If they don’t, it will be hard for them to stop thinking of their customer service staff as “overhead” or “expenses” instead of  what they really are: an investment in long-term, profitable customer relationships.

4. Pay your contact center staff well.

It has always struck me as bizarre that the people who probably have the biggest impact on long-term customer satisfaction get paid among the worst in many organizations.

As a result, call center turnover rates are huge: 30 – 45% .

Given how hard it is to find people with the right personality, and the time it takes to train them well, it makes way more sense to pay them better and keep them than to put up with the devastating costs of turnover.

Mentioned in this Episode

Morgan’s DO MORE Framework

A Zappos employee had the company’s longest customer-service call at 10 hours, 43 minutes

LitFest Alberta, Canada’s Original Nonfiction Festival

UX Camp, October 20 & 21, 2017

Disrupt HR Edmonton, November 1, 2017

Other Articles & Interviews about Call Centers and Contact Centers

How to Convince Top Execs That Your Call Center Is Worth It – Interview with Jim Rembach, of Beyond Morale

What Happens to the Call Center when People Stop Calling? – Interview with   Kevin Krempulec , then VP and General Manager responsible for Canada of contact center technolo...

How Can Anything Be More Important Than Customers?

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Hey, I’m all about customer focus and delivering consistently great customer experience. The whole point of the blog and podcast is to help you do that.

 

But according to today’s Frank Reactions podcast guest, Jeff Polovick, founder of the Driving Force, there’s a crucial step that comes before it: creating consistently great employee experience.

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That’s easier said than done. In fact, as Jeff put it,

 “The cultural part is way harder than the financial part.”

A while ago Jeff and I sat down for a long conversation about how the company he founded 38 years ago became a success by focusing first and foremost on employee satisfaction.

That focus has led to the Driving Force being named one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies (there’s a great story in the interview about the challenges of getting into the top 50 — they came 51st twice!) and one of Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures.

Anonymous Employee Surveys Are Vital

The company started doing employee opinion surveys about 18 years ago, and measures its progress year over year. Employees rate not just their satisfaction with the company, but also with their direct boss.

One interesting – and important – question: “How comfortable would you be going above your supervisor’s head if you had to?”

The fact is that most employee dissatisfaction results from a bad relationship with their immediate supervisor. Often the boss’s boss has no idea there’s a problem. So if employees don’t feel they can speak up, problems fester.

Of course a good employee survey will also identify problem supervisors if it is set up so you can look at the results by work unit. And if anyone actually looks at the results by work unit.

(I remember doing “post-exit interviews” for a national US employer. We discovered 3 problem managers who were causing most of the departures. But until my analysis, no one had looked at the data this way.)

At the Driving Force managers learn from the surveys how their employees feel about them. This can be a risk if the unit is very small, but even if you’ve got a half dozen or more employees, there can be enough anonymity to get valuable feedback.

In the interview, Jeff talked about how to deal with it if a small minority of employees give negative feedback, without having to know exactly who they are. 

Other Tips About Employee Experience Surveys

* Keep them as short as possible. He said theirs is “down to” 26 questions. That still seems pretty long to me. On the other hand, he said they get a 98% response rate, so who am I to argue?

* Over time you will learn that some questions aren’t needed. Drop them. But be careful not to change all your questions or how they are worded because if you do that you won’t be able to track results over time.

* Simplify the rating scale. Do you really need a 1 – 10 scale?

AKA, The Meat Lovers Marketing Research Episode

When Barry Davis, AVP of marketing research firm, Leger, started chewing on what consumers had told his firm motivated their decisions when buying meat, he found the results tough to swallow.

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You see, consumers were saying they wanted choice in cuts and quantities, and yet their actual behaviour showed the bulk of them flocking to Costco to buy meat.

If you’ve ever shopped at Costco, you know that it doesn’t give you much choice in cuts and quantities.

So why the contradiction?

To Get Customer Experience Right, You Have to Look Beyond the Obvious

In this podcast episode, we discuss several different approaches to the market research that Leger took to try to cut to the bone and find out what was really going on in consumers’ minds.

And that really is the point: if a research result doesn’t seem to fit the evidence, you’ve got to dig deeper.

Use multiple survey and research methods to “triangulate” and get to a result that makes sense.

In the episode we discuss several different methods they used to attack the problem, and the surprising result. (Hint: Although they were shopping at Costco, it was NOT for lower prices!)

Also in This Market Research Episode

* The dangers of forcing people to choose among options that are all considered non-negoitable. It can lead to seriously misleading research results.

* Ditto for making  people rank or rank order non-negotiables.

* Personas derived from market research, and how they can help you understand a confusing situation. (Here’s an example of a persona and how it can be helpful, in an article I wrote for Hotel Business Review.)

* Affordability vs value: they are not the same thing.

* How you can position your brand to charge a premium price based on a desirable trait even if it is legislated and everybody else has that feature too. If nobody’s beat you to it, make that your brand differentiator.

And, finally, a heads up: If you are thinking of attending B2B Online 2017, use offer code B2B17TF for a 25% discount for Frank Reactions fans.

And as of March 21, 2017, you can be entered in a draw for a $200 gift card at this page, just for asking for more information!

If you’d like me to come speak at an organization or event you are aware of, check out my speaking page and contact me. I’d love to discuss your event’s needs and see if I can help.

These days even product manufacturers are realizing that they need more of a service orientation if they are to succeed; more of a people focus. Lexmark, a provider of printing and imaging products, software and services with a worldwide staff of about 12,000, is making that shift.

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In today’s podcast episode, Phil Wright, Lexmark’s Director of Global Customer Experience and Enterprise Excellence, discusses how they are approaching it and what some of the challenges have been.

People Focus Is A Change For Many B2B Companies

Wright, who came from the product side himself, recognizes that helping staff see things from the customer viewpoint instead of an internal process viewpoint can be a major challenge. One thing that really helps is exposing his colleagues at all levels to the voice of the customer (VOC) — the actual words their customers are using.

Even if you don’t yet have a formal VOC process, make sure that any customer surveys you do include an open-ended option for them to add comments, and read those carefully. Wright finds that when staff hear what customers are saying it makes it much easier for them to accept that they need to change the way things have always been done.

Other Customer Experience Improvement Takeaways

1. Customer Journey Mapping Is Crucial

A natural tendency, especially in traditional, product-focused companies, is to look at process improvements from an insider perspective. If we can just get more efficient, the customers will be happy and the company will save money. But if you only look at process improvement from the inside perspective, you may be more efficient but end up with customers even less happy than they currently are.

Once staff start mapping the actual customer journeys, they start to understand why change is so important. Wright found that many staff members had no idea how the whole process worked; they just knew about their part of it. Without understanding the entire customer journey, it is impossible to get all the processes right.

“Customer journey mapping opened a lot of eyes to how complex our business relationship is with a lot of our customers” – Phil Wright

2. If Used to Lean, Compare Customer Journey Mapping to Value Stream Mapping

If your organization is already using a process improvement methodology such as lean manufacturing, they may well be comfortable with the concepts of process or value stream mapping. If you point out that customer journey mapping is a similar concept, but from the customer’s perspective, it may help them understand the importance and be more comfortable participating.

3. You May Be Surprised By What Customers Say

Another great benefit of VOC programs and open-ended feedback: you may be in for a shock from what customers tell you! For example, we all “know” it is better to talk to people using simple terminology, and explaining things carefully so that customers who call in for help understand what you are telling them, right?

Wrong. It turned out that because their customers were typically other businesses, often the person at the other end of a help call was someone who already had a lot of technical knowledge. If you don’t recognize the difference in the callers, you can either confuse those with lower technical knowledge or frustrat...

Personalization: More Than a Trendy Word?

When I was a little girl, my Mom told me, “We don’t ask personal questions.” I’d already embarrassed her enough by asking in my little high pitched toddler voice whether her hairdresser was a man or a woman.

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But today’s guest, Ernan Roman, says that we must ask personal questions in order to offer the level of personalization that customers want. 

How Do You Ask Personal Questions Without Irritating Customers?

You need to earn the right to ask personal questions, says Roman. And you have to provide value to customers in exchange for them sharing with you. He suggests starting with in-depth interviews with several customers to find out what motivates them, and what they would find valuable in exchange for revealing more personal information to you. Renee Racine, in our interview about customer panels at Indigo, discussed how willing many customers are to share if they see that you are truly trying to improve based on their suggestions. Ronan agrees.  Not everybody is going to be willing to commit to hour long interviews, but there are simple steps you can take to at least move in the right direction.

1. Don’t Ask Too Soon

If somebody asked you to marry them on your first date, you’d back off really quickly, right? Well that’s essentially what you are doing when you make people fill in a long form in order to even download your white paper. Realistically, the data you get from it will be of questionable value anyway, because even people who want the paper enough to fill in the form are likely to put in a lot of fake information. Just ask your sales reps how often they’ve tried to follow up with someone only to find the phone number was a fake. Take the time to woo them. Send them the info they want without demanding a lot of other information. Then follow up gently, with related information that they might also find of value.

2. Don’t Ask For Too Much At Once

Even once you’ve moved on to the second date, they still probably aren’t ready to meet the family. Be patient. Ask a couple more questions, based on what little you already know about them, to deepen the conversation.

3. Make it Clear How They Benefit From Answering

It drives me crazy when companies demand you register before you can place an order online. Don’t do that! Instead, let them place the order, and then at the end ask if they’d like you to save their information to make things faster for them when they come back. By showing the customer a benefit, you are much more likely to get agreement.

4. Make it Easy To Answer

The novelty of being asked to fill in a survey when I get back to my computer about a real world experience has long worn off. As Roman notes in our interview, at that point the company is asking me to do a favor for them. Why should I? The theoretical chance to win a $100 voucher isn’t enough for me to bother. Try adding at least three zeros!

5. Use Other Ways To Gain Personal Customer Knowledge

Equip your store staff with tablets and easy ways to note customer preferences while they are interacting with customers (and as soon as they have left the store).

It’s the Jewish New Year, and although I never quite understood why the Day of Atonement comes after the New Year’s celebration rather than before it, one thing that always did make sense to me was that the fall is a time of new beginnings. I guess that’s the academic in me, excited about what I’ll learn and who I’ll meet at school this year. (Even though it’s been ages since I’ve gone back to school in the fall.)

So it seemed appropriate to start the new year with a conversation about productivity. How can we get more things done this year? And how can we make sure they are the right things? 

Ever Worry That You Aren’t Productive Enough?

I have always struggled with productivity. One drawback to having run my own businesses since 1991 is that I never have anyone else to compare my productivity with. And I’ve always wanted to do so much that no matter how productive I’m being I still tend to feel that it’s not enough. That I’m not fast enough. Or efficient enough.

It was reassuring to discover, in today’s podcast interview with Mike Vardy, aka the Productivityist, (no that’s not him in the picture but it captures the spirit of our chat), that he also works constantly on fine-tuning his productivity.

Theme Your Days

One idea Mike had that I’m going to try is, instead of the classic “make an appointment with yourself” to do Project X at Time Y, theme your days. I’ve already been focusing on Thursdays as my podcast-themed day and Friday as networking coffees, lunches and walks, but I’m going to try applying this to the rest of the week too.

Not sure why, but the combination of focus with flexibility that approach provides seems to work better for me than setting fixed 90-minute appointments to write or exercise, or make phone calls. Appointments seem easier to move than an entire day’s theme.

[Tweet “Busy is like the F word of business. If you use it too much it has no power @productivityist“]

GTD: Weed Your Garden

If you haven’t yet read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I highly recommend it. It appeals to my ping-pong brain, because he basically has you log every idea that you think you might want to work on, or anything else that is crowding your brain and distracting you when you are trying to work.

Allen has a great system of then organizing these items so that you can, as Mike put it, “weed your garden” – get the most important things on a shorter hot list without worrying about them being crowded out by all the things you’d like to do “someday”. At the same time, you get to keep those someday items, and check them over regularly, so they’ll be there when “someday” comes.

Contexts

A core element of the system is “contexts“. Contexts help guide you on what you should do when. Recognizing, for instance, that you have low energy times of day, you can have a “low energy” context. When you don’t have the energy to tackle something major, and find yourself wasting time on Facebook or Upworthy, pull up your “low energy” context list and get a few little things out of the way.

Contexts can also be physical contexts, like “office” or “home” or “errands”. And there can be people contexts, so if you get an unexpected chance for a quick chat with Bob you’ll remember all the things you wanted to discuss wi...

To survive in the digital era, most businesses need to change. But leading and managing change, especially in big companies, is hard.  Some 70% of change management efforts fail.

In a recent article series, Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, of Unstoppable Conversations, argue that change management is dead. If it is, then how the heck are businesses supposed to cope with all the changes being thrust upon them?

In today’s podcast Vik and I discuss (and sometimes debate) what he sees as the failings of the traditional change management process, and a different approach that his company uses.

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Leaders Need To Focus On People, Not Things, in the Change Management Process

Traditional change management is mainly about propaganda argues Vik, about “staying on message” and repeating it so often that people will start to believe what they keep hearing. It is about the “things” we need to change, and training people on how to do things differently.

But the fact is, employees aren’t gullible. And if anything, all the past failed change management efforts make them especially cynical. You can train them all you want, but if you haven’t given them a reason to care about the change you are after, it won’t work.  (Avoiding losing their jobs is, surprisingly to some, not enough of a reason.) So you are starting your process by digging yourself out of a hole.

Change Your Thinking

It starts with the senior executive team examining what needs to change in their view of the world. We are all stuck viewing situations from our own frame of reference (or paradigm, or context, depending on whose terminology you want to use). Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you see things through a new lens.

Take, for example, Kodak, which I discussed with Kodak’s former Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, a while back. They needed to stop seeing themselves as a company in the business of making and selling film, and instead realize that their true business was about helping people preserve memories. If they had realized that a bit sooner Kodak might still be around today.

Unfortunately, in a fast-changing competitive landscape there’s a tendency to hunker down and try to do more of what you’ve been doing, but faster and cheaper.  What’s usually needed, though, is a radical shift in what you are doing and how you are doing it. 

Take Risks

That means taking big, scary risks. One of the best discussions I’ve seen of this comes from Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. (It’s one of the best business books I’ve read, and I would urge anyone who wants to learn more about business and leadership to read it.) Several times he had to make major changes in direction when an awful lot of money and reputation were at stake, to keep his companies alive.

Be Honest

Vik proposes what I consider “radical honesty”: That ...

How the World Domination Summit Helped Me Set Priorities

This is my first podcast since my road trip to the World Domination Summit in Portland last month. I thought I’d come back bursting with interviews to air on the podcast, but it didn’t quite work out that way. In this podcast, my most personal one ever, I talk about how losing a phone helped me set priorities for the coming year.

I’ve always struggled with priorities. You see, I’m interested in so may things! And, like most entrepreneurs, I’m forever coming up with new business ideas, and it is sooooo hard not to go chasing them all! Can you relate?

Step 1: Bury Your Phone

Yep, that’s my feet in the photo. You see that turquoise shape near the top of the photo? That’s a lake. Gives you an idea of how far up we were when my white phone dropped into that huge mass of snow below. It felt like a tragedy and it was frustrating as hell not having one, but it finally gave me time to think!

Step 2: What’s Been a Consistent Theme in Your Life?

In my case, it has been about people, and their feelings. Yuck, that sounds so mushy! I’m not the mushy type. Or am I?

My whole life I tried to resist being shunted off into the female ghettos like human resources. But what was my first book about? How businesses could become better places to work!

What was my first business, Web Mystery Shoppers, about? Getting people to let companies know how they really feel about the company’s website. (Otherwise known as usability testing!)

What’s my next book about? How businesses have to become better at how they deal with people — customers, staff, suppliers and the public — to succeed in our techie, social media, fast paced world.

Step 3: Get Opinions From Those Who Know You

I’ve been married for more years than my virtual assistant has been alive. So you bet my husband knows me well. What he said, among other things, was that I have to set priorities so I can focus more on my second book. “You have to write it,” he said. “It’s inside you. You won’t be happy if you don’t finish it.” He’s right.

But it’s not as simple as that. What do I do about all the other things: weekly interviews and podcasts, consulting about online marketing, writing this blog, teaching about digital marketing strategy and social media measurement?

On the other hand, if I keep doing all of those, how can I find time to write the book, to say nothing of spending time with my elderly parents, my sometimes needy young-adult kids, and my darling husband? And somehow finding time to get fit and sleep enough!

Step 4: Accept That You Have to Let Something Go

This is the hardest part.

One of the things I decided was to cut the podcast down to every two weeks. I know that I’m going counter trend here: thanks to the wonderful John Lee Dumas who hosts a daily, full-length podcast (Entrepreneur on Fire – go check it out! It’s great!), more and more podcasters are trying to do a daily show.  But you can’t do everything, right? At least, not all at once. Especially if you don’t have many staff. And if you don’t do well on 4 hours sleep a night.

Step 5: Decide Where You Can Do The Most Good

Or feel the most fulfilled. In my case, the two go together.