Have You Been Dissed on a Review Site?

Let’s face it: you can’t please all of the people all of the time. If you are in the type of business where people leave ratings, at some point you’ll be hit with a negative review.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Surprisingly often, says today’s podcast guest, Daniel Lemin, author of ManipuRated: How Business Owners Can Fight Fraudulent Online Ratings and Reviews, what you read fraudulent. And dealing with the big companies that host them, like Facebook or Yelp, can be an exercise in frustration.

If They Are Frauds, Should I Even Bother With Review Sites?

Unfortunately (or fortunately, from the viewpoint of customers who want to be well-informed before making buying decisions), review sites are here to stay.

Increasingly these sites are starting to recognize the need to crack down on fraudulent reviews, but most haven’t got the problem solved yet. So in the meantime, what can you do?

Join The Conversation

First, don’t ignore them. You need to “focus on review sites because that demonstrates a commitment to customer experience,” says Lemin.

So be sure you are tracking what’s being said about you, and be ready to respond quickly. The sooner you at least acknowledge the complaint, the better off you’ll be.

Show Empathy

Approach your critics “from a place of empathy.” Let them feel that you are truly sorry they had a bad experience. Then offer to talk with them offline to try to satisfy them.

Don’t get defensive! Even if you know what they are saying is wrong. You won’t win that PR battle.

Don’t Pay People For Good Reviews

You can get in trouble for paying people (with money, goods or services) for giving you a five-star review. Don’t go there!

However, you can offer a token of appreciation as encouragement for people to give a review, whether it is positive or negative.

But Do Ask for Ratings

Most of the time, though, you are best not paying for reviews at all. Instead, form a connection with your customers. If they feel that connection, they’ll want to review you positively.

“The most important thing …,” says Lemin, is to “take good care of your customers, and in turn give them a chance to take care of you back.”

Speaking of Which…

It would mean a lot to me if you’d review the Frank Reactions podcast on iTunes. Apple uses review numbers to decide which podcasts to let people see easily. Here how to do an iTunes review.

I also got the first review of my new book, PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule. To my delight, it was a five star, and from someone I’d never met. (I have since then; just recorded an interview for his Nice Guys on Business podcast.)

And if you want to hear more from Daniel Lemin, check out the

When you are selling high-end appliances or other premium products, customers expect their whole experience with you to be exceptional. German appliance maker, Miele, knows that and does some pretty clever things to improve customer experience.

With 17,500 employees worldwide, it isn’t always easy, but Miele’s focus on quality and continuous improvement is even embedded in its logo, which includes the words “immer besser” (ever better).

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Get Creative to Improve Customer Experience

Today’s interview is with Eric Esguerra, Director of Customer Service and Operations at Miele Canada.

In it he discusses both the extraordinary (like hiring helicopters to deliver appliances to remote mountain-top chalets) to the surprising (like sending the appliance installers to gourmet cooking classes so they can relate better to the customers and answer questions about the products based on real experience as users).

Other ideas we discuss include:

Truly partnering with distributors

I wrote about the importance of working closely with distributors in Chapter 12 of my new book, PeopleShock (which is now available on Amazon, iBooks and elsewhere).

Miele gives distributors extensive training. It even flies them to Germany to meet with head office and factory staff. It wants them to truly be part of the family.

Getting Customer Service Reps Into The Field

If customer service reps never see how the products are made, sold and used, it is much harder for them to understand customer needs. Miele sends reps on the road with technicians to get a good picture of the consumer’s world.

“They absolutely love it and they crave it,” says Esguerra.

I’ve talked and written about the value of getting other staff doing some shifts in the contact center, but hadn’t come across a company before that also takes the opposite approach.

They also see the contact center as a training ground, and reps know they’ve got real opportunities in other areas of the company.

Esguerra started in contact center work, and he knows how demoralizing it can be to spend eight hours a day dealing with problems and complaints. He figures 2 – 3 years is the ideal length of time to be in such a job. It’s a great training ground for people who can then move on to work in just about any other department.

These types of initiatives keep Miele’s  attrition rate for contact center staff is well below industry norms. They’ve actually had zero  attrition for the past two years.

Eliminating Barriers to Solving Customer Problems Quickly

The company surveys customers  at every touchpoint, and takes their comments seriously. Whenever a customer asks a question or makes a  comment on a survey, the company answers within 24 hours.

Not only are comments answered quickly, customer service staff can go straight to the factory floor if customers report a problem. This gets things fixed fast.

Nobody likes to hear that they’ve messed up, but, as Esguerra puts it,  

I’m on the road, and will be until late June, so rather than force you to endure bad sound quality (and, I confess, for me to be able to focus on a 25th anniversary celebration with my husband in southern Europe!) I won’t be publishing new episodes until late June.

In the meantime, why not go check out some of the episodes you may have missed?

And/or start reading my new book, PeopleShock. If you want a hard copy, buy it at Amazon and send me your receipt and I’ll send you the ebook version too, so you don’t have to wait! (Here’s the Amazon.ca link)

I’ll be back with more great customer experience podcast episodes at the end of June! Have a great month!

 

If your mobile strategy is going to work, it has to work for customers and staff

Renee Cacchillo, Senior Vice President of Customer, Brand & Technology at Safelite Group spoke about their mobile strategy at the recent CXPA Insight Exchange. In today’s episode we discuss some of the things they’ve done to improve both staff and customer experience, including improving the company’s mobile strategy.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Safelite repairs and replaces damaged car windshields. About 75% of its workforce is mobile: they travel to the client to do the repair work.

The company decided a while ago that it had to refocus. Who was going to be it’s priority: shareholders, employees or customers? And what was it going to be as a company: Operations focused? Product focused? Customer focused?

The decision was to become customer focused, and to do so by also putting employees as higher on the priority list than shareholders. Ultimately, they concluded, shareholder value will follow if you focus on the people inside and outside your organization.

Should We Have A Mobile App?

Given that its workforce was mobile, and people were likely to be on the road when the need for service arose, a mobile app seemed obvious. But on reflection, maybe it didn’t make sense.

* How often is a customer going to need to use the app? You don’t need your windshield repaired regularly (unless you live on a very bumpy gravel road!), so odds are that by the time you needed it you’d have forgotten you ever downloaded it.

* What benefit would a mobile app offer over simply a mobile-friendly website? None.

So instead of building an app for customers, they focused on having a really mobile-first, phone-friendly website. That included thinking of things like minimizing how much typing one has to do on the website to submit a request or even to find relevant information.

A mobile app, however, did make sense for the technicians who were going out to do the repairs. They are now even going beyond a phone app for mobile staff: they don’t want workers pulling out phones while driving, so they are moving to smart watches for them instead.

Create a More Uber-Like Experience

Instead of fearing customer reviews, Safelite decided to embrace them. The reality is that customers will turn to reviews to decide who to use when they need things like car damage repaired.

Safelite was confident that its quality and reliability were good enough that those reviews would be mostly positive, so it made it easy for customers to instantly rate their satisfaction with the experience, on their phones, as soon as the repair was done.

If a customer isn’t happy, the request for immediate reviews also means that the company hears about it right away and can try to solve whatever caused the dissatisfaction promptly instead of having a grumpy customer simply telling their friends to choose a different company.

Don’t Assume You Know What Your Customers Want

Nobody likes sitting around waiting for a repair person to show up. So it seemed obvious that shrinking the window for a possible arrival time from 4 hours to 2 would make customers happier.

But the obvious isn’t always right.

If you’ve ever worked in customer service, there’s a good chance you’ve had to deal with cranky, unreasonable, lying (or at least, exaggerating) customers.

It can be sooooo frustrating!

And yet, we keep preaching that our front line staff have to be nice to customers. Be respectful. Be empathetic.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Is that even a reasonable thing to expect of our staff?

The Point Is Not To Prove Who’s Right

Today’s podcast guest, Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Front Line, knows first hand about unreasonable customers: he’s spent many years in retail having to deal with them.

The trick, he maintains, is to give the customer the benefit of the doubt, but, as they used to say in nuclear disarmament talks “trust, but verify.”

He’s a strong advocate of documentation, because there are some customers who will try to take advantage of you. Ultimately you may have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Documentation will help you know when that time has come.

That said, when customers return products or want refunds or claim they’ve been mistreated, “the point is not to prove who’s right.” The point is to calm them down and try to turn the situation around.

So if you’ve got records proving that you had, in fact, left three phone messages for them and they insist you never called, you don’t want to get into an argument, but it may help to be able to say, “Well, our records show that we did leave messages at these three times, but I guess you didn’t get them, so now that we are talking, let’s try to get your problem resolved.”

Having the documentation will make you feel more secure and confident as you then flip the conversation away from arguing about who’s right and back to trying to find a solution that everyone will be comfortable with.

The documentation can also help prove the customer is right. Our memories and perceptions are not very accurate. We may firmly believe that we called the customer three times, when in fact, we thought about it several times but only actually called and left a message once. Having the documentation helps avoid exaggeration on both sides of the counter.

“It’s a balance,” says Toporek, “Sometimes you have to say no, but often small businesses go too far the other way.”

Empowering Employees To Really Help Customers

In the interview we also discussed the need to give customer service employees guidelines and training so that they know how to handle different types of customer problems, and what level of compensation they can offer without having to get permission. (Here’s a link to Adam’s extensive article on employee empowerment: http://customersthatstick.com/employee-empowerment/)

As Sue Miller discovered when she tried to give her customer service staff fu...

The way we’ve been running our workplaces is broken.

Companies that aren’t willing to make radical changes are going to die, says David Burkus, author of the book, Under New Management, in today’s podcast interview.

As Chuck Blakeman pointed out in our interview a while back, most rules were created for the factory era, on the assumption that workers were lazy and stupid.  Like Blakeman (and me, in my soon-to-be released book, PeopleShock), Burkus also cites Frederick Winslow Taylor, father of time and motion studies, who saw humans as little more than extensions of machines.

Even in factories, though, successful companies like Toyota concluded that using your people as robots is not a great way to run things. Not only do the workers get demoralized, your organization doesn’t get to benefit from their ideas and experience.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

In today’s interview, David Burkus and I discuss ideas for transforming the workplace to meet new realities.

Revolutionary Workplace Ideas That Are Being Tried & Work

Some of the ideas we talk about will be hard for many mangers to swallow. Things like:

Full Salary Transparency

Burkus argues that your staff are already making guesses about what their colleagues earn. Let’s just get it all out on the table.

The great thing about transparency is that it forces pay to be more closely aligned with performance. It makes it harder for under-performers to coast along, and for managers to shy away from having the difficult conversations with them that may ultimately lead to firing.

Unlimited Vacation Time

Even with the current structure, 41% of American workers don’t take any vacation time, and a further 17% take fewer than five days a year, according to 2016 research by Skift.

So why are we so worried about trusting people to self-regulate (and bow to peer pressure)? If you can’t trust staff to make wise decisions, you’ve got a bunch of other workplace problems too.

Self-Directed Work Teams

We already discussed the value of self-directed work teams in episode 47 – my interview with Marcie Kiziak  — and saw how they can improve both the atmosphere and productivity in the workplace. Burkus gives further examples in his book.

Peer and Subordinate Interviews for New Staff

Traditional job interviews have a lousy track record when it comes to hiring the right people. Google has done some fascinating research on how to improve hiring processes. They are strong advocates of team-based interviews, done by staff at all levels.

Not every company will go to the lengths Google does, but it makes sense for co-workers and the people who will be supervised to have say in who gets hired to supervise them.

I do worry about group-based hiring decisions becoming too insular.

Who doesn’t have a nightmare call center story to tell? And if you think it’s bad from the customer perspective, try working in one! (I know they are not all that bad, but…)

Fortunately, the times they are a changin’. And if your company hasn’t updated it’s call center model lately, odds are you’re losing customers.

Today’s podcast interview guest is Kevin Krempulec , VP and General Manager responsible for Canada of contact center technology firm, Genesys, and we discuss contact center challenges and the way forward.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Time For The Connected Call Center

These days customers expect to be able to the contact companies from which they buy in any way, at any time of day. The modern contact center has to be able to cope not only with telephone calls for support, but also with

* live chat,

* text messages, and

* several social media platforms.

Although many people still use the term “call center”, these centers really are becoming omnichannel contact centers. In fact, according to Krempulec, this year there will be more digital interactions with contact centers than voice ones. If you have kids in their teens or twenties, this probably won’t surprise you; they hate using phones for speaking to people!

Most companies are still struggling to cope with the sudden surge omnichannel service expectations. They may be tied down by legacy systems, which don’t play well with others. That’s why you so often have the frustration of having to repeat the same basic information to one person after another as you try to get your problem resolved.

Companies like Genesys are trying to find ways to solve these problems, but it isn’t easy, and we are clearly at a time of transition on the world of customer support.

What’s On The Horizon for Contact Centers?

In the short run, says Krempulec, most companies will be focused on simply trying to come to terms with the reality of omnichannel customer service.

Video-Based Customer Service

That will include adding in new options, such as video-based call center conversations. Now your call centre reps will not only have to be pleasant on the phone, they’ll have to look good!

More significantly, video chat means that they won’t be able to deal with multiple calls at once, which will require a re-think of how contact center teams are structured and run.

On the plus side, the video connection may prove a much more powerful way to engage with customers and generate up-sales. And it might not actually end up costing more to resolve problems — think about the time currently wasted as both sides type, and then wait for the other side to type back, and get distracted dealing with something else in the meantime, which means that it takes even more time to resolve a problem.

One direct, focused video chat may be far more effective than text-based communications, and better able to provide an empathetic connection with the customers than telephone-only calls can do.

Proactive Outreach

Next on the horizon are more effective ways of proactively reaching out to customers at just the right mome...

OK, so to most of us the words “love” and “bank” don’t seem to go together, but when ATB Financial decided to research the emotions people had about their financial institutions, it asked them to write either a love letter or a break-up letter to their bank.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Today’s guests, Tawnya Crerar, Director of Client and Marketing Research at ATB Financial, and Anne Coulter, Managing Director, RSG, set out to explore the psychoanalytics underlying how people feel about their banks. The letters they got were surprisingly touching and emotional, telling bad stories but also lovely ones. 

In this episode, which was recorded after Crerar and Coulter gave a presentation on the research to the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), we discuss:

* what psychoanalytics are

* how they used them

* the use of a simulation tool to help bank colleagues understand the impact of their actions on growing the bank’s customer base

* the trade-off between attracting new customers and retaining existing ones (and the clever balance they found)

* how ATB has changed its hiring and on-boarding processes to ensure that new hires fit into the customer-centric culture they are building

In a later episode you’ll get to hear their CEO’s perspective. If you want to make sure you don’t miss that one, sign up for the Frank Ideas newsletter, so you’ll always be alerted when a new episode comes out. Just put your email address in the box below.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

Entrepreneur Dan Lok comes across as a high-energy, high-hype salesman type. So I had two surprises in store for me when I interviewed him:

* Despite his controversial statements, such as saying it’s a myth that employee happiness key, we actually agree on quite a lot, and

* He had never intended or wanted to be a businessman in his youth.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

How to Make Employees Happy So They’ll Make Your Customers Happy

In today’s podcast, Dan argues that pandering to employees won’t make them happy for long, nor will it make them productive workers.

He quite rightly points out that if you give a year end bonus two years in a row because your company did well, but then have to give less during a bad year, employees will be angry. They will have come to see the bonus as a right, not a bonus.

Likewise, you may have a fun workplace with nerf balls and pool tables, but ultimately, true employee joy comes from within. It comes from doing their job well, and having a job worth doing.

So Lok tries to ensure that the people he hires are truly committed to the mission of the company, and excited to be working there.

That makes total sense, but where we disagree is that, to me, that attitude — and a workplace culture that reinforces it — is what creates employee happiness, and employee happiness is key.

Employee Happiness is Not the Only Myth

He raises some other excellent points in our conversation, such as:

* If you own a business it is unreasonable to expect employees to care about your business as much as you do. As Dan put it, if they had an “employer mindset” they wouldn’t be your employees. That said, profit sharing can change that attitude in most employees, because then they are owners.

* The best way to express appreciation for the work your employees do is with specific praise, not with free movie passes. (Again, though, I would argue that a bit of both could be beneficial.)

* You should set clear performance standards and expectations, and then manage for results. If people don’t know what is expected of them, you are unlikely to get it.

* Having a specific goal they are working towards will motivate employees more than money. If someone wants to earn $15,000 to go on a dream vacation, help them break down what results they would have to accomplish to earn that money, help them track it and have a picture of that vacation destination on their desk. That will motivate them more than if they were just counting the dollars themselves.

What Other Myths Do You Think Exist About Employees & Motivation?

Please add your thoughts below.

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

One of the biggest reasons company owners and CEOs want to avoid social media is because they’ve heard horror stories about companies that made little mistakes and then were attacked on social media.

 

Get your FREE Transcript Now!

 

Often the attacks aren’t even fair; some people just love to gripe publicly.

As Jay Baer, author of the new book, Hug Your Haters, puts it

So why should you risk even talking to customers on social media?

Two answers to that:

1. You really don’t have a choice anymore.

People will attack you on social media if they want to. Of course, others may defend you, and still others will compliment you. One way to make a little problem turn into a huge one is to ignore it. Ignoring online haters is as effective as throwing a blanket over your head and saying “you can’t see me!” Actually, it is even worse than that, because of social media’s ability to quickly point out to millions of people that you are hiding.

2. Handled right, you can turn your enemies into allies.

In my interview with Renee Racine, of Indigo Books, she talked about reaching out to people who had complained about the company and inviting them to join customer panels. In today’s interview, Jay Baer told a similar story from Le Pain Quotidien restaurant chain. They actually turned those who had complained into mystery shoppers for their chain, giving them coupons for a monthly meal at a different restaurant in the chain each month in exchange for giving a frank assessment of what the experience was like. Brilliant! (Even if it is a little worrisome to companies like mine, that do mystery shopping for clients!)

In the interview we also discuss:

Why you shouldn’t just move customer service staff from phones and email to social media.

Most people still try to get service in a private way first, so it is hugely important to serve them well in those private platforms. Instead, we are training people to complain publicly by only answering them quickly in social media.

These days, you’ve got to be fast in public and in private.

The mistake of comparing your customer service levels to others in your industry.

We’ve all been trained by what I call “the Amazon Effect“: expecting service quality, speed and pricing comparable to Amazon. So if you think you can get away with slow or sloppy service because “that’s the way this industry works,” you are wrong.

In a purely local market where there is a shortage of people available (such as plumbers here in oil country when prices were still high), you can get away with it for a while, but pretty soon you’ll be losing out to new competitors who’ve decided to make customer service their point of differentiation.

The advantage small and mid-sized businesses have when it comes to customer service.

Large companies are struggling to deal with huge customer data systems that don’t yet communicate smoothly with each other. It’s why, for example, you often have to repeat your account number to the call center rep even though you already keyed it in when the automated system told you to.