Waiting for Service

This is an episode about the anatomy of a painful customer experience.
We have a real end consumer on this episode who shares his experience with one of the leading phone companies.
There's all of this effort to wow people when people just don't want to go through all the hassle. As a customer I just want you to take care of my problem and make me spend 30 mins on the phone and put me through all of your departments.
In the episode, we discuss how all this process can be re-engineered.

"Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can stand". I hated my boss, I thought he was an a$$hole. I couldn’t afford to quit, I had an addiction to working electricity and a roof over my head. So I did next best thing, I left at exactly 5pm every day to register my protest. There are many things about those days working with him that stuck with me, he loved quotes - some of them were more confusing than profound but they all had one theme - leadership is about getting people outside of their comfort zone. It’s been over 10 years and that theme stuck with me and has influenced me greatly on my own leadership journey. I invited a few people to my podcast to discuss leadership, but I didn’t want to discuss the cuddly, nurturing part of leading but the uncomfortable parts of leadership. Our guest today is Amayea Maat (a leader in contact center space). I am not sure she knew what she was agreeing to but within 2 minutes I asked her about the worst leadership moment of her career, we discussed what leadership without fear looks like. My favorite moment was asking her to tell me the moments in her leadership career where her actions were so against the grain she thought she have been fired.

If you want great customer experience, stop putting customers first.
Think about your organization. Who your company exists to serve? This is about who comes first for you. Is it the end consumer, the vendors, the shareholders, the team? There are trade-offs you have to make once you have clarity on this topic. Hear the story of South West Airline and who they put first.

master promoter Louie Lavella is on the issue to talk about social media and CX. The experiences translate from hollywood to wall street

I was held at customs for about 30 minutes for being smart ass, I thought the customs agent and I were bonding over our respective jobs. Turns out I crossed the line, he didn't find any humor in me asking him why he has to ask every traveller a set of stupid questions. File that under "doesn't follow rules". No one is required to ask more stupid questions than people with customer facing jobs. They know the questions are stupid, so do their bosses but day after day this harmful practice continues... We put this issue to bed once and for all on today's show

How can Millennials help or hurt the Customer Experience?
They are called the "Control-Alt-Delete" generation because whenever something is not working for them, they reboot and start all over. We have to be very intentional to get the best out of the Millennial workforce and keep in mind that technology has changed the way we can approach work.

How to combine technology, Millenials mindset and flexibility search with the needs of the CX departments of companies?

We discuss trends and potential solutions with Darren Ford.

One of my clients used to brag about his refusal to hire any more young people - his argument was "the damn millennials were too entitled." He would constantly hold up his attrition over the last 5 years as proof. He was in online retail and his margins couldn't handle the abnormally high turnover. So I was hired to bring back a strategy to change the make up of his workforce that was at the time 80% millennials. The data notwithstanding the millennial hypothesis rang like bullshit to me but we studied it, there was a problem for sure, for starters, his employees (regardless of generational) hated working for the company, their reasons were not unique to this organization. The descriptors would fit any customer facing role in retail, hospitality or any contact center. On today's podcast I invited Darren Ford author of the Millennial Challenge to help answer some of these questions. Are millennials a completely different breed? If you have customer facing roles what should you watch out for? Subscribe on ITunes and please leave us a review

Adrian joins the show to talk about the evolution of international outsourcing in the contact center space.

I would like to take some of the emotion out of it and focus on the facts. Back in the early 2000's when companies started outsourcing in India, the US customers were quite unhappy, but more and more companies invested in outsourcing mainly because of the decrease in costs and the improvement of processes/efficiency.

So how it all involved since then?

Customers have lots of legitimate complaints about customer service - automated systems that seems to have been designed by sadist. They are constantly punted from one department to the next, and they have to repeat their problem over and over as they are punted from one person to the next like a football on 4th and 25. prioritizing where to focus can be challenging but for heaven’s sake we shouldn’t be focusing on a unicorn like omni-Channel