Be Different or be dead

June 9, 2011

The simple reasons why call centers don’t give good customer service

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The simple reasons why call centers don’t give good customer service.

Every organization that is big enough has a call center to handle primarily incoming calls from their customers.

There must be some redeeming value in having one if everyone has one, right? There is: it’s generally viewed as the most efficient operating solution for processing volumes of calls coming into an organization.

The dark side to call centers

But having led large customer service teams in a variety of business environments I have experienced a dark side to call centers.

In many cases I find that call centers represent the antithesis of miraculous service.

When an organization declares they intend to provide amazing service to their customers and then chooses an operating model with a call centre — particularly in a foreign country — as its nucleus, they are not only being disingenuous, they are fooling themselves (and probably driving their customers crazy) and assuming substantial competitive risk.

These are the aspects of call centers, particularly those that are outsourced, I find quite revolting.

They exist to manage cost

They choose to implement a call centre environment not to serve customers better, but to process volumes of calls at the lowest cost possible.

The question is rarely asked “Is this the best way to both serve our customers in an exemplary way while at the same time optimizing our cost position?”

It’s all about cost. That’s why most organizations outsource them around the world where labour costs are low. Current outsourcing destinations include India, Philippines, Thailand, China and Indonesia with many more planning to enter the fray.

This outsourcing trend has attracted a plethora of experts who define what it takes to have a successful call centre.

They are managed to improve productivity

Effectiveness of a call center is generally based on micro productivity measures such as:

▪️average holding time — the elapsed time it takes a call center rep to handle a customer query. Management tries to drive this number down in order to process as many calls as they can with the resources available.

The outcome of each call is rarely measured. Was the customer satisfied with the service they received? Did they enjoy the experience with the rep?

▪️average speed of answer — the average length of time it takes to answer an incoming call. When I ran call center operations in the telecom world, my target was to answer 80% of all calls within 6 seconds and our resource levels were set to achieve this result.

This was probably the best internal target we had that represented an attempt to deliver good customer service.
Can you imagine in today’s world reaching a call center rep of any organization within 2 or 3 rings of your phone? Rarely ever happens, with common wait times in the minutes rather than seconds.

Productivity and service miracles don’t easily coexist in most organizations; this measure needs attention if any organization wants to get out of the revolting category.

They don’t drive customer loyalty

Whether a call center serves incoming calls or is used to originate sales-type calls, the heavy traffic volumes involved generally work against the relationship building activity that leads to a loyal customer.

A call comes in > the rep answers (eventually) > the rep deals with the customer’s request > the rep terminates the call > the next call is fed to the rep.
And the cycle is repeated over and over again with a supervisor scrutinizing how long the rep is on each call.

The call center is essentially a production shop with no overt objective of creating an experience for the customer that could lead to brand loyalty.

Customer satisfaction may be measured along with productivity objectives, but a satisfied customer does not make a loyal one.

Satisfaction means that expectations were met; loyalty demands more — minds must be blown, expectations exceeded and marvellous experiences created if the loyalty dial is to be moved.

And this takes time. A WHAM! BAM! THANK YOU MA’M! process does nothing to encourage warm feelings and a desire to do more business with the brand involved.

They take control of your brand

The moment power is given to an outsourced call centre to engage with your customers, control is relinquished and your organization’s brand is put at risk.

Many organizations don’t even put in place a performance management contract with the 3rd party outsourcer to measure how customers perceive the service they receive from call center reps, so changes to brand position are unknown and can’t be responded to.

And with high turnover of employees, consistency in whatever customer treatment is given is almost impossible — at least I don’t experience it.

When your customer connects with the call center you have chosen to empower with your most valued asset, and the experience they have does not go well, it’s on YOU.
The call center rep is YOUR employee. The service outcome is YOUR responsibility.

YOU pay the price in the market.

Their words create the precious moment

Whether a customer has a miraculous service moment or not depends on communications with the call center rep. Miracles happen when the engagement is spirited, entertaining and responsive. When there is an easiness to the conversation that leaves the caller happy and fulfilled.

And for me, very often it is extremely difficult to fight through the accent of a foreign call center rep to have a meaningful and enjoyable conversation.
I simply can’t understand many (not all) of them, and that’s a BIG problem for the outsourcer.

If even the basic communications expectations of the call can be met, there is little chance that a service miracle will ever occur and in fact the opposite is the result with the caller being annoyed or angry with the encounter.

It’s not that the foreign reps are uneducated or don’t have some skills in the English language.
But it’s one thing to pass English 101 and have an understanding of sentence structure and grammar, and quite another to engage with someone else in a way that flows and is productive to the other party.

Are these reps tested by role playing to evaluate their conversational proficiency? Not from where I’m sitting.

Wait times are shameful

Outsources really don’t care about how long we wait on the phone to reach a rep; if they did, they wouldn’t tolerate wait times that often reach ridiculous levels — for me personally, I am blown away if I actually get a rep in 5 minutes and am not surprised to wait 45 minutes or longer. Business mediocrity in action.

It’s ironic that wait times take no priority at all; organizations are content to provide messages they feel assuage their shameful service: “Your call is important to us”; “We are experiencing unusual traffic volumes at the moment” unfortunately greet us more often than not when we call for help.

But wait! There is a silver lining to long wait times. Put your iPhone on speaker, slip it in your back pocket and get on with the job jar your wife has skillfully filled for you.

The reps have an impossible task

I totally get that even a highly competent and caring call center rep has a tough time being on 100% up time.
By the time a customer gets to them, they are often met with frustration, anger and sometimes abuse, with literally zero chance of turning a bad encounter into a pleasant experience.
The reps simply wants to get away from the pain they are engulfed in.

And the rep of course doesn’t own the problem — leadership does.

It’s a pipe dream and shameful leadership behaviour to create an impossible working environment and expect employees to perform impeccably. What planet are they on?

It’s quite simple, really.
If you want low costs, technology can do only so much and you will be saddled with the result. Under-resourcing is typically the result of cost cutting in the face of relentless demand and who pays the price? CUSTOMERS DO!

Call centers generally don’t focus on building intimate customer relationships and outsourcing them makes matters worse.

There are exceptions, however, but these rare organizations make the decision to establish their call center as an integral loyalty building instrument not as an efficient call processing center.

So if you decide to use call center technology to engage with your customers, please don’t preach your intent to deliver amazing service.

It’s intellectually dishonest and it fools no one.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 6.9.11 at 10:40 am by Roy Osing
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May 30, 2011

Why supporting the leader makes sense for your long term career success

Source: Pexels

Why supporting the leader makes sense for your long term career success.

Be on the side of the angels during a period of volatile organizational change. You need to support and be seen to support the direction that the company has decided to take whether you are totally in agreement wish it or not.

Clearly you only have one other choice, and that is to leave the organization.

A previous boss of mine used to say: ‘You really have only two choices: one, leave the organization if you can’t support the direction the leader wants to take, or, two, dig down deep and support the boss’s “dumb idea”.

Both thoughts effectively drive home the notion that the non-supportive option is really no option at all unless you are prepared to seek other employment. The higher up the organization you go, the greater is the expectation that you will put aside your personal views and objections and support the CEO’s decision on corporate strategy.

My story

When I was first appointed to an executive position, I was tutored that my main duty and responsibility was to support the CEO no matter what. Obviously this was not intended to be taken literally, however, the underlying theme of what was said resonated with me and served as a guide post for me over the many executive positions I held throughout my career.

Do whatever you can do to be supportive of the CEO and still be true to yourself: the side of the angels..

Of course this principle applies to whatever position your boss holds. It doesn’t have to be the CEO.

When a new CEO was recruited, there was the usual apprehension among the executive team about his personal style, where he would want to take the organization in the future and the role of the existing executive team.
His approach was to pull together the existing executive team to develop a new strategy for the organization supported by a new value system and organization structure.

I found the strategy building process He used very liberating. Here was a leader without any internal bias at all. His only interest was to set a future direction for the business that created growth in shareholder value.

Don’t hold onto the past

Reasons for past decisions made were really not relevant for him and he didn’t want to spend any airtime hearing about “why things were done that way”. One of my peer executives had a great deal of difficulty with this “let’s start out with a blank sheet of paper” approach. He wanted to try and convince the CEO that certain decisions taken in the past should be honored in the new plan that we were developing.

New leaders don’t want to hear why things were done in the past; they want to get on with their own agenda.

I disagreed with my colleague’s view as did the CEO. The strategy sessions became at times acrimonious debates with this out-of-sync individual. The beginning of the end for this person was clear to me, but the situation worsened as we concluded on our strategic course and turned our attention to the really tough decision on the appropriate organization structure that would deliver the desired results. More acrimonious debate ensued with my colleague’s attempt to dominate and sway the outcome, but the final structure mirrored the CEO’s views as you would expect.

The thing was the new organization structure wasn’t new to me at all. In fact it was a model that we had years before, and with all organizational approaches it had its plusses and minuses. So, I found myself actually in the same intellectual camp as my out-of-favor colleague on this matter and the CEO felt my reluctance to jump in and immediately support his call. He handled me with a great deal of respect and patience; asked me to think about whether or not I could support the new structure and let him know.

Even though I had reservations about his structural decision, I supported it in the spirit of helping out the CEO.

The end of the story is that my colleague who fought him tooth and nail on virtually every issue left the company.

I was appointed executive vice president & chief marketing officer.

You always have a choice.

Choose for the long term.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.30.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 26, 2011

Why great core service is not enough to make loyal customers

Source: Unsplash

Why great core service is not enough to make loyal customers.

Customer service that is unmatched by the competition is a function of what you provide and how you provide it. Does it work as promised? And did people feel good when they were engaged to get it?

Clean hotel rooms. Courteous staff. IPad that works like they said it would. Financial advice that delivers what was promised. A household move across the country on time, on budget with nothing broken. An airplane that takes off and lands. Baggage that is not lost. Uninterrupted Internet service delivering speed that was promised.

Each of these is a core service that represents the fundamental building block of a business. It’s the basic output or deliverable that defines a business.

But core service is table stakes. You need to deliver it seamlessly 24X7X365 to play the game

But it won’t necessarily win it for you.

When core service is delivered as promised, customers rate you ‘ok’ and nothing more. Providing seamless core service doesn’t build customer loyalty, but it is the essential building block to do so. Without consistent core service, customer loyalty isn’t possible; but with it, it’s not enough.

Winning the game comes not from what people get from you, but rather from how people feel when they get it. From the experience they get from you. Are they delighted? Are they dazzled? Are they left breathless?

It’s the context within which your core service is delivered. How do people feel between the takeoff and landing? Do they feel special or do they feel “abused” by the onboard staff?

Bottom Line: deliver your core service consistently and then get WOW’S for the service experience you create.

Table-stakes don’t go far enough to make you a long term winner.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.26.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 19, 2011

How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale

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How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale.

How many salespeople would consciously put their sale at risk in order to protect a long term customer relationship?

How many would continue to put time in with the customer even though they realize the probability of making the immediate sale is low?

How many would put their yearly quota in jeopardy in favour of securing an account for the benefits they will realize over the long term?

I suspect there would be an extremely small number of salespeople who would put up their hand and fess up to sacrificing the short term for the long term; and that is sad, unfortunate and just plain bad business.

The flogger is bad business

The fact is, an unrelenting focus on the immediate sale increases the chance that the salesperson will be a ‘one-sale wonder’, a ‘flogger extraordinaire’ who will be unable to offer any long term value to their organization.

Long term value creation in sales is all about building strong intimate customer relationships that will yield a relatively stable and healthy cash flow over future periods; it’s not about making the sale today.

The role of sales must change from the flogger of products and services to the ‘gatherer of friends’.

Relationships are all there are in sales and it is absolutely critical that they be protected, nurtured and strengthened in every moment a salesperson has with their customer.

The absolute worst thing that can be done is to erode the friendship by maintaining a short term product sale focus.

It’s all very well that sales leaders espouse the building relationships vision; it’s quite another when sales is confronted in the field with a situation where the organization’s products and services don’t meet the customer’s requirement.

Square peg in a round hole

This is the moment of truth. It’s that moment when the intent and action collide to discover if the organization is really serious about building long term relationships or whether it’s merely an aspiration with no substance.

Let’s face it, there are times when there isn’t the right fit between what the customer wants and what the organization supplies. It’s not a catastrophic situation; it’s impossible for an organization to expect to have a solution portfolio to match every problem their customers experience.

Your solution perhaps doesn’t have the right functionality to do what the customer specifically wants, or it might not be available when the customer wants it, or it might not meet their price expectations and there’s little to be done to satisfy them by adding value to the solution and selling at a premium price.

When this happens, the wrong thing to do is to try and force fit the organization’s solution into the customer’s problem in order to try and make a sale — again, it’s product flogging behaviour that will punish friendship building and long term performance.

Not only that, it’s more than likely to fail. Customers generally don’t like to get bullied into a sale and if a salesperson is into the force fitting mode, the customer will know it and will not buy. And two negative results occur. Not only is a sale not made, the friendship is diluted by the flogging behaviour.

The right thing to do is to walk away from trying to satisfy the customer with the organization’s solutions and refocus the energy on determining what can be done to ensure the relationship is deepened.

These principles should govern what a salesperson should do in this situation.

Sales Principle #1 — Own the customer forever

What does ‘owning the customer forever’ mean when the right solution for your client is not available from your company? If it’s not spelled out in detail, the salesperson won’t know what to do and how to behave and could risk the relationship ‘going south’.

Every action taken by the salesperson must be through a long term lens and leadership must draw a line of sight from this lofty goal down to the specific actions a salesperson must take when confronted with the challenge of a product or service misfit.

‘Owning the customer’ is a long term investment, not a quick buy-and-sell transaction.

You cannot leave it to the salesperson to decide how to respond; they will behave the way they traditionally have: bail on the friendship because there’s no quota payback from hanging around.

Sales Principle #2 — Do whatever it takes to protect Sales Principle #1

Every action sales takes must serve the purpose of solving the customer’s problem with whatever solution is available and from whatever organization supplies it.

Owning the relationship is a caveat-free goal without the constraint of solving the customer’s problem only with the organization’s solution set.
Rather, it’s an empowering notion that says to the salesperson “Go wherever you have to and do whatever is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. Period.”

It’s a narrative that needs to be an automatic response to a product or service deficiency — if this, then that.

It’s about you!

If you’re looking for a silver bullet to blow your customer away, this strategy is it. It basically subordinates the short term needs of the organization to the immediate needs of the customer; it says emphatically to them ’It’s all about you’.

As a loyalty building behaviour it’s probably the most powerful thing a salesperson could do.

Sales Principle #3 — Pay for the behaviour you want

If you want sales to behave a certain way, you must pay them for it. That’s the way salespeople are.

If it ain’t in the sales compensation plan it doesn’t get done.

Declaring the customer ownership goal and defining the specific behaviour sales must exhibit in order to achieve the goal is not sufficient; a measurement and reward system must be in place to ensure the right behaviour is constantly being practiced.

The measurement tool is simple: ask the customer if their salesperson offered other company’s solutions. If you don’t have a customer perception survey — the sales Report Card — in place, you should, because it’s the only way to get a handle on sales behaviour.

Owning the customer is more than sales revenue performance, it’s doing the right things today that will enhance the chances of maintaining a healthy revenue stream from the customer over the long term.

The rewards system is equally straightforward: include a compensation component in each salesperson’s annual performance plan for this practice. If 20% of their annual bonus is related to ‘selling someone else’s solution’, it will get done.

Building a long term friendship requires a great deal of emotional energy relentlessly applied day in and day out. And it involves sometimes taking a step back from our needs to put the other person first.

This is such a time in the world of sales, and those organizations who make the practice matter are the long term winners.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.19.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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