Be Different or be dead

January 3, 2011

2 easy questions to decide who to hire into customer service

Source : Pexels

2 easy questions to decide who to hire into customer service.

A key element of the business plan that many organizations use to separate themselves from their competition is to create memorable experiences for their customers.
To blow ‘em away and leave them breathless with how they’ve been treated.

The problem is, however, is that these same organizations haven’t figured out precisely how to do it. They’re excellent at declaring the aspiration but fall short when it comes to delivering on their intent.

And as a result their customer service intent is no more than a helium-filled shallow promise with no evidence to back it up and their performance is unaffected.

Typically memorable experiences are created by people, notwithstanding the relatively unsuccessful attempts - in my view - that many organizations make using technology to do it.

Hire the right person

The most important and basic way of achieving this objective is to recruit people who ‘love’ human beings. People that have the instinctive desire to serve their fellow homo-sapiens. To take care of them. To satisfy them regardless of what they want.

Hire the right person into a service position if you want to dazzle the customer or leave them breathless from the service experience they’ve had with you

I’m not impressed with the quality of some people recruited into customer service positions because many of them are incapable of delivering even a mediocre service experience.

Why? Well, many of them have been placed in the position because of their seniority in the company, or because they are looking for a career move and they want to try customer service.

And as a result, these people find that they really don’t ‘like customers’ with all the complications they bring and they would really rather be doing something that didn’t involve interacting with other humans (and the customer who engages with this person suffers).

How does this happen? How does an individual who would rather be writing code, taking inventory or preparing financial statements ever get a job in customer service?

The decision making process to select people for service jobs is imprecise and severely flawed and in too many instances unqualified and unwilling people are let loose with your most precious asset — your customer.

So how do you fix the problem? How does an organization ensure they are hiring individuals who are not only capable of delivering mind-blowing service, but also look forward to doing it with every fabric of their body?

Can you train someone to like a human?

Many would say that you can train people to do it; certainly that’s what many human resource managers generally believe — why else would they use seniority as a criteria to place people in customer service?

The fact is, however, despite all the good intentions of cross-training, you simply can’t train someone to like someone else.

Source: Pexels

You can give them ‘how to have a smile in your voice’ training and teach them how to grin at others and use other tools intended to deal with customer better, but you can’t train a person to bring all the honest emotional energy to the table that is required to create a memorable experience for another person.

People who love people are born to do it, and so the challenge is to discover them and embrace them in your organization as they truly are the custodians of the loyalty moment when a customer decides to continue doing business with you (and to tell others how great your organization is) or to leave for another service provider.

So how do you spot these people who naturally care for — ‘love’ — other humans?

You have to start with the usual task of filtering through the profiles of potential candidates, looking for content that relates to serving customers as opposed to merely stressing academic achievements or other hard accomplishments.

Most people avoid what they believe is the soft stuff as it relates to their background, but for the delivery of remarkable service, the soft stuff is absolutely essential.
And check their references to see if others commented on the candidate’s capability to effectively deal with others with care and affection.

The interview

But the critical element of the hiring process is the personal interview and I discovered an effective tool to separate the individuals who could really create magical experiences for others from those that talked a good game but who didn’t have the attitude or inclination to do it.

Ask two simple questions

Here’s a rather simple but so effective way of separating the human being lovers from the ‘fish’ who may have been through some type of customer service training program.

▪️ First, ask the prospective employee “Do you love human beings?”.

They will realize that this is a bit of a trick question but will not know where you are going with it. It’s a fun question to ask as the interviewer to say the least.

Most people will say ‘yes’ in varying ways, ranging from the declaration ‘absolutely’ to the positive inference ‘sure’ and the questioning ‘of course’.
However, to satisfy the real intent of the question, you need to dig deeper.

▪️As a follow up question, pose this: “Tell me a story that will show me that you love and care about your fellow humans”.

The responses you get from this question will define two types of candidates: one, ‘The Intellectualizer’’ and two, ‘The People Lover’.

The Intellectualizer has figured out what you are up to with the question and conjures up a story with their mind that leaves you cold.
Their answer draws on logic — what they believe you expect to hear from them — and therefore it’s dispassionate to the point of being superficial and phoney.

Those that don’t have the innate desire to move people emotionally with their answer should be ushered out of the interview.

The natural-born People Lover, on the other hand, thrills you with a story that leaves you warm all over.
Their story paints a vivid picture of someone who cares about other people and who is creative at finding ways to deliver unforgettable memories for them.

This was the question that separated the people who really got what it took to serve others from those who had only a theoretical understanding of what it too to be a caregiver.

Do you feel the goosebumps

Those that were born to serve leave you with goosebumps while they tell their story. Their story is rich with detail and the threads that bind it together were all about the importance of connecting with people on the emotional level. And their authenticity pours out with every word.

These individuals were the real deal. I hired them with minor interest in their other qualifications. And they always did me proud the way they dealt with our customers.

And many eventually found their way into higher level positions in the customer service organization to provide the leadership necessary to sustain this strategy that was extremely effective is gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage for our organization.

So if you really want to achieve a service strategy based on remarkable and memorable experiences, hire the People Lover who will leave you with goosebumps.

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

• Posted 1.3.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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December 16, 2010

Your customer service: is it is really bad or is it great?

Source: Unsplash

Your customer service: is it is really bad or is it great? Is the service you provide dead or alive?

DEAD service

— Rules, policies and procedures are created to serve the organization’s purposes. They are put in place as control mechanisms to satisfy the auditors. They have the intended impact of keeping the customer at a distance. An arms-length relationship with the customer is the result.
— Frontline responsibilities center around enforcing the customer engagement rules of the organization.
— Leadership is in the command and control mode. Frontline empowerment is restricted.
— There is little or no flexibility for people to deviate from established procedures. Those who do so are punished in some way or another.
— Short term results are stressed. There is little time to build sustaining relationships with customers.

— Efficiency is the focus in customer contact operations. Call Centers are measured on the length of time they are on the phone with a customer and on the number of calls processed.
— Call Centers are outsourced based on economics. Service is driven by the need to reduce costs to the lowest possible level.
— No loyalty programs are contained in the marketing strategy.
— Customers are viewed as transactions where the only thing that is important is the money exchanged.
— Customers don’t have personal identity. The organization considers mass markets to drive their activity.
— Telemarketing is used extensively and products are flogged to people without regard for the interruptions and inconvenience caused them.

ALIVE service

— The organization has a culture of caring for it’s people and this transcends to how customers are dealt with.
— Leadership believes that their primary role is to serve their employees; to make it easy for them to do their job. They believe that if the frontline is served well from within the customer will be served in the same manner.
— Internal rules, policies and procedures are created in the image of creating memorable service experiences for the customer. Good business practices are of course applied but the organization is flexible enough to restrict the mandatory controls to the necessary minimum.
— Frontline employees are empowered to bend the rules in order to say yes to a customer. The service strategy in play is to find a way to do what the customer wants and not enforce rigid rules.
— Service heroes are recognized constantly, reinforcing the importance of the serving ethic.
— Humanity is built in to service operations. Leadership understands that mind-blowing service is delivered by people not machines. Hi-Touch rallies over Hi-Tech.

— Call centers are not outsourced; they are considered a core competency of providing dazzling service.
— The quality of the customer contact is considered the primary objective. Each Moment of Truth is engineered to produce an emotion-rich experience for the customer.
— Quality of service measurement is based on the customer’s perception of how they were served. Internal operational statistics are used only to diagnose a customer perceived problem.
— The organization gives gifts to their loyal customers as a “thank you” for their continued patronage.
— The recruitment process is geared to finding people who love humans. The belief is that they can learn the business but are borne with the gift of serving.
— The organization heavily invests in service believing in long term results rather than emphasis on the short term.
— Social media tools are extensively used to connect with and learn from their tribe.
— The organization is open to feedback and criticism; they use it to improve how they serve customers.

Dead or alive service. Which characterizes your organization?

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

• Posted 12.16.10 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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December 13, 2010

Why a charter of rights should be given as a gift to your customers

Source: Unsplash

Why a charter of rights should be given as a gift to your customers.

It’s about time we created a list of things that we, as customers, expect of the organizations we do business with. It should go something like this…

I, as your customer, have the right to…

— be respected by every employee I connect with;
— feel important as the person who keeps you in business;
— be listened to; no I mean REALLY listened to!
— be the center of attention rather than an annoyance who takes you away from your “real job”;
— guide you in the formulation of your internal rules, policies and procedures;
— determine the appropriate systems and processes by which I do business with you. I expect you to make it easy for me to do business with you;
— have a voice in who you recruit into positions that govern the service experience. I expect you will hire people who will move heaven and earth to take care of me;
— personalized marketing offerings that recognize my own personal needs, wants and desires;
— NOT be on the receiving end of product flogging. I expect you will create offers that expose me to new experiences that will make me happy and joyful;
— afforded the opportunity of giving you honest yet at times critical feedback on how I am being treated, knowing you will take my comments and make my life with you better;
— NOT be ignored no matter how simple and trivial my request of you might be;
— dazzling service experiences. I expect you to surprise me with gifts that you give freely with no expectation in return;
— feel the humanity in your organization. I don’t want to constantly confront technology that replaces people. I despise voice response systems and call centers that require me to wait up to 30 minutes for one of your people to answer while I listen to you tell me “Don’t hang up. Your call is important to us”;
— a deep meaningful relationship with you rather than being viewed as a commercial transaction where all that is important is the money exchange from me to you;
— be rewarded for my loyalty to you on occasion;
— be communicated with regularly in terms of what new things you have that may meet my needs and my feedback on how well you have been treating me.

Is that too much to ask in a world of fierce competition, plummeting customer loyalty and tenuous organizational survivability?

I think not.

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

• Posted 12.13.10 at 10:59 am by Roy Osing
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November 22, 2010

Why is learning about customers so damn important?

Source: Pexels

Traditional market research doesn’t go far enough.

Periodic studies can’t keep pace with the changing needs of your FANS and everyone uses it.

Customer learning, on the other hand, is a continuous process of learning what your customers want, desire and covet.

And it is a core competency of your business which should never be outsourced.

What’s the key to customer learning? It’s all about LISTENING; REALLY listening to what people have to say.

Pay attention to their words and the results are remarkable; give it lip service and you are doomed.

Here is a brief guide on how to be an effective Listener:

LOOK — them in the eye. Don’t Grin ‘em. Give them your undivided attention. Show that you CARE about what they have to say. Lean forward.

LISTEN — Really listen! Ask questions to clarify. Take copious amount of notes. Don’t interrupt them when they are speaking. It’s about them not you.

LEARN — This is a moment of strategic opportunity; don’t miss it. Discover a secret. Look for hidden VALUE that you can create for them; latent Happiness you can generate.

What’s the ROI on Customer Listening?

LOYALTY — Your FANS will stay with you and tell others how terrific you are. Advocates & addicted followers create annuity streams for you.

LEAP — Beyond the herd who still compete by incremental product feature creep. You will achieve Distinction; Remarkable.

LEAVE — ‘em in the dust. to achieve true separation from the herd. And a clear unique value proposition that others will simply not be able to replicate.

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

• Posted 11.22.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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