Be Different or be dead

May 4, 2020

Customer service needs a major change for 4 simple reasons

Source: Unsplash

Customer service needs a major change for 4 simple reasons.

I’m really tired of hearing, reading and seeing claims organizations make about the customer service they provide.

They know if they don’t deliver great service, customers have many other options to consider. So they make outrageous declarations about the level of service they provide, and if they were all completely accurate our markets would be inundated by superlative service providers and customers who are blown away constantly.

But of course, this isn’t the case. In fact I’m inundated with complaints from people who are pissed off constantly with the service they receive from most of the organizations they deal with (I know there are exceptions, but most companies are challenged to make their service words and music actually line up).

Here’s why customer service needs a major do-over.

Because many policies are stupid

When a customer runs into an organization’s rule or policy they don’t understand or that doesn’t allow them to engage with the organization the way they want to, they freak out.
“I’m sorry we can’t sell you the T-shirt on the mannequin, it’s for display purposes only” pretty well describes the condition that drives customers crazy.

Or “You and your wife can’t be seated in a booth for your meal because booths are reserved for parties of four or more.” — BUT THERE’S NO ONE ELSE IN THE RESTAURANT!

The rules and policy systems in organizations need a major do-over.

Rules and policies in organizations are for the most part conceived to control customer engagement not to enable it. The auditors and folks in risk management define the process that satisfies internal concerns without regard for customer impacts.

Internal policies are a major “POF” in too many organizations and need a do-over to allow customers to transact with organizations in an easy manner; to empower THEM to define the rules of the game.

Because many service people don’t like humans

There are too many people in customer service jobs that shouldn’t be there because they don’t like dealing with humans.
You can spot them: they avoid eye contact, they try and move through you as fast as possible, they are borderline bullies and they could care less whether they satisfy you or not.

Recruitment practices need a major do-over.

Customer service should be treated as a priority in every organization and command the resources necessary to acquire the best, most caring people to work for their customers.
Why is it that the engineering function is paid more attention than customer service in terms of the quality of people hired? I’m not saying service is more important than engineering, but it’s at least as important.
What should you look for in recruiting new service people? Goosebumps.

Because cost trumps care

Leadership in most organizations view the service function as a cost to be controlled. For example, call centers are first consolidated and then outsourced to somewhere is the world where labour costs are low.

And they are managed to internal KPI’s such as call holding times — get the customer off the call as quickly as possible — without regard to call answer wait times at all. It seems leaders really don’t care that people wait 45 minutes to speak to a call center rep.
What’s important is that the costs of providing customer service are held in check.

The philosophy of running a service operation needs a do-over.

Customer service should be measured on how effective they are in creating memorable experiences for customers, not cost management. They should be viewed as a key driver of customer loyalty rather than a call processing cost reduction machine. There are very few examples of organizations that practice this philosophy, unfortunately, but one does exist.

Because service drives sales

As sales moves away from the product-flogging mentality to a focus on building strong relationships with clients, the importance of serving them in every way possible is on the rise. Clients are more likely to buy a product or service from a salesperson who listens well, takes the time to explore options, is always available and who is naturally empathetic with the client’s circumstances.

How the client feels about the sales engagement experience is rising to be the most critical element of their decision making process — whether they buy or walk.

The sales process needs a service do-over.

Serving a client in a caring way with the objective of creating a great experience for them should be a prime outcome of the sales engagement process because how clients FEEL about the sales experience determines whether they buy or not.
And the sales kit bag should be modified to include serving skills and methods in addition to traditional sales techniques.

For organizations aspiring to deliver unmatched customer service, they need to blow up the traditional sales model and be prepared to replace their operating model with a philosophy that places a priority on the service function.

Past service practices need to be replaced with new serving practices that focus on the experience created with a customer and the belief that a customer who is emotionally connected with an organization will buy — and continue to buy.

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

• Posted 5.4.20 at 05:45 am by Roy Osing
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April 27, 2020

What surprising legacy will COVID will leave when it’s finally over?

Source: Pexels

What surprising legacy will COVID will leave when it’s finally over?

Every major event in the world plans to leave a sustaining legacy long after it concludes.

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver left the Sea-to-Sky highway from Vancouver to Whistler along with many other game’s venues which stand ten years later and will likely be a reminder decades from now of the one-in-a-lifetime experience some of us witnessed.

And Steve Jobs gave us the iPhone.

COVID-19 didn’t intend to leave a legacy, but the deadly virus will.

Here are six remnants of COVID that I believe (hope) will influence us as we move forward and will be indelibly etched in our society forever.

1. The frontline

COVID demands that either the frontline get the recognition it deserves or the human species better be prepared to encounter the armageddon.
In this crisis, frontline workers are finally getting the respect and adulation they rightly deserve.
I have been advocating the value the frontline contributes to organizations for decades, that they are the face of any enterprise and that they carry their brand at every customer contact moment.

Well, thanks to COVID, the world now recognizes the importance of frontline workers, but not to individual organizations, but to humanity.
Healthcare workers, truckers, first responders, food preparers and deliverers and elderly care home support staff have all been thrown into the spotlight because of the service they provide to others in the COVID crisis.

They are now given the gratitude they have earned for the professions they have. Without frontline workers doing their job selfishly, leaders of organizations and of countries simply can’t succeed. And with their undying unselfish efforts, either will COVID.

2. Technology

COVID has forever changed how we communicate with one another, and will fuel, I believe, greater use of technology generally.

“Let’s have a ZOOM meeting” is becoming part of our vocabulary just as “Google it” is. And the Boomers are discovering the fascination with FaceTiming or using Skype to see their grandchildren as the only way they can stay in touch.

I’m seeing a greater willingness for people generally to explore and learn new ways of doing day-to-day things with the help of technology; there is a greater motivation to “dip your toe” in new technology because of COVID and I believe it’s a tipping point for technology use, particularly among the older demographic.

In addition, the need to shop online will forever change our consumption habits. People who never shopped online now do, and those that did it before are now doing more of it.

Bricks and Mortar operating businesses under pressure from online buying before will be even under more pressure post-COVID. The pressure to meet online needs of people will never relent; because of COVID it will be the norm of customer behaviour.

3. Personal space

COVID demands that we NOT invade the personal space of others; that we refrain from contact closer than 2 meters or 6 feet in order to prevent the transmission of the virus. I believe that this fingerprint of the disease will in the future take on a deterministic role in how certain functions are performed.

Physical spacing will drive workplace layout and design and will also influence how herd demand in the airline and entertainment businesses for example will be met. Pressure will be applied to the economics of product and service topologies, but will force solutions that best balance the needs of safely separating people and delivering acceptable profit margins.

4. Innovation and creativity

COVID stimulated innovation and creativity, as organizations had to figure out how to adapt to the new rules governing social distancing; it wasn’t a theoretical exercise on how to enhance innovation in their business, it was a matter of survival. And many didn’t make it.

Small businesses shifted from an in-house dining model to a takeout one; larger companies, in the face of reduced demand for their normal products and services, shifted their resources to produce the tools for fighting the virus such as masks and ventilators.

5. Customer service

The COVID world reemphasized the critical importance of caring for others, and this has profound implications for getting back to business as unusual. My reader knows how passionate I am about serving leadership and customer service based on taking care of others. Well, COVID has brought the importance of these attributes in people out into full display.

Under the banner of “we are all in this together” and “show kindness to your fellow humans”, the need to subordinate one’s own needs to the needs of others assumes a top priority.
I hope this attitude carries forward as a critical COVID learning. I have been critical of organizations that are more in it for their shareholders and care less about their customers and employees.

Customer respect — as evidenced by their dumb rules and policies — has waned over the years and perhaps now we can get back to the basics of serving customers and delivering what they desire.

6. The environment

Efforts to contain COVID by lockdown and isolation have resulted in a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and other pollutants that contaminate the environment.

After many weeks of these measures, parts of the world are able to literally “see” the results of cleaner air.

The Himalayas, for example, after 30 years can finally be seen from the Punjab region of India due to the significant reduction of air pollution.
This is likely to be a stimulus for more climate change action and support from the population generally where people can actually feel what it’s like to have a more contaminant-free environment.

Every legacy is created by something truly remarkable, be it in the form of a great persona or an event with a powerful impact that changes the future course dramatically.

COVID is such an event. It has the potential to leave a long lasting positive affect on all of us.

I hope we remember what it gave us and use it productively.

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

• Posted 4.27.20 at 04:55 am by Roy Osing
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January 20, 2020

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight

Source: Pexels

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight.

An astonishing source of customer amazement — and customer loyalty — is how service breakdowns are handled.

Typically service breakdowns include such things as a broken promise made to a customer, a product or service that doesn’t work the way the manual says it should, billing mistakes or service repairs that need to be redone because they weren’t completed right the first time.

The solution to these missteps is called service recovery and it’s formula is simple:

Service recovery = fix the screw-up and do the unexpected.

Let’s face it when you screw a customer over, they expect you to fix it. But they’re not particularly blown away when you correct your error; they don’t say ‘WOW I can’t believe you actually remedied what you screwed up!’

This is where most companies fall short. They actually believe that by merely fixing their mistake the customer will be satisfied and their obligations will have been fulfilled.

The rule of recovery: fix the mistake fast and then blow the customer away by surprising them with something they don’t expect.

If your goal is merely to satisfy a customer, you may be content with having a fix it capability that is incredibly efficient. But if you want to create the ability to consistently build customer loyalty and earn their lifelong trust you need to go further.

You need to move from a positive response to ‘Were you satisfied with what we did to fix our service screw up?’ to ‘Did we blow you away with what we did to recover from our mistake?’

The surprise factor

If you choose the path of wanting to delight your customers and create memorable service experiences for them, you need to understand that the source of of an amazing experience is doing what the customer doesn’t expect.

The challenge, therefore is to discover exactly what that little bit extra is and for them to do it in a way that makes their eyes bulge out with amazement.

And the key is that the surprise act must be relevant to the customer. Providing something extra for the customer that doesn’t resonate with their needs, wants and desires will leave them scratching their head.

And it’s not about coming up with a boilerplate trash-and-trinket program that provides the same bland response to every customer — you’re wasting your money.
The surprise must have personal meaning to the customer otherwise it will be ineffective — in fact could make matters worse!

The surprise must also be extremely compelling to the customer; it must be a high priority with them if you want to impress them.
This is the emotional component of recovery. A compelling act will stir the emotions and make the customer believe you actually care about them.

Customer secrets and speed

The successful surprise requires that you need to understand what makes the person screwed over tick; what turns them on and what action on your part would most likely trigger an emphatic emotional response. You need to know their secrets — reread the ‘How to build an amazing marketing machine’.

You can be relevant and compelling in your recovery act, but if you take a week to get it done, forget it. Your investment will be worthless.
Studies have found that you have about 24 hours to get it done; after that, the ability to capitalize on the screwup and build stronger customer loyalty goes down the tube.

If you make a mistake and recover in a dazzling way, the customer is more loyal to the organization than they were prior to the screw up.

If recovery is such a critical element in building customer loyalty, why are there very few organizations that have a recovery service strategy? I suspect it’s because no one likes to admit that they will have a service OOPS! from time to time; they pride themselves on trying to get it right the first time.

But if you know that mistakes will happen from time to time — and they will — and that there is tremendous strategic value in recovering well — and there is — why wouldn’t you have a plan on the actions to take when the event happens?

In my past role as Business Services VP with a major telecommunications company, one of the elements of our service strategy was: ‘If we fail, Recovery will be our #1 priority’.

We had a specific recovery plan that, for each customer segment, provided the range of recovery actions that could be considered to respond to an OOPS! and the level of recovery investment necessary given the value customers represented to the company — the higher the value, the more robust the recovery actions requiring greater investments.

And substantial training was given to all employees to ensure they understood the power of the strategy and what to do when a screwup occurred.

5 key takeaways

▪️Recovery = fix it and do the unexpected.
▪️Do something personal; make it relevant and compelling.
▪️Know your customers’ secrets.
▪️Execute the recovery process in less than 24 hours.
▪️Build a detailed recovery strategy.

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

• Posted 1.20.20 at 12:29 am by Roy Osing
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October 7, 2019

5 deadly acts that will make a toxic customer relationship

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5 deadly acts that will make a toxic customer relationship.

A toxic relationship is a relationship characterized by behaviours exhibited by one party that are emotionally damaging to another.

We hear about toxic personal relationships where one person inflicts emotional and sometimes physical pain on their partner, but toxicity isn’t limited to people relationships; it’s also related to organizations, and the relationship they have with their customers.

A toxic service relationship is damaging to both the customer because of how they are treated by the organization, and to the organization itself as unhappy customers typically move to another supplier with repeated mistreatment.

Feelings should be the judge

Toxicity should be viewed as THE criteria to observe and judge the relationship an organization has with its customers because it focuses on the EMOTIONS stirred up in the customer — it expresses how the customer FEELS about how they are being treated.

A toxic service environment in an organization is manifested by behaviours that annoy, frustrate, anger, sadden, infuriate, exasperate, irk, vex, and piss off the people who come into contact with it everyday.

In my 30+ years leading business organizations that had an extremely heavy service component; I learned that you lived or died on how you served customers.

I learned that these 5 characteristics that, if left unattended, will destroy any customer relationship.

1. Distain for humans

Ever talk to someone in an organization who treated you with a bad attitude? Who talked down to you? Who had absolutely no interest in what you had to say?

Unfortunately we’ve all had the experience of engaging with an employee who really didn’t want to talk to us.
These people really don’t like people and yet they are in the position of having to engage with other people.

In a heartbeat, this person can destroy value because they lack empathy and caring for fellow humans; they quite frankly don’t give a sh##.
Strange that a service employee that would rather be taking inventory or filling out requisitions would be given the keys to the organization’s brand vault.

The recruitment process in toxic environments is wrong. It doesn’t place a priority on the skills and attitude necessary to create miraculous service moments with customers.

It doesn’t probe whether or not someone has the innate desire to care for others, because that’s what amazing service requires.
If just ONE of your customer servers doesn’t like people, you are on your way to having toxic relationships with your most valuable assets.

2. Outsourced call centers

Organizations that don’t manage their call centers well nurture toxic behaviour even though they believe they are doing the right thing.

The problem is, it’s the right thing for THEM and not their customers. They use a call center to manage costs efficiently not to build customer loyalty by creating memorable customer experiences.

Two specific call center attributes, in my view, contribute to toxicity — wait times and fluency in the english language.

How on earth can you say “Your call is important to us” and force someone to wait for a service rep for 45 minutes? It’s a joke really. The fact is (I ran call centers), staffing a call center is all about cost, not level of service even though they would claim the opposite.

Because if the staffing criteria WERE based on providing a high level of service your call would be answered in less that a minute — my target was to answer 80% of the incoming calls within 10 seconds (3 telephone rings).

The second issue I have with call centers is the ability of some reps to engage in an understandable conversation.
To be honest, I can’t understand many of them because of their strong foreign accents. They may have passed english exams but they can’t converse with a customer in a smooth way.

As a result I get annoyed and frustrated as my needs go unmet.
Unfortunately, few organizations use call centers to build customer relationships; they create toxic behaviour.

3. Dumb rules

Many organizations design their policies to control customer engagement rather than to make it easy and enjoyable. They decide that the needs of the organization come before taking care of their customers.

A statement from customer servers like “You can’t ... because it’s not our policy” is evidence that what the customer wants won’t be accommodated because of a rule that satisfies a different purpose.

Often these dumb policies that made no sense to the customer. They are rigid and strict and serve the organization only.

Toxic behaviour is expressed by negatives like “You can’t” or “Sorry but…” Healthful behaviour, on the other hand, leads with “Of course”, “Yes” and “Sure, we can do that”.

4. No power

In toxic serving environments frontline employees rarely are empowered to make decisions on customer requests that are not consistent with rules and policies.
They are escalated to a supervisor for resolution.

In my experience the process is slow and cumbersome: the service rep explains why the customer can’t do what they want —> the customer is annoyed and insists —> the rep goes looking for a supervisor —> the customer explains again what they want —> the supervisor explains why the customer can’t do what they want —> customer gets more annoyed and insists —> the supervisor either maintains the “no” position or gives in —> the customer is still annoyed regardless of the outcome because of the process they were forced to go through.

Ironically, the policy to escalate “deviant matters” to a supervisor has no positive customer outcome, and furthermore the employee feels neutered because they provided no value to the engagement process; they looked like an idiot in front of the customer because they couldn’t solve their problem.

5. Rewarding non-loyalty

Toxic cultures are more interested in acquiring more customers; they spend less time on honouring and rewarding the ones they currently have. After all, why invest the money when you already have the customer? False logic and extremely short sighted.

So special deals like “Leave your current supplier and come over to us for 3 months free service” are offered to prospects but the offer is not made available to existing customers.
With such behaviour how can any organization claim they put their customers first? It’s a dishonest proposition.

Healthy environments make new deals and special promotions available to existing loyal customers first — loyalty is rewarded before a new customer.

Promotions and low price deals are typically marketing decisions but they are integral to maintaining intimate customer relationships and therefore marketing needs to join the serving team.

Toxicity kills customer relationships and yet so many organizations practice unhealthy behaviour every day.

Stay on the lookout for these symptoms and be prepared to change your behaviour immediately if you respect your loyal customers.

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

• Posted 10.7.19 at 04:18 am by Roy Osing
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