The Customer Experience (PART 11)

The Customer Experience: How To Wow Your Customers (PART 11)

TRANSCRIPT: “Steve, I’m doing it. Steve, I’m doing it, I’m empowering the frontline.” Great. If you are like a lot of the call centers that I work with, you are rewarding the wrong metrics. See, you need to remove incentives that value speed over quality. It’s just insane.

See, most customer service call centers still emphasize metrics such as average call time. If it’s a customer service center, average call time is meaningless. It really is. I don’t care if a call takes five hours to solve, I care about resolution, I care about happy customers, I care about customers for life. See, you are better off measuring resolved versus escalated issues and bonusing people, incentivizing people on resolved versus escalated issues versus trying to keep their calls down to under two minutes.

Why empower the frontline? We talked about people that don’t want to be transferred. See, escalating or deflecting to another department, that compounds the issue. According to Zen Desk, when asked what made a customer service interaction bad? 72% of consumers blamed having to explain a problem to multiple people. That’s an issue. “Okay, Steve, we solved an issue. Am I done?” No. Don’t just solve the current issue with the customer. Let’s head off to the next one.

First, we need to ask this customer, “Are there any another issues lingering?” “Mr. Stauning, is there anything else I can help you today? Is there any other issues I can solve for you today?” Then second, we’ve got to learn from this one and prevent it from happening again. That means we need some sort of feedback loop that it gets back to the frontline who first dealt with this customer or it gets back to the people who make the rules that this customer was unhappy with.

“Now by the way, I’ve got a customer service department, Steve, I got to fill it with people. Who should fill these roles?” Let me give you a seven great traits of a good customer service rep. Number one, they are patient, they are patient with customers. They know how to treat people like orphans. How patient would you with an orphan? You wouldn’t make them speed up, tell me what you want, tell me what you want. You are sitting on Santa’s lap? No, you be patient with them.

Good customer service reps are patient, also attentive, meaning they listen, meaning they pay attention to the customer. They genuinely care, remember, just like they would about an orphan. They are also very clear communicators. Now I’m not talking, I don’t care if they are from another country, I don’t care whatever, but their action does not get in the way of making the connection, and they also don’t use a lot of millennial speak or things like that that confuse your customers. They speak clearly, they enunciate properly and they make sense when they talk.

They also possess product knowledge. See, if you are going to expect people to solve issues, they’ve got to have product technology, they’ve got to be able, not be experts but they got to be close to that. They have to have the ability to read others just like a salesperson, they need to read other people, understand what they can say and can’t say to a customer, and they need to stay goal-focused as goal focused closers because you want them to get off the phone when it’s resolved, but you want them to say something like, “Okay, Mr. Stauning, it sounds like if we do ABC123, that’s going to resolve the issue. Is that correct?” That’s what a closer would say.

The customer says, “Yeah, that’s right.” “Great, Mr. Stauning, that’s what we are going to do. We are going to do ABC123, and I’m going to put it in motion right now. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” “Nope. That’s it. Thank you, you solved my issue.” Done.

All right, now let’s teach him also that words matter. We need to eliminate negative phrases like we can’t, we don’t or it doesn’t, things like that. For example, customer service agent on call center, here is a negative phrase they might use, “We can’t switch your plan until the next billing cycle.” How about this one? I can say that same thing but do it positively. “I’ll gladly switch your plan at the start of the next billing cycle.” Done. Versus, “We can’t switch your plan until the next billing cycle.” I want to say it positively, “I will gladly switch your plan at the start of the next billing cycle.” See, we need to find the can, not the can’t in this.

Finally, “Steve, it’s great, we are doing a great job, we are solving customer issues. Is there anything I can do to generate some good reviews while I fix what’s wrong?” Yes, there is and I’m glad you asked it. There are 5-Star Reputation Management training videos at two sites, 100% free. SteveStauning.com and UndeniableAdvantage.com, just look for 5-Star Reputation Management, just doing the search boxes you’ll find all the videos that are there that can help your team with that.

Let’s wrap this up today, I want to thank you for joining me today for this live video training, Undeniable Advantage. I just want to give you our Twitter handle so that you can connect with me on Twitter, you can follow me @SteveStauning, you can also follow us @UDAdvantage.

If you’ve got any questions that come from this training, please contact me through SteveStauning.com, just go to SteveStauning.com, look under Steve Stauning, find Contact Steve, fill out that information, I’ll be happy to answer your questions. Make sure that you stay in tune with all of our Undeniable Advantage live video webcasts, and we look forward to seeing you on our next webcast. Thank you for joining me.