Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Contact Center Trenches: Insights from Call Observations

I worked in Customer Experience Management for more than a year before I sat in a contact center and observed a call.  It was one of those reflective moments when every half-baked idea I had been holding met with reality.  All of my sales presentations of the previous year flashed before my eyes and I cringed thinking about the things I had said to my prospects that were so obviously wrong-headed and it occurred to me; they must have known it.  Ouch!

It is easy to claim that your product can offer efficiency gains and an improved customer experience when dealing in the abstract.  The challenges that contact center managers and directors deal with however are much more nuanced.  I found that I had broken one of my own rules of professional selling: I didn't know my customer's business or truly understand their challenges.  I now make it a point to see everyone face-to-face and, whenever possible, spend a day or part of a day observing calls.

Here are just a few of the humbling insights I have picked-up during my career.

1. Agents are very good at what they do.
Sit in a call center for a few hours and you will be amazed at the speed, proficiency, and professionalism of the contact center agent.  In fact, we do them a disservice by calling them "agents"; which is probably where our misconceptions begin.  For this post I'll just say representative, each organization has their own title and for good reason.  Anyway, I fell into the trap of seeing "agents" as interchangeable parts, a la Henry Ford.  If I'm in the contact center there is a good chance that the organization is struggling with disparate systems and multiple desktop applications that the representative must navigate during a call.  My assumption was that customers are enduring long hold times and a disjointed experience as the representative bumbles from one application to the next.  What I have seen is what you should expect to see: highly-skilled professionals deftly moving from one application to the next while maintaining a jovial disposition with the customer who, from the other end, has no idea just how many keystrokes and mouse-clicks are occurring.  Certainly there are efficiency gains to be had, but the improvements are likely to be at the front end by ramping-up new agents more quickly and in the back office with better reporting and analytics, not at the level of a seasoned representative who is probably close to their maximum efficiency already.  That is not to say that an experienced professional can't benefit from an improved desktop experience.  They can.  But the improvement would be in reducing their stress and frustration and subsequently reducing attrition.

2. Callers are terrible.  Shame on us.
After one day of observing calls I became a better caller.    I now try hard to quickly and concisely articulate my problem.  I try hard to have my account number, reference number, or any other identifier that I will likely need.  When I'm not satisfied with the answer I'm getting I realize the representative does not make policy and so I remain calm when I ask for an escalation.  And when I have had an extraordinary experience I let them know about it.  If the experience was good I always complete the post-call survey.  By the way, my new attitude has gotten me much better service and I find agents going way beyond their job description to help me.  Which leads to my last insight...

3. Representative want to make us happy.
Work in the job long enough and take enough abuse and you treasure those callers who are patient, prepared, and reasonable.  Not everyone who works in the service industry actually cares, but many of them do.  A call center is a community.  Good callers are celebrated and good service is rewarded.  They take ownership of our problems and empathize, not in a scripted, condescending way but the way you hope they do.  I observed a representative, just coming in for her shift, ask a supervisor about a customer and whether their issue was resolved.  It was obvious to me that she went to bed thinking about that customer and truly wanted to make them happy.

Knowing these things has changed the kinds of conversations I have with my prospects.  I no longer look at representatives as cogs in a machine. I am cognizant of the times when my solution will replace people and I pray it only means change and not lost jobs.  My approach is much more consultative now.  I was recently asked to fill-in a questionnaire from a prospect.  Sort of a mini RFQ.  One question stood out:  How Can Your Solution Make Us More Efficient?  Earlier in my career I would have jumped at the chance to answer that question.  My answer?  I don't know.  I need to learn about your environment and challenges.  I sure hope I get the chance.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Sales 101: The Importance of Integrity

During my sales career I have coached and mentored hundreds of new salespeople.  I would always start with Selling 101, tips for how to talk to customers and how to ask effective questions.  One thing I wished I had focused more on is the topic of integrity.  I admire those professionals I have worked with who will go to any length to take care of their customers, who never stop thinking of them, even long after the sale. This isn't just professionalism, this is integrity and it goes hand-in-hand with a service mindset. 

I have stunned colleagues in the past by walking away from business.  It seems counter intuitive.  As a salesperson, I personally invest in professional relationships and I genuinely like the people I do business with.  If I do not like someone we will never get to the "doing business" stage because it would never work.  People get into sales for lots of different reasons (usually the prospect of making lots of money) but you only stay in sales if you truly like people.  So when a prospect brings me an opportunity for which my product is not suited, I give it to them straight.

This is not to say that I have never made a mistake or never pursued a less-than-ideal opportunity.  But when that has happened in my career I treated it as a learning opportunity and tried not to repeat the same mistake.  Bad business is costly.  It saps your time and energy and damages your reputation.  Nothing is more disheartening than closing a deal with a customer you know will never be a reference and every customer should be willing to give you a reference once you have proven your value.

Salespeople have a reputation for being phony, for fostering relationships solely for personal gain.  Certainly you pursue relationships with people you hope to do business with, but that does not mean that each interaction is not genuine.  If business is a marathon rather than a sprint, then you cannot skip the first 15 miles.  When I make a new contact my goal is to understand their business and their challenges.  I do not walk into a first meeting with a product to pitch.  How could I?  I have not learned what their needs are yet.  Unless you sell a Swiss Army Knife, you will walk away from as many opportunities as you pursue because your product will not be a good fit for every customer.  Even better, you will give your prospect your honest assessment of their situation and recommend the product or company you believe will serve them well.   I do this often and it always creates a deeper and more profound relationship with my prospect; we move from being business acquaintances to being business friends.

If you have not done it lately, pick up the phone today and call a prospect from a deal you lost, a deal that went to a competitor.  Call to find out how things are going.  Do not call looking for problems or fishing for an opportunity, just demonstrate that you are still thinking about their business and their challenges and learn what they did to solve them.  Nothing elevates your mood and sets the tone for your day like doing the right thing.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

IVR Tuning: You Get What You Pay For

Ah, the dreaded tuning exercise.  Once the province of skilled professionals paid large sums to keep an IVR application performing and relevant, now in the hands of every business user with a cloud solution.  Raise your hand if you love tuning your IVR!  No one?  What about those fancy analytic tools you have that show you exactly where callers are abandoning the application?  Doesn't your reporting tool allow you to drill-down to individual calls and even listen to them?  Doesn't all that information make the tuning exercise easier?  More fun?

The truth is, people procrastinate or completely avoid work they do not enjoy (which is why I am writing this instead of preparing a slide deck).  Despite the powerful tools available to IVR administrators, poorly tuned applications, even ones with loops, dead-ends, and bad error handling, are easy to find.  There is a surreal clarity that comes from working in the customer experience field.  We tend to participate more with automation and are more keen at noticing errors and defects.  More typical users abandon much more quickly.  They rely on instinct much more than we do.  I think for the average customer, the minute they notice the IVR sounding like an IVR ("please listen carefully as these menu options have recently changed"), they start looking for the exit.  Their complaints about the automation tend to be less specific.  They will not tell the representative that there is an error on the third menu or that option 2 always takes you back to the beginning.  Instead they just "hate your automated system".  Now you know you have a problem.  You should have tuned your application sooner but there were five other projects that were more important, ones that you hated less.

This is an example of where the promise of cloud has let us down.  Your Vice President of Support bought the idea that IVR tuning was something that could be handled internally.  There is a great set of tools designed to identify problems and an easy design interface to make small changes. And without that line item for service and maintenance, the ROI looked even better.  One year later, after the rubber has met the road and the wheels have nearly fallen off, after the Service Director who recommended this system has moved-on to another job, no one remembers that self-management  was a big part of the justification for buying that cloud platform.  Time to call your vendor and buy some training so you can begin to get a handle on that participation rate.  Maybe in three months you can finally begin making those changes.

The cloud IVR space is saturated with companies promising ease-of-use and total self-management.  They have deceptively low setup fees (because all they are doing is creating a user account) and even templates to get you started.  If your needs are simple and your call volume is low then so is your risk.  Most of these vendors employ only a handful of Voice User Interface (VUI) designers and rarely have a Speech Scientist on staff.  They offer no one to turn to for regular tuning and do not have the expertise to diagnose performance problems.  Technology is important and a slick user interface makes for a very nice demo but they are no substitute for expertise, experience, and a culture of service.

The market is also proving this out.  As we see more and more consolidation these slick start-ups are being gobbled-up by the veterans who know how to support enterprise customers.  Multi-tenant is giving way to multi-instance (which is a nice way to say hosted) and executives are seeing that the improved customer experience of live agents dedicated to a specific channel (rather than elusive multi-tasking, multi-channel, super-agent) is preferable to the fuzzy ROI of self-management.

Large enterprise customers have always chosen vendors who stay engaged and provide application tuning support for their entire life cycle.  IVR tuning is an iterative process.  It never ends.  Reporting and analytics will alert you to when your application is falling below performance thresholds but only after it has begun to cost you money.  And unless you are skilled and experienced at tuning, you will be learning on the job, compounding your losses because the tuning exercise takes weeks or months when an expert could have done it in days.  Mid-market companies buy in to the idea that self-management is more affordable or is the only affordable option, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

A Rant On Social Support: If You Are Doing This - Stop!



  I am going to make this a brief one today.  Just venting really.  In my very first blog post on Multi-Channel CX (see it here) I talked about how companies can leverage multi-channel CX as a kind of force-multiplier; especially important if you are an underdog in your market and do not have deep pockets for a large contact center or a loyal user base willing to do half the work for you (crowd sourcing).

 Without naming names I would like to talk about one company that is violating the first rule of CX:  Do Not Make It Difficult For Your Customers To Get Support!

  Making it difficult to find your phone number is a bad practice.  Do not do it.  Sure if you have a phone number people will call you and that costs money.  You know what is worse?  When no one is calling you!  And that is the exact situation you will find yourself in if you force your customers down a prescribed support path not of their choosing - especially when that support path is ill-suited for their contact type.

  Take, for example, a technical trouble shooting call.  This kind of call is a dynamic human-to-human interaction with intense two-way communication.  "Please power the device off and back on.  Did you do it?  Great!  On to step two" etc. It should come as no surprise that this interaction would be best handled on a telephone call (I am excluding software support from this example where there is a well-established mode of handling technical support via email).  Forcing a customer to do this kind of trouble-shooting over chat is less than ideal.  Some may choose to take this path but it should not be your only available channel.  Making this your only option is also a bad practice.

  Why then would this company offer support (including technical troubleshooting) over Twitter where character limitations make for an even more disjointed customer experience?  Perhaps I am showing my age but when I use Twitter I do not expect rapid responses - at least not fast enough to handle a troubleshooting interaction.  I have observed the absolute worst use of social media for technical support with an average response time of 4 DAYS per tweet!  What should have been a 10 minute call has dragged on for more than 3 weeks.  Needless to say I have given up on this product and moved to a competitor.  This support experience tells me everything I need to know about where this company is focused - and it's not on the customer.

  In my earlier blog post I talked briefly about the Enterprise-as-Contact-Center concept which is a fantastic idea for the right companies.  This concept works well with the Social Channel as long as the requests are not as time sensitive as technical support.  By allowing your best and brightest to check-in to social queues one or two hours per day to share their energy and passion with your customers your company could truly differentiate themselves.  But using Twitter to deflect calls from a grossly understaffed support group is a recipe for disaster, lost customers, and lost revenue.