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.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014
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.
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.
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