Putting The Blog on Hold

There doesn’t seem to be much to add to this blog at this time and it doesn’t look like I get much in the way of readership. Prove me wrong! Let me know. In the meantime, I am going to freeze this project until an as-yet unknown future date. Thanks!

Is Customer Service a Downturn Lifejacket?

So we’re past Black Friday, and now officially into Christmas shopping territory. We’re also supposedly deep into a recession, maybe even edging into a depression. I was not able to partake in the great Black Friday fun and games myself due to work, but talking to people who were it did not seem to them that the recession was really biting. Plenty of people were out shopping at incredibly early hours on Friday and as much merchandise was moving as usual for the post-Thanksgiving sales.

The thing that has come to my mind over the last few weeks is this: can giving good Customer Service save a company from the downturn? I ask this question because I have personally noticed that in restaurants, gas-stations, and other smaller retail stores the staff have suddenly become a lot more polite and eager to help. Is this the management telling them to pull out all the stops or is this the staff themselves desperate to keep their jobs when everyone from Citigroup to Aston Martin¹ are laying off people? Even the company I work for has had its share of “job realignments” since the summer, partly due to a change in the company itself but also due to the economy.

Will smiling a little more often, or saying please/thankyou to everyone, or just being more eager to assist customers really make a difference? I guess we’ll wait and see. But then, you have to ask yourself this: why does it only matter when jobs are on the line and business is shaky? Why can’t people be nice and friendly the rest of the time? Has our society descended the capitalist ladder into greed and materialism so far that being nice to people and helping others is only a lifejacket to be worn in the roughest seas?

¹http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7759239.stm

When you just can’t swipe anymore

I have a question for anyone who’s worked in a retail establishment within the last five years or so. What is the difference between swiping someone’s debit card details as opposed to punching the numbers in manually? Recently I’ve had trouble with the magnetic stripe on my card and it’s very sensitive as to which places it will scan and which places it won’t. I am finding more and more shops, gas-stations and restaurants refusing to take my card because it won’t swipe; even though the card itself is valid, not out of date, and has money behind it.

Is there some law/policy about punching card numbers I’m not aware of? It seems a big secret because everytime I ask, I get told, “oh it’s just policy that we cannot enter cards manually“.

My understanding has always been that if a retail establishment has a merchant agreement with Visa; they are required under that agreement to accept my card if the card is valid, not out of date and has not be disqualified or withheld. Am I wrong? Should I be complaining to Visa about these lazy merchants? Please, tell me…

Just when you least expect it…

Just when you least expect to get some awesome customer service (see November 5th 2008), something amazing happens that makes you rethink everything.

I speak of none other than my recent experience with a very polite, courteous and totally useless customer service rep at Hewlett-Packard. Despite going through twelve levels of customer satisfaction training with me she was totally unable to grasp what my call had been about and was at a loss how to help me.

The following day I called the regular help desk number, played follow-the-phone-tree for about 15 minutes and was finally routed as expected, to a customer service desk in India. However, the person I spoke to there was not only charming, courteous and cheerful; he was also helpful, intelligent, and keen to see my issues resolved. He constantly engaged me in general conversation, talked about the weather, and about business in general. He checked and double-checked my service request and eventually confirmed all the information I needed, promised me a solution to my issue and (24 hours later, thanks to UPS), the part I needed to fix a computer was on my desk. Whereas I had been screaming to get back the wasted 45 minutes of my life, just a day before, this time I was smiling, content, and able to go on with the rest of my day.

What happens online….should stay online!

As part of my job as a technical support technician, I am expected to deal with defective computers, and replacement parts etc. This usually involves me going to the Hewlett-Packard website, entering some information about the product, stating the problem and submitting a case report; which they usually turn around within 24 hours and send me the replacement parts. The internet working like it should.

Today I was not so lucky. I had a phone call from a very efficient and business-like lady informing me that she was my “case manager” from HP. I didn’t know I had a case manager and wasn’t even sure why I needed one. Getting that information out of her was harder than I would have thought.

Eventually I manage to get her to tell me that she’s calling because I had submitted a request to have an AC-power adapter replaced on a laptop. Yes, I had. She’s calling because it’s their policy to follow up on customer service issues. This surprised me, nobody from HP had ever called before. Then she informs me that it’s her policy to call back all retail customers on warranty issues. Except, this was not a retail issue, this was a corporate issue. She wasn’t totally sure why I had filed the request online; her information did not state the problem I was having. That was too bad because I had a print out of the case I submitted and it clearly stated the problem with the computer. She was hazy too on the model of the laptop involved and the part number. Once she had got those straight she informed me that the laptop computer in question was a retail model that was sold in Germany during 2007 and that although it was still under warranty, I’d have to supply a credit card as “collateral” against the replacement.

Germany. Strange, though, that this laptop had been bought on a corporate account, probably in Massachussets or New Jersey, certainly not in Germany. I told her that I didn’t have to give a credit card before; and she seem puzzled by this. Maybe it was because this was a retail product? Which it wasn’t….

Eventually, after two lengthy periods on hold with some of the most disjointed and broken up hold muzak I’ve ever been forced to endure, she came back and told me that I had entered the product number incorrectly into their website. No I had not. I informed her that I was reading it back from a print out from the very web site I had submitted the request into. The numbers didn’t match what she had. I was back on hold for more muzak.

After another five minutes she came back; by now her soft, customer-service voice had turned into a more annoyed, irritable drone. Seems that someone in HP had given her some bum information and that I should have been talking to the corporate team and not the retail team. Well, I informed her bluntly, you did call me!

After about 45 minutes of this, she decided that she couldn’t help me any further and that she was referring my case back to the corporate team; which is what should have happened anyway. That was 45 minutes of my life I won’t ever get back. I still do not have the replacement parts I need. Maybe HP need to look at their customer-service website and fix a few holes in that as well as their products?

You’re invited…….again!

I am quite excited to share some news about my favorite store, BestBuy, and this time it’s not bad. Yesterday I received another of those exclusive private shopping invitations in the mail; inviting me (and a friend/partner) to shop after hours at BestBuy when the store would only be open to Exclusive Members. This time however, they actually took the trouble to see where I lived and invited me to the three nearest stores here in Maine! (see previous post). However, looking at what they are actually offering in terms of “give aways” and “specials” it doesn’t even seem worth going.

Blue Shirt

What concerns me even more is that the store will be crawling with blue-shirts with a captive audience just dying to harrass and maul me. I just wish that big-box stores would learn that if you leave customers alone instead of climbing all over them, they are more likely to buy something. Being asked by 15 different store clerks “Can I help you find what you’re looking for?” and having to tell each one individually that you’re “just browsing” drives me crazy. Then they stalk the aisles, looking at you as if “just browsing” means you’re a secret shoplifter and/or terrorist who’s going to ruin their Sunday afternoon.

To be fair, it’s not just BestBuy who suffers from this: most of the large electronics retailers have the same problem. Strange how it seems to be just electronics stores that have this endemic issue. When I lived in England, Dixons, Currys and Lasky’s and even PC World all suffered from the “can we help you” syndrome. Ironically though, when you really do need to find a blue shirt to help you locate a product or explain why two identical items are different prices, you can never find one who is available; even though seventeen of them are congregated around the HDTV stand trying to explain to a customer why HDMI cables are better than potato salad for getting hi-def pictures.

It seems to me that they train their staff with the simple assumption that anyone walking through the sliding doors is a total idiot who knows nothing about computers, video, photography or televisions and so they have to pounce on you and try to sell you something they think you want to buy. The saddest part is that in my experience, 90% of those blue-shirts know less about electronics, computers, televisions, toasters and cameras than I do.  Kudos however to BestBuy this week for at least knowing where I live.

Customer Service: The Frosting on the Cake

A couple of years ago I put together a customer service instructional at the company I worked for. I was beginning to notice that many of the new-hires coming into the call center had little or no background in customer-service and our training department was doing very little to rectify that beyond trying to impress their own idea of what customer-service should look like on those people. I worked on this guide independently, and then presented it to the company as a possible training module. It was never used. So I have decided to post it here with the hope that someone can gain benefit from it. Although it was written with the call center in mind, its ideas cover all aspects of giving good customer service.

Customer Service: The Frosting on the Cake

A look at the principles of customer-service from a different angle

1. What is customer service?
2. What does it matter to me?
3. So what can 1 do about it?
4. Putting the Frosting on the Cake

Introduction

This training exercise makes the assumption that you are technically adept in the day-to-day work you do. This training also assumes that you know how to use any systems your company provides and  that you know the mechanics and structure of a telephone call in the context of the call center. What it is intended to do is put the frosting on the cake. It is designed to highlight some of the things you can do to put pizazz into your calls and score extra points in call coaching and at the same time improve your overall outlook on the job you do. The difference between an okay call and a great call comes down to your customer service skills, which are sometimes referred to as soft skills, as opposed to hard skills which are those you use to actually do your job.

Ia.    What is Customer Service?

Customer service is defined as the set of behaviors that a business undertakes during its interaction with its customers. This can be at on a company level or at an individual level. We are interested with customer service at the individual level: your level. Before we can apply that set of behaviors to customers we need to ascertain who our customers are:

• Are the people you speak to everyday on the telephone your customers?
• Are the clients who you service your customers?
• Is the person sitting next to you your customer?
• Is your supervisor or boss your customer?
• Are you a customer of your boss/supervisor?

You should have answered yes to all of the above. Anyone who receives a service from another person is a customer of that person. If you go to Wal-Mart then naturally you are their customer. If your colleague comes to you for information on something you are working on, then they are your customers. The way the customers are treated should be no different. The way you interact with them should be no different.

lb.    Who needs to know about Customer Service?

Anyone who has customers! For anyone working in an office environment that means all of us. Let us take this a step further and look at a customer-client relationship in detail:

Look at the chart above. Think about the relationships each company has with the other companies. Think about how each company needs to treat its partners in order to supply International Products LLC with the widgets it needs. Think about what happens when one of the companies in this group does not treat its partners properly. For example, think about what would happen if any of the suppliers fails to supply its products to one of its customers? What would happen to any of its subordinate suppliers if it loses a contract due to bad customer service?

Look at The Bouncy Rubber Company in the chart. If they were to give bad customer service to The ACME Widget Company, ACME may decide to take its business to another supplier. Not only does this hurt the business of Bouncy Rubber and the people who work for them, but also in turn it affects the business of the Central American Rubber company who supply them with the raw product.

What does this have to do with you? Remember that each and every action you take can in some way affect the perception people have of the company you work for. If you drop the ball or do something that takes the shine off the service you provide, the resulting effects could ripple all the way down the chain. Think about that when you next have a customer-client interaction.

2b.    Why does it matter to me?

If you are asking this question then something is already wrong! It matters to you for one important reason: your job is on the line every time you have a customer-client interaction. If a company decides that it no longer wants to do business with [insert name of your company here] for example, they may have to downsize. Downsizing usually means that jobs are lost and yours could be one of them. Also the customer-service industry is performance driven. If you are in the kind of job where you are evaluated monthly and annually and scored as to how well you are performing in your job (and most people in customer-service are), and you are not meeting expectations in the service levels that you provide, the company will not wish to keep you.

Secondly, everyone should take pride in the work they do and the type of service you provide to your customers is your “product”. The service industry rarely has a tangible product the same way that manufacturing industries do. When an automobile assembly worker sees a vehicle rolling off the production lines, he/she can take some pride in knowing they  make or assembled part of that vehicle. A chef, for example, can take pride knowing the meal they cooked will be both enjoyed right now, and hopefully talked about for many days coming. You cannot rely on that. What you can rely on is providing service good enough that people will simply request to use your services again.

The best compliment someone in the service industry can receive is: “I spoke to Jack/Jill yesterday and he/she was so helpful and so pleasant I would really love to talk to them again and conduct my business with them.”

3a.    So what can I do about it?

There are many ways you can improve the level of customer service you give to your customers. You need to set a benchmark and understand what level you are at now. Listening to recorded phone calls is the most obvious way of benchmarking one’s performance in this area. Do you sound eager to help? Do you sound enthusiastic? Are you making your customers feel as though they are the only customers you have?

Or do you sound dejected and run down? Do you put yourself across to your customers with an attitude of nonchalance or apathy? Here is a list of a few things that can affect your ability to give good customer service on the telephone:

• Arriving at work late, rushed and feeling hurried
• Arriving at work with a head full of non-work related issues or worries
• Coming to work when sick
• Joining in with office gossip or being part of the rumor-mill
• Feeling overworked and under appreciated by the company or those around you
• Being disorganized and cluttered in your work environment
• Just not caring about the job you do

Which of these things are in your control? Arriving late is sometimes out of your control. When the traffic is bad or your car has broken down there is little you can do to turn the clock back! That can lead straight to you coming in with a head full of negative thoughts or distracting thoughts. Remember why you are coming to work though: to work. Check your baggage at the door. Try to focus and pull yourself together before you deal with your first customer of the day.

Coming to work sick is often unavoidable. We are all under pressure to fulfill our schedules and sometimes you have to come in even when you are not feeling your best. This is when you have to work the hardest to maintain a high level of customer service. It can be done. The secret is to focus on your work and not your ailments. Taking your mind off the way you feel may also help you feel better!

Joining in with office gossip and being part of the rumor mill is not a good thing to do and is something you can control. Bad feeling breeds contempt and whether you realize it or not, bad attitude will creep into your calls.

Feeling overworked or stressed about your job is something you need to address with your manager before it spills over into the work you do. By then it’s usually too late and you need to work harder to fix the problem.

Being disorganized or cluttered in your work environment is a big problem. If you cannot quickly and efficiently locate papers, memos, books or other information you need to do your job, you are going to feel stressed and under pressure. Having things arranged in such a way that you can find what you need removes the stress and helps you service your customers more effectively.

Finally, if you just do not care about the job you do at all, that is something outside of the scope of this training and you should perhaps be discussing it with your manager!

Role Play Scenarios

Role playing is an effective and (hopefully) fun way to realize some of the points mentioned in this guide. Taking time out to work through real-life situations and then analyze them is the best way to improve the level of customer service you can give.

1. Look at the Clients and Customers diagram from the previous section. Person #1 is the Purchasing Manager for the ACME Widget Company. For some reason, their order of 20 tons of refined rubber did not arrive this morning. The factory is at a stand still. He/she needs to make a telephone call to the Rubber Company and find out what is going on. Person #2 is a customer-service representative in the sales department of the Bouncy Rubber Company who will take the call. Person #3 is a representative of the Central American Rubber Co-Operative, the company who supplies raw rubber to Bouncy. How does this scenario play out? Who is the customer of whom? How does customer service come into the resolution of this scenario?
2. This time, Person #2, who is essential the middle of the chain, has abandoned their customer service skills. They no longer care about what happens. Run the same scenario again and see what difference it makes to the solution. How do Person #1 and Person #3 feel about each other now?
3. Person #1 owns an expensive sports car. It was making a strange noise so he/she took it into the Main Street Auto Garage to get it fixed. Person #2 is the auto mechanic who worked on the car. Person #1 is not satisfied that the job was done properly and his/her car is still noisy. Person #3 is the manager of the Auto Garage (and has almost unlimited resources). What customer service skills do person #2 and person #3 need to use to resolve this issue.
4. Person #1 works for a travel company. It is late in the day. Everyone has gone home except Person #1 who is in the office alone. Person #2 has booked flights from NYC to London. An email has just come into the office to tell Person #1 that there was an error at the airline and the flights were overbooked. Person #1 has to telephone Person #2 and tell him/her that unfortunately they cannot fly to London as expected. Take note of what skills come into play during this call.

Review these role play situations and decide 3 ways in which you feel you can improve your customer service skills going forwards:

1. ____________________________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________________________

4a. Putting the Frosting on the Cake

There is a famous story (possibly more anecdotal than true) about Harrods of Knightsbridge, a famous department store in London that almost everyone has heard of. Back in the late 1800s it was fashionable for the wealthy to own everything they could from vast British Empire. The story tells of Harrods supplying two live adult elephants to a customer who demanded them. Later on, Harrods frequently supplied cars from America to a British public eager to own them. They became famous for their ability to provide almost anything upon demand, at a price.

Customer service has moved on a lot since then but we still have the expectation that a company will do anything for us at the drop of a hat. When you are on the other side of the desk, it’s frustrating that customers feel this way. After all, you are the supplier, you should be able to do anything for them. Why can’t you?

Good customer service does not stop when the ability to fulfill demands stops. You may not be able to supply your customers live elephants, or even Rubber Widgets by the close of business, but you can supply them with an endless source of courtesy, understanding, helpfulness and education. If you can make your customers see why you cannot provide a service or product without making them feel like you are just rejecting them, you will have earned their respect and helped them bring their expectations in line with your own.  To put the frosting on the cake means to understand what your customers’ expectations are, and then trying everything within your power to exceed those expectations. You may succeed or you may fail but you have tried. You might not be directly selling elephants to the British public, but you are selling the desire to do business with the company you work for. If you can sell this to your customers, half the battle is won.

Final Exercise

1. Give examples of excellent customer service you’ve experienced and explain why you remember those experiences.
2. Give examples of the worst customer service you’ve experienced and what did you learn from the experience.
3. Give examples of how you, if you were in charge, would change the attitude of people who work in a store, shop, restaurant or bank you often do business with.

Now answer the question again:    who are your customers?

Is there anybody out there….?

It may be paranoia but the Emelano Experience feels like it’s talking to itself. If anyone is reading this, or better yet, subscribing to this blog, please talk to me: either leave a comment in the space provided below or send an email directly by clicking on the “Contact Us” link in the side bar.

Thank you!

Live Fast, Die Angry

There was a time, a hundred years ago, when time ran slower. Before computers, before cell-phones and before high speed travel when people’s expectations of daily life were much less hurried. Some time ago I found a copy of a department store catalog from Jordan, Marsh & Company from about 1900. One of the things that caught my eye was that orders were placed by sending a letter to them (not a pre-made order form) along with the remittance and shipping.  You were then politely asked to allow a couple of weeks for processing of your order before your goods would be shipped back to you. If you sent too much money to cover shipping, they would credit you with the surplus.

This was not the most convenient way to order goods from Boston, but I suppose if you lived in a town in Maine that did not have a decent sized department store of its own, you did not have much choice; after all, in 1900 it wasn’t like you’d hop in the SUV and drive 50 miles to the mega-mall-big-box-store to buy what you want!

I still remember my mother ordering from catalogs like this. She didn’t own credit cards or even a checkbook. She would fill out orders and mail them off with a money-order and per the advertising “Please allow 28 days for processing and delivery”, she would get the clothes/shoes she wanted. If 28 days elapsed and you had not seen your package, a telephone call to their customer-service department would usually resolve and placate the customer. This was, of course, when companies like that had their own customer-service departments with real people who also worked in the mail rooms and finance offices and fulfillment rooms and knew how the company worked and who was responsible.

Then came the internet. Three clicks on a website and you could order books and CDs which could be delivered to your house within 24-48 hours. The need to go into town had been replaced. However, not only did you no longer need to leave your house to buy things, your expectation of when you’d get those things became more important. It was no longer satisfactory to wait 48 hours to receive goods. When it came to booking vacations, flights, hotels, or buying insurance, retirement benefits, and other services, waiting 48 for confirmation of those services started to become tiresome. You wanted to be able to know immediately if you had bought something that you had it.

If you needed to send a form, or paperwork, or a check to a company, you sent it overnight it via UPS/FedEx etc. If it wasn’t in their hands 17 hours later you wanted to know why. If they didn’t return your phone call within 2 hours of you calling them, you wanted to know why. Why did you have to wait? What was the delay?

Now you call up and complain that something has taken over 24 hours to process. You are speaking to a supervisor on the phone. It’s the first time you’ve ever spoken to that person yet they should know who you are! You’re in their computer database! You don’t want to have to wait 2 hours for a call back with more information. Why can’t they resolve your problem right now? You’ve been on the phone 10 minutes and it’s not resolved yet? Why? If the phone rings for more than 2 minutes before your call is answered you get angry.

Breathe! Slow down! Chill out! Why does the world need to move at a million miles a second? Why do you need to know that your order has been accepted and goods shipped right now? How does knowing that improve your life? If an email doesn’t come through within 10 seconds of you placing your order, is that somehow going to mess up the rest of your day? If you cannot get a cell phone signal where you are standing, do you scream at the phone or do you walk 200 yards down the street to where maybe you can get a signal?

Relax. Please, relax! Living fast and dying angry is not the answer. I am not saying that technology is a bad thing. I love the fact that we have high speed internet, email, instant messaging, cell-phones, movies on demand. Everything on demand! But we don’t need to demand it all the time, right now. If we all went back to a more leisurely way of life, stress would evaporate, people would be happier, healthier, and probably richer than they are today. We look at tribal groups on TV: those guys living in mud huts in New Guinea. They are living in the iron age, most of them.  Their lives are still governed by family, respect, culture, tradition, taking time to enjoy every day and appreciating what the world has to offer. Why do we all like watching those kinds of documentaries? Simply, because it reminds us of how we were; and we all have a secret longing to go back to living the simple life like they do.

The Stupidity Epidemic – part 1

Dear readers, as another summer comes to a close, I am seeing signs everywhere that the world as we know it is coming to an end. Gasoline prices are starting to creep up again just as they were falling. Over the weekend, my local gas-station’s price rose from $3.59 a gallon to $3.77; literally overnight. I expect that given the latest damage from Hurricane Ike, we’ll be back over $4.00 a gallon within a week. Then I also notice in the news that financial giant Lehman Brothers are filing for bankruptcy. I think it will be only a matter of time before it’s not the Large Hadron Collider that sucks us all into a black-hole, but the world economy.

Having said all that; there is something else going on in the world which is even more disturbing than the financial downturn: the increase of the Stupidity Epidemic sweeping the world. It seems that every day the general public are becoming dumber and dumber; not through a lack of intelligence but from what I will loosely call “I couldn’t give a shit syndrome“. Increasingly, people are becoming islands; wrapping themselves up in their own affairs to the point that nobody cares about anyone else anymore, and respect and compassion seem to have evaporated.  I could go on about this all day, and over the coming weeks you may well see more of this on my blog; but for now, as a prime example of this epidemic, here’s a story from the BBC:

Pet bunny’s ears prompt 999 call

A woman dialed 999¹ because a rabbit she bought via a newspaper advert did not have floppy ears, Central Scotland Police have said.The force is urging the public not to dial 999 unless they are faced with a genuine emergency. The reminder comes after operators, who receive 34,000 999 calls a year, said the number was being dialld for “wholly inappropriate reasons“.

One call was from a woman splashed by a car which drove through a puddle. The force said staff were verbally abused after challenging her for using the emergency line for her complaint. Another man dialld 999 to ask call center staff for the postcode to Grangemouth police station.

Chief Inspector Alan Stewart, of the force communications and control center, said people who disregarded advice only to use the number in an emergency were putting lives at risk.

“Whilst officers and staff are dealing with these frivolous matters that a member of the public has deemed so serious as to call 999, they are not dealing with genuine emergency calls. It is unbelievable that anyone should phone 999 to report being soaked by a passing car, ask for a postcode or report that the item bought from a newspaper advert was not as described. In such circumstances life can be at stake and as swift and efficient a response as possible is required to ensure public safety. Nuisance calls to the 999 system put that response at risk.”

¹ 999 is the telephone number used in the United Kingdom for emergency services: Police, Fire, Ambulance and Coast Guard. It is used in the same way as 911 in the United States.

© BBC MMVIII