Tag Archives: Customer service

The Human Touch

Recently, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience. This sounds a lot like communications with customers I’ve seen over the years from all of the big ISPs – I can think of dozens of company messages telling customers that a big ISP cares about customer service.

What’s different about Mr. Sampath’s email is that he also included an email address where customers can contact him directly if they are having a problem that is not getting resolved. I have to assume this will use a different email address from the one he uses for normal emails, because it seems likely that his inbox will quickly fill with customer complaints.

This reminded me of an experience I had back in the early 1980s when I worked at Southwestern Bell. The company had an executive telephone hotline that was supposedly a direct line to the President for customers who knew the special number. Calls to this number were recorded and landed on the desk of somebody who happened to sit close to me. I would often overhear some of the complaints that came to the executive line, and they were the normal things you would expect – overbilling, botched installations, etc. Employees around the company responded quickly to every referral from the executive hotline.

I have to think that Mr. Sampath is doing something similar and has recreated the executive hotline using an email address. If Verizon customer service is indeed getting better, I assume anybody who makes a valid claim to that email will get some attention from elsewhere in Verizon. If that doesn’t happen, this will quickly be chalked up as another big company public relations ploy rather than an actual aid for frustrated customers.

I have to wonder how well this idea will work with such a gigantic company with coast-to-coast customers. I know at Southwestern Bell that no employee wanted to get the internal message from the executive suite that they had messed up. Will that work for a much bigger company?

People who run smaller ISPs, or other small businesses that deal with the public, will laugh at this article, because fielding customer issues is a daily part of every executive’s work day. It’s something that nobody loves doing, but it comes with operating a business. Every ISP hopes that employees can satisfy every customer so that the top guys never hear about problems. But the folks at Southwestern Bell many years ago figured out that there had to be a way for customers who aren’t satisfied with the routine solution to have an outlet to be heard.

This story has me thinking about how important the human touch is with customers – having a real person to talk to who can solve a problem. That question was prompted for me when I noticed that Verizon is touting that it has incorporated AI into the customer service process. I have to wonder if AI will be used to tackle problems sent to Mr Sampath’s email.

While big companies can pretend otherwise, we have not yet reached the time when an AI can provide the same quality response as a real person. My gut tells me that it will be a huge mistake for the big ISPs and carriers to take the human touch out of customer interactions. If so, that’s good news for the smaller companies that compete with big ISPs. I foresee that small ISP advertising will emphasize that customers can always talk to a real person.

 

Big ISPs Claim Great Customer Service

In late October, the FCC launched a “Notice of Inquiry that seeks information on current customer service practices to build a public record on the current state of customer support and ways that the FCC can “protect families and businesses that rely on these critical services.” The FCC sought comments from the public about broadband, cable, and telephone providers.

The associations for the big ISPs responded to the docket and basically said that their member companies offer great customer service. NCTA – The Internet and Television Association, which represents the big cable companies, filed comments that said that cable companies provide great service in today’s competitive market as a way to attract and retain customers. USTelecom, the lobbyist for the largest telcos, said that competition gives them no choice but to provide high-quality customer service.

I’ve written a few blogs over the years about the American Customer Service Index (ACSI), which measures customer satisfaction across all major industries each year. The ACSI historically ranked the ISP and cable industry at the bottom compared to other major industries. That put ISPs and cable companies below insurance companies, banks, and airlines in terms of customer satisfaction.

The current ACSI shows a lot of improvement over time for some parts of the industry. I looked back at the ACSI index from 2019 to make the following comparisons: The overall rating for ISPs since then increased from 62 to 71. This is due almost entirely to higher customer ratings today for fiber ISPs, at 76. Overall, cable companies improved from 62 to 68, although some cable companies still have low rankings, like Mediacom (61) and Optimum/Altice (63). The two biggest cable companies current rankings are Comcast (67) and Charter (68). Almost all other industries have rankings in the high 70s into the 80s.

One of the issues highlighted by the FCC inquiry suggests that ISPs should “offer live customer service support by phone within a reasonable time frame.” USTelecom responded by saying that telco online chatbots are quickly getting better at addressing customer needs.

The few smaller ISPs and municipal ISPs that made it into the ACSI survey show a high level of customer satisfaction – the public ire is aimed at the biggest companies only.

There were numerous filings in the FCC docket from groups representing the public. The filings documented customers who had long service outages and other significant problems. Comments were filed about the problems encountered by customers trying to resolve problems with online customer service. The California Public Utility Commission said in a filing that it believes that big ISPs don’t focus on customer service because they don’t have to – the CPUC said only 26% of California residents have a choice between two fast ISPs.

There was no telling where the FCC under Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel was headed with this docket, but there likely would have eventually been some guidelines or regulations defining good customer service. It seems almost certain that the issue will be dropped by the new FCC, since Republican-led FCCs have generally favored ISPs over the public.

Bad Customer Service as a Profit Center

There was a December article in Fast Company that spelled out what I’ve long suspected – that many big companies have lousy customer service on purpose – they want to make it hard for customers to get refunds or to drop service. The article was written by Anthony Dukes of USC and Yi Zhu of the University of Minnesota. The article is worth reading if you have the time to click through all of the links, which elaborate numerous ways that big companies abuse their customers.

This certainly rings true for the big ISPs. I harken back to the days of AOL, which was famous for making it a challenge to drop their service. Comcast has always had a reputation of making it hard for customers to break a bundle or leave the company for another ISP.

The article cites some interesting statistics. They claim that in 2013 that a study showed that the average home spent 13 hours per year disputing charges with customer service. That’s nearly two workdays of time, and it’s little wonder that people hate to call customer service.

Customer service at the big telcos and cable companies was never great, but in my time in the industry it’s gotten worse – the big ISPs are now rated at the bottom for customer satisfaction among all corporations. I think the big change in the industry came in the last few decades when the big ISPs got enamored with win-back programs – offering customers incentives to stop them from dropping service. Unfortunately, the ISPs tied employee compensation to the percentage of win-backs and there have been numerous articles published of ISP employees who would not let somebody drop service and who would keep a customer on the phone for an hour to convince them not to leave.

ISP customer service also took a downward spin when every call with a customer turned into a sales call trying to sell more services. Unfortunately, these sales efforts seem to result in new revenues, but it’s irksome to customers to have to listen to several sales pitches to accomplish some simple customer service task.

Dukes and Zhu claim that a lot of customer service centers are structured to dissuade customers from dropping service. They say that long hold times are on purpose to get customers to give up. They cite some customer service centers where the people answering the first call from customers have no authority to change a customer’s billing – only customers willing to fight through to talk to a supervisor have a chance at fixing a billing problem. They claim that chatbots are often set up in the same way – they can sound helpful, but they often can’t make any changes.

They also believe that companies are getting sophisticated and use different tactics for different customers. Studies have shown that women get annoyed faster than men in dealing with poor customer service. Research has shown that some demographics, like the elderly, are easier to dissuade from getting a refund.

Smaller ISPs understand the poor customer service from the big ISPs and most of them strive to do better. However, I know of smaller ISPs with aggressive win-back programs or who use every call as a marketing opportunity, and such ISPs have to be careful to not fall into the same bad habits as the big ISPs.

I find it amusing that one of the many reasons cited for breaking up the Bell System was to improve customer service. Regulators thought that smaller regional companies would be nimbler and do a better job of interacting with customers. This turned out not to be true. In fact, I consider my interactions with monopolies to be the easiest. I can’t recall a call I’ve ever had with an electric or water utility that wasn’t completed quickly and efficiently. Perhaps ISPs ought to strive to be more like them.

Big ISP Customer Service Still at the Bottom

This time each year we get a peek at how customers view the telecom industry, and for many years running it’s not been a pretty story. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) was recently published and shows ISPs still ranked at the bottom of all industries in terms of customer satisfaction.

The survey to create the ACSI rankings is huge and involves over 300,000 households and looks at services that households use the most,  considering 400 companies in 46 different industries across 10 economic sectors.

Customers really hate the big cable TV companies and big ISPs. The ACSI index ranks companies on a scale of 1 to 100 and the two lowest ranking industries are Subscription TV Services (62) and Internet Service Providers (62) – both with the same composite ranking as last year. All other industries have rankings in the 70s and 80s, with industries like breweries (85), TV manufacturers (83), soft drinks (82), food companies (82), and automobiles (82) at the top.

The companies ranked just above ISPs have much higher rankings and include the US Postal Service (70), Fixed-Line Telephone Service (71), and Social Media Companies (72).

The big cable companies rank from the low of Altice (55) to a high for AT&T U-Verse (69). The only other companies that rank higher than the industry average of 62 are Verizon FiOS (68), Dish Networks (67) and DirecTV (66). The biggest cable companies fare poorly – Charter (59) and Comcast (57).

Internet Service Providers didn’t fare any better than cable companies with the overall industry ratings at the same 62. The only three ISPs with rankings above the average are Verizon FiOS (70), AT&T Internet (69) and Altice (63). At the bottom of the rankings are Frontier (55), MediaCom (56), and Windstream (57). The big cable companies don’t fare well as ISPs – Charter (59) and Comcast (61).

This continues to be good news for competitive overbuilders that provide good customer service. It’s been obvious over the years that customers hate calling the big cable companies and ISPs because the process of navigating through live customer service is time-consuming and painful.

But these rankings go far deeper than that. At CCG we conduct surveys for our clients who are usually looking at entering a new market. We also interview a lot of telecom customers during the course of a year. The poor opinion of the big providers in our industry runs deep. I see customers that really dislike the process that many of these companies force upon customers who have to negotiate to get lower rates every year or two. People don’t like to find out that they are paying a lot more than their neighbors for the same services. People also dislike service outages which happen far more often than they should. In the last year, we had several headline-grabbing major outages, but more aggravating to customers are the small daily outages that can hit without notice. Households have come to rely on broadband as much as they do for other household necessities like electricity and water, so outages are becoming intolerable.

Competitive ISPs are not automatically better at customer service than the big companies. Some competitive providers also offer too many product options and are willing to negotiate rates with customers. Small ISPs can also fall into the trap of turning every phone call to the company into a sales pitch. Good ISPs are learning to deal with customers in ways tailored to each customer. I know I personally would be thrilled to have my entire ISP relationship be handled by email or text, as long as by doing so I could be assured that I’m getting a good price. Most ISPs still have a long way to go – although I doubt that any ISP is ever going to be liked more than beer!

Big Company Customer Service

comcast-truck-cmcsa-cmcsk_largeI know that many of my clients compete against the bigger cable companies, and one of the easiest selling points for years has been that small companies have superior customer service. It seems like every few years the big companies go through a big public display about how they are working to make customer service better. But maybe, just maybe, this time they might be doing some things that will actually work.

A few weeks ago both Comcast and Time Warner were hauled in front of a US Senate hearing to talk about their poor customer service. The purpose of the hearings was to ask why customers pay more than the advertised prices for specials. The answer was obviously that there are many ‘fees’ that the companies do not consider as part of the base cable or bundle rates. But much of this is not disclosed to potential customers, even in the fine print.

The Senate committee issued a report and faulted Time Warner (now part of Charter) for overcharging customers. The committee further reported that Comcast was guilty of not allowing customers to disconnect without a ‘good reason’ (as if not wanting the service any longer is not good reason enough).

There are numerous stories on the web of customers that have tried unsuccessfully to disconnect from Comcast. Listening to the recordings make it obvious that the company was giving bonuses for ‘saving’ customers who wanted to leave Comcast and that some customer service reps were going overboard to earn those bonuses.

The process of disconnecting is something that customers really hate about the cable companies. There has been some discussion at the FCC and at state Commissions of requiring any ISP that lets customers subscribe online to also be able to disconnect on line. Everything should be as easy as subscribing or unsubscribing to Sling TV or an online music services.

But the companies say that they are taking steps to improve customer service. And maybe they are getting better; so far this year there have been no more of the painful recordings of calls where Comcast won’t let somebody disconnect.

Comcast says it’s taking specific steps to improve service, and they will be:

  • Experimenting in some markets with an online tool that lets a customer track the status of a repair technician. People waiting endlessly for a technician has been one of the biggest complaints about them for years.
  • Hiring over 5,500 US-based customer service reps over 3 years (although they say they will not be decommissioning overseas customer service centers).
  • Creating a ‘holistic’ view of a customer’s account history internally within the company so that a customer won’t have to start over from scratch each time they call Comcast about a recurring problem.
  • Opening or renovating hundreds of retail stores.
  • Devoting 125 new employees to handle complaints made on social media.
  • Providing an interactive trouble-shooting app to help customers diagnosis problems. I guess now instead of calling I can have the app ask me the requisite five times if I have unplugged and rebooted my cable modem!

Charter is making similar claims and plans on hiring 20,000 in-house customer service reps and technicians to replace contractors.

Time will tell if they get any better. After all, Comcast was in front of the same Senate panel just two years earlier. But some of the changes (like having a record of customer history) are things that most of my clients have had for decades. Most people interact with customer service so infrequently that if Comcast or Charter can make even modest improvements they will be perceived by many as doing a much better job.

A Better Customer Interface

AndroidToday a lot of the time and money for what we think of as programming is really spent connecting APIs (Application Program Interface). APIs are defined as a software component that defines the operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying functionalities of a specific program that are then used to have a reliable interface with a given program so that programmers can query programs or can link different programs together.

The software world is full of APIs that are the basis for building and operating most complex software systems. APIs can be simple, such as an API that just looks up a customer’s address when querying a database with their name. Or an API can be more complex, such as having an API routine that calculates the outstanding balance for a given customer and then ages the accounts receivable. The process of connecting a new software package to all of the needed APIs is time-consuming and expensive and is one of the reasons it sometimes takes months to implement a large new software package.

APIs have been integrated into almost all parts of the software world and there are plenty of them in the telecom world. For example, an integrated billing system uses a lot of APIs. APIs are used to allow OSS/BSS software to gather calling details from a voice switch to add or delete features. APIs connect to the software in a cable headend to define what channels a given customer should be receiving or to capture billing information from a pay-per-view event.

But there is a downside to using API-based software that anybody paying for software is all too familiar with. Almost every complex software package you buy these days in a telecom environment requires signing up for software maintenance – and it’s not cheap. Software maintenance is often set at an annual fee of 10% – 12% of the cost of the original software package. A large percentage of that money is to pay for keeping abreast of the changes in APIs. Every time the software changes somewhere in a telecom system, such as in your voice switch, those changes then ripple through the rest of your software systems.

Even if a large telco employs their own programmers a lot of programming time is used in working with and updating APIs. Reliance in APIs goes far beyond the telco world. Establishing the right APIs is the number one hassle of writing an application for smartphones, and it’s the difference between the APIs of iOS and Android that requires app makers to create and maintain two versions of their software.

There was an attempt a decade ago to make it easy for software packages to communicate with each other under the label of the Semantic Web. That initiative ran into a wall because of the massive effort required to make APIs work easily. However, it looks like maybe we are on the verge of doing away with the need for a lot of those APIs, at least in the manner we use them today. It seems likely that we are headed towards a time when bots are going to take over a lot of the tasks that require API interfaces today.

I use the Amazon Echo with the Alexa bot. Already today I can ask Alexa a question in English such as, “Which Baltimore Oriole has the most home runs?” and Alexa will search the web and bring back the answer Cal Ripken. Alexa and other personal bots are improving at breakneck speeds. We are getting close to a time when we are going to have bot-to-bot communications, which over time will replace a lot of the software in place today.

Soon we are going to be able to use our personal bots to interface with other software systems. I should be able to ask Alexa to go my bank and get a copy of my June bank statement. Alexa will then interface with my bank’s bot and get the needed information. The plan is for bot-to-bot communication to be in English, so if I don’t get what I want I can look to see what went wrong with the transaction between the two bots.

The beauty of bot-to-bot communication is that each customer is going to be able to find out what they want. Today, the owners of a web site for something like a bank have to pre-determine what they think customers are most interested in and then set up menus to supply those answers. But with bot-to-bot communication the bank doesn’t need to guess what customers want and doesn’t have to arrange the data in a format needed to support the APIs. The bots will figure this out for each customer inquiry. Bot-to-bot communication means doing away with a lot of clunky customer service interfaces and that means cheaper software costs for the bank. And for customers it means getting what you want by talking to your own bot in plain English. That should cut down on a huge percentage of customer service calls.

APIs won’t die, of course, but even interfaces with APIs can be automated using bots so that when something changes in a hardware or software system the bots in connected systems can figure out what this means on their own. That’s bad news for computer programmers, because today a lot of their work is connecting to or updating APIs. But it’s good news for consumers and it should be good news for any company spending too much money maintaining software that uses a lot of APIs.

Responding to Customers in a Virtual World

Amazon EchoI don’t know how typical I am, but I suspect there are a whole lot of people like me when it comes to dealing with customer service. It takes something really drastic in my life for me to want to pick up the phone and talk to a customer service rep. Only a lack of a broadband connection or having no money in my bank account would drive me to call a company. My wife and I have arranged our life to minimize such interactions. For instance, we shop by mail with companies that allow no-questions-asked returns.

The statistics I hear from my clients tell me that there are a lot of customers like me – ones that would do almost anything not to have to talk to a person at a company. And yet, I also hear that most ISPs average something like a call per month per customer. That means for everybody like me who rarely calls there are people that call their ISP multiple times per month.

It’s not like there aren’t things that I want to know about. There are times when it would be nice to review my bill or my open balance, but unless there is no alternative I would never call and ask that kind of question. But from what I am told, billing inquiries and outages are the predominant two reasons that people call ISPs. And if a carrier offers cable TV you can add picture quality to that list.

Customer service is expensive. The cost of the labor and the systems that enable communicating with customers is a big expense for most ISPs. Companies have tried various solutions to cut down on the number of customer calls, and a few of them have seen some success. For instance, some ISPs make it easy for a customer to handle billing inquiries or to look at bills online. This is something banks have been pretty good at for a long time. But it’s apparently difficult to train customers to use these kinds of web tools.

Many companies are now experimenting with online customer service reps who offer to chat online with you from their website. I don’t know the experiences other people have had with this, but I generally find this even less satisfactory than talking to a real person – mostly due to the limitations that both parties have of typing back and forth to each other. Unless you are looking for something really specific and easy, communicating by messaging is not very helpful and might even cost a company more labor than talking to somebody live. Even worse, many companies use a lot of pre-programmed scripts for online reps to reduce messaging response times, and those scripts can be frustrating for a customer.

There are a handful of solutions I have seen that offer new tools for making it easier for customers to communicate with an ISP. For instance, NuTEQ has developed an interactive test messaging system that can answer basic questions for customers without needing a live person at the carrier end. Customers can check account balances, report an outage, schedule and monitor the status of a tech visit or do a number of other tasks without needing to talk to somebody having to wade through a customer service web site.

But I think the real hope for me is going to be the advent in the near future of customer service bots. Artificial Intelligence and voice recognition are getting good enough so that bots are going to be able to provide a decent customer service experience. Early attempts at this have been dreadful. Anybody who has tried to change an airline ticket with an airline bot knows that it’s nearly impossible to do anything useful in the current technology.

But everything I read says that we will soon have customer service bots that actually work as well as a person without the annoying habits or real service reps like putting a caller on hold, losing a caller when supposedly transferring you to somewhere else, or in trying to upsell you to a product you don’t want. And there ought to be no holding times since bots are always available. If a bot could quickly answer my question I would have no problem talking to a bot.

But as good as bots are going to be even within a few years, I am waiting for the next step after that. I have been using the Amazon Echo and getting things done by talking to Alexa, the Amazon AI. Alexa still has a lot of the same challenges like Siri or the other AIs, but I am pleasantly surprised about how often I get what I want on the first try. In my ideal world I would tell Alexa what I want and she (it?) would then communicate with the bots, or even the people at a company to answer my questions. At the speed at which AI technology is improving I don’t think this is going to be too many years away. I may like customer service when my bot can talk to their bot.

 

A Few Lessons from Big Companies

Text-messageI spend a lot of time reading about corporations and I think there are some lessons to learn from them that are relevant to small companies.

Selling Product versus Building Relationships. There are many  large companies that sell products without developing relationships with their customers. In our industry the large cable and telcos come to mind. They are all rated among the worst of all corporations in delivering customer service and they even antagonize many of their customers. This works fine for them until they get competition, and then the customers who don’t like them quickly jump ship to the new competitor.

But there are large businesses that go out of their way to build customer relationships because they believe that loyal customers are their most important asset. Consider car manufacturers. They realized a long time ago that they were not going to be good at customer service, so they created a network of dealers who are local businesses with ties in each community and these dealers have built trust over generations. And there are many other companies that deliver great customer service. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, and Google have been consistently rated among the top ten in customer satisfaction for the last few years – showing that tech firms can put an emphasis on customers and still thrive.

My most successful clients build relationships with their customers and as a result have built a loyal customer base. Many of them are or were monopolies, and there was a time when most of my clients could not tell me who their ten largest customers were. But I rarely see that today and small telcos and cable companies have learned to build loyalty through building relationships.

Growing Fast versus Growing Deliberately. Many large companies need to grow fast to be successful. Once you have taken venture capital money or gone public then the pressure is on to grow profits quickly. But growing too fast almost always changes a company in negative ways. It’s really common to see companies go into the growth mode and then forget who they are. Most tech companies, for example, started with a small core of people who worked hard as a team to develop the core company. But when it’s time to grow, and companies hire mountains of new people it’s nearly impossible to maintain the original culture that made the company a great place to work.

Growth can be just as hard for small companies. It can be as hard economically and culturally for a small company to grow from 5,000 to 10,000 customers as it is for a large company to add millions. Small companies are often unprepared for the extra work involved with growth and find that they overwork and overstress their staff during a growth cycle. Growth creates a dilemma for small companies. If you hire the people needed to staff the growth period your company will be overstaffed when growth stops.

And so a lesson about growth can be learned from large companies. They will often staff growth through temporary employees, contractors, and consultants rather than take on people that they may not need later. Companies of any size are hesitant about hiring employees that they might not need a year from now.

High-Tech versus High-Touch. A lot of large businesses are trying to feign a good customer service experience by electronically ‘touching’ their customers often. I recall last year when Comcast introduced a texting system to communicate with customers. After they sent me half a dozen text messages in the same week, I disconnected the texting function because I really didn’t want to hear from them that often. But there are large companies who are convinced that if they electronically reach out to customers often that they are engaging in relationship building and proactive customer service.

And perhaps they are with some customers. But I am more appreciative of a business where I can talk to a person when it’s needed. Not that I mind electronic communications. I like to know that AT&T has auto-billed me and I like knowing when charges hit my credit cards. But I don’t want to be bothered by a business when they aren’t passing on information I want or need.

The important point here is that you have to touch your customers sometime and whether you reach out electronically or in person it’s better than no-touch and not talking to your customers. I know telecom companies that call every customer at least once a year to ask them if they like the service and if everything is okay. Such calls are welcomed by most customers and this is a great tool for businesses to build relationships. But just be prepared that if you ask your customers how you are doing that you need to be ready to deal with negative feedback. That is how to build happy customers.

Branding your Company and Products

Just FYI, no blogs last week due to flu bug. Funny how you can’t write when you can’t sit up.

Today’s guest blog is written by Mindy Jeffries of Stealth Marketing. She will be writing a series of blogs that will appear here occasionally. If you want to contact Mindy you can call her at 314 880-5570. Tell her you saw her here!

In my last blog, I talked about branding things – things with which your customers interact! “Things” is a little vague, so let’s clarify – your branded assets include things like: your office, trucks, people (uniforms), website.  What about branding your product?  What are the stepping-stones of branding your service that you’ll be delivering to your customers?  This gets complicated really quickly, so how can we simplify it?

Let’s begin with the strategic analysis of the brand.

The first step is a customer analysis.

Here are questions you have to ask yourself:  what are the current trends in the telecommunications industry? What is affecting your business?  We all know some of those major trends; landline disconnections, and streaming TV, for example. But now let’s add motivation questions.  Which customers are motivated to use cell phones in which parts your geographic footprint?  What are the unmet needs of your customers?   Brainstorm these questions with your team and figure out answers relevant to your brand. In the end you’re shooting for stellar customer service, making each customer happy beyond expectations.

The second step: Competitor analysis.

What are your strengths compared to all competitors including these new Internet competitors?  What are your answers to the “cell phone problem”?  What are the strategies to attack the segments we have previously identified? And last but not least, what are your vulnerabilities?  Examining your vulnerabilities is hard, you have to strip away your bias, take a step back and look at the big picture. Be honest with yourself. Analyze yourself like you would your competitors. Which leads nicely into…

The third step: Self-analysis. 

Ask yourselves and your customers: what is the current image of the brand?  What is the brand’s heritage?  What does your product provide? What are its strengths?

The last step: Determine your organizational values.  

What are the positive attributes of your leader or leadership team? It might be something as simple as: “we always go the extra mile!” or “We’ll make sure the customer is always satisfied.”

Still not sure what organizational values look like?

Here are the Stealth values to give you an idea!  We exist to help others, we are passionate about what we believe in, we are perpetual students, we love challenge, we like to stretch boundaries and evolve to the next level of everything.  We are driven by relationships because relationships drive communication and good communication drives success.  We work to achieve success.

How Good Should Your Customer Service Be?

This is the hardest question I have asked as a blog title, because there just is no easy answer. Before I try to answer the question at all, let me set some parameters. I am talking about smaller companies and not those that operate large call centers. There are dozens of consultants who specialize in software and metrics for large call centers. But most of my clients do not operate call centers and they have a more intimate relationship with customers. So let’s look at this question in terms of smaller companies.

One glib answer I could offer is that your customer service has to be at least good enough to make your customers happy. And there is certainly some truth in that, but that sounds a bit like consultant speak. So let me dig a little deeper and ask: what ought to be the goals for a smaller customer service group? Here are some of the traits a small customer service group needs to have to produce the best results. I have learned these over the years by having worked with literally hundreds of small customer service groups:

  • Friendliness. One of the advantages that small companies have over large ones is that your employees can get to know your customers and form bonds with many of them. This should be encouraged because when somebody knows the person they are talking to on the phone the whole transaction is more likely to go well. So encourage your customer service reps to get to know your customers.
  • Accuracy. Accuracy means just what it says. It means making sure every order you take is accurate so that the customer gets what they asked for. It means giving customers the right answer when they ask a question. It means perfect directory listings. And to be accurate requires training, but more importantly it requires that your reps are graded for paying attention to details.
  • Prompt Responses. Customers love it when a customer service rep has the information they are looking for right at their fingertips. If they call with a billing question they don’t want to be put on hold for five minutes while your rep tries to find the answer to their question. The way to make this happen is to have a good OSS/BSS system. If you want your reps to do a great job you must have great tools. Companies often get very comfortable with a software system and never consider changing. I visit many clients and see them using outdated systems that make it hard for their employees to do a great job. There is no excuse for that these days. There are a number of quality vendors and you should not be afraid to change if your current software is not doing what you need. I always ask the question – who is more important to you, your customers or your vendor? Do not get wedded to a vendor just because you have used them for many years. If they can’t and won’t keep their software current to fit your needs, look for somebody that will.
  • Knowledge. Your customer service reps ought to be able to answer most questions about your products and prices without having to look up basic facts each time. Make knowledge a priority in how you grade their performance each year. They ought to know how your most common features work and should be able to walk a customer through using them. They ought to know the basic troubleshooting steps needed to fix basic problems when they get a trouble call. If they can take care of a problem without having to refer it to a technician, then you will have saved money and have a happier customer.
  • Empowerment. Your customer service reps should be empowered to fix customer’s problems on the spot. Some companies have policies like always requiring higher approval before giving a credit to a customer. Empower your employees to make decisions and take care of customer problems on the spot. You can always review credits that are given out and if you don’t like the way they were done you have a teaching opportunity to do it better the next time. But don’t be afraid to empower your employees to take care of customers so that the customer can get a problem resolved on one phone call, talking to one person.
  • Not Scripted. I don’t know of a person who doesn’t feel marginalized and unimportant when a customer service rep is clearly reading something to them off of a screen instead of talking to them person-to-person. This is something that many large call centers foster, and sometimes calling customer service feels like talking to a robot. I don’t think this works well for large companies and is one of the reasons that people hate large telco and cable company customer service. So don’t fall into this trap and try to put pre-packaged words into your reps mouths. Make sure they know what they need to know and then just let them talk to customers like a person.
  • The Right Policies. Your reps need to be working with policies that are customer friendly, and this is all up to you. I often find policies that make me shake my head. For example, I have one client who required a money order or cash for a customer to reconnect service for non-pay. Of course, this leads to customers just deciding to not come back. The policies you have in place in dealing with customers need to all have the same underlying premise – they must be customer-friendly and they must make it easy for customers to use you as their vendor.