Customer Experience, Work

Keynote Learnings from ICMI Expo 2018: Ernesto Salas, Disney Institute

Trade shows are a fantastic place to get up to date on all of the latest technology, best practices and ideas in your industry. The ICMI Contact Center Expo which took place at the end of May was no different – with a strong keynote lineup and insightful sessions to attend, it was a fantastic event for anyone looking to top up their knowledge on everything CX.

But one of the challenges of so many opportunities to learn is figuring out how to package up those insights and apply them within your contact center. Hearing the philosophies that power world-class companies to deliver exceptional customer experiences is incredibly inspiring, and can drive you to adjust the same philosophies that affect your processes. But working out how processes need to change to fall in line with those same philosophies can be tougher.

In this blog post series, we’ll be picking apart some of the keynote speeches shared at the ICMI Expo, and throwing some light on what those insights could mean for your contact center.

We’re starting off with the opening keynote of Tuesday, May 22nd – “Inspiring Customer Service Excellence” from Ernesto Salas, Business Programs Senior Facilitator at the Disney Institute.

Common Purpose & Brand Promise

Ernesto shared a lot of ideas around the factors which caused Disney to become the hugely successful company it is today. At Disney, one of the most important parts of having a strong customer focus is having a common purpose and a clear brand promise.

Disney’s common purpose is “We create happiness by providing the finest entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.” This common purpose applies to everyone within Disney – every cast member has a role to play in creating happiness, no matter whether they’re greeting parkgoers or sweeping the streets.

The type of language used within this common purpose is important. Disney’s common purpose isn’t to ensure that it delivers value to stakeholders, or ensures profitable growth. Common purposes like this are both accessible and inspirational for employees of all levels, helping to get them excited about the opportunity to make a difference.

Ernesto also spoke of Disney’s brand promise: “We deliver entertainment with heart.” Statements like this unite internal and external customers in their expectations of the service that will be delivered – helping to ensure consistency across the brand. Customers hate inconsistency, and it’s by tightening up on this that exceptional experiences can begin to be created.

What can we learn from this? I think there’s a few things here that can be applied in any contact center. Firstly, if you haven’t got a mission and vision which unite employees and make it clear what you’re all working towards, it’s good to think about developing one.

If you already have a mission and vision, ensure that employees aren’t so tied up in meeting KPIs that they’re blind to long term goals. A strong vision of service which appeals to emotion helps employees to feel they are part of something worthy and important. It’s that feeling which drives engagement, and is one of the reasons why uniting employees under a common mission and vision is so vital.

Lastly, consider what your brand promises, from your own perspective as well as that of your customers and your employees. If there are mismatches, it’s likely your customers will feel them acutely. Getting to the bottom of what causes those mismatches is a great step in creating consistent, excellent experiences.

Intentional Experiences

Disney magic doesn’t happen by accident. Ernesto spoke to the areas where Disney concentrates on to create positive experiences, noting that Disney’s consistent business results are driven by strategically focusing on certain business areas and opportunities, where other businesses may not see value or potential.

And that’s important, as that’s where differentiation occurs. Paying attention to those areas that fall by the wayside for other businesses is a key to Disney’s success. Or, in Ernesto’s words, “We have learnt to be intentional where others may not be intentional”.

Another interesting idea that Ernesto covered is in relation to stereotypes. He explained that significant service differentiation can occur when widely-held industry stereotypes are ruptured. This is so relevant for contact centers, which still suffer from the high-volume, low-quality stereotypes associated with call centers in the 80s and 90s. There’s a lot of potential for you to rupture that stereotype! Think how you can subvert your customer’s expectations to deliver service that’s not only exceptional for your business, but extraordinary in your field.

Ernesto, Sergio and Aliases in the Contact Center

Ernesto explained that in his previous role in Disney reservations, he used to take on the role of Sergio – a made-up persona who inspired him to deliver better service. In the role of Sergio, interactions were always bright, attentive and helpful. Ernesto was left at the doorway of his home, together with any grumpiness or hang-ups that could affect interactions with customers.

As a former call center worker and manager myself, I’m always a little cautious of management philosophies which advise that your ‘real life’ personality should be left at the door, replaced with a mask of cheery helpfulness. For one, the perspective that personal problems don’t belong at work means that those problems become taboo – with the implication that we shouldn’t acknowledge difficult emotions and that they should be ignored, even if they’re affecting our work. While I’m not suggesting that we all become armchair psychiatrists, I do believe that all of us should be able to bring our whole selves to work, and be able to acknowledge when our ‘real’ personas aren’t doing so great – as it’s that acknowledgement which allows change to occur.

Of course, modern work requires us all to act differently than we would in our everyday lives. That’s certainly true for contact center agents, who are expected to regulate their emotions when talking to customers. So in one sense, maybe adopting an entirely different persona is just part of the job description.

On the other hand, researchers have identified that workers adjust to workplace personas in two different ways. The first is known as ‘deep acting’, or the process of trying to align your internal thoughts and feelings with organizational expectations. It’s a genuine and thoughtful process of self-development, and that process seemed to be what just Ernesto described.

The second way is known as ‘surface acting’. This means workers fake a persona, while leaving their internal thoughts and feelings intact. The problem with surface acting is that it has been shown to lead to higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization – two of the three key elements of burnout.

So, following Ernesto/Sergio’s example, should you ask your employees to adopt an alias, in an effort to improve customer service?

In short – aliases can be fantastic to inspire engaged employees to achieve better. But be cautious of mandating their use, as encouraging disengaged employees to fake a persona can be damaging.

Culture & Training

Culture is all-important at Disney, since it’s cast members who are responsible for delivering extraordinary experiences. It’s only through paying attention to employee engagement that those cast members can be empowered to.

Ernesto spoke to the importance of ensuring employees are engaged, as it’s only those employees who will deliver the best service. Hiring for culture fit is all-important at Disney, and once Disney had developed a strong culture it became easy to see who would be a right fit for it.

He also spoke to the importance of training employees, again for engagement and also to ensure that they are appropriately skilled for their role. Ernesto spoke of times where Disney had been challenged on this by other firms, who ask why Disney spent so much on training when employees can leave at any time. Disney’s response to this – “What if they stay?”

It’s always fantastic to hear about organizations putting training and development at the heart of their operations, as many organizations are still only just beginning to understand the importance of the employee experience in delivering great customer experiences.

Tips to take away from this are to consider whether your hiring practices include an assessment of culture fit, and taking a fresh look at your training programs to see if they’re truly engaging your employees and giving them the development they’re looking for. Rolling out an internal survey to assess this is a great place to start.

Conclusion

Ernesto’s description of how exceptional service is delivered at Disney was wide-ranging and detailed, which makes sense, given that Disney are such advocates of paying attention to even the smallest things that others might miss.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

The Challenge of AI Voice Assistants in Customer Service

During May, Google’s I/O 2018 conference was held to show the latest in Google’s offerings to developers around the globe. While Google demonstrated a lot of different new tech at the conference, it was their keynote demonstration of its latest “Duplex” technology which has lit up the internet.

Duplex uses Google Assistant to call companies on a user’s behalf to perform simple, structured tasks, such as booking a haircut or scheduling a restaurant reservation. While voice synthesis isn’t exactly new, it was the humanlike inflections and natural conversational flow in these calls that many found to be jaw-dropping (or, alternately, terrifying).

If you haven’t yet seen Google’s demo, click through to watch it now, and prepare for your mind to be blown. (Skip to 43 seconds to get straight into the demo.)

Although this technology isn’t yet consumer-grade, Google says it will start to test Duplex within Google Assistant as early as this summer. How then should our customer service operations handle this upcoming customer-side automation in voice calls?

Identify Verification & Trust

Part of the reason why Duplex has caused so many ripples is because it gives a glimpse into a rather dystopian future – one where humans can’t tell whether they’re talking to an AI (causing many to wonder if the Turing testhas been passed by this new tech).

Before now, voice assistants haven’t been capable of holding natural-sounding conversations. But the calls demoed by Google, complete with inflections such as “Mm-hmm” or “Ah, gotcha”, sounded so lifelike that it’s clear the human operators on the other end had no idea they were speaking to an AI.

That in itself has caused outrage – with commentators pointing out that ethical problems occur when service workers and call center staff are unsuspectingly experimented on by Google’s human-sounding AIs. Google reacted to this outcry by asserting that working versions of Duplex should have the ability to identify itself built in.

But whether AIs self-identify or not, the cat’s already out of the bag for anyone considering whether their identity verification processes will need to change as a result of this technology – the answer is undoubtedly, yes. The key to how exactly processes will need to change lies in whether AIs are required to self-identify or not – whether by Google themselves, governments or any other regulatory body.

If AIs are required to self-identify themselves as such and state that they’re acting on behalf of a human, should agents be responding to their wishes as if they were that human? I can easily envisage scenarios where AIs can eventually make payments, change data or perform any other process that has impacts on customer or company – only for the customer to respond that the AI’s actions were a mistake and not authorized by them. How then can we determine human intent behind the actions of an AI?

If AIs are not required to self-identify, issues emerge around trust and standards. As it stands, technology like Duplex is only effective in a limited range of scenarios, making it easy to ask a question that sits outside of the AI’s programming to test whether it’s a robot or not (for example, “Who is the president of the United States?”)

Having agents ask these types of questions to try to weed out the “robots” from the humans is reasonably straightforward. But how will those questions evolve as AIs get smarter? Will they constitute a new, more intrusive layer of data protection processes that we have to subject unsuspecting customers to? What happens then when we speak to human customers who cannot answer these questions – through health issues, a lack of shared cultural understanding, or anything else? Could we be dooming them to be treated like little more than unfeeling robots?

Emotion & Empathy

Speaking of feelings, Duplex brings big questions as to what will constitute effective customer service in the future. Our current, human-focused model of optimal customer experience runs on the premise that if you focus on solving problems quickly, accurately and in a friendly manner, you’re likely to achieve good customer outcomes.

But AIs don’t feel. All the niceties and small talk in the world don’t matter to them. Considering that humans and AIs have different needs and priorities during issue resolution, we could see two distinct sets of standards emerge.

The first relates to service standards for humans – and as beings who have thought and felt in much the same way for thousands of years, I can’t see these undergoing any huge revolution in the future.

But a second set of service standards relates to how we can provide optimal service to AIs. I can see these standards relating to focusing on clear language, accurately clarifying intent, and decreasing emotionality in speech which could cause confusion to an AI – quite the opposite of the emotion-centered training we’ve been giving to front-line agents for decades.

Taking Humans Out of Interactions

Thinking about the role of our front-line customer service agents in the potential applications of this technology, we must consider the messages that Google is implicitly sending about the service employees customers speak to every day to get things done.

PC Magazine sums this up deftly: the implicit message embedded within Duplex is that there’s no need for customers to ‘suffer’ through speaking to service employees to get things done. In one of Duplex’s demonstrations, the lady taking the call has a thick accent that is a little difficult to understand. The AI handles this with little awkwardness, making it clear that even in service situations that can be tricky for customers, machines can handle this instead, removing all of the ‘bother’.

I still believe that human interaction and emotion is what humanizes our brands, and makes them friendly and accessible. And putting myself in the shoes of my agents, there’s something that stings about the implicit message within AI-driven voice calls – that other people see talking to them as a waste of their time.

But I do believe that the best kind of customer service is invisible, that is, mediated through access to a range of easy self-service and digital options available to prevent customers from needing to make inconvenient phone calls. Maybe then we need to focus less on the perceived value of individual interactions, and think instead about downsides of the phone as a communication channel that have caused Duplex to become a customer need.

Phone Calls as Inconvenience

The development of Duplex points to an issue innate in customer service operations – and that is, while phone calls are often the best way for a customer to accomplish a goal, they aren’t always convenient. The rise of live chat, self-service and social messaging channel options has happened as a result of this issue. These channels allow more customers to connect with organizations in ways that don’t take up all of their time or attention, require them to take time out of their day, or prevent them from multitasking while they solve problems with organizations.

The necessity of Duplex (and its positive reception by many) shows that while many organizations see cost or effort barriers to providing service over non-voice channels, clearly for some customers that isn’t good enough. Given that organizations such as Deloitte predict volume of voice interactions to businesses to fall from 64% of all channel communications in 2017 to 47% in 2019, organizations need to consider better ways to connect with their customers than by relying on voice-centric service models.

Automation promises to hold the key to dismantling these cost and effort barriers to multichannel service, as we’re now seeing within Chatbot uptake by firms big and small all over the world. While we’ve been exploring Duplex as a tool for customers to take advantage of automation in their own lives, let’s look at what the impacts are when the tables are turned and organizations can use tools like Duplex to evolve and improve their service offerings in a multichannel climate.

What if Duplex Could Help Organizations?

In the spirit of Moore’s law, it’s feasible to consider that given the current pace of technological advancement, and as a privately-owned company, Google will be looking for other ways to apply this technology, helping them to profit from it and secure its future development.

Because of this, I predict that it won’t be long at all until AIs like Duplex are pitched as a replacement for customer service agents on voice channels.

We can already see the evolution from human-led to AI-led service within other channels. Chatbot services are now handling a good percentage of everyday organizational queries over live chat. Considering that studies show that it’s realistic to aim to deflect between 40% – 80% of common customer service inquiries to chatbots, the same deflection principles could be used to help technology like Duplex to drive the same change for voice.

For voice as a channel, the closest thing we have to this right now is the dreaded IVR. The difference between IVR and AIs, however, is in the promise of service that truly helps, rather than hinders. While IVR is almost universally viewed as an unwelcome hurdle to jump on the way to service from a human agent, chatbots are proving that for certain service scenarios, AI can be as efficient as humans – if not more so, due to their speed, constant availability and scalability.

Projecting the development of this technology for voice interactions within the contact center, we’re faced with some questions. What types of voice queries are ripe for automation, and how can we channel these to AIs in a way that doesn’t add more options to a traditional IVR? What happens when customers can’t tell whether a voice agent is human or an AI? Whether that AI self-identifies or not, how does that reflect on our companies? Could we even be ushered into an age of universal mistrust in customer service where our human agents are treated badly by customers, as if they were robots, because our customers just can’t tell the difference?

Perhaps exploring automation within live chat can throw some light on these questions. I’ve seen many organizations who are meeting these issues head-on within chat – and many are digging deep into customer needs and preferences to harness this technology in ways that are both comfortable for their customers, and effective for their businesses.

A Values-Centered Approach to Automation in Customer Service

Now is the time to reflect on how our businesses will handle customer-side automation coming this year, and how more organizations can handle automation-related issues generally as technology develops.

We can take the lead from design ethicists such as Joe Edelman to consider how best to work with this technology in a way that doesn’t result in negative outcomes for our businesses, our agents or our customers.

Edelman proposes a values-centered approach to the design of social spaces online, and by using this same philosophy, we can consider how AI voice assistants detract from or complements the values of customers and other stakeholders interacting with it. Whether it’s us or the customer who’s automating, great service design will come from a consideration of not only what each party aims to achieve but also how their service preferences are denied or accommodated.

When we can consider the values of our customers and our employees, and how those interface with the needs of our businesses, we can start to use this technology in ways that are helpful and useful to them, morally sound, and which deliver the time and resource benefits that both businesses and customers want.

Originally published here.

Culture, Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Work

Creating Customer Heroes: How Your Agents Can Become Customer Storytellers

Let’s imagine, for one moment, that you’re casting your agents and customers in a movie.

What roles would they play?

Would your agents make their screen debut as wise sages, imparting knowledge and truth to help spur your customers to a glorious conclusion in their customer service journey?

Or would your agents be more like sword-wielding fighters, battling to defeat angry customer ogres before they burn your contact center to the ground?

Fantastical tales aside, stories about our businesses carry a lot of meaning. The narratives weaved by ourselves, our agents and our customers can communicate common values, elicit emotion, develop trust and understanding, and communicate knowledge and wisdom that can allow us all to grow.

The exercise above might seem silly. But thinking about your agents and customers as people in a story often paints a more vibrant picture of the type of service your business gives than a lot of the ‘hard’ information we calculate, classify and analyze in our contact centers.

Stories are a great way to make communicating complex information simpler, they provoke thought and learning, and they can often guide our actions in a way that’s clearer than cold NPS or CSat figures.

Some stories have persisted for thousands of years – and many people have produced theories that help to explain why storytelling is still such a useful form of information transfer. Communication scholar Walter Fisher argues that storytelling is one of the most persuasive forms of communication.

And in Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Made to Stick”, they argue that storytelling is a key ingredient of ideas that are compelling and produce action.

I certainly agree with them – as a professional trainer, I can confirm a story told during training sessions often gives people a lot more to analyze than a basic “show and tell” type of learning.

Given that storytelling can be such a powerful way to share learning, what does that mean for your contact center?

In this article, I’ll explore some of the ways you can help your agents to become “Customer Storytellers” to help everyone in your organization benefit from the stories your customers tell, and to learn from the ways that your agents helped them.

Agents as Listeners

Every day, your agents are in the privileged position of being let into the stories and lives of your customers. Agents act as the ‘ears’ of an organization, and it’s listening and perspective-taking that allows successful agents to understand and find meaning in the stories your customers tell.

It’s been said that the contact center is one of the most data-rich departments within an organization, and that’s true. What’s also true is it’s the department most rich in narrative!

Given all of the information that flows through your center, why should we pay extra attention to trying to capture customer stories in particular?

Well, we all know that customer expectations are on the rise. The stories your customers tell every day are an authentic and real-time source of information to allow you to keep meeting those expectations.

While customers might not have the time or want to go to the effort of providing feedback via formal channels, your agents can help to fill that gap.

While we’re all used to capturing CSat data and the like to measure how we’re doing, few organizations consider how best to capture the customer stories that your agents hear every day.

Because stories come to life when we tell them, asking your agents to listen carefully to customer stories with a view to sharing and understanding them is a pretext for helping them become true customer storytellers.

Agents as Storytellers

Listening to customer stories is just the first step, as it’s the sharing of stories that holds the most potential for growth and change in our organizations.

Ask any of your agents for stories about their customers, and the tales they tell will say a lot about the roles that customers and agents play in the big story of your organization.

Do they talk about customers so angry that they threatened to call every newspaper or politician that they thought might be able to swing things their way?

Or do they talk about those stories where they laughed or cried with customers, and connected with them in a way that goes beyond a simple phone call?

The morals and learnings we can gain from those stories are significant, and whether they’re good or bad, it’s through sharing them that we can start all to understand and to do better.

Your contact center staff have the potential to be the ‘voice’ of your organization just as much as they’re also the ‘ears.’ 

Customer advocacy can start within your agent team, and encouraging them to communicate stories allows more people access to information that’s rich with learning opportunities.

Developing processes for agents to share customer stories (with the rest of your team, or even with your entire organization) helps us not just to better understand our customers, but also to better appreciate the personalities of our agent team.

And it’s through a better understanding of each other that we can begin to affect significant changes in our work.

While we will never all agree all of the time, if we can approach more interactions with our customers and each other with a view to hear and consider different perspectives, it opens up possibilities for reasoning and action that would have never been there had we simply viewed situations from our point of view.

When teams can use a variety of perspectives to develop a fair and balanced comprehension of what’s important and what they should strive for, this allows them to be better equipped to deliver a service that provides fair and balanced experiences for customers.

Not to mention that encouraging the telling of stories, whether good or bad, makes for workplaces where we can be more comfortable with telling our own stories – the ones that help others to understand more about our authentic selves.

Agents as Heroes

A danger inherent in customer storytelling is asking your agents to tell stories about situations they’re powerless to control, making them little more than a bit-part character in the tales of others. Often, this results in stories that show the frustration of agents who want to do the right thing, but are consistently unable to.

If you’re interested in using storytelling within your organization, think about how you can empower your agents to become the heroes in your customer’s stories – the characters that save the day, subvert expectations, and provide hope.

It’s a lot easier for agents to ensure your customers’ stories have happy endings if they can themselves initiate the ‘plot twists’ that turn negative situations around. The ability to act autonomously in deciding the outcomes of customer stories means that the roles agents play, of the attentive listener or the customer advocate, can become genuinely lived rather than just acted out.

Being able to affect change in the lives and stories of your customers has profound benefits. Autonomy in work has been shown to lead to increased levels of well-being and job satisfaction, and many of us should be able to recognize that when agents can affect change in their work, it turns it from being something that’s done to them, to something that they participate in.

If you’re wondering how you can give your agents more autonomy, just ask your agents themselves. They should be able to provide you with examples of an abundance of situations where they wished they could do more, but weren’t able to – and sometimes something as simple as a change in access permissions can open up new possibilities for issue resolution.

While agents won’t always be able to give customers everything they ask for, combining sensitivity to the stories of customers with the ability to turn situations around makes for better issue resolution that’s full of possibilities and fairer for all parties involved.

Not to mention, the bonus of giving your agents more freedom to become customer heroes is that it increases the chance of positive customer experiences occurring.

And for most of us in customer service, it’s those positive customer stories which are much of the reason we’re in this industry in the first place – stories which show that we all have the capacity to listen, to understand, and to do even small things that can mean the world to others.

Originally published at CX Accelerator.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Work

10 Educational, Funny & Thought-Provoking Customer Service Training Videos You Won’t Have Seen Before

Have you ever experienced that feeling when you encounter a new piece of information that completely shifts your understanding of the world around you? Whether it’s a great book, an enlightening movie or a blog post with a fresh perspective you’d never considered, those moments are at the core of all great learning experiences.

As a manager or trainer of a customer service team, you’ll know that excellent customer service teams aren’t born that way. Learning and training are at the heart of teams who are united in vision, strive for excellence and deliver the best customer experiences. And when training your team to become the best, excellent training materials are essential to help your team experience those paradigm shifts that fuel greater understanding of your customer.

As a seasoned customer service trainer of more than ten years, videos are an essential part of my ‘training toolkit’ that help me to achieve powerful learning outcomes. Why is that?

Firstly, people learn in different ways. The VAK Learning Model says that people typically have a preference for learning in one of three different ways – visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Adding video to your training sessions helps cater to visual learning preferences and creates an approach to learning that blends different types of media to create effective learning experiences. Secondly, Pictorial Superiority Effect means that using pictures and words together promotes greater information recall – helping you to get maximum retention and engagement through your learning content.

We’re all lucky to live in an age where video is accessible and easy to implement in a learning setting. YouTube is a fantastic resource, with so many different videos that can be used to demonstrate customer service concepts. But it can be challenging to find genuinely great videos that give ‘mic drop’ moments in training sessions, and don’t come across as patronizing or irrelevant.

I’ve created this blog post to share some customer service training videos I’ve used to create “wow” learning moments. You’ll notice I’ve steered away from using videos from industry greats and thought leaders, and have stuck to videos that are accessible and relatable to everyone. I’ve also avoided using the same customer service training videos that are shared by a ton of other blogs, and have used just videos from my experience that I have found personally effective.

So without further ado, let’s jump in!

Context & Assumptions with the Two Ronnies – Fork Handles

As a Brit, I grew up with the comedy of the Two Ronnies on TV, and this is a classic clip to demonstrate the impact of context on customer service communications. In this video, the customer and shopkeeper grapple with one misunderstanding after another when the shopkeeper assumed he knows what the customer wants. Mistaking “Four candles” for “Fork handles” is just one error in a conversation rife with confusion and misunderstanding.

Successful communication relies on ensuring that you share the same context and understanding as the customer, and checking this where you’re not sure – avoiding assumptions that make communication difficult. This is an especially great video for teams who struggle with translating corporate jargon to customers, and it’s an excellent reminder for all of the importance of checking and questioning in customer service communications.

Deceptive Intuition with the Monkey Business Illusion

This video is a great way to demonstrate the results of a well-known study on selective attention. Ask your team to watch the video and count how many times the ball is passed from one participant to the next. At the end of the video, ask the team for their answers. Then, ask if they noticed the gorilla. About 50% of the time, individuals will miss the gorilla entirely. Rewind the video to show them that it was there all along!

Intuition can be a fantastic thing to help us troubleshoot issues and get to the root of problems quickly. But what happens when your intuition is faulty? Customer service agents need to be aware that when they assume they know what the answer to a customer’s problem is, they could be incorrect – and the right answer might have been staring them in the face all along.

Content in Communication – Sounding Smart with Will Stephen

This fantastic video features TEDx Talk presenter, Will Stephen, saying absolutely nothing. He uses presentation skills to sound eloquent and persuasive without actually imparting anything useful on any topic.

There’s a lot of different reasons why you might want to show this to your team. It might be that you want to show how Will uses tone, body language, and visual aids to create particular impressions – demonstrating the power of these facets of communication. Or, you might want to warn your team of the dangers of saying an awful lot when that speech doesn’t contain much that’s useful to your customer. Either way, this video gives a great insight into how the way you present your message impacts on its persuasiveness, and should be a required watch for all customer service teams.

Empathy with the Cleveland Clinic

I was on the fence about including this video. It’s very emotive – so much so that you might find training participants are moved to tears while watching. Because of this, it’s your call to decide whether it’s appropriate to show your team this video. I’ve used this with teams I know well, with a warning that the video is a tear-jerker, because it’s so useful for demonstrating what empathy is and creating great discussion about how to handle empathy in a professional setting.

This video, created by the Cleveland Clinic in the US, shows different hospital patients grappling with different life events. It’s a powerful reminder that everyone has their issues, whether they’re hidden or visible – and that goes for us, as well as for our customers.

You can shape post-video discussion in a few ways, asking your group questions like: How can we ensure we’re reacting to customers empathetically without reacting emotionally? When is an affective or cognitive empathy response most effective? How can an empathetic mindset improve interactions with customers who are upset or angry?

Sympathy and Empathy with Brené Brown

This video is terrific to demonstrate the differences between sympathy and empathy, and it’s another one that provides a lot of thought-provoking ideas for your group to explore when discussing appropriate empathetic responses to customers.

Brené Brown shows the differences between empathetic responses – which are rooted in true perspective-taking – versus sympathetic responses, which usually don’t put the sympathizer in the other person’s shoes. It’s an excellent video to begin discussing the differences between sympathy, empathy (and apathy), and exploring what responses are appropriate in your business setting. This isn’t such a heavy-hitting video as the last, so I’ve used this before for teams I don’t know so well to provide a more comfortable way to explore the concept of empathy.

Body Language, Facial Expression and Nonverbal Cues with “Friends”

Although this video is perfect for teams who deal face to face with customers, it’s also really useful for digital teams. In this video, the cast of “Friends” demonstrate how much of the impact of communication is carried in nonverbal expression, to hilarious effect. Relevant questions to ask your group after viewing include: How can we modulate and control our nonverbal communication to ensure our messages are received clearly and unambiguously? How can teams who rely purely on text strengthen their responses to ensure the right message is communicated?

Plus, it’s a fun video for multigenerational teams to watch – from those who knew and loved Friends when it was originally on TV, to your younger staff who might not know it was ever a ‘thing.’

Fun in the Workplace with WGN-TV Anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange

Happy, engaged employees create better customer experiences. However, many initiatives aimed at encouraging positive attitudes at work can fall flat. Videos featuring attitudinal initiatives such as the Fish! Philosophy sound great, but can come across as arrogant or even lacking in understanding of employees with mental health issues.

As a manager or trainer, though, you can encourage the kind of playfulness that keeps work enjoyable. This video from WGN-TV Anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange shows their ‘commercial break handshake’ in action and is a nice way to promote having fun at work.

Email Faux Pas with Tripp and Tyler

Email is a brilliant medium for customer communications, as long as it’s done right. Comedy sketch duo Tripp and Tyler show how actions over email would play out in a face to face context, taking email norms such as auto-responses, CC’ing in the entire office, caps lock and email signatures, and putting them in a real-life context.

This is a great video to start a discussion about proper email etiquette, whether in interactions with customers or with each other. It also brings up questions about the appropriateness of particular communication methods.

Listening Skills with The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon

Sheldon from Big Bang Theory isn’t the best or most empathetic communicator. Here, you can show your group some of the hallmarks of bad listening and ask some questions to help the group explore what that looks like. What did Sheldon do? What didn’t he do? What caused this? What was the impact? Where in work do we see these behaviors (or lack of them)?

This video is ideally finished off by exploring the Five Levels of Listening. You can then use the model to ask the group to define what levels of listening Sheldon uses, what we tend to use, and how we can ensure we listen at higher levels.

Communicating Instructions with Origami Frogs

On its own, this video doesn’t seem to have any clear link to customer service principles. But used as part of a fun training activity, it’s a great way to explore how to clearly communicate instructions and troubleshooting steps to customers.

Divide your group into three and give all participants a sheet of origami paper. For the first group, show them this video and ask them to replicate the frog. For the second group, give them a copy of these diagrammatic instructions and ask them to do the same. For the last group, verbally walk them through how to create a frog, giving verbal instructions like “fold the paper down the middle” – however, don’t actually show them what to do.

At the end, ask the group about their experiences with each method. What problems did they encounter? What type of visuals helped the most? What parallels are there in our troubleshooting processes? How can we use what we’ve learned from this experience to ensure customers can clearly understand the steps we guide them through?

Once you’re finished, the group will also have some fun jumping frogs to play with throughout the rest of training!

I hope you enjoy looking at these videos and thinking how they could benefit your team. Do you have any other videos that you’ve used to successfully illustrate particular customer service concepts? I’d love to hear about them – let me know in the comments below!

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

How Blockchain Could Transform The Customer Experience

Blockchain. Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency.

It’s likely you’ve heard these terms mentioned in the news recently, but unless you work in banking, these terms probably don’t factor much into your day-to-day work. Let’s face it – customer experience doesn’t often overlap with the world of financial technology.

But blockchain is a technology that holds the potential to revolutionize the way we all do business, far beyond its potential to change financial transactions. Enterprises everywhere seem to think so too:

  • 90% of North American and European banks are exploring blockchain technology [Source]
  • Nasdaq is piloting a blockchain-powered private market exchange [Source]
  • IBM and Comcast Ventures are backing a fund for blockchain startups [Source]
  • Kodak share prices recently leapt 117% after announcing a new blockchain initiative [Source]
  • Gartner predicts the total business value-add of blockchain to reach $3.1 trillion by 2030 [Source]

If your business has anything to do with customers, the processes it follows to sell to them, market to them or share information with them could be radically transformed by blockchain.

That might sound intimidating. But blockchain has enormous potential to change customer experience for the better – improving access for disadvantaged customers, making businesses more accountable, and increasing security in all kinds of business-customer interactions. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through some examples of how blockchain could change the customer experience, and the firms that are pioneering those changes. But first, you’ll need to know a little about how blockchain works – not an easy feat for something so technical. I spoke to Andy Spence, Workforce Advisor and faculty member of Blockchain Research Institute, who gave me a crash course on what blockchain is about and how it’s being used.

Andy says there are two main things to consider when learning about blockchain. Firstly – blockchain and bitcoin (or cryptocurrency) are totally different concepts. Although bitcoin is built on blockchain technology, bitcoin represents just one example of how blockchain technology can be applied. Blockchain technology itself can be applied in many different ways, far beyond just cryptocurrency.

Secondly, blockchain isn’t just used in financial settings. There are a lot of examples of blockchain technology being used in a wealth of industries for different applications. For example, blockchain technology is already being used for charity donations, voting systems, HR processes and more – far outside of the scope of finance. And there’s a lot of potential CX uses for blockchain too, which I’ll explain in a moment.

So how exactly does Blockchain work? I’ll explain (although if my explanation is too simplistic for you, I recommend this excellent primer from Blockgeeks.)

Imagine you have to send some money to a friend. To do this, you contact your bank and ask them to send the money to your friend’s account. The bank has a ledger of transactions. To perform the transfer, it removes the funds from your account, adds them to your friend’s account, and records it all on their central ledger.

The process is reliant on a single authority – the bank – to perform the transaction and keep accurate records on their ledger. As a consumer, you have to trust that the bank will do this accurately and without corruption. Sadly, this isn’t always something that banks are capable of doing.

Blockchain allows for transactions to occur without a single authority to oversee them. It does this by recording transactions on an electronic ‘ledger’ that everyone can access. Computers all over the world hold copies of this ledger and continuously work to verify transactions registered on it.

Transactions made on the blockchain are stored forever, and it’s impossible to tamper with them or alter them once they’re made. Sensitive information relating to each transaction can be cryptographically secured, meaning that it is only accessible by those with the right keys to unlock it. That information can be disclosed at will by the parties involved in the transaction.

At the moment, blockchain is being used most notably by Bitcoin to provide decentralized payments – that is, payments that don’t need to occur through a bank. And while the example above uses banking as an example of a transaction, blockchain technology could be used for all sorts of information that moves from one person to another, not just financial transactions.

In short – Blockchain democratizes and secures transactions, taking transactional ledgers from the hands of authorities and putting them into the hands of everyone.

Businesses of every kind hold ledgers which record the moving of things from one place to another, whether it’s money, products or services that are changing hands. For example, CRMs exist to record details of customers’ identities and their ownership of products and services.

Now imagine if all of the transactional information your company holds wasn’t located inside of your business – imagine it existed in an external, decentralized way, on the blockchain. Suddenly, there’s a whole lot of extra possibilities for customers, and enormous implications for businesses.

Here are some conventional processes that customer service functions perform now, and how blockchain could transform them in the future.

Sending and Receiving Payments

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the blockchain to send money from one person to another. It’s a secure yet transparent system that operates with no need for a central bank, allowing strangers to transact without needing a third party to oversee the transaction.

Our modern banking systems are not perfect. Clearing and identity checking takes time. International payments can take a long time and usually come with high fees. Customers who are disadvantaged or disabled may not have a bank account or be able to get to a bank.

Payments made through blockchain technology could cut out these banking-related issues, letting money move freely between businesses and their customers, with no banks or payment processors needing to act as middleman. It could cut payment processing times to minutes (in some cases, from days or weeks), and completely revolutionize processes such as clearing. In fact, change is already underway – Mastercard is even opening up its own blockchain as an alternative payment method.

Sending or Receiving Products

The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting bigger, and this technology combined with blockchain could allow for massive improvements in how customers pay for and receive products.

Customers commonly complain when they have paid for a product or service that they haven’t received. Those complaining customers are the tip of the iceberg of problems with dispatch and receipt of products – for every customer who complains, 26 remain silent. Those 26 customers are opportunities lost for businesses, as rather than highlighting service problems and giving companies a chance to improve on them, those customers just walk away.

IBM’s Watson IoT blockchain offerings allow for goods to be tracked along each point of a supply chain, with information about the status of a package updating via GPS as it moves, and payments being released when each section of a transaction is verified as having been completed smoothly. Holding this information in the blockchain means that neither party needs to prove the delivery status of a package if it goes astray – the transaction’s status is an objective truth held within the blockchain.

As well as allowing companies to act proactively upon service issues, this means that businesses can gain increased visibility into their supply chain since they would no longer need to rely on customer feedback as an indicator that a process hasn’t worked correctly. This new insight into service failures could open up the potential for service improvement of a kind never seen before.

In future, businesses could even have the capability to take customer funds only when a product has been verified on the blockchain as received by the customer. This type of blockchain-facilitated process change could be used by companies as a strategic differentiator, helping to reassure customers that they won’t be at risk of losing out if a package goes astray.

Smart Contracts

In the same way that IoT and blockchain could revolutionize the transaction of physical goods, there’s potential for non-physical exchanges to be changed too. One way this can be done is through smart contracts, facilitated through the blockchain.

Using the blockchain, contractual obligations can be tied to specific actions through an “If/Then” model. These actions can trigger when contractual conditions are verified through the blockchain as having been met or not met.

For example, imagine that a customer signs a contract with a cable firm. The cable firm agrees to have service available by a specific date. The transaction is held in a smart contract and recorded on the blockchain. If service is not delivered by the specified date, the customer gets a refund. Or if service is set up on or before the specified date, payment is taken from the customer, and the service begins.

Because the transaction is verified publicly and cannot be altered or tampered with, all parties are held to their contractual obligations and action can automatically be taken if they are not met.

Real distress can be caused to customers when companies don’t keep to their side of a bargain. The burden of proof often rests on the customer to chase, discuss, persuade and fight for compensation. When things go seriously wrong, cases often get referred to third parties such as complaints teams (or even consumer affairs regulators) who are needed to verify claims of contractual wrongdoing and put situations right – a layer of operations that’s often resource-heavy and complicated to administer.

But with smart contracts automating the consequences of contractual non-compliance, third parties and complex processes become unnecessary. The time and effort required to put situations right can be reduced, while leveling the power imbalance between customers and businesses. It also helps companies with great processes gain competitive advantage, especially when compared to companies who seem to only stay in business from making it prohibitively difficult for their customers to complain.

You might have heard about smart contracts having the ability to revolutionize our voting systems, which is exciting in itself. But in the world of everyday business, smart contracts are already being used by Barclays Corporate Bank to verify ownership and release funds between banks, and there’s vast potential for contracts of all kinds to switch to a smart model too.

Customer Record Keeping

We’ve all heard horror stories of companies who have failed to keep customer data safe. Whether it’s personally identifiable information, passwords, sensitive health records or even information that reveals political preferences, businesses and customers everywhere are rightfully concerned about the security of customer data.

As it stands, customers have to trust that companies only hold information about them that’s reasonable and proportionate when in reality, that might not always be the case. Not to mention that each time customers hand over their personal information to businesses, it puts them at risk of identity theft.

Companies like Civic are working on systems to store customer identity information on the blockchain, with that data secured in an encrypted form that customers can disclose as they choose. While the specifics of this are beyond the scope of this blog post, ultimately this could mean that in future, businesses wouldn’t need to hold the personal information necessary for customers to pass data security checks. Companies wouldn’t have to worry about keeping that data safe, clean or compliant as it won’t be held internally, and customers won’t have to worry about excessive or unsafe personal information being held by companies.

Beyond the treatment of customer identity information, there are possibilities for other types of blockchain-based record keeping too – for example, in healthcare. Factom intends to use blockchain to store healthcare records such as medical bills and patient-physician communications. The nature of blockchain-based records means that this information can be simultaneously secured through cryptography while ensuring that records made can never be tampered with.

(On a related note, compliance processes are also an area ripe for massive disruption by blockchain – as the backbone of compliance rests in rigorous record keeping. With a recent Accenture report showing that 23% of financial services firms spend as much as 5% of their annual net income on compliance every year, there’s the potential for substantial cost savings through moving internal records to the blockchain. Here’s an excellent article that explains more on this, if you’re interested.)

The Future of Blockchain?

“We should think about the blockchain as another class of thing like the Internet… But the blockchain concept is even more; it is a new organizing paradigm for the discovery, valuation, and transfer of all quanta (discrete units) of anything, and potentially for the coordination of all human activity at a much larger scale than has been possible before.”


– Blockchain, Blueprint for a New Economy – Melanie Swan

Blockchain technology is a fantastic concept to explore for anyone who loves ethical business, who loves exploring new ways of working, or who wants to make business better for customers.

This new technology gives us all the opportunity to reconsider traditional business processes from their foundations. It’s not far-fetched to consider that in the future, companies like yours and mine could employ blockchain specialists not just to remove liability from businesses, but to make all kinds of processes fairer for customers too.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has caused customers everywhere to question who holds their data, and why. We’re all living in a new age of data insecurity and mistrust. Blockchain technology could act as the antidote to this consumer skepticism, as the decentralization of customer data could usher in radically open, more transparent customer relationships – which could even be the next big differentiator for businesses.

Blockchain adoption could allow our businesses to demonstrate this increased transparency and enable us to build a new type of relationship with our customer – one built upon core values of security, fairness, and equality. Blockchain could even usher in an entirely new era of customer expectation: the expectation that customers should be treated fairly by the businesses they spend their money with, and what’s more, that the blockchain itself can act as a guarantee for that fair treatment.

That’s why customer experience professionals everywhere need to be aware of the potential of this new technology. Of course, nobody knows to what extent blockchain will be adopted. But with publications like Forbes and Fortune predicting blockchain will, quite literally, change the world – along with blockchain ventures launching from some of the world’s most prominent and influential businesses – we all need to watch how this technology develops.

Is your business getting ready for blockchain? I’d love to hear more about how firms are understanding and preparing for its potential applications – feel free to drop me a note in the comments below.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Work

[Webinar] Stop the CSat Nosedive with Chat

I had a fantastic time discussing how live chat can protect against CSat falls with CCW‘s Brian Cantor and Michael Dejager.

A great conversation covering technology, best practices, and how top companies are using chat to not only gain competitive advantage but also secure happy and satisfied customers, both now and in the future.

Register for the recording here.

Customer Experience, Work

Cutting-Edge Customer Experience Ideas from Call Center Week 2017

Customer service is in a huge state of flux. From Chatbots to culture shifts making their mark on the industry, there were a lot of new and important topics for speakers to talk about at this year’s Call Center Week Conference.

The conference certainly gave the Comm100 team some food for thought, so we wanted to share these ideas with you. Here’s our top selection of thoughts and ideas from the speakers at this year’s event, to help you get up to date with everything happening in the customer service field right now. We’ve also included some tweetable quotes for you to share these ideas with your network.

Opening Remarks from the CCW Team

The CCW Team opened the conference with a host of facts and stats, with several hot topics discussed including Live Chat and AI.

80% of customer service managers say improving Live chat is a priority this year. And 68% plan to implement AI this year, too. However, don’t think about getting rid of your agent team yet – only 5% think AI will replace humans.

“AI should be to complement – never to replace – your existing customer service team.”

CCW

Headliner Keynote: A Proven Model for Creating a Winning Culture – Disney Style

Jeff James, Vice President and General Manager at the Disney Institute, headed up the first keynote.

Jeff shared how the team at Disney have a “maniacal focus on world class customer experiences” and how he felt that customer experience for many businesses in recent years has been in decline, fueled by a focus on improving the efficiency of processes.

Jeff noted that “Customer loyalty is earned by delivering on brand promise time and time again.” But how do you make sure your employees deliver on brand promise?

The answer, says Jeff, is employee engagement. And at the source of that is strong leadership.

call center week 2017

Jeff had some insightful things to say about great leadership, noting that:

  • Every leader is telling a story about what he or she values.
  • We judge ourselves based on our intentions, others judge us based on our behaviors.
  • Great leaders do not allow themselves to become separated from our occurrences on the front line.

Disney’s common purpose, throughout all their staff from the CEO to the street sweeper, is to create happiness. Jeff described a culture where employees are not afraid to deliver great customer experiences even if they don’t fit exactly with their job title, emphasizing that creating happiness is everyone’s job.

It was fantastic to hear how Disney’s culture empowers everyone to create great guest experiences, every day. Jeff closed with some fantastic stories around their staff creating fantastic, above-and-beyond guest experiences, and shared how important this behavior, and the recognition of it, is to create the culture Disney needs.We search for people doing it right. Go out and find that. Then reward them. Reverse the model of managers looking to bust ass. They’re looking for opportunities to recognize and reward great behavior. To reward, we almost never use money – it’s ‘Nice job!’ or sharing success in a meeting with peers. When you catch somebody doing something right – that’s great for not just cast members but customers too.

“Every leader is telling a story about what he or she values.”


Jeff James @DisneyInstitute

Game Changer Keynote: Move Your Ideas into Action Through Emotional Transportation

The second keynote was given by Peter Guber – Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment.

call center week 2017

Peter started by describing how businesses need to be able to create purposeful stories that move their audiences. Successes need to be able to be packaged into a narrative to allow customers to evangelize, and this narrative forms what is emotional transportation.

Peter explained that businesses need to focus on creating narratives through sharing benefits, not just features. The whole time you’re treating the customer in a transactional way, you’re moving the customer away from sharing the message you want with them. That’s why emotionalizing messages help – this is what moves people and builds relationships.

“Relationships trump transactions, all the time.”

Peter Guber

“State of the art technology has to be in service to state of the heart technology.”

Peter Guber

Panel Discussion

This panel was hosted by Gary E Barnett – Senior VP & GM Engagement Solutions at Avaya. The panel itself consisted of Gail L Smith – Chief Customer Officer at Metroplus Health Plan, Jon Robertson – Chief Customer Officer at Desk Yogi, and Darren Toohey – Head of Global Sales & Customer Retention at Carlson Wagonlit Travel.

call center week 2017

Gary opened by noting that the industry is “right in the middle of a tornado today” regarding how quickly change is happening.

Darren opened the panel discussion, noting that his industry has changed significantly with the advent of Generation X, Y and Millennials demanding more self-service and live chat options, with less telephone conversation.

Gail introduced herself and her background in healthcare, noting that the Affordable Care Act of 2014 changed healthcare service dramatically, exposing healthcare providers to a wider customer base with different demands from what Metroplus were used to.

Jon explained that changing customer expectations had impacted the fabric of his business dramatically. Where previously companies used to dictate how customers interacted with them, now the tables have turned, with legacy systems and silos causing problems in adapting to this new standpoint.

Gail echoed the idea that breaking down silos is critical to building great customer journeys, noting that communications between different teams can be critical in creating appropriate responses to tricky customer service situations.

The discussion turned to data, with Jon drawing attention to the close relationships needed with developers for data to be scaled and unified as organizations grow. Gary highlights that conversations have shifted from businesses asking for reports, to businesses asking what data they can access, and the benefits inherent within organically interrogating this data.

Discussion around customer expectations was the focus towards the end of this panel discussion, with Gary noting that customers are becoming more demanding. Jon shared that he feels customer expectations are increasingly influenced by companies like Amazon, who have the ability to get a parcel on a customer’s doorstep with just a few hours of the order being placed. Gail mentioned that other industries do certainly influence customer expectations, with the satisfaction of healthcare customers often being met through above-and-beyond customer experience initiatives.

“Regardless of how advanced technology becomes, you still have to know, help & value your customer.”

Darren Toohey

Keynote: The Journey to Customer Centricity – People Powered, Customer Driven Strategy

Tim Spencer, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Safelite Group, opened this keynote by discussing the transformation of Safelite’s business through a focused customer service agenda. Later, Tim was joined by Troy Mills, former VP of Customer Care at Walgreens, now CEO of Customer Card Advisory.

Tim shared how any transformation starts with purpose – that unless everyone within an organization is aligned, it’s vital to establish a purpose that helps their people, or Associates, understand not just what they do, but why they do it.

Safelite’s business is in repairing windshields. For them, many customer interactions start with a situation of distress for their customer – nobody expects that they’ll need to repair their windshield, and it’s often a time of stress while it’s being repaired. Safelite recognized that turning a distress situation into one where Associates show care, no hassle occurs in getting the issue sorted, and customers can get on with their daily lives, is crucial to building a company that people love.

Like Jeff James at Disney, Tim also linked exceptional experiences to employee happiness, created through outstanding leadership. Tim noted that in this sense, CX always starts with AX (the Associate Experience) and that his organization does some key things in building a great culture where Associates genuinely want to create the best customer experiences:

  • Build an environment where people are empowered to act and have autonomy
  • Make it personal
  • Engage closely and understand what’s going on in your people’s lives
  • Recognize performance

Authenticity was also a hot topic here, with Tim recognizing that authentic leaders who engage with their staff helped Safelite’s leaders “make it real.”

Tim discussed ways Safelite’s infrastructure, innovation, and KPIs have shifted to accommodate their new customer focus – with CSat being phased out in favor of customer ease of business scores, new technology such as Chatbots being explored, and HR departments being replaced with People & Leadership Development teams.

“It’s essential to focus on words: these have to align with what we do and what we say we do.”

Tim Spencer
call center week 2017

Keynote: Customer Management Practice Executive Report: Three Bold Predictions

This keynote was headed by Mario Matulich, Executive Director of the Customer Management Practice at IQPC. Additionally, Mario was joined by Troy Mills, former VP of Customer Care at Walgreens and current Chief Academic Officer at CCW University.

Mario opened by stating that the stakes are real. It’s time to be bold! 77% of people talk to friends about poor customer experience. 78% of the same people make decisions based off word of mouth feedback. 62% of customers change brands if they have just one poor experience – and 61% of those will tell you they’ll move even to an inferior product or priced higher if they’re getting a poor experience.

  • Prediction number 1 was that speed becomes a number 1 priority for customers. Hold time was found to be twice as important as personalization, with the understanding that while personalization is great – if you waste a customer’s time, they can never get that back. Wait time was found to be the number 1 reason why customers complain.
  • Prediction number 2 was that disintegrated technology must go. Making customers repeat themselves through disintegrated solutions frustrates customers, which then puts staff on the back foot. Because 68% of customers say agent demeanor is a critical part of their service experience, ensuring that solutions are integrated and help form linear, easy customer experiences are critical to help your agents do the best work they can.
  • Prediction number 3 was that today’s Contact Center agent will become obsolete in the next 24 months. But this idea isn’t about the steady march of automation taking jobs – rather, that the traditional contact center skill set is changing drastically with the advent of omnichannel and the increasing complexity of agent interactions. This issue doesn’t just concern agent training, though – it’s also about future leadership development.

Troy opened on this topic by discussing that at many big companies, training is one of the things that gets left behind when service levels decrease. But that’s not how to develop leaders. Ultimately, Troy said that getting better predictions about the future, sharing them with staff, and developing time for their development is key to lead staff to become true leaders.

Troy also commented on leaders needing to present revenue drivers rather than cost sinks to company strategists, in order to see change. The stakes are certainly high for these future leaders, and Troy commented that many businesses have knowledge gaps when trying to develop leaders who have people and financial leadership skills, ability with communications and technology, as well as an understanding of where businesses operate in a global environment. In this sense, it’s even more vital for businesses to ringfence time to ensure their leaders are up to scratch on these points.

“63% of customers would pay more for a better experience; 87% then share great experiences!”

Mario Matulich

Keynote: Customer-Centric Transformer – Customer Obsession at Amazon

This keynote was presented by Tom Weiland, President of Worldwide Customer Service at Amazon.

Tom started by discussing good intentions versus mechanisms. A common problem in many businesses is that good intentions aren’t enough – they don’t cause change, in and of themselves. What works for Tom’s team is what he calls mechanisms – which consist of good tools, adoption of those tools, and inspection, working together to form positive change.

Mechanism 1 Tom discussed was working backwards. Tom described the process of starting with a press release, to solidify everything expectations and requirements when releasing a new feature at the planning stage.

Mechanism 2 was creating a customer connections program. One a year, each employee is invited to come to the contact center, listen to customers, get customer feedback, and improve processes as a result.

Mechanism 3 was the Andon Cord. The Andon Cord is a decades-old idea from the manufacturer, Toyota – that if anyone on the assembly line spotted a defect, they could pull the Andon Cord which stopped the production line until it was fixed. At the time, this idea was revolutionary – the idea that anyone on the line could stop it was seen as a major shift in power. Tom used this idea at Amazon by enabling employees to make an item temporarily unavailable if they were getting complaints about its quality. This kind of process is deeply empowering for staff and means that quality issues are dealt with, not glossed over.

Mechanism 4 was Tenets. Tenets at Amazon are principles and beliefs held by staff – Tom described them as “like a north star for a team.” Each team has a few tenets covering their purpose, what they’re working towards, and guiding them in how to act.

call center week 2017

“Good intentions aren’t enough – because you’re not asking for a change.”

Tom Weiland

Keynote: Training Innovation – The Revolution of Training: VOC is Just a Click Away

Davy M Roach, Vice President Customer Care PMO at Frontier Communications, gave this training-focused keynote.

Davy argued that the traditional method of training is broken:

  • It’s expensive, both developing training and taking staff offline to train them.
  • It’s slow. Processes within a company can be bad, and increase training time. It also takes many employees to deliver the curriculum.
  • It’s ineffective. As employees, we’re human – we listen for positives, and ignore or bias the negatives. We have selective memory. Feedback through coaching is hard to do – hard to deliver, hard to receive.

Davy shared that social and self-discovery are emerging training models, and discussed some of the differences between these newer and older models.

call center week 2017

Davy discussed what this looks like at Frontier. In a self-discovery training session, employees talk informally and discuss what they could be doing better. Learning here is peer to peer, and much more effective than coming from a supervisor.

Regarding timing training, it used to be that scheduled sessions were timetabled and then delivered, often some weeks after the event that precipitated the training need. Now, Frontier uses VOC data to drive employee training, with reviews of customer feedback being delivered in real time. This VOC feedback allows employees to discover what they did well, what they could improve, and look out for patterns that need addressing.

“Traditional training mechanisms are ripe for disruption.”

Davy Roach

Conclusion

Call Center Week saw some big themes emerge across several of the keynotes as well as the smaller discussions. Culture, employee engagement, AI and omnichannel were topics that most leading industry figures engaged with, regardless of business size or industry.

The customer service field is now growing far beyond recognizing the need for great customer service processes, and instead, embracing these factors outside of the call center that contribute to amazing customer experiences. These are challenging, yet exciting times for anyone working to improve the experiences of their customers.

Were you at Call Center Week? What did you think? Or do you have a different point of view to the speakers we’ve shown here? Add your comment in the section below.

Originally published here.

Culture, Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Work

More Than Just Lip Service: How To Turn Corporate Values into Lived Behaviors in Your Contact Center

Communication – We have an obligation to communicate.
Respect – We treat others as we would like to be treated.
Integrity – We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.
Excellence – We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do.

Do these corporate values sound familiar to you? Given that some 89% of companies have core values of some kind, it’s likely that you’re accustomed to these types of statements, which many companies all over the world proudly align themselves to.

The difference with this list of values is that they’re pulled from the 2000 Annual Report of what would become one of the most unethical companies of all time – Enron. In the wake of Enron’s 2001 accounting scandal, it quickly became clear to shareholders and customers alike that these values meant nothing, in a corporate culture where greed reigned supreme.

While Enron is an extreme example of values fallen by the wayside, sadly it’s all too often that company value statements are pinned up on the wall and forgotten about, while lived culture brews all practices and tactics which make for disempowering, politically-charged or unethical working environments.

It’s a sad thing that the contact center is so often a place where these practices are often seen and publicized. From KPIs that cause role conflict and stress, to high-pressure sales tactics employed by desperate staff at the expense of vulnerable customers, there are companies everywhere who pay lip service to great culture while allowing awful business practices to impact on customers and agents alike.

Corporate value statements are meant to prevent this, but they’re problematic for any professional who looks for results in any business initiative – and corporate values are as much of a business initiative as any other practice to fuel organizational change. How can values be measured? What even are we measuring here? While corporate values are often seen as too disputed or illusory to get to consensus on and measure, it can be done. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from helping contact centers to embed their corporate values.

Make Values Visible

Your values shouldn’t be hidden in a corporate handbook. Make it clear how much they influence your working culture by putting them front and center. Print them on coffee mugs, engrave them into meeting room windows, hang them on posters.

Making values visible is much more than physically marking their presence. Your leadership team have a huge role to play in setting the standard for values-driven business, too. To put it simply – if they’re not talking about values, your teams aren’t going to either.

Work Towards Shared Definitions

Some values are really difficult to define. Ask your average person what integrity is, for example, and you’ll likely get an answer along the lines of “Doing the right thing”. That’s all well and good, but Enron’s executives probably thought they were doing the right thing for their lifestyle and family the whole time they were secretly lining their pockets with the organization’s money.

Values mean different things to different people, so it’s essential to get your team agreed on what a particular value actually means in order for them to see how it can be applied to their work. Get your teams thinking about what your corporate values really mean to them by way of a brainstorming session – and be prepared for some deep discussions that range into the realms of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and more.

All of this makes for some seriously interesting debate that will help you understand your teams in new ways, as well as helping them towards a deeper understanding of what values really are, and how they apply within your organization.

Define What Values Look Like – And What They Don’t Look Like

Many of us would say we are principled people who act according to certain standards. You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t say that they don’t take accountability for their actions, or that they don’t treat people with respect. But ask how values can be shown in an everyday working environment, and some might struggle to come up with some concrete examples of what certain values actually look like. What do accountable people actually do to show that? What behaviours do you need to show to demonstrate excellence?

What’s more, the nature of modern work often presents some interesting ethical dilemmas that value statements alone don’t resolve. Is it a violation of integrity to book a doctor’s appointment on work time when you’re not feeling well? Is Ken’s bordering-on-xenophobic nature to be expected given his upbringing and culture, or does that signify a problematic absence of respect? Identifying behaviors linked to value statements is a great way to give clarity to these moral grey areas.

Create some clear examples of specific behaviors to give your teams that clarity. Work with them to brainstorm what each value looks like, and also what acting with an absence of that value looks like. These behaviors should cover both interactions with customers, as well as interactions with each other.

With some encouragement, many people can come up with some real-life behaviors that act as a solid guideline for value-driven working practices, and help make value statements more concrete than a list of well-meaning but vague phrases. Document them for future reference and be clear that your list should rightly be always up for debate.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is – Measure & Assess Values

It’s rare for organizations to measure and assess standards for behavior against corporate values, but turning values into a KPI sends a seriously strong message about how important values are to you as an organization.

What’s more, when staff know there are expectations for value-driven conduct, values transform from being statements that are talked about on induction day and then forgotten, to becoming a reliable standard which defines how work occurs within your business.

You can implement a value-based KPI into your annual review process by asking staff to come prepared with examples of times they’ve shown behaviors that signify a particular value. You can decide how in-depth and granular you want this process to be – it might be enough for you to ask your teams to evidence one or two things that show they’ve acted with a certain value at each review, and give them a tick in the box that demonstrates they have thought and acted in accordance with that value. Or, you might choose a more lengthy process that incorporates coaching and 360-degree feedback to develop a rating.

With sensitivity to the practicalities of this process, it’s possible to develop a new KPI that helps your corporate values to become truly lived.

Why Values Matter In The Contact Center

Few business areas have seen as much transformation in the last few decades as the contact center. Back in the 80s, as the telephone enabled the offshoring of customer communications, the call center was born as an opportunity for business cost reduction. The draw of call centers was the ability to cheaply process high-volume customer inquiries – inquiries which were often low quality, and the targets and practices within them tended to disadvantage agents and customers alike.

Only in the last ten years has CX become a strategic priority, and now, our agents are much more than low-skill, scripted triage staff – they’re fully-fledged knowledge workers, with valuable and transferable professional skills, creating clear business advantage for the organizations they work within.

Despite this incredible change, contact centers still suffer from the image problems of the past – viewed as places where ‘professional’ work and ethics are often absent. Agents still try to minimize aspects of their role from their friends or relatives, who still commonly see contact centers as unskilled, low-value places to work. And many customers still dread contacting customer service, expecting to talk to agents with no ability or desire to truly help. These are big issues which affect the potential success of the work that we all do, as demonstrating the worth of our centers is especially hard against this backdrop.

With that in mind, it’s important for anyone who hopes to advance contact center working practices to reject the perceptions of the past, through ensuring that their centers are staffed by agents who aren’t disadvantaged by their jobs, and who serve customers who are treated fairly. Values can be a strong driver to set a clear standard for conduct, communication, and behavior in our centers so that this hope becomes more than just an aspiration.

The promotion of value-driven business practices, then, is essential to actually change the problematic perceptions of contact center work and to help us raise the bar of best practice throughout our industry.

It’s on all of us to situate values strongly in our workplaces, helping us to create contact centers which are recognized as operating fairly, upholding exceptional standards of practice, and allowing for empowering work to take place – for agents, businesses and customers alike.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Work

Why Are Customers So Rude, Stupid, Entitled? (Or Important!)

Many of you will be familiar with Google’s autocomplete feature – the suggested phrases which pop up when you start to type in a word or phrase, based on phrases other people have searched for.

Google’s autocomplete suggestions can be pretty telling in what people around the world are thinking about their customers – and as well as Google itself, there’s some great tools out there to help curious customer service professionals see all of the questions people are asking about customers all around the internet.

So, what are some of the top questions being asked about customers? Typing in “Why are customers” into Google brings up four top search terms… with some telling results for everyone working within customer service.

Read more at the Comm100 Blog.