Ian M Rountree

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Manners and Momentum, a Missing Piece of the Success Puzzle

January 12, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

non exietence on FlickrTom is the best customer service person I know. He cooks and serves at a place in the food court of the mall where I work. He always smiles, always waves when he sees someone he recognizes, and is always immaculately polite. I’ve seen him ask the same five questions to every customer he sees, every time I walk by for the last year. I’ve never heard him use the same phrase twice in a row. A while ago I asked him how that came about and he said he had developed the habit years ago, and couldn’t seem to get rid of it.

It got even more amusing when he came into my store a few days later, and I noticed that his manner was identical in person to the person he portrayed behind the counter at his own business. For most people, this wouldn’t even get a notice; Tom is a polite guy, soft-spoken, always with a small, courteous smile. But I make a business of noticing things about people, and the very preciseness about Tom that makes him a great person is what makes him a great customer service person. It’s not the other way around.

You can argue that people in call centers have the best phone manners. I’d agree, to some degree, because most of the way I approach people over the phone comes from having done market research surveys for a year. It gets into you. Once you stop using the script, your acceptance goes up, so you foster the most real, most human manners you can to be successful. This only works, of course, if you’re the kind of person willing to do the work. People in outbound are good at this. We’ve all had our bad experiences with the intractable fops on inbound service. They are not what this is about.

This is about interpersonal skills. The ability to make real, fast, transparent connections is being downplayed in the new culture, in part because of the automated veil the internet places over our sense of communication (even though the veil is a paper tiger), and in part because we’re changing our habits on the outside to match those we see online. Teenagers are saying “lawl” and “Oh em gee” outloud, rather than learning to take their expressiveness to the net. Instead of learning to engage maturely online, we’re learning to bring digital body language and netiquette out into the rest of our lives. It’s counter productive.

Developing great interpersonal skills isn’t just useful as a human being, it’s useful to you in business. If you want another good example of this, look at the death of Circuit City. One of their many bad moves was to fire the top third earning commissioned salespeople on staff, and bring in lower paid people who didn’t care. When you hire people who can, but for the grace of HR, find another minimum wage job two doors down, you’re not hiring good customer service, you’re hiring a trainable bank of low engagement labourers. The kinds of people actively attracted to these jobs – I’m not talking about people who fall into them en route to better things, I mean the kind that actually want a low intensity job with no life impact – they’re not interested in your business, or in customer experience. And if they are, do what you can to keep them, because they are your greatest asset, and they don’t even realize it.

So few businesses encourage the growth of interpersonal skills it’s frightening. For all the hubub about the new human business, down in the trenches (read as: on the sales floor) many front line customer service reps are still being coached into using inane catch phrases from a booklet and watch their individual statistics with no understanding of why these key point indicators (KPIs, in the right circles) are useful to either the company, to their customers, or to themselves. It’s ludicrous, but we’re convinced it’s the best way.

We, as businesses, think that because our low-earning staff are unwilling to invest in us, that we can get away with not actually investing in them. But we, as businesses, have the trend entirely backwards. We’re doing the same thing those teenagers are. Our inability to demonstrate meaningful investment in the bottom ranks (even calling them the bottom ranks) is what’s creating a lack of loyalty, engagement, and ingenuity in our people. It’s not them, forcing us to streamline. It’s our constant streamlining forcing them to flee in mortal terror from emotional and cultural investment in the business that employs them. They don’t care about us, entirely because we never, ever, demonstrate real care about them.

Back to Tom. People like him stand out because, whether or not he’s the business owner or a front of house clerk, his built in reaction to everything is “Give if your guts.” Tom couldn’t stop asking people if they’d like the combo meal if he tried. He’s made himself aware of exactly the reasons why it’s important to his business, and is aware that determined people won’t be offended by his asking and will say no if they wish to. The real brilliance behind Tom’s attitude is that he refuses to make a judgement of need or want on behalf of another person, choosing instead to ask direct, simple questions, and get every piece of information he needs without allowing room for omission, presenting in such a way that infers neither opinion, threat, or pressure.

Generosity of intention. Economy of information. Aware, detached participation in your experience as a customer.

I’m declaring Tom as one of the new demigods of business. I’m going to try to be more like him. Why don’t we all? I’m sure it would solve a lot of nagging problems.

Photo by mindfulness.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: aspiration, awareness, business, customer experience, customer service, demigods, economy, generosity, netiquette, participation

The Worst Attitude For Customer Service

December 30, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

“You can’t please everybody.”

While it is possible to commit no errors and still lose sometimes, believing any variant of “can’t please everybody” instantly ruins any customer interaction you’ll ever have, because you’re leaving room for the possibility of a less than perfect experience.

I say this is the worst for customer service, because it’s not specific to any given industry. No matter who you are, in what locale or business, you have customers. Sometimes it may not feel this way – especially if you’re behind the scenes, doing IT or intra-business support, but the only thing that changes here is the terminology, not the process. Sometimes your boss is your customer; this comes back to the difference between bringing a service to market or a product. Which you’re focused on determines the terminology, but the same remains, if you leave any room for less-than-awesome, you’re leaving room for failure.

I suspect this is an area where just about every business on the planet can use some improvement. And people as well; while we want to participate in our brands more than ever, compromise is a necessity. People are, in general, more tolerant than we give them credit for, if we give them the right, valid information in a timely manner.

It takes a little practice, but consider it this way: When someone says “Thank You,” how do you respond? Do you say “You’re Welcome” because you’re happy to have helped?
Or do you respond “No Problem” and run the risk of diminishing their experience because, in effect, you’re claiming it was worth so little of your time it’s had no effect on your day?

Employing the “Can’t please everybody” defence when you’ve failed may be strict truth, but it also removes the responsibility from your own shoulders. It means you’re unwilling to do the work and find the root of the problem.

And while walking away from the right wasting efforts is sometimes a good idea, the Walk Away Now philosophy is NOT (Say it with me, N O T) intended to be employed without any effort to learn why whatever it is you’re walking away from was a bad idea at the moment anyway.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: chris brogan, customer service, follow-the-linker, for-your-boss, reaction

Technical Support

July 8, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

There are a lot of places where businesses can do better for their customers – and where customers can better support their providers. Here are a few examples.

When there’s something strange, going on under the hood. Who you gonna call? Helpdeskers!

But who wants to? Since the middle ages, people have been having issues with things they don’t make themselves. If you made it yourself, you know the ins and outs, but if someone else did, there are always things they forgot to tell you. Or didn’t tell you in words you understood.

Run for the hills! They’ve thrown the dictionary at us!

It doesn’t have to get this bad, EVER! But it does, doesn’t it? All the time. I can’t even count the number of calls I’ve made to some form of customer support where the terms they use haven’t been previously explained. After a while it begins to feel like every third word is martian, and this is where the first disconnect happens. Lots of folk just have no patience for learning new terms on the fly – and why should they? There are almost always easier words to use that don’t rely on industry jargon or obscure legalese, but for whatever reason, it seems like it’s almost impossible for many support calls to survive more than two minutes without one of these terms flying out of the phone line and turning most of us into “Uh-huh” zombies who can’t properly follow an instruction to save our lives – and the rest of us, who are either lucky enough to understand the terms, or unlucky enough to have learned them through repeated exposure, these sad few just get annoyed because we know there’s no good reason for this stuff.

There’s clarity, and there’s user-speak.

Techs just can’t translate, sometimes. ven putting aside the problem of jargon, if you’re not intimately involved with a system/product/service, it’s hard to understand people who are. Whether it’s computer support people talking just above the level of the average user, or credit employees railing on about their terms and numbers – very often, helpdesk can become two countries divided by a common language. Who needs to fix this? We, the users, are always able to say “Hang on, explain that a little more?” or flat out call bull on a helpdesker’s advice. But do we? Not often, because they’re the experts, right? And what about the helpdeskers? It’s fully in their power to offer more information, but knowing when’s a good time to give this detail, and which callers are actually going to benefit from the extra tidbits is often really hard. Over-sharing can apply to business transactions too.

How many people do I have to talk to?

Forget for a moment that you only understand a third of what comes across the phone line. Ever counted the number of techies you talk to in a given call? How about how long it takes before they call in the supervisor? I’m not sure whether this is out of some phantom need to make a caller feel that their call is actually important, or complicated, or if (and this is likely more true) the support people are rated on fast call turnover and passing a problem on to a higher tier actually gets them better stats and raises. The ratio of calls with in-call hold times while the support person is supposedly “talking to a more experienced tech” has got to be through the roof!

So what’s the bottom line?

Users owe it to themselves to learn a bit more about their products and services. I’ve found that the more information people gather for themselves – whether brochures, FAQ files, blogs like this one, or even post-it notes put in place after a useful helpdesk call, the better off they are in general. It not only means more confidence in their products, it usually means less calls to support at the end of the day anyway!
Users are certainly not the only ones who have space to improve. Helpdeskers NEED training. And I’m not talking technical or service-oriented training, either. Product knowledge is par for the course. What support people need is soft-skills. Give them some real sales training, get them face to face with people every so often. Make sure that there’s a feedback system that actually has bearing on their jobs. Coach them when they mistranslate. Penalize for passing on calls, just like you praise for short call times.
At the end of the day, it’s not the support person’s fault you don’t know what they’re talking about. But it’s certainly not your fault that they didn’t ask the right questions either.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: advocacy, customer service

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