This could be disappointing if you came for information on a minimum viable product. This has nothing to do with that. It is a mini-rant on the current ridiculous customer experience practices in Enterprise that are "Making Values Plunge" and leading to "Minimum Viable Productivity."
Seriously leaders, if your company claims a place at the forefront of your field or industry, or if you aspire to position your organization there, please take a few hours this week to examine the goals and processes around your customer service experience.
Why are your managers continually shoving expanded multitasking on your front-line employees when years of research prove that it is inefficient and diminishes productivity?
The American Psychological Association shares studies from 2001 by Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, that demonstrate a productivity loss of up to 40 percent from multi-tasking. More recently, MIT Neuroscientist Earl Miller shared in Fortune why people should stop multi-tasking.
Obviously, today's increasingly complex environments require sales and service reps to process vast amounts of information. They must also routinely stay current on massive amounts of constantly changing product knowledge and company information. While artificial intelligence and chatbots are helping shift customer interactions, there seems to be a terrible disconnect between the actual customer experience and C-Suite and upper management perception of it. Intentions and designs may be good, but the execution is failing far too often.
While most every role in the business world is constantly shifting and evolving, front-line personnel are caught in the crosshairs of rapid change from almost every department throughout the company. They manage and respond to poorly planned or ineffectively executed transformations every day, but they are almost never involved in the planning processes.
They also run intervention and manage concerns from irate, upset, or disgruntled customers. That in itself can be overwhelming, but intelligent, motivated employees will rise to meet the challenge. Problems seem to be growing exponentially, however, around the trend of turning customer service departments into sales departments. Why would forcing more badly managed multi-tasking onto people in positions where turnover is already problematic, seem like a good management decision?
While the customer journey has evolved into a maze of possibilities in today's omnichannel world, the fundamentals of customer service have not changed. Your front line teams should be able to concentrate on listening to your customer's questions, concerns, and needs. If they are being directed to interrupt that primary focus for any reason, there is a problem. If your customer-facing teams feel like they are facing an obstacle course on every interaction, you have a management problem.
So, on that note, why are customers who call for help with a problem or issue being bombarded with sales pitches?
That was a rhetorical question. Historically, customer service has always been a cost center. Given the volume of interaction between your customers, clients, and service centers, it would be foolish not to capitalize on potential sales opportunities during these interchanges. Most businesses aim to convert the cost center to a revenue generation source.
There is, however, a difference between opportunity and exploitation. This applies to people on both sides of the exchange. Customers who are extremely upset or have been given wrong information or misled should not be forced to fend off questions that have nothing to do with their problem. Your employees should not be facing discipline or negative performance feedback for taking care of your customer properly.
If you are hiring employees who are not able to differentiate when a sales offer is appropriate from when it is not, you are hiring the wrong employees. If your managers are threatening write-ups or discipline to employees for not asking questions and making sales offers to angry, upset customers, or customers who are running through the airport trying to catch a flight, then your managers are the problem. If your customer's issue is complex or he or she has had to make multiple calls to get resolution, your reps should be empowered to choose whether a sales offer should be presented.
They are required to manage the call, and if they are held accountable for customer satisfaction and resolving problems, then adding sales requirements to a "bad" call is unfair to both customer and employee. If the managers demand sales offers on calls where the rep feels it inappropriate, then any negative customer feedback should apply to the manager, not the employee that was undermined.
That brings us to the next point. Unless you are a specialty surgeon providing a life-saving service that only a couple of others in the world can provide, success in business depends on your customers choosing to do business with you and your company. The effectiveness of your customer-facing employees is your salvation or downfall on an hourly basis. Efficiency matters in any business, but if your front-line people are continually being given expanded responsibilities, why are they not also being given the autonomy to manage them?
Management structures in Enterprise call centers and customer service environments are increasingly obsolete and ineffective. If your management team is demanding specific call and chat management flows in situations where they make absolutely no sense because someone in a higher level management position told them to do so, where is the person who is asking "WHY?"
If experienced service and sales representatives are encountering the same problems again and again, but managers are focused on enforcing behaviors that do not solve the problems, at a company level, where exactly is the accountability? Why is your company wasting money to pay managers who are not solving the problems?
Smart, well-managed companies empower their representatives and pay more to retain quality and experience. Recent studies show that a 5% increase in customer retention rate increases profits by 25% to 95%. As business leaders like CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos and others have proven, the kind of emotional experience your customers, and potential customers, experience, impacts the length and quality of your relationship with them. If your managers do not understand the motivations of their employees,, they may consistently diminish their morale and effectiveness. As this video discussing a study by economists at MIT points out, they are wasting resources and actively working against the main goal that every company should have for customer service.
My intention here is not to ridicule or diminish the idea that call centers and customer contact points can contribute to sales and marketing efforts. On the contrary, I have been a passionate advocate of the unrecognized and underutilized value of service representatives for years, and even helped restructure an entire division to make better use of resources and increase sales profits.
The business world today is a barrage of change and rapid deployments, and that will not end anytime soon. Customer service, on the other hand, is a basic business precept. It has been analyzed, deep-dived, and evaluated by the best of the best. Yet, so many companies STILL miss the boat. They just don't get it.
Your business is either customer-centric, or it is not. Talking about being customer-centric does not equate to being so. Memos, emails, and meetings don't bring you into the fold either. Perhaps the sheer simplicity of customer service makes it such an elusive concept for so many companies. The person who interacts with your customers directly should be empowered to resolve your customer's issues.
If your front line employees encounter the same issue repeatedly or need to issue credits at a level that causes concerns about revenue or P&L, then you have a product, process, execution or ethics issue. If your first reaction toward a solution is to create more rules, regulations, and policies for those on the front line, your company is NOT customer-centric.
Own the fact that you have a management issue that needs to be resolved. Someone did not involve the right stakeholders, neglected to include appropriate checks and balances, or left important considerations out of a process. If your supervisors and managers are not identifying these issues and submitting process improvements and recommendations, exactly what is their purpose?
Do you expect advertising and marketing teams to create the perfect journey for your customers? If your answer is yes - when did their last conversation with members of your front end teams who are actually interacting with your customers take place? If it has been more than a week, your company is not customer-centric.
Those responsible for planning your customer's experience should be seeking direct feedback on a weekly basis from those who are actually making sales and servicing your customers. The data they accumulate should be clean and accurate. If bias is introduced, for example, by always interviewing reps from the same store or service center, your efforts are compromised before they start. If sources are not accurately representative of your workforce and customer base, the data is pointless. If representatives are hand-picked by managers to protect center preferences or regional prejudices, the data is corrupt.
Service is service and sales should be an outgrowth of good service, but they are not one and the same. Do your business a favor, and check this week to see if your frontline employees are feeling valued and respected. See if they are happy in their jobs. See if they are facing any significant repetitive challenges or problems because those problems and challenges are usually the ones at the forefront of your customers' frustrations.
Compare it to discovering a trend before it gains popularity. If you do this, even on a small scale, you will always have a measure on the pulse of your customer. Customer experiences travel at warp speed in today's connected world, and can literally make company valuations and stock values plunge in hours. Business leaders cannot afford to simply assume that others in their organization grasp the magnitude of impact.
Unsure if your current customer service processes or experiences are optimal? Other service or sales integration concerns that you would like to see addressed? Contact me here.
The American Psychological Association shares studies from 2001 by Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, that demonstrate a productivity loss of up to 40 percent from multi-tasking. More recently, MIT Neuroscientist Earl Miller shared in Fortune why people should stop multi-tasking.
Obviously, today's increasingly complex environments require sales and service reps to process vast amounts of information. They must also routinely stay current on massive amounts of constantly changing product knowledge and company information. While artificial intelligence and chatbots are helping shift customer interactions, there seems to be a terrible disconnect between the actual customer experience and C-Suite and upper management perception of it. Intentions and designs may be good, but the execution is failing far too often.
While most every role in the business world is constantly shifting and evolving, front-line personnel are caught in the crosshairs of rapid change from almost every department throughout the company. They manage and respond to poorly planned or ineffectively executed transformations every day, but they are almost never involved in the planning processes.
They also run intervention and manage concerns from irate, upset, or disgruntled customers. That in itself can be overwhelming, but intelligent, motivated employees will rise to meet the challenge. Problems seem to be growing exponentially, however, around the trend of turning customer service departments into sales departments. Why would forcing more badly managed multi-tasking onto people in positions where turnover is already problematic, seem like a good management decision?
While the customer journey has evolved into a maze of possibilities in today's omnichannel world, the fundamentals of customer service have not changed. Your front line teams should be able to concentrate on listening to your customer's questions, concerns, and needs. If they are being directed to interrupt that primary focus for any reason, there is a problem. If your customer-facing teams feel like they are facing an obstacle course on every interaction, you have a management problem.
So, on that note, why are customers who call for help with a problem or issue being bombarded with sales pitches?
That was a rhetorical question. Historically, customer service has always been a cost center. Given the volume of interaction between your customers, clients, and service centers, it would be foolish not to capitalize on potential sales opportunities during these interchanges. Most businesses aim to convert the cost center to a revenue generation source.
There is, however, a difference between opportunity and exploitation. This applies to people on both sides of the exchange. Customers who are extremely upset or have been given wrong information or misled should not be forced to fend off questions that have nothing to do with their problem. Your employees should not be facing discipline or negative performance feedback for taking care of your customer properly.
If you are hiring employees who are not able to differentiate when a sales offer is appropriate from when it is not, you are hiring the wrong employees. If your managers are threatening write-ups or discipline to employees for not asking questions and making sales offers to angry, upset customers, or customers who are running through the airport trying to catch a flight, then your managers are the problem. If your customer's issue is complex or he or she has had to make multiple calls to get resolution, your reps should be empowered to choose whether a sales offer should be presented.
They are required to manage the call, and if they are held accountable for customer satisfaction and resolving problems, then adding sales requirements to a "bad" call is unfair to both customer and employee. If the managers demand sales offers on calls where the rep feels it inappropriate, then any negative customer feedback should apply to the manager, not the employee that was undermined.
That brings us to the next point. Unless you are a specialty surgeon providing a life-saving service that only a couple of others in the world can provide, success in business depends on your customers choosing to do business with you and your company. The effectiveness of your customer-facing employees is your salvation or downfall on an hourly basis. Efficiency matters in any business, but if your front-line people are continually being given expanded responsibilities, why are they not also being given the autonomy to manage them?
Management structures in Enterprise call centers and customer service environments are increasingly obsolete and ineffective. If your management team is demanding specific call and chat management flows in situations where they make absolutely no sense because someone in a higher level management position told them to do so, where is the person who is asking "WHY?"
If experienced service and sales representatives are encountering the same problems again and again, but managers are focused on enforcing behaviors that do not solve the problems, at a company level, where exactly is the accountability? Why is your company wasting money to pay managers who are not solving the problems?
Smart, well-managed companies empower their representatives and pay more to retain quality and experience. Recent studies show that a 5% increase in customer retention rate increases profits by 25% to 95%. As business leaders like CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos and others have proven, the kind of emotional experience your customers, and potential customers, experience, impacts the length and quality of your relationship with them. If your managers do not understand the motivations of their employees,, they may consistently diminish their morale and effectiveness. As this video discussing a study by economists at MIT points out, they are wasting resources and actively working against the main goal that every company should have for customer service.
My intention here is not to ridicule or diminish the idea that call centers and customer contact points can contribute to sales and marketing efforts. On the contrary, I have been a passionate advocate of the unrecognized and underutilized value of service representatives for years, and even helped restructure an entire division to make better use of resources and increase sales profits.
The business world today is a barrage of change and rapid deployments, and that will not end anytime soon. Customer service, on the other hand, is a basic business precept. It has been analyzed, deep-dived, and evaluated by the best of the best. Yet, so many companies STILL miss the boat. They just don't get it.
Your business is either customer-centric, or it is not. Talking about being customer-centric does not equate to being so. Memos, emails, and meetings don't bring you into the fold either. Perhaps the sheer simplicity of customer service makes it such an elusive concept for so many companies. The person who interacts with your customers directly should be empowered to resolve your customer's issues.
If your front line employees encounter the same issue repeatedly or need to issue credits at a level that causes concerns about revenue or P&L, then you have a product, process, execution or ethics issue. If your first reaction toward a solution is to create more rules, regulations, and policies for those on the front line, your company is NOT customer-centric.
Own the fact that you have a management issue that needs to be resolved. Someone did not involve the right stakeholders, neglected to include appropriate checks and balances, or left important considerations out of a process. If your supervisors and managers are not identifying these issues and submitting process improvements and recommendations, exactly what is their purpose?
Do you expect advertising and marketing teams to create the perfect journey for your customers? If your answer is yes - when did their last conversation with members of your front end teams who are actually interacting with your customers take place? If it has been more than a week, your company is not customer-centric.
Those responsible for planning your customer's experience should be seeking direct feedback on a weekly basis from those who are actually making sales and servicing your customers. The data they accumulate should be clean and accurate. If bias is introduced, for example, by always interviewing reps from the same store or service center, your efforts are compromised before they start. If sources are not accurately representative of your workforce and customer base, the data is pointless. If representatives are hand-picked by managers to protect center preferences or regional prejudices, the data is corrupt.
Service is service and sales should be an outgrowth of good service, but they are not one and the same. Do your business a favor, and check this week to see if your frontline employees are feeling valued and respected. See if they are happy in their jobs. See if they are facing any significant repetitive challenges or problems because those problems and challenges are usually the ones at the forefront of your customers' frustrations.
Compare it to discovering a trend before it gains popularity. If you do this, even on a small scale, you will always have a measure on the pulse of your customer. Customer experiences travel at warp speed in today's connected world, and can literally make company valuations and stock values plunge in hours. Business leaders cannot afford to simply assume that others in their organization grasp the magnitude of impact.
Unsure if your current customer service processes or experiences are optimal? Other service or sales integration concerns that you would like to see addressed? Contact me here.
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