‘Round and ’round it goes, where it stops… nobody knows!
Today, class, we are going to talk about customer service, specifically communication.
Does the following script sound familiar?
- You open a trouble ticket, have it go into the great beyond, and… dead air. Nary a response, nothing, nada, zip, zilch.
- You wonder, “Where did it go? Who’s looking at it? What action is being taken? When will someone take care of it? How do you go about getting a response?”
- Out of the blue, you receive a canned response; something like, “Please reboot your PC, this will fix your problem. This trouble ticket has been closed.” You have no contact telephone number to follow-up, and a canned message. Great.
- You cry “Why me…!”
Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and let’s pretend that you are the helpdesk manager (or someone responsible for customer service.)
The Scenario
You’re under funded, under staffed, and over worked. Your staff wades through the same cruft for over their standard allotted 8 hour work day — verging on 10 to 12 hours on a “normal” day.
You receive on a daily basis a deluge of requests, some from very smart people and some from those that may not be so savvy in the wile ways of customer support and your service niche. Customers and clients, both internal and external are constantly clamoring for your time and making demands for your limited resources.
You just don’t have the staff to address the demand and remain profitable — even if you could add staff, the training curve for your product eliminates the effectiveness of that individual for some period of time, not to mention the cost associated with training.
On top of the logistical issues, you have morale issues — since you’re understaffed, employees are working long hours, on-call and after hours maintenance, and (*shudder*) splitting shifts, add to that confusing or conflicting priorities and politics. You are being held to a “higher standard” and quite possibly your bonus (if you’re lucky enough to get one) is based on closing requests. Customer satisfaction is a vague concept, as you have no way to query and collect, much less analyze, end user feedback.
Your people rush through tasks, often kicking out canned responses — that may or may not solve customer issues — because they have “quotas”. In most cases your staff may actually be recognized and rewarded for closing more cases under a pay-for-performance plan. According to The University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston, “The competitive reasons for the growing emphasis on performance-based compensation are companies cutting costs, restructuring, and boosting performance.” Go figure. Quantitative closures are assumed to be less expensive to enforce than qualitative quotas; Translation — it’s easier to measure number of closures, rather than happy customers.
Your processes are out of date, your technology is archaic and, sadly, there isn’t likely to be any improvement any time soon, because you aren’t getting additional funding. Do more with less, as the saying goes.
Of course, you just want to deliver World Class Support.
…
The Explanation
Huh? World Class Support? What’s that?
Clear and consistent communication, That’s what.
Sandy Geroux says, “Clear communication is great; consistent communication is better.”
The moral of the story is that you don’t need to have the best communication in the world, you don’t even need to provide mediocre communication. Just communicate consistently. Positive and consistent communication with customers will make you a hero.
So, how do you go about delivering this elusive target called World Class Support under the already stated business constraints?
You must keep your customers informed and happy:
- Tell them what they want to know; make it relevant
- Tell them when they want to know it; make it timely
- Tell them in a format that is understandable
- Collect customer satisfaction information
- Do all of this in a positive and collaborative manner
Is it really that simple? No, I’m sorry, there is no silver bullet. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Can’t Get No… Sat-is-fac-tion
Let’s get measuring customer satisfaction out of the way first, since it’s not really the focus of this article. Kevin Cacioppo has a decent article (although a bit far-ranging for our given scenario). My suggestions are: keep it short, keep it simple, and keep it actionable. If you can’t act on the data to fix something, don’t bother your customer with it. Want a suggestion? End trouble calls or email chains with a wrap up message like “Was this trouble ticket resolved to your satisfaction?” Any non-affirmative response should be evaluated. As a cardinal rule: Never, ever, ever, close a case until the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes.” Again, realizing that you (as the manager) are over worked, as are your employees, this won’t always be easy — but it must be done.
Coach your employees. [The] Help Desk Institute has a decent handbook entitled, aptly enough, Coaching for World Class Customer Support [pdf]. We all have bad days; Your employees should be coached to never let the client know this. As far as your client is concerned, your employees are the happiest people on earth. Your client should hang up the phone, happy — because happiness is infectious! Likewise, rude or abrasive grumpiness is infectious and will lead to very dissatisfied customers. In some cases, as possible, you should judge the stress levels of your service employees and take the most stressed off the phone for the day. If they are in a particularly bad rut, find another task for them, or send them home. Heck, take them for an ice cream (it sounds stupid, but it actually works!)
Having happy employees will not only give you happy customers, but will increase your customer satisfaction levels [Webex seminar]. Now we’re inching toward World Class Support!
Communicate!
Ok, so that’s customer satisfaction. What about effective communication? How can we communicate in such a way that the information we relay to our customers is timely, relevant and clear — all while keeping the workload to generate the communication at a minimum?
Again, communication is the most critical element of World Class Support. Something we should all realize: In any communication, some loss of meaning occurs between the sender and the receiver. That loss can be substantial depending on the medium and method used to communicate, cultural differences, language barriers, and even “standard” terminology.
Information passed through multiple mediums or multiple individuals can suffer from Generation loss — remember the game of telephone? Decoding errors (translation errors) may also occur due to cultural differences. Colloquialisms can damage relationships. Back to coaching, teach your employees to minimize cultural or localized sayings and to be tolerant of customers that aren’t as aware.
Show respect. Unless otherwise requested by the customer, use “Sir” or “Ma’am” or “Mr. LastName” and “Ms. LastName” — I will admit that this one is cultural, perhaps asking “May I call you Jerry” would be a more polite method of requesting permission for the less formal first name usage. If you’re going to use their name, make sure you pronounce it correctly, and call them what they want to be called; Do not shorten Richard to Dick, unless that is how the customer introduces themselves. Likewise, do not assume Bob is Robert, or Jennifer is Jenny, and Jose is definitely not Josey.
But don’t over-do the formality, avoid the “sir sandwich.” Sir, Yes Sir!
Use “Yes” rather than “Yeah” and “No” rather than “Nope.” Grunts, sounds, and “uh-huh” are not answers, they are verbal gesture and can be mistaken for their alternative, such as “unh-uh”.
If a client actually uses a telephone to call you, ask for their first and last name (this tells you how to pronounce it properly, and what they desire to be called), and a telephone number to call them back at, should you get disconnected. Be sure to call them back if something happens. You can then proceed to gather other required information, such as account number, nature and duration of the issue, and so on.
Canned responses are fine, as a great deal of customer inquiries and support requests are standard questions. Canned responses increase turn-around time for inquiries and thus can improve customer satisfaction. Ensure your responses are well worded and up to date. It doesn’t hurt to wrap the canned response with something personal, and end with a pleasantry: “Sir, I found this article in our knowledge base, perhaps it will solve your issue:
Information should be relevant and in a format that is usable by the end user. Telling a paying customer to RTFM is not an answer and it is rude. Alas, this is exactly what happens when they receive a canned message saying “Your problem is covered in the FAQ.” Rather, answer with the excerpt from said FAQ (if it is applicable) and ask if the answer was sufficient to resolve the customer’s issue. This also means that answering with “Please read KB Article 123456 for more information” is not a solution. Place the content of the solution in the response, it’s OK to footnote a solution with “More information can be found in KB Article 123456″ but the solution should actually be contained in the response — along with “Did this sufficiently resolve your issue?” Again, don’t close the case until the answer is “Yes.”
Eliminate jargon, tech speak, and acronyms where possible. “Yes sir, your HDD is a FRU, we’ll have a 5 business day turnaround RMA out to you ASAP, so you can UPS it back to our SOC for immediate DR.” Uhh.. ok. I think you get the point. “I’ll send you a shipping label and instructions for removing the hard drive. We’ll have someone try to recover your information and ship you a new unit within a week.”
Oh, and no leet speak, T9 or random abbreviations! “cn u plz rbt ur pc?” NO NO NO! bad! bad! bad! Remember that for some of your customers, english may not be their first or primary language, it’s difficult enough without the added translation from yet a third pidgin language.
And lastly, make it timely. Your customer expects an immediate response. Remember, the outside consumer has no idea about how you run your business. All they know is that they need help. So, let’s give it to them. Autoresponses are fine, even with stock “Your answer may be contained in our Knowledge base, please check here…” answers. Be sure to provide an alternative contact method for the customer, typically a telephone number to call (you must actually answer the phone!) More importantly, do frequent check-pointing throughout your process. If, internally, you move the ticket from a basic helpdesk queue to a system admin queue, tell the customer: “Your request has been escalated to a tier-two resource.” This makes the consumer feel validated, and keeps them feeling in-the-loop and not forgotten or ignored.
If the issue will take some time to resolve, notify the customer with an approximate time frame for completion — it’s ok to put in a qualifier: “Your request is expected to be completed by close of business (5PM-PST) barring any unforeseen issues.” If you run up against that unforeseen issue, notify the customer: “Your request is taking longer than expected due to a service outage beyond our control. Your new estimated time for completion is tomorrow morning at 9AM-PST. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.” Your client may not be happy, but they’ll certainly be happier that they didn’t have to chase you down for a reason.
Again, [say this slowly to yourself]: Communicate. And. Keep. It. Timely. Your dialog with the end-user should be as real time as possible. Telling a client that a service outage has delayed the resolution of their issue after the service outage was resolved can be perceived as an excuse rather than as a reason. Reasons should be reasonable; Excuses aren’t excusable.
Fin.
A little knowledge about what’s going on behind the scenes can win business, and keep customers happy; Find a positive way to keep your customers informed.
Like G.I. Joe happily says, “knowing is half the battle.” The other half of the battle…? Well, that’s another article.
