Why We Need Less Leadership

By Kathryn Frankson

Ok, ok so we still need leadership. But, as someone who just wrapped an Experienced Manager training I'm now convinced that we actually need more management. Even typing that feels a bit underwhelming because management conjures up thoughts of scheduling, status reports and approving PTO; however, when done right management is truly the catalyst for achieving business outcomes. Why? Because management is exactly 3 things: 

1. Clarifying the Objective
2. Creating a Plan to Meet the Objective
3. Facilitating the Plan

People are fundamentally motivated by understanding what they need to do every day and having the resources and trust to do so.

 

And as someone who recently shifted into a new role with a new team and new projects, this was a timely reminder.

 

It's easy to get swept up and anchored in the positives of leadership, because there are many. Leaders influence culture, leaders drive change, leaders have vision and clarity which motivates others to follow.

 

But to execute strategy and unite teams, especially as we all take on more, faster, in an ever-changing market, the need for banding collaborators together with clarity around objectives and a road map to get there...is more important than ever.

Kathryn Frankson is a B2B event sales and marketing professional at UBM. A believer that 2019 communication means knowing how to get the markets attention through thumb stopping content, audience development and storytelling, she executes sales and marketing strategies in the catering, food service and special event space.

Connect: LinkedIn 
  


5 Ways Tomorrow's Contact Center Will Deliver Value

By: Andrew Gilliam

Imagine what the world will be like after you've checked off every box on your customer experience to-do list. Pre-purchase anxiety no longer exists, thanks to careful messaging and word of mouth. Product issues are eliminated at their root-cause, before goods leave the factory. Service failures are anticipated, and recovery is automatic. Customer journeys are frictionless and fault-tolerant, because they were meticulously studied, optimized, and fortified. Contact centers played a vital role in bringing your organization to this paradise, but will they still relevant? Yes, more than ever!

This article explores the contribution of contact centers towards the end of an organization's customer experience journey. Their mission, methods, and role within a company will change dramatically, but important work will continue to happen in the contact center. These fives ways are just the beginning of how tomorrow's contact centers will continue to drive value.

Proactive Engagement
Today's contact center mission is painfully reactive. Customers experience a problem, and they call. Customers have a question, and they chat. Customers are overwhelmed, and they tweet at us. With so many customers to help, it's hard to imagine making more work for ourselves. In the future, that's exactly what we'll do. As companies perfect the customer journey, the problems, questions, and uncertainty that contact centers mitigate will disappear. Instead, they'll focus on a more noble purpose: engagement. Contact centers will be freed up for post-purchase check-ins and follow-ups that nurture relationships instead of repairing broken ones. Contact centers will always be the face of the organization they serve, but tomorrow's contact centers will be friends instead of repairmen.

Community Building
Online support communities are nothing new; they originally promised to reduce support costs by relying on customers to help each-other. Many companies have online forums, but most have become ghost-towns where pleas for help go to die. Ubiquiti Networks' community-driven success demonstrates the full potential of customer communities. They don't provide traditional phone or chat support for most of their enterprise networking products, which helps them to offer disruptively low prices. Instead, customers go to the online support forum for help, where they interact with other customers and senior Ubiquiti engineers (who actually built the products in question). Ubiquiti representatives also have a strong presence in third-party communities and on social media. They're not there to sell, Ubiquiti's existing customers take care of that.

As customer journeys are refined, root-causes are solved, and automation steps in, the mission of tomorrow's contact center will shift away from near-term resolutions to long-term relationship building. With their day job out of the way, contact center professionals will refocus their creativity and skills towards building strong customer communities.

Harnessing Unstructured Feedback
Through engagement and community building activities, there's no doubt that tomorrow's contact center professionals will be exposed to an abundance of feedback. The unstructured feedback gathered from these activities will prove to be some of the organization's most valuable knowledge, provided it's leveraged effectively. Capturing, structuring, and applying these lessons learned will largely fall on contact center leaders close to the front-line. Unlike traditional market research, companies will gain insight into how products actually perform in wild, uncontrolled environments.

Product Development
Contact center professionals have always had to be experts in the products, services, and markets they support. In the future, smart organizations will use the in-house expertise from their contact center to design, refine, and promote their products. Not only will the contact center be an invaluable test bed, but they'll be the inspiration for future product and service offerings. Front-line contact center employees are closest to market demand, they interact with it daily. Solutions generated in the contact center will be at the forefront of the product lineup.

Content Marketing
Content generation is currently relegated to a few artsy interns in the marketing department. It can be an effective way to share a message and build a reputation, but it's time consuming and won't always hit the mark with customers. Worse, it can come across as being too "on-message" or lacking in personality. As demand for content increases, tomorrow's contact centers will step up to the challenge with renewed passion. Contact center professionals often have untapped talents and creativity. Paired with their deep knowledge about customer needs and challenges, they'll create content faster and more effectively while making sure customers have a laugh along the way.

Andrew Gilliam is a passionate customer experience innovator and change agent. He’s developed new employee portals, created effective surveys, and built silo-busting escalation systems. Andrew’s background in Information Technology put him on the front-lines of customer service as an IT Support Center Analyst. His vision: deliver Amazing Customer Service and Technical Support™.

Learn more at andytg.com, follow @ndytg on Twitter, and connect on LinkedIn.

Listen to Your Heart (or your calls)

By Diana Aviles

I’ve chatted with speech analysts from all walks of life. They speak many languages and are versed in different speech analytics solutions. Despite the fact there are some differences in approaches, we can all agree on the one thing, we consistently struggle to get our organizations to understand: you still need to listen to the calls.

I can bucket, categorize and query the life breath out of everything you need, but at the end of the day it does not absolve you from some type of manual listening. I am notorious for saying that our goal in speech analytics is to help make insights easier to obtain- not outright replace human listening.

What good is a category or query to an organization, if you have no context outside of those key terms and phrases it was programmed with? How do you know if a process is successful, or if it is failing, if you aren’t engaged with the actual agent and customer interaction? What actionable intelligence are you getting from static data? Very little to none. But, you can change that.

Speech Analytics (SA) is an extremely interactive process. It is very exciting to get your hands dirty and discover all sorts of wild stuff you never would’ve found without SA. Sometimes it may feel like it takes forever, but simply adjusting your perspective to see it as being for the greater good of your organization will brighten your outlook and reveal vast benefits. Listening to 100-200 calls certainly will not injure you. There are different strategies on how to create listening studies that are effective and efficient at any size.

The aspect of SA that makes us awesome, is that we can pull insights from data and have the flexibility to further think outside the box, while exploring those insights on a deeper level than our more structured data contemporaries. Speech Analytics is about tying together trends to tell a story, that can help an organization make business decisions. You are doing yourself a big disservice, if you are just sitting around building out queries, and running reports without trying to take a peek at the bigger picture.

So please, do yourself a favor and listen to your calls. I promise you it's worth every second of time you invest in it. 

Diana Aviles is a long time speech analytics fan with a specialty in Nexidia Interaction Analytics. 

She is a vocal speech analytics advocate with the primary objective to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution and overall customer experience.

Connect: LinkedIn

Women Leadership & Customer Experience

By Stacy Sherman (MBA, CX Certified)

 

 



This article originally appeared on Doing CX Right

There’s an increasing amount of conversations about Women and Leadership, and I love it! I believe that the next generation, including my own daughter, will have more opportunities to share their voice, without judgments, and pursue jobs that had been traditionally filled by men.

I’M WRITING THIS ARTICLE FOR TWO REASONS:

1. TO ENCOURAGE PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WOMEN, TO BUILD THEIR SKILLS AND FOCUS ON A CAREER IN THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FIELD.

CX is not a fad. It’s here to stay and reputable companies are seeking expertise. Voxpro interviewed five women leaders who talk about the need for females in high-level customer-focused roles. I couldn’t agree more. You can read about what the ladies had to say in an informative article: “Why We Need More Women Leaders in CX.”

2. TO INSPIRE WOMEN TO PURSUE THEIR PASSIONS.

I’ve learned a lot over the past 20 years working in large and small companies. I know first hand the challenges in pursuing a career while balancing parenthood. I am elated that more companies are committed to creating a culture where women matter and employee diversity is valued. Below is a recap of a recent interview of me in honor of International Women’s History month. I hope it serves as inspiration for all my readers.

Source: Schindler Elevator Corp
 

INTERVIEW SUMMARY:

Q: EXPLAIN WHAT YOU DO IN YOUR ROLE.

A: I’m currently the Director of Customer Experience, leading a team focused on delivering best-in-class Customer Excellence and Employee Engagement that serves as a brand differentiator. My role includes establishing & implementing innovative Voice of Customer (VOC) initiatives that provide a deep understanding of how customers interact & feel across all touch points. I’m also leveraging data, including Voice of Employee (VOE) feedback, to enhance customer journeys, and collaborating with cross-team to “close the loop” resulting in record high customer Net Promoter (NPS)scores.

Q: WHY IS GENDER EQUALITY IMPORTANT?

A: Gender equality is important because all people deserve access to the same resources and opportunities. If two individuals with similar skills &  education apply for the same job or promotion, there should be no difference in the evaluation process. Unfortunately, equality has not been the case over time and I’ve witnessed this. I am very glad there is now a cultural shift so that my kids benefit in positive ways.

Q: WHAT HAVE YOU OVERCOME TO GET WHERE YOU ARE TODAY?

A: I have overcome “inclusion” situations in past workplaces. For example, there’s been a multitude of times that I was not invited to all male meetings, even when my level or related positions were in the room and topics pertained to my job. I’ve overcome challenges by communicating tactfully with people and articulating the value I bring, so they’d understand my perspective and need for inclusion. While self-advocacy is not easy, it is essential and a contributing factor for my success.

Q: WHAT WOULD YOUR ADVICE BE TO THE NEXT GENERATION OF WOMEN ASPIRING TO GET ADVANCE THEIR CAREERS?

A: I encourage everyone, especially women, to communicate openly and honestly, and deal with uncomfortable situations head-on versus an avoidance approach. Be impeccable with your words and choose the right moments to contribute. You have 2 ears and 1 mouth. Use them accordingly. Also, always be learning and advancing your skills through formal and informal education. I obtained my MBA years ago but continue to get certifications from prestigious institutions to sustain my position as a credible thought leader. (Read more about my Rutgers CX Course)

Q: WHAT HAS BEEN THE MOST PIVOTAL PIECE OF ADVICE YOU’VE RECEIVED IN YOUR CAREER?

A: There will ALWAYS be obstacles. Know what you can control and focus your time and effort on those things. People often say “No” without even thinking about situations, but there IS a path to “Yes!” Be creative and figure it out!

Q: DO YOU HAVE A FEMALE ROLE MODEL THAT HELPED YOU GET TO WHERE YOU ARE TODAY?

A: Executive Director Stacey Aaron-Domanico from my former job at Verizon, taught me about leadership and authenticity through her actions and words. We are still connected, and she inspires me to be amazing and genuine in everything I do.

If you like my article, please subscribe to DoingCXRight to continue getting updates. And, join the conversations about customer experience, employee engagement and much more on Twitter & Instagram.

Stacy Sherman is a results-oriented Customer Experience (CX) and Digital Marketing professional with a proven track record increasing brand awareness, sales, and loyalty at B2C & B2B companies of all sizes and budgets.

She’s worked on both the client side and agency environments leading projects for reputable brands (Martha Stewart Crafts, American Girl, Perler Beads) along with well-known Telcom companies (AT&T and Verizon). Stacy is a Founding CX Board Member and Advisor at Rutgers University.



Removing The Training Wheels - Self Service Solutions in Speech Analytics

By Diana Aviles

I feel like I often say, “One of the biggest challenges in speech analytics is...” in many of my pieces since there are so many moving parts in what we do. From getting the SA program launched, to maintaining the program so that the organization continues to see value in the investment- it’s all a challenge.

However, something to think about is how you want your SA program to sustain itself in the long run. Sometimes it seems easier to keep all the knowledge on how to utilize the tool to yourself, but I have found that organizations who operate like this find themselves with very burnt-out speech analysts since what often happens is they become inundated with countless requests. They start feeling like the nerdy kid in school who the popular kids only talk to when they want to copy their algebra homework. So how do you reduce this? With self-service solutions.

What does “self-service solutions” mean? Well, it means that you and your team will have to get comfortable with teaching people who are interested in utilizing speech insights on how they can produce those results on their own. It might mean you have to decline certain requests, but kindly offer a 30 minute consulting call to show them how they can run the report on their own. You can also see if you may host a bi-weekly, one-hour “Ask us Anything” type of call, with your most frequent requesters, to see what kind of things they are interested in looking at. “You wanna see AHT? Sure, we can show you how to run a report that shows this, and we can even set it to indicate outliers if you would like.” “You want to see how often an agent uses the proper closing greeting filtered-down by supervisor? Absolutely, we can show you how to set that up.” This allows you to get an idea on what the organization actually cares about so that you and your team can aim to be as proactive as possible with your insights.

Also, by establishing self-sufficiency it will help alleviate the workload from your folks so that you can better focus on all the cool types of studies that you’re dying to do. It also helps maintain value by having more than a select few people know how to use the tool. Remember, at the end of the day as speech analysts you should be aiming to spread the word about speech analytics as much as possible. You should be looking to always share your experiences with other people. Those experiences often turn into valuable insights that improve ROI. Heck, even in my new role, I find myself still learning new tricks from my colleagues because each of our experiences with speech analytics is unique.

Ultimately, this boils down to a culture thing. If your organization’s culture is one where no one wants to step out of their comfort zone, unfortunately there's not much you can do to fix that, but it is worth trying to put it out there and see who bites. I can guarantee you there is at least one person in your organization who would jump at the chance to see how the magic happens with speech analytics.

Diana Aviles Senior Speech Analytics Consultant, Wells Fargo

Diana has been working in speech analytics for 8 years with a specialty in Nexidia Interaction Analytics.  She is a vocal speech analytics advocate with the primary objective to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution and overall customer experience.

Follow Diana on LinkedIn.

All About the Feels? Why Emotion Plays a Critical Role in CX Success

By Cohan Daley

“Feel the feels”, “all about the feels”. Whether you love it or hate it, this phrase highlights a key point about digital communication. Customers are increasingly turning to self-service, chatbots or messaging apps, but while digital channels may be replacing voice for some interactions, how your customers feel about interacting with your brand is more important than ever. 

 

In the words of Maya Angelou, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And actually, isn’t this as true of customer experience as it is our relationships with friends, family and colleagues?

 

Yet our industry as a whole is still failing when it comes to meeting customers’ emotional needs.

 

The 2018 Temkin Experience Rankings raised alarm bells for the industry when it reported that just 7 percent of 10,000 consumers who took part in the research said they felt good about their interactions with brands.

 

Why does this matter?

 

There are numerous studies which demonstrate that emotion is critical to a brand’s bottom line. I’ve provided just a few examples below:

• Organisations that optimise emotional connections outperform their competitors by 26 percent in gross margin and 85 percent in sales growth (Gallup, Customer Satisfaction doesn’t Count)
• 63 percent of customers with positive feelings about a company will remain loyal, while 74 percent will go a step further and advocate for the brand (Customer Think)
• Best-in-class brands average 17 emotionally positive experiences for every negative experience, while the lowest-performing brands provided only two emotionally positive experiences for each negative one (Forrester)
• Emotionally-engaged customers are three times more likely to recommend and repurchase, less price sensitive and less likely to buy from a competitor (Harvard Business Review)

Emotion trumps success and effort when it comes to building long-term customer loyalty. So what makes your customers feel good about dealing with you? The foundation of good customer experience is making it enjoyable (not just easy) for them to complete their journey with you. It’s vital that your customer journey planning takes this into account:

• Ensure that you are investing in customer experience from your customer’s perspective rather than making it fit your internal systems and processes – and remember that understanding customer feelings about your service is essential at key stages in the process. While it is vital to capture the behavioural elements of the customer, emotion is a crucial part of the picture
• Design customer interactions that engage with customers at the most critical times in their journeys with a message that connects emotionally and is delivered through their preferred channel
• Gain executive buy-in by creating a direct link between emotionally-engaged customers and desired business outcomes

It might look straightforward but most CX professionals know how hard it is to follow these precepts. It starts with understanding your customers, planning the customer journey based on the real-life needs and motivations of these customers and removing the technology barriers to implementing these journeys. Many brands have invested in legacy systems that operate in silos and it can be difficult to join these up to provide the seamless experiences that your customers crave.

People are struggling to access the assets they need in their existing platforms and alongside their on-premise systems. West is embracing cloud-based platforms like UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS so we can help our customers pull all the systems they need together. Over the last year we’ve focused on creating a cloud-based contact centre platform that allows us to move capabilities in and out of business systems, while providing a 360-degree view of the customer.

 

Feel the same way as we do?

 

At West we’re passionate about delivering technology solutions that enable emotional connections, whether by empowering agents to empathise with customers, by offering joined up omnichannel journeys, or by allowing customers to self-serve if they want to. If you want to build emotional connections with your customers, then download our expert guide, Why Eemotional Connections Are Vital to Delivering Outstanding Customer Experiences, which includes a wealth of practical advice.

 

 

Cohan Daley, UK&I Acquisition Country Lead, West Unified Communication Services

 

Cohan is a highly-motivated, energetic and accomplished professional armed with a keen knowledge of Customer experience and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) A graduate of Reading University, his Neuroscience degree led to his interest in data science, A.I. and Machine Learning. And Cohan's passion for sharing his knowledge was recognised by ICMI who included him in their Top 50 Contact Centre Thought Leaders on Twitter in 2014.

 

At West he has built a strong internal following for his talent to use available data and information, internal resources and creative thinking to successfully create commercial opportunities. He built the company's Customer Experience practice in EMEA, an achievement which was recognised by his promotion to UK&I Acquisition Country Lead in 2019. In his spare time Cohan has a real passion for sport and enjoys spending time with his children and family. Cohan is highly competitive and trains in mixed martial arts and boxing disciplines.

 

Connect: LinkedIn | Twitter

A Tale of Two (Well, Three) Customer Experiences: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

By Erica Marois

Two years ago, after an 18-month stint as Connecticut residents, my husband and I boxed up our belongings and made the journey back down south, landing in Richmond, VA. Unlike our move to Connecticut, we hit the road with significantly fewer belongings. If you’ve ever lived in New England, you might be able to guess why. The cost of living is high, and the closet space in the beautiful historic buildings tends to be rather sparse.

Fast-forward a year, and we were ready to move into our newly built home in Virginia. There was just one problem; because we downsized in Connecticut, we suddenly found ourselves in need a ton of new furniture to fill up the bigger space. Now, as much as I love to watch HGTV and daydream about decorating, I’ve never particularly enjoyed shopping for furniture. Mainly, for two reasons. One: furniture is expensive! Two: I’ve had so many bad experiences buying furniture over the years--from poor quality to poor service to nightmare deliveries and high-pressure sales staff. To me, furniture shopping is about as enjoyable as car shopping.

Alas, we needed a new sectional and new bedroom set, so we set out on a quest to find the perfect pieces for our new home. Did we get what we needed? Ultimately, yes. But the journey there was complex. We encountered a tale of two, then three, customer experiences. Whether you work in retail or not, the stark contrasts between these stores offer a few lessons worth gleaning.

A Tale of Two (and Then Three) Customer Experiences

Several months ago, motivated by a closet organization spree, my husband and I set out to find a new set of dressers for our bedroom. The set we had was just too small. Remembering a browsing excursion we’d taken a few weeks earlier, I suggested we head to Haverty’s to check out their options. The last time we’d gone there, I thought their selection was impressive, and the store was nice and clean.

When we walked through the door, a kind gentleman named Bert greeted us. He asked us what we were looking for, pointed us in the right direction, and let us loose to browse without interruption. Pretty quickly, we found a set we both loved, and Bert helped us place the order. He explained the payment options in detail, went over warranties, and made friendly conversation while we waited for some of the back office folks to complete their paperwork. It was a pleasant and no-hassle interaction, which I appreciated. To make it even better, Bert let us know that we could have the set delivered to our home just two days later, and we would receive SMS updates on the day of delivery, including a custom link we could use to track the delivery drivers in real-time to find out exactly when they’d be arriving. Furniture stores are notoriously bad about giving you vague delivery windows, so this shocked me. I’ve spent many a day waiting for deliveries that never showed up at the promised time. I was cautiously optimistic that this would be different.

Luckily, it was. The day before our delivery, I received a text letting me know that our furniture would arrive between 4:00 & 6:00 the next day. As promised, I got access to a link I could use to track the delivery team on their route--I could see that they had nine deliveries scheduled ahead of ours, and I could even see the other zip codes in which they’d be making stops.

At 3:00 on delivery day, I got a text letting me know that the drivers encountered a delay at the stop before ours, so it looked like our delivery would be closer to 6:00 than 4:00. I appreciated the proactive update! By 6:30, everything was in its place and drivers were on their way.

All in all, we couldn’t have been more pleased. Not only do we love the new furniture, but we appreciated how easy and transparent the entire process was. And as a pleasant surprise, we received an email from Bert a few months later--he wanted to check in and make sure we were still enjoying our furniture.  Ironically enough, that email came just as we were dealing with a very different experience involving one of Haverty’s local competitors.

Customer-Centricity at the Competition? More Like Customer-Chaos

Four or five months after we bought our bedroom furniture, we realized new living room furniture was the next priority. With family coming to visit for the holidays, we wanted more seating. While I loved the experience at Haverty’s, they didn’t have the size sectional I wanted at I price that I could stomach, so I was open to looking elsewhere for a good bargain on an oversized sectional. After being lured by some convincing TV ads, we stopped by a local chain to see if their holiday deals were as enticing as advertising.

After “winning” 20% off our purchase at their one-day sale event, we decided to go ahead and buy a gloriously soft, cozy, and spacious sectional. While they didn’t currently have the one we wanted in stock, our salesperson assured us that they were expecting one to arrive any day, and said he thought we could have it delivered within the next week.

A week passed. We didn’t receive a phone call. I finally decided to call the store after Christmas to see if I could get an ETA on delivery. The customer service representative let me know that our sectional had arrived over the holidays and she went ahead and set up a delivery time for four days later. I was excited!

Fast forward to the day before delivery. My phone rings, and I see it’s the furniture store. I’m expecting that they’re calling to give me my delivery window, but instead, they called to tell me that they discovered our sectional was damaged, so they needed to reorder and reschedule our delivery. At this point, I was starting to get annoyed, but I also appreciated that they didn’t send us a defective product. Unfortunately, from here, things just spiraled more and more out of control. I never got a call back to give me an update. After another week of no word from our salesperson, I called the store again, and this time a manager told me they wouldn’t have another sectional in for at least six weeks. She did offer to refund the delivery fee, so I decided to wait it out.

Six weeks, then seven weeks later, we never heard from anyone at the store. We called three times, and could never get a straight answer. Each person we talked to tried to pass the buck to someone else. Finally, one of the managers told me they had no idea if or when our furniture would arrive. After a visit to the store, and a few more frustrating phone calls, we finally canceled our purchase and got a refund. To me, the most frustrating part of the ordeal was the lack of proactive communication, or really any communication at all. And ironically, this company is now running an aggressive TV ad campaign touting its focus on customer experience.

Rooms to Go for the Steal

The weekend after we got our refund on the sectional that never arrived, we decided to stop by Rooms to Go, just to browse. I’ll be honest, I had a few mediocre experiences with them in the past, so my expectations were low. Much to my delight, the shopping experience was low-pressure, pleasant, and incredibly easy. As soon as we walked in, a friendly salesperson named L.T. greeted us, explained their current sales, and then left us alone to browse. My husband and I were debating between two sets, and we asked for his opinion. He offered up his thoughts, and we got to chatting for a bit. When we were ready to check out, he used his iPad to tell us exactly when he could get the new sectional to our home. Much to our delight, he said us we’d have it within 48 hours. And guess what? We did! The delivery team was incredibly courteous and professional, and we love our new furniture.

The icing on the cake? Two weeks later, we received this note from L.T. in the mail.

Bringing It All Together

I didn’t write this post to vent or shame (in fact, that’s why I never revealed the name of the second store). Instead, I hope this real-life example serves to illustrate that customer experience really does trump price; and if you’re going to market your products on the basis of customer experience, you better be able to back it up. Like it or not, the experience that other brands deliver impacts the expectations that customers have for your company. What can you do you to make sure you don’t fall short? What could furniture store number two have done to deliver better service?

Here are two quick tips:

1. Keep your promises! If you can’t, be transparent about why, and offer an alternative. I’m not an unreasonable person. I understand that things go wrong--and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault. However, as service professionals, we have to be creative problem-solvers. Furniture store number two could have found a way to keep their promise: they could have offered to give us the floor model (which they clearly had in stock) at a discount. They could have offered to have us pick another sectional that they knew they could deliver within a reasonable timeframe. Rather than trying to work out another solution, they chose to ignore that there was even a problem in the first place.
2. Communicate proactively! Don’t make your customers reach out to you for updates. This one seems like a no-brainer, but plenty of brands still struggle to do this effectively. The good news? You don’t necessarily need any fancy or expensive software to keep customers in the loop. Free email marketing services like Mail Chimp are an excellent solution for small businesses or budget-strapped teams. Setup automated emails to let customers know what’s going on with their order, what to expect next, or how to reach out with a question/issue. Or, utilize simple calendar reminders. Have a customer order that’s set to go out next week, but you don’t yet have an ETA? Setup a reminder to take the 5 minutes to check for an update and provide the customer with more information before that week is over.

What advice would you add to the mix? How would you have handled things differently? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! For more insights on meeting customer expectations, check out this useful advice from Brad Cleveland.

Erica is the Content Manager at ICMI, an Informa PLC company that helps business elevate the customer experience through training, events, consulting and information resources. A passionate connector of people, Erica is a customer and employee experience enthusiast who loves helping others find unique solutions to their biggest challenges. Outside of her day job, she's also a community organizer for CX Accelerator.

You can connect with her on Twitter and join her on Tuesdays at 1:00 ET for #ICMIchat.

 
 

4 Reasons to Create Job Descriptions & Performance Standards

Errol Allen

 

 

    



Errol Allen is an operations consultant and customer service expert. Using his 25 + years of corporate experience with companies such as ADT, The Houston Post, TCI Cablevision and GEICO, Errol assists his clients in developing a customer focused environment via documenting processes, creating task manuals, identifying key performance indicators and providing customer service training. He is the author of “Keys to Delivering Amazing Customer Service”.

Connect LinkedIn | Twitter

 

 

 





Attrition Analysis & The Psychology of Disengagement

Ron Rhodes

Without a doubt, my most perplexing and profound observation from years of leading large organizations is a behavioral complex I refer to as the psychology of disengagement. In the back office BPO and contact center business, competition for labor is heavy and aggressive. The work can be repetitive, mundane, offering considerable risk to workforce stability. Workers, increasingly millennials, have a lot of choices to go along with their impatience and innate need for challenge and social expression. With their 1980’s + vintage years, the modern workforce is vocal and self-assured so it is not hard to figure out if or when they are dissatisfied with their employers. And even if you missed the earlier signs, the dark computer screens and empty cubicles can be quite convincing.

Labor attrition, being the effect, is the result of basic employee needs and expectations not being met. The psychology of disengagement acknowledges that people simply leave under these circumstances, but more importantly, that people leave before they leave. In other words, their contribution progressively declines like slowly vanishing silhouettes occupying seats. In fact, the probability exists that a significant portion of your workforce is surfing job site postings and mauling over employment leads received via text and social media –at this very moment. We have to pay attention to more than KPI and financial results if we hope to achieve our planned performance targets. Labor stability, in Six Sigma terms, is “critical to quality.” It is very likely that our financial plan was based on the assumption of a fully engaged workforce. Colleagues and friends, take some advice from an old war horse, this is the job. Focus on hiring and retaining good people. Everything else will fall in line.

Employee attrition can be costly or even devastating to businesses of any size in both, financial and less tangible ways. I like the quote by former Xerox CEO, Anne M. Mulcahy, “Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”

It is therefore vital that attrition be subjected to extensive and continual observation, measurement, and analysis. While many companies do this, they may stop at the straightforward and perhaps simplistic measurements of turnover which include the percentage of attrition to total headcount by month, and cumulatively on an annual basis (the months added together). This is certainly a helpful measure of butts in seats, but falls short of providing advanced indicators or an understanding of what employee attrition is costing in financial terms, competitive positioning or customer satisfaction.

Importance of Measurement

The ability to measure turnover can give business leaders the information needed to reduce its negative effects, while shedding light on what can be done to address the underlying causes. Thorough analysis that encompasses the impact of attrition on finances, productivity, efficiency and your brand image over time will allow you to develop strategies to mitigate the concluded risks, while potentially providing clues as to the reasons behind them.

Average Tenure Compared to Turnover Rate

Measure the average length of time that employees remain with your company to spot internal and external risk factors. For example: If a large percentage of your employees stay for years, but your monthly attrition rate is still high, you may want to look at recruiting and on-boarding and how it may have changed over time. Other time-inspired factors may also be in play which could include changes in labor market conditions, local leadership issues, the recent cancellation of the company picnic, etc. The opposite holds true as well; If your average tenure is low and a large number of employees leave the company within months or even weeks, the drivers are likely entrenched in your on-boarding process or management practices and not influenced by time, one way or the other.

To calculate the average, add the total length of time each employee has been with your company. Divide the sum by the number of employees used in the calculation. Consider how long your business has been open when analyzing the result. Newer companies will naturally have shorter average lengths of employment, while more established companies should see longer average lengths.

Base versus Backfill Attrition

Your base headcount might be the number of employees on your roster when the year begins. This would be compared to attrition from this roster throughout the year. You can then add your backfill, as well as attrition from backfill. In other words, at the end of the year, I have 80 of the original 100 on my roster so 20% base attrition. My annual cumulative attrition rate was 80% so by backfill turned over 3 times (4 times including the original backfill). Also, since program launches and/or expansions during the year may not be included in the starting roster you should exclude any added headcount or attrition directly associated with them. 

This view is helpful when trying to validate your investment in employee training, for example. The higher your base retention, the more sensible the investment or, at least, that’s the theory.

Average Tenure or Length of Employment

Measure the average length of time that employees remain with your company. This will help you in financial planning as pertains to recruiting and training expense, salary increases, and facility initiatives. To calculate the average tenure, add the total lengths of time each employee has been with your company. Divide the sum by the number of employees used in the calculation.

Performance and Production Regression

Calculate the ratio of new hires to your total number of employees at a specific point in time to get a clearer picture of how much of your workforce is made up of newcomers. A higher ratio of new employees can be a sign that your turnover is unusually high, unless you have recently started your business or expanded your workforce. It is often a sign of lower quality based on a lack of experience.

To calculate this ratio, divide the number of new hires currently employed by the current total number of employees. The result is the percentage of new hires compared to the total workforce, including the new employees.

Cost of Turnover and Break-Even Analysis

Hiring and training new employees incurs direct and indirect costs. Your cost-per-hire includes the costs of advertising available positions, performing background checks, paying out referral bonuses and other costs incurred simply to inform job seekers of your available positions. Internal costs include management's time spent reviewing resumes, making calls and conducting interviews, as well as the time spent by dedicated recruiting staff and the HR department. Other related costs could include paying temporary workers and the opportunity costs associated with lost productivity, sales, billable hours, etc. Add to this the costs of training new employees once they arrive, and you will get a picture of just how much it costs to lose and replace an employee.

If you would prefer – as we do – to not spend your time dutifully conducting attrition analysis, consider an equal or greater time investment in initiatives that effectively drive workforce stability. Listen to your employees and challenge yourself to have an increasingly high yes ratio when considering their requests. Their disengagement declines as your engagement grows.

Passionate about mentoring and developing the industry’s future leaders, in 2000, Ron authored Fundamentals of Call Center Management, a guide intended to help entry level managers, as they begin to master their craft.

Having spent 20 years with category leaders, American Express, Nestle, Moore Business Forms (now RR Donnelly) and Comcast, Ron's background includes an additional 10 years of key global BPO assignments with TeleTech, Convergys, Stream, STARTEK and now Connext. Ron's international experience includes stints in Jamaica, Canada and currently the Philippines.

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