Process Training For Business Success

American Express Open Forum just published 8 Ways To Build And Sustain Customer Loyalty By Going “Lean”, by Metaspire Consulting’s very own Nina Segura.

Take minute to find out how Lean methodologies can help your business create a solid and growing base of customer who will be excited to buy from you again and agin.

You can find the article here:  8 Ways To Build And Sustain Customer Loyalty By Going “Lean”

By: Nina Segura

When I was seventeen I had a choice to make, stay the popcorn girl at a local movie theater or interview for a position as a customer service representative. I chose the latter. My career lasted 17 years at a company that continues to take pride in everything they do including superior customer service. They are an industry leader and winner of years upon years of distinguished awards.

As a customer service representative, I learned that I liked helping people.  Sometimes though, I didn’t understand why we did certain things, so I wanted to find out why certain policies were the way they were.  Thus began my journey up the corporate ladder and I actually started helping those ivory tower folks! Over time, I worked to attain my master’s degree in organizational management and eventually my six sigma black belt certification.

In 2005, my brother was diagnosed with a rare and very progressive type of cancer. I watched him come and go into medical offices, treatment centers and the hospital being treated as a patient but not usually a customer.  During that time, I left my career in global reengineering technologies to found Metaspire Consulting. My goal then, and it still remains, is to leverage my experience and training to support many varied companies in the area of customer service.  Here are some observations learned through my customer interaction:

What do most customers want?

1. 100% of the representative’s attention
2. Resolution with little to no effort on their part
3. Be heard
4. Feel special
5. Accuracy

What don’t most customers want?

1. Don’t want to be trapped by a voice response or overly standardized system
2. Don’t want to call back or be transferred
3. Don’t want to wait

What do most call center representatives want?

1. Help the customer
2. Tools that efficiently and effectively help them do their job
3. Feel confident that their manager will support their decisions
4. Time to dialogue and debate about any changes with one another
5. Leave their work and not bring their work home

What don’t most call center representatives want?

1. Don’t want to escalate the call to their supervisor
2. Don’t want to worry about how much time they spend on the phone
3. Don’t want to tell you the wrong thing

Keeping these do’s and don’ts in mind, below are some tips to increase performance improvement in your call center:

Tip One:  Give the customer a choice to select an option to address their specific question or speak directly with a customer service representative. Voice response systems must always have a zero to transfer to an operator.   Call centers are not doing themselves any favors by forcing someone to pick an option that doesn’t fit the reason why they are calling. This leads to dissatisfied, irate customers in addition to unnecessary dial transfers and call backs.

Tip Two:  If scripts do not fit the situation, include alternative solutions or attachments to assist the call center representative. If call center services representatives’ are following scripting, they must always have a “none of the above” and/or “additional comments” and/or “additional attachments” option. We must put technology back in its place in a supporting customers and employees not working against them. Escalated and repeat calls based on these types of scripting mistakes are an unnecessary capacity planning nightmare.

Tip Three:  Allow appropriate time for the call center representatives to engage a conversation with the customer to fully understand and resolve the customer’s inquiry. Give call service representatives’ time to understand what is being asked of them.  Call center representatives are human beings that not only want but also need connection. They need time to absorb, discuss and debate. We all have budgets, however if something is a major change, or things are changing back to the way they used to be done, customer service representatives’ need time to learn and grow from one another.  At this point in the process, multiple types of communications are necessary.   Communications such as team meetings, town halls, morning huddles, small workgroup interactions, etc.   A single electronic communication – chat, email; computer based training (CBTs) will not be effective.

Tip Four: Listen and encourage employee feedback. The call center representative feels the pulse of the customer and can often be proactive to problems that may arise rather than be reactive to issues. If a call service rep. tells you why something won’t work, listen to them.  Empowering people means that they have a voice. It means “We heard you, and we are taking action in very specific ways. You make a difference.”  Most call center representatives are in the position because they want to help people.  Let them help you too! Don’t fall into the trap that if you give representatives too much empowerment, they’ll do whatever they want. Let me repeat.  Customer Service representatives want to help. Let them participate in pilots so they can influence their peers.

Tip Five: Use performance metrics and customer surveys performed by an objective third party to arrive at Best Practices. Pick no more than three to five key performance metrics.   One of these metrics must be a Voice of the Customer related.  Customer Satisfaction surveys must be conducted by an objective third party.   We once helped a company understand why their outsourced call center vendor should not conduct Voice of the Customer Surveys.  “Traditional” metrics such as Availability for calls, “Auxiliary time” and “After call” time are not the best metrics to tell you what’s happening from the customer’s perspective. One particularly effective yet tricky metric is to balance (or weigh) Average Handling Time with First Person or First Call Resolution.   This requires efficient and effective call center analytics to help with measurement and enable improved performance.

Most businesses measure something; the trick is to make sure that what you are measuring is what the customer cares about. Furthermore, how call centers measure representative performance needs to directly correlate with what the customer cares about and translate into positive performance results.

Improve your employee and customer satisfaction as well as performance by enhancing the overall customer and employee experience; from first time call resolution to empowering the employee to make the right decisions and/or taking the appropriate actions. We can help you reach these milestones by providing recommendations to take your call center to a new level of high performing, quality focused, empowered customer service representatives.  Our approach to creating satisfied customers and employees removes the frustration from all involved in the call center experience from the customer to management.

The challenge in most organizations today is to figure out the true nature of their problems and then consider what type of intervention is required to resolve the problem.

Organizations are continuing to focus on business improvement. An important part of identifying business improvements is the understanding of existing processes which we can achieve through business analysis and business process modeling.

The output from the process is a model that depicts the sequence of activities, from an initiating event, that results in an outcome of value to the organization that can be managed, monitored and supported.

Throughout these courses, participants learn to use a structured, disciplined approach to understanding business process models through eliciting, analyzing, documenting and validating business processes. Particular emphasis is placed on identifying measurable end-to-end business processes, ensuring alignment to the business in meeting defined goals and objectives.

These courses use industry recognized standards to depict business process models. It draws upon international best practices to provide a range of techniques and methods for conducting business process analysis.