IT

Leaders: Do You Treat Your Customer Service Reps Like Adults?

In customer service organizations and technical IT (information technology) customer service teams, I see a lingering trend of leaders treating front line customer service reps, global service desk agents, and technical support analysts like children.

Selfless, professional caring is an adult emotion and behavior yet managers treat reps as children who need to be monitored, controlled, scored, and highly directed.


Leaders, Treat & Engage Customer Service Reps Like Adults Image by: BetterWorks



Key Question on Engaging Customer Service Reps:



Do you score your reps performance or do they first review their customer interactions and note the improvements they will make?


If they first assess their performance, you are treating your customer service reps and IT global service desk analysts like adults. You engage in dialogue with them and brainstorm interaction improvements. You are treating them as valued employees entrusted with the weighty responsibility of customer service.

Bravo! They own both the concept and the delivery of customer care. When you engage them in self-assessment, they will engage the customers with spirit and skill.

The result will far exceed that of the directive parental approach in other call centers, BPO contact centers, and IT front line service desks. Businesses with highly engaged employees experience five times the success of other organizations for the employees have a voice in their responsibilities and a personal stake in the results of their performance.

Engage front line reps like trusted adults:

  • Give them access to professional customer service training so that their self-assessments will be based on high quality standards. If their assessments miss the mark completely, you will have both your experience and professional standards to teach and coach them.
  • Allow them to give feedback to each other as team members working toward the shared goal of outstanding customer service.
  • Engage them to increase the standards they will reach. You will be amazed at how high they will set the bar.
  • Tap them for front line service improvement ideas while you as leader take on the bigger challenges of breaking down silos and process barriers to outstanding customer service. The reps and front line team leaders are rich with insights from working with the customers.



Interestingly, initial self-assessment in performance reviews has been the standard for over 20 years with professional jobs in organizations. Yet on the front line of customer service, the model is parent/child.

The very traditional “leaders judging the reps” approach is a non-starter for today’s customer care.

To ask employees to suggest customer service improvements requires that leaders first ask the reps to assess their current performance and valuable improvements. Excellence is achieved through mutual assessment, dialogue, and shared ownership based on respect and trust.

Employee engagement in customer service is overdue yet never too late. I’ve worked with thousands and would be pleased to work with all of you to engage their talents with ownership and a true stake in the outcome.


What winning customer service employee engagement steps have you taken that you will share with us in the comments section below?


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

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The Performance Appraisal Treadmill

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

CIOs, Resolve IT Customer Service Threat – Blocked Teamwork

Some think that the greatest IT customer service challenge is the technical mindset of the team members. It isn’t. Most everyone who has the desire to deliver customer service can learn to do it well. I have trained thousands to do just that.

CIOs, the biggest challenge continues to be blocked teamwork among the silos. Whether you have outsourced or off-shored your front line, brought it back in house (which is happening more and more), or always had it in house, teamwork among front line and other resolver groups is where your customer service improvements will surface.

CIOs, IT Customer Service Threat is Blocked Teamwork Image by:eirikref

CIOs, Resolve the Obstacles to Teamwork for IT Customer Service

  • Fake Hierarchies. One of the biggest mistakes IT made was naming support as Level I, Level II, Level III. It has created a fake hierarchy of importance. Although it described the flow chart of how problems are resolved, it minimized the importance of the front line. Customers hope the problem gets solved on the first call and yet the front line struggles to get knowledge and training.

    Many level II and III teams could share more knowledge with the front line for quicker problem resolution. Ask yourselves why they aren’t. The quick answer is time. That’s not the whole picture. Many times they don’t see them as teammates. They complain that the front line doesn’t do enough even when they have never seen how tough a job it is nor sat in those chairs.

    Suggestions:     Boxer Day (have them shadow/switch roles), shared service levels, physical co-location, reporting into one leader, shared metrics on customer satisfaction, same tracking/ticketing system, team building sessions.


  • Politics. Every organization has them yet it can kill customer service and internal customer (employee) productivity. Nonetheless there are IT organizations withholding key productivity tools from the front line — like remote control — because of political jockeying for what groups have the most power. It neuters the front line effectiveness and leaves the customers thinking the front line is of no value. They begin calling up just to get a ticket number and pressuring the front line to make everything a priority one.

    Suggestion: Give the front line remote control to resolve more problems. Don’t turn the front line into ticket monkeys by yielding to power politics. Customers see pure routing centers as a block not a road to productivity.


  • The Deskside Bond. One hidden block to teamwork is the bond that deskside support team members have to their customers. As you centralize to a global service desk, customers continue to ask deskside onsite team members directly to come and help them. These team members struggle with how to get the customers to call the front line of service desk for problem resolution.

    Some resort to saying, just call them to get a ticket number rather than championing the skills and value of the front line. Moreover, you may have some team members who don’t think anyone can take care of the their customers they way they do. All of this undermines swift problem resolution and customer service.

    Suggestion:
    Train deskside team members specifically on how to redirect onsite customers to the front line of the service desk.

    I have delivered this people-skills training and practice sessions to deskside teams for years. And with the front line tooled and ready, the deskside team members will have an easier time of redirecting.

Responsibly pour the tools and knowledge into the front line of IT service desk and you will see customer productivity and satisfaction soar.

Include all teams into the IT service desk structure. Service desk is not just the front line. It is one large team that serves the customers with consistently excellent customer service.

Have all teams working together to proactively prevent problems and the need for customers to call. The front line of service desk learns the big customer picture across the organization. It understands the customers’ urgency, sees the impact of broken technology, and can provide great insights on preventing problems. The other resolver teams have deeper knowledge to build prevention.

Admittedly each customer hopes for a day of zero defects. When problems arise, they just want them fixed as quickly as possible to stay productive.

Resolve the threat of blocked teamwork and see the corporation value the IT organization as a critical partner in productivity.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Post: CIOs, Are Your IT Teams Truly Customer Focused?

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, is a former IT professional. She delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service focus, teamwork, and leading change especially to technical organizations. Kate turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Customer Service: Does Our Experience Dull Our Empathy?

Former customer service agents and tech support reps often have empathy for customer service and technical support teams. They remember the pressure and are considerate.

It begs the question: Why do many customer service and tech support agents forget the experience of being a customer?

Experience should make it easier to give empathy, right?

Or Does Experience Dull Empathy?

 

 

Experience and knowledge can blind customer service agents and tech support reps to customers’ …

  • Emotions of needing help
  • Fear of not knowing
  • Frustration of being delayed in lengthy procedures
  • Impatience with being routed and transferred
  • Anger at being trapped in the maze of customer support
  • Vulnerability of having to trust others with their success

Experience and knowledge deliver confidence and a sense of control — the very things that lower fear and vulnerability.   Unfortunately for some agents and reps this reduction in vulnerability also dulls their empathy.  

And the saga isn’t over yet.   When you add the pressure of customer service work to the picture, it often makes agents and reps even less empathetic to customers.

Consider: When you are under incredible pressure do you care less about other things that normally bug you?  You just want to get rid of the big pressure so you minimize or overlook everything else?

 

YET … to the customer the things you want them to overlook still matter! 

 

The best agents and reps overcome the dulling effects of experience and pressure by:

  1. Being aware of how they feel outside of work when they are customers.
  2. Repeating the following before each shift, one call at a time!  This focus delivers empathy.
  3. Picturing the customer relaxing as their reassuring words manage customers’ emotions and experience meets customers’ requests and solves problems.
  4. Embracing the true role of service and support — to make life easier for the customer and/or get them productive again!

 

Agents — abandon the myth that your job is simply to solve the problem.  Your job is to deliver a wonderful experience while solving the problem.

Turn your experience into a channel of empathy and an easy win for each and every customer!

 

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Posts:

Best CSRs See Key Link in Chain, Not Life in Chains

Best CSRs Beat Attribution Error in Customer Service

 

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, workshops, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Customer Service & IT Support Leaders: Do You Hear the Envy?

For decades, leaders have heard the same outcry from customer service, call center, and technical support teams: “We have to treat the customers well even when they are yelling at us. Why do they get treated better than they treat us?”

Service and support leaders, managers, and team leads ask me: “Kate, how do we counter that?  Beyond our efforts to treat team members well, what’s the answer to this endless outcry?”

It depends on what you think the team members seek. If you hear it as an outcry for equality and fairness, you might be tempted to say “because they are the customers” or the old standard “the customer is always right.” Your reply affirms that it is not an equal relationship.

Well fairness and equality may be part of what customer service and tech support teams want. Everyone deserves to be treated with basic human respect and most organizations do not tolerate true verbal abuse on either side.

Customer Service & Tech Support Leaders: Do You Hear the Envy?


Nonetheless, the outcry continues.


I can affirm, after 23 years of training these wonderful teams, that the other part of the outcry is envy. 

It’s understandable how agents, reps, analysts, and associates could envy the customers’ privilege of:

  1. Showing anger and dissatisfaction; they can’t.
  2. Receiving help; they give it and often don’t get help from other teams.
  3. Participating in industry conferences; they rarely see the light of day.
  4. Attending training for professional growth; they have limited access.
  5. Having time to work projects completely; they are expected to perform well while simultaneously clearing the queue.
  6. Working a regular schedule with holidays and weekends off; they often work shifts or are on-call.
  7. Being respected and valued; few top leaders recognize service and support as vital to the organization.



Leaders, The Impact of Envy in Customer Service
The risk and impact of this envy is worthy of your attention.

  • It stops teams from consistently delivering the ultimate in customer service. If their heads and hearts don’t love being in service, they won’t.
  • Unchecked envy emphasizes the feelings of unworthiness and diverts valuable focus from service to the imbalance.
  • It impacts the teamwork critical to delivering outstanding service.
  • Unaddressed envy can fuel high staff turnover. Some turnover is healthy for service teams. High levels are a warning sign of a service organization in trouble.

Understanding this has given many leaders and me the chance to cultivate a non-envy culture that inspires and delivers service greatness.

Through workshops, we have helped the front line managers, supervisors, team leads, and staff to replace envy of customers’ privileges with pride in:

  • Breadth of knowledge
  • Continuous learning through experience
  • Great ease and style in working with people — valuable and not everyone has this prowess
  • Multi-tasking and ability to work under pressure
  • Professional skill of being empathetic and objective — many doctors don’t even have this
  • Inspiring yourself and others to excellence



To build and sustain a non-envy service culture, it is necessary to help service team members discover a sense of fulfillment. I rarely hear the cry of envy from service team members who are fulfilled in other ways.

Fulfillment squelches envy whether it comes from their family life, years of work experience, inner peace, gratitude for having a job, comparison to previous jobs, or a tremendous high from reaching results in the face of adversity.

Leaders, showing appreciation and recognition for service team’s work and helping them build a positive service team identity feeds fulfillment. Working with your peer leaders of non-customer facing teams to build the cross teamwork necessary for mutual success feeds fulfillment.

Declare your vision to your teams and ask them for their insight on how to achieve it. Telling does not engage excellence; asking does.

Offer training to develop their professional skills. Budget for temps to cover service demands while service team members present a case study of their achievements at an industry conference.


Face team problems, like envy, stress, and morale, and your teams will achieve success.

I look forward to helping you take your customer service and tech support teams from inspiration to action.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

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©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service, customer experience, teamwork, and leading change. For 23 years, she has turned interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer testimonials and results.

Simply Great Choices Create Super Customer Experience

Delivering a super customer service experience is all about the choices. Simply great choices can create it! Poor choices can destroy it.

Frustration with the customer is often at the heart of those poor choices. In fact, frustration with customer behavior can make poor choices very tempting.

The best in customer service find something else even more tempting — the strength and skill to resist temptation and choose greatness!

Deliver Super Customer Experience With Simple Choices Image by:Shannonnnnnnn

Frustration, Temptation & Simply Great Choices

The strength to choose service greatness rests within your professional identity.

How do you want to be known? What do you picture as greatness? If service is not in that picture, your attitude and behavior will yield to frustration.

If you want to create super customer experience, here are 7 common frustrations, temptations and the simply great choices!

  1. Your Frustration: The customer wants to speak before you or more than you.
    Temptation: Seize control of the conversation and talk over the customer. Poor choice.
    Great Choice: Let them talk! Your response will be far more accurate the more you understand.


  2. Your Frustration: The customer wants something non-standard. This takes time, thought, effort, and takes you out of your normal pace.
    Temptation: Show your exasperation and label the customer as difficult. Poor choice.
    Great Choice: Show your interest — even excitement — in doing and learning something different. This is the chance to WOW ‘em.


  3. Your Frustration: You want the customer to completely populate your contact database before you help them and they want some information without being locked in your detailed procedure.
    Temptation: Ignore their preference and continue on with your questions. Poor choice.
    Great Choice: Get basic identifying information like name, account # and then focus on what they need! Once you have the solution underway, validate or get other personal information for your database. Focusing on the customer delivers a super customer experience. Focusing on your database doesn’t.


  4. Your Frustration: The customer is upset and venting their anger.
    Temptation: Lecture to them (i.e. There is no reason to raise your voice, I am trying to help you). Poor choice.
    Great Choice: Let them vent. When they are done, empathize and take action. Fix the situation, not the customer! If you don’t, your competitor will.


  5. Your Frustration: The customer waits until the last minute for help and has an urgent need.
    Temptation: Tell the customer they should have called you sooner. Poor choice. Criticizing them for poor planning leaves an emotional scar on them that will burden you next time — if they come back.
    Great Choice: Determine whether or not you can meet this urgent need. If yes, do it. Being the customer’s hero is a super customer experience! If you truly can’t, let them know that and refer to other resources that might be able to help them. Expressions of good will and effort build future trust.


  6. Your Frustration: Customer doesn’t follow an important procedure and it causes the customer, and you, repeated problems.
    Temptation: Patronize the customer with an insipid rhetorical question like do you remember I said to enter your account id not your phone number? Poor choice. Patronizing the customer is professionally immature and disrespectful.
    Great Choice: Simply give the customer the answer again. Courteous honest answers help and don’t hurt. After you have helped them, ask if there is anything you can do to make it easier for them next time. You might also review any written instructions or online design to see how to make it clearer.


  7. Your Frustration: The customer wants to ask questions along the way and you want to go through your whole presentation or explanation first.
    Temptation: Tell the customer to wait until you are done. Poor choice. You are telling the customer that you are more important than they are.
    Great Choice: Dialogue with the customer; put their needs first. You will meet your needs through theirs and deliver a super customer experience.
The feeling of relief from venting your frustration on the customer is very short lived. It ruins your company brand and your personal and professional reputation.

When you choose great listening, adaptability, patience, reasonableness, competence, and agility for sudden needs, you deliver truly memorable and super customer experiences.

Question
What other frustrations do you have with customers? Add them in the comments section below and I will help you deliver a super customer experience. I deliver the antidotes to your frustration!

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Post: Be Plentiful & Ready to Deliver Super Customer Experience

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

CIOs: Are Your IT Teams Truly Customer Focused?

Corporate Informational Technology (also known as IT) teams are challenged to protect the corporation while meeting its business needs with technology. Many of these teams lean more toward the protection side of that equation.

I thus hear IT customers often chanting “IT is not customer focused!” when I first go into an IT organization to improve customer experience focus.

I also witness CIOs and their IT teams doing wonderful things yet still falling short of customers’ expectations.

My key questions to CIOs are:



Are your IT teams truly customer focused?

Whose checklist are you using? Yours or your customers?


CIOs: Are Your Teams Truly Customer Focused? A Checklist.

Two reasons IT organizations miss the customer focus mark:

    Many are measuring and comparing themselves to best practices in their own IT industry! Best practices have value yet they don’t tell you if you are meeting your customers’ expectations.
    Many wait for complaints to rise before understanding the customers’ view of IT service quality. But this squeaky wheel approach, screams out “non-customer focused”.



Your IT Customers’ View & Checklist

  1. Talk to us about our business goals not about your IT processes. Use your IT processes behind the scenes to reach our goals.


  2. Be able to adapt to our sudden business changes. Success is not always planned.


  3. Mobility has not just arrived. It is an integral part of our business success. Make it both easy and secure.


  4. Solve our short term business need when it is urgent — then solve the root cause later.


  5. Speak our native language when we call for help. It difficult times, we need people we can easily understand — else our stress level goes up and our productivity down.


  6. Don’t behave as if you are indispensable because we work for the same company. Collaborate with us — we are in this together.


  7. Change is difficult for most everyone. When you are introducing changes in technology to our work, minimize the damage to us and to the business.


  8. Treat us like valued customers — not like burdensome users.


  9. Show us how excited you are to meet our challenges — not how excited you are about technology.


  10. Respect our expertise and empathize with our frustration. Then use your expertise to minimize our frustration and and combine it with ours to solve the problems!


  11. Rigid procedures make you feel secure yet they scare the bejeebers out of us. Don’t strangle our success with your inflexibility.


  12. Be our heroes when tough times hit.


Find out how your customers rank you on these 12 points!

Customers rank you high in customer focus when they both like and trust you. For information technology (IT) teams, this means getting every IT team member to see and behave through the business lens.


Question: CIOs, IT Directors, and IT Managers — besides cost of delivery, what are your top 2 customer focus challenges? How would your team members answer this question?


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Related posts:
Customer Experience Blooms When We Flex

Super Customer Focus: Customers & Us in Harmony

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, is a former IT professional. She delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service focus, teamwork, and leading change especially to technical organizations. Kate turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Leaders, Foresee & Reduce The Burden of Needy Customers

The Customer Experience ViewMaster!

Leaders, if your teams were to read this caption — Leaders, Foresee & Reduce the Burden of Needy Customers — whose burden would they think of? Theirs or the customers?

The answer will show you the state of your current customer experience culture. If they think of the customers’ burden, you are in a good zone. If they think of their own burden first, you have miles to go in building a super customer experience culture.

Foreseeing & Reducing The Burden of Needy Customers

Image by: AndyMiah via Creative Commons License

Customer Experience Culture


Needy customers are the only type of customers!

Un-needy prospects are of little value to our organization.

If they don’t need our products and services, they don’t need us.

It’s time to build your team’s desire to foresee and reduce the customers’ burden.

Help them to see the burden of uncertainty that every customer bears and how they can reduce it!


The 21 Customer Burdens (of Uncertainty)

  1. Can I trust this company with my needs?
  2. Will they fully understand my needs?
  3. Do they care about my needs?
  4. How well do they work together or will I have to run between them to get what I want?
  5. Will I understand them and how to easily use their product/service?
  6. How well will they deliver on my needs?
  7. Will they treat me well — even when it doesn’t serve their profits?
  8. How much will their mistakes cost me? In time, money, reputation, lost revenue?
  9. What positive effect will they have on my life or business?
  10. How easy will it be to use their product or service?
  11. What if we disagree? How will they handle it?
  12. Will the interaction be stressful or positive?
  13. Are they capable of giving me a super customer experience?
  14. What assumptions are they making? What do the expect of me?
  15. What don’t they care about — despite their promises?
  16. How will they treat me after the sale?
  17. Will I regret picking their product or service?
  18. What happens to me if I do regret picking them?
  19. How will a bad decision impact my career, my life, my business, my customers?
  20. Will I like their product, service, and dealing with them?
  21. Should I trust this company?




The customers’ burden of uncertainty takes them away from you.

Take the burden of uncertainty away from them and build your success with their trust in you.

When I go into companies to build a super customer experience culture, I often see that the leaders are aware of these customer burdens – the teams aren’t.

Teach every team in your company to foresee these burdens and reduce them through product and service design, positive selling and trust-based customer service.

It delivers a super customer experience with great success and best results for your business.





Is there a #22 for the list above? What other customer burdens will you reduce?

From professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Post: Super Customer Experience: Be Plentiful & Ready

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Emotional Intelligence Starts as Invitation for a Response

Do you think that emotional intelligence is hard to learn? The ability to understand how people want to be treated is something you can develop — if you know where to start.

Emotional intelligence doesn’t start with a list of clues. It doesn’t start with psychic strength.

Emotional intelligence starts

as an invitation that waits for a response.

 

Emotional Intelligence Starts with Invitation for Response Image via: Istock

The heart of emotional intelligence is showing smeone that you honor their choice for interaction even if you don’t know how they want to be treated.  It’s like extending an invitation for a connection and waiting for a response instead of ordering someone to interact with you.

When you honor their choice and consent on how to be treated, you will be seen as having some emotional intelligence.  Why? Because it shows …

  1. You are thinking of them not just yourself or your goal.
  2. You understand that human differences exist and impact results.
  3. You will listen to both your desires and their needs.
  4. You see value in balancing interests to reach a common outcome.
  5. You know that a person’s needs can vary daily depending on stress level, goal, etc…
  6. You believe they are worth the effort to adapt – in other words, they matter!

And there’s more good news even if you are not highly intuitive.  You can honor differences and display some emotional intelligence simply by posing a question instead of making a statement.

For example, in a doctor’s office the nurse can say either: “Please get on the scale.” or “Will you step on the scale please?” The first is a statement that does not invite interaction. The second is a question that honors choice and asks for consent. The bonus is the nurse will start to learn how the customer wants to be treated through response.

Now for the caution. Here are obstacles to your great start in emotional intelligence:

  1. The need to be in full control.  You are likely to bark orders vs. invite interaction.
  2. The fear you will appear weak.  You are likely to sacrifice connection to protect your image of strength.
  3. You just don’t care. One person told me he chose not to because it was just too much trouble.

Emotional intelligence is a sign of maturity and greatly valued in today’s global business setting.  The choice is yours. If you honor others’ choices you will earn their respect and achieve more than you can by yourself.

 

What else would you add to this list of obstacles to emotional intelligence?

What has helped you develop EI?

 

From my professional experience to your success,

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes on customer service, teamwork, and interpersonal success in business. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
 

Best CSRs: Key Link in the Chain not Life in Chains

Customer Service Reps (CSRs), call center agents, customer care associates, technical support & help desk analysts, are often tethered to a desk or a pager. The best ones are key links in the chain of service or sales and don’t see it as a life in chains.

Important Link or Life in Chains Image by:VersaGeek

How do they achieve this zen like state working in what so many others consider to be a stressful and confining job?

Here are the answers I have collected over the last 20 years of teaching these inspired CSRs and technical support professionals:

  • Chained to the desk or a pager means you are focusing on yourself. Remembering you are a key link in the chain keeps you focused on the customer.
  • Satisfaction comes from knowing that you helped — made their life easier, found the solution, made the experience fun, lifted them up.
  • On tough days, I take pride in how great I am under pressure.  Other CSRs buckle, I don’t.
  • I never let envy of other jobs rob me of the joy of my current life.
  • Before working as a Technical Support analyst, I was in the Coast Guard patrolling in the Gulf of Mexico. I was shot at daily by drug running boats.  Trust me, tech. support work is not stressful!

Service is different than servitude (a life in chains). The former you choose that latter you don’t.

Choose your attitude every day.  Why let angry or rude customers change your choice?

Choose to see the value in what you do — a key link in the chain.

Choose to educate yourself about business success by learning directly from the customers.

Choose to be a CSR, Help Desk or Technical Support Analyst at an enlightened company.

Choose, as leaders, to enlighten your organization’s approach to customer service and to help change your industry with your enlightened view.

Choose to evolve and grow every day of your life.

Which mindset will you choose?

Life In Chains?

or

A Key Link in the Chain of Success



You can choose to be a strong link for others if your mindset is one of service — not of servitude!

©2010-2012 Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you would like to re-post or re-publish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission.  Thank you for intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, continues to inspire legendary service attitudes and behaviors across generations, industries, and professions. Her keynotes, workshops, and DVDs re-energize commitment and delivery of outstanding customer service experiences. Authentic, intelligent, and humorous — book Kate Nasser to transform your next service initiative.

Empowerment & Knowledge – The Confusion at the Front Line

Does empowerment come before knowledge or knowledge before empowerment? That’s what the CEO of the business asked me.  Never is this confusion more prevalent than with new front line leaders.  Businesses almost always spend time and money training and developing the leadership and managerial skills of their top level leaders and often one or two levels down.

Yet they promote team members into front line leadership positions without training or coaching.  They leave them to learn on the job — the hard way — and label it empowerment.  This presumes that empowerment precedes knowledge. In truth, knowledge breeds empowerment.

Empowerment & Knowledge Image by:KarenWithak





The thinking is that higher level leaders are paid more, have a broader impact on the company and therefore must have ongoing training, mentoring, and coaching.

Consider, however, that empowered incompetent front line leaders have daily impact on end results. They can damage morale and team commitment to quality work.

Empower them with knowledge and know-how.







Develop future front line team leaders especially in these areas:

  1. Turning disagreement into profitable success
  2. Building accountability without micro-managing
  3. Tapping talents of diverse team members for transformational business results
  4. Transitioning from peer to boss (if applicable)

You could choose to hire experienced front line leaders from outside your organization. Yet, if you are going to promote from within, first develop and empower them with knowledge and know-how. The results are amazing.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers training and coaching to diverse organizations from large corporations to governmental agencies, for remarkable bottom line results. For more information on her workshops, KateNasser, The People-Skills Coach.

The Perfect Apology – the ONE Word That Destroys It!

As The People-Skills Coach™, I start this post with the assumption that you are willing to take ownership of the impact your actions and words have on others. You are ready to deliver the perfect apology!

Well the perfect apology is found in simple sincerity and the ONE word that destroys it is …

IF

I am sorry IF I hurt you. IF? Do you own it or not? Do you care to rebuild my trust or not?

I am sorry IF that came across as … IF? You are aware that it came across badly so why waver?

We are sorry IF we have not met your business needs. IF? We wouldn’t be discussing it otherwise.

Your intentions don’t matter much if a team member or a customer is offended by what you have said or done. Rebuild the trust with a sincere apology as soon as you are aware of his/her reaction.


Replace IF with THAT or FOR and see the difference.

I am sorry THAT I hurt you.
I am sorry FOR the impact this had on you.
I am sorry THAT came across as …
We are sorry THAT we have not met your business needs. We will …

Why does this little change make a big difference to others? Because it is clear that you are putting their needs ahead of your pride. Simple sincerity makes for the perfect apology.

Are there are other words that destroy the perfect apology?
What apology format have you found successful?

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2010-2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, goes far beyond etiquette and body language in her training sessions and DVDs. She delivers insights on human needs that catapult customer care and teamwork to refreshingly new heights. See this site for video footage, DVD info, workshop outlines, and other blog posts.

People Skills Tips for Technical Professionals

My strong technical background (Mathematics) and my natural intuition about people gives me a special insight into the people skills (also known as soft skills or interpersonal skills) of technical professionals. It is a myth that technical professionals are incapable of highly social interaction. 

As with any population, there is a range of abilities which can depend on interest level. Many technical professionals seem to enjoy the technical/occupational skills over the people skills. Yet I see in them a wealth of knowledge and a very deep commitment to helping others.

So this post is dedicated to you, technical professionals and to your people skills, so that all can benefit from your intelligence, knowledge, and deep commitment to help others.


People Skills Tips for Techies By:@J#@

People Skills Tips



#1 Collaborate vs. Control Instead of speaking through your entire thought and assuming people will understand you when you have completed it, stop along the way and welcome input, collaboration, and discussion. Else you risk alienating people who are not technical in nature.



#2 Dedication vs. Arrogance In any profession, you can choose to share your dedication to your profession with others. This choice creates powerful people skills and influence for your profession. Conversely, you can choose to look down on those who do not have your knowledge. This choice alienates people and reduces your influence. Dedication or arrogance — it’s your choice.



#3 Feelings Lead to Facts Most technical professionals are comfortable with facts and many are uncomfortable with feelings. Non-technical people are loaded with facts that you need in order to apply your knowledge to their business or scientific needs. In order to discover those critical facts, listen to feelings and then ask questions. Otherwise your discomfort and impatience with feelings, will come across as insensitive and possibly cruel. Bonus tip: To discover what they truly want, try a simple empathetic phrase: This can be … important, scary, frustrating … for you. People open up when they feel empathy, validation, and support.



#4 Willingness to Learn is NOT Weakness. My sister is a Ph.D. research scientist. A very bright creative problem solver with decent people skills. She is the first person I call when I have a scientific or medical question and she is glad to help. Yet when she faces a new situation about dealing with people in difficult moments, she calls me. Her willingness to learn and improve her people skills is NOT a weakness. Rather, people skills have increased her influence not lessened it.

What people skills tips would you like to add to this list? The sky’s the limit! Please share your experience in the comment field below.


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, customer service, customer experience, and teamwork. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results. See footage on this site.


Empathy in Customer Care – Lose Your Fear!

Customer care (customer service, help desks, technical support, contact call center) reps,  sometimes struggle with showing empathy to angry customers. Heck, some struggle with showing empathy to any customer!

Throughout 20 years of inspiring and training professionals to understand the customer’s perspective and empathize to build customer loyalty, I have seen some who are naturally good at it, some who learn it, and others who struggle with it.

Most puzzling to me have been those whom I have seen empathizing with customers — except with angry or irate customers. If you or your customer care reps find it difficult to empathize with customers — especially angry or irate customers — is fear of emotion part of the reason?  I believe that it could be. I have met professionals (many not even in customer care) who are afraid to empathize with a colleague, a customer, or even a boss. They have said to me, “What if the person gets more emotional when I empathize?”

Moreover, recent research has taken on the subject of negative emotions and empathy. In one such study, subjects empathized more with those who showed fear than with those who showed anger. Turning Bad Emotions Into Empathy and ProSocial Behavior post reports: “While there is a huge range of human emotion, recent studies have suggested that a fearful facial expression is a more salient elicitor of prosocial behavior than are other facial expressions, such as surprise or anger.”

Empathy - Lose the Fear By:Zaaracollier

Are you more likely to show empathy to a customer who shows you their fear — credit card problems or serious technical difficulties or critical health issues — rather than their anger? Is it because their fear doesn’t frighten you but their anger does?

The issue is critical in customer service, technical support, and customer care because it affects customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Showing empathy to customers, angry or not, builds bonds to your product, service, and brand.

Lose the fear of the customer’s anger to build your empathy skills. Here is a post to help you do exactly that Two Mindsets to Show Empathy for Irate Customers.

What else do you think blocks people’s ability to show empathy? I welcome your comments below.

©2010 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, has a Masters in Organizational Psychology and a natural intuition about people. She delivers highly interactive workshops, info-packed webinars, and distance learning DVDs on this and many customer service topics including customer care in technical support.

Speak From Inside Your Customers’ Head for Best Service

My passion is customer service and teamwork.  So I was very pleased to deliver a key session at the International Help Desk Conference Las Vegas, NV.

“Conversations with Customers: Best & Worst Moments”
The session was recorded. If you want a copy of the CD, please contact me.

Metrics don’t create great service. They measure great service that you create through the conversation. In fact, the conversation is the customer’s metric — voice-to-voice and online.



When conversing, speak from inside the customer’s head.

  • Value the customer’s need for help – that’s why you are in business.
  • Use the customer’s language and jargon — not yours.
  • Respect the customer’s expertise and add yours to it.
  • Use the customer’s perspective when choosing your focus.
  • Embrace the customer’s business priorities and deadlines to satisfy them.

Lastly, make the service experience easy and enjoyable for the customer.  View this related post GPS Your Brain to Work Other Personality Types if you want to deliver customer service at the highest level.

I welcome your contributions in the comment section below.  If you wish to share the info in this post with others, I ask only that you credit this site.

Yours in service … Kate

Apply Yourself and then Apply for That Job!

A recent discussion post on LinkedIn posed the following question:

Most IT job postings list many skill sets.  How does one overcome this challenge when you have some but not ALL of the skills sets the employer is seeking?  My answer is: first apply your efforts to sketching a true picture of yourself.  Go beyond the list of technical skills and projects completed. 

 

As I coach many IT professionals, I guide them to see what they offer along with their technical skills.

 

Use this list to honestly assess your strengths:

  • Are you great at seeing the bigger picture of individual tasks?
  • Or are you truly better at digging in to the deep details?
  • Are you great at initiating change or better at contributing once it starts?
  • If you have great expertise in your technical area, are you also good at explaining/teaching it to others?
  • Do you have experience in quickly rotating on/off project teams?
  • Or do you have a special knack for building long term relationships within a team?
  • Do you learn very quickly?
  • What about IT work excites you?
  • What level of satisfaction do you get working with end-user clients?  Any?
  • Or do you shine at working behind the scenes to build state-of-the art systems?
  • Do you have experience with different cultures even in your personal life? Valuable in a global environment.
  • How experienced are you in giving presentations in your area of expertise?
  • Are you the inventive creative techie?
  • Or are you a customer-focused IT professional?
  • What few words would your closest friends use to describe your strongest traits?

What else would you add to this list that highlights who you are?  Do not include that you can read both analog and digital clocks as did one job applicant.  Sadly this is a true story and the skill mentioned is not a standout!

 

Now sketch a picture of yourself with words.  Be concise, punchy, and include the benefits to your potential employer using key words from the job post description.  Not only will you have a better chance of getting a job; you will have a better chance of getting a job that fits your natural talents and interests.  If writing is truly not your strength, get help from someone who writes well.  Isn’t that what networking is all about? 

 

Please add your suggestions for the above list in the comments section below.  You are welcome to quote pieces of this article if you will be kind enough to post my name and the URL for this blog post.

 

Thanks for visiting this blog and get ready for the job fit you have always wanted! 

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– Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach and Former Techie

http://katenasser.com