KateNasser.com

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.

Key Question on Engaging Customer Service Reps:

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

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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™

Related Posts:
Engage Employees Through Their Entrepreneurial Spirit

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.

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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.

Business leaders, your customers have read your marketing message on commitment to superior customer service. Yet it takes only one moment, one bad experience with a negative attitude for that message to become null and void.

Leaders, are you and your teams — attitude ready? Can you say that team members display a highly positive attitude on each interaction with every customer?

Most leaders reply, “I think so” or “I hope so” and then quote satisfaction metrics to support their claim. The attitude metric for super customer experience must be 100%.

The challenge of excellence is consistency — not repetition.

Customers will always interpret a bad attitude as a sign of personal disrespect. It scrapes emotion and breaks the bonds of loyalty. It creates that horribly inevitable question: Shall I accept this insult? Thus it drives customers away from you and toward your competitors.

Leaders, Are You All Attitude Ready?

Here is a readiness checklist to develop and maintain consistently positive attitudes for super customer experience. Consistent attitude is not scripted and robotic. It is sincere, in the moment, and authentic.

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1. Are front line leaders selected and/or trained to inspire or just to manage? What do they believe is their primary focus? Ask them. For super customer experience, the answer must include “modelling and inspiring” great service. If their answers are mostly a list of tasks including handling escalations, monitoring performance, managing volume, etc…, the team members will not be living a culture of attitude excellence.




2. What is the team’s picture of displaying excellent attitudes? The definition of a great attitude including words like helpful, caring, respectful, warm, friendly, assuring, appreciative, going the extra mile … doesn’t completely drive behavior. Many reps display neutral attitudes and believe they are doing a great job because they are not insulting customers. The customers take this neutrality as lack of caring. It doesn’t produce bonds and loyalty.

   Spot displays of positive attitudes during interview role plays and hire them. Else train with role plays and behavioral displays of positive attitudes to create excellence.
   
   

3. Zero Tolerance of Bad Attitude. After hiring, training, and inspiring excellence, the zero tolerance of reps’ bad attitudes is critical.

   Many leaders today have mistaken the new leadership style of understanding and engagement to be tolerance of bad attitudes and behavior. This is a red herring. Bad employee attitudes and behavior are unacceptable in customer service.

   As a leader when you make excuses and create exceptions, you are creating the culture that will sink super customer experience. You also demotivate those with great attitudes for they want to work in a culture of excellence.

   Listen to reps to understand the tools and other resources they need. Bring those solutions to the table. They must bring their positive attitudes to the customer interaction — regardless of the situation. When my clients ask me: “How long should I coach a negative attitude?” My response is: never. Model and inspire it? Yes. Coach it? No. Reps who choose to display a bad attitude would do better in a non-customer facing position.

   What if great reps, who are consistently positive with customers, slip up in one instance? Anyone can have one bad moment right? Yes but their greatness is evident as they apologize to customers at that moment. They take ownership and make amends immediately. Their professional beliefs shine through. That’s the proof of greatness. They don’t make excuses or run and hide.




4. No shame in leaving policy. Many customer service leaders strive for low employee turnover. It’s understandable from a cost and image perspective. Yet taken too far, this goal can infect morale, performance and results.

   Managers have come to believe that high turnover on their team is an automatic black mark against them. They work to keep everyone there — including poor performers and those ill suited for the positions. Yikes!

   Zappos got it right. They even pay people to leave if it is not a match.

   There is no shame in reps leaving jobs they truly don’t want to do with a positive attitude.

   If turnover is high on your teams, surely check all aspects of the job including pay, training, teamwork, leadership style etc… Fix those issues to attract and retain top talent; don’t keep bad attitudes around just to prove you are a good manager.

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The consistently positive attitude for super customer experience has its roots in these beliefs:

• It is professional and rewarding to serve and give to others.
• Being highly responsible is better than highly entitled.
• People-skills matter as much as occupational skill and problem solving.
• Diversity is fun. It is an exciting way to learn and grow.

Succeeding on the Finer Points of Attitude
When customer service job applicants say that they like the feeling of helping others, dig deeper before hiring them. Will they only like it when the customer is being nice? If they are keying off how they themselves feel, they may struggle when the customer is not happy. Conversely if they see it as a professional goal to serve others, they can give empathy without getting it back.

Responsible vs. Entitled: One rep emailed his front line manager with the following request — “I would like to work from home three days a week. How can you make this happen for me?” This rep will not give superior customer service. There is no sign of responsibility, people-skills, or professional giving.

People who love to solve problems and do it well don’t always do well in customer service. If their focus is tunnel visioned on the end result, they may overlook the customers’ human needs for positive interaction along the road to the solution.


If you are a rep and or manager who loves and lives diversity, learning, responsibility, and professional giving, you are creating a culture of positive attitudes and super customer experience. You are strengthening the profession for the good of all those it touches. Bravo to you all!

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

Related Posts:
Psychological Barriers to Super Customer Experience

The Challenge of Excellence is Consistency Short video.

©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.

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

From big brands to smaller local enterprises, the first truth is:

To make money you must attract customers, get them to buy, and hopefully get them to come back and buy again. This is why so many businesses today are focusing on delivering a super customer experience.

Getting them to buy again requires one unequaled treasure — their trust. It preserves the connection. Unlike confidence, which takes shape in the mind, trust flows to and from the heart. Trust is a risky choice; anything close to the heart is. It is a decision that has consequences and customers fear the worst.

To overcome that fear, the second truth is:

Rapport is the artery to the heart of trust

on the road to super customer experience.

Rapport is the interaction at every level and every moment.
It flows from your agents and reps.
It pings from your website.
It emanates from your packaging.
It springs from your marketing.
It shouts from your procedures.
Every move you make opens or closes the artery of trust.





Keep Rapport Positive & Open for Trust to Flow

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1. Review everything you ask customers to do. Keep doing what builds trust and change what blocks it.

   When your actions while selling show customers you trust them you open the artery to the heart of trust. Later if your customer service procedures cast doubt on their honesty, you cut the artery to the heart of that customer relationship.

   Keep trust flowing the entire time. Lands End is a great example of this. When a Lands End down coat I purchased 2 years ago (and didn’t wear during that time) spewed feathers all over my black business suit when I finally wore it, they told me to send it back for a full refund. It didn’t matter how long I had the coat! Can you just hear the trust coursing through my artery? Yes, Lands End, I will buy again.
   
   

2. Hire and train for emotional intelligence. Much is spent on training sales reps in customer rapport and people-skills. This is good. Do you do the same for your customer service reps? CSRs with poor people-skills can cut the artery of trust. Moreover, customers will mistrust your brand. “You’re nice to me to get my money and then treat me badly during after sales service.” Inconsistency & unreliability are the early signs of a hypocritical brand – unworthy of customers’ trust.




3. If you outsource your brand’s customer service to a BPO, measure and pay that company’s customer service reps (CSRs) for great rapport with your customers not just average handling time (AHT). You get what you pay for and rapport fades when you and thus the CSRs focus on cost. Else your customers believe that you value profit and saving money more than you trust in their value. Trust = buy again. Mistrust = stop and consider your competitors.




4. Design & deliver a friendly trust-building website. Is it easy to find contact information on your site? Does it build rapport with the customers before it asks them to trust you with their personal information?

   Websites that immediately show a squeeze page pop-up do not build rapport. They say “we’re greedy” and don’t want to build your trust. Related Post: We Are Selfish Websites & the Customer Experience

   Does your website truly welcome the customer? This is the beginning of rapport and trust. Does it talk about them or just about you? Related Post: The Welcomer Edge: Unlocking the Secrets to Repeat Business




5. Include rapport in the “r” of customer relationship management (CRM). Relationships are based on rapport and trust. Yet much of CRM can become overrun with metrics, predictions, and strategies. Ask yourselves, are we truly focusing on the relationship or are we skewing too much to the big picture predictors. Customers care about how you treat them at every moment. Do your actions tell them that? Even large success is the sum of each individual moment with customers.




6. Retain the personal touch even as you grow large. Do your known customers become unknown as your enterprise expands?

   Long time customers may frizzle at new procedures yet good rapport can ease them along if the new process is customer friendly. Bad rapport can send them running to your competitor for a tourniquet to stop the emotional bleeding from the loss of trust. Snippy answers like “times change” or “one bad apple spoils the bunch” will send them to social media for the empathy and validation of thousands.

   Becoming unknown is a deeper gash to the artery of trust than not being known at the start.

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Competence touches the mind and builds confidence.
Rapport touches the heart and builds trust.
Does your brand focus on confidence and overlook trust?


What Does Rapport & Trust Do For Your Brand?

• Pings a message to your customers – “friend” not “foe”.
• Gives you a second chance when your brand messes up – and remember no brand is perfect.
• Eases and speeds interactions.
• Makes negotiations more win/win vs. win/lose.
• Reduces or removes the customers’ desire to look around.
• Lowers costs by retaining customers instead of always farming for new leads and customers.
• Overcomes customer resistance to your innovation and changes or
• Surprises you with valuable customer reactions on your brand you couldn’t even pay to learn.
• Gives you the golden nuggets: Auto-renewals, auto-pay withdrawals, personal referrals.

Customer trust is an invitation for a bond and long term relationship. Your actions RSVP the truth about you and your brand.

Based on that, would your customers invite you back? Do they think you are worthy of their long term trust?

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 email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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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.

In the past I have written that great choices create a super customer experience. A recent jaw dropping experience at the Hilton Garden Inn once again shows that the opposite is also true. Bad choices burn customers.

Many of these bad choices are driven by psychological barriers. Awareness of these psychological syndromes gives managers, CSRs, reps & agents the ability to make better behavior choices and deliver super customer experience.

Psychological Barriers to a Super Customer Experience

Which of these have you witnessed in service reps, agents, and managers?

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1. Cognitive Dissonance: When a person’s self-image or view of performance is in conflict with facts or another person’s perception, denial can set in.

   Example #1: When Jason, the general manager at the Hilton Garden Inn realized the horrible things Karen the front desk manager said to me, it was in conflict with his existing view of her.

   Burning behavior: He clearly declared that her behavior was unacceptable yet slipped into cognitive dissonance and thus burned my experience with “she is a good manager.”

   Caring behavior: Instead of changing the reality to meet his perception of Karen, he could instead admit the failure and the dissonance. “Her behavior is unacceptable and I must admit quite surprising to me.” Or simply admit the failure and keep the dissonance to his own private thoughts.

   Example #2: A patient said to a dental hygienist during a cleaning, “That’s painful. I am in pain.” The hygienist’s view of herself was that she does not inflict pain. What she was hearing didn’t fit with her self-image.
   Burning behavior: She simply responded, “Well there will be pressure!” in a sing-songy voice. In her mind she was applying pressure not inflicting pain. She offered no empathy because that would require her to accept that she had inflicted pain. The patient never went back. She told the story of the samurai hygienist to the next caring hygienist she found.
   Caring behavior: The next hygienist said: “I am sorry. I can put some fluoride on your gums to ease the pain then continue.”

   Cognitive dissonance burns customers because most don’t see that the rep or manager is the one struggling psychologically. Customers believe at that moment that the statements and behavior are a direct reflection of what the manager or rep thinks of them. This is a huge risk to super customer experience and loyalty.




2. Defense Mechanisms. Karen’s defense mechanisms were in full swing when I objected to her giving my room number to the cab driver. She was unable to accept that her actions were out of line and change course.
   Burning Behavior: Karen made it a win/lose between her and me. When you define customer interactions as win/lose, you trap yourself and in the end your company loses.
   Caring Behavior: Define interactions as win/win from the start. In that mindset, changing course is not backing down. Changing course is a logical way to finding a mutually agreeable road.

   When a manager, rep, or agent is defensive, they have basically declared that there is a war and their focus is protecting themselves. Customer service is not a war. It is the continuous improvement and delivery of superior interactions between ourselves and our customers. Otherwise, why would they come back? To fight a war?




3. Weak self-image. Even after 20 years of teaching customer service, I still encounter one or two reps in each class who admit they cannot say “I’m sorry” unless it is proven they themselves made a mistake.
   Burning behavior: I feel for these reps. Their inability to say to a customer, “we are sorry for the impact this had on you” is rooted in a struggle to always feel good about themselves. It will also leave the damaged relationship to smolder in pain as the customer shares their dissatisfaction and disappointment with other potential customers.
   Caring behavior: Experience the greatness of putting others’ feelings ahead of your own. A sincere apology for the service team’s failure to deliver outstanding service — bonds, corrects, and heals the wounds.




4. Overactive Ego The manager, rep, or agent who has to dominate any interaction with a customer comes across as a control freak.
   Burning behavior: The mindset, “you need my help so follow procedure and do it my way.” Communication may not be as blunt as that yet the tug-of-war that ensues can leave the customer fatigued and disinterested in your services.
   Caring behavior: Share control of the interaction with the customer. Give and take is far easier than any tug-of-war.

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Every customer wants service to be easy. Paying their money to handle psychological syndromes, hangups, and barriers isn’t on their bucket list.

Free the customer and yourself from the trap of psychological distress. Embrace reality, make it a win/win, and create an easy super customer experience for everyone!

What other psychological traps would you add to this list?


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

Related Post: Simply Great Choices Create 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.

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

Super customer experience is not a series of learned steps or categorized procedures.
It is continuous improvement and delivery of superior interactions between our customers and — our staff, our products, and our services.

Steps, procedures, and processes are merely the ways that large companies organize their work, train their workers, and lower their risk. They are only tools to handle on a large scale what a small enterprise does well without the complex of rules.

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Many of the customer experience horror stories are born of procedures gone mad. They erupt from processes that have conquered thought/reason, empathy, and unfortunately guillotined the customer experience.

Management mistakenly puts so much focus on procedures and adherence to them that the employees delivering service focus on procedures instead of the customer.

The customers are aware of this. They experience procedural focus as uncaring, disrespectful, and dehumanizing.

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Conversely when we, as caring intelligent life forms first unearth the input to the experience (the customer’s perspective), we can easily deliver a superior customer experience with personalized care using whatever procedure is needed.

What super customer experience truly requires is awareness before action!

The customer is constantly aware of what they want and aware of us when they want it. Are we aware of them and what they want or just aware of our procedures?

Super customer experience comes from us being aware of the customers’ wants, needs, and expectations before we deliver. Interaction is the time to become aware.

Interaction before action. Whether it’s face-to-face, on the phone, on Live Chat, or even the e-commerce site, awareness must precede action.

Have you ever heard customers rave about an experience by saying: “Your employees executed the internal company procedure so well”?

The early interaction with the customers foretells the outcome. Will it be the beginning of a wonderful movie with a happy ending?

Or will it end with the customer feeling thwarted, silenced, and metaphorically beheaded by our internal procedural focus?

Picture the customers singing Every Breath You Take by Sting.

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Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you

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3 Reminders to Be in Harmony With Customers

1. We don’t do things for the customers. We do things with the customers and with their input and consent.
2. Interact before we act. Awareness before action.
3. Every procedural move we make, every caring vow we break, every procedural claim we stake, they’ll be watching us — and looking for more caring effective alternatives.

I have taught thousands in customer service, customer care, technical support, and contact center teams how to deliver the ultimate customer service while working the procedures behind the scenes. Let’s create a superior customer experience for each and every customer!

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 the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Related Post:
Super Customer Experience: Customers & Us in Harmony
The Threat to Superior Customer Experience is Company Narcissism.

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

PART I

Visionary customer experience leaders know that it takes more than a thin veneer of customer care to turn customers into their loyal advocates.

When you think of Ritz-Carlton, the image is one of universal excellence not because of the high end price tag but because the leaders consider every single aspect of delivering customer care. From vision through execution, the focus is success through the ultimate customer service.

This can happen in any organization of visionary leaders committed to superior customer experience.

It is a deep commitment, where loyalty takes root. The opposite of that — conquering customer loyalty with a few broad strokes — blocks the root of success and prevents growth.

Image by: Blockpartypress via creative commons license.

Plant Deep Roots for Customer Loyalty
The classic advice for building customer loyalty — from listening to the customer, planning & designing, to employee empowerment, brings success IF you attend to every aspect of it.

Recent Customer Experience: A Strong Growing Root Cut in Two Defensive Moments

On several trips to Minneapolis area, I stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn in Eagan, MN. As a Hilton Honors member, I checked the Hilton family of hotels first for my upcoming trip. The Garden Inn had the features that I needed: Clean comfortable hotel near the work site, restaurant onsite, shuttle service to/from airport, accessibility to taxis, and a good star rating.

The first trip delighted me with positive customer service attitudes from managers and staff. So I automatically booked the Eagan Hilton Garden Inn for the second trip. Again, the service attitudes were warm, welcoming, attentive to detail, and flexible on special requests.

I thus booked it for the third trip on this project. My customer loyalty to the brand and property was well on its way. They had removed all reasons for me to even consider another hotel.

And then it happened. During that stay, they reserved a taxi for me to get to the work site. I came down at 7:15am, went outside to the cab driver, and he asked me for my room number. I replied that for safety reasons of course I never give out my room number. I gave him my first name and asked him if I was his ride? He insisted on my room number. I asked if he would like to go back inside with me so they could indeed confirm that I was his 7:15 am ride. He agreed.

I described the situation to the Karen at the front desk, gave her my name, and noted that of course I don’t give out my room number. She looked in the reservations book, looked me in the eye, turned to the cab driver and said, “Her room number is 210.”

Karen gave out my room number and threw my request back in my face with blatant disregard for my preference and concern. Shocked, I said to her, “Excuse me, you just gave my room number to this man.”

Karen replied, “the cab company requires it”.

I thought to myself: You take orders from the cab company and push my preferences and safety aside?
Instead I repeated, “You just gave this man my room number.”

Karen replied, “Nothing has ever happened.”
I thought to myself: So you will change the procedure after something bad happens? There is a reason room keys don’t have room numbers printed on them.

Nonetheless, I simply repeated one last time, “You just gave out my room number. How are you going to fix this?”

She then fired the final bullet: “Are you going to argue with me or are you going to get in the cab?”

What??#!? Since when is a customer objection to a hotel’s mistake seen as arguing? I immediately asked to speak with a manager. She replied: “I am the manager on duty.”

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After work I spoke with Jason, the general manager.

Even though he put me in a suite, comped me a room, and gave me dinner, he showed that he too defined customer experience as a veneer of customer care. He, general manager, severed my loyalty when, in the middle of telling me how sorry he was, added that Karen was a good manager.

Wrong Jason. A good manager doesn’t verbally attack a customer communicating a safety concern.

Karen’s approach to conquering my objection with an ultimatum about getting in the cab couldn’t even be called customer service. It was a rude, low class, insulting personal attack to silence me and get me out of the hotel. It showed defensiveness about her mistake and incompetence in service recovery.

If Karen were a staff member, you would consider remedial training. When a manager makes this attack and the general manager defends this manager as capable, it is a statement about the brand’s definition of a great service experience.

Although, they stated they would never again use any cab company that requires room numbers, their purely reactive view of great service means customers will suffer a bad experience before the hotel learns and improves. It also says nothing about delivering great care when a customer is highly dissatisfied — another critical moment, the studies show, for securing loyalty.

When I checked out the next morning and Karen was at the desk, I wondered how many other customers would unfortunately suffer that day and in the future. My memory is one of gross disrespect and disregard for me — not one of a free room and dinner.

I now have a reason to consider a different hotel brand for my next trip.

The root of customer loyalty grows from a deep and pervasive care about everything that affects the customer. The root at the Hilton Garden Inn Eagan stops growing at the bedrock of management’s expectations of its front line managers and the thin veneer of care that defines their view of great service.

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In the next post, Part II of this customer experience, I will provide a deeper list of the steps to customer experienced based loyalty. In the meantime, ask yourself — How do your staff and managers react when customers object?

Do they listen with great care and use their empowerment to make significant changes? Or do they snip back to conquer the customers’ objections and pretend to care with a thin veneer?

If you think they are doing it right, dig deep to make sure. Almost sure isn’t enough to build customer loyalty.

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

Related Post: THE Threat to Superior 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.

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

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, 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.

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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.

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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.

A recent CBS Sunday Morning Show featured behind the scenes details of derogatory names companies have for their customers.

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Some Wall Street firms refer to their investors as “muppets”.

Airlines nickname their infrequent passengers “hillbillies or Clampetts” referring to the old TV show The Beverly Hillbillies.

They dub very frequent customers as “Platinum Trash”.

Credit card companies nail the tag “deadbeats” to their customers who pay their balance in full every month.

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As a customer service/experience pro, I listened with some outrage, sadness, and then wonderment.

The leaders of these companies don’t get it  Even if they don’t use these words themselves, they have not done enough to establish a positive culture of valuing the customer.

THE Threat to Superior Customer Experience

Corporate Narcissism

Loving Everything But the Customer

Misapplied Thinking That Fuels This Threat

• Freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not justify hating the customers. If you cannot respect customers, then perhaps it’s best not to build your livelihood on serving them.




• Bluntness relieves stress. There are days when individual workers may find working with customers frustrating. They may blow off some steam privately and offline to relieve the stress.

  Yet the leadership is there to correct that course to ensure it doesn’t become a culture of disrespecting the customers. Leadership is there to teach and remind everyone what it feels like to be a customer and what the customer means to the business.




• Treat the employees well and they will treat customers well. Not necessarily. If leadership and employees treat each other well and collectively disrespect the customers, it will not produce superior customer experience. You cannot hide loathing.

I travel a great deal and can always spot flight attendants and hotel staff who think positively about the customers and those who don’t.

I’m not psychic. It’s in every gesture and word they say. It’s in their proactive help or their indifferent delay.

When company leaders tolerate thinking that degrades customers – even behind the scenes — they are agreeing to it. From thinking comes attitudes and daily behavior with long term strategy not far behind.


How Sad
Picture flight attendants thinking, “I wonder how many platinum trash I will grovel around today?” Can you imagine flight crews dreading the boarding process with so many hillbillies?

Will these crews come across as personable and caring or resentful, impatient, and patronizing?

Do the employees of credit card companies know the value of a customer who pays their balance in full every month? It would be much more valuable to have each employee know that than to foster or tolerate corporate disgust of customers. If there is no business value, why keep them as customers?

As for Wall Street, the world has witnessed the outcome of runaway disregard for customers and their money. From the epithet of investors as “muppets”, we can see the thinking that produced the second greatest economic crisis in modern history.


Good News
There are many companies who have established a customer valued culture that inspires the thoughts and the actions of all employees.

There are airlines now helping the customers as they traverse airport concourses as well as on the flights. They are using kool technology, like Ipads, yet realize that the care comes from the heart.

As other airlines redesign planes to have more economy plus seats with extra leg room in coach class and fully reclining seats in business first, hopefully they will redesign the culture to value everyone who buys and flies. Why improve anything for people you view as trash?

As companies like Ritz-Carlton, Nordstroms, and Zappos, and outstanding hospitals like St. Jude’s Childrens’ Hospital and magnet nursing centers continue to shine their customer care for all to see, we can encourage leaders in other companies to see the true benefit of a customer valued culture.

Call to Action
CEOs and their leadership teams of confused corporations would do well to look at how companies have embraced customer value.

Delivering superior customer service experience doesn’t come from fancy technology, or marketing, or metrics, or branding. It starts at the heart of how a company thinks about customers and brings that thinking to life in its strategy, policies, and interactions.

Thoughts breed actions and many companies ask customers for feedback on their actions. What are your customers saying about your thoughts and culture? That’s worth exploring.

I am honored and thrilled to be working with many companies and professional practices that want to move beyond surveys and go all the way to a customer valued culture.

April is customer loyalty month. Let’s get started!


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

Related Post: Simply Great Choices for Super Customer Experience

Special thanks to CXJourney on Twitter for sending me the URL link for the airline story.

©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.

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

I am pleased to welcome writer Pattie Roberts as the guest blogger for this post. Her thought-provoking personal stories serve up many lessons. Welcome back Pattie!

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I’ve been thinking a lot about my Uncle Fritz lately.  Every spring, as I begin the early garden cleanup, I see the coffee can “Tin Man” he made for me hanging next to the rose bed, and it makes me laugh and cry at the same time.  I laugh because Uncle Fritz was a delightful nutball – wildly successful as an insurance agent, devoted to my Aunt Franny throughout her long battle with breast cancer, and truly offbeat in the way he expressed himself.

I cry because he was the definitive example of the one key thing that continues to be broken about customer service in American business.  I cry even more when I think about how simple it is to fix it.

The Story

Let me back up to 1987.  My mother had just passed away and, as is typical in many families (especially Italian families like mine), we shared our grief over mountains of food.  One evening we were at dinner at Ventura’s, which to this day remains my favorite restaurant.  As usual, Uncle Fritz presided over the table and made his recommendation for our entrée choices.  “Try the veal,” he exhorted, and everyone but me agreed.

I hadn’t had a good plate of spaghetti and meatballs in a while, and that’s what I wanted.  Besides, I don’t eat baby things.  Like veal.  It’s a quirk, I know, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t really affect anyone but me, so I don’t see it as something I need to ‘fix’.  “You should really try the veal,” he said to me as I was making my final selection from the menu.  Non-sequitur:  as I write this, I am really wishing for some Ventura’s spaghetti and meatballs.

Anyway, I try not to be confrontational over small issues (how could my food preferences possibly matter to anyone but me?), so I said something like “I’m sure it’s delicious but I am really jonesing for spaghetti and meatballs.”  After a couple more exchanges like this we ordered – veal for everyone else, my beloved spaghetti for me.  “Did you order the veal?” Fritz asked me.  Fortunately Aunt Rose interrupted with a glowing anticipatory review of the much-vaunted veal so I didn’t have to answer – again.

This is what happened when our orders arrived.   Uncle Fritz:  “You didn’t get the veal?”  Me:  “I’m really happy with my spaghetti.”  Uncle Fritz: “Here, try a piece” Me:  “No, really, save it for yourself, I’m going to have enough trouble eating all this yummy pasta.”  Uncle Fritz (cutting a big chunk of veal and putting it on my plate):  “Try the veal.”  Me (on the verge of an aneurism): “I don’t want the veal! I don’t like veal! It’s BABY COW! It’s bad enough that we eat grown up cows, we don’t need to eat the BABIES too! Take this off my plate!”  Uncle Fritz (to my father):  “What, she doesn’t eat meat?”

So what does any of this have to do with customer service?  If I am the customer, and Uncle Fritz is the CSR, why in the name of all that’s holy didn’t he listen?  He was sweet throughout the entire exchange, he was never snippy or mean, and he was paying for everyone’s dinner.

I had nothing to complain about except the fact that I was benignly but completely ignored.  He wanted to make me happy, but he was rooted in his own idea of what that was, and oblivious to mine.

I think about veal, Ventura’s, and Uncle Fritz every time a CSR tries to talk me into or out of something I want or need.  Being pleasant, concerned-sounding, and even generous is important, but it’s not enough.

Customer service has to be grounded in listening before anything meaningful can take place between the customer and the company.  Even if the veal is scrumptious.

Some questions to ponder:
- Does passion and caring block good listening?
- Is it caring if the CSR isn’t listening?
- How can we balance passion and listening?

©2012 Pattie Roberts. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Guest blogger, Pattie Roberts, is a writer and research analyst in Annapolis MD. You can follow her on Twitter @hughsboo or on LinkedIn.

How long do you think customers will wait for information and answers? Well Google engineers have found that for people surfing the Web, even 400 milliseconds (the blink of an eye) is too long. Wow.

Now picture your typical customer, pressured for a solution. Double wow.

This age of instant information has increased customers’ expectations of front line customer service knowledge and of the CSRs, agents, and technical support reps (TSRs) that deliver it.

Are Your Front Line Teams Tooled & Ready?

Super Customer Experience Info Checklist

• Can your front line reps see what the customers see on the Web? Can they at least see your own company website? In my consulting work, I often here the incredible answer, no.

  I ask, why not? “Because we don’t want them to surf the net. Only the teams that monitor social media can see the Web.” Huh?

  Wake up call from customers: “If we can see it, we expect front line reps to be able to see it too!”




• Do the front line agents and all other teams use the same tracking system software (without cumbersome interfaces that create errors)? For a super customer experience, customers expect that all involved in delivering service will be able to see what they need.

  Checkpoint: How many of your customers are dissatisfied because your service and support teams cannot access the same customer information? In today’s world of instant information, the customers don’t even think this could be happening. Instead, they just think you don’t care about them.




• Do your front line technical support reps have remote control to the customers’ desktops? For customers with computer problems, remote control as an option has eliminated their stress, sped up problem solving, and increased their satisfaction. Many customers will grant permission for the rep to use remote control, yet many front line teams don’t have it.

  Advice: Give front line technical support reps remote control. Don’t let organizational politics, internal turf wars, and hierarchical structure keep this wonderful technology from the front line.

  Customers tolerance for front line technical support reps who can only route tickets to problem solvers continues to decrease. In today’s world of instant information, it seems antiquated and illogical and a far cry from a super customer experience!

It can be a big challenge in large companies to have seamless integration of systems and information. Yet the technology is available to make it happen and customers assume you will have shared information.

They expect it, in the blink of an eye, for super customer experience.

Will this challenge make it to the top of your 2012 goal list? They surely hope so!

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Question:
As a customer, what other information would you want and expect the front line teams to have?

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

Related Posts:
Customer Experience: Customers & Us in Harmony
Does Customer Service Fix Failure or Build Success

©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.

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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. BS Mathematics. Masters Organizational Psychology. Former techie!!

As I read 7 Horrible Phrases Job Applicants Say That Are Warning Signs, I discovered seriously bad advice that can ruin your customer service hiring.

It suggests that if a job applicant uses the phrase my pleasure or no problem, they will not serve customers well. It claims these are bizarre phrases showing the applicant it out of touch with customers.

Quite the opposite is true.

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In fact, these my pleasure employees deliver super customer experience.

Hiring agents, CSRs, reps, and specialists who find serving a pleasure sustains customer experience in a way that training can’t.

The author and those he consulted have misunderstood this time honored phrase of deep service and civility. The phrase my pleasure is not, as he proposes, a focus on the employees’ needs.

My pleasure is a shortened version of:

• My pleasure to serve you …
• It is a pleasure to serve you
• It is a true pleasure to be in service to you and others

The phrase no problem is a shortened version of no problem doing anything you request.

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Many brands use the phrase my pleasure — from high end hotels to fast food chains like Chick-Fil-A restaurants.

Yet even if you believe that your customers would not like these traditional expressions of civility, employees with naturally giving hearts can learn to say other phrases. The retraining is quite simple. Not hiring this natural service talent would be a serious error of omission and disastrous for customer experience and your brand.

The Bonus of Morale

Employees who feel it is a pleasure to serve have self-sustaining morale. When you have enough of them on one team, the teamwork shines as they unite in this spirit. Their can-do attitudes make the difficult, easy and the mundane, special.

I would hate a simple misunderstanding about these phrases lead you to exclude the very customer service employees that will treat customers with pleasure and deliver super results.

Unless you detect true signs of selfishness or immaturity in the interview, hire this natural talent.

My pleasure and no problem are not red flags in hiring. In fact, they are green lights to super customer experience!

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

Related Post: Simply Great Choices Create 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.

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

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:

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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!

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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.

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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.

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.

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:

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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™

Related Posts:
Leaders, 12 Worthy Kudos to Spark Employee Engagement
The Ultimate Customer Experience – Challenge of Excellence (video with sound)

©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.

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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.

As we work tirelessly to deliver super customer experience, I find and fix common everyday mistakes that drive customers away.

Recent experiences focus me today on ways we imprison customers which do everything but build loyalty. You might think imprisonment is too strong a word. Yet that is what customers report.

Give customers a get out of jail free card — fix these mistakes!

Ways We Imprison Customers!

1. Endless Loops. This is definitely #1 on the customers list. Beyond the endless unclear phone menus (voice response units – VRUs, IVRs), customers also feel imprisoned by agents, reps, and CSRs with poor skills.

   The Story: A business owner needed to become a credit card merchant. The sales rep was clear, focused, and offered a great deal. The business owner signed up. The sales rep reported that the support team would send an email with account # and temporary password. Support would then call to finalize everything.
   

   

   Super Customer Experience: Loyalty Not Imprisonment! Image: iStock for Editorial Use.

   
   The business owner received a phone message from support saying “By now you have received your email with account # and password. Please call me, Mindy, at this phone number and extension.” The business owner left Mindy a message saying “We never received the email. Please let us know what to do now.”

   Mindy left a second, third, and fourth message saying the exact same thing as her first message! When the business owner finally spoke on the phone with Mindy, she continued to say “you should have received the email by now.”

   Imprisonment: The business owner finally said, “Time is money. Move me forward or I will cancel my account.”

   Customer service is forward not stagnant. To customers, stagnant feels like imprisonment.

   Release customers from status quo prison! For a super customer experience, move them forward to the solution.

   Question: Where in your organization do customers get stuck in the status quo?




2. Lack of teamwork. Multiple teams engaged in service with little or no teamwork leave customers trapped in a maze. Customers must jump between teams to get a solution or jump out of the maze and choose freedom. That’s not conducive to customer loyalty.

   For super customer experience, deliver a single point of solution not multiple points of failure. Build teamwork with shared technology, mutual service level targets, and one service culture.

   Question: How many teams in your organization must work together to deliver a super customer experience? Do they all give it the same priority? If not, customers end up imprisoned in the maze.




3. Tunnel vision. A less evident yet still common mistake, thinking only from the company or agent perspective. Super customer experience requires seeing things from the customer’s view. Else the customers feel ignored and overlooked — imprisoned in solitary confinement.
   Cultural tunnel vision in global service leaves customers in the dark.
   Rigid script reading and poor listening slam the door shut.
   Websites with poor e-commerce design drive customers away — to well-designed easy-to-use sites.

   Shine the light of customer awareness throughout your organization to free customers from solitary confinement and to value them in your organization.

   Question: Where in your organization is tunnel vision blocking super customer experience? Expand the vision. Replace the tunnel with bridges to the customers and to your success.

Customers want information and solutions that meet their needs. Online, in person, or on the phone, they seek positive easy experiences to get what they want. Imprisonment is not positive nor easy. It makes them want to break out, run away from the stress and find success elsewhere.

Think customer care not customer control. Think bonding not bondage. Think customer!

I look forward to working with you, leaders, and your teams to create super customer experience.

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

Related Posts:
Super Opportunity to Improve Every Customer Experience
Simply Great Choices Create 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.

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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.

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!

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.