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Information and
Resources to Help you Build and Retain a
High-Performance Company
Volume I
Issue III August 2007
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FROM
JIM SIRBASKU’S DESK
Customer Service: A How-Not-To, and a How-To
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The stories we
hear and read about customer service
these days should frighten any
executive into making clandestine
calls to her own office to check out
what’s really going on at
home. It’s an old trick, but if all
CEOs made such calls on a regular
basis, we might usher in a new age
of enlightenment.
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In spite of a proliferation
of tales about bad customer service, some of
them amplified on Web blogs to thousands of
people, customer service horror stories
continue.
From some of these incidents,
we can divine this sure-fire philosophy for
driving away customers:
- Never talk to them. Keep them on hold on
the phone, and don’t answer their e-mails.
Tie them up in voice mail so that they never
get to talk to a real person.
- If they persist in phoning in and demand
to speak to a person, make sure they get
transferred so that they have to repeat
their problem again and again.
- Make them stand in a long line each time
they visit your business.
- Tell your salespeople that it isn’t
important for them to know about your
products, and don’t ever empower a
salesperson to solve a problem. Make your
CSR go to four or five other people first.
- Reward the salesperson’s surly attitude
by never correcting it.
- Don’t trust customers, for they are
never right. If they tell you your product
is defective, assume the problem is their
fault.
I believe the old adage that
customers vote with their feet. And with the
cost of finding a new customer at 10 times the
cost of retaining one, I don’t think any of us
can afford that kind of fancy footwork. I also
believe that all of us, no matter the business
or industry, must take a hard look at customer
service. The problems don’t populate just one
business or industry; you can find them in
banking, retail, health care, insurance and
airlines.
Still, some companies don’t
get it. They have hired the wrong people, or
gone to the self-service model of customer
service, or made their customer service someone
else’s problem and called it outsourcing. They
have pinched pennies, convinced they are saving
money, when in reality they are losing customers
and may eventually lose the store. Meanwhile,
they hang up a sign that says, “Customers Come
First” and hope that their employees get it.
The bad news is that no one
ever gets anything from a sign like that; it’s
not that easy. The good news is that hiring the
right people and training them is not
impossible, either, and can make your
organization hum like a well-tuned engine.
As with any good professional
practice, good customer service starts with a
set of standards or values that the company
wants employees to embrace when serving
customers. Then our managers hire the people who
most closely match those standards. Assessments
help identify job candidates whose attitudes
match ours. Ideally, we all want to hire workers
with the customer service “soul,” perhaps
imprinted on them by their mother or father when
they were just babes. But it’s not as obvious as
Harry Potter’s lightning bolt; you can’t see
this imprint just by looking at someone, or
listening to her talk.
Once the right person is in
the right position, managers can’t just walk
away, believing their job is done. The best
companies offer employees continued, focused
training in customer service.
As we all try to remain
competitive while retaining customers, we must
remember that people, both the customer and the
one serving the customer, are the most important
ingredients in the business equation. By all
means, we should use every technological
advancement available to further our goals in
this increasingly complicated world. But in our
haste, we cannot forget the people part. As one
infuriated blogger wrote, “Without customers,
there is no business.”
Jim Sirbasku, CEO
Profiles International
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7 Steps
to Superb Customer Service
S stands for
product savviness and salesmanship. We’re much
more effective selling the product if we know
how it works.
E is for ears.
Use them to hear what the customer wants and
needs. Don’t interrupt. Do ask questions so you
will fully understand.
R means
responsibility. Seize it, and give customers
confidence that you hear them and will help
them.
V is for value
of the product and the organization standing
behind it.
I represents
initiative, or doing what needs to be done, and
ingenuity or inventiveness.
C stands for
courtesy. Consider everyone an important
customer, whether that person works inside the
company or is stepping in from the outside to
purchase something.
E stands for
ethics. Treating people with respect and
fairness bodes well for a constant supply of
customers.
CASE STUDY
A Decrease in Turnover Using Customer
Service Profile™
What kind of workers does
your organization hire for customer service? Do
they like dealing with people? Are they tactful?
Do they listen well? These behaviors are
paramount in any organization that promotes good
customer service, and the keys to this
particular kingdom are hiring the right people
and retaining the ones that meet your high
standards.
This case study examines the
steps that a financial services organization in
Louisiana took in an attempt to improve employee
retention. Over a two-year period, Profiles
International staff helped the company examine
the relationship between employee turnover and
job candidates’ match to the customer service
position. Part of the study included measuring
the degree of alignment between the jobseeker’s
customer service perspective and the specific
expectations of the company in which the
candidate was seeking a job.
Method
The organization administered the Customer
Service Profile™ to 1,287 job-seekers. The
company developed a Job Match Pattern that
reflects its views on customer service.
Participants who respond in a similar manner to
the organization’s views implicitly share the
organization’s belief in customer service, and
managers perceive them as a stronger fit for
customer relations than those who don’t respond
in a like manner.
Job Matches percentages were
assessed this way:
- 80 percent or greater job match, strong
fit to the job.
- 79 percent or less job match, weak fit
to the job.
The organization hired 226 of
the candidates who participated in the study. Of
those, 166 were seen as a strong fit for their
positions, and 60 were seen as a weak fit.
Over the two-year period, the
company also tracked the 226 workers’ employment
status within the organization, including
turnover figures. The results? The turnover rate
of the employees demonstrating a strong fit to
the position was 61 of 166, or 36.7 percent. The
turnover rate of employees demonstrating a weak
fit to the position was 25 of 60, or 41.7
percent.
Results
By using the Customer Service Profile™, the
organization has shown the ability to
successfully predict employee turnover based on
Job Match percent. The study showed a reduction
in turnover of 12 percent, which helps in the
expensive areas of selecting and training new
people. By using the Customer Service Profile™,
this organization will continue to hire
candidates that it is more likely to retain.
The Job Match Pattern now
serves as the organization’s benchmark for
matching other employees. |
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Executives and
business owners seeking the excellent
customer service formula can look to THE
POWER OF NICE for ideas. Corny to
suggest that merely acting nice works?
Maybe, but there’s evidence that it
does. Linda Kaplan Thaler,
co-author of the THE POWER OF NICE and
owner of the fastest growing advertising
agency in the United States, maintains
that even not-so-nice people can learn
how to be nice. She offers a “NiceQ
Test” on the book’s website,
www.thepowerofnice.com,
so that everyone can judge his own nice
quotient and see what areas or traits
need work.
Or we can read the
book and discover more, including how
treating people well has put Kaplan
Thaler and her co-author, Robin Koval,
at the head of the class. We learn in
Chapter 1 how the security guard in
their building helped land a prominent
client for the Kaplan Thaler Group. The
potential client was from Minneapolis
and felt apprehensive about coming
face-to-face with the legendary rudeness
of New Yorkers. The friendly security
guard disproved the legend with his
helpfulness.
Watching Diane Brady
interview Kaplan Thaler in “Video Views”
on BusinessWeek.com, you get the feeling
that the author sincerely means what she
says about the power of making nice.
Whether you call it good karma or good
business practice, it’s easy to believe
the tale about an assistant whom she was
nice to years ago coming back to her
with loads of business.
Kaplan Thaler told an
interviewer for The Columbia
Journalist that the inspiration for
THE POWER OF NICE stemmed from an
experience early in her life. Her father
worked at a toy company, and as a child
she accompanied him to work. “He asked
his secretary if she wanted coffee,”
Kaplan Thaler said. She asked her
father, ‘Isn’t she supposed to do that
for you?’ He told her, ‘The people who
support you, you get them coffee.”
In addition to
anecdotal evidence, Kaplan Thaler and
Koval have done their homework. They
note that organizations that try to
operate under the “nice” mantra get sued
less often and show lower recruitment
costs, lower turnover and higher
productivity than their counterparts.
Their employees are healthier. And a
survey the agency took, quoted in
Parade magazine, reveals that 79
percent of employees believe that nicer
people prevail in the office over their
more aggressive and political
colleagues, and that 81 percent believe
their bosses are nice.
Still, nice does not
always prevail. Kaplan Thaler told Brady
that “people think they are nicer than
they actually are.”
Interesting tidbits
from NICE:
- You can be a
total jerk and still be nice.
(Niceness is a skill, not a
personality trait, they say.)
- Negative energy
takes a big bite out of the work
environment.
- People choose
whom to be nice to.
If you read the book
and want more, or if you want more
before you get the book, check out the
website. In addition to the NiceQ Test
and a couple of videos, the index
includes “Nice Buzz,” which showcases
the headlines this book has made.
Kaplan Thaler is the
CEO and chief creative officer of the
Kaplan Thaler Group, and Koval is the
president. The two also co-authored the
national bestseller BANG!
Advertising Age ranked their agency
as the fastest growing advertising
agency in the United States, and the
agency is the winner of 13 Clio Awards.
ABOUT
THE BOOK
THE POWER OF
NICE: How to Conquer the Business World
with Kindness
Authors:
Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval
Publisher:
Doubleday/Currency
ISBN 978-0-385-51892-5 (0-385-51892-7)
144 pages |
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Customer
Service Quotes
"We have two
ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice
as much as we speak." Epictetus, Greek
philosopher
"Courage is what it takes to
stand up and speak; courage is also what it
takes to sit down and listen." Winston
Churchill, British leader
"A business that makes
nothing but money is a poor business."
Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company
"Your most unhappy customers
are your greatest source of learning."
Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, in Business @
the Speed of Thought
"It's nice to be
important, but it's more important to be nice."
Author Unknown |
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PRODUCT
FOCUS
Customer Service Profile™ Makes Your Wishes Come True
If you watch your best customer
service employees work their magic, you’ve likely wished
that you could clone them. In their bag of tricks are
all the right words: empathy, tactfulness, intelligence,
sensitivity, sense of humor. Not only that, they know
how to show these behaviors. And they know your
business inside-out.
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Cloning them is out of the
question. But what if you could spread their
beneficial behavior throughout your
organization? It’s not magic and it’s not too
good to be true. With Profiles International’s
Customer Service Profile™, you can hire the
people who match your company’s high standards,
and you can quickly pinpoint the areas where
your organization would benefit from coaching.
All of your employees, not
just those who have the words “customer service”
in their title, need to serve customers.
Everyone who works for an organization is its
representative. That’s the way customers
perceive the situation, and that’s the way you
should see it, too. But how do you communicate
that to your employees? |
This vital bit of communication is
easier if you hire people with the right attitudes. This
is where the Customer Service Profile™ provides
invaluable help. It assesses the beliefs and customer
service proficiency of employees and job candidates.
This gives you the critical information you need to hire
people with the skills you desire, improve training in a
vital area and increase awareness that every employee is
involved in customer service.
The assessment tool measures such
characteristics as tact, trust, empathy, conformity,
focus and flexibility. It also measures skill level in
vocabulary and mathematics. It measures how each
person’s perspective on serving customers aligns with
the organization’s policies and attitudes.
With Customer Service Profile™, which
is available in custom form for the healthcare,
hospitality, financial and retail industries, you get
three types of reports:
- Placement report. The Job Match Percentage, part
of this report, tells you how well job candidates
match your standards and the degree of alignment
between a candidate’s perspective and the company’s.
- Coaching report. It shows you the areas in which
individualized training/coaching will instill the
attitudes you want in all employees.
- Individual report. This report helps employees
improve and deliver their skills through a sense of
awareness.
It’s all right for companies to believe they are lucky
when they find employees who excel at customer service.
But the Customer Service Profile™ can help create an
atmosphere in which customer service is part of
everyone’s job.
STRATEGIES FOR
WINNING
Talk ’em Down!*
Make Customer
Complaints Work for You
One day, we received a call from one of our Strategic
Partners who said she was about to lose her biggest
client because of a glitch in our e-mail system. How did
this happen?
The first step in fixing the problems
was to gather facts. The e-mail problem had originated
when we installed new software not properly configured.
The situation got worse when the client called our
office seeking technical assistance and was given
instructions that didn’t work.
We quickly called a meeting of the
people involved and soon had a temporary solution to use
until we developed a permanent solution. Our Operations
Vice President implemented the appropriate actions
immediately. We called the Strategic Partner and gave
her an update on the situation. Next, we contacted the
client and explained our situation, apologized for the
inconvenience, and presented the temporary solution. We
not only saved the account, we were also complimented
for how quickly we responded to the situation. Through
quick attention to the problem and attention to the
client, we turned a potentially bad situation into a
very positive one.
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We recommend you consider
customer complains in a positive frame of mind
and see them as suggestions for improving your
products and the way you do business.
No matter how good you and
your people are, or how good your
products/services are, you will occasionally
encounter an angry customer. A normally
reasonable, happy customer who gets angry
transforms into a flesh-eating beast, bent on
your destruction. Sometimes they come at you
foaming at the mouth and demanding satisfaction.
How do you talk ’em down from the ceiling?
There are two traditional
ways. The first is to eat crow immediately,
accept the blame fully, beg forgiveness, kiss
up, and do everything the customer-turned beast
asks in order to satisfy them. You’ll likely
keep the customer, but after you’ve crawled like
that more than a few times, can you look at
yourself in the mirror and smile? |
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Another approach is to get angry back
at the customer, slug it out with them (verbally, at
least), exchange blame and insults, deny all
responsibility and tell them where to get off. That way
you needn’t worry about repeat complaints. After all, no
customers, no complaints.
Calming angry customers and resolving
complaints to their complete satisfaction need not mean
sacrificing your self-respect. Experts have demonstrated
that the following guidelines will resolve more problems
more easily, and turn a complaint into a more positive
experience for the customer. And you will still be able
to look at yourself in the mirror and smile!
1. It’s Your Problem, But
Don’t Take it Personally
It may not be your fault, but it’s still your problem.
Approach all angry customers with this attitude. Even if
it is your fault, don’t take the complaint personally.
Customers complain because they want you to address a
perceived shortcoming, not because they don’t like you.
Resist the temptation to fight back. Even if you win the
battle, you’ll lose the war. And the customer.
2. Listen
In order to address the customer’s problem, you’ll need
to know exactly what the problem is. As with all other
endeavors, listening is a key skill. Shut up and listen
carefully. Besides giving you some insight into the
reason for the customer’s distress, it also helps to
exorcise some of the initial anger the customer is
feeling.
3. Don’t Interrupt
Let complainants express themselves. Don’t stop them
mid-flow. Let them vent their anger; it will be easier
to reason with them afterwards.
4. Calm Your Complainant and
Clarify the Problem
When your customer has finished complaining, show some
empathy. Explain that you understand why he or she is so
upset, and you’re going to try to sort things out. Then
clarify your understanding of the problem. Ask questions
and qualify comments. This will calm your customer and
ensure that your suggested solution will address all
aspects of the perceived problem. Step into your
customer’s shoes. Look at your company, your products,
the problem and your actions from the customer’s
perspective, and then decide whether or not the
complaint is justified.
5. If it’s Your Fault, Say So
— If it’s Not, Don’t
When you fully understand the complaint, decide whether
or not your company is at fault. Don’t automatically
accept blame before you know it’s warranted. But if it
is clearly your fault, admit it early in the process.
Accept responsibility and don’t hide; don’t try to pass
the buck. Adopt a genuinely humble tone.
6. Solve the Problem
Think about how best to solve the customer’s problems.
If you need some time to come up with a response, tell
them so and commit to getting back to them on a
specified timetable, and do so. Make sure all of your
responses project a clearly concerned but calm manner.
Stress your eagerness to resolve the problem, and
project a calm confidence that you are the person to do
it. When you have a suggested solution, agree with the
customer the steps you’ll take and the timeframe for
correction. Assure the customer that you’ll take
personal responsibility for seeing the resolution
through, and do so. Nothing is more important than
resolving customer complaints. Attend to them with the
utmost urgency. Research shows that it costs as much as
ten times more to recruit a new customer than to retain
one you already recruited.
7. Don’t Accept Abuse
Don’t accept it if a complainant steps over the line
between the reasonable right to complain and outright
personal abuse. Calmly explain that you will address
problems, but you can do so only if they speak and act
courteously and respectfully. If they continue with
their abuse, terminate the conversation. You don’t need
that kind of customer!
8. Pin Down Moving Targets
If you’re dealing with a problem that seems to grow
every time you implement an agreed solution, ask your
customer to put the complaint in writing so you can
better understand and address it. This will help you to
focus upon an agreed solution. Also, working things out
on paper can sometimes make a complainant recognize if
theirs is an unreasonable viewpoint.
9. Stop it from Happening
Again
Try to prevent angering customers in the future:
- At purchase time, let your customers know it is
your policy to resolve any difficulties they might
encounter with their purchase. Then, should they
call to complain, their stress levels should be a
little lower given their confidence of receiving
good support.
- Keep in touch. if something’s about to happen
that might upset customers, let them know before
it’s an issue.
- When a customer identifies a problem, change
what you do to minimize the chance of the problem
recurring.
Customers who take the time to
complain are generally telling you they want to continue
doing business with you, but with some changes. Put a
high priority on resolving their difficulties, but don’t
ever feel you must sacrifice your own self-esteem to do
so.
*From the book 40
STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and
Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore
Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved.
Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint
permission. |
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