Month: March 2016

Keeping service simple

I had two internal meetings today that reinforced with me how important it is to keep customer service simple.

The first one was with a long-time employee, a brilliant product person and people manager.  We talked about a lot of things, but one thing she mentioned really struck me.  She said that our current employee performance evaluation has so many facets and details that it has gotten away from what really matters – client satisfaction, client retention and campaign optimizations that make an impact.  She suggested that we move to just those three competencies, and I loved the simplicity of her recommendation.

The second meeting was with an employee who recently moved into a new job.  He told me that the new role was refreshing because he was able to really focus on helping clients and solving their problems from start to finish, rather than worrying about completing a specific number of tickets each day.  While I loved his new perspective, it made me think that on his previous team, they were more worried about targets and productivity than actually helping clients.  They were caught up in the complexity of our productivity formula versus thinking about client problems.

If you are running a service team or function, it can be easy to get obsessed with the metrics, productivity, targets and quality of client communication.  It makes sense – that’s part of your job.  But it’s also great to be reminded that service is simple, and sometimes getting back to the basics of just helping a client is incredibly refreshing and reinvigorating.

Striving for service greatness

This is being reprinted in a few places, so I wanted to post it here too. Like I did in 2015, I started the year with a message to my team about continuing to improve our service levels.

Team:

In 2015, we talked a lot about service excellence and what it means for Indeed. We defined it as “making the most of every client interaction,” and shared stories of how we saw one another exhibit service excellence in our work and day-to-day lives.

In 2016, service excellence is our new baseline and expectation. To further differentiate Indeed from our competition and to deliver truly memorable client experiences, we need to keep getting better and finding new ways to wow our clients. We need service greatness.

When I think about service greatness, very clear things come to mind that I see you all doing regularly. To me, service greatness is:

  1. Personalizing the client experience
  2. Going above and beyond what the client expects
  3. Turning negative experiences into positive ones

It’s easy to reply to an e-mail or take a call from a client and not necessarily do these things. It’s harder – and thus great – to push ourselves to ask one more question, to take one more step or to investigate one more thing to make sure we are providing the best service possible.

In 2015, we took our service to another level, and I believe that we can do it again! Thanks for everything you do to deliver quality every single day, and please let me know if you ever hit a barrier when trying to deliver great service to a client – I’m here to help.

Thanks and happy 2016,

Jason