Category: Service excellence

Answering the right question

I recently was helping my team with customer emails and chats during a company retreat.  This is one of my favorite times of the year, because I get to make sure my skills are still reasonably sharp, and I can help to offset volume while my employees are getting a break from work.

One lesson I reminded myself of when doing this work is making sure I am answering what the customer is actually asking.  If I move too fast, jump to conclusions or make assumptions, I can be slightly off, which likely means more interactions to solve the issue, and maybe even customer frustration.

One email exchange I jumped into was facing this for a specific reason – the employee was using published macros to respond to the customer, but none of them really addressed his issue.  They were close but slightly missing.  When I dug into the situation, I learned that the customer fundamentally didn’t understand something about the product.  That was actually fine, but never could have been uncovered or answered by a macro.  It was a nice reminder that although macros, talking points, scripts and the like help to provide efficiency and consistency, they are not always the right solution, and they sometimes don’t or can’t actually answer the customer’s question.

In another situation, I caught myself getting too excited because I thought I knew the answer to something, which then resulted in wrong assumptions and customer confusion.  While it felt natural to try to go fast, it led me to answer the wrong question.  In this chat interaction, the behavior showed up when I was making statements rather than asking questions.  Example:

Me: So, the employee has this benefit through an outside provider.

whammy

This was dead wrong, because I had made an assumption based on too little information.  While I don’t think the customer cared too much, she had to correct me and the solution took longer than it needed.  After, I thought about how it could have gone better, and realized I could have asked questions to learn more rather than making an assumptive statement:

Me: Does the employee have this benefit through an outside provider?

Or, even more generally:

Me: Can you tell me more about what’s going on and how I can help?

That would have led me to answering the right question much more quickly, and without a customer correction.  Overall, this exchange was a great reminder and something I have been thinking a lot about since – these little efficiency wins (or losses), although seemingly small in the moment, add up as a team scales, and can really hurt in times of increased volume.

Channel switching usually stinks

Last Fall, I Tweeted about channel switching in customer service:

And I wrote about it lightly as part of my post about how Verizon handles social customer service.

This topic has been on my mind because of an experience I recently had with Chase, the enormous consumer bank. Very oddly, Chase decided one day to put a restriction on all of my accounts, which caused any scheduled bill payments, transfers or ATM withdrawals to fail. When this happened, Chase gave me no warning and no notice until the failures started happening. I have been a customer since I was a teenager, so this approach was pretty surprising and disappointing.

When it was time to fix the problem, they gave me only one support channel option – in person.  This was fine and seemed reasonable based on the severity of the issue.  I visited a branch near my office, and while I was able to clear the block on my accounts, Chase couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me why it happened.

At first I let it go, but I later thought I should check in with them to get the full story.  So I logged into my Chase account and wrote a “secure email” asking for a manager to research what happened and to share the findings.  I said it wasn’t urgent and might need some digging.  Chase quickly responded by saying (1) they didn’t see any previous restriction, and (2) they can only discuss compliance issues via phone.

I tried one last time, by asking them to forward my email request to the compliance team so they could investigate and share their findings.  I was again told that (1) no block was recorded on my accounts and (2) if I did want to know more, I would need to call, although they understood that I prefer email.

While I totally comprehend why you wouldn’t do this kind of sensitive customer service work via social or another channel that is dependent on third-party apps, doing it in their own “secure message center” seemed reasonable.  Trying to honor a customer’s preferred channel, without switching – whenever possible – feels much more supportive.

Service is grit

I recently sat in a restaurant with my family and carefully watched the table next to me. The couple had ordered wine before their meal and looked upset. When the employee taking care of them came back to the table, one of the customers said, “This doesn’t taste good, can we have something else?”

The employee worked with them on a choice, and a few minutes later, brought over a different wine option, then walked away. Upon tasting this latest choice, one of the customers said, fairly loudly, “This tastes terrible.” At that point, my 8-year-old child noted their behavior and asked me about it. She was surprised that they would send wine back at all, much less twice.  She described their reaction as “not nice.”  I agreed.

I began wondering how the employee would react when she came back to the table. Would she get defensive? Upset? Or just battle her way through it?

When she arrived again, the couple reiterated that the wine was “terrible,” and it was decided that beer would be a better choice. At no point did the employee get visibly upset or flustered, although I’m sure some things were stirring inside her. I bet her heartbeat was elevated and she had chosen some words that she would like to say to the couple. Even the greatest customer service employee reacts to a tough customer or tough situation. It’s how you battle through it and recover that matters most.

In this case, the employee gritted through the situation.  She accepted the feedback, brought the beer, and graciously kept servicing the table at a high level.  She could have reacted poorly, had an outburst or done something that would have upset the customer or even put her employment in jeopardy.  Instead, she showed grit in the face of adversity.

I see this every day in my teams.  An employee will have a tough call, and tell me about it with a smile.  That’s grit.  Or she’ll talk about how she could have done better to prevent it from getting escalated to her manager.  Pure grit.

I’ve also seen new employees cry their way off the floor because a call was too tough or too personal.  That doesn’t mean they don’t have grit.  What happens next does – if they come back to the floor with a smile and determination, you’ll know they have grit.  It’s not always the reaction to adversity you need to look for, but the recovery.  Some of my best employees have to walk away after a tough call.  Even I do.  But we come back, do it again, and keep delivering at a high level.  That’s grit.

Little service moments matter

The other day I was at Whole Foods and saw a customer with two young sons in the produce section. She had put some blueberries in her cart, and the boys immediately wanted to eat them. Outnumbered, she was looking for help.

She ingeniously walked over to the coffee counter (which is not where you buy food) and asked the barista if she would wash some of the blueberries so her sons could eat them.  I watched on from the bananas to see how this would go – it felt like a great opportunity to help this customer out when she was in a tough situation.

The employee immediately said yes with enthusiasm and washed the blueberries.  The customer was relieved and the boys were pumped.  In the big picture of that day at Whole Foods, it was a tiny moment, yet it was incredibly important.  Here’s why:

  1. If every Whole Foods employee who faces a similar request acts the same way, it creates a culture of service that extends far beyond that moment.
  2. If the above is true, in aggregate those moments can actually elevate the Whole Foods brand.  Customers will gravitate to the brands that treat them well, surprise them with kindness and create special moments.
  3. The employee was asked to do something that is not, on paper, her job, and avoided every service false step along the way.  I never heard, “No, I can’t,” or “That’s not my job” or “You can try asking someone else.”  She enthusiastically said yes, helped the customer and likely made the rest of her day much easier.

But, these small service moments can be harder to isolate:

  1. It’s unlikely that anyone at Whole Foods trained that employee on whether she could or should wash blueberries at the coffee counter for customers – she just had good service instincts.  (This reminds me why I sometimes am critical of training manuals – they will never comprehensively include everything we face in service.)
  2. If the employee would have said “No” or “I can’t,” it’s unlikely her boss or the shift manager would have ever known.  The customer probably would not have complained, so it would have just been a missed opportunity.
  3. As service professionals, we tend to search for big opportunities to satisfy or impress clients.  Doing so can blind us from the smaller opportunities in front of us every day.

Little service moments can add up, elevate a brand and arguably surpass “big” moments in terms of overall client impact.  How can you find some small opportunities like this in your day?

Client Services at Indeed

About a week ago, I finished up as SVP of Client Services at Indeed after nine years, three months and one day. In that time, a few things happened:

  • We grew from one employee (me) to 600+ the week I left
  • We expanded our locations from one to 13 globally
  • We made huge gains in client satisfaction (NPS) and retention
  • We created specialized teams focused on important client segments (SMB, mature accounts), internal service excellence (training and development, product support) and new contact channels (chat, social)
  • We changed the conversation in recruiting to be more about metrics and ROI

All of the above are great, measurable things where we moved the needle, and I am proud of that progress and those accomplishments.  But when I spoke to my employees to give them the news that I was leaving, what choked me up the most was talking about the culture we created of always helping and supporting one another no matter what.

Every week when I met with our new hires, they would always comment on how nice their new teammates were.  This always made an impact on me.  When an employee would falter, his or her teammates would step up to help.  If a tough client call resulted in some tears, the employees around that person would quickly huddle and provide support.  And when a new employee took his or her first client call, the floor would always erupt in applause.

So yes, the metrics matter.  The client experience, NPS and retention matter.  And every day, we walked in the door promising to one another to deliver quality for our clients worldwide.  But at the end of the day, the culture of supporting one another and “being nice” is what mattered most to me.  I know it will continue.

Many have asked me why I left Indeed if the team is so wonderful.  It’s a great question and I think about it a lot.  I am very lucky to have built such an incredible group, and I believe deeply that they will expand on our legacy to get even better.  But I am ready to do it again, to bring that focus somewhere else, to find nice people all over again.

Thank you Indeed Client Services team.  Stay nice, and good luck.

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.