AFFINA Blog

Go Ahead and Sweat the Small Stuff

2010-04-21T11:52:00.003-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director

“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” It’s a phrase that has launched best sellers and become part of our cultural vernacular. It means of course that we should not let the little things rule our lives, to relax about the small potatoes and focus on the big prize.

However, in the context of customer care, are there benefits in sweating the small stuff? If we can redefine the small stuff as the simple gestures that make an impression, is it possible that paying attention to the small things will make a huge difference in the scope of customer lifetime purchase behavior?

Indeed.

Consider your own experiences as a customer. For me, the ones that are the most memorable are those that are defined by a small action that made a huge impression. Someone who uses my name, listens and truly understands who I am as a customer then responds with even a small offer or expressed appreciation to restore my faith in the brand.

Perhaps sweating the small stuff can actually deliver the big prize of lifetime loyalty. What do you think?

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Are You Enjoying The Ride?

2009-11-20T15:09:00.004-06:00

By Donna J. Malone
President & CEO – AFFINA

I recently attended a conference where speaker and author Steve Gilliland talked about how too often we focus on the destination rather than enjoying the ride. This is the time of year when that happens more than ever. It’s easy to get so focused on planning for the holidays that we forget to enjoy the simple pleasures in each day. How many times have you felt like you spent countless hours planning a holiday celebration that was gone in the blink of an eye – I know I have felt that way more times than I would like to admit.

I am a list maker so typically almost everything in my life starts with a list. This time I made a list with the goal of spending the last two months of 2009 enjoying the ride rather than focusing only on the destination. It’s simple, make a list of the 5 people you are most grateful for and the 5 things you enjoy doing most. Then, next to each name, write down how many hours a day you spend with that person or doing those things you enjoy. You may need to look at hours in a week since many of us don’t spend our time in the ways we would like.

If you are happy with your list, congratulations, you are clearly enjoying the ride! If you wish your list looked a little different, the good news is there is someone who can change it, and that person is you! Remember not to get so caught up in focusing on your next destination that you forego changes that will make the ride more enjoyable. Perhaps more than anything we need to remember to make the changes we want today, because we never know what the future holds.

In business, it’s no different. What changes would drive positive results for your company? What’s on your list of tasks to complete today? Are there ways to wow your best customers and find new ones? Will they make the ride more enjoyable, solidify your customer relationships, and make an impact on your business?

Life is too short! Make your list, get changes made, and ensure you are enjoying the ride.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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What are People Saying Online about Your Brands, Products, and Promotions?

2009-10-28T11:46:00.003-05:00

Why Social Media Strategies Should Integrate with Customer Care.

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director – AFFINA

Imagine a never-ending, virtual focus group during which your customers openly share candid feedback and opinions on your products, promotions, and brands. Let’s say this virtual, never-ending focus group includes participants who have actually used your products, and the audience is thousands or even millions of individuals in your target market.

Wouldn’t you want to listen-in? Facilitate conversations? Dispel myths? Thank those who praise your products? Make things right with those who have had negative experiences? Learn more regarding the buzz being generated about your company?

The virtual focus group is going on right now across more than 100 million social media sites! What are customers saying about your products and brands right now?

If you have a strong customer care strategy, you are ready to add social media as an essential moving part of your customer relationship solution. How many customers are waiting for a response? How many more would be delighted and surprised to know you hear them?

You would never ignore a customer who contacted your toll-free number or emailed from your website. Maximize the online buzz about your company through a smart customer care approach.

What are your company plans for integrating social media buzz into your customer care strategy? We want to hear your experiences!

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Use Customer Data to Make Strategy Decisions

2009-10-23T12:37:00.002-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Through hundreds of thousands of contacts across multiple channels, your customers are saying, “I have this product,” or “I use this service,” and most importantly, “here’s what’s happening,” and “what can you tell me about it?”

When analyzed carefully, data can uncover trends and customer feedback that can be used to help improve the service experience and reduce overall service cost. Using data to your advantage should start with an overall review of the information at hand. A few suggestions include:

Fully understand call arrival patterns and channel distribution. Optimize staffing so your agents are available to handle contacts in a timely manner. After all, overstaffing can drive up your cost per contact; understaffing can cause customer dissatisfaction and abandons. Both scenarios are counterproductive to your overarching goals. Look at volume arrival history in 15 minute increments to determine staffing and scheduling.

Don’t ignore customer satisfaction and loyalty survey data. Made up of 100 percent customer perception, these data can help verify or validate other trends, and when viewed in tandem with customer case data, can uncover the specific drivers to satisfaction and loyalty (or dissatisfaction and disloyalty). If you could pinpoint exactly which of your multiple call types, products, or reasons was causing a customer satisfaction metric to dip, wouldn’t you want to know?

Similarly, if you ask your customers for their opinions on your products or services, be sure to listen and then respond.
Customer care interactions with customers offer a voluntary market research pool. Don’t abuse it, but a few quick questions can glean spectacular data that can help shape your service delivery. For one of our clients, we were able to reduce inbound contacts by 27 percent by conducting a quick packaging survey and recommending changes to package instructions.

Use data to make decisions on the level of service offered. When brainstorming ways to reduce costs, use data to back up your suggestions and test customer tolerance. For example, we helped a client reduce the number of agents required to staff their customer care program by analyzing the impact of service level variability on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Using service level performance data and analyzing it with parallel timeframe data from our customer satisfaction survey, we were able to isolate specific customer tolerance levels to hold time. Specifically, we were able to recommend a longer hold time and reduce the number of agents, which lowered our client’s overall cost of service. At the end of the day, our data proved that as long as customers’ inquiries were resolved to their satisfaction, they were more tolerant to wait for a representative.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Social Media and Customer Service: Your Questions Answered

2009-10-15T16:29:00.003-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Social media sites of all types have become powerful channels for companies to use for smart marketing strategies that reach targeted customer segments and further evangelize their brands.

The influence of social media on customer loyalty is unmistakable. Social media channels – including blogs, message boards, networking sites, and many more – are full of comments from customers who are offering opinions, complaints, compliments, and advice on millions of brands and products.

A customer service strategy for social media is understanding the online buzz, analyzing it, developing a smart strategy uniquely designed for your company, then responding to customer comments to build relationships, dispel myths, reverse complaints, and reward compliments. In a few words, it’s the essence of customer service: listen to your customers and respond to resolve their issues and drive loyalty.

Here are answers to some common questions:

Should I monitor online consumer discussions?
Absolutely! There may be thousands of people talking about your brands right now online that could have a significant impact on your brand image.

There are so many sites out there; which ones should I pay attention to?
There is no secret formula or a set of universal sites that are the magic bullets for all companies. It’s critical to find out what’s being said about your brands, and then start to monitor for trends.

Should I respond to online consumer comments?
Maybe. There are certain things you will want to respond to, while others, not so much. For example, some consumer comments may be through sites that have large audiences, others may not have the same influence and reach.

Isn’t Social Media just a fad?
Not likely. Social Media has been around for years in different forms, and has gained popularity exponentially in the last few years. Studies suggest that social media is here to stay.

How can I keep up with social media if it’s changing all the time?
Monitoring online consumer conversations isn’t a one time event. It requires daily monitoring and analysis to understand when the buzz trends related to your company change.

Are you contemplating a social media customer service strategy? What are the questions you have that need answers? We want to hear from you!

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Is Reducing AHT a Good Cost Savings Strategy for Your Operations?

2009-09-25T09:57:00.003-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

Companies everywhere are seeking ways to cut costs at no risk to the customer experience. Is it possible to achieve both? Absolutely.

When customers reach out to you, they are seeking resolution, and doing so quickly, accurately, and to their satisfaction is one way to keep them coming back for more of your product or service.

There are a lot of ways to achieve cost savings; in this post, the focus is on one: reducing average handle time (AHT) in ways that will protect the customer experience and reduce your overall costs. Here are two quick ways to determine if reducing AHT will work for you.

Stack rank your agents by handle time and quality scores to identify variances in your team’s performance.
Look at average talk time (ATT) and after call work (ACW) as separate metrics to isolate areas for improvement.

Stack ranking helps compare the AHT of the total team with the AHT of highest performing agents and lowest performing agents. If a significant gap exists, AHT improvements may very well help shift the team AHT enough to drive cost savings associated with labor and telecom costs.

Use the stack rankings to hold round table discussions with your best performing agents to brainstorm on ways to streamline the customer experience to everyone’s benefit. It’s not surprising that good agents know exactly what it takes to make the customer experience more streamlined to everyone’s advantage.

As a next step, use the stack ranking exercise to also evaluate the differences between talk time (part of the customer experience) and after call work (outside of the customer experience). Oftentimes, improvements in ACW can be the low hanging fruit, and a way to make changes that will be seamless to customers.

Finally, don’t discount a return to basics. Fundamentals training in call control can provide a refresh on how to satisfy the customer and control the call length. Using your best performing agents for positive side-by-side mentoring will build teamwork and help agents improve metrics.

What AHT reduction strategies have been successful for you? What challenges are you facing to reduce AHT of a team? We want to hear from you!

Interested in other ways to reduce costs while protecting the customer experience? Click Here to get the AFFINA White Paper: Enhancing the Customer Experience while Reducing Contact Handling Costs.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Bright Ideas for Upcoming Customer Service Week in October

2009-09-16T09:30:00.002-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director AFFINA

Customer Service Week (CSW) is October 5-9. Do you have plans to mix things up in your customer care operations to recognize and reward the team members who work each day to delight your customers and maximize their experience with your brand?

Here are a few quick ideas to get you started on planning:

Go with a theme. Last year when our company celebrated its 35th anniversary, we chose the week of CSW to celebrate, and rolled back the style to the 1970s. Our teams had fun with 70s trivia, jargon contests and 70s costume day! Have some fun and get silly with a creative theme.

Don’t forget the FOOD! Cookies, hot dogs, popcorn, donuts; all designed to put smiles on the faces of team members. Especially when served by the management team!

Hold team contests. Scavenger hunts, trivia, chair decorating (more fun than it sounds actually), penny wars … form teams and compete for prizes – big and small. Generate some excitement and a competitive spirit. Even a cheesy traveling trophy can become a coveted prize!

Find ways to help team members connect with each other. Use CSW as another opportunity to build a positive and connected employee-focused culture. One idea: have team members fill out a fun questionnaire with questions like, “If you could be any super hero, who would you be?” or “What do people always catch you saying?” Then, make a contest to match the answers with the person. These are great ways to get people talking and laughing … making connections to build teams and relationships.

Whatever you do, be sure that the spirit of customer service week resonates all year. Make special plans to celebrate Customer Service Week and show appreciation for the exceptional work done on the front lines of customer care. Then extend that to everyday … catch people doing great things and call it out, and be sure your customer service team knows that caring for customers, one at a time, is the lifeblood of a company’s sustainability.

What creative ideas have you used to celebrate Customer Service Week? Share your ideas here … we want to hear from you!

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

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Cinnamon Rolls have a Pinch of What?

2009-09-03T19:54:00.005-05:00

A recipe philosophy for training contact center agents.

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director - AFFINA

My grandmother was a fantastic baker. Everything she made was wonderful and magical. As a child, I would spend days in her small kitchen that was filled with the smell of cinnamon, cookies, cakes and other wondrous treats. Good memories and delicious goodies!

As I got older and starting experimenting in my own kitchen, I often would ask her for advice and recipes. My favorite of all time were her tiny cinnamon rolls … little warm gooey bites that were oh so good.

As many grandmas are, her instructions were less than precise. Some flour, a little butter, throw in a dash of salt, an egg or two.

What?! Wait a minute, that's not a recipe … I need precise instructions, measured amounts, exact baking times … otherwise I will certainly fail!

“Baking isn’t a science, it’s an art,” she would advise. So after hearing her detail the art of cinnamon rolls, I watched her make them a few times. I picked up a few tricks and learned a little more about what to do if the dough is too sticky or if the outsides cook faster than the insides. I noticed something different each time I studied her technique.

Finally, I made them on my own … sort of. She was there helping me along the way. Today, I can almost make cinnamon rolls that were as tasty as hers.

So what’s the point of this story on a blog about customer care?

Just as I went through the steps of listening, observing, and doing on my journey to the perfect batch of rolls, the same success can be achieved in a customer care setting. After all, few would disagree that customer care is indeed an art as opposed to a science.

The right recipe for training new agents or even existing ones should be to add a few things, and mix well.

Sit them in a classroom too long, and the detail becomes detached and quickly loses meaning.

When learning to perfect a recipe, I had to observe the challenges first hand, and see how an expert handled each one. The same can be applied to customer care employees - allowing them to transition to working on their own through structured learning, observation, role play, side-by-side mentoring, and live production - results in prepared agents who feel confident and ready to knock the socks off your customers.

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to prepare agents for contact handling? Any challenges you have encountered? Best practices to share? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

Chicken or the Egg? | To achieve an exceptional customer experience, put employees first.

2009-08-28T15:11:00.001-05:00

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director

I was at a networking event last week, and during a conversation with a group of people, someone made the comment that “it’s important to never forget to put the customer first.”

That’s hard to argue with on the surface, and it certainly is an age-long service philosophy. As I contemplated it further, a question kept popping into my head:

Is it possible to put the customer first without first focusing on employees?

Great organizations interact with customers using personalized responses that clearly communicate the value that each customer represents. The best foundation of delivering on exceptional customer care is to first invest in and show value to the front-line employees.

In our experience, employees become brand advocates when they realize their role in the customer lifecycle, their influence on brand loyalty, and their ability to hear and communicate the voice-of-the-customer. Regardless of why customers make contact, the success of these interactions all comes down to the employees and their motivation to exceed.

Here are some quick tips:

Build a culture that encourages employees to get to know each other. This connectedness on a personal level fosters a family-like environment. As just one example, our front line agents personalize their workspaces with family photos and other personal items. Plus, we offer table and video games in our lunchrooms so people can meet others with shared interests and make personal connections. When people feel connected, they begin to care for each other in little ways, everyday, like helping the people sitting around them overcome small challenges, and in big ways like coming together to lend support to employees who have unforeseen personal challenges. Fostering a caring and nurturing environment internally lends to customers being treated with the same care. It becomes second nature.

Motivate and celebrate successes. There’s no magic bullet when it comes to methods to keep employees motivated, and finding what works for your employees can take some trial and error. Mix things up. At AFFINA, we have fun contests, recognize top performers in our employee newsletter and screensavers, host pizza parties, and simply help agents improve their individual and team scores. Positive energy is contagious and is bound to spill over into customer interactions.

Provide leadership worthy of inspiration. From front-line supervisors to executive team members, demonstrate integrity, passion, and be sure employees know that their voice is heard. If employees trust you, they will support your overall goals. Trust is nearly always mutual by nature. With mutual trust comes the ability to empower employees to make decisions that will maximize your customer relationships. Reward and lift up leaders who consistently display high integrity, are trusted by their teams and peers, and stay focused on what really matters. By shining the spotlight on these leaders, you show employees what traits to emulate to advance their careers.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Are you facing challenges driving customer care excellence from the grass roots? Have you found success with specific approaches you have implemented? We want to hear from you.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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AFFINAblog is now featured on Alltop!

2009-08-23T16:58:00.005-05:00

AFFINAblog is now featured on Alltop under the topic of Customer Service at http://customer-service.alltop.com/

Train the Brand Culture to Maximize Customer Care

2009-08-20T15:45:00.004-05:00

Part 2 in a series: The Top 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care

By Lori Boyce
Senior Director, AFFINA

As the second in a series of The Top 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care, I want to share a few insights into the value and benefit of spending the time to train front-line employees on your brand and company culture.

Stop to consider who interacts with your customers? The list can be long – inbound contact center agents, retail sales representatives, in-home service professionals, you name it – they all have a role to play in reinforcing your brand and ensuring brand promises hold true.

Here’s what we suggest: Train the culture.

Helping employees understand the company culture and brand personality of the products and services they are supporting makes all the difference in their approach, passion, and enthusiasm when interacting with customers. As a customer care partner, I can tell you that at AFFINA, we are interested in our agents feeling connected to our clients’ brands and cultures even more than to our own.

Recreating your corporate culture starts in training. A few simple ways to infuse a culture transfer into the training experience include:

Describe your products and services with as much passion as you feel about them. Energy is contagious! When your front line employees know that you believe your brand is the best thing since sliced bread (or even better), they will have a reason to believe it too!
Share advertising and marketing efforts. Use advertising collateral and point-of-purchase displays in the training environment and on the production floor. Surround the team with your brand images. Be sure they understand the latest and greatest features and benefits of your product/services!
Be sure front-line employees can experience what customers experience. Let them test the product, use it according to the package instructions or owners manual, and even make some mistakes with it. These tactics help employees empathize with customers’ experiences and create connections.
Convey the role that front-line employees have in building and protecting brand loyalty. Share with them how customer insights are integrated into new products or marketing campaigns and what happens to the data they have captured after they close a case or transmit an order.
Use lots of role-play, and reward creative and enthusiastic participation.
Be present and engaging … employees feel part of the culture and are motivated to maximize the customer experience when they understand that they are part of an overall strategy.

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to extend your company and brand culture to front-line teams? Any challenges you have encountered? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

Strengthen Loyalty through Bad Customer Experiences

2009-08-18T10:17:00.008-05:00

By Lori J. Boyce
Senior Director, AFFINA

I was on the customer end of a bad experience recently that reminded me of the impact of customer care on brand loyalty.

It’s a long story with too much detail to go into here, but as a customer care professional, I immediately recognized the situation as it was: a behavior-changing customer experience.

While at a local restaurant dining with my family – which includes three young children, our order took more than 45 minutes to arrive, and when it did – it was wrong and cold. The server was indifferent to the situation, which was only made more miserable by kids who were beyond impatient not to mention hungry.

Bottom line – I had made up my mind … I was through with this restaurant which had created a situation that had turned a relaxing family meal into a stressful experience. I wanted to get out of the place as soon as I could and never return. My loyalty was dramatically impacted. It was likely that I was lost as a customer and worse, I may even tell others about it. A shame – it was a family favorite.

That’s when something happened … just in time. The manager, who had started her shift toward the end of this experience, recognized that something had gone wrong. After a short conversation at our table, she apologized, offered our meal at no charge, provided my children with milkshakes to go, and gave us a half-price coupon for our next visit. Then she sealed the deal by empathizing with us, and asked us to give them another chance.

Just like that, our loyalty was … well, strengthened. Can bad customer experiences, when handled carefully, actually strengthen loyalty more than if a customer had never had a problem at all?

Absolutely.

In this situation, the manager clearly was more than just a nice person. She deliberately sought us out and did three things very right:

1. Recognized that my loyalty was at risk.
2. Took the time to hear me out and understand my pain.
3. Responded to me as an individual, and did what it took to increase the chances I would return.

She knew that she had one opportunity to fix my bad experience. She nailed it.

Complaints represent rare opportunities to impact loyalty in big way. After all, when customers reach out to complain, they are willingly offering you:

1. A chance to make things right; and
2. Honest feedback on your products and services.

Sometimes, customers simply want to be heard and have someone acknowledge that their experience was unacceptable. Simple allowances – like coupons – can go a long way to restore loyalty, and invite customers back into a relationship with you. Finally, don’t discount the data collected through complaint handling. Real-time alerts, periodic trending and analysis, and validation through customer satisfaction and loyalty survey results, all shed valuable light on how customers react to your products and services.

AFFINA - Your Customers. Our Priority.

Staff with the Best

2009-08-07T13:28:00.002-05:00

Part 1 in a series: 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care

I’m happy to launch AFFINA Blog, an ongoing forum to share insights, advice, and observations on the business of inbound customer care. With 36+ years of customer care experience, we’ve learned a thing or two about what customers really think, how to respond to their inquiries, and the impact that we all have on overall loyalty. We’re happy to share with you our thoughts, hope to offer tips that you can implement right away in your own center, and engage in an open discussion to share ideas.

Today, I introduce a five-part series: 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care. I have to admit, there are so many things that drive exceptional customer care, that I’m a little hesitant to limit this series to only five factors. The five covered in this series are ones that set a strong foundation to deliver unexpectedly exceptional customer care that sets your brand apart. They include:

1. Staffing with the best
2. Training the culture
3. Reinforcing quality
4. Rewarding success
5. Driving continuous improvement

In this post, I’ll address the first: Staffing with the Best. Hiring the right individuals that are a best fit for your company, its culture, and contact types is an excellent way to get off to a great start.

Staff with the Best

Putting the most appropriately skilled and motivated front-line resources in place can be easier said than done. The task is critical and its level of success is pivotal to exceeding long term goals. Who are the ideal candidates that will knock the socks off your customers and blow the doors off your customer care objectives? Staff a team with individuals who have a passion for helping people and the skills and knowledge to back it up. Here are four tips:

1. Seek out individuals who are passionate about your products or industry. It seems simple, but in our experience, matching personal interests with products supported works great. For example, when we staff technical support for the consumer electronics industry, we seek out those individuals who are the go-to person in their extended family for electronics hook-ups and troubleshooting. Their interest and passion for the topic is already there.

2. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can train anyone to do anything. Hiring a team of individuals with customer service experience and then training them to up-sell and cross-sell products or accessories can be a recipe for failure. Be sure to match candidates’ experience and aptitude with the requirements of your specific customer care contacts.

3. Whenever possible, staff a new team with some internal, existing employees to assist with mentoring. There’s certainly an appropriate balance to strike between new employees and existing agents. Maximize the benefits of both by ensuring a good blend.

4. Finally, put a staffing structure in place that allows the front-line team to focus as much time as possible on customers and quality. As much as practical, move tasks off the desks of your supervisors and allow them to work on reinforcing your culture, driving quality, and coaching agents to deliver service beyond what your customers expect. As an example, we staff a separate team responsible for monitoring service levels and schedule adherence in real time so our supervisors can spend more time with our agents, providing coaching and motivation.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Are you facing challenges with staffing a team that exceeds your customers’ expectations? Have you found success with specific approaches you have implemented? We want to hear from you.