Number one on the hit parade is STOP, CEASE, and DESIST Active Listening. If you, as a call center leader, are not practicing, encouraging, and supporting reflective listening, the customer will NEVER hear you! Reflective listening is listening with the intent to understand and reach a resolution. Active listening is heard, and the fake comes through crystal clear when faked. Helping customers feel cared about and valued begins, lives, and dies horribly with how your agents listen. How they listen comes from leadership, and when a face-to-face conversation does not lead to a resolution, it is heard and communicated downstream until a customer hears!
Number two, on the hit parade: use titles and names, as often as possible, in a manner that shows respect! I do not use my first name; I have a preferred name; when I tell you my preferred name, and it is not used, I DO NOT CARE about anything else. I have earned an educational title. I have earned military titles. Earning these took effort and time, and while I do NOT insist on them, my willingness to hear and invest logic, reason, and emotion goes up when used. If I tell an agent my preferred name, and they refuse, I will NOT engage with anything but severe politeness, and I am actively looking to replace that company!
While an agent for escalated calls, I had different calls for a Colonel and a First Sergeant. Both escalated memorably because the agents thought it was “cool,” “hip,” and “bitchin’” to call these customers by their first names, insert “dude” instead of Mr./Mrs./Miss, and exude speech disrespect. Yet, when their hard-won titles were used and respect paid, they calmed down almost instantly. If a customer spends their time telling you what they want to be addressed as, and you as the agent fail to address them as such, expect meltdowns, expect customer churn, expect VOCs resembling Mt. Vesuvius, for you have proven your agent is not trustworthy, and by extension your company is disrespectful!
Is this also a risk; in this day and age, YES! A customer I had as an agent wanted to be called “The God Queen Magnificent.” Another wanted to be addressed as “King of all Bastards.” Both accounts went to the legal department, and the customers were invited to change their preferences or end their customer relationship. People have only become more sensitive to what they are addressed or called. Hence, preferred names, titles, honorifics, etc., must be trained as a sign of respect. Does this mean that sometimes it will cause problems? YES! Expecting these problems is a role of leadership to train agents in resolving not helping customers.
Let’s also discuss the 800# Gorilla in this problem of addressing customers properly: the employees. It cannot be stated enough that customers will hear how your leadership treats employees! As a leader, if you tend to downplay earned titles or refuse to use preferred names towards your employees, so will your agents. Does your team have an emotional dilettante that goes Mt. Krakatoa? Guess what? This emotionally crippled person is NOT going to sacrifice their identity for team dynamics and customer service until they learn. Who will teach them: your team leaders, supervisors, and you, the organizational leadership team.
Number three, on the hit parade: dump the canned phraseology! Customers can hear the canned phrases, and frankly, they hate them! An agent does not sound sincere when the words selected for them are disconnected from their speaking manners. Some of this is part of an Agent’s daily preparation, and learning to sound natural using approved phrases helps. However, that is all it can do: help. It does not solve!
There is a difference between help and solve, and award-winning customer service agents will practice their language of speaking, timing, speeds, and locution, including pronunciation and annunciation of technical words. Reading legal scripts means the agent knows when to breathe, recognizes punctuation, and paces properly; even these scripts can sound natural with practice! Nothing screams “I hate this job” more than Marble Mouth. In the movie My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn had a mouth full of marbles; the idea was to help her speak properly. I do NOT suggest marbling agent mouths in team meetings, yet maybe that scene could help spur a conversation on locution.
Ingenuity will help those agents who have legitimately impaired abilities to speak. This is the role of leaders in solving problems, not helping problems fester. Many of us who struggle with speech issues can still help, support, and be productive members of organizational customer-facing departments. Technology helps, but the resolution lies with good leaders, a little imagination, and a proper fit in a team.
Never forget, the root of award-winning customer service is NOT the agent but the organizational leadership! Award-winning customer service is supported through a team approach. If there are members on the team who are not pulling their weight, that team might have award-winners, but the team is failing to support the customers. This means the leadership is NOT making sufficient changes or paying appropriate attention and is to blame for that team failing the customer, meaning that the supervisor is failing that team and represents an organizational leadership failure.
A recent project helps to elaborate on this issue. The team leader allowed an emotional dilettante to keep their position, even though they recognized that this person was causing dynamic team failures and frequent customer failures. The team leader preferred to insult and run down their ex-spouse than train employees. That team leader’s boss was fully aware of both problems but preferred to cut people who pointed out these problems out of the organization rather than solve them. The VP was disinterested. Who is at fault when the entire chain of leadership fails, the employees leave, or those leaders keep their jobs? The agents spent so much time putting out customer service fires that their performance failed the customer! This could have been avoided through simple leadership, improved performance, and saved costs. Nevertheless, the employees were churned instead, and the company called this “Looking for the bar-raiser.”
Please keep the following in mind: in most situations, you have already won the customer, and keeping that customer requires naturally building the relationship. It does NOT mean giving away the store. It does NOT require games, giveaways, credits, or other nonsense! It means creating natural moments where you can capture the customer’s attention, respectfully hold it, and give them a reason to stay excited about your products and services.
Guess what? A leader’s relationship with their people exemplifies how your agents treat their customers. Need to build customer care and value? Build your team leaders, supervisors, and other organizational leadership FIRST! Then, chase operational processes and procedures; these are identified pain points that slow processes down and create customer frustration.
Another recent project saw a 40-year-old weekly task costing between $50,000 and $500,000 in operational losses. Multipled by several hundred sites, these weekly costs quickly burned through millions of dollars a week! That 40-year-old task has a $0.00 value to the organization and is not used to predict stock on hand, improve performance, or drive efficiencies. The process itself could still have value, but the technology, which was an improvement 20 years back, failed to include this process in improving technology. Organizational leadership has been informed of this problem quarterly for the last 15 years, which has included multiple solutions, and the leadership fails to either stop the weekly task or connect the technology to the task. What does this inattention of leadership exemplify in the frontline customer-facing teams? Nothing good!
Seeing a problem in agent performance, look first at the leadership examples communicated to the agents. Juran’s Rule remains true: when there is a problem 80-90% of the time, the process is the problem, and poor leadership is a cultural process that can be fixed! The pattern is simple: want more excited customers and support your customer-facing teams. As a VP, your customer-facing teams are those direct reports, not their reports on a third or fourth level down. If your customer service is lacking, it will be quickly exemplified and communicated to your customers in ways and means that will shock and disturb them, all because you failed to look after them.
Your organizational hierarchy plays a role in identifying your customers. If you, as a leader, are more concerned about customers above you, you are the problem. If you are more concerned about customers two or more slots down, you are the problem! If you want more time in your day, focus on your customers. Solve problems; do NOT ever help. Your customer is looking to you to solve a pain point; do not help the pain, as all you’ll do is increase the pain. Fight to solve the problems for your customers, even when it needs courage and action. 90% of the problems you will face from your customers will require immediate and decisive action, not data, statistics, and a more nuanced look into the variables surrounding the issue clear and decisive action. Take the action! Solve problems!
© Copyright 2024 – M. Dave Salisbury
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