Call Center
Essential Traits for a Customer Service Manager
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Above is a sneak peek at The Philly311 Show episode where I interview 311 Operations Manager, Sheryl Johnson.
What I loved most about speaking with Sheryl is her passion for customer service. This passion is so important to a customer service manager because it tends to transfer into the organization and its employees. From my time speaking and working with Sheryl, I took away a few key attributes that every customer service manager should have.
Innate passion for customer service. Sheryl’s level of passion for customer service is an asset to the organization, unfortunately, this level of passion can rarely be taught. The same innate passion should be sought out in your hires, the kind of potential employees who yearn for more than a just a paycheck. Among other aspects, these individuals should be evaluated on the way they have handled past situations rather than on the intricacies of their resumes. (See my blog post on how to hire the right customer service people.)
A clear understanding of the organization’s mission. A customer service manager must understand how his/her “shop” contributes to the organization’s mission and communicate this to employees to increase their level of engagement. Small ways managers can accomplish this is by celebrating milestones, achievements, and other types of employee recognition also helps to engage employees, relating their success to the success of the organization and vice versa.
Ability to identify special skill sets of employees and capitalizing on those skills. In a contact center, most of the day-to-day work is mundane. That’s why it’s important for a contact center to give employees special projects that cater to their skills or interests. This not only lets employees explore their passion, but it also helps create a more vibrant and creative environment where employees are excited to come to work.
What other traits does a customer service operations manager need? Let me know in the comments!
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog atwww.rosettacarringtonlue.com
How Are You Developing Your Talent?
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Above is the sneak peek for the The Philly311 Show’s latest episode with guest Jackie Linton, Director of the Center of Excellence. I really enjoyed sitting down with Jackie and discussing the Center of Excellence’s three core functions: Project Management, building project management capabilities; Organizational Development, developing talent for the future; and Performance Management, supporting departments in managing their performance metrics and facilitating external transparency. While all of these functions have a direct tie to customer service excellence, I would like to focus on organizational development (specifically talent development) for this week’s customer service tip.
Developing talent within your organization is crucial to your customer service operations for two important reasons: the first is that many of the employees who are on the receiving end of development programs are ones closest to your customers. Customer service representatives, supervisors, or even call center managers have direct contact with your customers every day, with the ability to make or break your customers’ overall experience. With such constant high stake interactions, these are the employees whom you should be developing the most. While most organizations carefully plan and implement training programs, development programs are just as important as they help to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence of your employees on and supporting the front line.
The second reason that talent development is so important in customer service is that a good development program helps to build employee engagement. While most organizations agree that higher employee engagement leads to better customer service, most organizations do not agree on the best ways to engagement their employees. Why not engage your employees by taking a proactive interest in their future? This will not only help your employees to feel valued but it will also help them take a vested interest in the organization’s success. (Forbes has a great blog post about why employee development is so important.)
As customer service professionals, what do you think are the best ways to develop your talent?
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog at www.rosettacarringtonlue.com
The Philly311 Show Sneak Peek: Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs in Customer Service
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Above is a sneak peek from the newest episode of The Philly311 Show, airing tomorrow. In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Rodriquez, the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Multicultural Affairs. Jennifer speaks about the services her offices provides to Philadelphia’s non-English speaking community including in-person translation, document translation, and the training of City employees to better meet the needs of a multicultural customer base.
Diversity is an important topic for customer service executives. How can you provide excellent customer service to a diverse customer base speaking a wide-range of languages? The answer is more complex than simply outsourcing a translation service.
When planning to provide customer service across cultures it’s important to not to treat every customer in the “same” way but to treat every customer in an “equal” way. This means that Non-English customers (or culturally diverse customers) should not feel inconvenienced when engaging with your organization; they also should not feel as if your organization is being inconvenienced by serving them.
While there are many outstanding technical solutions to serve a multicultural customer base, treating every customer equally also hinges on internal training. Are you training your employees on the nuisances of multicultural communication or are you training to simply transfer to a translation service? Language aside, different cultures communicate in different ways (i.e. tone of voice; volume; etc.) If your employees are trained on multicultural communication, they might not become multicultural experts but they will at least be cognisant of the endless differences that exist. With this knowledge, your employees can be more sympathetic, patient, and prepared when dealing with customers of a different cultures.
The Philly311 Show airs on Philadelphia’s Channel 64 at 7:00pm on Monday/Wednesday/Sunday and 7:00am on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. The episodes can also be found on the Philly311 YouTube channel.
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog at www.rosettacarringtonlue.com
An Employee Engagement Miracle
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I loved WestJet’s “Christmas Miracle.” I couldn’t stop watching this viral video for a number of reasons. For one, it goes above and beyond the scope of customer service excellence. Through its gift-giving customer service effort, WestJet was able to bring its customers (and even its Youtube viewers) to tears. But while it was fun to watch customers receive surprise gifts, there was another aspect to the video that intrigued me: WestJet level of employee engagement in the company’s rich customer service culture.
Engaging employees in a customer service culture is a difficult task. It does not focus on just one area such hiring or on-boarding or recognition. To create a truly engaging customer service culture, there needs to be a set of processes in place, across the organization, at every point of an employee’s career. Here are a few of the ways that can help:
1) Choosing the right employees. Choosing the right employees, especially for customer service, involves a flexible hiring process that allows you to choose candidates based on fit. In customer service, this fit means placing less emphasis on what a candidate has done in previous positions, with more emphasis on what an employee would do in certain situations. Engaged customer service employees have a rare blend of passive, yet assertive traits that make them invaluable on the frontlines of customer concerns. These traits should be sought out before picking the best-looking resume. (See my post on choosing the best customer service people.)
2) Training employees with hands-on, peer-to-peer training. Micha Solomon wrote a great blog post on Forbes about “How Hiring and HR Build Customer Service Culture.” Solomon writes that hiring the right customer service employees is important because (A) they are ultimately on the front lines, serving as the “face” of the organization and (B) “The employees you hire will ultimately exert pressure–positive or negative–on other staff members, who, when its their turn, will directly interact with customers.”
While Solomon admits that the first reason (A) is a bit obvious, the second reason is important to consider. If you’re hiring the right employees for customer service, those employees should be the ones directly training new employees. Which do you think is more impactful: a powerpoint presentation from a middle manager or a hands-on lesson from an employee performing the same job as the new hire? At the very least, the new hires will behave in the way their peer trainer behaves as a way to “fit” with the organization. If new hires cannot behave in the same manner their per trainers behave, they’ll likely leave.
3) Combine empowerment with standard processes, without micromanaging. Empowerment is the new buzzword in customer service, and it should be, because empowered employees have the ability to best satisfy customers wants and needs. But it can’t just be about empowerment. There needs to be a standard, communicated process for almost every situation. Employees need to be well-versed in these processes; without them, most employees will feel lost. Once employees have a firm grasp of the set processes and procedures in your customer service operations, it’s important to communicate that they can deviate, should they find it necessary. Employees who are empowered by both education and the ability to deviate from the “plan” without someone standing over their shoulders are the employees who will feel most comfortable providing excellent customer service.
4) Meaningfully recognize employees, often. Employee recognition programs often drive performance and help engage employees, but only if these recognition efforts are recognized by employees. Do you think a paper certificate or gold star will have much impact on an employee’s level of engagement? Recognition efforts need to be personalized and thoughtful in order to build a community within an organization. This personal sense of community is especially important to customer service operations that deal with people every day. One way to engage employees through meaningful personalize, and fun recognition is to have an employee-led recognition committee. These employees will know how to meaningfully celebrate because they are planning for their peers.
What are your essentials to engaging employees? Let me know in the comments!
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue or visit her blog at www.rosettacarringtonlue.com
Philly 311 Empowers the Community with Multichannel Service
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
2013 Global Contact Center Awards finalist Philly 311 empowers the Philadelphia community by providing quality multichannel customer service. Watch the video for a behind the scenes look at how they do it.
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Inspiring Call Center Supervisors to Lead Teams
Most call center employees fall into a rut of comfort in which they try to get through their workday with the least amount of pain and hassle.
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City’s Philly311 Operations Recognized for High Performance
I’m very honored and excited to lead a great operation and team of customer focused employees. The City of Philadelphia 311 Contact Center was recently recognized as the 2013 High Performing Department of the Year from the Office of the Managing Director. This award is bestowed on the City department that exceeds the City’s performance management program, PhillyStat, strategic goals and objectives.
Watch out! We have only begun to disrupt and innovate the City to the next level of customer engagement. I love my job!
CRM: plan your surveys properly
Surveys and questionnaires are common ways of understanding who your customers are. But do you prepare them enough to insure optimum results and return on investment?
See on www.julienrio.com
How to Create a Stellar Customer Service Training Program
You cannot expect to create a culture of excellent customer service without a training program. Employees need to be given the education and tools to adopt your organizations’ customer service values. Through my years in the private and public sectors, I have seen customer service training programs ranging from lecture-based to hands-on exercises to pamphlets to everything in-between. One of my most recent experiences with customer service training program was the “Customer Service Leadership Academy” I launched in 2009 for the City of Philadelphia. Although this class was originally developed for a small group of employees, it expanded within the next year to train over 24,000 employees. Across mediums and sizes, however, the success of these programs (getting employees to “buy-in” to customer service values and techniques) relies on two things: structure and engagement. We can tackle structure first.
In creating a customer service training program, you need to make sure it has real structure. By this I mean that the program has substance—the program needs to have been built on concrete values with the buy-in from an organization’s leadership. This will provide the training program with the resources it needs to be sustained. Structure and substance also deals with the actual make-up of the program. Is this program only a few PowerPoint slides? Have you as the facilitator done outside research? Do you have committed instructors? Put yourself in the shoes of the attending employees: does this program have enough structure to be meaningful for you?
Here is a “To-Do” List to ensure your customer service training program has structure:
- Establish your organization’s customer service values and what you hope the training program will accomplish.
- Get buy-in from organizations leaders; make sure the leaders can deliver the resources you need.
- Review supplementary materials from outside sources.
- Craft a course curriculum keeping in mind both the goals of the program and the employees’ point of view.
- Incorporate other mediums of education and learning (i.e. videos; hands-on exercises) to provide a textured learning experience.
- Launch the program, being careful to take feedback from employees along the way.
- Evaluate the program and its results before offering another session.
One of the ways we were able to add to the Customer Service Leadership Academy’s structure was to gather immediate feedback after each session. This was accomplished by simply asking participating employees to fill-out a survey as each session finished, creating an instantaneous bench-marking system for the program and its instructors.
The next key to your customer service training program being a success is engagement. While engagement can mean discussion and entertainment (you don’t want to bore your employees to death) it should also expand on what is traditionally taught. In creating an engaging customer service training program, are you giving employees a chance to look at V.O.C. metrics? Are there case studies to show examples of best practices? Have you properly explained customer service vs. customer experience? To create an engaging training program, you need to provide both interesting and challenging examples to get employees thinking about customer service practices past what they have typically been taught—it’s the best way to get their buy-in.
A way we tried to create a high level of engagement in the Customer Service Leadership Academy was through inviting instructors from the private sectors to share their stories and best practices. This gave employees another lens to which to look at customer service practices. It provided entertainment while adding a new dimension to the learning experience.
Do you agree with structure and engagement being critical in a customer service training program’s success? Help me out by leaving your suggestions in the comments below and the best answer (determined by me) will be rewarded with a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Rosetta Carrington Lue is the Chief Customer Service Officer and Senior Advisor to the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director. Follow Rosetta on Twitter @Rosettalue.
Innovative Customer Service Leadership Strategies 