Management
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
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
Top 5 Easy Ways Government Can Proactively Communicate with Customers
In the customer service industry, we’re always looking to give the customers what they want. But as great as our intentions may be, we’re often confined by budgets or technology or buy-in from others in our agency.
While implementing or upgrading new or existing technology (or even creating a new touchpoint) isn’t an easy task, there are opportunities and more economical ways to give your customers exactly what they want. It all hinges on your ability to adapt and consistently use these tools within your agencies.
Customers certainly value the addition of new, easier ways to connect with your agency but chances are what they really want is relevant information. What’s your agency’s “hot topic” of the month? In order to give your customers exactly what they want, you must pay attention to the reasons they’re contacting your operations. This is where the adaptation to technology comes into play.
Once you can identify frequently asked questions or common inquiries, you can begin to adapt your customer multi-channels. Specially, you can:
1. Arm your customer service agents with frequently asked information in real-time. For the “hot topic” of the day, provide customer service reps with more information than usual. This information can include basic research or even testimonials from other customers and customer service representatives regarding this issue. Using this information, customer service agents can relate to your customers better and share insight on a more personal level.
2. Write a blog post. If you keep seeing the same issue or misunderstanding arise, why not post something on your agency’s blog to save your customers the trouble of calling or sending an email?
3. Make a quick video. Just as easy as writing a blog post is to address the month’s “hot topic”by shooting a short video. This video could simply feature a customer service representative answering a frequently asked question. Watching a short video could be a much easier way for your customers to get the information they want.
4.Frequently post and pre-schedule social media FAQs and updates. While every agency has scheduled posts on social media, it’s important to frequently update these posts with the most relevant information for your customer. Make sure that your social media accounts are pushing out information on your “hot topics” at least a few times a week.
5. Update your telephony Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform. If you’re using an IVR, make sure it’s loaded with the most relevant, up-to-date concerns for your customers so that they can get the information they need as quickly as possible without having to speak to a call center agents.
While large-scale adaptations can be challenging, proactively communicating relevant information to your customers does not have to be.
How are you anticipating and proactively communicating with your customers? 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
Rosetta Lue – Philadelphia Business Journal
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Chief customer service officer
Honored to represent the public sector as a Philadelphia Business Journal 2013 Woman of Distinction. Congratulations those great group of innovative and visionary women from the Philadelphia region.
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Hiring the Right Customer Service People and How to Use Them
Anyone in the industry will tell you that people are the most important asset to a customer service operation. While CRMs, mobile apps and social media channels are essential pieces to service delivery, it’s the real interaction with employees (in-person or electronically) that’s going to make or break the overall customer experience.
With this fact comes a great deal of responsibility for both you and your employees. What’s the correct method of training? How can you create standardized scripts while maintaining a “personal” touch? How can you prevent one bad interaction from ruining a customer’s experience?
Although each of these questions could be answered with its own blog post—the overarching answer is to hire the right “customer service people.” And although this may seem obvious, traits that are valuable for customer service representatives are different from the traits of other professions. Bill Thompson listed a few of these customer service traits on Salesforce’s Desk.com blog. Here they are:
- Genuine warmth: A person that exudes friendliness, caring about other people and an upbeat and outgoing personality.
- Empathic: Able to understand other people’s feelings and relate well and be sympathetic to someone under stress.
- A good listener: A person who trends toward active listening in order to fully understand an issue or problem before acting
- Conscientious: It sounds basic, but it’s vital to have people who by their nature take pride in taking care of every little detail perfectly
- Anticipatory: This sounds as though it’s antithetical to #3 but it’s slightly different. A person who is excellent at anticipating cause and effect can save much time in not just answering the main question but also digs deep to make sure every corner of the customer’s problem is fully resolved by the time the conversation is over.
- Optimistic: Again, it sounds basic, but an optimistic attitude is vital in avoiding burn-out as the daily exposure to people sometimes in stress and not acting in tune with their better angels can drag a person down.
Read Bill’s complete post here.
As you can tell from some of these traits, the best customer service people are the ones with a very particular personality—a tug of war, even, between loud and quiet personality traits. On the loud side we have genuine warmth, anticipatory and optimistic while on the quiet side we have emphatic, conscientious and a good listener. Because this personality is so particular—such a perfect combination between loud and quiet characteristics—it’s absolutely vital that once you’ve found this personality, you allow your employees to utilize it. Training and standardized procedures are important, but equally as important are empowerment. This means allowing your employees adapt to situations, to go “off script”—adapting to a situation and using the personality that made them such valuable hires.
In summary—hire the people with a “customer service personality” and give them the ability to use it. It is, after all, your organization’s biggest asset.
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
Should Your Organization Have a Customer Service Plan? Part One
Should your organization have a customer service plan? The simple answer is yes!
Developing a Customer Service Plan
While implementing specific customer service initiatives and programs is essential to creating a positive customer experience within an organization, these efforts need to be developed together as part of a customer service plan to increase their effectiveness and make sure that they are strategically aligned. Taking the time to develop a comprehensive customer service plan can help to ensure that your efforts are customer-centric, sustainable and consistent with each other.
Over the years, I have developed customer service plans of all shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny, digestible plans for single departments to the massive, voluminous plans needed to serve large companies or city governments. As part of my Customer Service Officers Program within the City of Philadelphia’s Managing Director’s Office, I walk designated customer service officers through the process of creating a customer service plan for their individual departments. Let’s walk through the steps in how to create a customer service plan:
Get Buy-In
As it is first, getting “Buy-In” is probably the most important step to creating and implementing a customer service plan within your department or organization. As a customer service leader, you need to communicate both the importance and urgency of a strong customer service plan to the people who have the power to make changes. Buy-in ensures that your efforts will have enough resources to get off the ground. It also ensures that your organization’s leaders will make these efforts a priority in their implementation phase and will not ignore them once real changes are made.
Understand your Customers
Understanding your customers is a vital step in creating a customer service plan and ought to take up most of your time prior to actually writing the plan. Getting to know your customers means mapping out who your customers actually are (every internal and external customer you might have) and getting real feedback from them on their wants and needs.
Far too often leaders within an organization say something to the effect of “Well I know what the customers want.” Developing an effective customer service plan, however, means actually hearing and understanding what the customers want and catering to their real, not perceived, needs.
In the Customer Service Officers Program, officers conduct at least 5 focus groups of both internal and external customers to better understand their department’s current service and customers’ expectations. As part of the requirement, all of the focus groups need to be conducted prior to creating the actual plan, allowing the feedback to be the driving force behind its development.
(Sometimes, real customer feedback can help to get buy-in from your organization’s leaders)
Want to know more about how and why your organization should have a customer service plan? Stay tuned for “Should Your Organization Have a Customer Service Plan? Part Two” !
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
Ten ‘Must Do’s’ for Chief Customer Officer’s
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Chief Customer Officers (CCO) are charged with ensuring that an organization’s customer experience is considered by all departments, in all major decisions, at all times. He or she is the one
This is one of the best post I have seen on the topic recently. Most of the points can be applied across industry sectors (including government).
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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.
Deliver a World-Class Customer Experience | TIME.com
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Take a page out of Disney’s employee training playbook to see how creative management can lead to fully engaged employees dedicated to pleasing customers.
Enjoyed reading this article and the author summarized key points that applicable to all industries.
See on business.time.com
The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
Business management magazine, blogs, case studies, articles, books, and webinars from Harvard Business Review, addressing today’s topics and challenges in business management.
FOCUS is a key leadership attribute that is so undervalued sometimes. Set a direction for the organization, establish performance measures to monitor success, and communicate the results of the organization’s efforts to achieve its goal.
See on hbr.org
Innovative Customer Service Leadership Strategies 