Staffing
City of Philadelphia Celebrates Customer Service Week in a Big Way
Customer Service Week was a tremendous success! The conversations that took place during these trainings were meaningful and lead to very important questions and reframing of our customer service mentality.
During our first session, City employees and I deconstructed the role of customer service in creating a welcoming, responsive, connected city. We discussed this topic in great detail. What makes a welcoming city? Who is our customer and why are they customers, why not citizens? We talked about how to treat customers like you value their investment in our communities, workforce, and local economy. Our customers are what drives our city and we want to show them we appreciate them.
Public service means committing to and working for the people. Because of the nature of public service, an immense customer base and often limited resources can lead to disgruntled customers and equally frustrated city workers. That is why these workshops were geared towards training and development of the every day heroes who work directly with customers on a daily basis. These City employees came out to discuss the importance of quality customer service because they believe in their calling.
You may have seen my recent post on our second session. To recap, Darryll Adams, General Manager of the Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia spoke to City employees about what it means to provide outstanding service. He talked about your attitude, appearance, and presentation all being a factor. He talked about choosing the right employees, with a customer-oriented mindset both on and off the job, and getting employees invested in the mission. Customer Service is directly connected to efficiency. In a cyclical way, when your employees are invested and believe in what they are doing they provide better services and the customer satisfaction rate increases dramatically.
Our thirds session, with Stacey Mosley of the Office of Innovation and Technology, covered open data. We went through what open data is, how we obtain and share it, and what practical uses it has in your department, particularly as it relates to customer service. Open data increases transparency. When residents, businesses, and visitors have more data, they are equipped to make better decisions. Open data can also reduce the amount of calls from customers looking for information that is public through open data and media can access information without a right to know request. All of these aspects of open data help make Philadelphia, more efficient and responsive to the needs of our customers.
In our final session, we talked about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. We went through the process of defining your desired customer experience and did some brainstorming on what the customer experience model could be for the departments present at this session. Reading Terminal Market presented about their customer service model and how they developed it, and how it has helped them in creating a cohesive experience for all of their customers and vendors too. We closed by talking about what role social media can play in defining and enhancing the customer experience.
All of the Customer Service Week sessions were about training, brainstorming, and working together to provide the best interaction possible when customers work with their local government in Philadelphia. But this week was also about recognizing the great work of our very own every day heroes in Philadelphia. The customer service representatives on the front lines, helping people understand and navigate city government; these are the every day heroes. The City of Philadelphia celebrates all of the employees who directly impact the experience customers have with city government, these representatives are the first impression customers have of the City.
City services are directly related to quality of life concerns. Citizens and government need to work together to keep making this city cleaner, greener, and safer. That is what we are here to do, and we want to acknowledge and celebrate
the success we have had so far, as we continue to improve our service standards.
Thank you to everyone who participated in Customer Service Week! We are looking forward to doing it again next year!
An Employee Engagement Miracle
Video Posted on
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
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
Contact Center Agent Turnover Is A Fact Of Life That Must Be Tracked And Managed | Forrester Blogs
Customer Experience Excellence Best Practices
A really well written article. “Good” turnover in a contact center is between 20%-50%. How does your organization measure and manage agent turnover? What strategies are in place to retain great employees?
See on blogs.forrester.com
Innovative Customer Service Leadership Strategies 