Strategy
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!
Streamlining Customer Information through Video
As we begin to release new episodes of Philly311 TV, I thought I’d write a post about the importance of these videos from a customer service standpoint.
Philly311 TV is the digital engagement effort of the Philadelphia city government’s non-emergency contact center. I serve as the host of the show and interview a diverse range of employees throughout city government. We created the show as part of our multi-channel engagement strategy to provide customers with more information and access to our organization.
After lessons learned from Season 1 (filming 30-minute, talk-show formatted episodes) we decided to move to a more flexible format that would provide more value to our customers. In Season 2, we still film casual conversations in a studio setting, however, we cut these conversations into vignettes in post-production to streamline information for our customers.
With these vignettes, we can provide quick, immediate answers to some of our customers most frequent questions. We can use these videos to populate our social media streams, meaning that customers can see answers to their questions on their newsfeeds before they even ask.
Here’s a great example:
Another benefit to using video to answer customer questions is that it humanizes your organization. If customers can see that real people, who care, are behind your organization, they will be more likely to engage. It’s always better to have an explanation come from a person (or a video of a person) than from a word document, FAQ list, or an instruction manual.
Providing quick, engaging video answers to our customers has been a relatively easy process, and could be for your organization too. What are your thoughts on the using video for customer engagement?
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
5 Ways Government Can Improve Its Customer Service Excellence Brand
While government has started to incorporate more and more private sector strategies to improve operations, one effort where government is lacking is branding. Where private-sector companies are able to build brands that customers love and are enthusiastic about, governments tends to stray away from any substantial efforts to build a lovable brand.
While government may never be able to build a Starbucks-esque brand (where customers are constantly “wowed” and pass this wow along via word of mouth and social media) government can make small changes to the way it interacts with its customers to create a more open, pleasant, and collaborative experience for customers.
I recently read an article called “5 Lessons from Companies with Adoring Customers” by Hannah Johnson on the Get Satisfaction blog. The lessons outlined were incredibly helpful and offered great insight for how small changes can improve an organization’s brand.
Let’s take these lessons and adopt them for government.
1. Provide Customers Access to Decision-Makers when they have a Gripe
The words “open” and “accessible” are now synonymous with any progressive government. While some of this focus is on releasing data, constituents also want access to the top officials making decisions. Thankfully, there’s social media. Social media has leveled the playing field in terms of constituent accessibility. Now, all it takes to reach top officials is a tweet or a comment on Facebook. And you would be surprised at how impactful a genuine reply or even a retweet can be.
2. Don’t Just Innovate for Them, Innovate with Them
Social media and other technologies have also given governments the ability to brainstorm with customers and get their feedback. When designing a process, program, or event, why not post something on social media asking for input? Also, Tweet Chats (scheduled discussions on Twitter) sponsored by governments are a great way to engage and discuss new ideas with customers.
3. Identify, Incentivize, and Empower Customers
Governments should take this cue from the private sector and reward top customers. This does not mean that governments need to buy customers expensive gifts, but customers who are top proponents of services or programs should gain recognition or meetings with top officials. Another way to incentivize customers is through gamification. Gamify civic engagement by giving points for participation in programs or community events. You can also designate great customers as “Super Users” or other honorary names.
4. Treat Customers like Humans
Government may be limited by budgetary or regulatory constraints in terms of marketing messaging. However, customers need clear information from their government. In some cases, there’s not a lot of room for creative marketing promotions or messaging, as information about resources and other public services should not be misconstrued. Social media, however, allows government to step away from entirely robotic responses. Through the use of social media, government can have real, human conversations with customers, rather than only pushing out information. Human interactions can improve the way customers perceive government as a whole.
5. Allow Customers to Help Themselves
Governments are known for being overly bureaucratic. Now more than ever, customer want information, answers, and resolutions instantaneously. A way to appease the customers is to make many processes self-service. Let customers get the information they want, as soon as they want. If your current system don’t allow for the creation of self-service portals, create informational blog posts, or even a wiki so that customers don’t have to wait in a queue to get an answer they could find faster themselves. Empower your customers. They’ll appreciate you for it!
Can you think of any other ways to improve your local government’s customer service brand?
Customer Satisfaction: Innovating with Lack of Resources
My post originally appeared on the DigitalGov blog.
As government contact centers, we all face financial and technological constraints in our pursuit to improve the customer experience. One challenge faced by many contact centers is staffing limitations to handle the volume of incoming customer traffic. There are barely enough employees to operate phones, let alone work on meeting or exceeding the organizational customer satisfaction performance goals.
One initiative that was important to the City of Philadelphia’s 311 non-emergency contact center was the successful collection of customer feedback and coaching our employees to improve the customers’ experience with each transaction. The 311 Contact Center serves as the single point of contact for over 1.5 million residents, businesses, and visitors needing City-related non-emergency services and information.
With so many daily interactions between our customers and agents, how could we improve customer experience if we did not have the means to ask our customers about their experience? With a limited technology and staffing budget, it seemed impossible to implement a customer satisfaction program in our government contact center. We needed to find innovative solutions to effectively collect, and manage, accurate and real-time customer experience responses.
A Solution
To create a credible program to measure customer satisfaction, our contact center partnered with a national Fortune 500 company who, pro bono, helped to develop an effective customer satisfaction survey and we partnered with a local non-profit organization for surveying and data entry staffing support. The benefit of these partnerships were two-fold: building a best-in-class program and providing a training environment to enhance clientele’s skills through their experience in a customer contact operations.
For example, in an agreement with the non-profit’s Work Experience programs, we provide opportunities for their clients to gain experience in an office setting. Work Experience employees work in our contact center for up to 20 hours a week for an agreed-upon number of months (based on the program) or until they found employment. Work Experience employees administer customer satisfaction surveys via the telephone.
In Practice
Formal training is conducted for our Work Experience/customer satisfaction surveyors to familiarize them with our services, the data collection processes and why their role is critical to our success. After this, surveyors are given a list of anonymous customers who contacted us within the last 24 hours and authorized the use of their number for a customer satisfaction survey (asked by our contact center agents at the end of each phone call). Over time we have enhanced the sample questions the surveyors ask. The results are entered into a centralized database. Following are the current baseline questions used in our survey:
- Did the agent explain the process for resolving your issues or concerns?
- Did the agent have access to the necessary information to meet your request?
- Was your call (or e-mail, or visit) handled in a timely manner?
- Were you satisfied with the service you received from Contact Center?
- Would you like to provide any additional feedback about your experience with the contact center?
- Would you like to provide your name, phone number or e-mail address, if you would like to be contacted.
As part of the process, surveyors are able to transfer concerned or dissatisfied customers to a contact center supervisor or manager to follow up on or resolve their issue.
Results and Overview
Results of the customer satisfaction surveys are shared with our contact center supervisors for meetings with their teams. The previous day’s average is also displayed on our contact center’s reader boards. Monthly and quarterly customer experience results are shared with Senior Leadership within the organization and posted on the department’s bulletin board.
Overall, our ability to gather customer satisfaction data has been instrumental in our growth as our city’s customer service center. The data has improved our technology and business processes, external communication, and service offerings as we continue to strive for customer service excellence. We continue to use Work Experience programs to collect customer satisfaction surveys and we have also expanded our initiative to include social media data mining. Designated agents monitor social media “streams” to see what our customers are saying about us, in addition to their “wants” as they relate to our services.
While we still face budgetary constraints, our contact center continues to innovate and find means to continually improve our customers’ experience.
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.
Philly311 TV: Community Engagement is Customer Service
Video Posted on Updated on
The above video is a clip from our upcoming episode of The Philly311 Show featuring PhillyRising’s East Division Coordinator, Joandelis Marquez. PhillyRising is a program within the Philadelphia City government that targets neighborhoods plagued by chronic crime and quality of life concerns, and establishes partnerships with community members to address thoseissues. Joandelis and I had a great time discussing the innovative community engagement strategies she uses to connect with and serve her “customers.”
Community engagement is customer service–it’s just more targeted and personal. Often times, it’s more effective too. Some organizations view community engagement efforts as optional or philanthropic extensions of customer service. In actuality, community engagement should be mandatory because of the level of service these efforts provide. Through community engagement efforts, your organization is able to provide the most personal customer care possible. You’re also able to engage your customers by building human relationships.
Building personal relationships goes farther than you think. Not only do they humanize your organization or brand (making it easier to connect with customers) but they also lend valuable insight into your customer’s wants and needs. While surveys and customer data can be effective representations of of customer sentiment, through community engagement efforts you can literally hear what your customers are saying. Often in a more natural setting than a phone or self-service customer satisfaction survey, customers are able to voice their honest feedback in their own way, in person, on their own turf. Even if your community engagement efforts are small, this valuable feedback could benefit all of your customers.
How are you engaging the community?
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 CRM has Kicked Off!
Last week, after months of strategic planning, we held the kick off for the Philly311 CRM: a new era of citizen engagement in Philadelphia.
As the project executive, I have seen every part of this process– the brainstorming, demoing, journey-mapping– but most importantly, I have seen the exciting potential for how Philadelphia can serve its residents.
While the backbone of this system will improve the City’s ability to share knowledge and work interdepartmentally, the CRM’s social functionality will provide a great deal of value to our external customers. The system’s robust infrastructure will create a social platform around the non-emergency contact center; the Philly311 CRM will facilitate conversations between neighbors and stakeholders who want to collaborate, share best practices, and organize events to improve their community. On our end, we’ll be able to capitalize on a variety of communications, including social media data, to better understand the needs of our customers so we can proactively serve and provide information.
My vision for the Philly311 CRM is to improve the customer’s overall experience when seeking out municipal information and services. The technology will provide more information and functionality to both City agents and customers, paving the way for more seamless resolutions. This, paired with the technology’s social capabilities, will add to the City’s current success in making positive transformations within municipal government.
In reference to the PhillyCRM, Managing Director Rich Negrin told me:
“A new CRM will open a world of possibilities for city government to engage with Philadelphia residents and will help provide the level of service they deserve. It will enhance our efforts to treat our citizens as valued customers. The new system is innovative, smart, comprehensive, and social. This marks a new era for citizen engagement.”
Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid also told me:
“The 311 CRM replacement project is part of the Mayor’s overall vision to use our limited dollars to modernize mission critical services and open up opportunities for improving customer service.”
As this exciting journey begins, it is necessary to thank Mayor Nutter for his leadership and support throughout this process, Executive Sponsor and City Managing Director Richard Negrin for his commitment to customer service, Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid for his insight and guidance, and last but not least, our diverse group of internal and external partners who have worked tirelessly to ensure that our citizens are served in the best way possible.
I look forward to updating you throughout this process. Any questions?
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
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
The Customer Support Hierarchy of Needs
Your customers won’t settle for chaos, and neither should you.
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The Philly311 Show Premieres Today!
Philly311, the City of Philadelphia’s non-Emergency Contact Center, is proud to present The Philly311 Show. Hosted by Chief Customer Service Officer Rosetta Carrington Lue, the show’s goal is simpl…
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