Customer Service Training, Tips, Articles & Videos with Myra Golden
Here’s Why You Need to Let Your Employees Cool Down After a Busy Period
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My son cooling down after a family game of basketball Sunday afternoon
I started running a little more than a year ago. The running training program I started with insisted on a 5-minute cool down after each run. Sometimes I’d cool down and sometimes I wouldn’t. I didn’t notice any problems when I didn’t cool down so I really didn’t think it was a big deal. For weeks I ran 2-3 miles with my indifferent attitude toward the cool down. Then one day I ran 4 miles, my longest and most vigorous at that point. I was so proud of myself and I felt amazing. I felt so good that I didn’t “cool down.” After my run, I showered and resumed normal activities. Or, at least I tried to resume normal activities.
Within an hour of my amazing run I was feeling dizzy and nauseous. I couldn’t shake the feeling for hours. It was that day that I learned the importance of cooling down after a run. I now know that physiologically, cooling down helps the body transition from intense activity to normal activity. Cooling down helps prevent blood from pooling in the legs, which I now know can happen after a hard run. This limits blood flow to the heart and brain, and can lead to the dizziness and nausea I experienced that day.
What happens when employees don’t cool down after a busy season?
When employees come out of a tremendously busy season such as a large product recall, holiday season or a new product launch, the mental toll is not unlike a vigorous run. Just because they “survived” the busy season doesn’t mean all is well. I survived my first 4 mile run, but I didn’t transition to normal activity well at all. Provide your employees with a “cool down” period so they can transition into normal business activity.
How do you cool down after a busy season?
Offer paid time off if you can, celebrate accomplishments, award your employees with gift cards, have lunch brought in or bring fun into the office. Get creative. The important thing is to acknowledge the sacrifice and challenge and to provide a transition into normal activity.
Cooling down after a busy period helps your employees de-stress and refresh. Failing to cool down can lead to burnout and low morale. Proactively provide a corporate cool down and you’ll avoid potentially serious problems later on…and your people will be better prepared for the next busy season. (I now cool down after every run!)
3 Bold Ideas to Help You Screen and Hire The Right Talent for Your Culture (And weed out employees who don’t fit)
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Companies with a defined and strong culture outperform their competitors by as much as 200%. Culture is what positions companies to innovate, deliver an exceptional customer experience and become an employer of choice. Company culture can make or break a company and one of the biggest threats to company culture is employees who are not a cultural fit for the company. Not only can wrong-fit employees threaten company culture, but research has shown that hiring the wrong employee can cost as much as three times the employee’s annual salary in replacement costs. It is imperative that companies defend culture by screening, hiring and retaining the right people. Here are 3 bold ideas to help you protect your culture by finding and keeping the right people.
1. Hire for motivational fit
Most companies screen applicants based on a skill set, experience and core competencies. Screening and hiring in this manner can lead to competent employees who are not a motivational fit. The result could be early burnout for the employee, negative impact on company culture and morale and frustration for managers who may have to deal with negative attitudes. A better way to screen and hire is to seek not only skill competency, but a motivational fit.
In order to excel and be happy, employees must be intrinsically motivated for the position. If you’re hiring a customer service representative, good motivational fit questions might include:
- What do you like most about being in a customer contact position?
- What do you want from your next job that you’re not getting from your current job?
- What part of your current job do you enjoy the most? The least?
- What are some of the things in a job that motivate you?
Strive to hire not just for skills, but also for motivational fit.
2. Keep your star employees. Ask everyone else to leave.
When Jack Welch was the head of GE, the bottom 10% of organizational performers were routinely asked to leave. Welch noted that in many cases, the bottom 10% went on to successful careers at companies where they truly belonged and could excel. An on-demand Internet media streaming company sees management’s job as hiring, developing, and cutting smartly so they have star employees at every level. The Keeper Test managers at this company use is: “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving in two months for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep?” Consider keeping and developing your star talent and helping everyone else find better fitting opportunities.
3. Pay employees to quit.
An online retailer famous for its customer culture pays employees to quit. All new hires of the company must attend 4-weeks of Customer Service Culture training. This training is mandatory, not only for customer service employees, but every position in the company. After the first 2-weeks of new hire training, employees are made an unbelievable offer. If they feel that the company is not a good fit for them, they can walk away with their salary for 2-weeks plus get a check for $1,000. Two weeks later, after 4 weeks of training, new hires are offered $2,000 to walk if they don’t feel the job is the best fit for them. A third and final payout if offered 3 weeks after new hire training and employees who don’t think they are in the right place can take a check for $4,000. The company pays employees to quit because they are fiercely protecting their culture. Weeding out employees who don’t fit the culture early on helps maintain the culture. The offer is so high because the company wants to provide an amount that enables the employee to make the right decision and not feel they have to stay in a culture that doesn’t fit just to avert a lengthy period of unemployment.
Paying employees to quit is certainly a bold idea. But can you envision this strategy (at a payout level that makes sense for your organization) saving you frustration and money down the road?
The right employees will support and strengthen your culture, while the wrong employees threaten the culture and cost you money. Defending company culture through rigorous screening, hiring and retention practices takes great effort and the rewards are performance and profits.
Sources cited
Golden, Myra, “Keep the Star Employees. Everyone Else Needs a Generous Severance Package Now.” 2010 Retrieved from: http://myragolden.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/keep-the-stars-the-others-need-a-generous-severance-package-now/
Michelli, Jospeh, A. “The Zappos Experience” McGraw Hill, NY, 2011.
Ren, John, F. Company Culture: What it is and how to get it. Retrieved from: http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/companyculture.htm
IVR: Pet Peeve or Dealbreaker?
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by Dan Fox
I’ve often heard it said that every customer relationship should be considered a marriage between the company and the consumer. I can’t agree more. There are as many different types of marriages as there are customer relationships. I’ll start with the wonderful kind – the couple married for dozens of years, with each partner loving everything about the other. This would be my relationship with Starbucks. Then there’s the short marriage, like Kim Kardashian’s, that starts off fine but quickly sours. It’s like finding a great pizza spot where you start to regularly grab lunch, until the day you see a rat running across the floor. There’s the couple that’s been married for much longer than they should be, but they are still together for some reason; let’s compare this to your relationship with your cable company. I could go on, but you get the idea. I’d like to focus on one aspect of every relationship: the pet peeve, the one thing that bothers you more than anything else about that other person. It can range from a mild annoyance to a deal-breaker, but either way, it exists in every relationship. In all company-customer relationships, that ”pet peeve” very well might be your IVR. If you’re like most companies, an overwhelming majority of your customers are averse to your IVR; it’s not something your customers love about you. The problem is that for some discerning customers, your IVR might be a deal-breaker. However, there are some things you can do today to address this problem.
1. Improve the Voice Talent
Believe it or not, voice talent is one of the most important factors in your customers’ overall opinion of your IVR. Your voice talent is the personality that callers connect with your company. It goes far beyond the voice’s tone and inflection. I highly recommend you read, “I Wanna Go Tuh Cleveland…” by Allison Smith. She goes into detail about how your callers mirror the style of the voice talent when engaging. Therefore, if your IVR has limited speech recognition capabilities, your voice talent should have a stiff, robotic voice. When your callers duplicate that style, the IVR will be able to understand them more easily. If your IVR has a superior understanding, a more relaxed style will prompt callers to use a natural, conversational style of speaking, thus reducing their effort.
The question I see most often is whether to use a female or male voice. I’ve seen one too many studies comparing the two. The most honest is a 2010 study by Adweek and Harris Interactive, which states that almost half of all surveyed believe that a male voice is more forceful and almost half believe that a female voice is more soothing. Be that as it may, in my humble opinion, there is no difference. The talent, skill, intonation, and inflection have a much greater influence than the sex of the voice.
2. Improve your web self-service
I know we’re supposed to be talking about improving your IVR, but if you want to improve your customers’ experience in the IVR, you need to eliminate some of the calls to the call center that can just as easily be handled on the web. This frees up your IVR to devote more time and attention to the most complicated issues. This, in turn, elevates the call center representatives to the position of “trouble-shooters” instead of ordinary customer service reps. It’s a win-win situation for both company and customer.
Improving your web self-service is affordable, quick, easy to maintain, and something you can do immediately. Where do you start? A clean interface. Nothing turns your customers off more than going to the help page and having columns and columns of help articles that they assume will not address their specific concerns. One of the greatest benefits of using live chat or automated chat rather than scanning through a complicated FAQ is having the information pulled for the customers, rather than having them do all the legwork themselves. Simplifying the help section of your website with a solid knowledge base will decrease the number calls to your call center.
3. Dumb it down or Smarten it up:
It’s that simple. You can dumb down your IVR, making it a simple routing menu: press 1 for sales, 2 for technical support, and then take them right to the agent. No over-complication, no trapping your customers in endless trees, no confusion. There are many companies that are doing this today. Clearly you lose the benefits of automation and capturing data upfront, but many of these companies believe that a happier marriage will lead to a greater ROI in the long run. Some companies, such as Zappos, take this to the extreme, refusing to use an IVR at all. Every call starts and ends with a human. Of course, if all of your traffic is from the web, your callers have very specific needs that cannot be met on the fully equipped and intelligently designed website. In this case, you fully lose the benefits of routing and automation. However, a company like Zappos, whose customers give it rave reviews, makes up for that with happy marriages.
If you are a large corporation with millions of monthly calls, you realize immediately that dumbing down your IVR is not economically savvy and would be a major detriment to the company. In this case, you might consider “smartening” your IVR. There are a few companies that are challenging the common perception of IVR by offering fully natural language in conversational self-service. These systems are equipped with a greater degree of understanding potential. With improved speech recognition, more processes can be automated and the IVR becomes useful beyond a simple routing application. Upon equipping your IVR with an advanced natural language system, simple self-service requests can be automated, saving time for your agents to handle more difficult transactions.
These are just a few of the ways you can improve your IVR. It’s this type of change that diminishes the likelihood that your IVR will be your customers’ pet peeve. It’s hard to please your customers through the IVR, but if you can make it easier for them, you are more likely to experience the bliss of a happy marriage than the misery of a failed one.
Dan Fox is a Marketing Director with Interactions Corporation. Interactions offers most natural conversational self-service available – providing a revolutionary approach to customer service.
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Hiring & Training the Right Customer Service Agents for Energy
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If you work in the utility or energy industry and you’re concerned about hiring and training the right customer service agents, you’ll want to watch this presentation.
Three Steps For Creating Effective Call Center Measures and Reports
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I came across a really good article on creating effective call center measures and reports. If you’re needing to create valuable reports for management and forecasting, this may help you:
Three Steps For Creating Effective Call Center Measures and Reports
How do we get call center agents to buy-in to a quality call monitoring and coaching program?
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Hi. We’re looking for ways to create buy-in among our call center agents for our quality call monitoring program.
Myra’s answer to How do we get call center agents to buy-in to a quality call monitoring and coaching program?
You’re in for a treat for this response because I’ve taken a segment right out of my Supervising, Coaching & Progressive Discipline Webinar and I’m sharing secrets lawyers use in the courtroom -secrets supervisors can apply immediately to prepare for difficult conversations with employees.
1. Give evidence of performance to employee. In litigation, prosecutors are required to turn all of their evidence over to the defense. In order to be fair to employees, supervisors need to do the same thing. Tony frequently received disturbing memos from his district manager about his poor performance on sales calls. “You failed to cover the Five Points for Sales Excellence with a customer last month. This is unacceptable.” Tony never received a monitoring sheet spelling out the discrepancies, never heard a tape of a recorded call, and he didn’t even have the opportunity to defend himself because the cowardly manager simply shot her message off in a cold blunt memo.
Giving feedback the way Tony’s district manager does is dangerous. It certainly isn’t motivating Tony to improve. Moreover, because the manager has provided no proof of the calls – no score sheet, no recording of the call, no date or time, and not even one specific statement about Tony’s alleged ineffectiveness – Tony can’t even defend his performance.
When monitoring and coaching employees, ALWAYS turn over the evidence of the call to them. This evidence may include a recorded call, Mystery Shopper score sheet, detailed notes from customer’s account, etc.
2. Prepare for employee performance meetings in advance. No attorney would conduct a direct examination or cross examination without thoroughly and carefully pre planning their questions. I always prepare a loose script prior to meeting with employees about problem performance, even though I don’t actually read from my script. Writing the discussion out reinforces it in my mind and allows me to be less concerned with covering all the basis and more concerned with my employee.
3. Ask open-ended questions. Asking a juror if they are for the death penalty yields a yes or no answer, but asking her how she feels about the death penalty gives the attorney the opportunity to learn more. Just the same, asking your employee if she thought the phone call in question was good will yield a yes or no answer, but asking her how she thought the call went gives her the opportunity to expound. My favorite open-ended coaching questions include: “If you could do this call over again, would you?” “Tell me about that caller.” “Is there anything else about this call/customer that I haven’t asked, but need to know?”
4. Don’t allow the “Twinkie Defense.” In court, defendants may stand behind a theory of the case called the “Twinkie Defense.” This theory tries to throw the jury off the trail by blaming the client’s bad actions on something else – he ate too many Twinkies, for instance, and was on a sugar high when he killed/robbed/raped/molested and therefore is not responsible for his actions. You may have encountered the Twinkie Defense with your employees: “I was late because traffic was unusually heavy and then when I got here the elevator was broken, therefore my tardiness is not my fault.” Decide that employees will be held accountable for their actions and don’t allow them to hide behind the Twinkie Defense. In response to the Twinkie Defense, you respond with, “This is about individual responsibility – not trying to hide behind excuses.”
What is a good target for call abandonment for a large call center?
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Myra’s answer to What is a good target for call abandonment for a large call center?
Call abandonment is extremely tough to forecast and truly, there is no industry standard for acceptable levels of call abandonment. Some industry experts will tell you to aim at 6% or less, while others will tell you that 3% is unacceptable.
Here’s some research you can benchmark against:
*According to the Help Desk Institute, the median call abandon rate among support call centers is 4%.
*Purdue Research Foundation’s benchmarking study found that participating call centers answered abandoned 5.85%
My advice is to determine what feels right for your business and to also realize that several factors affect caller tolerance.
Customer Service Q & A
Myra Answers YOUR Questions
Myra looks forward to answering your questions about customer service, contact center management, and customer service training. Please e-mail Myra at info@myragolden.com or tweet her at @myragolden.
Who Says There’s No Free Lunch?
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Two years ago I walked into my client’s office for the first time for an exploratory meeting. The aroma of deli sandwiches and fresh salads was in the air. I spotted a buffet table surrounded by a few dozen employees. When I sat down in the Human Resource Director’s office I asked what special event accounted for the luncheon. She explained that there was no special event, “We provide lunch for our employees every day.”
“Lunch is provided every day?” I asked. “Yes. Every day we provide free lunch to every employee.” I was blown away. I actually have conducted full-day seminars for companies that didn’t so much as provide pastries for breakfast, let along lunch. And this company is giving every employee free lunch every day!
That’s Like Putting an Extra $1,200 in Your Pocket Every Year.
I wondered if the employees fully realized the perk they were getting. When I eat out for lunch, I spend an average of $5. That’s $25 a week. $100 a month. $1,200 a year. When I eat out I drive, which means I’m also spending money on gas. This company is giving employees a minimum of $1,200 in food a year…a $1,200 net savings to each employee.
What company is providing this amazing benefit, you ask? Video Gaming Technologies. Check ‘em out here. Take a look at my full cool client list here.
What’s the nicest way to give constructive feedback?
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What’s the nicest way to give constructive feedback?
I just received a review from my boss that included a comment that I am too harsh when I correct employee performance. I want to come across as friendly and diplomatic. What is the “nicest” way to give constructive feedback?
Myra’s answer to: What’s the nicest way to give constructive feedback?
I salute you for quickly looking for help in giving constructive feedback more constructively. You can’t go wrong with these steps…
1. Always begin with praise. Dale Carnegie once said, “Beginning with praise is like the dentist who begins his work with Novocain. The patient still gets a drilling but the Novocain is pain-killing.” Starting with praise puts both you and your employee at ease.
2. Describe the specific performance/behavior you have observed. If I say, “Lynn , you don’t respond well to feedback.” that doesn’t tell her much. But if I say, “I am concerned about the way you respond to my feedback. For example, last month when I spoke to you about your attendance, you became defensive and abruptly left my office. Yesterday, when we spoke about the same issue, you raised your voice and again walked out of my office.” Describing the situation helps the employee understand exactly what you mean and it helps them to accept the feedback as valid. Vague feedback may actually be more confusing than helpful.
3. Respond to the situation. It’s important for you to express your feelings about the performance or behavior so the employee knows exactly how you feel. You mi g ht say, for example, “I’m disappointed in you and I know you can do better.”
4. Invite your employee to respond. Giving constructive feedback must be a dialogue and it’s important for your employee to state her feelings just as you did. Ask, “What do you think about what I’ve said?” Getting the employee to respond makes the discussion more relevant and builds accountability for behavior or performance change.
5. Offer suggestions for performance improvement. Instead of giving a direct order, which employees tend to not like, offer a suggestion. You mi g ht say:
§ “You might consider this.”
§ “Do you think this would work?”
§ “What do you think of this?”
§ Maybe if we were to phrase it this way it would be better.”
6. Summarize and express your support. You’ve covered a lot in steps 1 – 5. Now it’s a good idea to clarify your main points and the employee’s commitment. One suggestion is to say, “ Lynn , what will be your first step?” After hearing and accepting her response, you could say, “I know you’ll do just fine. Let’s g et back to g ether in exactly 30 days to review your progress.”
These simple steps will position you to engage in interactive dialogue that is focused on results and maintaining the esteem of your employee. Use these steps the next time you give constructive feedback and you won’t feel guilty or cause resentment.
P.S. You might be interested in my webinar recording, “Managing to Elimiante Unacceptable Employee Behavior and Performance.” Here are some details: http://tinyurl.com/2e27qbv
Customer Service Q & A
Myra Answers YOUR Questions
Myra looks forward to answering your questions about customer service, contact center management, and customer service training. Please e-mail Myra at info@myragolden.com or tweet her at @myragolden.
When calibrating for quality call monitoring, do you suggest calibrating scores only or also the coaching?
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Q. My team meets weekly for a 60-minute calibration and we focus solely on the scores on the monitoring form. But it has occurred to us that we may not be consistent on the comments we individually share with our agents. Do you know if most call centers calibrate scores only or do they also calibrate the comments they share when coaching each attribute on the monitoring form?
Myra’s answer to When calibrating for quality call monitoring, do you suggest calibrating scores only or also the coaching?
Great question! For optimum consistency I recommend calibrating BOTH the scores and the verbal comments about each dimension on your quality monitoring form. Warning…this gets complicated and very time consuming. But when you get consistent as a team on how you coach each dimension, you’ll find that both quality of calls and consistently of coaching improves dramatically.
A few months ago I hosted a webinar entitled Call Monitoring and the recording is now available. This program has dozens of tips for more effective call monitoring, agent coaching, and it discusses call monitoring technology. I encourage you to take a look at this program, as it may give you great insight for your current challenges. View my call monitoring training outline.
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