Waiting for Service

Latest Episodes:

Episode 37 - The 3 Imperatives for Contact center Leaders Nov 10, 2018

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Your mission as a leader of a contact center is pretty simple. Make work more meaningful for your employees to do that do these 3 things.

Episode 36 - Why you need to be a Persuasion Expert in CX w Jeff Sep 20, 2018

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Why is persuasion in such a high demand from a business perspective?
Jeff says that we all live or die based on our ability to persuade. That's a bold statement!
If you think about Customer Service, the vast majority of interactions start with the premises that something has gone wrong, which is why customers call. How the Support Agents should deliver the news that the solution the customer is calling for won't be delivered today? How to say "no" to a customer or deliver bad news?

Episode 35 - Why we need to rethink QA Sep 20, 2018

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I want to talk about Quality Assurance specifically in contact centers. I want to give you 3 reasons to rethink QA.
1. Sample size. You'll be making a conclusion over a small size of data, and you might be biased on the interactions you decide to listen to.
2. The entire premise of QA was created several decades ago. Is it still relevant today?
3. If you cannot link directly QA efforts to the ROI you're looking for, you have to rethink it Quality Assurance.

Episode 34 - Stop Telling Call Center Agents when to use the Bathroom Sep 02, 2018

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I want to talk about the call center agent because I have a passion for improving the agent experience.
Being a contact center agent sucks because of the leadership in the organization, but it does not have to be this way. Let me focus on one particular area. We schedule, regulate and punish agents for going to the bathrooms at the wrong times. Most of the managers speak to me about the needs of the business and that if bathroom breaks were not scheduled the agents would go whenever they want, which would harm the productivity and the numbers. I call Buillshit on that!

Episode 33 - 3 Strategies for Dealing with difficult customers Aug 28, 2018

Show notes

I want to discuss why we have difficult customers and what to do with them.
1. You are creating difficult customers.
So do a self-evaluation on why customers are "difficult." Identify these frequent accidents with the customers, address the issues and solve them.
2. Fire some of your customers.
Sometimes you just don't need certain people to be your customers, particularly when there isn't a match with what they are looking for and what you've taken a strategic decision to offer.
3. Upskill your folks with better tools.
I don't mean (only) tech tools, but rather soft skills. Tools and knowledge that helps your team deal with complicated human interactions.

Episode 32 - Why Benchmarking is a waste of Time May 20, 2018

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Customer Experience needs to be personal and copying other crappy industries isn't the way to go.

Episode 31 - What call center leadership looks like after AI eliminates jobs (w/Darren Ford) Feb 20, 2018

Show notes

- Remember the paper- less office - How will we screw up this whole AI thing in service - What happens when all the humans in the contact center get eliminated - What happens when every call in the contact center is a tough one - Federal prisoners have more freedom than call center agents -Healthy culture - who do we hire is the most important decision to make - People in HR will be super busy -Value people

Episode 30 - The Service Industry Is Still Measuring The Wrong Things Feb 02, 2018

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I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about analytics a few weeks ago about analytics software. We talked about AI and advanced analytics but I digress. I want to talk about what service leaders measure, particularly in the contact center or service centers. What are you measuring? Do me a favor, bring out your scorecards and lets evaluate what you are measurin. I will wait. Let us start at the top of the organization. Most of your metrics tend to be financial, then it filters down to whoever the leader CCO, over the CX organization. Let's start there. What is on that scorecard? This isn't rhetorical. Please share with us. So I suspect that scorecard has some efficiency metrics and some for effectiveness. So like most organizations you probably pretend to care about customers, who doesn't at least pretend to be into CX right? Let's stay there for one second how are you measuring that all important metric. NPS? CES? CSAT, WOM? Why are you interested in measuring customer sentiment? Really why? I suspect you want to know how your customers feel. But why? The answer must be that you believe customer sentiment is directly correlated to outcomes that are important to you? Wallet share? whatever is important to your organization. My question today is can you prove that there is a direct correlation with your service metrics top your company objectives. If you can prove it, why are you struggling with getting your organization to bet big on service? Compare to marketing.... half my dollars are wasted but can't tell which half. How come your org spends a tons money on marketing and is better off setting the money on fire but does it time after time after time. You know why, no one believes you that taking care of customers is the path to growth. I believe you, I believe you and I think it is predictable. But your CFO isn't buying it. Let me let you in on a story when I worked for one of the biggest online retailers, I looked at our service levels - how much time to answer calls as atrocious so I decided my gosh we have to improve hold times. My boss who is the President of the company (smart guy but a bean couter) asked me to make a business case to prove that making customers wait less was a good business decision. Not in soft dollars but in hard dollars. So to be clear, I was biased in favor of improving service levels and I couldn't prove it, customer hold times had no correlation whatsoever to the outcomes that mattered to the CFO. Now if you want to feed me the argument that there are some soft ROI sure but can you sell that to your CFO? I have seen thousands of scorecards now doing this line of work and one thing is clear, one big reason why we have not seen a BIG shif in the customer and service experience is because the guys who are supposed to be making the case are showing up with the same old tired numbers and we are blowing it. There is a better way. If your scorecard looks the same as it did 10 years ago, and don't feed me balanced scorecards, I mean can you look your CFO in the eye and say the following unlike my friends in marketing I can show you that every dollar you invest in service will make us money or more profiatable then you are doing it wrong. Here is what is making me excited. Investing in service is every bit as important as investing in Marketing and sales and you can prove it. You do not have to rely on soft metrics

Episode 29 - Why you can't listen to the experts Jan 13, 2018

Show notes

We worked in 70 year old company, I wanted to run customer service like a start up right after a B round. He ran IT like the KGB. We were a match made in hell. I had a running list of initiatives in customer service and he always said no or it will happen some day. So I found the cloud, I didn't have his patience. He hated the cloud because he read somewhere that the Cloud will never be good enough for enterprises. "I will chain myself to the servers before we ever move to the cloud". He had a flair for the dramatic. Fortunately, I was armed with an 8 figure budget, and a team that could deliver on ROIs I signed them up for. I started moving the contact center technology to the cloud. I was an early adopter to the cloud because I loved to go fast. On this episode I talk about the next transformative movement powered by Artificial Intelligence. We have the prognosticators predicting how it will go. Put your bullshit meter on high alert.

Episode 28 - Customers don't trust you Oct 23, 2017

Show notes

I got a check in the mail, it was from my cable company, they reimbursed me (without my asking) for all the times my service went out. I was happy they did this until of course I woke up and realized it was a dream. Getting customers to a place where there is emotional trust doesn't happen by accident, there is a way to begin building trust.

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