Connecting rapport to five star service

Does rapport really matter in customer service?

I’m not talking about fake, going through the motions rapport. A wooden greeting at a retail store doesn’t quality. Neither does a robotic contact center agent reading scripted pleasantries.

I’m talking about genuine, “Hey, I like this person,” rapport.

There’s an objective way to find out. By combing through customer service surveys and online reviews, I was able to find proof that rapport influences customer’s perception in a positive way.

What is rapport in customer service?

The first challenge was defining rapport.

According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, rapport is a “relation marked by harmony, conformity, accord, or affinity.” In a customer service context, this involves connecting with customers in a way that causes them to see you as a real, likeable person.

Terms like rapport can be a bit squishy, making it hard to observe, quantify, and even train. One way to operationalize the definition of rapport is to count how often people mention someone by name in the comments section of your customer service survey.

I put that theory to the test.

Rapport improves customer perceptions

I started noticing a very specific trend around names while helping a client analyze their customer satisfaction data. Their survey had an overall satisfaction question where customers were asked to rate their service on a three-point scale:

  1. Below Expectations

  2. At Expectations

  3. Above Expectations

A definite pattern emerged when I separated the comments section by rating.

Individual employees were mentioned by name much more frequently when customers gave their service an “Above Expectations” score. Here’s the distribution for one of the groups I worked with:

clientnamedreviews.png

A much higher percentage of positive reviews mentioned an employee by name.

Another trend stood out. When customers mentioned an employee by name in a negative review, the employee was often mentioned as a lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak encounter.

“Denise is always so nice and helpful,” said one negative review. The customer’s gripes were about wait times and procedures, yet they still appreciated Denise’s efforts to make things better.

Just for fun, I looked for other places to see if ratings were affected by whether customer’s knew employees by name.

The Yelp reviews for my favorite Italian restaurant, Antica Trattoria, showed a similar trend. Their overall rating is 4.0 stars with slightly more than half the reviews giving 5 stars.

However, you’ll see a familiar pattern if you look at the reviews that mentioned an Antica Trattoria employee by name:

anticayelpreviews.png

My friends at Zendesk, a leading customer service software provider, provided analyzed nearly 2,000 customer surveys to see if this trend held true for other companies. It did!

Look at the difference when a survey mentions an employee by name in the comments, versus surveys that do not.

Barriers to Rapport

If rapport is highly correlated to outstanding service, why doesn’t it happen more often? One explanation might be that customer service professionals face a number of barriers that can make rapport-building difficult.

  1. Speed. It’s hard to build rapport when employees are in a hurry.

  2. Skill. Many people simply don’t know how to build rapport with customers.

  3. Sales. It’s really hard to like an overly aggressive salesperson.

  4. Task-focus. Rapport takes a hit when tasks are prioritized over service.

  5. Customers. Some customers are jerks and resist rapport.

There’s also a concept called emotional labor. It takes effort to be nice to people. For some customer service reps, this is exhausting.

How to Build Rapport

You’ll have to remove these barriers if you want your employees to build more rapport with customers. Here are three simple steps to help your employees become rapport-building champions.

Step 1: Look at the Data

Review your customer satsifaction data to see how rapport might be impacting service quality. Do you see evidence of greater rapport in your top box survey scores? Are some employees consistently mentioned in customer service surveys while others are not?

Step 2: Observe

You can learn a lot by assessing the current situation before doing any tinkering. Watch your employees serve customers. Can you observe any of the barriers to rapport mentioned above?

Step 3: Engage the Team

Share your observations with your employees and ask them to help you find solutions. You might be surprised at how many good ideas your team can come up with. You’ll also notice they are more like to implement ideas that are their own.

In many cases, employees just need a little bit of training to help become more adept at building rapport. One of my favorite exercises is called the five question technique.

This short video from my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning explains how the technique works:

Have companies defined outstanding customer service?

In his famous book, Built to Last, Jim Collins observed that companies that endure over a long period of time possess “cult-like cultures.” This is certainly true in customer service. Think of the companies best known for outstanding customer service and you’ll almost certainly find a strong, customer-focused culture.

These cultures are anchored by a clear definition of what outstanding customer service should look like. It gives employees, managers, and executives clear direction when making decisions that impact customers. Without a shared definition, it is very difficult for companies to provide consistent service since everyone has their own idea of what's best.

I recently conducted a survey to discover whether companies have created their own unique definition of outstanding customer service. 

Is outstanding service clearly defined?

Only 62 percent of respondents were positive that their organizations have defined outstanding customer service.

Has your organization created its own definition of outstanding customer service?These results indicate employees at a large number of companies may not have clarity when it comes to how they should treat their customers. 

Does company size matter?

Yes. The larger the company, the more likely it is that outstanding service has been clearly defined. The chart below shows the responses from small, medium, and large companies (based on number of employees).

Percentage of companies that have defined outstanding service, arranged by number of employees.

What do you think is the explanation for such a big gap between small and large employers?

Are employees aware of the definition?

Respondents that indicated their company had defined outstanding service were asked to estimate their employees' awareness of this definition on scale of 1 - 5. The responses indicate awareness is generally high when a shared definition exists. There wasn’t any variation among companies of different sizes so I'm showing the aggregrate data.

If your company has a definition of outstanding service, how aware are your employees?

This question was tricky because respondents were asked to estimate their employees’ awareness of their company’s definition of outstanding service. Do you think the results would be different if we actually quizzed employees in each of these companies?

In my own experience, and this is purely anecdotal, leaders tend to overestimate how well their employees know the company's definition of outstanding service. 

Conclusions

If your company doesn't yet have a clear definition of outstanding customer service, I suggest you create one right away. You can use my customer service vision worksheet if you're not sure where to begin.

If your company does have a clear definition of outstanding customer service, you've taken the first step on the journey to a customer-focused culture. You can use this guide to keep your company moving in the right direction.

ASTD 2013 ICE Conference Re-cap

I attended the ASTD 2013 International Conference & Exposition in Dallas, Texas last week. This is the premier conference for Training and Development professionals with an estimated 9,000 people in attendance. This conference is always important to me since training is at the core of what I do to help clients improve customer service.

Attending a conference like this can feel like drinking from a fire hose so I’ve put together a summary of my top take-aways from the conference.

Conference Overview
You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference.

Another great resource is a collection of David Kelley’s curated resources from the ASTD 2013 Backchannel. 

Conference Themes
These are the top three themes I took away from the conference.

Theme #1: Where's the Performance?
The whole point of training should be to help people perform their jobs better. This topic was conspicuously lacking at the conference.

The conference was certainly rich in content. There were wonderful sessions, keynotes, and vendors sharing the latest trends in learning. The place was abuzz with technology. You had to literally run and hide if you wanted to avoid networking with amazing people.

The missing piece was why any of this should matter. How can we do a better job of helping the employees we serve improve their performance?

Theme #2: Problem-centered Learning
Most training courses today are built around a specific collection of content. A problem-centered learning approach builds training around a specific problem. The content is only introduced (or discovered by participants) as they need it to help solve a problem. 

For example, let’s say you wanted to learn about geography. You could take a course that taught you all sorts of geographic facts. Or, you could try playing a round of GeoGuessr where you are shown a random location and must try to locate it on a world map. The game-based approach challenges you to develop your geography skills by examining clues in the picture to narrow down the location. (Warning: this game is addictive, especially if you try to beat my high score of 27,151.)

This theme promised to move us closer to performance if we can build training around real work challenges. For example, a customer service training program could be designed around around finding ways to improve customer satisfaction ratings. This could make the training much more useful than simply providing a set of generic customer service skills.

Theme #3: Technology
ASTD released its newly updated competency model in 2013. One of the biggest changes was the introduction of Learning Technologies as an area of expertise for the Training & Development Profession. This recognizes the growing influence of technology in how we deliver training and support our employees’ performance.

Two big technology themes at the conference were social and mobile learning. Social learning is a broad term, but at the conference it primarily meant using social technology like Twitter to help foster learning. Mobile referred to learning from a mobile device such as a phone or tablet. In many ways, conference attendees were doing both since we could access most of the session materials from a mobile application and many of us were exchanging ideas and resources via Twitter throughout the conference.

Another area where I see technology growing is the use of webinars for training. Most webinars today are delivered in a boring death-by-lecture format, but they can actually be highly engaging and interactive if facilitated correctly.

For example, I recently facilitated a customer service training program entirely via webinar for a call center client. The highly interactive class was split into one-hour sessions so participants could apply what they learned before focusing on a new skill. The sessions were highly rated and, more importantly, they used what they learned to improve customer service.

If you attended the conference, or tuned in via Twitter, what were your take-aways?

Three tools that make training more effective

So you've decided to send your employees to training. Maybe it's customer service training, or a time management workshop, or perhaps it's a life-changing transformational leadership development experience.

Whatever it is, you are probably about to waste a lot of time and money.

The goal of training should be to help people improve performance. Many training programs focus instead on delivering information. In many cases, it may not even be the right information.

Fortunately, a some simple adjustments can change all this. I've assembled a few of my favorite tools to help your next training event deliver results.

Learning Objectives Worksheet
Many training programs fail to achieve their goals because, well, there are no goals. You can fix this by writing goals that target the specific performance areas you are trying to improve. This worksheet uses the classic A-B-C-D model:

  • Audience: Who is being trained?
  • Behavior: What will they be able to do?
  • Condition: Under what conditions will do it?
  • Degree: How well must they do it?

Download the Worksheet

Workshop Planner
Preparation and follow-up are the keys to a successful training program. This tool helps you perform a simple needs analysis and then create an action plan to maximize the training's impact. And, it's all done on one page.

Download the Worksheet

Employee Development Worksheet
Many Individual Development Plans (IDPs) fall short because they focus on activities rather than results. It really doesn't matter how many books you read or conferences you attend or training classes sign up for. What matters is whether you can use those books, conferences, and training classes to improve performance.

The employee development worksheet helps create a targeted IDP that gets results. 

Download the Worksheet

ACCE 2013 Conference Re-cap

I attended ICMI's ACCE 2013 conference in Seattle, WA this week. This was the 10th anniversary edition of the premier global gathering for contact center professionals.

If you are like me, you find it hard to keep track of all the brilliant ideas, inspiring speakers, and helpful contacts you come across at a conference like this. And, it's sometimes just too difficult to choose between going to one session or another! 

With this in mind, I’ve put together a brief re-cap of some of the conference highlights.

Conference Overview
You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference if you didn’t attend.

I owe a special note of thanks to Voiance Language Services for giving out copies of my book, Service Failure. They made me feel like a star. When people asked how to get my book I was able to send them over to Voiance’s booth in the expo hall!

Conference Themes
Three themes really stood out for me.

Theme #1: Multi-channel customer engagement
Contact centers are interacting with customers in more ways than ever before. We’ve moved beyond phone and email to engage customers with chat, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, text, mobile, and other means. Some customer conversations span multiple channels which makes keeping track of everything even more challenging.

Kathy Hutchens from Sharp Rees-Stealy and David McCann from Varolii co-presented an interesting session on this topic. They talked about ways that Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Centers engaged customers through multiple channels by learning and acting upon customer preferences. Hutchens gave the example that picking the right channel for appointment reminder notices reduced appointment no-shows by 25 percent.

Many participants told me their companies are still struggling to determine who owns some of these channels. I think this Tweet may have said it best:

Theme #2: Technology + People = Success
Technology was a hot topic. It dominated the exhibit hall. Many participants were in search of new technology solutions for their contact centers. It was even a hot topic on the call center tours.

The most successful uses of technology also accounted for the people using it. For example, technology is making it easier than ever before for contact centers to utilize home-based agents. I toured the Starbucks call center where I learned some of their best people practices for making home-based agents successful.

The tour featured a coffee tasting hosted by some of the contact center employees (known as Partners as Starbucks). One of our hosts was a home-based agent who participated via conference call. Their home-based agents regularly participated in these types of events to maintain their connection to the team.

Theme #3: Resource Constraints
Many contact centers don’t have a lot of resources. This puts a lot of technological solutions out of reach, but they still have to find a way to get the job down.

One example came from Tamara Taylor and Dorian Anid at Abbot Vascular. They were part of a session on creative solutions at small call centers. Taylor and Anid used Microsoft Access to create their own CRM system after their request to buy a technology solution was denied. Their homemade system has helped reps work more effectively, but it is also enabling Taylor and Anid to gather data to make a business case for a more robust solution.

I also participated in a roundtable discussion about gathering voice of the customer feedback. The discussion was hosted by Josh Chapman from Cars.com. Chapman’s company employs a lot of sophisticated tools and third-party research firms to gather useful VOC data. This makes sense for Cars.com, but what about a small contact center with no budget for VOC? The roundtable participants discussed a simple solution where the contact center could leverage their company’s existing Survey Monkey account to start a rudimentary VOC program at no cost. It was a small step, but would still yield data they could use to improve customer satisfaction.

On a side note, Josh Chapman was one of several people honored at ICMI’s Global Call Center Awards Dinner. He won the Customer Service Business Leader of the year award and created a memorable moment where his wife tuned into the ceremony via Facetime to see his acceptance speech. 

If you attended, what were your biggest take-aways?

Speed kills first contact resolution

Nobody likes having to contact customer service for help resolving a problem. It’s doubly aggravating to contact them a second time because the issue wasn’t fixed. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it is to contact customer service 16 times on one issue.

First Contact Resolution, or FCR, measures the percentage of customer problems that are resolved on the very first contact. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a high FCR rate is a good idea. Customers are happier and companies are able to work more efficiently.

Surprisingly the metric has been slow to catch on. One factor holding back its adoption is speed.

A recent poll conducted by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) found that FCR ranked fifth among metrics shared with frontline call center employees. Two speed-based metrics and another efficiency-based metric ranked ahead of it.

Source: ICMI

The two most popular metrics for front line employees tell call center agents when to work faster. Many reps will speed up their interactions when there are a lot of calls in queue. This in turn allows them to improve service levels (the percentage of calls answered within a set amount of time).

Schedule adherence is an efficiency metric. It calculates the degree to which call center agents are working their assigned schedule. Agents may be less likely to spend time fixing a difficult problem if they feel pressured to immediately take the next incoming call.

The impulse to work faster can hurt FCR. Employees take short cuts, speed up their interactions, and try to multitask their way through an avalanche of work. All of this can make it harder to spot the important details that are the difference between First Contact Resolution and Endless Back-and-Forth. You can see an example of this in my breakdown of an email service failure.

I recently attended the Contact Center Conference & Expo where FCR was one of the hot topics. However, I was only talked to a few people who were actually measuring FCR in their contact center.

One of those people was Kathie Gerrard from MTS Allstream, a business communications provider in Canada. Gerrard told me that their FCR initiative really took off when they stopped emphasizing another speed-related metric, Average Handle Time (AHT).

 “A few years ago, we identified FCR as a key performance indicator and began to set improvement targets. Although we’ve seen improvements in our FCR results, we’ve found that monitoring average handle times contradicts FCR. AHT metrics encourage reps to shorten the length of the call instead of focusing on resolving the customer’s issues.”

MTS Allstream still tracked AHT behind the scenes even after they stopped emphasizing it with their reps. Gerrard told me that they haven’t seen a significant increase in AHT since shifting their focus to FCR. Her observations suggest that the extra time required to resolve a customers’ problem completely is often negligible. It’s the pressure to wrap things up quickly that actually causes the service failure.

Gerrard also told me MTS Allstream had widespread executive support for their FCR initiative. This isn't always the case. Another call center manager I spoke to at the Contact Center Conference & Expo told me his executives resisted moving to FCR because they had invested so much money in technology that measured speed and efficiency. They understood and felt comfortable with metrics like calls in queue and average handle time.

How do you get your executives on board? Show them the money. Here are a few ways that FCR can lead to financial results.

  • Reduce Waste: 23 percent of the average call center's budget goes to repeat calls. (Source: SQM Group)

  • Increase Revenue: 66 percent of customers will spend more for excellent customer service. (Source: American Express)

  • Retain Customers: 19 percent of customers are at risk of leaving if their problem isn't resolved on the first call. (Source: SQM Group)

Slowing down to speed up is counter-intuitive, but the numbers don't lie. Speed can kill first contact resolution. 

Extended Q&A for Hidden Causes of Poor Service Webinar

I recently got a chance to be a Zenmaster for a day when the folks at Zendesk asked me to facilitate a webinar called Three Hidden Reasons Why Good People Provide Bad Service.

It was a lively session with lots of great questions. In fact, we ran out of time before I could answer them all, so I'm responding here to ten additional questions from participants.

The interactive webinar is embedded in this post (click here if you don't see it) and the additional questions are answered below it. 

Question: I have heard that speed is the # 1 factor in great service. Are you recommending we slow down?

Yes. It doesn’t matter how fast you respond if you don’t resolve the problem. Customers won’t mind a slight delay if you take the time to get it right.

The counter-intuitive paradox is you will actually go faster by working slower. For example, look at the service failure I shared on the webinar where it took three emails to answer one question. Let’s say that each email took 30 seconds to write. That means they actually spent 90 seconds solving my problem. What if they took an extra 15 seconds to fully respond to my first email? That would mean they spent 45 seconds on the problem, or half the time. 

Question: I am in a unique position, I am the sole person answering emails and calls for my company. All customer service issues are on me. How would someone like me not multitask if I am the only person doing this?

This can be tough when you are a one-person show, but there are a few ways you can reduce multitasking.

  • Try to focus on non-phone tasks like email when phone volumes are lower.
  • Only open email when you’ve set aside time to focus on it. This will prevent the email notifications from constantly distracting you.
  • When the phone does ring while writing an email, resist the temptation to quickly finish the email. Set it aside and give it your full attention again once you’re off the phone.

Question: Where may we gather information to test Customer Effort Score?

Check out this Customer Effort Score primer to get started. One word of caution – no single metric will answer all your questions. It’s good to start by asking, “How can we improve?” and then finding the most appropriate set of indicators for your business.

Question: Great presentation, thank you. My question is about incentivizing our customer service agents. It's very easy to track calls answered or emails answered but much more difficult to get numbers for satisfaction. In my experience, customers don't always want to leave positive feedback, they are more likely to leave negative feedback.

Incentivizing survey scores can be a risky proposition that may actually lead to negative performance. You’ll get much better results if you set a team goal (without incentives) and use the survey as a continuous improvement tool. In this way, negative feedback can help you spot problems and improve. 

Question: What tools do you use to measure net promoter score?

It comes from a single survey question that asks how likely the customer is to recommend your company, product, or service (on a scale of 1 – 10). You can learn more from this overview.

Question: We have that issue (some people spending too much time on phones). What are some tips for keeping phone conversations under control?

In general, I’ve had success training my team to focus on clarifying the customer’s needs by asking good questions and actively listening. At the same time, I’ve encouraged everyone to try to fully serve the customer’s needs on the first call since a little extra talk time is much less expensive than a second call and a more irritated customer.

Question: Our company has some focus on metrics for customer service. Can a company be too focused on these metrics?

Yes! Getting too focused on metrics can take the focus away from the ultimate goal of providing outstanding customer service. The metrics should tell you if you’re on the right track, not whether or not you’ve arrived.

I recently wrote two blog posts on the danger of focusing too much on metrics:

Question: Do you have recommendations for metrics on resolving customer questions as a measurement? I can choose to send out a "survey" feedback request for every email, but that gets irritating for customers to fill out every time they contact us about every little thing. Currently, we do a LOT of individual email reviewing which is great, but do you have any other suggestions to get at this metric in particular?

Getting feedback directly from the customer is a good way to determine whether an issue is resolved, but you are right to want to avoid irritating customers with feedback requests.

Some of my clients have had good success putting the survey request in the email itself. That way, customers can choose to click on a link to the survey if they want to provide feedback. Your response rate will probably go down, but the survey will also be less annoying. If your response rate goes down too far, you can try sending a survey request to a sample of customers, but not to everyone.

Question: How important do you think it is to keep consistency in call center hours - is it harmful for someone to take initiative and take a call after hours?

Is your specific concern that you might train customers to call after hours if you take the occasional call? I don’t think it’s too big a deal if you have the resources available.

However, you may want to review your call volume by time of day. This way, you can adjust your call center hours as needed to best match your volume.

Question: Our sla is 1 business day, but we sometimes get customers that expect a 2-4 hours reply and it is impossible with the resources we have. Any advice to deal with this situation?

There are a couple of tactics you can use to manage customer expectations. First, post your standard response time wherever you display your email on your website. Second, create an auto response email that acknowledges each email received and tells the customer you will respond within one business day. Most customers are okay if you clarify up front how long it will take to respond, but can get anxious if you don’t do this.

Question: If a client is in the wrong and we notice, do you have advice on how to resolve the problem gently without pointing fingers?

The customer may not always be technically correct, but I like to try to make it easier for the customer to be right. Here are a few suggestions:

  • Focus on finding a solution rather than placing blame.
  • Make an exception to a policy when possible.
  • Learn from the situation. Is there a way to help other customers avoid similar misunderstandings?

Why customers don’t read signs

Anyone who has served customers face-to-face can attest to the fact that customers don’t read signs.

Take a look at this example from a deli. The sign above the bin clearly reads Recycle (in two languages!), yet many customers have ignored the sign and used it to throw away their trash.

So, why don’t customers read and follow simple signs like this one?

The root cause of this problem stems from employees and customers viewing the experience through different frames. As I noted in a recent post, customers often see things differently.

Going back to the deli, let’s start by looking at the employees’ perspective. The location of the recycling bin seems like a matter of common sense because their actions reinforce their knowledge of the bin's location:

  • They put out the recycling bin so they know where it is.
  • They put up the sign.
  • They put out the trash bin too (15 feet away, not pictured).
  • They empty the recycling bin and have to sort out the trash.
  • They direct customers to the recycling bin when asked.

Now, let’s look at the customers’ perspective. It only took a few minutes of observing customers to see what led people to put trash in the recycling bin.

I observed customers stand up, scoop up their trash, and quickly scan the area for a trash bin. The recycling bin was closest to the deli’s tables, so it was the first bin most customers saw.

The bin looked like a trash bin at first glance. It was gray and stood by itself, so customers naturally approached the bin thinking this was where trash goes. This thought was reinforced when they peered inside the bin and saw a mixture of trash and recycling.

Deli customers are in a slight hurry to leave once they finish their lunch. Being in a hurry can narrow our focus and lead to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness that causes normally obvious things to disappear from view. Hurried customers fixated on a solo gray bin filled with trash could easily overlook the recycling sign.

Customers can and will make mistakes like putting trash in the recycling bin. I even devoted the second chapter of Service Failure to the notion that the customer is not always technically correct. However, it’s our job as customer service professionals to make it easier for customers to be right.

Here’s what the deli could do to help their customers recycle:

  • Put the recycling bin and trash bin side-by-side so customers see both.
  • Use a blue bin for recycling to differentiate it from the trash bin.
  • Add the "chasing arrows" universal recycling symbol to the sign.

Customer service employees often find themselves getting annoyed, frustrated, or exasperated with customers who don’t read or follow signs. However, taking a step back to observe customer behavior can often reveal simple solutions that will yield better results.