How to keep hot potatoes from burning your customers

Image source: Flickr / Ian Burt

Some customer service problems are like a hot potato; nobody wants to touch it. 

We’ve all heard the language of excuses. Employees use these words to avoid blame and pass the proverbial potato on to someone else. None of these lines make customers happy:

• “It just fell through the cracks.”
• “Who told you that?!”
• “That’s not my job.”
• “You’ll have to talk to someone in another department.”
• “I just do what they tell me to do.”

If you want to prevent hot potatoes from burning your customers, you’ll need to know three things about taking ownership:

1. Why employees don’t own problems
2. The real definition of ownership
3. How employees can take ownership

Why employees don't own problems

I’ve asked thousands of customer service professionals why it's tempting for employees to avoid taking ownership. Their answers generally boil down into three primary reasons.

The first reason is they want to avoid blame. It’s the employee’s job to solve the problem, but this isn’t always the top priority for customer service employees. The desire to preserve self-esteem is often stronger.

The second reason is they don’t believe they can fix the problem. In many cases, the employee doesn’t have the authority or they physically aren’t able to do it. For example, if you order a steak in a restaurant and it comes out undercooked, your server has to rely on the chef to cook the steak a little longer. If the chef chronically undercooks steaks, the server may eventually develop what psychologists called learned helplessness and stop trying altogether.

The third reason is the employee is disengaged. According to Gallup’s latest report, 70 percent of American workers are not engaged with their company. These employees aren’t about to go out of their way to solve a difficult problem. It’s much easier to pass a hot potato along to someone else.

If you want to overcome these challenges, you’ll need to help employees understand the real definition of ownership.

The real definition of ownership

Here’s how I define ownership in customer service:

Ownership is the process of accepting responsibility for solving a problem. 

Notice that ownership is not:

• Accepting blame
• Assigning blame to someone else
• Personally fixing the problem (although this might happen)

Employees who take ownership expand their circle of influence to find a way to get things done. They navigate around obstacles. They work with others to solve the problem if they can’t do it themselves. They resist temptation to pass the buck. They refuse to let anything fall through the cracks.

How employees can take ownership

Here’s a simple three-step model that can help employees learn to take ownership. 

Step 1: Acknowledge the problem. It’s important to demonstrate empathy by acknowledging the problem. This validates the customer’s negative emotions and positions the employee as someone who cares. If this is something you or your employees struggle with, you can read my post on five ways to help employees empathize.

Step 2: Re-focus on a solution. The conversation should now re-focus on finding a solution. Think of this as customer service judo where you take all of the energy surrounding the problem and redirect it towards partnering with the customer to find a solution. 

Step 3: Be the point person. The means making sure the problem gets resolved one way or another. Sometimes, the employee fixes the problem personally. At other times, the employee must coordinate with other people to obtain a solution.

Cindy, a participant in one of my customer service training classes, recently sent me an outstanding example of how to effectively use this model.

"A customer had previously left a voicemail message for a co-worker who had been on vacation. When she called in I assured her that I would get the information for her right away.” (Step 1: Acknowledge the problem)

Cindy asked a few questions to find out what the customer needed. “Turns out it was actually a problem for a different co-worker. When all was said and done there were others who had partial information regarding this customer's request.” (Step 2: Re-focus on a solution)

“I took responsibility for making sure her needs were met by getting all communication components from those involved and responded back to her quickly with what she needed." (Step 3: Be the point person)

You only imagine what would have happened if Cindy has simply dumped the call into her co-worker's voicemail instead of handling it!

Additional Resources

Solving problems is a huge part of providing outstanding customer service. Here are some more resources that can help you become a master problem solver:

• Don’t let icebergs sink your service ship
• Why angry customers don’t complain
• How could they miss that?

Why Customer Service Isn't Our Top Priority

Source: Wikipedia (author unknown)

Customer service is not our top priority in life. At best it’s fifth. Understand this and you can understand what really motivates customer service employees.

Don’t take this into account and you run the risk of service failures.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great when customer service is a top priority for a company. Making service your number one business focus is an insanely good idea. No arguments here. 

Just understand that there are more things to life.

Customer service is our fifth priority

In 1943, Psychologist Abraham Maslow first proposed a framework that ranked our basic human needs in priority order. 

1. Physiological
2. Safety
3. Love and Belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self-actualization

According to Maslow’s theory, our focus shifts when a higher priority need is not being met. For example, we all value our physical safety, but we’d be willing to risk injury or death if our physiological need for food or water wasn’t being met. The framework, known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, has since become widely used in the management, training, human resources, and psychology fields.

Providing outstanding customer service is a form of self-actualization, the fifth priority in Maslow’s model. Service professionals typically enjoy solving problems, attending to their customers’ needs, and making people happy. They also have a difficult time being their absolute best if more important needs such as esteem aren’t being met.

I explored this topic in Chapter 10 of my book, Service Failure where I wrote about the emotional roadblocks that can get in the way of outstanding service. Here, I want to go a bit deeper with some additional examples.

Self-esteem

There are times when working in customer service can really challenge your self-esteem. 

First, there are angry customers. The worst can be rude, demeaning, and insulting. Our actions would likely be different in any other situation where we encountered this sort of behavior. We’d either confront the person or try to get away from them. 

In customer service, we get to do neither. The expectation is that we keep a big smile on our face while we take it all in, acknowledge that the person is right (even if they’re not), and then try to make it better. 

Bosses often challenge their employees’ self-esteem too. They hand out “discipline” for poor performance while failing to recognize positive contributions. Employees are often treated like interchangeable parts where one can be discarded and easily replaced with another. Psychologists have even found evidence that it’s surprisingly easy for bosses to put their employees in awkward positions by asking them to do work they’d never do themselves. 

Love and Belonging

I recently had an extraordinary experience at the end of a customer service workshop I had facilitated. Two participants approached me after the class. They nervously looked around to make sure everyone else had left the room and then one of them asked, “What do you do when your boss is the problem?”

The two proceeded to tell me about their experiences with a recent re-organization. What had once been a cohesive team was now a difficult place to work. Roles were unclear. Policies seemed to change constantly. Bosses didn’t communicate. Long-time co-workers had begun to mistrust each other. 

After a few minutes of conversation, one of them let down her guard and began to cry. Her co-worker tried to comfort her with a big hug and soon found herself crying too. 

Clearly, their need for love and belonging in their job wasn’t being met. This made it hard to display the confidence that’s so critical in customer service but is difficult without self-esteem. It also made it nearly impossible to give their best performance in a job where they no longer felt a sense of belonging.

You can’t expect greatness from employees when they feel a sense of hopelessness and dispair.

Solutions

The primary function of a customer service leader is to make it easy for employees to provide outstanding customer service. This includes creating a work environment where employees feel a sense of love and belonging and enjoy high levels of self-esteem.

Are you up to the task? If so, here are a few things you can do:

• Ensure that leaders foster caring and supportive relationships with employees.
• Give customers as little as possible to be angry about.
• Never tolerate a customer who crosses the line with an employee.

That’s the big picture. It’s simple in concept but difficult in execution. You can check out some of these resources if you want some more specific ideas.

• The Communicate Better Blog exemplifies taking care of priorities 3, 4, and 5 in one project. It's written by Jeremy Watkin and Jenny Dempsey, two of Phone.com's customer service leaders. They're an impressive duo that I've previously profiled.

• The Employee Engagement Cycle is a helpful tool for understanding how you can be deliberate about keeping employees focused on self-actualization.
  

• My recent blog post on employee emotions as a new frontier for efficiency.

What we can learn from customer service benchmarks

Benchmarking can help you improve customer service.

I recently teamed up with Jen Waite from inContact to present an ICMI Educast on benchmarking. It’s a short, informative webcast that explained the value of benchmarking in call centers and provided practical tips for getting started. It’s definitely worth checking out if you work in a contact center.

The process got me thinking about broader applications for benchmarking customer service. Regardless of your industry or customer service specialty, there’s probably a relevant benchmark that can help you identify ways to resolve problems, validate performance, or gain executive buy-in for a new ideas.

Here’s an example of a question that’s relatively easy to answer using benchmark data:

Is customer service really getting worse?

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), customer satisfaction has actually gotten slightly better in the past 20 years.

Source: American Customer Satisfaction Index

What causes all the ups and downs? One explanation is the ACSI tends to be a leading indicator of changes in the US gross domestic product: 

Source: American Customer Satisfaction Index

Admittedly, it can sometimes be difficult to draw meaningful conclusions for such high level data. Here are a few more practical ways you can use customer service benchmarks.

Competitive Analysis

Benchmarks can let you know how you stack up against your competition. 

For example, let’s say you work at a telecommunications company and want to know whether your 77 percent customer satisfaction rating is any good. You could look at the latest ACSI benchmark report to discover the industry average is 74 percent.

Given this context, your customer satisfaction rating isn’t bad, but you may want to do more to distance yourself from the pack.

Identify Industry Trends

You can use benchmarks to spot specific trends in your industry. 

Suppose you work for a retailer and want to know whether you should invest in self-service technology for customer service. A benchmark report from customer service software provider Zendesk reveals two compelling stats for the retail industry:

• 53 percent of self-service attempts result in the customer contacting the retailer directly for support. (Compared to only 25 percent for all industries.)
• 21 percent of self-service attempts are made via a smart phone.

The first statistic suggests that a lot of retailers haven’t figured out effective ways to consistently provide their customers with self-service. You may need to look outside your industry for good examples.

The second statistic suggests that a mobile self-service option may be important to your customers. Zendesk’s data reveals overall growth of 50 percent in mobile self-service in just one year.

Learn Customer Expectations

It’s helpful to know what customers generally expect when creating systems, policies, and procedures. Designing something that will fall short of customer expectations is a recipe for disaster.

What if you wanted to know how quickly customers expected responses to inquiries sent via various service channels?. You could turn to Oracle’s Consumer Views of Live Help Online to learn about customer expectations for Facebook and Twitter response times. My own email response time study could fill in the gap for email. Here are the averages:

• Facebook: 2 hours
  
• Twitter: 2 hours
•  Email: 1 business day

Keep in mind these are averages, which means a certain percentage of customers expect even faster responses. The data suggests your service channels needs to be very responsive just to meet your customers' basic expectations.

A word of caution

There’s a famous Mark Twain quote that serves as a cautionary notice to anyone using benchmark data:

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

In other words, approach benchmark data with caution. Take time to understand where the data is coming from and then use the data to make generalizations rather than absolute statements. Recognize that there are many ways to slice and dice data to fit a certain point of view.

For instance, how could we settle the question of which airline offers the best customer service?

I could easily nominate Alaska Airlines, my personal favorite, by citing JD Power’s airline industry rankings. For 2013, Alaska Airlines topped the traditional category.  A Jet Blue fan might counter by showing me both the JD Power Index for low-cost carriers  and the ACSI airline index where Jet Blue currently leads both. An international traveler might suggest that Singapore Airlines is the best because they're the highest rated airline on the Conde Nast Reader’s Choice poll, ahead of both Alaska and Jet Blue. 

See what I mean? There are no absolutes. It’s often very easy to find benchmark data to support several equally valid arguments.

The opposite can hold true as well. The credibility of your benchmark data will quickly come under fire if it refutes a strongly held opinion.

Suppose I asked you to name the best city for pizza in the United States. Is it New York? Chicago? According to Trip Advisor, the answer is San Diego.

I live in San Diego and even I don’t believe that one.

Confirmation Bias and The Power of First Impressions

First impressions set the tone. 

We all know that great first impressions are important in customer service. But exactly how do first impressions influence customers’ perceptions of service quality?

One factor is a powerful force called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias occurs when people have strongly held opinions. There’s a natural tendency to selectively filter new information, facts, and experiences based upon whether it confirms our opinion. We conveniently hang on to anything that supports our point of view while ignoring or dismissing any evidence to the contrary.

If you want to see confirmation bias in action, all you have to do is strike up a conversation with someone about politics, religion, or sports. Find out where they stand and then try to change their mind. Good luck.

In customer service, a strong first impression can form the basis for future confirmation bias. This can work in your favor if the impression is good or against you if the impression is bad.

Here are two examples from recent hotel visits:

Good example – Sheraton JFK

Evette greeted me as I arrived at the hotel shuttle pick-up area at New York’s JFK airport. I was tired from a long flight but her cheerful greeting immediately lifted my spirits.

“Hi! My name is Evette. I’m your greeter.”

The shuttle came on demand, so she radioed the hotel to request a shuttle to pick me up. Evette kept me company while I waited by giving me some additional information about the hotel and transportation options in the area. I was also impressed to see her helping people headed to other hotels find their shuttles.

Evette told me, “I work for the Sheraton, but it doesn’t cost me anything to help people going to other hotels since I’m already out here.” She was a great example of what Steve Curtin talks about in his book, Delight Your Customers. The spirit of service is separate from your job function, it’s voluntary, and it’s often free.

When the shuttle arrived she introduced me by name to the driver, Mike. It was a short ride over to the hotel where a friendly front desk associate named Livingstone checked me in. 

The positive first impression created by these associates did more than just start my stay off on a good note. It helped me form the opinion that this hotel offered good service. Once that opinion was formed, I became biased towards observing and remembering positive aspects of their service while dismissing or ignoring any minor occurrence that didn’t confirm that opinion.

Bad example – budget hotel

I recently stayed at a different hotel that created a less than stellar first impression. 

There was only one associate at the front desk to check in a long line of guests. I was tired from a long day of travel and the line felt like one more obstacle between me and relaxation. When I finally got to the front of the line, the associate seemed as tired as I felt while she plodded through the check in process.

To make matters worse, my key didn’t work when I got to my room so I had to go back to the front desk. Ugh.

This negative first impression left me irritated and tired by the time I got to the room. It gave me the opinion that this hotel provided poor service and it was all too easy to find additional examples throughout my stay. Each new service failure compounded my disappointment until I decided to document the problems on a short video.

Reality

The reality is I probably experienced a mixture of service at both hotels. The Sheraton JFK certainly provided better overall service but there were a few things they could have done better. I likely would have noticed more, or have been more bothered by what I did notice, if the first impression they created hadn’t been so good.

That other hotel also had some positive aspects too. There’s a very good chance I would have noticed more of them if the initial impression hadn’t been so poor. 

Most of perceptions about a company are really comprised of several experiences over time. This makes the first impression so important since it can serve as a reference for future experiences. I illustrated an example of this continuum in a post about Verizon that described how good service I had received was really a combination of good, outstanding, and poor experiences.

How to make a good first impression

Making a good first impression is usually easy if you follow a few steps.

Step 1: Observe first impressions from your customers’ perspective. This can quickly show you what’s working and what’s not. For example if you manage a call center, you could call to see how long it takes to reach a live agent, how easy it is to navigate the phone menu, what it feels like to be on hold, and what type of greeting you receive when you finally do reach a live person. You can use this same approach with many other types of businesses simply by tracing the same steps a customer would.

Step 2: Ensure you have adequate staffing to make a good first impression. Customers hate to wait, so immediately putting them in a long line isn’t the right way to get things started. If a wait is unavoidable, you can still employ a few jedi mind tricks to make the wait seem shorter.

Step 3: Learn and use customer names. Calling customers by name is a great way to make a customer feel welcome by personalizing the service they receive. Don’t forget that names are a two way street. Customers are much more likely to give service high marks if they remember your employees’ names.

Additional resources: Here are some other blog posts that also focus on positive first impressions:

• You lost me at hello

• How hotels can generate loyalty on the first visit

• Five question technique

 

Jedi mind tricks for reducing customer wait time

Updated July 2, 2021

It’s no secret that customers hate to wait.

What may be surprising is customer satisfaction isn’t just influenced by the actual amount of time spent waiting. How customers spend that time is also important.

A New York Times article provides a nice summary of ways that psychology influences our perception of wait times. One statistic really jumps out:

People overestimate actual wait times by as much as 36 percent. 

In other words, waiting a little bit makes us feel like we’ve waited a bit more. The good news is companies can influence customers’ perceptions of wait times even when they can’t decrease the actual time spent waiting.

Would you be interested in learning a few Jedi mind tricks to help your customers feel less aggravation, frustration, and dissatisfaction the next time they have to wait?

If so, read on.

What influences wait time perception?

Let’s start with a basic overview of some of the factors that influence our perception of wait times. These are primarily directed at physically standing in line, but many can be connected to other situations such as being on hold with a call center. Much of the background data is neatly summarized in a 1995 research paper called The Experienced Utility of Queuing.

However, here are factors that can make the wait seem longer:

• Expectations. The wait time is longer than we expected it to be.

• Fairness. People are cutting in line.

• Competition. Another line appears to be moving faster.

• Movement. The queue is moving slowly.

• Line Length. We can see a long line.

• Boredom. Our wait time perception increases when we are bored.

• Unpredictability. There is no information telling us how much longer it will be.

Understanding these factors can allow companies to reduce customers’ perceptions that they are waiting a long time.

Disney is a master of this science in their theme parks. The Indiana Jones Adventure ride is a great example.

• A sign at the ride’s entrance displays an expected wait time (usually a conservative estimate).

• The line is clearly demarcated so interlopers are less likely to wander in.

• There’s a single line (except for “Fast Pass” holders and disabled guests), so nobody gets anxious over choosing the wrong line.

• The line is designed to keep moving so guests feel as though they are constantly making progress.

• Guests are led through a series of rooms so they aren’t able to see the length of the line.

• Entertaining videos and clever displays make guests feel the adventure has already begun.

• The line is designed to give guests a glimpse of the end so they get a sense that they’re getting closer.

Make no mistake. The line for the ride is often quite long. However, a little Disney magic has prompted more than one guest to say, “I wish we didn’t have to wait in line for an hour, but it didn’t seem that long.”

Ways to reduce perceived wait time

You don’t have to design an entertainment extravaganza to help your customers feel like the wait isn’t quite so long. A few simple strategies can make a big impact.

Strategy #1: Provide accurate estimates. Restaurants, call centers, cable companies, and many other businesses routinely provide estimated wait times. This strategy cuts both ways. Customers are generally satisfied if the estimated wait time is agreeable and it matches (or is slight longer than) the actual wait. Customers generally get upset if they end up waiting longer than expected or the original estimate is too long.

The key here is to give accurate, but slightly conservative wait time estimates. Historical data and operational knowledge often enable these fairly precise forecasts. Just be careful to check your estimates frequently to make sure they’re still accurate.

Strategy #2: Provide a fair and common queue. We’ve all played the game at the supermarket where you select the line you hope will go the fastest. Another surprise from the New York Times article was that the negative feeling associated with seeing another line move faster than yours is much stronger than a positive reaction from picking the best line.

The common queue or common-feeder line is a way to reduce this anxiety. It also makes it more difficult for interlopers to exploit confusion and cut their way in front of someone else.

Well-trained employees can step in when it’s not possible to physically denote the line. I recently rode the cable car in San Francisco and was amazed at how well the cable car operators ensured passengers boarded the car in the order they were waiting. Knowing they were making sure the process was fair reduced a lot of passengers’ anxiety.

Strategy #3: Occupy their time. Another sure-fire way to make wait times feel shorter is to keep your customers occupied or entertained.

You don’t have to be Disney to take advantage of this simple principle. Some restaurants put out free coffee at breakfast to help guests warm up while they wait. Waiting rooms have magazines, television, and free WiFi. Call centers have music or messages played while customers are on hold.

One of the best ways to occupy your customers’ time is through engaging them directly. Initiating conversation will make the time fly for your customer and it may even help uncover additional ways to be of service. Don’t worry if you aren’t a natural conversationalist – you can always borrow my five question technique.

Conclusion

Learn more about influencing customers’ perception of wait times from this short video:

Making wait time more bearable from Innovative Customer Service Techniques by Jeff Toister

---

How often do you talk about customer service?

How often do you talk about customer service?

Companies are constantly searching for new and interesting ways to improve customer service. Here’s a simple one that has flown under the radar:

Talk about customer service more often.

Pick up any book profiling a company that’s known for delivering outstanding customer service. You’ll see a consistent theme whether it’s Disney, Nordstrom, Ritz Carlton, Southwest Airlines, or Zappos. They all talk about customer service a lot. You have to be obsessive if you want to your people to consistently deliver outstanding service.

How often do you talk about customer service with your employees?

If you’re a customer-focused leader, the answer is daily. 

Employees tend to attach the same level of importance to concepts as their leaders do. If leaders talk about something a lot, it must be important. Conversely, employees don’t focus much energy on topics that leaders rarely discuss.

If customer service is important, you need to talk about it a lot.

Why leaders stay silent on service

I typically get one of two answers when I ask leaders why they don’t talk about customer service more often. 

The most common is “I don’t have time.”

The statement “I don’t have time” really means that customer service isn’t a top priority. There are other tasks that the leader has chosen to spend his or her time on instead of devoting time to customer service. It’s important to recognize that customer service isn’t really a high priority if you aren’t able to carve out time from other tasks to devote to it.

Service shouldn’t be something you talk about when you get a chance. It needs to be the way you do business. The secret is integrating the service conversation into communication that’s already taking place.

Are you willing to make customer service a priority?

The second most common reason I get for not talking about customer service more often is leaders don't know how. They tell me, "I don't know how to keep the conversation fresh and meaningful."

How to keep the conversation going

The first step is to make sure your employees all define outstanding customer service the same way. This gives everyone a common frame of reference for ongoing conversations. You are welcome to download my customer service vision worksheet to help you complete this step.

The second step is to integrate customer service into the daily operational discussions you already have. Looking at service as an initiative separate from your daily work is a sure-fire way to make service a low priority.

Here ten ways you can keep the conversation going:

• Talk about service in team meetings.

• Incorporate service into one-on-one discussions.

• Make service enhancement one of the success criteria for projects.

• Add a service section to bulletin boards and newsletters.

• Integrate customer service into strategic plans.

• Include a service metric on executive dashboards.

• Consider customer impact when solving problems.

• Ensure department goals are customer-focused. Track results.

• Review customer feedback with the team on a regular basis.

• Discuss customer service in employee review discussions.

Bonus tip! A client once asked me if there was an easy way to share customer service tips and reminders with the team. Their question led to the creation of a simple Customer Service Tip of the Week email. 

Anyone can subscribe for free by clicking here.

REI's tighter return policy is still customer-friendly

I take my dog to the beach more often thanks to a purchase encouraged by REI's generous return policy.

Last June, outdoor retailer Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) tightened up its return policy that allowed customers to return an item at any time for any reason. Customers now have up to a year to return most merchandise for a replacement or refund. The Seattle Times published a good overview of the changes.

REI implemented their new policy to address a reported spike in older items being returned at a time when corporate profits are shrinking. Outside magazine even reported a story of a customer who funded his outdoor adventures by profiting from fraudulent returns.  

To their credit, REI's stricter policy remains customer-friendly. You can still return most items for any reason within the one-year period. And, REI still offers a lifetime warranty on any item that is defective. The full text of the new policy is on the REI website. 

REI’s generous return policy recently gave my wife and me the confidence to make a purchase we otherwise might not have made.

We were thinking about buying a special cover that would allow our dog to ride in the back seat of our car. Its sturdy material protected the car’s interior while creating a hammock that was supposed to be comfortable for the dog. Our only reservation was we weren’t sure if our dog would actually like it.

The helpful REI salesperson told us to go for it. If our dog didn’t like it, he explained, we had one year to return the cover for a full refund. It didn’t matter if it was covered with dog hair and drool. We could still get our money back.

The return policy sold us. And, it turned out that our dog loves the new cover.

REI did a great job tweaking their policy. They prevented a small percentage of customers from hurting their business while making sure they didn’t punish the rest of their loyal fans. 

Here are a few lessons that can be applied to other businesses worried about dishonest customers:

• Don’t punish the majority of customers who are honest because a few customers aren’t.
• Most customers will understand a policy that sets reasonable limits.
• A generous policy can be an effective sales tool.

 

How Detoxing Our Brains Can Improve Customer Service

A constant stream of information can be overwhelming.

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Blog. You can also read my latest Salesforce blog post, "The Biggest Myth in Customer Service."

The ability to pay attention is one of the most important customer service skills. It helps us understand our customers’ needs and identify solutions to make them happy.

Unfortunately, this ability can become strained or even compromised as our brains respond to an ever-increasing avalanche of distractions. When this happens, we get irritated, and find it difficult to pay attention. And when that happens, service failures become increasingly likely.

What’s the cure to this malady? Our brains need to go on an information diet so they can detox and recover.

Causes and Symptoms

A study conducted at the University of San Diego estimated the average person consumes 34 gigabytes of information per day. That 2009 estimate for the average person is certainly much lower than what a typical customer service employee is exposed to today.

Today’s customer service representatives are overwhelmed by information. They speak to customers and co-workers face to face, answer phones, respond to emails, text, chat, Tweet, and post on Facebook. For an increasing number of people, one computer screen is not enough, so now we have two. Retail stores wire their associates to headsets for constant communication. Food servers juggle several orders simultaneously. A new email flashes on the screen to interrupt our train of thought, only to be interrupted by a hovering co-worker who is in turn interrupted by a ringing phone.

For many of us, the information avalanche continues when our work day is over. We listen to the radio or talk on our mobile phone during our commute. When we get home we turn on the television, surf the web, text our friends, post, update, and share. It doesn’t even end at night as more and more of us bring our smart phones to bed.

This high volume of information takes its toll on our ability to concentrate. Continuously focusing and re-focusing our attention can leave our brains feeling exhausted. Without enough rest and recovery, it can eventually lead to a condition called Directed Attention Fatigue.

Here are some common symptoms of Directed Attention Fatigue (B. Cimprich, 2007):

• Distractibility

• Irritability

• Impatience

• Indecisiveness

• Difficulty starting and finishing tasks

 None of these qualities are conducive to outstanding customer service.

As the condition worsens, it becomes increasingly difficult to pay attention. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell coined the term “Attention Deficit Trait” or ADT to refer to this brain overload effect. In a 2005 article in Harvard Business Review, Hallowell described a striking similarity between ADT and the well-known medical condition ADD (attention deficit disorder).

Hallowell observed that the number of patients he treated with ADT symptoms had increased ten times from 1995 to 2005. You can only wonder what that number looks like today.

How to Detox Your Brain

Our brains need time to recover from the constant bombardment of information and stimuli that vie for our attention. Here are five strategies you can employ that will put you in a better mood, increase your mental acuity, and improve your ability to pay attention to customers.

1. Take information breaks throughout the day

Studies show that customer service often gets worse in the afternoon, when employees get tired. Your break routine might be part of the issue. What does the typical customer service employee do on their break? They continue the information overload on their personal phone by checking email, responding to texts, and posting on Facebook. A better strategy is to stop the overflow of information completely. Try taking a walk or having a conversation with a co-worker.

2. Impose a curfew on electronics before bed

Sleep naturally restores our ability to focus, but our ability to get a good night’s sleep can be hampered if we continue to consume information as we go to bed. Sleep experts recommend shutting down electronic devices an hour before bed time to help improve the quality of sleep.

3. Commune with nature

Numerous studies have found that exposure to nature, such as taking a hike, can help restore our ability to pay attention.

4. Take a digital vacation

You may not be able to control the constant barrage of information at work, but you can do something about it in your personal life. Try taking a digital vacation where you turn off your phone, computer, and TV for a weekend. It may be hard at first to resist the digital cravings that are stirring up your appetite for useless information, but stick with it! You might just re-discover the simple joys of personal conversation, reading a book, or playing a board game.

5. Take a real vacation

Pack your bags and get out of town or take a “stay-cation” and explore your home town. Whatever you do, give your brain a break from the rat race.

Want more ideas for detoxing your brain? Check out Fast Company’s digital detox list or follow the #unplug hashtag on Twitter.

Signs that a service failure lies ahead

Businesses use signs for a variety of reasons. They’re used as advertising to entice customers to come on in. They offer guidance so people head in the right direction. They’re also posted to warn people about potential hazards.

I’ve written about signs a few times before. One post examined an unfriendly sign from a penny-pinching business that may have cost more money in lost customers. Another post had some fun with humorous signs posted in restrooms. I even wrote a post explaining why customers often don’t read signs.

Sometimes, signs warn customers that a service failure lies ahead. Here’s the signage I recently encountered outside a casual restaurant:

Would you want to eat here? 

The rules themselves aren’t unreasonable, but these signs suggest the restaurant focuses more on making sure guests are well-behaved than providing a great experience. 

Signs like this are often just the tip of the customer service iceberg. A closer look at this restaurant revealed other indicators that a service failure is likely to happen. Their rating on Yelp was 2.5 stars. Trip Advisor reviewers were a little more generous with a 3 average. They offered open air seating, so I was able to observe a server greeting a newly seated table. Her opening lines consisted of listing the items they were out of. No “Hello,” “How are you today?” or “Can I get you something to drink?” Just “Here’s what we don’t have.”

All of these signs encouraged me to find somewhere else to eat. 

Fixing service quality at this restaurant will take more than just fixing the signs up front, but signs are a part of a business’s image. It’s hard to imagine a place that offered great service would choose to project an image like this restaurant did with their signs.

Here are a few questions you might ask if you want to look at your own signs: 

• What do your signs tell customers about your business?
• Do your signs match the image you want to project? 
• When rules are absolutely necessary, is there a friendlier way? 

5 Ways to Hire Faster

Hiring the right people takes time, but there are shortcuts.

This post originally appeared on the Call Center Demo and Conference website. I'll be facilitating a session at the conference titled "Staff Up! 10 Ways to Hire and Train Faster"   on Tuesday, October 22. The conference is in Atlanta, Georgia and early-bird rates expire this Friday, September 6.

You’ve just gotten the green light to add some staff to your call center team. Adding headcount will bring some much needed relief to an overworked team, but it can take quite a bit of time to get new employees hired and up to speed. Unfortunately, you don’t have a lot of time.

This post offers five tips to help you speed up the process. But, before you get started, make sure you have two prerequisites:

1. A profile of the ideal candidate
2. A way to screen candidates to ensure they meet the ideal criteria.

These two items will ensure you know what you are looking for and can tell the difference between a qualified and an unqualified applicant. You’re welcome to download my free worksheet and view the short how-to videos if you haven’t completed these steps already: www.toistersolutions.com/competency

Once you have those two prerequisites in place, you’re ready to start hiring. Here are five tips to help you speed up the process.

Tip #1: Hire a temp agency

The knock against temp agencies is they can charge some hefty fees, particularly for temp to hire placements. That may be true, but there are some good reasons why you might turn to an agency to help you hire.

The first is speed. When I managed a call center, I knew I could place a call in the afternoon and have interviews set up the next morning. The second is volume. Temp agencies hire for multiple clients so they have access to a much broader pool of candidates. The third is screening. Agencies can do a lot of basic screening for you that you would otherwise have to do on your own, such as testing for computer skills.

Tip #2: Go hunting

In a perfect world, you post the job ad and watch the qualified applicants come stampeding in. In the real world, this doesn’t always happen. Don’t assume that your next superstar employee is actively looking for a job. Talented employees often have jobs already but could be persuaded to join your team if the right opportunity came along.

Where can you find someone who isn’t looking? Try searching on LinkedIn. Post the job announcement on your own social networks and ask people to share. You can even try networking with employees at the call center across town.

Tip #3: Lower the bar

Before you dismiss this idea as just plain crazy, think about what someone really needs to be successful when they join your company. Each additional requirement decreases the number of available candidates so you can access a broader pool by eliminating requirements.

A great example comes from insurance companies. They often need their call center representatives to be licensed. It would be extremely difficult to find enough licensed insurance professionals to meet their staffing needs so they incorporate the licensing process into their new hire training program.

Tip #4: Find people who are passionate about what you do

When I was a teenager, my first job was in a retail clothing store. Why did I work there? Because I bought all my clothes there and the employee discount was awesome! Once I was hired, I learned the store had a steady stream of applications from people like me so they never had a problem finding new employees.

Many companies have groups of potential employees who are already passionate about your company, your product, or your industry. These people might be customers or just enthusiasts. For nonprofits, they are often volunteers. Find out who they are, where they are, and make sure they see your job posting!

Tip #5: Hire from other departments

Your next call center employee might already work for your company.

Starbucks was one of the site tours at ACCE 2013 in Seattle. The call center we toured assisted employees who worked at Starbucks stores with their human resources needs. On our tour, we learned that most of their contact center employees come from their stores!

This concept can also work for short-term or seasonal staffing needs. When I worked in a large call center, our quality assurance and training teams served as emergency back-up agents. Occasionally, when things got really busy, we’d all get on the phones and answer calls. It helped the call center quickly respond to a spike in calls but it also kept our own skills sharp so we could do a better job of training agents and monitoring calls.

Want more?

I’ll be sharing more ideas to help you speed up the hiring process at the Call Center Demo and Conference in October. My session is called Staff Up! 10 Ways to Hire and Train Faster and will also include ideas for training new employees once you get them in the door.