Why Great Self-Service is Backed by Humans

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Self-service technology is everywhere these days.

In Champaign, Illinois, you can go to the public library and check out a book from a self-service kiosk. Interacting with a human is entirely optional.

Library assistant Ruairi McEnroe explained, "We have self-checkout kiosks at the library where customers can checkout, make payments (using credit cards), and check their account status without the need for a staff person."

This is a win-win for both customers and the library. Customers can avoid waiting in line and are often able to check-out faster using the kiosk. The library is able to save money in an era where many libraries face chronic funding shortfalls.

That doesn't mean humans aren't needed. Great self-service is almost always backed by capable humans.

Ruairi McEnroe assists a customer at the Champaign Public Library.

Nobody Likes to Wait

Think of all the places where self-service helps us avoid a line.

We use the Starbucks app to order our coffee ahead of time. Airlines allow us to check in and display our boarding pass on a smart phone. Even the grocery store may soon eliminate checkout lines with the advent of Amazon Go.

Nick Francis, CEO of the customer service software company, HelpScout, told me he initially struggled with the idea of offering self-service.

"I felt like we wanted to provide the greatest personalized service, but at some point, that's actually quite inconvenient."

Over time, he realized self-service was an essential customer benefit. Customers didn't like the hassle of waiting on hold to talk to a person for something simple like answering a basic product question, tracking a shipment, or resetting a password.

The realization that self-service can often be a better experience prompted Francis and his team at HelpScout to develop some really good self-service tools. HelpScout and other customer service software companies now strive to make self-service as convenient and accessible as possible.

That doesn't mean humans are no longer needed. McEnroe told me that humans serve as a sort of service lifeline at the library in Champaign.

"Generally there is one staff member on hand to clear up account issues, take cash payments, or direct customers to the area they desire. We are often now able to help customers a lot more rather than having to send them to a different desk. There are customers who would rather have a person check them out, so we can also do that.”

Where Humans Are Essential to Self-Service

There are several places where humans are the key to great self-service.

Escalations

Kiosks at the airport, the grocery store, and other places often have a customer service representative standing by. These reps can dramatically improve the self-service experience when they are properly trained.

That's because self-service doesn't always work as intended. Sometimes it can get confusing while other issues can't be solved without a customer service professional.

The 2017 Customer Service Barometer published by American Express and Ebiquity revealed that just 23 percent of customers prefer to speak to a person over the phone or face-to-face for simple issues, like checking an account balance. 

That number jumps to 63 percent for difficult issues, such as disputing a charge.

Updates

Information drives a significant amount of self service.

For instance, let's say you're shopping for a pair of running shoes online. You spot a new model from one of your favorite brands and are about to order them in your normal size when you spot a helpful note suggesting you order a half-size larger.

You make the sizing adjustment, order the shoes, and they arrive a few days later. The shoes fit perfectly and you're very happy.

Think about what went into that experience. The retailer or shoe company had to collect sizing feedback from customers and then share that insight in a meaningful way to help guide other customers like you. If the sizing information had been wrong or out of date, you would have ordered the shoes in a different size and you would have been disappointed with the fit.

Humans are the key to identifying those insights and keeping self-service functioning.

Fixes

Self-service sometimes breaks or fails to work as intended. 

Snack vending machines are terrific until your bag of chips gets stuck. It just sits there, suspended on the rack, taunting you. This is exactly when you need a human to fix a self-service fail.

Some failures aren't so obvious. A customer might search a knowledgebase for a solution, fail to find it, and then contact customer service. The customer service rep might never know about the customer's failed attempt or the 100 more customers who experience the same issue.

In The Effortless Experience, authors Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi detail a helpful exercise to help identify and fix broken self-service experiences.

It consists of three simple steps for customer service reps to follow:

1. Identify customer issues that could have been solved via self-service.

2. Tactfully ask customers if they tried self-service.

3. Note any feedback about unsuccessful self-service attempts.

This information can then be collected so broken self-service systems can be fixed.

Lessons From the Overlook: Beware of Easy Money

Note: Lessons from The Overlook is a monthly update on lessons learned from owning a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply some of the techniques I advise my clients to use. You can find past updates here.

You'd probably listen if someone offered to put an extra $5,000 in your pocket.

My wife, Sally, and I use Idyllwild Vacation Cabins to manage The Overlook. I recently received a letter from one of its competitors offering us a guaranteed $5,000 in net income during our first year if we switched.

The competitor has about the same number of rental properties under management in Idyllwild. It is also a much larger company with more resources. The kind of resources that allow them to pay $5,000 customer acquisition fees.

Should we make the switch to the new property manager? Our decision was pretty easy. We never even hesitated for a second. Nope!

Here's why you need to beware of easy money.

Our property manager keeps the shaded deck clean and inviting.

How Magazines Derailed a Catalog

Twenty years ago, I supervised the call center training team for a retail catalog company. This was back in the days when the majority of customers called in to place an order.

Our vice president of customer service one day announced a partnership with a magazine subscription company. It was an elaborate scheme that would require our call center agents to offer free trial magazine subscriptions to customers at the end of each sales call. 

It seemed like an odd fit for an apparel catalog, but our vice president was chasing easy money. The magazine company would pay a fee that could cover the cost of each phone call if we met certain performance targets for new subscriptions.

This happened during a rough period for the company and the vice president was under pressure to cut costs and turn things around. Service wasn't great, sales were flagging, and the company refused to invest in e-commerce at a time when online shopping was starting to take off.

The magazine money seemed like an easy fix. In reality, it took resources away from the training, monitoring, coaching, and other activities the company needed to improve the sales and service experience. The magazines also did nothing to address the chronic operational issues that had been plaguing the company for years.

Things eventually got worse as the company continued losing money.

Do Your Homework

There's almost always a downside to easy money.

Sally and I contacted several property management companies when we first bought The Overlook. Our goal was to set up interviews with the local property manager as part of our vetting process. The local manager for the company that sent us the $5,000 offer never returned our call.

It's easy to imagine the headaches that would come with that one-time $5,000 bonus. Decreased guest satisfaction, increased maintenance issues, and plenty of headaches all seem likely. Something tells me we would lose a lot more than we would gain over the long run.

Sticking with our property manager was an easy decision.

Idyllwild Vacation Cabins takes great care of our guests and does a terrific job looking after our cabin. Communication is incredibly responsive and we've built a strong working relationship.

Those are the things that are most important to us and we know that other company can't provide them.

How Their Service Failure Can Be Your Problem

Chances are, you've had a bad customer service week. One where it seems like you receive bad service everywhere you turn. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

Mine started recently when a company shipped me the wrong socks. I normally wouldn't think much of a shipping error. This one turned out to be just the tip of the service failure iceberg. 

That same week, I had to contact a local hardware store multiple times to find a missing part for a front door handle. Painters ruined several window screens on my home. A new microwave stopped working properly and required a service call, crushing my schedule between 8am and 12pm one day.

My patience began to wear thin as the week went on. It started taking more of an effort to be a level-headed, friendly customer as I tried to resolve each of these situations. 

It also made me realize something you may already know—an upset customer might not just be frustrated at your company's service failure.

Bad Experiences Add Up

The common denominator for all my bad experiences was time.

Each service failure required time to resolve that I hadn't planned on spending. It's frustrating to feel as though your time is being wasted. This can lead to anxiety if you are already busy with multiple tight deadlines.

Service failures often get amplified by multiple failed attempts to fix an issue. 

For example, the company that manufactured my door handle didn't include an installation manual or parts list with the handle, so I knew a part was missing but couldn't tell exactly which one. The company's website didn't have the information and the support team was closed by the time I researched the issue.

Imagine your company makes socks and I'm your customer. I've just experienced that runaround with the hardware store. Suddenly, a small shipping error with a pair of socks doesn't feel small anymore. It feels like the straw that broke the camel's back. 

The reaction might be disproportionate to the error. Oh boy did I have to work hard not to let that happen, but imagine a customer who wasn't so conscientious about how they treated your employees?

Kaboom.

Their Service Failure, Your Problem

A couple of years ago, I unearthed some fascinating research about how customers react to customer service situations when they are already upset about something else.

Two problems can occur:

• Customers are more judgmental.

• Customers become less open to ideas.

Neither is a recipe for a good service outcome. Judgmental customers are more likely to nitpick small imperfections or imagine service issues. We often need customers to be open to ideas so we can solve their issue.

A healthy dose of empathy is required to help many of these customers. Empathy can help cool down those negative emotions and convince your customer that you're on their side.

The painting crew won the empathy award during my recent week of service failures. 

The foreman was sincerely apologetic about the window screens. He then showed me how the screens' advanced age made them bend and tear easily. (In other words, he empathized with me, even though the problem wasn't his crew's fault.) He also came up with a way to temporarily fix the screens so they would look good cosmetically until I could get them replaced.

I appreciated his efforts and started to feel a little better. His creative fix took an immediate problem and put it on the back burner. And that helped put the issue back into a more appropriate perspective.

Create a Competitive Advantage

The crew from Peek Brothers Painting stood out in a positive way during my very bad week of service failures. The empathy and extra effort from the foreman to help with the window screens helped. I also received several compliments from my neighbors about how courteous the crew was.

And, of course, the paint job was beautiful.

Imagine your customer service team is an empathy oasis in an angry desert. You might take the brunt of a customer's anger or frustration when they are experiencing multiple issues. You can also be their hero.

Here's one way to take action:

1. Share this post with your team.

2. Discuss times you experienced multiple service failures from different companies. 

3. Think of ways you can make those customers feel better.

It often takes just one friendly, kind, and patient person to turn around a customer's perspective. Try to be that person with your upset customers. 

They'll appreciate your efforts and your company will suddenly stand out in a positive way.

The Surprising Consequence of Consumer Anger

Losing customers isn't the only thing to worry about when there's a service failure.

You've probably seen the typical angry customer studies. The numbers change, but the gist is X percent of customers will stop doing business with a company after a service failure. While not exactly an earth shattering discovery, these studies prove that good service is good for business.

But what happens to the angry customers who continue doing business with your company? There doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion or concern about this group.

That could be a mistake.

I recently discovered this study from Dr. Venessa Funches that reveals angry customers may continue doing business with your company, but they can still find other ways to hurt you.

Here's what you need to watch out for.

How Angry Customers Punish Companies

Funches gathered data from 732 people who were asked to recall a specific customer service situation that made them angry. The respondents were then asked what they did next.

As expected, a large portion stopped doing business with the company. In this study, it was 42 percent. The remaining 58 percent still did business with the company, but many changed their buying behavior (respondents could choose multiple options):

• 35 percent reduced the amount of business they did

• 25 percent stopped buying certain products or services

• 17 percent stopped doing business with a particular location

Then there's the 25 percent of customers who said they continued doing business with a company in the same way because they felt they had to. You will see no change in buying behavior from these customers, though they may still find other ways to hurt you:

Here's what else angry customers do:

• 70 percent spread negative word-of-mouth about the company

• 60 percent complain to the company

Negative word of mouth includes a lot of things business leaders don't like to see:

• Negative online reviews (Yelp, Google My Business, Trip Advisor, etc.)

• Negative social media posts (hello viral tweet!)

• Negative stories shared with friends

Notice that not all customers complain to the business. There are many reasons that angry customers don't complain, so it's never safe to assume that no complaints means all is well.

What You Can Do About It

Funches's study discovered that broken promises were the number one source of customer anger. If I'm a customer service leader, I start there and look for trends in service failures.

Many customer service departments react to one complaint at a time. For example, I recently bought a handleset for my front door. There was a part missing and, even worse, there was no instructional manual in the box to help identify exactly which part I needed. The company's website did not have an instruction manual for this particular door handle, either.

It took a lot of back-and-forth to finally identify the missing part.

The major failure is it's been two months and those support documents still aren't on the company's website. That means countless other customers have likely struggled through the installation process.

These types of issues are preventable. Smart customer service leaders do two things on a regular basis:

• They look for icebergs that are subtle signs of bigger problems, such as the missing handleset instructions. 

• They collect aggregate data on the top causes of service failures so those issues can be quickly addressed.

Another action step is to re-engage customers after a critical incident.

Years ago, I worked as a national account manager for a company that sold business uniforms. A customer called who was pretty upset about a mistake in an order she received. I apologized for the mistake and agreed to send out the corrected uniforms at no charge.

Many customer service professionals stop there. An even better move is to follow up again once the customer has had a chance to cool off. In my case, I called the customer right after her replacement order was scheduled to arrive. My last conversation was during a moment of misery, but this time I was talking to my customer during a moment of delight.

The replacement order had arrived safely and the customer was very happy with the outcome.

Take Action!

Customer-focused companies are constantly learning from angry customers. Try to find the source of what's causing their anger and fix it.

Another tactic is to try to prevent customer anger in the first place. This short video shares a technique called the Pre-Emptive Acknowledgement to help you do that.

Preventing negative emotions from Customer Service Foundations by Madecraft and Jeff Toister

Insider Perspectives: Brand Expert Denise Lee Yohn on Culture

I recently had a chance to speak with brand leadership expert, Denise Lee Yohn about her new book, Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies.

Fusion is a wonderfully practical guide to aligning your company's brand with your organizational culture. The book makes three primary arguments why this is essential:

1. Employees work more efficiently when they share a common goal. 

2. Fusing brand and culture makes a brand more authentic.

3. Aligning brand and culture leads to better brand execution.

You'll find plenty of real-life examples to illustrate each concept and many helpful exercises that result in concrete action steps.

The book is now on sale through leading retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I took a few pages of notes when I read Fusion and I highly recommend it.

It's always fun to talk about culture, especially with an expert like Denise. Here's her perspective on brand-culture fusion.

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Q: A lot of leaders point to the importance of culture, but I don't know if we're always talking about the same thing. How do you define it?

"In the most informal way, culture is the way we do things around here.

"A more formal definition is the way people in your organization act and the attitudes and beliefs that inform those actions.

"One client I'm currently working with is a large technology company. They have a very process oriented and hierarchical culture, so the interactions between employees are more formal, structured, and preplanned. Another client, a senior living center company, has a nurturing and empathetic culture, so their employees are very concerned about how others are feeling and if they are growing and being cared for."

Q: What is a brand-culture fusion?

"Fusion introduces the concept of fusing brand and culture together so they are well-integrated and tightly aligned within an organization.

"Many companies focus on brand and culture separately, which can create silos where a brand doesn't really reflect the culture.

"The greatest companies fuse both of these together so they are working together.

"The culture and brand at Airbnb, the hospitality company, are one and the same—they're both about belonging. Airbnb wants customers to feel like they belong anywhere, wherever their travels might take them. It also wants employees to feel like they belong at the company, so its employee experience is all about community and comfort."

Q: This seems like a straightforward idea. Why don't more organizations do this?

"A couple of reasons come to mind.

"One is I think there's a misperception about what makes a good culture. Business leaders often cling to this idea that there's a right culture that focuses on things like being nice and supportive.

"That's just wrong. There isn't one right type of culture for every organization. For example, Amazon is known for being an incredibly customer-focused brand. They also have a challenging culture that's difficult for many people to work in because expectations for being customer-focused are so high. Amazon succeeds because it has a distinctive culture, but that culture is clearly not the right culture for everyone.

"I also think most leaders at the top would consider culture to be a human resources function and branding to be a marketing function. So it becomes dysfunctional where each department is doing its own thing and there's a lack of leadership to bring these functions together.

"A lot of executives tend to misunderstand both culture and brand. Many think of branding as just advertising or a logo. Culture can be the same way where executives liken it to ping pong tables or free beer Fridays. It becomes something that's tactical where you can just check it off the list rather than something that's fundamentally ingrained in your organization's core values."

Q: What's the connection between a brand-culture fusion and customer service?

"In Fusion, I outline nine general brand types. 

"One type of brand is Service, which are companies like The Ritz-Carlton that use service to differentiate their brand from competitors. So a service-focused culture becomes critically important for these organizations. 

"But all companies need to provide good customer service, even if it uses luxury, value, or another brand type besides service to differentiate itself. It's essential for all companies to have a brand guide or toolkit that helps all employees bring your brand values to life in all facets of the company.

"This helps people align their decisions with the brand and culture, such as how to interact with a customer."

(Note: You can learn more by taking this Fusion Assessment.)

Q: What is the one thing you really want people to know about the brand-culture fusion?

"Just one?! A few come to mind!

"The top one might be that your culture needs to be as unique as your brand. It's not enough to just be generic like friendly, supportive, etc. You need a distinctive culture to really produce specific results that are on brand and motivate employees to do what we need them to do.

"It's also important for people to understand there's a difference between simple and easy when it comes to culture-building. I think the concepts behind  brand-culture fusion are simple, but culture is not easy!"

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Fusion is a must-read for anyone interested in marketing, branding, or service culture. It's available in e-book and hardcover formats.

Five Ways Leaders Unwittingly Sabotage Their Teams

The association president decided to make an informal speech to the crowd gathered at the happy hour. He realized the people towards the back couldn't see him, so he grabbed one of the hotel's banquet chairs and stood on it.

Standing on chairs is dangerous. Every year, numerous employees suffer broken arms, legs, ankles, and other serious injuries sustained when they fell off a chair they were standing on at work. 

The president set a poor example with his behavior. When he asked a conference organizer to say a few words after his speech, she hesitated a moment and then reluctantly followed the president's lead and stood on the chair as well.

Leaders should understand employees are paying attention to the way a leader behaves. Here are five examples of leadership behaviors can than undermine your message to the team.

Service

Employees look to see how the boss treats customers and even other employees. If the boss treats people poorly, employees will, too.

One customer service leader regularly belittled his employees. He disparaged them for poor service, gossiped about employees to coworkers, and generally acted like a bully if he didn't get his way. Even worse, he shied away from customer interaction, even going so far as to feign important meetings to avoid talking to a customer. Needless to say, employees were scared of the boss and did just enough not to get noticed.

Employees look to their leaders to model outstanding service. As a leader, it's up to you to demonstrate the appropriate behaviors when working with customers or even fellow employees.

Communication

Employees tend to understand how important something is by how and when you talk about it.

One restaurant manager rarely talked about service with his employees. He spent most of his time discussing compliance issues such as attendance, following procedures, and adhering to policies. His tone was consistently negative. 

One day, the manager sent a nasty memo to his employees addressing a string of poor Yelp reviews. He criticized employees for their performance and threatened to fire people for continued bad service. The memo was the first time he had communicated anything about service in a long time, and it only served to demotivate employees.

Take a moment to review your own communication. Think of the emails, verbal discussions, and team meetings you had in the past week. What were the most frequent topics? Do you tend to use a tone of encouragement or compliance?

Tolerance

Employees will look to their leader to see what is tolerated and what is not.

An employee in one organization routinely generated complaints for poor customer service. Her boss wanted to hold her accountable, but the business unit's vice president overrode the decision. The vice president felt the employees' sales numbers were too valuable to the unit's scorecard, and she didn't want to undermine her unit's successful image by correcting a top producer. This send the clear message that poor service was fine as long as you made your sales numbers look good.

Think about what negative behaviors you allow. Leaders often make excuses to themselves, brushing away minor transgressions and being too minor to worry about. Beware that tolerating something small often sets the stage for even worse performance in the future.

Enthusiasm

Employees look to their leader for enthusiasm.

I'll never forget the first boss I ever had, Christi. I was working in a retail clothing store while I was in high school and just starting to learn about customer service. At the end of every day, I noticed how Christi would walk around the store and thank every employee for doing a good job. She always displayed such enthusiasm for working at the store that her employees felt a strong urge to do a great job for her.

Other managers have the opposite effect. They are consistently negative or overly serious, which are usually not ideal attitudes for employees to convey to customers. One executive flat out refused to say "Good morning" to employees as they arrived for work and passed her in the halls. Those managers unconsciously influence employees to act the same way.

Consider what attitudes you display to your employees. Are you enthusiastic? Negative? Serious? Authentic?

Decisions

Employees place a lot of weight on the hidden message behind a leader's decisions.

A software company's support team leader told his team that service was a top priority. Yet the leader consistently made decisions designed to save money. The support team was understaffed, undertrained, and lacked some of the tools needed to serve customers at a high level. Employees soon realized that service wasn't a top priority at all. The real priority was short-term cost savings.

A leader at another software company made a completely different set of decisions. He worked with his support team to create a customer service vision, which is a shared definition of outstanding service. He then used that vision to guide other key decisions such as goal setting, hiring, training, procedures, and even his communication as a leader. Support employees in that company quickly realized that service was truly the top priority.

Pay careful attention to your own decisions and how you make them. Your employees are watching and will understand your true priorities by the direction you take.

Take Action!

Take a moment to complete a personal inventory of the behaviors you've modeled in the past week. These questions can be a powerful assessment of your performance as a leader.

• Service: Do you consistently model a strong service culture?

• Communication: Do you consistently have positive communication about service?

• Tolerance: Do you tolerate negative or inappropriate behavior?

• Enthusiasm: Do you regularly display genuine enthusiasm for serving customers?

• Decisions: Do you use service as a top priority when making decisions?

The results can be eye opening.

Who First Said "The Customer Is Always Right?"

"The customer is always right" has a longstanding tradition in customer service.

Pushy customers quote it when they try to get their way. Customer service professionals bristle at the saying because they know it isn't true. Customers are often wrong.

When I was doing research for my book, Getting Service Right, I tried to find the origin of that lousy quote. My goal was to find the person who first said it and maybe send them a box of glitter.

What I learned was a surprise. The original quote had been mangled over time. Here's what I learned.

The Origin Story

There's no conclusive evidence as to who first said "The customer is always right." However, the Quote Investigator website does reveal some interesting possibilities.

One contender is the famous hotelier, Cesar Ritz. He is credited with saying "The customer is never wrong," in 1908.

Another contender is the Chicago retailer, Marshall Field. He was quoted in The Boston Herald on September 3, 1905 as saying "The customer is always right." 

There are two issues that call this quote into question. 

One is a longer version of the quote adds important context (although I can't locate the origin). The longer quote is, "Right or wrong, the customer is always right." 

The second issue is a similar quote attributed to another Chicago retailer, Sears, Roebuck, & Co, was published several months earlier in April, 1905: "Every one of their thousands of employees are instructed to satisfy the customer regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong."

The most likely explanation is "The customer is always right" concept predated these quotes published in 1905. I tend to believe the longer version of Field's quote because it adds additional meaning and other stories place its origin much earlier in time. Alas, I can't find any proof of those stories.

Does it matter?

Customers are absolutely wrong at times. To me, the real meaning of "The customer is always right" is our goal in service is to help the customer be right, even when they are technically wrong.

This suggests some specific types of actions:

• Don't argue with customers

• Partner with customers to help them succeed

• Help customers avoid making mistakes

• Be generous in your policies

• Give customers the benefit of the doubt

"The customer is always right" is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of inaccurate customer service quotes and statistics floating around.

The key is to take each one with a grain of salt and understand the true meaning and intent behind them.

Companies Are Fixing the Worst Part of the Customer Experience

Walk into a grocery store early on a Friday evening and you'll encounter chaos.

There are lines several people deep for each checkout lane. People waiting in line spill into the aisles, making it difficult to navigate around the store. The trip seems to take forever just to pick up a few items for dinner that night.

Checking out or checking in is often the worse part of the customer experience.

We wait to pay for our groceries, purchases at a retail store, or our bill at a restaurant. There's a line to check in for a flight, check in to a hotel, or buy a subway ticket.

All those lines and waiting feel miserable. The good news is companies are making huge strides to fix this terrible experience.

The bad news? Customer service professionals need to adapt.

Solving The Worst Part of Customer Experience

I'm anxious to try Amazon's new grocery store.

If you've not yet heard of it, the store is called Amazon Go. There's just one right now, located in Seattle, though more are expected soon. What makes it special is you walk in, select your items, and walk right out without ever standing in line for a cashier.

This short video provides a tantalizing preview.

Grocery shopping isn't the only place where the checkout is being eliminated or greatly improved. OpenTable is slowly rolling out its payments feature which allows you to make a restaurant reservation and then view and pay your check right from your smart phone. Imagine enjoying a great meal with friendly service and then leaving without having to wait for the check!

One of the major benefits of rideshare services like Lyft and Uber is the app-based checkout. As a frequent business traveler, one of the worst parts of a taxi ride is the time it takes to pay for the ride once you reach your destination. I used Lyft on a recent business trip and enjoyed the convenience of hopping out of the car as soon as we arrived. I could open the app on my phone and leave my driver a tip as I walked into the building I was visiting.

The opposite side of the coin, checking in, is also improving.

Airlines have allowed app-based check-ins for years. Now some airlines like Delta are eliminating the check-in process entirely and automatically generating boarding passes for confirmed passengers using the app. 

Hotels are slowly rolling out this feature as well. This is especially handy when you check in to a busy hotel for a conference and you can skip a check-in line that can take 20 minutes or longer.

Movie theaters get this right too. Most theaters in my area have automated kiosks that allow you to buy tickets or you can buy your tickets ahead of time via an app so you can skip the long box office line.

Even mass transit systems are getting in on the game and starting to allow passengers to buy tickets via an app rather than wait in line at a kiosk or a ticket counter.

Humans Need to Step Up Their Game

All this automation creates both a challenge and an opportunity for humans in customer service.

The challenge is the check in or check out is the primary point of human interaction in many customer experiences. Eliminate that and you remove a big opportunity for people to shine.

The Starbucks app is a good example. You can order your drink and pay for it via the app which allows you to skip the line. I frequently see people pick up their drinks without so much as a nod or smile towards the human making them.

This experience seems to run counter to the Starbucks mission: "To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time."

This is also the opportunity.

Freed from the transactional nature of checking customers in or out, people have a chance to add more human value to experiences.

Lupe at my local Starbucks store greets customers by name, even if they are picking up a drink they ordered via the app. He can actually greet more people since he says hello to both people waiting in line and people coming in to pick up a drink they ordered via the app.

I've really enjoyed using Lyft because the app handles the transaction, freeing me up to have a pleasant conversation with my driver. My experiences have been incredibly positive and the ride always seems to go faster.

Tips to Help You Stay Connected

Building rapport is a foundational customer service skill. Automation is making rapport more important than ever before. 

Here are just a few tips:

• Greet everyone enthusiastically. Yes, we all know this. No, we don't always do it.

• Try to personalize your interactions with customers.

• Use the five question technique to create thoughtful conversation starters.

You get find even more suggestions when you subscribe to the Customer Service Tip of the Week email. It's one email with one tip, once per week. 

How to Hire Employees Who Fit Your Service Culture

Advertising disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

You've probably heard the adage, "Hire for attitude, train for skills."

It sounds good, but how exactly do you hire for attitude? Customer service leaders struggle with this one. Many rely on off-beat interview tactics they hear about in blogs and books, such as asking questions like "What kind of fruit best describes your personality?" Some just like to have a friendly conversation to see what sort of vibe they get from each person.

Researchers have confirmed you'd make better hiring decisions if you skipped these sort of interviews entirely.

You need a systematic process if you want to hire for culture fit. 

There aren't a lot of great examples to follow. In fact, the biggest challenge when I wrote The Service Culture Handbook was finding good examples for the chapter on hiring. (One of the best examples I know is Publix.)

This post is an update from a post I wrote back in 2014.

Start by Defining Your Culture

The very first thing you need is a clear definition of your culture. It's pretty tough to hire people who fit your service culture if you can't describe that that is!

A service culture is defined by what's called a customer service vision. This is a shared definition of outstanding customer service that gets everyone on the same page. 

Let's imagine we started an online wine store that focuses on helping customers learn about wine and explore new wineries, varietals, and wines from different regions. Our customer service vision might be: We make it fun to discover great wine.

So people who work in our company should not only love wine, but definitely not be wine snobs. They should enjoy learning about wine and helping others experience the fun and joy of learning about wine, too. (I really want to start this business now!)

We can now use this vision as a basis for hiring people who will embrace our service culture.

Create an Ideal Candidate Profile

The next step is to identify the characteristics of an employee who fits your company's service culture. I use this worksheet to create what's called an ideal candidate profile.

This profile separates the characteristics we want in an employee into two categories:

1. Must Have Characteristics

2. Like to Have Characteristics

The must have characteristics are attributes a candidate must have or we would not consider hiring them. For instance, everyone we hire for our online wine store must have an enthusiasm for wine. They don't necessarily need to be an expert, they just need to really like learning about it.

A like to have characteristic is an attribute that would help us make a hiring decision but isn't essential. So we might not require our wine store employees to have extensive knowledge of different wine varietals, but a candidate who did have this knowledge might have an advantage over other candidates with similar qualifications.

One key test for your ideal candidate profile is to compare it to your existing employees. You'll need to revise your profile if you have any successful employee who did not possess one of the must haves when they were hired.

Devise Screening Tests

The final step in creating your hiring process is to devise tests to screen candidates for each item on your ideal candidate profile.

The most common way to do this is through interview questions. Each question should be designed to uncover something specific. You should also have a clear answer key before conducting the interview.

For instance, we could test our online wine shop candidates for the "enthusiasm for wine" characteristic by asking them to tell us about a recent wine tasting experience.

A answer that indicated a culture fit would be an enthusiastic story about discovering new wine, such as going wine tasting at a local winery or wine bar. A poor culture fit answer would be someone who hadn't tried any new wine recently, admits they don't really like wine, or describes a story that sounds more like going out and partying.

I highly recommend Janis Whitaker's excellent book, Interviewing by Example, for clear guidance on how to write effective interview questions.

There are other ways to test an employee's qualifications besides interview questions. Here are a few examples:

• Resume or LinkedIn profile

• Skills assessments

• Small project

We might screen potential wine shop employees for the "continuous learner" attribute by  looking for recent training classes, certifications, or education on their resume or LinkedIn profile. These don't necessarily need to be wine related since any recent learning indicates this person is likely a continuous learner.

Some companies have customer service employees respond to a realistic customer email to gauge both their writing style and resourcefulness. Assessing skills through a small project is another great way to learn a lot about a candidate.

Take Action

Assess your current hiring process by asking these three questions:

1. Does your company (or team) have a customer service vision?

2. Do you have an ideal candidate profile?

3. Do you have screening tests for each characteristic on the profile?

The answers will help you decide where to start. You can learn more and see additional examples by viewing this on-demand webinar from ICMI.

Report: Companies Struggle with Email Support

A new report from CRM software provider SuperOffice revealed some dismal trends for email customer service.

The company sent an email to 1,000 companies. The email asked two questions:

• Do you have a phone number I can call you on? 

• Where can I find pricing information on your website? 

The results were not good. Response times were too long, if companies responded at all. Replies felt canned and the substance of the answers often left these two simple questions unanswered.

This post highlights five email best practices and compares them to the results in the SuperOffice report. You can download the entire report here.

Best Practice #1: Respond

OK, stop laughing because this is a real challenge. The SuperOffice study found 62 percent of companies did not respond to an email.

This is almost always a systematic issue. Common causes include:

• Unmonitored email boxes

• Emails that go to an individual (who may no longer work there)

• Insufficient standards or processes for handling email

Best Practice #2: Acknowledge Emails

An automated message should be triggered by every customer email. That message should do three things:

• Acknowledge the email was received

• Set expectations for a response time

• Provide alternative ways to solve the issue (i.e. phone, FAQs, etc.)

Only 10 percent of the companies SuperOffice tested acknowledged an email.

Best Practice #3: Respond Within One Hour

My own research from 2015 revealed that companies should set an email response time standard of one hour or less.

The average response time in the SuperOffice study was 12 hours. That's too long, and may cause customers to contact your company multiple times which increases their frustration and wastes your resources.

Best Practice #4: Answer the Question

This one shocked me. SuperOffice reported that only 20 percent of companies answered both questions (phone number and pricing) in the first email. 

I double-checked the math and realized the report was counting the companies that did not respond at all in the group of companies that did not answer both questions in the first email. When you adjust for companies that did respond, that number rises to 56 percent. Still not good.

Support agents typically fail to answer customers' questions for two reasons:

1. They are working too fast in an effort to handle a large queue

2. They rely too much on pre-written templates to respond quickly

The fix here is simple:

1. Train your agents to slow down, fully understand the customer's request, and answer it

2. Monitor emails for quality, just as you would phone calls

When I started monitor email as a customer service manager, I was surprised to find an issue with more than 50 percent of the emails my team sent! Some training and improved coaching helped the team quickly improve, but it was a lesson that stuck with me.

Best Practice #5: Convey Some Personality

The SuperOffice report discovered that just 39 percent of companies responded with an email signed by a person. The rest used generic identifiers such as "Customer Service" or even "Secretary."

Yes, templates are an essential part of email support. That doesn't mean your support agents need to sound like anonymous robots. 

Let your people add just a little flair to each email so they can make a more positive connection with the customers they serve. Some companies even encourage agents to put a micro-bio in the signature line of their emails, which creates an even stronger connection. 

Take Action

These basic best practices are table stakes for an effective email support operation. Your company will struggle to serve customers if you can't do these things well.

I recommend auditing your own company. Navigate to your website just as a prospective customer would and send off a simple email inquiry. Start a timer and evaluate how quickly you receive a response, whether that response answers your question, and whether that response conveys warmth and personality.