Why employee effort is the key to improving your customer effort score

Jeff Toister February 24, 2022

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.

Most of us take order confirmations for granted.

A confirmation is sent when an order is placed. Another one is sent when the order ships that provides the tracking number and estimated arrival date.

Before the advent of order confirmations, it wasn’t uncommon for customers to worry about whether their order was received or when it would arrive. Many would call or email. Some more than once.

It was a lousy experience.

Order confirmations reduce customer effort and make online ordering easier. They provide assurance and, in most cases, prevent customers from calling.

Most companies automate this process, but not all. Macie (not her real name), has to do it manually. Sometimes, she forgets.

"I am human," explained Macie. Each day, she has to remember to check for new orders and shipments and then send an update to each individual customer.

Macie would like her company to be easy to do business with, but the current process makes that hard to do. It’s tedious and time-consuming. Occasionally forgetting just makes things worse.

In many companies like Macie's, the key to reducing customer effort is reducing employee effort.

What is customer effort?

Let's start with a brief description of customer effort and why it's important.

Matt Dixon, co-author of The Effortless Experience, described customer effort as making customers jump through hoops to do business with your company.

He gave several examples in this exclusive interview:

Making a customer call multiple times to get their problem fixed.
Confusing or broken self-service options.
Forcing customers to switch communication channels to get help.
Transferring customers from one department to the next.
Making customers repeat information, such as account numbers.

High customer effort creates disloyalty. Customers grow tired of struggling to get things done and start looking for other options.

Some companies measure customer effort via a special type of survey called Customer Effort Score. It works by asking customers how easy it was to do business with the company.

How employee effort creates customer effort

The likelihood of something going wrong increases the harder employees have to work to serve their customers. High employee effort causes three common service failures.

Time: High employee effort makes customers wait longer.
Errors: More effort makes mistakes more likely.
Attitude: Employees struggle to remain friendly when they’re dealing with nonsense.

Think back to Macie's manual order updates.

They take a lot of time. Macie has to send them one-by-one while also juggling other tasks throughout the day, so she doesn't send updates as soon as they're ready.

Impatient customers are more likely to call or email before Macie has a chance to send an update.

Macie sometimes forgets to send an update, which is a simple human error. Other errors are easy to make when doing a manual task, such as sending the wrong tracking number or an incorrect arrival date.

This can cause customers to call or email when their update is wrong.

Extra effort can be discouraging, which makes it difficult to retain a positive attitude. One company discovered its Customer Effort Score declined by eight percent in the afternoons as employees grew tired.

Take a moment to identify high-effort tasks your employees must perform. There's a good chance that those tasks take longer than they should, have higher error rates, and make employees grumpy.

Three ways to reduce employee effort

Focus on making your employees' jobs just a little easier. Automation is a good place to start.

The more you can automate routine tasks, like order confirmations, the more you can free up employees to focus on customers who need extra help. For instance, most e-commerce software today can automatically send out order and shipping confirmations.

A centralized knowledge base is another good solution.

Employees spend a lot of time searching for answers, whether it's product knowledge, procedures, or the details on the latest marketing promotion. They'll save a lot of time, and give the right answer more often, if they have a single repository with all the latest information.

Empowerment is another solution.

Customer-focused organizations define empowerment as giving employees the ability to provide outstanding customer service. This means providing them with the resources, procedures, and authority they need.

You can learn how to empower your employees with this step-by-step guide. Or explore the empowerment secrets of customer-focused companies in The Service Culture Handbook.

Conclusion

If you want to make it easy for customers to do business with you, start by making it easy for employees to do great work.

You can get several more ideas here.

How do job applicants evaluate company culture?

Jeff Toister February 17, 2022

Note: This post was updated in February 2023 with new research.

Company culture is an important consideration for job seekers.

In February 2023, I surveyed more than 1,200 employees. A whopping 95 percent said they consider a company’s culture before applying for a job.

Even after people apply, culture remains an important consideration. My research shows that 43 percent of employees have turned down a job offer because the company had a poor culture.

Culture is also a reason existing employees choose to stay or go, with 64 percent of employees indicating they’ve left a company due to the culture. (You can see that research here.)

So how exactly do job applicants evaluate your company's culture?

I posed that question on LinkedIn and got a lot of great responses. Here's a summary, along with some commentary of my own.

What is company culture?

Culture is defined as how people in an organization think and act. To job applicants, this often boils down to “What’s it like to work here?”

This might include a few things:

What are general norms and expectations for the workplace?
How do coworkers treat each other?
Are employees proud to work for the company?
How are senior leaders viewed by employees?
What is a typical workday like?

Every organization has its own unique qualities. Candidates want to know if they can see themselves working for your company and if they’ll enjoy it.

Applicants do their research

Many job applicants do a lot of research before applying for a job with your company.

The employer review site, Glassdoor, is one popular resource. It contains anonymous reviews and ratings of thousands of companies.

Many also use LinkedIn extensively.

"I’ll review who the leaders are, Google them, find them on LinkedIn, [and] review their profiles," wrote Thomas Velasquez. "If I know someone, I will reach out and see if I can get an informational interview."

Aida Soleimani takes a similar approach. "It’s been helpful to reach out to employees on LinkedIn not involved in the interview process and ask them what they like or dislike about the company, what they would change and if they have thought about leaving the company. Sometimes it also helps to reach out to ex-employees and ask similar questions."

"One thing I use is the company’s hiring trends," wrote Greg Freeman. LinkedIn Premium users can quickly access information such as the company's growth rate and the average tenure of employees.

Some, like Jessica Hollo, check a company's social media accounts. "What does the company feel is important enough to portray to a wider audience?"

"I analyze the texts & overall narration on the website (mission, values, key concepts etc) & in the job description," wrote Anastasia Zarusskaia. "The language usually speaks for itself."

One way to make it easier for applicants to research your company culture is to include a culture page on your website. (See examples in this post.)

The interview process is important

Applicants evaluate the interview process itself to get a sense of an organization's culture. Does the organization seem to value them and their time, or are they treated poorly?

Multiple interview rounds can be a red flag, especially for applicants with jobs, school, childcare, and other responsibilities that must be juggled to accommodate several days of interviewing.

One-way video interviews are another turnoff. Some companies try to be more efficient by asking applicants to record short videos of themselves answering screening questions, but many candidates report having a bad experience.

The interview setting is also important.

I've seen job interviews happen at Starbucks and other public places, where the applicant is asked to respond to personal questions within earshot of other customers. It can be a jarring experience.

Applicants also assess the interviewer and other employees they meet.

"I try to make my impression from how [the] interviewing process is going," wrote Samer Mcshat. "I do my assessment usually when the interviewer gives me space to ask questions. That was always useful."

"I've asked to meet different team members across the company," added Marco Yim.

Many applicants are interviewing with multiple employers, and it’s a competitive process. You can stand out by making the interview process enjoyable, informative, and easy for applicants.

Interviewing the interviewer

Candidates frequently turn the tables on recruiters and hiring managers to interview them.

"How interviewers respond to questions about work/life balance, diversity, and salary negotiations during the interview says a lot about company culture," explained Jasonda Desmond. "I also like to talk to other people in the team. More often than not I am looking at how they react to questions or answers, in addition to what they say."

Brad Langebartels also looks for how people discuss the culture. He prepares questions ahead of time and then asks follow-up questions to learn more about the culture and check for inconsistencies. "If interviewer groups can demonstrate how their communicated vision is reflected in their public reputation and work culture, you will have one important factor to consider."

"One should also enquire about the team as you will eventually work with the team at the org," wrote Garvit Arora. "[The] company might have a people-first culture but as an employee it is important to know if that culture drills down to individual teams as well."

Interviewers can standout by proactively discussing culture.

“During interviews I speak about the company and department culture,” wrote Katrina Garcia. “I believe by opening the discussion proves we care about work/life balance, communication, and that we want to be a good fit for them equally as we want them for us.“

Conclusion

Culture is vitally important to job applicants, especially in a tight job market.

Employers can improve their hiring by making it easy for candidates to assess the company culture. Encourage people to do their research, share candid information about what it's like to work in your company, and make other employees readily available.

It's a bad idea to try to hide reality. "It's one of those intangible concepts that's really hard to fake comprehensively," wrote Scott Ontiveroz.

A better approach is to share the real culture, warts and all. This will help attract employees who really want to work in your company, while discouraging candidates who might be short-timers anyway.

You can use this guide to hiring for culture fit for more ideas.

What is internal customer service and why is it important?

Jeff Toister February 10, 2022

"It just takes a lot of effort to get things done."

A friend recently shared these frustrations. She had worked in sales at her company for the past six years. It had a good product and she was successful, but something was gnawing at her.

My friend explained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to hit her sales targets. The challenge wasn't a new competitor, shifting market conditions, or even the pandemic.

The biggest issue was a lack of internal customer service.

My friend increasingly spent time and effort navigating corporate bureaucracy, waiting for results, and following-up with other departments to make sure they didn't drop the ball.

"I'm not looking right now," she said, "but I'd jump at the opportunity to leave if the right offer came along."

Poor internal customer service frustrates many employees like my friend. This post will answer three critical questions:

What is internal customer service?
Why is it important?
How can you make it better?

What is internal customer service?

Most people think of a customer as someone who buys our products and services.

Customer-focused organizations tend to define "customer" more broadly. A customer to these organizations is anyone we serve.

So an internal customer can be defined this way:

An internal customer is anyone we serve inside our own organization.

This can include several groups of coworkers:

People on your team
Your boss
People in other departments

You can also broaden it to include contractors, vendors, and other third-parties you work closely with to get your job done and ultimately serve your external customers.

Internal customers often have a few common characteristics when compared to external customers:

Frequent interactions: we tend to serve the same people more often.
Close relationships: we form tighter bonds with the people we work with.
Two-way service: internal customers often serve each other.

These characteristics don't always hold true.

In some larger organizations, some departments serve thousands of internal customers and more closely resemble a traditional external customer service team.

Here are a few examples:

An IT help desk in a major retail chain keeps the computer systems running at over a thousand stores.
An employee relations contact center in a multinational company helps thousands of remote employees with their human resources needs.
The underwriting department in a credit union reviews loan applications submitted by loan officers at the credit union's branches.

This short video provides more information about who is an internal customer.

Defining internal customer service from Customer Service: Serving Internal Customers by Jeff Toister and Madecraft

Why is internal customer service important?

My wife, Sally, and I recently checked into a non-smoking hotel room that reeked of cigarette smoke. We had to trudge downstairs to the front desk to request another room.

It's clear we experienced a service failure, but what about the front desk employee who checked us in?

He experienced an internal service failure.

The employee relied on a colleague in the hotel's housekeeping department to verify the room was clean and available. Marking the room as clean despite the strong odor of cigarette smoke set the front desk employee up to fail.

We were patient and understanding, but many customers are not.

This creates a miserable experience for employees. Getting yelled at by customer after customer for mistakes that someone else made can make employees quickly re-evaluate whether they're in the right job.

External service failures aren't the only sign of a problem.

My friend in sales has managed to prevent any major issues so far, and her numbers still look good. But all the extra effort required to overcome poor internal customer service eventually wears thin.

How can you improve internal customer service?

Roughly 50 percent of my customer service training requests are for internal customer service. What I've learned over many years is the formula for improving both internal and external customer service is essentially the same.

First, you must define outstanding service so everyone is on the same page.

The best way to do this is to create a customer experience vision statement. You can follow my step-by-step guide to write your own.

Next, make sure every employee is aware of what a great customer experience looks like and how they play a role.

This includes employees who only provide internal customer service. No one in a customer-focused organization is exempt from service.

You can use this guide to engaging employees to get everyone on board.

Finally, remove the friction that makes it overly difficult for employees to serve each other at the highest level. You can get a few ideas here.

Conclusion

You can help your employees build their skills with my LinkedIn Learning course, Serving Internal Customers. Over 100,000 people around the world have taken the course so far.

It's available to all LinkedIn Learning subscribers. You can also view the course with a free, 30-day trial.

Here's a short preview.

Serving internal customers from Customer Service: Serving Internal Customers by Jeff Toister and Madecraft

Lessons from The Overlook: The outsourcing dilemma

Jeff Toister February 3, 2022

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.

Our property manager called with some bad news.

The flapper in the downstairs toilet at The Overlook was sticking, making it hard to flush. The sink in another bathroom was draining slowly. Guests were checking in the next afternoon.

The property manager seemed unconcerned. She suggested I try to get a plumber out sometime the following week, after the guests had checked out.

"I'm just letting you know," she said.

My wife, Sally, and I don't want plumbing issues to mar our guests' experience, so this was an urgent matter to me. I scrambled to get a plumber to the cabin before our guests arrived.

The conversation exposed what I call the outsourcing dilemma.

How do you create a consistently great experience when you and your outsourcer don’t see eye-to-eye?

Thanks to outsourcing, we can keep the walkways clear of snow and ice at The Overlook.

Who owns your customers?

We face a customer ownership issue at The Overlook.

Sally and I view people staying at the cabin as our guests. We want to make sure they have such a great experience that they tell their friends about us and come back again.

From our perspective, we've outsourced guest service to our property manager.

We don't have direct contact with guests. That's all handled via our property manager who books the cabin, welcomes guests, resolves their issues, and bills them for their stay.

From our property manager's perspective, people staying at The Overlook are not our guests at all. The Overlook is a supplier to her vacation rental business, one of nearly 60 cabins managed by her company.

Problems happen when we don't see eye-to-eye on guest experience issues, such as the urgency of minor plumbing problems.

Our property manager is okay with her guests having a few minor plumbing problems during their stay, but we’re not okay with that happening to our guests.

Other industries face similar challenges where customer ownership is blurred.

Fast food chains franchise locations to independent operators.
Consumer brands outsource their customer contact center.
Online retailers outsource shipping and order fulfillment.

You likely face a similar dilemma if your business outsources any part of its customer-facing operation. This can sometimes create conflicts when your partner has different philosophies, priorities, and capabilities.

What challenges are caused by outsourcing?

Creating a consistently great guest experience at The Overlook is our biggest outsourcing challenge.

We've learned that any deviation from our property manager's standard procedure creates more opportunities for mistakes and services failures.

For example, we wanted to supply extra towels for guests using the spa. Guests had been using towels from the bathrooms, but it's uncomfortable to dry off after a shower and then re-use your still-wet towel to dry off after using the spa later that evening.

So our property manager agreed to add extra towels and we put a small bin next to the door leading outside to the spa to make this easy.

It wasn't easy.

It took nearly 18 months of reminders to get extra spa towels regularly added to the bin. Our property manager's standard procedure is to place towels in each cabins' bathrooms, so adding extra towels near the spa was an exception to their standard practice.

Which brings us to another challenge.

It's difficult to cede control of so much that impacts the guest experience to a property manager, but my wife and I couldn't rent our cabin without outsourcing.

We live two hours away from the cabin, so we'd need to hire local labor ourselves to perform many tasks. Good people are in short supply everywhere, and it's hard to find reliable help plowing snow, cleaning houses, or performing routine maintenance.

Our property manager faces similar constraints, but she's able to leverage her local presence and the scale of her operation to work with a consistent group of employees and contractors.

We’d also have to do all the marketing, sales, and customer service ourselves if we stopped outsourcing. The Overlook has been sold out every weekend for over a year and a half, so it would likely be difficult to replicate our property manager’s performance.

There are other property managers in town. We've vetted several and the results weren't good. None appeared capable of doing nearly as good a job as our current manager.

Outsourcing isn’t easy, but it’s our best option right now. It just takes a lot of effort to make things work.

How can you outsource more effectively?

A Customer Service Tip of the Week subscriber recently emailed to ask me how to work more effectively with an outsourcing provider.

While I'm clearly struggling with this myself, I did have a few suggestions.

First, set clear expectations. It helps to know who is responsible for what. That sometimes is an evolving conversation. My wife and I talk to our property manager about expectations at least once per month.

Second, provide your outsourcer with adequate resources. We act quickly whenever something needs to be repaired or replaced. We also keep a stock of extra wine glasses, light bulbs, and other small items so our property manager can easily replace them as needed.

Finally, monitor your outsourcer's performance as closely as you would an employee. We inspect The Overlook once a month using a detailed checklist and discuss any issues with our property manager. We also perform regular preventative maintenance, deep cleaning, and fix problems that are outside our property manager's scope of responsibilities on these monthly visits.

Conclusion

My preference is to avoid outsourcing whenever possible. To me, it's always best to have direct contact with your customers throughout the entire service delivery process.

But that's not always feasible.

So if you must outsource, it helps to recognize the inherent limitations. Take care to be an active participant in the relationship and constantly advocate for your customer.

Is scoreless quality assurance right for your contact center?

Jeff Toister January 27, 2022

"Nope."

The contact center agent shook his head as he scanned the quality assurance form. We had just sat down to review a call, and it wasn't going well.

"Nope," he said again.

The call had been fairly good overall, but that's not what he focused on. The agent was fixated on the score. Specifically, the points he didn't receive.

He scanned the report while tuning out my feedback, saying "Nope" anytime he saw a score he disagreed with. It was a frustrating conversation.

In retrospect, it's hard to blame him.

He knew his performance was ultimately judged by the score, and the scores were a bit arbitrary. Why was one behavior worth six points while another one was worth four? I didn't do myself any favors by just setting the score sheet down in front of him at the start of the conversation.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered a way to give clear, unvarnished feedback without agents getting defensive about the score.

The solution? Eliminate the score.

What is contact center quality assurance?

I realize some readers might not be familiar with the quality assurance process in contact centers. Here's a brief overview.

You've probably heard that disclaimer at the start of the call, "This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes." Many contact centers record customer phone calls and this disclaimer is often required for legal reasons. They also capture emails, chat sessions, social media responses, and other customer communication.

In a typical contact center, a checklist is used to evaluate a sample of each agent’s recorded contacts as part of the QA process.

The checklist contains a series of required actions or behaviors used to evaluate each interaction. Many of these checklists also assign points for each behavior, and the points are tallied to give agents a total score.

QA can be an important part of agents' job evaluations.

Why quality assurance scores are a problem

"Well, that's friendly for me."

The agent clearly wasn't friendly on the call. Her monotone voice sounded bored, perhaps even a little put-off by her customer's reasonable request.

But "friendly" was worth 10 points on the quality assurance (QA) form, so the agent was arguing. The discussion had devolved into a debate about points rather than how to project more friendliness on the next call.

This often happens when we attach an arbitrary score to an employee's review. The score becomes the focal point and the intended behaviors get pushed aside. Any loss of points can feel like a slap.

The worst part for a supervisor is the scores are hard to defend.

What exactly is friendliness?
What does 10 points worth of friendliness sound like compared to five?
Can you still be friendly if you sound like a grumpy robot?

Inevitably, score-based QA takes the focus away from constructive feedback and turns review sessions into arguments about points.

What is scoreless QA?

Scoreless QA is a quality assurance process that focuses on behaviors rather than points. For many contact centers, the transition can be as easy as eliminating the scores from your existing process.

For example, let's say an agent is required to verify a customer's identity before discussing private account information. When you review a call, the agent either correctly verified the customer's identity or they didn't.

It's the behaviors that count, but points often get in the way.

Jeremy Hyde, Director of Customer Service at Sun Country Airlines, explained the benefit of removing the points. "The idea behind no score is avoiding the argument of 'that call was a 93, not a 92!' rather than focusing on feedback."

Eliminating the points makes it easier to focus the conversation on helping the agent do a better job the next time.

"We use scoreless QA sheets but still track areas of focus and quality expectations," said Kristine Berken, a customer loyalty team lead at Cellcom. "We find reps react more positively to this method as it creates less anxiety or 'big brother' feelings."

How to create a metric without a score

The biggest objection to scoreless QA comes from supervisors who want a clear metric to evaluate agent performance and to track overall trends. Here's where scoreless QA really shines.

Let's say you monitor five calls for a particular customer service agent. The agent provides the correct answer to all customer questions on just three out of five calls.

You now have a tangible, actionable metric!

Goal performance: provide the correct answer 100% of the time.
Actual performance: provided the correct answer 60% of the time.
Gap: improve accuracy by 40 percentage points.

Removing the score shifts the conversation from earning more points to "How do you ensure you give correct information on your next call?" (By the way, this blog post can give you some ideas as to why reps give out the wrong information.)

The goal of the QA discussion should be helping the agent identify expected behaviors for the next contact and agree to try them.

Jeremy Watkin, Director of Customer Experience and Support at Number Barn, offered this three-step process on his Customer Service Life blog for giving behavior-based feedback:

Start by discussing what worked.
Now discuss areas for improvement.
Wrap-up by discussing goals for future calls.

You can also identify macro-trends across your contact center without QA scores.

Perhaps you identify "prevent future calls" as an area for improvement. A roll-up of your QA results for the month shows that agents are doing this 82 percent of the time.

You can then drill down and try to find the root cause.

What issues tend to drive future calls?
Do agents know how to recognize these issues and prevent them?
Are there particular types of issues agents fail to prevent?

Conclusion

You can immediately improve the quality of feedback you share with your agents by getting rid of arbitrary scores. This reduces noise and focuses the conversation on what matters—improving calls.

What the heck is a Chief Customer Officer?

Jeff Toister January 20, 2022

More companies are adding a Chief Customer Officer (CCO).

It sounds like a positive development, but you're not alone if you don't know exactly what a CCO does. I'll admit—I had to do some digging myself.

Thankfully, two experts gave me the inside scoop.

Customer experience pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss, literally wrote the book on this topic. The book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, spells out in great detail the role of the CCO.

Judy Weader is a senior analyst at Forrester who researches the field of customer experience (CX). You can find her quoted in publications like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

In this post, I'll attempt to answer a few questions with help from Bliss and Weader:

What does a Chief Customer Officer do?
Does a CCO need to have functional responsibility?
What’s the difference between a CCO and a CXO?
Is the CCO role a fad or a real trend?
How do you know if your company needs a CCO?

What does a Chief Customer Officer do?

"The Chief Customer Officer is responsible for building and guiding an organization’s customer experience strategy," explained Weader.

Customer experience extends beyond just customer service. It extends to all the interactions a customer has with your brand, including advertising, sales, delivery, support, and even the product itself.

A CCO should help ensure all of these functions work seamlessly together.

According to Bliss, the CCO is ultimately responsible for "Uniting the c-suite to elevate the organization to become an admired company and earn the right to customer-driven growth."

This means more than just collecting and presenting survey results or fixing problems. The CCO should give senior leaders enough information to grow the business.

Does a CCO need to have functional responsibility?

Both Bliss and Weader agree that a CCO doesn't necessarily need departments reporting to them such as customer service, marketing, or sales.

"I have yet to find one single mold for a CCO that establishes one typical set of functional responsibilities outside of CX," said Weader. "However, I’ve come across a number of CCOs who are also responsible for brand, marketing, sales, customer success, and/or the contact center. Some of this relates to their reporting structure; if the CCO reports directly to the CEO (which is the most common alignment), then they’re more likely to have a specific function beyond CX reporting to them in order to be efficient at the executive layer."

Bliss agreed that a CCO should report directly to the CEO in order to have the appropriate level of influence within the organization.

She also pointed to a few criteria shared by most successful CCOs:

Already a senior executive when they're promoted.
Experience building collaborative teams.
Have led an operation.

Bliss explained that top CCOs have "dirt under their fingernails" from running part of the business. This helps them better understand the real challenges of continuously improving customer experience.

Whats the difference between a CCO and a CXO?

Generally speaking, the titles of CCO and CXO can be used interchangeably.

"Importantly, Chief Customer Officers may not always go by this title—Chief Experience Officer (CXO) and Chief Client Officer (also CCO) are seen, as well," said Weader.

Is the CCO role a fad or a real trend?

This appears to be a real trend.

Bliss published Chief Customer Officer in 2006. The second edition, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, was released in 2015. The role of the CCO has only continued to proliferate since then.

Weader cited research from her colleague at Forrester, Angelina Gennis. "From 2014 to 2019, we noted explosive growth in CX leadership roles at the executive level, including the CCO: in 2019, there were over 10,000 current job titles for CX executives (including CCO and CXO), versus fewer than 1,000 only 5 years prior."

How do you know if your company needs a CCO?

Bliss offers an excellent 10-point checklist in Chief Customer Officer 2.0 to help you decide whether your company needs a CCO.

I won't share all of it here—you should really get the book—but here are a few highlights:

Do you need someone to clarify and champion the customer experience vision?
Is there a roadmap for the customer experience work to be done?
Do clear metrics exist for measuring progress?

A "no" to one or more of those questions might indicate the need for a CCO.

Interestingly, Bliss also advocates that CCOs try to work themselves out of a job. As an organization matures its customer-focused culture, the CCO function should become embedded in the daily work of every other executive.

Conclusion

This insight Bliss and Weader shared makes a lot of sense. I've observed CCOs struggle when they haven't been put in a position to succeed:

They weren't a member of the senior leadership team.
Their role was limited to collecting and presenting survey data.
The position was added to chase a trend, not because of a strategic imperative.

On the other hand, I’ve seen Chief Customer Officers make an impact on their organization under three conditions:

A strategic need exists for this person.
There's clarity around what this person does.
The CCO is a senior executive.

How surprise fees put employees in a no-win position

Jeff Toister January 13, 2022

Hotels have gotten sneaky with resort fees.

They're tacked on to the advertised rate, hidden in the "taxes and fees" section at the end of the booking process. A few hotels don't disclose them until guests check-in.

One hotel didn't reveal its resort fees to me until check-out. The fees were ultimately taken off my bill, but not without first having to argue the point with the manager.

Hidden fees catch guests off-guard, but hotel associates are also victimized. They didn't create the policy, yet they must defend them to frustrated guests.

It's an awkward position to be in.

How hotel fees hurt the guest experience

My wife, Sally, and I looked forward to spending a few relaxing days at one of our favorite places to stay, the Olea Hotel in California's Sonoma Valley.

The hotel offers a number of amenities, including a complimentary gourmet breakfast each morning. The hotel's website clearly mentions the breakfast is included with each stay.

I was booking our room when I noticed a curious line item labeled "Extras" on the list of charges. You had to expand the line item to reveal a $50 resort fee had been tacked on ($25 per night).

The same resort fee was also confusingly listed as an optional item, yet it couldn’t be removed.

Notice the complimentary breakfast is listed as one of the amenities included with the fee. Surprised, I called the hotel for an explanation.

Savannah answered and identified herself as a manager. She explained the resort fee was mandatory and covered several items, including that complimentary breakfast.

How can a fee labeled “extra” and as an “option” be mandatory?!

She refused to waive the fee, even after I pointed out the multiple places on the website advertising a complimentary breakfast.

Finally, Savannah admitted she wasn't allowed to make the change. "You'll have to contact the owner about that," she said.

We ultimately booked our stay at another hotel.

These hidden fees feel like a scam, so it's no wonder that hotels go to great pains to hide them in places they hope guests won't notice. Even when the resort fee is disclosed, it's often difficult to learn what's included.

Marriott Hotels routinely charge resort fees, but you'll have to contact the hotel directly to learn what you get for the mandatory charge. The list is often laughable.

One property offered the following for a required $30 per night fee:

Free WiFi (I already get that as a frequent guest)
A re-usable water bottle (I have one and don't need another)
Yoga classes

Another Marriott property threw in a $10 box of candy to "sweeten" the deal.

Even worse, the front desk associates were not empowered to waive the resort fees, even when it became clear the included amenities offered me zero value.

I was able to get a manager to waive the fee at both hotels, which makes me wonder why the front desk associates weren’t empowered to do it themselves. Both made it clear they weren’t allowed.

Why do hotels charge resort fees?

Erica Lamberg explained the rational in an article for USA Today. "Resort fees make it harder to compare costs between hotels."

Indeed, Ashish Patel, the owner of the Olea Hotel echoed this rationale in his explanation for the mandatory fee.

"Personally, I don’t like property fees," Patel wrote in an email. "The hotels around us implemented a property fee which allowed them to drop prices under us but make up for it with the property fee. Therefore we lose business to them."

Ironically, it was Patel's hidden fee that drove my business to a competitor.

Hospitality consultant, Donald Bowman, pointed to third-party booking sites as a primary driver. "The reason hotels and resorts are using them is so that they do remain visibly competitive through third-party booking sites like Expedia or Booking.com where your comparisons are just on the room rate, not with Resort Fee included."

This might explain why resort fees are commonplace in some markets, yet rarely charged in others.

Derrick Ricca, a senior sales manager at the Radisson Plaza Hotel at Kalamazoo Center, explained his property doesn't charge resort fees because they aren't necessary. "In our market in our comp set there are no resort fees."

This is a relief for Ricca, who would rather not charge them. "I am just like the general public, I am not a fan of resort fees."

How are employees affected by hidden fees?

Resort fees wedge frontline employees between a boss who insists they defend the fees and irritated guests who don't want to pay them.

An entire chapter is devoted to this topic in my book Getting Service Right, where I labeled it the "double agent problem."

On one hand, the employee is an agent for the hotel owner, who insists upon charging the fees. That makes it the employee's job to explain the fees, and defend them if necessary.

Most employees tell me they are not allowed to waive them or they don't have the necessary access in the hotel's billing system.

On the other hand, the employee is an agent for the customer. It’s their job to help create a terrific experience. They're responsible for welcoming guests, checking them in, and explaining the hotel's amenities.

Resort fees can quickly turn a friendly conversation into a sour one.

Hotel associates often confide in me that they privately resent having to absorb guest ire for an obviously deceptive practice they have absolutely no control over.

What should hotels do instead?

The simplest solution is to eliminate the fees.

There are many other ways to keep room rates competitive and still increase revenue. The most obvious is to offer a such a great experience that guests will keep coming back.

Sally and I were repeat guests at the Olea Hotel and were planning yet another visit until we were hit with the surprise fees.

Another tactic is to offer optional add-ons, such as a breakfast package. This adds transparency for the guest and can showcase the value the additional fee provides. It also allows guests who don't need the add-on to avoid the fee.

In some cases, the fees are mandated by the hotel owner and managers have no control over them. If that's your situation, it's important to give your associates some tools to better serve guests.

Donald Bowman has several helpful suggestions:

Make sure associates know the value of everything included in the fee.
Give the team collateral that helps explain the fee.
Empower associates to waive all or part of the fee when warranted.

For example, some hotels include parking in the resort fees. Bowman suggests allowing associates to credit a portion of the fee back to guests who didn't bring a car.

Conclusion

Resort fees and other hidden charges make employees become double-agents. They must enforce an unfriendly policy that annoys guests or annoy their boss if they waive the fee to make the guest happy.

Don't put employees in that position.

A better approach is to make it was easy as possible for employees to create great customer experiences.

How to build better customer relationships by following up

Jeff Toister January 6, 2022

Paul Harvey was on the radio in my house a lot when I was a kid.

Harvey was famous for a segment called "the rest of the story" where he shared a forgotten story or little-known fact about a famous person or event. Each ended with with a surprise twist and his famous phrase, "And now you know... the rest of the story!"

We often miss the rest of the story when we interact with customers.

Did the solution work?
Did the customer succeed?
Are they happy with how things turned out?

Surveys sometimes capture some of the story, but often anonymously or without all the interesting details. When you care about a customer, you want to know what really happened.

Friendly follow-up is one way to learn the rest of your customer's story. It can help you build stronger relationships and identify additional opportunities to serve.

Here's how to do it.

When to give customers a friendly follow-up

The best time to follow up with a customer is right after a critical moment in their customer journey where what happens next can determine success or failure.

My wife, Sally, and I recently had solar installed on our home by Stellar Solar. Friendly follow-up is one of the reasons the company has been voted the best solar company in San Diego County for five years in a row.

Our sales person, Dave Gersz, did an amazing job of following up throughout the installation process.

There were a couple of very minor hiccups along the way, but Gersz's check-in calls allowed him to address any small issues immediately before they became big ones. They also assured us everything was on track.

Our installation was very smooth as a result.

Take a moment to determine when it makes sense and under what circumstances you should follow up with your customers. Here are a few examples:

An important delivery
A resolution to a challenging problem
A milestone in a big project

How to follow up with customers

There's no single best way to follow up with customers. Try to pick the method that's most appropriate to the situation and best matches what you know about your customer's preferences.

Generally speaking, a call or text is better than an email because it’s more personal and urgent.

When I experienced difficulty getting a furniture delivery scheduled, I communicated with a supervisor via both phone and email. However, she called me to follow up on the day of the delivery.

It was a good thing she called, too. The furniture had arrived damaged and now I needed her help getting it replaced. We were able to work out the details over the phone.

There are times when an email is more appropriate. For instance, if all of your previous correspondence was via email or you are following-up about a relatively minor issue.

I also like email to send additional details, such as sending customers step-by-step instructions.

How to remember to follow up with customers

This can be the biggest challenge for some customer service professionals. It's hard to keep an important customer top of mind when you serve hundreds of other people during the week.

Setting a reminder is one easy way to do it. There are a few places you can do this:

A customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Your calendar.
A project management system.

Some follow-ups can be automated.

For example, I've set automated follow-ups for my free Customer Service Tip of the Week newsletter. Subscribers get a follow-up email from me at several milestones:

When they subscribe
After three months
After six months
After one year

Each email contains a helpful suggestion or reminder. It also contains my contact information so subscribers can easily reach me if they have a question, comment, or some feedback.

These automations help me effectively support more than 10,000 subscribers without any additional staff.

Conclusion

You've likely experienced friendly follow-up when you've dined out at a restaurant.

The server comes to your table shortly after your meal arrives and asks, "How is everything?" Everything is great most of the time, but occasionally there's a small issue with the order, a drink needs refilling, or you want extra ketchup.

Friendly follow-up can work even if you don't work in a restaurant.

Use it to spot additional opportunities to serve or find a way to prevent small problems from becoming big ones. It is also a great way to build stronger relationships with important customers.

Here's one bonus tip I can share.

Some people ask customers to write an online review on Yelp or another platform right after the customer service transaction. I advise against this.

A better strategy is to use friendly follow-up to learn the rest of the customer's story before asking them to leave a review. This will help you solve any issues that could prevent you from earning a glowing recommendation.

Why do customer service reps give out bad information?

Jeff Toister December 30, 2021

As a customer, do you ever feel like you're stuck in an old-timey comedy routine?

My wife, Sally, and I recently had one of those experiences. Ironically, it happened while we were lining up to get into a comedy club.

An employee approached us. "You’re in the wrong line," he said. "Get in that line," pointing to another queue of customers.

So we dutifully followed his directions.

"This is the wrong line," said another employee “You need to be in that line,” pointing back to the line we just came from.

"We were just in that line," we replied. "Your coworker told us to get in this line."

"He does't know what he’s talking about. I know what I'm talking about. Get in that line."

Confused, we started going back to the first line when a third employee intervened. "No, get in that line," he said, pointing to yet a third line.

By now, Sally and I were starting to wonder if we were on some sort of hidden camera prank show. Why are there so many lines? Are they just messing with us?

Sadly, no. The comedy club employees were just giving out misinformation. The big question is why do customer service employees routinely do this?

What's the impact of giving customers bad information?

The salesperson confidently told a customer, "If anything happens, even if it just gets a scratch, the company will replace it, free of charge."

That bold claim was enough to convince the customer to make a purchase. The claim was also totally wrong.

The reality? If the product broke, the company would repair it free of charge. The customer felt cheated when they learned the warranty didn't extend to cosmetic issues like a scratch.

Customers can experience unnecessary misery when employees share misinformation.

It might be a bit of frustration, like the experience at the comedy club. It could be a true service failure, like a customer who believes a salesperson's false promise, only to learn the salesperson exaggerated to make a sale.

Sometimes, the consequences are tragic.

An airline passenger flushed her hamster down an airport toilet after a customer service rep mistakenly told her she could bring the hamster on the plane, only to get to the airport and learn the hamster couldn’t travel with her.

The impact of misinformation on the business can also be harmful:

Increased customer complaints
Lost business
Negative word of mouth

Or in the case of one airline, national media coverage about its careless employees.

Why do employees give out the wrong information?

There are multiple reasons why an employee might give out false or misleading information to employees. Here are a few:

#1 Bad incentives

Employees are sometimes incentivized to lie. For instance, a retail salesperson might receive a commission if they bend the truth a bit to get a sale. They could be even more motivated to lie if they know they won't have to deal with any subsequent fallout.

#2 Overconfidence

Some employees overestimate their ability. A Cornell University study discovered that the less someone knows about something, the more likely they are to overrate their knowledge. A subsequent study from Yale found that people who can easily search for information on the internet also have an inflated sense of smarts.

#3 Bad data

Employees can sometimes give out the wrong information because their data source is wrong or out of date. For example, a technical support rep struggled to solve an issue with her company's app because her knowledge base hadn't been updated with information about the latest software release. So she had to rely on outdated information when trying to help customers.

#4 Bad mentors

The people employees trust, such as bosses and trainers, often give out false or misleading information, too. Early in my career, a mentor shared with me several statistics such as "55 percent of communication comes from body language." I later researched the origin of this claim and discovered it's totally false.

#5 Stress

People stop making great decisions when they are under stress. That's what happened at the comedy club. The previous show ran long and now the club was late getting people seated for the next show. This put employees in the weeds, where nobody knew exactly what to do, but everyone felt they had to do something to keep the line of people steadily moving into the club.

How can you improve information quality?

Companies can use several strategies to make sure employees are giving customers accurate and truthful information.

#1 Simplify

Reduce the number of places employees have to look for information. For instance, one company used a comprehensive elearning system to train employees on products and policies, but employees used a separate system on-the-job once their training was complete. The training system was often out-of-date, so the company solved the issue by using just one system for both training and on-the-job.

#2 Audit

It's helpful to audit the sources of information employees use to answer customer questions, especially when you encounter a service failure that happened because an employee gave a false or misleading answer to a customer. One option is a customer experience promise audit that reviews whether promises made by marketing, sales, and other departments are actually being kept.

#3 Reinforce

A great way to avoid misinformation is to constantly reinforce the correct information. Some customer service teams require reps to cite the source of an answer when sharing data with customers, such as a link to a knowledge base article. Other teams use team huddles and other information-sharing techniques to keep everyone updated.

Conclusion

Customers ultimately trust businesses that keep their promises. This includes sharing accurate information and setting clear, reliable expectations.

My book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience, outlines a process for creating experience guarantees that will help you win and retain more customers. You can get a free toolkit to help evaluate the promises you're making and ensure they're being kept.

One overlooked customer escalation you need to improve

Jeff Toister December 23, 2021

What comes to mind when you think of a customer service escalation?

Is it an angry customer demanding to speak to a supervisor?
Perhaps it's Tier 1 support transferring a customer to Tier 2?
Maybe a big issue requires another department to get involved?

There's no shortage of those types of escalations this time of year, but there's one escalation that's often overlooked: the escalation from self-service to human-service.

That escalation is often clunky, frustrating, or even painful for customers. Rather than solving problems, this escalation can get so badly bungled that customers are even angrier at the end.

Here's an example of one of those situations. I hope it's instructive.

Initial contact: web portal

How easy do you make it for customers to help themselves?

Simple, intuitive self-service options can prevent a lot of escalations. Most customers are happy to solve simple issues on their own if it's easy.

I logged into my wireless phone service account after unexpectedly receiving a $15 credit. While it's great to get money back, I suspected there might be a problem.

Unfortunately, billing information was difficult to find. The website was poorly organized and I couldn't find a transactional record of payments and credits.

This caused the first escalation.

First escalation: chatbot

The website offered more help via chat, so I tried it.

This is an escalation, since I'm going from self-help to a conversational channel. What I didn't realize was that "chat" really meant "chatbot."

Wedging a chatbot in between traditional self-service and a live person is almost always unnecessary friction. There are two things you should know about this:

Customers feel better about self-service when they know a human is ready to help.
Research shows customers really don't like chatbots.

My wireless provider probably went the chatbot route because it also sells chatbots. Unfortunately, my experience was a poor showcase:

A chatbot worth its salt would be able to answer the question directly. This one couldn't. I’m pretty sure it didn’t understand my question at all.

The next response was unhelpful, so I typed “human.” This prompted another unhelpful response. We danced around a few times before it finally connected me with a live agent.

Second escalation: live chat agent

Customers are understandably frustrated when their issue gets escalated a second time.

This puts the customer service agent in a difficult position. Adding too much friction to the escalation process makes customers more judgmental and less open to ideas.

The agent's job gets even harder when the company views this first live chat agent as an initial, Tier 1 contact. These agents often have little training and limited access to important systems. Their interactions are also highly scripted, which makes it more difficult to empathize with upset customers.

My wireless company didn't do itself any favors by identifying the employee as "Agent" in the chat rather than by name. It was a really dehumanizing experience.

It also didn’t make my previous chatbot conversation visible to the live agent, so we had to start over again.

To make matters worse, I had to wait several minutes between responses. This was likely because the agent was chatting with several other customers simultaneously.

I typed “Hello” a few times before getting another reply.

Now things really took a nosedive. I was on the second escalation, but the rep was clearly at a disadvantage:

They were dehumanized by being labeled "Agent."
Handling multiple chats at once made them slow to respond.
The rep didn't have access to the billing system needed to see the issue.

We went back-and-forth a few more times. Finally, the agent decided this issue needed to be escalated. Here's where the customer and company viewpoints really diverge.

Company perspective: This was the first escalation. The frontline chat agent couldn't solve the puzzle, so they escalated my issue to the "offline review team."

Customer perspective: This was the third escalation. Now I'm a really sad customer.

Conclusion

"Agent" assured me the offline review team would respond in 7-10 days. They never did.

It's a sad, but common tale of a company mishandling escalations at every turn. I received another $15 credit the following month. Once again, there was no explanation to be found.

Suddenly, I’m thinking about switching providers over a recurring $15 credit.

There are some companies out there that are really nailing escalations from self-service to live agent. They’re making it a pleasurable experience that improves loyalty rather than killing it.

Check out this post for some more examples of escalations, including a great example from Osprey.