twelve solutions

This month’s feature article will focus on the internal customer. Every job function within an organisation requires rendering some form of customer service. For some of us, we may only be dealing with other departments or units within our organisations. These group of people are those we refer to as our internal customers and also deserve our best in terms of service.

Some organisations fail to focus on the primary path to exceptional customer service which is internal customer service. When we build a good internal service culture as individuals within an organisation then we set the tone for success.

As external customers,often times when we encounter problems with the product or service on offer, the most common excuse is oh, its so and so department that has failed to finish what you asked for or is taking their time to deal with the issue. This is often referred to as passing the buck. However, we believe that passing the buck is often times a manifestation of poor internal customer service.

If all departments correctly apply all the do’s and don’t s of exceptional customer service then the front line staff will never have cause to pass the buck. Communicating internally is also a key part of good internal customer service. It puts us all on the right part and reminds us all that we all have one common goal within the organisation.

This month we’ll be discussing listening and how it impacts on the customer experience. Customers expect active listening from CSR’s at every service point and watch for the slightest change in body language to determine their next course of action.

Listening isn’t just about hearing the customer; it’s also about understanding what the customer is saying. Listening involves making eye contact with the customer (or in phone conversations having a pen and paper to jot down details from the call), keeping an open and positive body language and generally making the customer know that you are listening and trying to understand what he/she is saying.

How can we achieve good listening skills? To achieve good listening skills, we need to listen to what our customers are saying with an open mind, check their voice tone so that we can try to determine what emotions they would be experiencing and listen to their body language. When we listen to our customers and actually understand what they are telling us, we can never go wrong as CSR’s.

Last month we looked at measuring our First Contact Resolution rate. This month we will be reviewing the handle time of customer transactions and its effect on the customer experience. Normally as customers we like to take the time to fully express our needs or wants at every service point and would become irritated when rushed by the attending customer service rep (CSR). This feeling of being rushed is often looked on as rudeness from the CSR.

Human resource management is usually inclined to quantify the amount of work done by CSR’s by the number of customer interactions they may have handled for the review period. A huge percentage of their performance review is normally based on this factor.

While this may seem a logical measurement we must be careful not to put our customer relationships at risk with this evaluation criterion. If our major focus as an organisation is to ensure customer satisfaction then we must allow our CSR’s ample time to deal with these transactions otherwise we will be putting our customer relationships at risk. It becomes a contradiction of sorts if we request our CSR’s to minimise the amount of time spent on each customer interaction, (thereby increasing the number of transactions) and also ensure all customers needs are met and even exceeded.

Human instincts would normally drive the average person to apply a speedy courteous approach to the customer interaction to the detriment of the customer experience. This is so because no one wants to be identified as “not having met his/her targets”. And the consequence of unmet targets would normally reflect on the employee’s pay cheque.

So what do you think and what is currently implemented in your environment? Are you measuring the quality of the interactions and maintaining your customer relationships or are you measuring the quantity/ number of transactions handled by your CSR’s?

I’ve come to realise lately that most organisations don’t give much thought to who works in their customer service departments. Recruitment is done based on “who knows who” and “he/she just needs a job”. Most CSR’s are not people who like to serve but they are thrust in the “limelight” and often times fall short of the required standards. 

Recently I met with a friend who works with one of the top banks in our country and while we were talking she spoke with excitement on how she had been moved from sales to customer service. And when I tried to probe deeper with specifics on the interview for the switch between units, her response was, “there was no interview; it was just an internal posting”.

Alarm bells rang in my head and I was wondering “gosh, what are these people up to”. Reason being that my friend is definitely not the best of “helpers”. She can be pleasant when she feels like it but a bit sassy at times and that part will be sure to tick customers off.

Customer service should be treated as a career and not just a job. Recruiting customer service personnel is a very complicated process. Some people have the passion to serve, the patience to listen, a ready smile; they make excellent customer service personnel.

It’s not enough to have this long list of questions to use during recruitment of CSR’s; rather you need to interact informally with your candidates. This interaction process allows them be themselves and affords you a rare glimpse into their personalities.

Organisations need to run frequent health checks on their customer service personnel. Always advice your staff to make a plan to leave the service environment as soon as they find that they’ve lost their initial passion for service or can no longer just bear to listen to the whines of customers.

How do we fare as organisations with our customer service personnel? As customer service managers, do we respond to our staff with a ready smile, an open ear? Or are we grouchy and unhelpful and yet expect them to be the friendly face of the business with our customers?

In a nutshell, who is serving your customers?

In this section, we will discuss a new customer service tip each month, stating its benefits and possibly comments by customer service representatives. Our tip for this month is starting with the right ATTITUDE.

While we go about our daily lives, we discover that service is an integral part of us and we are either in a service offering or receiving position. We frown and are upset when service given to us does not meet our standards and we are happy when it’s fantastic. However, the receiver determines what constitutes good customer service at every point in time.

Whenever we find ourselves in a service offering position, we need to listen attentively and assist the service requestor in a way he or she would leave happy and satisfied.

Recently I walked into a restaurant to pick up a few pastries, feeling happy about the upcoming weekend I went to the counter to make my purchase. However, my upbeat manner was shot down with a surly look from the attendant; and I thought what had I done to deserve this ATTITUDE.

The difference between good customer service and bad customer service often times simply lies in the ATTITUDE! To offer good customer service, we must be prepared to keep an upbeat attitude, and do away with any negative attitude. Someone with a positive attitude will attempt to help, even if they don’t have all the answers. They will search for an answer or find someone who can help. Someone with a negative attitude will treat a request for help as an intrusion, interference or simply as a bother taking them away from what they were doing.

So how is your attitude today? Are you being helpful or frustrating? Let’s take time to reflect on this and think about how we can improve. The bottom line is we are responsible for whatever attitude we exhibit, and only when we choose to change can we be different and stand out as stars.

In this edition, we take a look at a critical factor in call centre management that is often overlooked – occupancy. Occupancy can be defined as the amount of time call centre agents are actually occupied on customer contacts during a shift. It is usually measured as a percentage of the call centre agents total shift time spent busy in talk or wrap up. Occupancy is often used as a statistic in calculating call centre productivity and is a critical factor in call centre staffing.

The question to ask here is why should CC Managers measure occupancy rates in their environment? Low occupancy rate is an indication of an overstaffed call centre or poor scheduling scenario, and with call centre agent costs consuming over half of the call centre budget, Managers need to keep track of the resources. Likewise, an extremely high occupancy rate will indicate likelihood of high abandonment of contacts, and high pressure on call centre agents bringing on exhaustion and a downslide in quality standards.

For centres that have implemented skill based routing, it is important to track occupancy per skill group so as to determine a course of action when it gets overboard – possibly cross train other groups to allow for failover during peak periods. Understanding the work pressures being faced by call centre agents is a good reason for tracking the occupancy ratio.  

Measuring agent occupancy is the reverse to service level. To improve service level, we’ll need to increase headcount effectively ensuring everyone is less busy thereby reducing occupancy. Likewise, to improve occupancy levels, we could reduce the head count, thereby increasing workload per person and creating less idle time. However this will impact negatively on the service level.

While there are no agreed industry standards, many call centre managers are of the opinion that a centre’s occupancy should not exceed eighty five percent (85%). This should ensure that your agents are not under pressure the whole shift and are therefore able to meet agreed quality standards.

One key way to ensure that the occupancy levels are at the right level is staffing (scheduling) accurately. Random call arrival in the call centre creates peak and off peak periods during a workday thereby making scheduling accurately more of an uphill battle for call centres. The trick therefore, is to schedule covering all the periods as adequately as possible without overstaffing whilst ensuring that agents are not under-utilised.

So while preparing that budget, make sure you’re monitoring the occupancy ratio as you analyse your service level and evaluate scheduling and staffing needs

Hello everyone,

We’ve launched our all new blog! It promises to be very exciting and informative.

Customer Service is a very special area for us and we have decided to put up various topics within the call centre and customer service area for discussion. Customer Service is very important for any business to survive. Many organisations in our environment still choose to ignore customer service or see it simply as something that gulps a lot of funds. When training sessions are held within organisations, junior level staff are mandated to attend while the company executives use work to avoid attending these sessions. This attitude from senior management staff does not help change the attitude of junior staff towards customers. For a customer service culture change to effectively occur, all staff need to be a part of the process.

A ripple effect of not involving the entire organisation is that the customers take the final punch. Customers get bad service from the front line staff and their issues are not dealt with internally because no one within the organisation’s management empathises; having not been a part of the process.

What attitude does your organisation have towards customers? Are there two “standards” in operation? Do senior staff ensure that junior staff imbibe the customer service culture but remove themselves from the process?

How about the customer? How do we feel when our issues remain unresolved by front line customer service personnel and we are told that our issues will be escalated to senior management, and many weeks down the line we’re still waiting for response?

Will be back again later.

Ati