Last week I bought a Reliance Broadband Data card and immediately encountered some issue with its activation. I called their Customer Support Representative (CSR) (aka Call Center folks). The support representative listened my problem patiently and asked few probing questions. Then she had conference me with various stakeholders (Sales Person, who sold the data card to me, and Field verification person, who has to verify my Address) and solved my problem within 30mins. I was ecstatic!!
Involving your customer in problem solving and making your internal workflow transparent to them will make your customer believe you. Shroud of secrecy and keeping everything hidden from customers didn’t help companies much till date. Empower your CSR with requisite knowledge and skills and give them authority to make decisions. Zappos gives full freedom to its CSR to decide whether to give replacement shoes or not. CSR is your front end to customer so they need to be empowered to take timely right decisions and hence kindle trust in customer. Customer doesn’t like CSR who just reads out brochure and fail to make any decision for them. CSR folks should be aware of the bigger picture of the company. They should be aware of all workflows in company, scope of various Business Units (BUs) and which responsibility lies with whom. Awareness will help them to make right decision and Authority will allow them to make things happen with people from various BUs. CSR are generally seen to pass buck to other BUs and just acts as mundane information providing centers. They generally crib about not getting proper proactive response from other BUs. Customer is not bothered about what your internal limitations are and why things are not working at your end. They just need solution.
CSR should be customer focused and should have conscious inclination towards customer. This will help them in understanding customer’s pain points better. CSR, in addition to working as problem solvers, can also act as consultant to the company. They can give feedback to management on areas that can be improved. Feedback would be more precise and holistic if CSR is aware of all workflows internal to company. CSRs continuous feedback will smoothen various business units’ integration and inter-BU communication.
In case of customer complain, CSR should pull in all stakeholders in a conference call, find out the root cause of the problem, assign action points to concerned stakeholders and then follow up after expected closure. In case they find some process flaw\blip they can give feedback to concerned person so that problem can be eliminated for all future customers.
Transparent processes will make all stakeholders accountable in product servicing. A product manager told me once that key to success is to make every stakeholder accountable (in success as well as failure). People are more responsive when they are accountable. Various BUs act as if to do their mechanical work and push the work to next basket so that they can say my job is done. They are more focused on avoiding any possible blame rather than focusing on delivering right service. Once responsibility of delivery is shared amongst various BU they will act more coherently and with enhanced communication. Stakeholders should be properly trained for this transparency and they should be made aware of various dynamics of other interfacing BUs. People generally think that things are too complex so they can’t do anything about it. But if things seem complex then it means that you still have not understood them logically.
Once the things are transparent Customer will start to gain faith in you. And faith is far more valuable than, usual, customer delight. Faith makes your customers as your advocate. They will be able to vouch for your service in front of anyone. An advocate is even more valuable than Sneezer as Sneezer only spread information but Advocate vouch for you along with spreading information.
Transparency should be practiced with utmost caution in the beginning. When you are becoming transparent you are exposing your flaws to customer and few customers might not act in very genial manner if they are aware of flaws. Also stakeholders should be proactively responsive to CSR. CSRs should also act as moderator in stakeholders’ conference to facilitate resolution.
We are always told that failure is fine. We can learn from mistakes, improve and carry on. But what if you fail on your BIG day, the day you are most expected to deliver?
Many a time famous bloggers refer or point out something in their blog and add web link to something interesting. The server hosting newly recommended thing crashes because of huge number of hits that day.
This not only make you lose your probable customers but also give them a negative first impression. In case they hear about you again from some other source next time, they might not turn up.
What if one day you get 20 times more customers?
What if your company gets a big proposal today?
Plan for the big day (when it’s about to come you will know that it’s coming; gut feeling?). Get ready and deliver that very day. Because some mistakes pushes you back few years.
Someone rightly said that “it takes 20 years to become overnight success” so that night you need to deliver.
And if sudden rush flummoxed you, recover fast and deliver.
It’s all about delivering at right time. And nothing more right time than Big day.
Nearly entire world whines about customer support call center’s long waiting period. But not many organizations did anything substantial regarding this. Companies still have average waiting period of 10 plus minutes before they entertain customer.
When customer wants to speak to support staff of a product or service it means either she is in need of some info or some action from support team. And most of the times it is urgent. When customer is calling you with utmost urgency and you want her to wait endlessly and force her to listen to your promos or on-hold music then it means you don’t give a damn about customer and you are making her irritated.
Automate as much responses as you can for the customer. Take care that just for the heck of automating responses you won’t let customer travel in zigzag fashion (like press 1, now press 7, now press 9, now…). When customer has chosen one particular selection where the end point is speak to customer representative give option to end user for call back service. As soon as your support staff is free they can call back customer and handle query\issue.
Call back facility will make customer feel special and will obliterate the need of irritating waiting period. You value your customer, customer will value you back.
People hate when they are stopped in midst of something. If they have joined a queue and guy at the counter tells them that this is wrong queue they are rightly enraged. If people are buying something online and on 3rd step if you add some caveat or clause that will change their buying pattern or decision to buy then they will not feel happy. By stopping people in midst of something you are wasting their time and their effort so they will definitely give you a piece of their mind.
Give people seamless experience. Smoother the experience, more they will appreciate you to value their time and effort.
If you want to tell them some instruction or note, tell them before they embark on their journey. They will accept your note very gracefully and might not even budge. The same instruction\note given in between their journey will force them to leave you for someone better.
Remove all the hurdles from every journey.
People love positive surprises. They feel pampered, special when something\someone amazes them. It is surprise that make people travel across the world to visit different places to see different culture, nature or history. Creative advertisements surprise people and we tend to remember those product\services more whose story surprises us. Discounts are also a form of positive surprise (omg, 30% discount on my favorite clothing!) that make people flock to shops. Touch-screen computers are surprising people that computers can be so easy to handle; hence they are and will be so popular. A easy to use product feature surprise you every time you use it and forces you stay longer with that product.
It is beyond doubt that pleasant surprises works wonder for relationships.
So create surprises and your customer will surprise you back with their warmth and their prolonged association.
Did you surprise someone today?
