chapter 10

shoulder your customer’s burden (and make sure you’re not adding to it!)

taking on customer burdens as your own, and taking care to eliminate anything you may be adding to that burden (wasting their time, tripping them up with inaccurate or incomplete information, taxing customer patience and memory with poorly designed systems), is central to modern, anticipatory, technologically informed service.

The most pervasive way businesses add to the burden on their customers is by wasting their time. I recommend tackling this issue for starters; it sounds mundane, but a lot of creativity can go into attacking this problem with gusto. Your business should be a fumble-free zone where you actively avoid wasting the time of customers, especially time wasted in repeated efforts by customers on inanities that can be better handled by improving your company’s processes.

stupid stuff

Here’s a paradox: If you’re going to successfully bind customers to you and build lasting customer loyalty, it helps to have touch points: chances to interact. But these touch points shouldn’t be occurring because of broken processes. For example, the questions customers are forced to call you with after they’ve searched for the answers to those same questions on your website or your mobile app—and found them nowhere. Or phone calls because your product keeps breaking on them in the exact same way, but word isn’t getting to your engineering team to get the update out that will fix it. These impositions on your customers are what I call “stupid stuff” (although depending on the squeamishness of the client and the absurdity of the context, “stuff” might or might not be the actual “s word” I use). Bill Price and David Jaffe, in their refreshing manifesto The Best Service Is No Service, similarly call these moments “dumb contacts.”1

Take a twofold attitude, companywide, when a customer calls. On the one hand, be delighted that she called. A call from a customer, truly, is an opportunity. Marketing departments spend dozens, sometimes hundreds, of dollars of promotion to make the phone ring a single time. So to have a live customer on the phone is, indeed, something to be valued. On the other hand, realize that the customer may not actually want to be calling. And that too many forced calls for “stupid stuff” will ultimately drive your customers away. It follows logically, then, that every customer service call deserves to be analyzed. Why did the call come in? Was it for a customer-driven reason or a broken-process reason? I’m fond of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s theory that people call his company for all sorts of reasons: It’s late at night and they feel a bit lonely; it feels odd for them to order shoes on the web without ever having talked to someone at the company; or even because they want to test if Zappos customer service is really as good as it claims to be.2 All of these are legitimate, customer-driven reasons. But I’m concerned about the host of calls that come in because of a burden you’ve placed on the customer. These are the reasons that will drive away your customers.

stupid is as … i forget

To analyze calls for stupid stuff requires a deft touch. Thanks to misuse of CRM (customer relationship management) software, the vast majority of companies tend to have far too many codes for call sources, sometimes numbering into the thousands, while other companies throw up their hands and drop everything into catchalls that are completely meaningless, such as “returns” or “shipping.” Amazon.com had three hundred and sixty codes to choose from at one point—three hundred for email and sixty for telephone contacts—before reforming its ways, says Bill Price, Amazon.com’s first vice president of global customer service. Its lesson is an excellent one for all of us.

Amazon once had 360 customer contact codes … some created at the behest of a “store” marketing manager, IT, or the legal department. The company frequently added or removed codes, requiring ongoing training for the agents and even a metric to track “code use compliance.” Few of these early codes attached to an owner [in other words, became the specific responsibility of a high-level Amazon.com manager], and the company fell into the trap of presenting weekly “top ten” codes, which rarely moved up or down one position, and which, by design, ignored the 350 reasons looming in the darkness below the top ten. The company decided to reengineer the contact coding system, … resulting in thirty codes that could be entered directly into the CRM system, each with an owner in the MECE tradition [MECE is the McKinsey & Co. acronym for mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive], codes that would never change … and they haven’t, after all these years.3

Some reasons for calls are deep-seated. Resolving these issues is more likely with the system suggested above: that codes should each have an owner at the company, and only one owner. Once you identify an owner, via calls sourced to him that appear to represent incoming “stupid stuff,” you can get down to work—involving your vendors, your engineers, everyone needed to eliminate the source of the call.

Now if some of these call codes show repeat calls from the same customer (and some of them will) you need to figure out what this means. Poor training or poor technology? Either of these can be systematically addressed, once you identify it as the problem. Or the repeat calls may mean that you’re rushing customers off the phone because of misguided metrics that encourage short calls—a mistake so common it should be one of the first places you look: In my experience, limiting time per call is one of the top causes of repeat calls. Not having enough time to solve a customer problem is also one of the top causes of call center burnout. It’s a prime way to create what psychologist Martin Seligman famously termed “learned helplessness” among good employees who really do wish they were able to assist customers thoroughly, rather than rushing them off the phone with an incomplete solution.4 Breeding helplessness in employees is dangerous. It’s the utter, absolute opposite of optimism, the “O” in WETCO.

Odds are good that the codes, correctly tracked, are going to show a variety of causes, from simple, predictable queries such as (for a bank or credit union) “when is my mortgage due?” to more complex and sometimes truly unique issues. Coming close to eliminating the more predictable queries is something you can do if, like Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, you commit to inventing on behalf of your customers. By inventing, Bezos doesn’t only mean huge strides like his Kindle e-reader that has transformed the publishing and reading landscape. He’s also talking about eliminating stupid stuff. Amazon.com, Schwab.com, and other savvy organizations frequently invent ahead of their customers by tracking the stupid-stuff calls and eliminating them through proactively delivered confirmations and other creative methods, leaving staff free to handle the more complex and unusual issues that crop up.

Just because customers haven’t asked you to eliminate stupid stuff for them doesn’t mean they don’t want you to. I remember the days when you didn’t know whether Amazon.com had received your order and you had to try to call to find out. (That’s right: call.) Then, one day, order confirmations started to arrive every time you placed an order—first within a few minutes, now within what seems like a few milliseconds. By anticipating their customers’ desire to not be on the phone talking about stupid stuff, Bezos and team became very profitable pioneers.

This Book Won’t Help You … If the Stupid-Stuff Calls
You Get Are Intentional

We bought a house recently, complete with what seemed to be a functioning furnace. The furnace had been built by a major HVAC manufacturer that had carefully cultivated a premium reputation, a reputation that dissolved quickly for us once we moved in. Immediately, the furnace quit, requiring a $1,600 repair. That’s okay, I thought: The previous homeowners had sprung for an extended warranty, which, being organized people, they had the Realtor turn over to us in a folder of household documents at closing. So, trying to schedule a warranty repair, I called the perfectly nice people at the company that had installed the furnace, but the exchange unfortunately went as follows:

Furnace Installers: “Oh, you must be the Jacobsens.”

Micah: “No, we’re the people who bought the Jacobsens’ house.”

Furnace Installers: “Sorry, we can’t help you. The manufacturer requires you to have the Jacobsens transfer the warranty. But it only costs $25. You’ll need to print out a verification form from the internet, have the Jacobsens both sign it, and mail it to the manufacturer in [home state of manufacturer], and a week or two later you’ll get a new warranty certificate.”

Micah: “But we’ve never even met the Jacobsens and my understanding is they now live across the country. We don’t know how to reach them very easily, and our furnace is out now.”

Furnace Installers: “I’m sorry.”

To my mind, the manufacturer wasn’t looking to get our $25 warranty transfer fee. Its goal was to keep us from using the warranty, so the manufacturer could avoid the entire $1,600 repair cost. I mean, seriously: This unit weighs tons. It’s not going anywhere; there’s no switcheroo possible. Which means the calls I was forced to make to track down the Jacobsens (who, against all odds and against the HVAC manufacturer’s expectations, did transfer the warranty to us), as well as my later hounding of the furnace manufacturer to get them to honor the warranty, were all intentionally created stupid-stuff calls.

Are draconian customer policies full of intentional gotchas, sneaky expiration dates, and hidden fees the reasons for your stupid-stuff phone calls? If so, this book isn’t going to help your company. Customers may have accepted this anti-consumer behavior pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook. But in the age of social media, the balance of power has changed.

get to them first

Beyond not wasting their time, it’s time to have a policy and mindset of using communications technology and automation to let customers hear from you before they have to ask for anything themselves.

Like much else in customer service, this requires a masterful touch, far removed from the hamfistedness of a spammer. Applied properly, the principle of “getting to them first” is a powerful way to make customers feel remembered, cared for, and, ultimately and paradoxically, left alone and unbothered, since they can now relax knowing you will, for example:

image Notify passengers if flights have been delayed or gates change, and if the worst happens (a cancellation) rebook them and alert them to the new arrangements, without any work on the passengers’ part.

image Reach out to customers if there’s a delay in shipping the item you’d promised to deliver before the holidays.

image Remind customers of something they “should” be keeping track of themselves, but that you, in your quest to become their irreplaceable vendor, are happy to put on your own shoulders. For example, you can remind them, before they ask, when their mortgage payments are due or when a medication needs to be refilled.

Along these lines, my credit card company has cozied up to me by taking what should be my responsibility—posting my payments on time—off my shoulders and put it on the company’s. Now, as a result, I’m rarely late on my credit card payments these days, and I don’t really think of switching companies anymore, thanks to the simple automated alert sent to my inbox:

Alert: Your Payment Is Due in 10 Days to X Card Services

To: [email protected]

Your payment to us will be due in 10 days, for your account that
ends in 1111.

This sense of being able to relax in a company’s electronically anticipatory arms is analogous to the sense of being cared for in a childhood home, the archetype we’re using for ideal customer service. This effect is enhanced by making sure that every automated addition to your repertoire is accompanied by an option for the recipient to easily reach a human being. Remember, your marketing department would spill its blood to reach a live customer one on one; this isn’t an overhead expense. It’s an opportunity. So strive to offer customers a chance to talk with a human, if that’s their preference, even when you’re reaching out to them through automation.

where are the opportunities to get to them first?

Here are the opportunities you’ll find to get to your customers first:

image With anything you think about more than/more frequently than your customers do. If your business is a mail-order pharmacy, it means you work all day on the intricacies of injectable medications. These are expensive and involved medications used for managing multiple sclerosis and other chronic illnesses, requiring pre-approvals from insurance agencies, typically shipped to the customer every ninety days. Your customer, on the other hand, has a life. She’s doing everything other than thinking about her medication supply in the eighty-nine-day span between reorders. So, you set up the ultimate in bulletproof reminder systems, check for her that insurance and physician verifications have remained up to date, etc., and handle everything for her as transparently as possible, thus becoming her indispensable dispensary.

image Any time your customers would otherwise be waiting in the dark. Projects and products built or shipped in stages, from insurance applications and disaster relief efforts to cross-country relocations and event planning, are important opportunities to get to your customers first. “No news is good news” isn’t something customers assume or should assume. Regular updates should be your mode of operation.

image With anything that customers need to know about, if you’re aware of it before they are. This could be protection from a new software virus; many stitches are saved when electronic patches are provided to customers before they need them. Or, let’s look at an application from the fine-arts world: Don’t make your patrons find out for themselves that a sporting event has closed off the normal route to the ballet. Sure, they’ve already bought their nonrefundable tickets this time, but they may never buy them again or become that legacy donor you’ve been looking for if they encounter an aggravating experience that leaves a poor taste in their mouths. So I was impressed one evening when, courteously and cannily, the ticketing service used by the Philadelphia Ballet sent an automated call to my phone to alert me to leave extra time so as not to miss the opening curtain that Saturday—which we would have by at least forty-five minutes. It also coupled the phone call—just for safety—with an email, as follows:

An important message regarding your performance on Saturday at 12 p.m. The International Dragon Boat Festival and the U.S. Pro Bike Race will take place Saturday. Throughout the day Kelly Drive will be partially closed and MLK Drive will be completely closed. Please allow extra time to arrive at the Academy of Music for your 12 p.m. performance.

I’m from the Government—And
I’m Here to Save Your Life

Some government agencies and regulated utilities have learned the importance of getting to customers first better than their counterparts have in the private sector. Consider our power company in the Philadelphia area (PECO). Even if I do have to make the first call to PECO’s easily remembered 800 number when a tree falls and knocks down a line on our little street, after that, anticipatory behavior from the utility kicks in. The utility’s automated messaging system lets me know if the problem has already been reported or if it needs me to provide more details, calls me back when the crew’s on its way, and tells me the estimated time until power will be restored. This is exactly the information my family needs to know to plan our response to the situation.

In tornadoes and other severe circumstances, this becomes even more important. Government agencies have become accurate and proactive about issuing severe weather alerts, to the point that the risk from tornadoes within the United States has become, at least in theory, more a risk to property than to life. This is why the terrible loss of life in the May 2011 Joplin, Missouri, tornado is, at present, such a puzzle. While the physical damage to neighborhoods and commercial areas was unavoidable, what’s disturbing here is that the emergency alert systems failed to get humans to shelter, in a way that wasn’t supposed to happen. “‘Something didn’t work the way we’d like it to,’ says Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.”5 One theory is that the reason for the failure, although heightened by the odd timing of the storm (occurring as several proms let out), was the spamlike effect of excessive alerts: Too many previous warnings to too many nonaffected people had created numbness.

If you’re working with customers, this numbness hazard is something you need to actively avoid, whether you deal in life-and-death situations or not. In the case of the weather agencies, they’re responding to the issue by incorporating better targeting and less-spamlike behavior into their next round of improvements. The National Weather Service in the U.S. is in the process, as I write this, of unveiling a new Personal Localized Alerting Network. Once it’s rolled out, any county will be able to broadcast a warning specifically and exclusively to cell phones in the threatened area, transmitted to those phones from the nearest cell tower. “Anybody with a bar on their cell phone in that tower’s range—usually about 10 miles—will get the messages,” says John Ferree, Severe Storms Service leader for the National Weather Service in Norman.6

permission to anticipate

To be so electronically attentive to and proactive with your customers requires permission. I know this doesn’t seem fair, considering that your purpose is to help customers, but just like the old joke about the psychiatrist (he can only change a lightbulb that wants to change), the customer has to want your proactive assistance—and you have to know the customer wants it. Here’s why you need permission:

image No matter how justified you feel you are in contacting a customer, legally speaking you may still need permission to make that contact, depending on your business relationship and the jurisdiction in which you do business.

image Assuming you have legal permission, you need to be sure that you’re following the emotional definition of permission laid out by master marketer Seth Godin, who invented the concept of permission marketing:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

“Pay attention” is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.

I got a note from a Daily Candy reader the other day. He was upset because for three days in a row, his Daily Candy newsletter hadn’t come. That’s permission.7

Note that this may put you at loggerheads with some in your marketing department concerning how, and with what frequency, you’ll make contact with customers. Amazon.com sends me an email every time my orders are placed, when my orders ship, and in the event of a delay or other problem with my order. Super. But this means I hear from it a lot, because I order from Amazon.com a lot. So Amazon.com gives me an option to alert the company to all the other times I don’t want to hear from it. It’s quite a long list:

Musical Instruments /Books /General Offers /Software /Shoes /Office Products & Supplies/ Automotive /Baby /Beauty / Grocery /Health & Personal Care /Home, Garden & Pets / Sports & Outdoors /Tools & Home Improvement/Industrial & Scientific /Jewelry /Magazine Subscriptions /Music/Toys & Games /Video Games /Computer & Accessories /MP3 Downloads/Kindle /Video on Demand /Movies & TV /Electronics/ Watches/Amazon Partners /Clothing & Accessories /Associates8

Amazon.com offers a single-checkbox escape hatch to protect me here, a simple unsubscribe that frees me from non-transactional emails but still keeps me in the loop when I need to be:

Do not send me email. Check this box to stop receiving all Amazon.com communications (except transactional emails).
Note: Even if you choose not to receive some marketing emails from us, you will still receive our transactional email, such as messages related to your orders …9

Your marketing department may not have the same confidence in your customers that Amazon.com has in its customers. They may use any email or phone number that a customer volunteers as a potential receptacle for undifferentiated marketing materials. In addition, your systems may not be set up like Amazon.com’s, allowing your customers to opt out of one stream (marketing) and not the other (transactional). If so, you have a problem to fix—pronto—because nothing can be taken away faster than permission, the permission you need to maintain in order to be anticipatory.

image You need specific permission and knowledge of how your customer wants to be reached. Consider the telephone. With so many customers listing only a cell phone as their point of contact, be careful: You call that number at your peril if you don’t have permission. As pioneering social media maven and writer Peter Shankman (check out his book Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World) says, “Just because you have all of [a customer’s] contact info doesn’t mean you have the right to use it. (Try to sell me something by calling my mobile, and I’ll crush you.)”10

On the other hand, texting or calling a mobile phone to give a customer a needed alert may be very well received. As with most things, the difference is in whether you’ve met the definition of permission. In an example that Price and Jaffe cite, two private health insurers asked their customers for a phone number as part of their sign-up form. The first insurer (Fund A) just asked for a phone number and later called the customer when it had a need. The second insurer (Fund B) offered the customer a checkbox, requesting permission to call and a preferred time of day.

When Fund A called its customers, they were greeted with hostility: “I emailed you; why are you calling?” The insurer quickly dropped the idea, as it didn’t want to annoy customers. Fund B, in contrast, called only those customers who had given permission (and the vast majority did), and these customers welcomed this service and were expecting the call.11

the specific medium is the message—and its only chance of getting through

To call or text or not to call or text a customer’s mobile is a rather easy decision to work out for each customer. But there are more technologically complex ones as well. These come down to finding out specifically how your customer likes to receive alerts: HTML, standard mobile formatting (a stripped down version that works well on a smartphone such as an Android-compatible phone or iPhone), or text-formatted, which is handy for an old-school BlackBerry and important for the visually impaired.

Platinum Hotel Las Vegas handles this quite well (you can visit micahsolomon.com to view screenshots of how Platinum does it). The hotel sends out automated alerts prior to a guest’s arrival, checking that all details on the reservation and in the guest’s preference file are correct. Each alert features a simple view-switching selection at the top— “view: HTML–Mobile–Text”—allowing the guest to switch the way information is displayed, regardless of what the guest may have initially indicated as a preference.

I recommend you consider offering this format-switching functionality front and center like Platinum does, because customers are nothing if not fickle. Anticipate that, too.

“and your point is?”

image The predominant way businesses add to customer burdens is by wasting their time.

image Touch points with customers shouldn’t be occurring because of broken processes; being made to call too many times for “stupid stuff” will drive your customers away.

image Misguided metrics can be hazardous to the success of your customer interactions. Specifically, limiting call time for CSRs is one of the top causes of repeat calls.

image Even if customers haven’t asked you to eliminate “stupid stuff” for them, they still probably want you to. Amazon.com, Schwab.com, and other savvy organizations have frequently invented ahead of their customers by tracking the stupid-stuff calls and then mostly eliminating them via automated confirmations and other creative solutions, leaving staff free to handle the more complex and unusual issues that crop up.

image Applied properly, the principle of “getting to them first” is a way to use technology to make customers feel remembered, cared for, and, ultimately and paradoxically, left alone, knowing the company is handling everything that may come up.

image Make sure the automated alerts you send are accompanied by an opportunity for the customer to reach a human being if desired.

image To be electronically attentive to and proactive with your customers requires their permission—for legal reasons and to be effective. So be sure you’re following the definition of “permission” laid out by Seth Godin: “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

image Nothing can be taken away faster than permission, and you need to maintain permission to aid your efforts to be anticipatory.

image You need to know how your customer wants to be reached. Find out how your customer likes to receive alerts: HTML, standard mobile formatting, etc. And make it easy for customers to switch their option.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset