In the era of social and digital everything, the very basic tenants of manners and business etiquette in other everyday interactions are acknowledged and practiced less and less. These are not old-fashioned principles, but simple guidelines to socially acceptable behaviors that still hold true today.
There has always been a code of conduct for social behavior in business when interacting with customers, a potential employer, work colleagues, vendors, suppliers, and people in general. Read More
The other day I stopped at a well known North American Donuts Shop on the way in to work.
We were celebrating the soon-to-be birth of a new baby at our IF Family.
Every now and then, we get together as a Team to thank and honor a Team Member — babies, birthdays, service awards. A great way to chat, catch up with each other as people, discuss our business goals. A mini-State of The Union, if you will.
The way that companies handle customer service has changed dramatically in recent years. More than a decade ago, there were only two ways to contact a company – by phone or by fax (remember fax machines?). Today, you can take your pick; phone, email, live chat, snail mail and social media. The list appears endless. The challenge for many companies is not only to be accessible in these channels, which is important, but for those channels to deliver consistent and an integrated service quality. Companies that provide a consistent service quality across multiple channels retain 89% of their customers, whereas companies that do not provide a consistent quality are only able to retain 33%. A consistent service quality across multiple channels will significantly impact company revenue. And this is why more companies are investing in Omni-channel customer service.
Typical multi-vendor pain points are the ability to service customers efficiently and effectively.
“The more vendors that are in the kitchen, the harder it is to cook a meal.”
The preference is to work with companies that have a consistent service delivery model and the same predictable quality of service.
While some may see multiple vendors as decreasing risk, it can actually increase risk and complicate the management of SLAs and responsibilities when an issue needs to be managed. Not to mention the complication of multiple vendor touching key components of Customer Service, particularly if there is possible risk of litigation involved.
1. Go for quality, not quantity with your vendor
The old procurement-driven advice on managing vendors was to have a huge portfolio of potential vendors, and put every procurement out to competitive bid, playing vendors against each other and applying pressure until you got the absolute lowest cost. While this can be effective in the near term, there are two risks. The first is rather obvious: if you always seek the lowest cost, you’ll always get the minimum acceptable output. This may be fine for commodities like connectivity services, hardware, and some IT services, but puts more complex endeavors at risk.
For an analogy to our personal lives, finding the cheapest gasoline is fine (as long as you don’t spend an hour driving to save a few pennies), but you probably don’t want the cheapest brain surgeon poking around between your ears.
I received the most wonderful gift. It was a card.
The front of the card had one word : GRATEFUL
And the inside of the card was thanking me for being a mentor and a person to look to for comfort and advice. It was from my friend’s 25 year old daughter who I adore but really don’t see all that often.
She has just begun her teaching career and spent some time travelling. Last summer I managed to snag her for a day and took her to some of my favorite shopping/eating places.
We shopped, laughed, cried and told each other some terrific stories. I watched her grow up and make s’mores in my backyard, and now I am watching her make a difference in the world by offering them the gift of ‘learning’.
I can’t begin to tell you the power of that small card with the words THANK YOU inside. It really meant the world to me.
Are you still wondering if Your Customers would prefer to talk to a Human, or if you should move to an Auto Attendant?
It depends on your GOALS.
If you are trying to drive your Customer AWAY from your Brand, then I say: Go ahead.
We recently had to close our Customer Contact Centers due to a major snow storm. You know, the ones where they close all the schools the next day? Yep—one of those.
Anyway, when we returned to the office the next morning, there were only 5 messages from Customers requiring technical assistance or where to buy information.
Since our Customer Contact Centers receive more than 100 calls each hour, and we were closed for more than 5 daytime hours, wouldn’t you expect there to have been more?
I’ll let you do the math on how many people simply HUNG UP.
Fortunately, the majority of those hang-ups turned to email for quick resolution.
In today’s instant society, if you aren’t able to offer the information requested within 2 rings or less, you could be opening the door to the competition.
Idea Factor provides a full suite of marketing services including B2B lead generation (gathering qualified sales leads), surveys, data mapping, event tele-boosting, trade show follow up, in-bound and out-bound omni-channel call center services, data cleansing, list cleaning, customer retention and loyalty programs.
Our commitment to excellence in customer service has awarded us repeat business for more than 25 years, from both our global and community clients. To find out more go to www.idea-factor.com
Are you a Hoarder?
I just found out that I am!
We have lived in our house for 20 years and are about to re-finish our un-finished basement. That means there is a lot of STUFF that
has to go.
For years I complained that my husband is a pack-rat. But now that I have been looking in cupboards and on shelves, it is with great embarrassment that I admit … it’s ME! Read More
A positive Karma in your business relationships can be easily achieved and maintained by employing a few very simple practices. This can mean the difference between seeing and buying into what is directly in front of you and establishing a long-term strategic objective that has more to do with ethically motivated practices than profitability.
We are conditioned by decades of business practice that dictates that the customer is always right and to engage in whatever way they want to meet their end goal. I DISAGREE. If your customer is committed to an action or path that you believe will cause them irreparable harm, it is your responsibility as a partner or vendor to at the very least lay out in detail the potential dangers and outcomes, bring it to their attention in a distinct and thoughtful manner, or extricate yourself altogether, even if it means walking away from a lucrative contract.
WHY? Aside from being the right thing to do, when things do fail, and you were the only partner/vendor that voiced concerns or shared the potential danger, not only will your reputation with that client increase, they will turn to you for thought leadership and pro-active process, even going so far as to recommend you to others. Trust is earned, and respect is gained.
It is not easy to say no to a strategic partner or customer; but laying out a descriptive list of the reasons for your concerns, offering a suggestion for alternative process that can work to meet their end goals, and walking them through your thought process can help clarify and sometimes even win them over to your school of thought with appreciation and thanks. This should be an essential component of the overall long-term success of your business.
Good Karma all around upholds our mission statement to offer an exceptional customer service experience every time bar NONE!
Idea Factor provides a full suite of marketing services including B2B lead generation (gathering qualified sales leads), surveys, data mapping, event tele-boosting, trade show follow up, in-bound and out-bound omni-channel call center services, data cleansing, list cleaning, customer retention and loyalty programs.
Our commitment to excellence in customer service has awarded us repeat business for more than 25 years, from both our global and community clients. To find out more go to www.idea-factor.com
My recent experiences with artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, especially those used for CUSTOMER SERVICE, have left me feeling irritated rather than amazed — and I don’t think I’m alone.
How do I hate AI? Let me count the ways:
THEY Want to Talk Your Ear Off!
If I chat with a human being, I can express complex issues and speak in long, content-rich paragraphs. The person is able to decode and parse what I say, even when there is more than one thought involved. This makes my interaction more efficient.
Chatbots, on the other hand, aren’t able to consume a firehose of human language. They keep coming back and asking question after question. It’s like a chatty neighbor who keeps talking and talking when you have work to get back to. With chatbots, there is a lot of repeating and “did you mean this?” chatter. They have to be walked through a problem while a person can hear the whole problem and break it down themselves.
I ran into this with Visa Card support. I needed to ask what seemed like a simple question about my account. It was the type of question a human could (and did) answer in less than a minute. The VISA chatbot, however, couldn’t understand my question and kept responding with more and more irrelevant questions of its own in a vain attempt to understand what I wanted. I finally had to ask for a human.
Chatbots Take More Time Than a Human
Since chatbots are so inefficient in their “speech” they take a lot longer to find a solution outside the most common ones. That would be only mildly annoying if they offered a single interaction such as “What can I help you with?” followed by a “Is this what you are looking for?” answer and then a pivot to a human agent if it didn’t resolve your issue. I also find the voice extremely condescending in it’s over-zealous desire to sound like a human.
Unfortunately, that’s not how they work. Instead, they continue to ask questions until you give up. Sometimes, they don’t give up even when you demand a human. I recently went to the Verizon Wireless customer service chat expecting a human. It was obvious I was speaking to a chatbot — it kept making really silly suggestions — and I demanded an agent. The chatbot persisted until I asked for an agent THREE TIMES and then it sent me into the chat queue. The question was more complex than the chatbot could handle but it wouldn’t give up. The chatbot wasted my time before finally getting me to an agent that could help … two minutes later.
It’s Not About Service — It’s About Costs
Chatbots leave one with the impression that chatbots are not intended to front-end a human interaction or gather information to make that interaction more meaningful. Instead, it is pretty obvious that chatbots exist to keep you from speaking to a human. They are just like interactive voice responses (IVR), which also exist to save costs by keeping you from a human, only they require more effort.
It’s much easier to say a simple command or press “1” on your telephone keypad (although, in all fairness, I do find myself yelling “Agent!” at the IVR voice recognition a lot. So I guess I hate IVRs as much as chatbots.)
What makes the cost shift obvious is the implementation of most customer service chatbots. They don’t ask for some basic information (account number or product model) which could then be used by a human agent. Instead, they try to solve the problem and keep doing that even when it’s out of its league. This is just an IVR jail, only with more typing.
In the end, when I am answered by this level of technology, I’m left with a very firm impression that this company does not want my business.
Ahhh – how great it is to have OPTIONS!
Idea Factor provides a full suite of marketing services including B2B lead generation (gathering qualified sales leads), surveys, data mapping, event tele-boosting, trade show follow up, in-bound and out-bound omni-channel call center services, data cleansing, list cleaning, customer retention and loyalty programs.
Our commitment to excellence in customer service has awarded us repeat business for more than 25 years, from both our global and community clients. To find out more go to www.idea-factor.com