As you are aware from my previous blogs, my background is based in leading customer care organizations. There is no question that the most rewarding, and at times the most frustrating aspect of running a customer care organization is managing large groups of people. It can be very difficult to operate at a high level of efficiency and effectiveness and the slightest misstep can create chaos.

Here are two factors that drive success.

The first factor of success is leadership, but not just the leaders, Director of Operations, Operations Managers and Supervisors interacting with the front line CSR’s, but how they interact with other departments like Workforce Management, and Human Resources.  

Leadership development starts from the top down. Inspect what you expect on a daily basis. Every operation I have been directly involved with has an attendance policy. The policy is usually based on some form of excused and unexcused absenc... read more >

The relationship with customers is like any relationship, it’s built on trust and on promises. 10 years ago I worked for a UK company who at that time saw its key differentiator being the customer experience that it delivered and the customer care that it offered as ‘part of the deal’.

As soon as I joined the organization I was inducted into this ‘brand culture’ and one of the key messages that has stuck with me ever since is that Brand is a promise delivered .

We all hate it when promises are broken, it’s often why personal relationships breakdown and it’s also why our relationship with organizations breakdown.

We all know that it’s easy to make promises but so often in business we fail to deliver and that ruins the reputation of the Brand.

In business, promises are made in many different ways:

The products and services we develop The marketing messages we creat... read more >

Mistakes I hate to make mistakes. I know I am human. I tell myself we all make mistakes. But big or small, consequential or meaningless, they bum me out. The worst kinds involve watching a simple slip-up cascade into a growing series of headaches.

The latest involved a Bermuda Triangle of my personal bank account, my corporate credit card, and my company’s accounting department. The problem started when I jumped online to look at a credit card bill, while balancing my checkbook late one Sunday night. I impatiently clicked past the annoying pop-ups only to realize that … Ohhh sh##! ... I just emptied all of my bank account to satisfy a very large corporate credit card bill.

How bad was this? Images went through my head like rolodex cards; my bills, my empty bank account, the layers of approval I’ll have to go through to sort this out, my stupid hand for clicking too quickly. Groan.

What is the un-do for this? The transfe... read more >

A symptom I see recurring when speaking to contact center managers who are deploying hardware-based contact center solutions is a desire to provide a more personalized experience to their customers.

“Yes it does route my interactions to my agents, but I would like to give my customers a great personalized experience. I can’t do that with my current solution.”

Sounds familiar?

In a recent webinar titled ‘ One to one Routing ’ I discussed the needs and benefits for a well-designed, cross-channel, one-to-one routing strategy.

During the webinar I asked the audience two poll questions about their current landscape. The first question I asked was:

“Have you implemented a skills based, data driven routing strategy to provide a more personalized customer experience?”

Here are the results:

The majority of the audience has not implemented such a strategy but 31% ... read more >

Overheard between a supervisor and a service fulfillment employee… “How can I get my work done when you also want me to be on the phone supporting our field organization? I get interrupted every few minutes and nothing gets done!” Supervisor: “I know it can be confusing, but do the best you can”

Many back office employees are expected to be on the phone supporting customers, branches or parts of a field organization and they still are expected to get their work done to meet customer delivery demands. This trend is growing, not shrinking. One organization we work with in the insurance industry has their policy underwriters supporting thousands of field agents and they are also expected to get customer policies out on time.

This can be a very tough and demanding environment when employees are expected to focus while the phone keeps ringing without some type of technology support. While the concept of doing two or more things ... read more >