My grandmother was a fantastic baker. Everything she made was wonderful and magical. As a child, I would spend days in her small kitchen that was filled with the smell of cinnamon, cookies, cakes and other wondrous treats. Good memories and delicious goodies!

As I got older and starting experimenting in my own kitchen, I often would ask her for advice and recipes. My favorite of all time were her tiny cinnamon rolls … little warm gooey bites that were oh so good.

As many grandmas are, her instructions were less than precise. Some flour, a little butter, throw in a dash of salt, an egg or two.

What?! Wait a minute, that’s not a recipe … I need precise instructions, measured amounts, exact baking times … otherwise I will certainly fail!

“Baking isn’t a science, it’s an art,” she would advise. So after hearing her detail the art of cinnamon rolls, I watched her make them a few times. I picked up a few tricks and learned a little more about what to do if the dough is too sticky or if the outsides cook faster than the insides. I noticed something different each time I studied her technique.

Finally, I made them on my own … sort of. She was there helping me along the way. Today, I can almost make cinnamon rolls that were as tasty as hers.

So what’s the point of this story on a blog about customer care?

Just as I went through the steps of listening, observing, and doing on my journey to the perfect batch of rolls, the same success can be achieved in a customer care setting. After all, few would disagree that customer care is indeed an art as opposed to a science.

The right recipe for training new agents or even existing ones should be to add a few things, and mix well.

Sit them in a classroom too long, and the detail becomes detached and quickly loses meaning.

When learning to perfect a recipe, I had to observe the challenges first hand, and see how an expert handled each one. The same can be applied to customer care employees – allowing them to transition to working on their own through structured learning, observation, role play, side-by-side mentoring, and live production – results in prepared agents who feel confident and ready to knock the socks off your customers.

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to prepare agents for contact handling? Any challenges you have encountered? Best practices to share? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

I was at a networking event last week, and during a conversation with a group of people, someone made the comment that “it’s important to never forget to put the customer first.”

That’s hard to argue with on the surface, and it certainly is an age-long service philosophy. As I contemplated it further, a question kept popping into my head:

Is it possible to put the customer first without first focusing on employees?

Great organizations interact with customers using personalized responses that clearly communicate the value that each customer represents. The best foundation of delivering on exceptional customer care is to first invest in and show value to the front-line employees.

In our experience, employees become brand advocates when they realize their role in the customer lifecycle, their influence on brand loyalty, and their ability to hear and communicate the voice-of-the-customer. Regardless of why customers make contact, the success of these interactions all comes down to the employees and their motivation to exceed.

Here are some quick tips:

Build a culture that encourages employees to get to know each other. This connectedness on a personal level fosters a family-like environment. As just one example, our front line agents personalize their workspaces with family photos and other personal items. Plus, we offer table and video games in our lunchrooms so people can meet others with shared interests and make personal connections. When people feel connected, they begin to care for each other in little ways, everyday, like helping the people sitting around them overcome small challenges, and in big ways like coming together to lend support to employees who have unforeseen personal challenges. Fostering a caring and nurturing environment internally lends to customers being treated with the same care. It becomes second nature.

Motivate and celebrate successes. There’s no magic bullet when it comes to methods to keep employees motivated, and finding what works for your employees can take some trial and error. Mix things up. At AFFINA, we have fun contests, recognize top performers in our employee newsletter and screensavers, host pizza parties, and simply help agents improve their individual and team scores. Positive energy is contagious and is bound to spill over into customer interactions.

Provide leadership worthy of inspiration. From front-line supervisors to executive team members, demonstrate integrity, passion, and be sure employees know that their voice is heard. If employees trust you, they will support your overall goals. Trust is nearly always mutual by nature. With mutual trust comes the ability to empower employees to make decisions that will maximize your customer relationships. Reward and lift up leaders who consistently display high integrity, are trusted by their teams and peers, and stay focused on what really matters. By shining the spotlight on these leaders, you show employees what traits to emulate to advance their careers.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Are you facing challenges driving customer care excellence from the grass roots? Have you found success with specific approaches you have implemented? We want to hear from you.

Your Customers. Our Priority.

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By Lori Boyce
Senior Director, AFFINA

As the second in a series of The Top 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care, I want to share a few insights into the value and benefit of spending the time to train front-line employees on your brand and company culture.

Stop to consider who interacts with your customers? The list can be long – inbound contact center agents, retail sales representatives, in-home service professionals, you name it – they all have a role to play in reinforcing your brand and ensuring brand promises hold true.

Here’s what we suggest: Train the culture.

Helping employees understand the company culture and brand personality of the products and services they are supporting makes all the difference in their approach, passion, and enthusiasm when interacting with customers. As a customer care partner, I can tell you that at AFFINA, we are interested in our agents feeling connected to our clients’ brands and cultures even more than to our own.

Recreating your corporate culture starts in training. A few simple ways to infuse a culture transfer into the training experience include:

1. Describe your products and services with as much passion as you feel about them. Energy is contagious! When your front line employees know that you believe your brand is the best thing since sliced bread (or even better), they will have a reason to believe it too!
2. Share advertising and marketing efforts. Use advertising collateral and point-of-purchase displays in the training environment and on the production floor. Surround the team with your brand images. Be sure they understand the latest and greatest features and benefits of your product/services!
3. Be sure front-line employees can experience what customers experience. Let them test the product, use it according to the package instructions or owners manual, and even make some mistakes with it. These tactics help employees empathize with customers’ experiences and create connections.
4. Convey the role that front-line employees have in building and protecting brand loyalty. Share with them how customer insights are integrated into new products or marketing campaigns and what happens to the data they have captured after they close a case or transmit an order.
5. Use lots of role-play, and reward creative and enthusiastic participation. 

6. Be present and engaging … employees feel part of the culture and are motivated to maximize the customer experience when they understand that they are part of an overall strategy.

What tactics have worked for you in your efforts to extend your company and brand culture to front-line teams? Any challenges you have encountered? We want to hear from you.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

I was on the customer end of a bad experience recently that reminded me of the impact of customer care on brand loyalty.

It’s a long story with too much detail to go into here, but as a customer care professional, I immediately recognized the situation as it was: a behavior-changing customer experience.

While at a local restaurant dining with my family – which includes three young children, our order took more than 45 minutes to arrive, and when it did – it was wrong and cold. The server was indifferent to the situation, which was only made more miserable by kids who were beyond impatient not to mention hungry.

Bottom line – I had made up my mind … I was through with this restaurant which had created a situation that had turned a relaxing family meal into a stressful experience. I wanted to get out of the place as soon as I could and never return. My loyalty was dramatically impacted. It was likely that I was lost as a customer and worse, I may even tell others about it. A shame – it was a family favorite.

That’s when something happened … just in time. The manager, who had started her shift toward the end of this experience, recognized that something had gone wrong. After a short conversation at our table, she apologized, offered our meal at no charge, provided my children with milkshakes to go, and gave us a half-price coupon for our next visit. Then she sealed the deal by empathizing with us, and asked us to give them another chance.

Just like that, our loyalty was … well, strengthened. Can bad customer experiences, when handled carefully, actually strengthen loyalty more than if a customer had never had a problem at all?Absolutely.

In this situation, the manager clearly was more than just a nice person. She deliberately sought us out and did three things very right:

1. Recognized that my loyalty was at risk.
2. Took the time to hear me out and understand my pain.
3. Responded to me as an individual, and did what it took to increase the chances I would return.

She knew that she had one opportunity to fix my bad experience. She nailed it.

Complaints represent rare opportunities to impact loyalty in big way. After all, when customers reach out to complain, they are willingly offering you:

1. A chance to make things right; and
2. Honest feedback on your products and services.

Sometimes, customers simply want to be heard and have someone acknowledge that their experience was unacceptable. Simple allowances – like coupons – can go a long way to restore loyalty, and invite customers back into a relationship with you. Finally, don’t discount the data collected through complaint handling. Real-time alerts, periodic trending and analysis, and validation through customer satisfaction and loyalty survey results, all shed valuable light on how customers react to your products and services.

AFFINA – Your Customers. Our Priority.

I’m happy to launch AFFINA Blog, an ongoing forum to share insights, advice, and observations on the business of inbound customer care. With 36+ years of customer care experience, we’ve learned a thing or two about what customers really think, how to respond to their inquiries, and the impact that we all have on overall loyalty. We’re happy to share with you our thoughts, hope to offer tips that you can implement right away in your own center, and engage in an open discussion to share ideas.

Today, I introduce a five-part series: 5 Factors to Delivering Exceptional Customer Care. I have to admit, there are so many things that drive exceptional customer care, that I’m a little hesitant to limit this series to only five factors. The five covered in this series are ones that set a strong foundation to deliver unexpectedly exceptional customer care that sets your brand apart. They include:

1. Staffing with the best
2. Training the culture
3. Reinforcing quality
4. Rewarding success
5. Driving continuous improvement

In this post, I’ll address the first: Staffing with the Best. Hiring the right individuals that are a best fit for your company, its culture, and contact types is an excellent way to get off to a great start.

Staff with the Best

Putting the most appropriately skilled and motivated front-line resources in place can be easier said than done. The task is critical and its level of success is pivotal to exceeding long term goals. Who are the ideal candidates that will knock the socks off your customers and blow the doors off your customer care objectives? Staff a team with individuals who have a passion for helping people and the skills and knowledge to back it up. Here are four tips:

1. Seek out individuals who are passionate about your products or industry. It seems simple, but in our experience, matching personal interests with products supported works great. For example, when we staff technical support for the consumer electronics industry, we seek out those individuals who are the go-to person in their extended family for electronics hook-ups and troubleshooting. Their interest and passion for the topic is already there.

2. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can train anyone to do anything. Hiring a team of individuals with customer service experience and then training them to up-sell and cross-sell products or accessories can be a recipe for failure. Be sure to match candidates’ experience and aptitude with the requirements of your specific customer care contacts.

3. Whenever possible, staff a new team with some internal, existing employees to assist with mentoring. There’s certainly an appropriate balance to strike between new employees and existing agents. Maximize the benefits of both by ensuring a good blend.

4. Finally, put a staffing structure in place that allows the front-line team to focus as much time as possible on customers and quality. As much as practical, move tasks off the desks of your supervisors and allow them to work on reinforcing your culture, driving quality, and coaching agents to deliver service beyond what your customers expect. As an example, we staff a separate team responsible for monitoring service levels and schedule adherence in real time so our supervisors can spend more time with our agents, providing coaching and motivation.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Are you facing challenges with staffing a team that exceeds your customers’ expectations? Have you found success with specific approaches you have implemented? We want to hear from you.