Ensuring Your Customer Service Initiative Will Be Successful: The Second Key

In Part 1 of this series I touched the impor­tance of know­ing the WHY – the pur­pose, the belief, the INTENT behind your strat­egy– so we can inspire and lead our teams to go after the dream of what could be.

In this post, I’m going to intro­duce the next key ele­ment that if imple­mented will ensure your cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy takes hold and flour­ishes. This key ele­ment is com­posed of two of the most pow­er­ful action verbs in the Eng­lish lan­guage: Empower and Enable.

EMPOWER and ENABLE your work­force. Empower is one of those words that tend to be overused in busi­ness and yet in real­ity is under­uti­lized. Empow­er­ing your staff means giv­ing them some mea­sure of author­ity, some degree of own­er­ship over their jobs and work lives.

We know from see­ing it first hand in dozens of sit­u­a­tions that empow­er­ing your work­force can increase their moti­va­tion, their self-discipline, and their abil­ity to learn from their mis­takes. It also shows that you’re will­ing to trust them – at least until they’ve given you rea­son not to. Most impor­tantly, empow­er­ing employ­ees allows them to feel that they are respon­si­ble for their own success.

Of course the degree to which you empower your team will depend on var­i­ous fac­tors. Some con­tact cen­ters allow a lot of auton­omy; oth­ers are strictly reg­u­lated. In either case, you, as a man­ager, can take a look at where you can take some accept­able risk. Look­ing doesn’t mean you have to do it. Think about it. Maybe talk to peo­ple on the floor.

Speak­ing of talk­ing to your peo­ple on the floor, another way to empower is to ask reps how they would ide­ally do some­thing (for exam­ple, solve a prob­lem) and if you like the sug­ges­tion, encour­age reps to do it.

Here’s another idea—you’ll, of course, have to take a look and see what’s doable, but con­sider this: Give your team the respon­si­bil­ity for mak­ing cer­tain cus­tomer ser­vice deci­sions that affect cus­tomer expe­ri­ence or their rela­tion­ship with the customer.

Yes, ced­ing respon­si­bil­ity can be uncom­fort­able. Risk is scary but the rewards of trust­ing your team are huge.

Another thing you can do as a man­ager or super­vi­sor is “share the wealth.” Pre­sum­ably, your knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence had some­thing to do with get­ting you where you are today. So take the time to teach your team mem­bers what you know.

I know that your time is valu­able and that you have a ton of work on your plate but, come on, who in your orga­ni­za­tion has more to gain by hav­ing a knowl­edge­able, well-trained team than you?

This kind of train­ing doesn’t have to be in classroom…

• Some­times you can share an anec­do­tal experience;
• Some­times you can explain what you’d do in a given situation;
• Some­times you can guide what the rep is doing with feedback;
• Some­times it’ll work best to demonstrate.

What’s impor­tant is knowl­edge transfer.

The other half of this key ele­ment is “enable”. A team with a great atti­tude can still be hob­bled in their efforts to deliver great cus­tomer ser­vice by things like the company’s inter­ac­tive voice response unit. IVRs can help boost pro­duc­tiv­ity and stream­line get­ting callers to the right place BUT if the IVR is poorly designed – in other words, has too many branches, too many hoops to jump through or directs calls to a team that can’t really help the caller – it actu­ally makes the rep’s job a lot harder. The poor rep hasn’t had a chance to say “hello” and the customer’s expe­ri­ence is already in the dumpster.

So part of enabling your team to be able to imple­ment your won­der­ful cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy is to:

• Make sure your com­pany voice response units helps both your com­pany and the customer
• Make sure your com­puter tele­phony inte­gra­tion (CTI) really is inte­grated. Is infor­ma­tion being pulled from the appro­pri­ate data­base and pre­sented to the rep tak­ing the call? Is it the right infor­ma­tion? Does the infor­ma­tion make it to the desk­top with the call?
• If you can’t inte­grate legacy sys­tems seam­lessly with CTI, at least make sure reps know how to tog­gle between them efficiently.
• Does your cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment soft­ware help the rep or does it slow things down because peo­ple aren’t using it con­sis­tently or cor­rectly? Is the infor­ma­tion that reps need captured?
• And, is there a reli­able way for reps to get the infor­ma­tion they need…quickly?

Recently I heard a pre­sen­ta­tion about a call cen­ter start-up; I thought they han­dled the knowl­edge man­age­ment issue well. They were a start-up and knew they wouldn’t have all the answers they needed on file when they went “live.” So instead of pre­tend­ing they had all the answers, reps were asked to write up ques­tions and answers and doc­u­ment solu­tions as they took calls to begin flesh­ing out the knowl­edge base. The idea was “if I don’t know this, some­one else prob­a­bly doesn’t either.” As a result of this respon­si­bil­ity the floor built a tremen­dous sense of pride and own­er­ship of the infor­ma­tion and how well they were able to help each other and callers.

So to help ensure your cus­tomer ser­vice strat­egy doesn’t end up being reduced to a dis­tant mem­ory and a bunch of really cool posters in the cafe­te­ria, empower and enable your team.

Let them bring the strat­egy to life. Give them author­ity to make deci­sions that will help cus­tomers. Let them act to carry out the intent of the strat­egy. And be sure, while you’re at it, to enable them… Make sure your sys­tems sup­port their efforts and your intentions.

Here are some ques­tions to think about related to empower and enable:

• What are the risks you’d asso­ciate with giv­ing your team more deci­sion responsibility?
• What could be done to reduce the risk?
• What are some of the deci­sions that are too risky to let your team make? Are they really? What if it would vastly improve the customer’s expe­ri­ence if your team mem­ber was able to take care of some­thing right away?
• What is the state of your team’s tools sup­port? On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do they enable your team to do a great job for your customers?

In Part 3 of this series, I’ll touch on at what “proper train­ing” means and the cru­cial part it plays in imple­ment­ing a cus­tomer ser­vice strategy.