Plan A: Ensure Customer Service Reps Go On Strike
Want to have a great call center? Every three years or so, send it on strike.
Here’s my thinking: When Group Health Insurance (GHI) — now Emblem Health — was in deep discussions with Innoveer over how to improve the insurer’s four New York state call centers, the staff went on strike.
The scene outside GHI’s Manhattan headquarters — located across from Penn Station and near Madison Garden — was dramatic. Imagine a long tractor-trailer parked on the street, blaring salsa music from morning to night, and a crane dangling a giant rat in front of executives’ office windows.
But inside GHI, a revolution, albeit of the quieter variety, was also underway. That’s because during the strike, GHI decided to rotate the management team through the call center to handle the phones themselves. So management got assigned shifts to resolve customer issues, and used the company’s then-CRM system to deal with all customer inquiries, including requests for claim status updates, dispute resolution and so on.
Say Hello To Senior Executives in the Call Center
Thanks to this hands-on experience, management learned:
- Which processes needed improving
- How the customer service group interacted with — and used CRM to support — claims processing
- The flow of information, or lack thereof, from the sales group to the call center, including sharing and managing leads
- About various systems-level and configuration issues, which made it difficult for agents to quickly resolve customer inquires
By the time the strike ended, GHI executives knew that they had a customer service problem on their hands, and that they needed to set a different tone. As a result, the strike was a customer service watershed event for GHI, and led directly to a number of great enhancements.
Plan B: Design Great Customer Service From the Start
Accordingly, our position is that the ideal way to improve customer service is to send your call center on strike every few years.
Not feasible? As a backup, here at Innoveer we’ve defined the best practices for services leadership. Properly approached, this will help you understand and gather the same types of first-hand information that GHI collected and then applied to create a world-class customer service program.
Best Practices for CRM Customer Service Leadership
Great customer service arguably starts with what we’ve dubbed customer service leadership, which has four components:
- Service tier structure: Establish levels of service and access based on customer segment or stratification. For GHI, this meant deciding whether to route customers to different call centers based on whether they wanted a Medicare versus a PPO product.
- Service channels: What’s your plan for dealing with different sectors or products? Some organizations use a triage approach and transfer callers around. GHI, however, opted to create a single phone number that everyone uses, then a customer speaks with one agent, who tries to resolve all of their issues at once. Done correctly, this approach doesn’t cost the least, but it does provide the highest customer satisfaction levels.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Does service play well with sales and marketing? For one of Innoveer’s clients, which manufacturers consumer electronics, the lion’s share of people that contact the call center have the same problem: they’re missing a required component, such as a cable. So the manufacturer set up a complementary sales process. Now, a service agent can sell them what they need, which increases both revenue and customer satisfaction levels.
- Agent development & coaching: This might sound basic, but it’s essential. Development and coaching includes delivering service competency training, monitoring service delivery quality levels, and providing feedback to improve service delivery performance. Always assess, react and improve.
Ensure Customer Service Leads to Happier Customers
Customer service leadership is only one requirement for creating a world-class customer service program. But set your leadership sights correctly, and you can ensure that when it comes to great customer service, you’re not left trailing the competition.
