Tag Archives: NYT

Improve Your Customer Service with Our 5 Step Plan

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About Kelsey Zorn

Research Lead at Interaction Metrics
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Improve Your Customer Service with Our Step-by-Step Plan

Everyone’s trying to improve their customer service, some with more success than others. Last month, the New York Times column The Haggler, which usually posts customer service horror stories, gave voice to tales of exceptional service. The column was a refreshing change and likely sent plenty of business towards the companies mentioned.

So how can a company improve their customer service enough to be column-worthy? Google turns up a hodgepodge of papers, articles and books, some of which may bump your customer service up a notch, but you’d be hard pressed to find a clear, step-by-step plan.

That’s where we come in. We’ve improved customer service for dozens of companies: for example, GE CareCredit attributes a 31% increase in revenue to our customer service improvement program. So, we thought it was time to share the plan we use to improve customer service.

Our 5 Step Plan to Improve Customer Service:

  1. Pick your goals. Ask yourself what, in addition to answering customers’ immediate questions and concerns, you’d like to accomplish through customer service. There are seven main goals that customer service can achieve. These include optimizing self-service, expanding your brand and increasing customer loyalty.
  2. Catalog your interactions. Identify each customer touchpoint and decide how you will realize your goals from step 1 in these front-line situations.
  3. Create a model communication for each customer touchpoint. Your model communications may take the form of call scripts, email templates, checklists or talking points. Regardless of the format, you must set the bar and show associates exactly what you expect from each touchpoint that you identified in step 2.
  4. Measure meaningful details. Averages often mislead. So be sure to measure the weird stuff—the stuff that gets at the heart of interaction quality—like percent of time associates demonstrate they care about the customer, or end their interactions in an authentic and positive way.
  5. Keep your employees in the loop. Monitor your performance with mystery shopping, customer service monitoring and other forms of customer service quality assurance. Make sure your whole team knows how they’re doing, and which specific steps they need to take to improve their performance.

Read more about our 5 step plan in our full article here.

Here’s Why U.P.S. Failed the Top Haggler

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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David Segal’s “The Haggler” column in the 2/12/12 edition of The New York Times covered a few horror stories about U.P.S., all of which had one thing in common: a customer’s package was lost, and U.P.S.’s customer service was useless. The haggler conservatively estimated that if U.P.S. is truly exceptional at keeping track of packages (only losing 0.05%), then every day U.P.S. bungles about 8,000 deliveries.

8,000 mistakes a day means 8,000 upset, confused customers and 8,000 calls in to U.P.S. customer service. Segal spoke with one U.P.S. rep who was “extremely helpful” and several who were “pointlessly brusque”. Other customers spoke with Segal about their U.P.S. travails and had a similar ratio of helpful to useless service.

Now, I’m going to extrapolate: If only one out of several calls (let’s say 1/3) was helpful, that means U.P.S.’s error rate when it comes to these critical conversations is 67%. How could a company with an enviably low error rate for deliveries have such a high error rate when it comes to a key, memorable customer conversation that happens 8,000 times a day?

Here’s why: Apparently, U.P.S. Managers don’t consider the “hazy conjecture” and inconsiderate care their team gave Segal to be a problem. If they did, these frustrating conversations wouldn’t have happened—or, at least not 67% of the time.

Most companies simply don’t recognize the importance of customer interactions. They think that with the right software and generalized metrics, they’ve got things covered. In fact, according to a much quoted Bain & Company study, 80% of companies believe they deliver a “superior experience,” but only 8% of customers agree. In our customer service audits, we find that poorly designed surveys that result in inaccurate information are often the source of staggering gaps between executives and their customers.

What’s the solution? Because getting covered by The Haggler can’t possibly be good for business, U.P.S. needs to change its perspective. U.P.S. managers need to turn their gaze away from averages and take a closer look at their actual interactions. After all, by definition, averages obscure the details.

If we had a U.P.S. exec’s ear, we’d tell him/her that they need to study their customer interactions with fresh eyes and different metrics—metrics that more realistically capture the lived experience. If they did that, they wouldn’t have to learn the weak points of their customer experience by reading The New York Times. As always, snaps to The Haggler for giving a voice to the actual customer experience!