Premium Contact Center = Hard Work – Simple Truths
Posted by scott bell on Fri, Feb 03, 2012 @ 08:31 AM
Legendary Hotelier Horst Schulze (Ritz-Carlton) wrote the forward to Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit - The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization by Inghilleri and Solomon. “…what truly matters, what builds strategic value for a business, is loyalty: customer loyalty, employee loyalty.” Mr. Schultz goes on to caution us that it is hard being committed to a framework of quality service that is indeed extraordinary.
The authors of “Five Star Service” assert several times in their best seller that being attended to is a nearly universal human desire. We get this and we go to great lengths to make customers feel attended to. In all honesty though, this isn’t an easy thing to measure. One proxy for the “attended to” measure is the quality of specific customer interactions that we score for training and coaching purposes. Every week, Trase Miller’s Supervisors and Leadership meet for calibration sessions to review a sampling of customer care calls. The calibration session consists of listening to recorded calls and critiquing the performance based on 22 attributes. There are four categories that we calibrate to one of which is the “Needs of the Customer” which represents 6 of the 22 things we look for. In our meetings however, more recently we have gone beyond the monitoring form and 22 attributes. At the end of the recorded call we ask the simple reflective question - would you recommend THAT agent to your friends and family based on THAT call? Isn’t that what truly matters? Isn’t that a great measure of knowing whether or not someone truly felt attended to?
We are not afraid of hard work around here and sometimes it’s helpful to remind ourselves that there are simple truths about the work that we do. One idea as presented in the video above is putting a personal signature on customer interactions. We deal with loyal customers every day and handle their points (earning and redemption). So here is OUR “thought of the day” relative to driving loyalty: Loyalty points matter – Exceptional service matters more. We’re here to help you.