Rule #28 – Build it and they well come

The first surprise for some senior executives is that that good and great support results in more cases.  While this may seem counter intuitive and scary to those who fear of cost per case and worship call deflection, this is a good thing.  Great service as defined by fast response and resolution time via correct answers changes entire nature of the relationship with the customers.  Quality support is more than offering SLAs.  Support means giving customers someone to contact or even call when there is a problem or they have a question.  Customers grow to depend on support services (via phone, email, chat, automated, knowledge base,  pro-active, etc.) that are predicable and delivered in a reliable manner. Customers will use support more often and learn to trust the service and seek advise.  The result is a lower cost per case, better margins, better and more successful utilization of the products and customer buy more products and services.  With more calls, you move up the learning curve faster. Very simple model.

Those who fear the cost per case (and more cases)  in the situation described above have to remember that poor service causes higher cost per case because of fewer calls, poor product utilization, lower sales, and customer distrust.    Better service equals better value and higher account renewals and sales. Companies that are satisfied with 75% to 89% customer satisfaction are leaving money on the table.  Long term poor service can create a a downward spiral customer returns, lower sales, declined service renewals and lower margins.  Bottom-line poor support is the greatest case deflector because no one wants to call.

90% plus customer satisfaction should be the target metric.  The number one support process issue in a company should be collecting and processing feedback from customers.  This process goes to the heart continuous process improvement.  The number two process is service readiness.  This is that group of processes that delivers on-going training, new product training, tools, and service automation.  All of those efforts drive up product and service quality and lowers cost.

Why doesn’t it happen at all companies if its so simple?  Fear of cost rather than focus on delivering value.  Also because its requires hard work and a passion for improving the customer experience.    Why do we do it?  Its fun to solve problems and take on new challenges.

Rule #27 – Color outside the lines

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall – Confucius 551-479 BC

Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity – Gen. George S. Patton

Give your team directions and goals and let them go.  They need the what and not the how or the lines to color within to grow and bring innovation.  When you let your team use their own ingenuity you help drive increased capacity to add value to your customer.  They could fail and getting up and trying again they grow in both knowledge and confidence.  With confidence your customer will feel greater trust and that trust can release the energy that may be blocking there progress and success.  Success leads to great customer satisfaction and more sales and lower costs.  Its not a difficult process to understand it just takes managerial courage to get it started.

If your team can only work within the lines you draw for them, you will never get to the service productivity needed to grow rapidly and scale.

Rule #26 – Don’t make me call out the flying monkeys

For a long time I knew I wanted to write about how do work with difficult customers but I could not come up with the right title that both expressed humor and notion that you have gone too far until I saw this sign in a shop in Fredricksburg, Texas.

The first point about a customer going too far is to not let it go that far.  This process while simple can get lost in the focus and analysis needed to solve a customer issue.  The prevention is to set up the action plan with the customer, time expectations, follow-up, keep the customer informed and reset action plan if needed.  Follow-up with that model and you will keep the customer working with you.

From time to time you do run into a customer that is a its kindest, difficult to work with.  Most of the time behind the scenes things are happening that you are not privy to are the cause of those problems.  As you sense the customer’s  boiling point rising you may need to dig for those problems by being open letting the customer know you sense there is a problem and how can you help.  It may be a good time to bring in your manager to talk to the customer’s manager to assure them all is being done and you have the right person on the case.  At other times problems outside your control may be the cause and you have to fall back to letting them know that you understand there concerns and they may be valid.  However correct me if I am wrong but we agreed on the action plan and is it still the the right course of action?  Free up the energy and get the problem solved.

At other times there are customer through no fault of yours, the product, or keeping the customer informed they become too abusive and too painful to work with.  Get your boss involved and perhaps escalate to the customer’s supervisor involved.  In the few times I have had this happen to me, the supervisor was already aware of the problem with the individual and acted quickly to get another person on their team involved to resolve the situation.  In a very few cased the individual was already on their way out the door with several previous warnings.

Rule #25 – You can’t control the wind but you can adjust your sails

From a customer service perspective, conversations with customers can blow from a combination of  different directions or styles.  These can be described as  defensive, elusive, friendly, and authentic.  If you are not aware of the tactics you,  and that of the customer’s are using, you can waste a lot of time and frustrate both sides.  Like the wind we cannot change the customer direction but we can adjust our sails to get the right tacking.  By choosing the working style most appropriate the work will move faster with much better results.  Lets look at each style, their tactics and the right strategy for each.

DEFENSIVE:  The me only customer is abusive, hostile, and intimidating.   This is not about you but the use of a tactic to get a reaction and intimidate.  From the customer perspective this person is seen as a hero going into battle the evil service prevention department.  Thus they likely have some history on their side and they did not want to call because of that history.  The strategy is to avoid arguing, absorb the initial abuse and probe assertions.  Be firm and stay focused on the problem by using facts,  summarizing often and moving in small steps to gain confidence and show progress.   As trust is built the process will move faster.

ELUSIVE: The not me customer.  This customer is a time sink.  They often delay, recant, procrastinate, use quasi-data, fail to follow-up,  and  then nit pick.  These folks have a ton of work to do and are going to work late again to try to catch up.  Their staff has been cut and new technologies added to “help them” do with less staff.  Their behavior can be shy, cautious, distrustful, questioning, and apathetic.  The strategy here to avoid going too fast keeping emotions under control.  You will need to summarize often pinning down their understanding of the details while stressing the routine nature of the solution.  Follow-up often and keep them on track.

FRIENDLY: The you and me customer.   This customer is too friendly and tends to be too social and compliant.  The result is the customer stays at too high level or big picture and glosses over details that are actually needed to solve the problem.   This customer is often an expert in one area but unfortunately not the area the problem involves.  This is about pride.   With this customer you can’t inundate with information but you have to keep them on track and keep looking to uncover the missing information, deadlines and artificial limits the customer is placing on themselves on what they can do or how much time they have available.  Keep it friendly and supportive and avoid criticism, and be patient.

AUTHENTIC: The Us customer.  This is the flexible customer who is open, authentic, and consistent.  They involve others and deals with the situation.  This is a high trust situation on both sides.  There are no games here and this customer is on top of the situation.  Your strategy is to check often for understanding and be prepared to deal with your own weaknesses while remaining flexible and looking at all the options.

No customer blows from just one direction so recognizing where the wind is blowing goes a long ways to speeding up the process.  Recognizing when the wind changes and respecting the implications of that change is critical.

Rule #24 – Empathize and Collaborate, don’t Apologize

The goal in a customer service or support situation is to quickly form a collaborative working relationship and execute an action plan to resolve the situation and get the customer back on the road to success.  The big barrier in the road is the heightened level of stress and/or loss created by the situation itself and the process of asking for help.  When a customer contacts you move quickly to neutralize or reduce stress by empathizing and legitimizing their feelings.  Use the a phrase like  “I understand how you feel about . . . ,  I might feel the same way if I were in your shoes.  Let’s get an action plan together and we can get you back up and running, does that work you?”  Personalize as needed and use the words you are comfortable.  Note we empathized with their  situation and we asked permission to move onto getting the issue resolved.  We neutralize and reduce the tension that could have blocked progress and ask to collaborate with the customer to get the situation resolved.  The exhalation by the customer will be obvious.  Thus we begin a conversation to understand the problem, listening carefully, asking questions to clarify, and asking for feedback on their understanding of what you are saying and the actions you are proposing.

Why not apologize?  Apologizing for something you personally had no role in is an empty gesture and tells the customer not to expect quality, good support, or whatever the issue may be.  This actually creates more tension and can further block your progress in solving the problem.  Customers need an action plan and the confidence that you are working to right their situation and get them back on track.

Rule #23 – Great Customer Service starts at the top

Customer Service is driven from the top, not by the Customer Service department alone.  Great Customer Service and Customer Support is driven by senior management who must be committed to great service as a strategy, by making the investment to make service and support a proactive feature of the entire organization’s processes. This means all processes.  Customers don’t differentiate between the sales order error, to the shipping mistake, to the bug, to the technical question, they are all “customer service” and they all impact customer success and thus future sales.

If service or support begins when a customer complains, it’s too late and if it results in blaming the person on the frontline or engineering you tell the customer not to expect good service or product quality.  Consumer Service begins with analyzing the entire customer experience and working outward from there to anticipate their needs across EVERY possible touch point to solve problems before they arise, from pre-sales to billing to shipping to marketing to post sales. No area is exempt and every area should have a plan, process, and training to respond.  This is not a daunting goal, it starts with the same outline; pickup the “phone”, get the issue to the right person, track the results and follow-up.  Just imagine your experience if you raise an issue with order entry or a bug with engineering to not only get the problem resolved but also get a call from the person you raised the issue or the engineer who fixed the bug to confirm its resolution, that is the WOW factor.

Rule #22 – Only you can prevent forest fires

Fighting fires is a part of business; those all hands on deck events that cancel all previous plans for the day.  While an adrenaline rush, Fire fighting gets in the way of execution, stifles creativity and creates a heroic culture that is not scalable.  Fire fighters get a rush from the excitement and enjoy the praise for a job well done.  But if you don’t work for the city or the county as an actual fire fighter this is not the value you are being paid to deliver.  Fires cause damage and cost money.  While some fires will happen, many are preventable but are hard to stop unless you stop the “arsonist”.

Arsonist are the folks in your organization that can take a set of events/issues and run into the room screaming “fire” by escalating to you, senior executives and around the process and their managers.  In many cases this is to enhance there own position and then act as the fire fighter to claim the glory.  That creates the vicious and downward cycle if not arrested early.  The “fire” often could be handled by the problems resolution processes in place, but now must be treated as a high priority all hands on deck issue.  How do you prevent it?  Make a hero of the person that fixes the process, people, job, or leadership problem that is the root cause and ignore the person who screams fire as well as keep them out of the fight.  Have their manager work with the arsonist on the process and how to handle these issues. People learn the right behavior very quickly when there is no reward for bad behavior.

10 Keys to Great Leadership

This is not original but I liked it and I have kept it now for several years.  Unfortunately I can’t remember who wrote it.

1. Personal Responsibility.
“Enron and 9/11 marked the end of an era of individual freedom and the beginning of personal responsibility. You lead today by building teams and placing others first. It’s not about you.”

2. Simplify Constantly.
“I always use Jack [Welch] as my example here. Every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is working on. If you can’t, then you’re not leading well.”

3. Understand Breadth, Depth, and Context.
“The most important thing I’ve learned since becoming CEO is context. It’s how your company fits in with the world and how you respond to it.”

4. The importance of alignment and time management.
“There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them.”

5. Leaders learn constantly and also have to learn how to teach.
“A leader’s primary role is to teach. People who work with you don’t have to agree with you, but they have to feel you’re willing to share what you’ve learned.”

6. Stay true to your own style.
“Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It’s about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the mirror and say, ‘I could have done three things better yesterday.’ “

7. Manage by setting boundaries with freedom in the middle.
“The boundaries are commitment, passion, trust, and teamwork. Within those guidelines, there’s plenty of freedom. But no one can cross those four boundaries.”

8. Stay disciplined and detailed.
“Good leaders are never afraid to intervene personally on things that are important. Michael Dell can tell you how many computers were shipped from Singapore yesterday.”

9. Leave a few things unsaid.
“I may know an answer, but I’ll often let the team find its own way. Sometimes, being an active listener is much more effective than ending a meeting with me enumerating 17 actions.”

10. Like people.
“Today, it’s employment at will. Nobody’s here who doesn’t want to be here. So it’s critical to understand people, to always be fair, and to want the best in them. And when it doesn’t work, they need to know it’s not personal.”

The Future of Technical Support

Customer support has been be redefining itself for sometime based not only on SaaS but also the customer evolution process where the customer needs change over time from basic services, such as troubleshooting and startup, to value-added services, such as best practices consulting. SaaS accelerates this process as service organizations climb up through these levels, the nature of the customer relationship is altered from transactional relationships involving commoditized services to partnerships that create real value to insure customer success. Complex support organization such as EDA have been in this space for a long time even without SaaS. Now other support teams are adding; Proactive Services to reduce the number and severity of usage problems by helping customers avoid problems in the first place and; Value-Added Services that help business get more value out of an application by increasing adoption and helping users find and use appropriate  new features.

Rule #21 – Build Products and Deliver Services Customers Want to Buy

Several years ago, in another downturn, we where brainstorming ideas to turn business around an executive in the room uttered “we could resolve our sales downturn with a product customers want to buy.” We stopped for a minute at most and then began to laugh.

A downturn like the present one help us to get back to the basics of doing what customers want to buy. They want to buy want helps them with their problems in their lives and their business. They don’t buy value propositions or what comes from focus groups. This is hard work to figure out. But with discipline, open conversation, and careful analysis you can do it.

Even in hard times customers still have problems. If you can solve their problems for less you can leave this downturn even stronger.