General Information Archives

How Long Does It Take To Overcome a Poor Customer Experience?

If a customer has an unresolved poor experience with your company, what will it take to make it right? According to research, it takes a while. I recently read a statistic data sheet from Help Scout, which uncovered some interesting facts and statistics related to customer service. While you can read the article here, I wanted to highlight a few interesting statistics related to poor customer experiences:

So, what are we looking at? First, if a customer has a poor experience, and it is unresolved, from their perspective, it’s going to take 12 positive experiences to overcome the one negative. That’s a lot of work! Couple that with the fact that where there is one customer who complains, there are 26 others that are dissatisfied, but never say anything, things can get tricky with regard to customer loyalty and retention.

What’s a company to do? Below are some tips to consider when looking at the customer experience, identifying pain points, and implementing procedures to ensure that customers keep coming back.

1. Are you listening? Customers want to tell you what they think, especially when they’re unhappy. Do you have an easy way for them to share their thoughts with you? Review your customer service channels – do you have multiple communication points so customers can share their thoughts with you where they are most comfortable, whether that is by phone, email, social media, or live chat? Make it easy for customers to talk to you; when they feel heard, and their issues are resolved, they will give you that chance to give them 12 positive experiences, long forgetting the one poor experience.

2. What does your resolution loop look like? Often times, when customer issues go unresolved, they shut down. You may never know that they felt the issue was not fully addressed – they just leave and do business with others. If you have a strong resolution loop in place, ensuring that all issues are resolved, following up with the customer to be sure they perceive it as resolved, and looking at trends to pinpoint common areas of customer disconnect to proactively preventing them in the future, you will circumvent a lot of customer loss. Remember, customers will “forgive and forget” to a certain extent when their issues are resolved.

3. How are you measuring customer resolution and overall experience? If you have a solid resolution loop in place, are you certain it is playing out as intended? How are calls handled? This is where customer experience management tools, such as mystery shopping and quality content monitoring come into play. By utilizing these types of services, you will have the opportunity to review customer channels in an objective, quantitative manner. Quality content monitoring allows your already recorded customer service calls to be listened to an evaluated based on an objective performance criteria list – when a company has not used a mystery shopping program in the past, this type of evaluation can give some great insight and give the company a starting place to monitor performance.

Customers are tough, and today’s customer is much different than customers even five years ago. Making sure you know what they’re thinking, resolving issues, and striving to make each experience positive will keep loyalty and satisfaction levels high.

Treat Your Staff Like Angry Birds

I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve renewed by obsession with Angry Birds recently. When the faze first took over, of course I was curious and played a bit, but then I forgot all about it.

Recently though, I’ve been a bit addicted. Not sure why, but it happens I guess. As I was playing the other night, I thought of how this game can be tied to managing your staff.

Think about it for a moment….

You have a task (to wipe out all of the green guys) to complete and are given staff (the birds) to help you accomplish this. As you get more into the game and move on to more advanced levels, you quickly learn that each type of bird has it’s own strength with regard to how they work best. As a player, you need to make the most of each bird’s capability to get the task done.

Kind of like your staff – each has a role to do, and every one comes with unique strengths and abilities. Your job, as a manager, is to learn what each employee’s strengths and weaknesses are, and how to make them the most effective for your team.

Sometimes, as in angry birds, it takes some time. You need to learn the best way to complete the task. The first time out may be exploratory; send off the birds in the way you think may be best and see what the effect is. Of course, on this first run you may be unfamiliar with a new bird (like a new hire), and send them out thinking they’d do one thing when they actually do something completely different. Lesson learned for next time.

It may take a try or two, but eventually you learn the best way to utilize your birds, in the order they are given to you, to complete the task as quickly and efficiently as possible to give you the most points for that level.

As is similar with managing employees, it may take some time to learn how each one will be most effective, and in turn most successful, as part of your team. Funny how a simple game app can bring that message home so easily.

How Do You Measure The Effectiveness of Sales Training?

If you have recently undergone staff wide training, or implemented new company policies and procedures, you know that it can be tricky to determine the effectiveness of the training, as well as if the new procedures are playing out in the field as they should be.

Training of any kind, and certainly staff wide, can be costly. Many will utilize employee testing and even certification at the end of a training session to be sure important information was correctly retained and that staff have a good working knowledge of what is expected from them.

While mystery shopping is traditionally thought of as an ongoing tool to be used on a continual basis, many sales trainers are turning to this type of program to objectively measure the effectiveness of their training program.

It is very simple and can be easily deployed in a short time frame in order to quickly pinpoint what is working and what may need additional education/training. Here’s how it works:

1. Determine the current staff expectations with relation to customer service. Devise a mystery shopping baseline program from this information. Deploy a batch of shops across locations. It is best to conduct multiple shops at each location so that there is a variety of staff evaluated across different times of day and days of the week.

2. Once the baseline pilot is complete, take the data and review it carefully. Many programs offer back end reporting capabilities to make this process easier. You can pinpoint baseline strengths and areas for opportunity, as well as determine where to focus training efforts for the best success.

3. Once training is conducted, it is wise to keep to more traditional methods of measurement, including employee testing, to make sure that, at a minimum, staff understood policies, procedures, and expectations.

4. Allow for a short period of time to pass to allow for staff to become used to what they are expected to do. Waiting for a two week period is a good rule of thumb – it gets employees to the point where they can focus on adhering to training and start getting settled in their behaviors. This will give you a true sense of performance, and it will also ensure that you are not conducting measurement during the “honeymoon period.” This is the point where staff are most aware of their performance and tend to do their best since training has just ended and they realize that they may be evaluated. This is similar to the honeymoon period at the launch of any mystery shopping program – once staff are told this will be happening, they tend to be hyperaware and put their best foot forward for the immediate future.

5. After the “honeymoon period” the company then conducts another round of mystery shopping in a similar fashion to the baseline.

6. The final stage is analyzing the data collected from the second round, and then making general comparisons to the baseline. This will gauge effectiveness of training, and pinpoint areas (or even specific staff members) who may require additional assistance.

Sales training is not cheap; making sure you have the necessary tools to measure, monitor, and maintain quality staff performance is vital. Mystery shopping is one tool that can really make a difference with training programs!

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