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Hot Transfer For Customer Feedback

 

If you use a customer feedback program, you know the value of post transactional feedback from your customers. You provide a link to a feedback survey at the bottom of the receipts, on your website, and possibly even through POP signage.

 

How do your telephone customers provide feedback? You may want to consider a “hot transfer” program to incorporate into your existing feedback program.

 

Here’s how it works. Say you have a phone based feedback program in which customers call a toll-free number to provide feedback. Depending on your telephone system, this toll-free number can be programmed into your system so that once a call with one of your customer service representatives is complete, it will transfer the call to the feedback survey.

 

Sounds great, right? I’m sure you are also thinking of a few issues that may arise with the hot transfer system. Let me see if I can address them below:

 

1. Employees won’t transfer the call to the feedback service for all calls, especially the ones that don’t go so well: the hot transfer system will automatically transfer calls to the feedback service as soon as your employee ends the call – they do not have control over which customers get into the feedback system. Since every call will have the opportunity to provide feedback, this is not something you need to worry about.

 

2. Customers will be annoyed by this system: not at all! Customers, as you know, love giving feedback. It shows that you care about their experience and want to do better. Like traditional feedback programs, of course not everyone will want to participate. You can set your phone system to throw an automated recording (along the lines that you do for recordings: “This call may be monitored for quality control…”) that asks customers to press 1 if they would like to provide feedback at the end of the conversation. This not only makes them aware that you’ll be asking about their experience and make them more aware of the details of the call, but it gives them the option to participate or opt out.

 

3. Customers won’t provide negative feedback for fear the employee will know who left the feedback – after all, they typically have the customer’s account number: customers are opting in to take the survey prior to the call taking place. Yes, they can hang up if they change their mind, but assuring customers that their responses are completely confidential can help in obtaining negative feedback. You want to encourage this group as their feedback is what can best help you to improve.

 

If you haven’t considered the hot transfer method of customer feedback, or if your current provider doesn’t offer this service, please let us know and we’d be happy to help! You can leave a comment below or email us for more information.

 

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The 9 Circles of Customer Service Hell

 

We’ve all been there and can relate – we have a customer service experience that makes us want to bang our head on a wall and never, ever do business with a company again.

 

What are the 9 circles of customer service hell? As you read this list, created by Jay Steinfeld in an Inc. publication, see how many you find yourself nodding to vigorously…

 

  1. The never-ending voice mail phone tree
  2. The requirement to repeat your name, account number, etc., ad infinitum
  3. Hold, hold, hold
  4. The ominous sound, mid-conversation, of the dial tone
  5. The disappearing clerk
  6. The line that’s always 20 people deep
  7. The agent who doesn’t understand your question
  8. The “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the authority to do that” response
  9. The clerk who’s busy texting someone who’s clearly more important than you

 

All of these items are particularly troublesome, but there are some items on this list that are more eye gauging than others as they relate to customer service:

 

1. Voice mail tree: what was supposed to be an efficiency in business has become problematic in many respects. Most disturbing are the voice activated voice mail trees. I’m not sure if I speak too softly, or having speech issues I’m unaware of, but I find these to be the most frustrating – I end up having to yell at the voice mail system to make them understand, sometimes to be told by the automated attendant that I’m interrupting and should be patient before giving an answer.

 

Solution: employ mystery shoppers to place typical calls to your business to navigate your voice mail system to find out what’s working and what isn’t. By mirroring typical customer needs via telephone, you can pinpoint areas that need improvement. Similarly, you can use a hot transfer feedback option that, if a caller successfully navigates the voice mail tree, can leave their feedback at the end of the call.

 

2.  The requirement to repeat your name, account number, and other identifying information multiple times: I’ve seen this from time to time in the service industry, but have noticed it most often in the medical industry. I recently took my daughter to a new doctor. After spending 15 minutes filling out all of the required forms, we were ushered into the examination room, only to find the nurse seated at a computer waiting to ask the same questions I just filled out so she could enter them into the computer. Surely there’s a better way to do this!

 

Solution: survey your front line staff, the ones who are responsible for the day to day aspects of your business. They may feel as frustrated as customers do with some of the data collection gathering and might have solutions to streamline the process. Coupling employee and customer feedback may give insight into ways to make the process smoother all around, which gives employees the opportunity to serve more customers and keep satisfaction at a strong level.

 

3. Employees who don’t have the authority to make decisions: how often do you hear this? “I’d love to help you, but I don’t have the authority to do that.” While they may be able to find a supervisor who can help, it’s just one more touchpoint a customer has to deal with, and wait for, which can harm customer perception.

 

Solution: empower your employees to make certain decisions on their own to help customers quickly and within one conversation. Find the most common customer issues, the best ways to handle these issues, and train your staff on troubleshooting. Help them ask the right questions and collect enough information to make an informed decision on how to best satisfy the customer. Go one extra step and give them the ability to make that decision and help the customer without needing to go through a supervisor.

 

While this won’t work with every case, and some situations will require help from a supervisor, giving employees the power to make decisions for the more routine situations can go a long way in customer satisfaction.

 

Do you have any circles of hell you’d like to add? What is the most frustrating customer service aspect you’ve come across? Feel free to share and join in the conversation!

 

 

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Mystery Shopping Programs: Read This Before Implementing Incentives

 

More often than not, the information gleaned from mystery shopping reports will be used for an incentive, or factored into performance reviews. This is a great use for the program, but one where companies should proceed with caution.

 

Before tying mystery shopping scores into performance reviews or bonuses, consider the following:

 

1. Have you had the program in place, or are you just starting a program? It’s an interesting thing when a company announces to its staff that they will be starting a mystery shopping program, even when it’s promoted in a positive light (as it always should be). Staff become nervous, thinking that it is a “big brother” approach to keeping tabs. Others, who may have had a negative experience in a past life, may want to buck the system and protest loudly to anyone who will listen.

 

It is recommended that a program be implemented and run for some time before placing incentives on it or incorporating it into your performance reviews. This will give staff time to see the value of the program and that it is truly intended to make the company better as a whole. It will also give staff time to work on areas where they need improvement before rolling out the incentive/reward program.

 

2. Set the bar now for employee kickback: it will happen, even in the best of programs. After all, we’re all human and it’s human nature to defend ourselves. Decide as a company how you’re going to handle employee disputes from mystery shopping reports beforehand and communicate that with your staff. If you allow employees to fight every report that is less than stellar, it will send a message that they can try to argue their way out of a lower score, which will devalue the program.

 

That’s not to say that there won’t be reports where clarification is needed; this can happen from time to time, but when employees try to dispute every less than perfect report, you need a plan in place for them to accept that it is what it is and the program is not going to change.

 

3. Make sure the report is measuring what staff are trained to do: sometimes programs need to be tweaked after the first run or two. Make sure that each question on the report measures what you train, otherwise it will not be an effective program. Don’t ask a question that records if a customer was greeted within 10 seconds of entering the store, for example, if your staff were not trained on this or it’s entirely impossible given the store layout or business model.

 

4. Prepare management for the initial fallout: even if you have program in place for a while and then raise the bar by implementing an incentive program, something interesting happens. Employees will become defensive, claim they “knew it was the shopper”, or otherwise try to fight reports from time to time. It’s a natural progression we’ve seen time and time again, and I always share this with clients who have had a program and are now raising the bar in this manner. It’s not an issue with the program itself, it’s just staff reacting to the change. By preparing your managers for this, it will make the transition process as smooth as possible.

 

Mystery shopping programs offer an excellent method of collecting objective data to measure operational standards; using it to its fullest potential will make it even more valuable to your company. By keeping the above tips in mind, it will make incorporation into an incentive program easier and help staff buy into its value as well.

 

 

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