Here is an exciting preview from Frost & Sullivan’s upcoming Executive MindXchange Chronicles: Customer Contact 2015, East:

Reach for the Summit: Achieving Your Personal, Team, and Leadership Goal
Keynote speaker Scott Kress, President, Summit Team Building, called upon his considerable experience as a team leadership teacher at several universities and as a leader of non-profit traveling activities for veterans to talk about team building and leadership.  His purpose was to inspire people in the audience to do things differently by focusing on building teams. In his engaging keynote, he reviewed techniques for attendees to implement in their own environments, reiterated that key business goals should always include team work and leadership and shared insights on how to deal with change and overcome challenges in today’s fast-moving world.

SESSION
Reach for the Summit: Achieving Your Personal, Team, and Leadership Goals

PRESENTER
Scott Kress, President, Summit Team Building

TAKE-AWAY(S)

• Team work is the most important factor in organizational success 
• Communication with your team is key. You have to be able to talk about the good and the bad to make communication effective.
• The higher you go in achieving team goals, the harder it becomes to achieve them.
• High performance teams succeed and low performance teams fail. 
• We take it for granted, but there is a lot more to the success of a team than bringing good people together.  Every high performance team needs a mentor. 
• The job of the leader is to serve his team.   
• 80% of people fail at success because when they are close to reaching their goals, they relax and no longer focus on creativity and innovation. 
• Success can lead to failure if you don’t focus on maintaining it.

BEST PRACTICES
You have to have a good relationship with team members to build a successful team.  You have to know about each other, about their values, their family, etc. It’s important to spend time with your team talking about leadership and motivation.  You want to talk about your vision and share it with the team.  All team members need to be on the same page.  The key to leadership is communication.  Let the team know what the expectations are, and what actions are to be taken.  Define roles and responsibilities.

ACTION ITEMS
 You need to build time for reflection.  Look at yourself and figure out what you are doing well, and what you need to work on.  Work in stages.  Break down goals from large to small.  Go from yearly, to monthly, to daily and even hourly, to be able to achieve them. 

TAKE-AWAY(S)
How to Conduct A Team Analysis:

• Form: When you first bring your team together strive to build a foundation, a relationship.  Set values, goals, a mission, and vision, every time.
• Storm:  Things normally don’t go as planned.  When you run into conflicts, and you have a good foundation, it is easier to get through.  It is critical for our success.  You have to look at all the possibilities. 
• Norm: Keep the team motivated and in a good state of mind. How you choose to lead, and to be a good team member dictates your rate of success.

• Circle of influence:  Rate of success 80%.  Keep yourself in a good mental and personal state.  Positive thinking.
• Circle of concern:  Rate of success 9%.  Stress, a negative environment and negative thinking are your enemies.

• Perform:  Keys to be successful when working as a team: 

• Leadership
• Inspiring vision
• Mind exchange / Communication
• Create the future
• Be Accountable for results

ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT
Things you can do today:

• Create your vision
• Analyze your team development
• Chart your concerns and influence
• Take ownership of your results, whether they are good or bad
• Choose your attitude
• Have a meeting once a week for 10 minutes.  Analyze the following: Are we doing what we said we are going to do?  Are we losing our way?

FINAL THOUGHTS
Your attitude determines your altitude.  Ultimately nothing fails like success. When it comes to making a difference, if it is not you, then who?  If it is not now, then when?

Customer Experience: "The Crucial Differentiator"

By Carlos Paniagua
Director, Relationship Care® Partnerships
American Express






Service remains a major reason why customers choose American Express today. Yet this is an unprecedented time, and service has never been more important than now. Customer Experience has become the crucial differentiator. Companies need to deliver best in class customer experience.

First, there are the regulators, who have become more vigilant in recent years. This increased regulatory scrutiny of financial services is a result of distrust. But when trust in the financial services industry is uncertain, service makes the difference. Coming out of the recession in a still uncertain world, people want elevated service and companies they can trust. Regulators are keeping companies increasingly accountable for being clear and credible with their consumers. So companies need to show customers and regulators that they’re not just being compliant, but that they are going above and beyond.

Today’s consumers have higher expectations than ever. This is, in large part, because customers’ expectations are informed by service experiences across industries. Customers are more demanding and more vocal than ever before:

• They’re more informed.
• They’re accessing multiple service touch-points.
• They’re sharing information about their experiences in virtual communities.
• They’re part of an interconnected, “want it now” society.
• They look for meaning from what they buy and who they buy it from.
• They’re aware of their purchase power and want valuable experiences in exchange for their loyalty.

And then, there’s the competitive landscape. Being part of a service-led cultural transformation, as today’s competitors are rapidly becoming service-focused, as opposed to product-focused. Companies should be looking to achieve scores that put them among the top service providers in the world, not just those within their industry.

There’s a set of consistent service values from world class service leaders across industries:

1. Develop a deep understanding of customers needs
2. Secure top-down commitment
3. Revere the front line
4. Measure and reward based on the voice of the customer
5. Acknowledge failure and recover with grace

To truly drive a transformation and not an incremental change, servicing should be an ecosystem of leadership, people and tools which all work together with the customer at the center.

Prevent issues and failures in the first place rather than being really good at fixing them.
Companies should view service as an investment—an opportunity to build relationships and customer loyalty. It’s all about customer-centricity, using the Voice of Customer to define great service:

1. Do what you say you’ll do.  Deliver seamlessly. This is the baseline prerequisite level of delivery, and it includes recognizing a customer’s choice and keeping the “contract” with them.
2. Do more than I expect.  Go the extra mile and do all the little things beyond what’s contractually obligated. Take the relationship and personal circumstances into account. Be flexible. Listen.
3. Acknowledge failure. Customers don’t care about internal structure or obstacles. Reach out to customers who were dissatisfied with service interactions to understand what could be done differently.
4. Validate my choice.  Give customers ease, convenience and access to information.
5. Make me feel special.   Make every customer feel like they’re recognized and treated better than other customers. Do the little things that make customers feel special, like giving perks and making exceptions.
6. Make feel you know me.  Be genuine and treat customers like people, not account numbers. Make every customer interaction feel like part of a relationship. Act appropriately and accordingly.
7. So while the customer remains a focal point at American Express, customer-centricity is a virtuous cycle that rewards all constituents. It’s driving key benefits to  employees, customers and shareholders alike:

For the employee, there’s job satisfaction, incentive pay and new opportunities. With the ability to add a human touch to their work. We need to invest more in our employees to enable and empower them to deliver extraordinary service. This includes tools, training and leadership focus. And as a result, the majority of employees will have improvement in their performance.

For the customer, they see more value in every interaction. Customer-centricity provides the environment for a service experience that makes customers feel valued and helps them get the most from  products and services they’re paying for.

For shareholders, will drive improvements across all important measures of business success. Most notably,  a lift in Recommend to a Friend scores, which translate to profitability.

In summary companies have to:

• Create a customer-centric culture and experience by shifting from a transaction-servicing model to one that deepens engagement
• And build competitive advantage and deliver economic value through meaningful engagement with customers.

How Big Data is of Value for Improving the Customer Experience at AARP

By Curtis Generous
VP and Chief Technology Officer
AARP






With nearly 38 million members, AARP serves a wide array of customers:  caregivers, policymakers, advocates, digital communities, volunteers, and many others.  We produce the world’s largest circulation magazine and run the country’s largest refresher driving course.  We help older adults fight financial fraud and help them save money on their home energy bills.  Through our Drive to End Hunger, we have helped donate more than 30 million meals to hungry older adults.  We provide community-based technology training.  We advocate for people 50-plus in public policy.  We advocate for them in the marketplace by selecting high-quality, high-value products and services that carry the AARP name.  We help our members get discounts.

With so many offerings for so many customers, it is critically important that we use Big Data related technologies to enhance our customer experience.

Traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) technologies are focused on providing reports and dashboards for operationally- based reporting.  Today, to provide the best customer experience, we need to go further.  Executive leaders and marketers want to gain more insights about the data to understand customer sentiments, analyze voice or chat data, understand current topics of interest or trends, and combine and analyze data from a wide range of IT and external business systems.

Here are some of the ways we are meeting that challenge at AARP:

• We are linking behavioral, transactional and customer interactional data to better understand customers’ expectations so that we can deliver the best possible value to our members.
• We are using in-depth data to personalize our members’ experience and what we can offer them.
• We are measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of our Contact Center agents and operations to continuously improve and deliver the best experience for our members, volunteers, and others who are seeking information from AARP.
• We are discovering what types of services and discount offerings are most valuable to our members so that, when necessary, we can redesign our offerings and services to make them more relevant.
• We are using Contact Center agent notes to constantly improve the ways in which our agents interact with our customers so that we provide a better customer experience and grow our relevance with our members.

Call Center Success Through the Power of Giving

By Sharon Scheckter
Director of Service
Blinds.com






How to provide value, grow employee happiness and increase profitability

How generous is your call center?  And I'm not talking about the dollar amount of your employee holiday bonuses or 'giving it all away' to angry customers.  



Encouraging a culture of value creation and generosity in your organization might have some unexpected and exciting consequences for your employees and your bottom line.  Here's a look at some of the things we do at Blinds.com: 




Be passionate about providing value to your customers

No customer likes to be on the phone with a call center agent that is unable to solve their problems.  Empower your employees with the ability to make important decisions and take immediate action to make things right.



There are many smart ways to provide value to your customers, but it all starts with being passionate about customer satisfaction and providing amazing experiences.  When your team is in alignment with these goals, the rest easily falls into place.

We work hard to ensure that every customer service team member is able to tackle the day-to-day challenges that arise after a customer places a complex, custom order like window coverings.



From being pro-active in alerting customers of delivery issues or unexpected back orders to spending the time required for a deep research dive on an order status with hyper-communicative updates, we train the team extensively to do the right thing for our customers and make it an easy experience.

There are, of course, moments in any business where things go wrong and customers become upset. 

This means crediting back to a customer's credit card to apologize for a much-delayed order or replacing products entirely (even if they're not under warranty!) when the situation merits it.  Agents do these things on their own, without management's approval in most cases, as we have trained them well and given them the power to empathetically take control of any situation.





Be generous to your community and have fun!

It's inspiring to see how your call center employees can rally behind causes they believe in!  One of the most rewarding programs we have implemented at Blinds.com is our 'Pay It Forward' customer program.  

Perhaps it's happened to you. A customer calls in and shares a personal story of a challenge or tragedy in their family that truly touches your team.  Beyond offering words of encouragement and a fantastic customer experience, what else can you offer that customer to truly make a positive impact in their world?



Our team uses the 'Pay It Forward' program to nominate customers to receive specials perks or gifts from our company within their quarterly budget.  We have sent chew toys and humorous  cards to customers who had to replace their blinds because of a naughty puppy.   



Employees have even taken it upon themselves to collect personal funds to send money to families who have lost everything in natural disasters or to help sponsor a family movie night outing to offer an evening of normalcy for children who are struggling with an parent's illness.

You can take it farther, of course, in supporting employees' favorite charities and providing nonprofit volunteer opportunities to reach an even greater slice of the world.  Allow your team to take the lead on what community initiatives to champion and celebrate their successes and involvement.  It will mean the world to your employees and to the people they impact.




Encourage a culture of giving within your organization

We enjoy an incredibly low turnover rate at Blinds.com (under 4% annually) in part due to a positive, collaborative work environment.

Employees give to each other on a daily basis, whether through peer training, daily coaching sessions or by mentoring each other. While there is always healthy competitiveness, especially as we openly share employees' metrics and salaries with one another, this competition also drives employees reaching out to one another to share their best practices with each other.



To drive this spirit of employee giving home, our employees share weekly 'You WOW-ed Me' cards to recognize the 'little things' that they do for one another.  These cards are distributed privately and are greatly cherished as they celebrate moments like 'you calmed me down after a rough call and that meant a lot to me' or 'you referred a sale to me and that really made my day' or even statements like 'your success this week inspired me to try new skills and improve as well!'



Imagine a working culture where collaboration and helpfulness thrive on all levels, there is a tremendous power in actively growing and participating in a generous call center culture.  You'll love the results you see!

Customer Contact East Webinar Recap

By Lindsey Walker
Integrated Marketing Solutions Coordinator
Frost & Sullivan

On January 28, 2015, Frost & Sullivan’s Principal Analyst in Customer Contact, Michael DeSalles, led an engaging panel discussion titled: Dynamic Customer-Centric Strategies: 10 Strategies in 20 Minutes. Michael was joined by Cippy Seidler, the Call Center Director at Banner Health, and Sean Albertson, the Director of Performance and Technology at ViaSat. Both presenters delivered their insight on how to engage your customers, and interestingly enough, many of their tips started with engaging your employees first.  Below, are each speaker’s biggest takeaways from the webinar.

1.    Focus on the journey of your employees
 
Siedler’s main point was that any successful company and leadership team should focus on the journey of the employee by “engaging their hearts and minds,” helping them transition from an “agent” to an “ambassador,” while moving away from the “transitional job” stigma that call center jobs often carry. Creating a supportive employee environment, with an actively involved leadership program, is one of Siedler’s critical recommendations for supporting her employees. “By giving them the tools they need to be successful it provides a lot more opportunities down the road.” Siedler invests in the journey of her employees, and focuses primarily on creating trust and a sense of accountability by setting clear expectations for both sides. This, inherently leads to employees being more likely to participate in advanced training, peer training, and in turn, becoming an “ambassador, or role model,”  for their company.

2.    Capture the voice of your customer

Albertson’s insight provided another look at focusing on the customer experience, and capturing the true voice of the customer, while searching through an over-saturation of data in the information age. Albertson believes that sorting through the seemingly endless amounts of data “noise” to find value, is extremely important to understand and find the main voice of the customer. The key, is finding “anecdotal data at a human level” and “leveraging resources to support this data statistically” to add value to the business. An organization perceives the voice of the customer program differently amongst each department and sales channel, so it’s important to understand each department’s needs, and “report effectively” by bringing in real examples of customers’ specific stories. When simply using surveys, employees only get a broad overview of a customer’s level of satisfaction. With a little “elbow grease” to dig up the actual experiences and additional feedback from their customers, employees are able to see trends in what specific customers are looking for, and then to appropriately tailor their approaches to increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Visit www.frost.com/ccsweb to hear the rest of Cippy and Sean’s dynamic customer-centric strategies, in addition to their answers from the audience question and answer session!  Additionally, you can gain real world insight and experience by meeting  the presenters in person at the 11th Annual Customer Contact 2015 East: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange on April 12-15, 2015, in sunny, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Visit www.frost.com/ccs for more information and instructions for registering for the event.

A Customer-Centric Culture Begins from Within

By Shep Hyken
Chief Amazement Officer
Shepard Presentations





There are many great companies that are considered “rock stars” in customer service, winning awards and accolades – Amazon, Southwest Airlines and Zappos.com for example. But for me, one company stands out above the rest, and that shining star of customer service is Ace Hardware.

It’s no secret that Ace Hardware offers outstanding, helpful customer service – the JD Power award is very public recognition for a job well done. But if you look at Ace Hardware stores and then compare them to the competition, you realize that it is a different kind of success story. It’s David vs. Goliath. Ace competes against “Big Box” stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot with larger stores, more inventory and bigger advertising budgets, and Ace is still able to compete and prosper in the market. The secret is in the customer service. Ace Hardware relies on its special brand of helpful customer service – and that service starts from within.

I have talked and written a lot about how to create a customer-centric culture. My basic premise is that you must start on the inside, with the employees. To be the best place to shop, you must first be the best place to work. It comes down to this:

Treat your employees the way you want your customers to be treated – maybe even better!

I call this the Employee Golden Rule, and it is the key to creating a company that is customer-focused. Ace Hardware understands this and lives it every day. Before Ace retailers expect their employees to deliver helpful customer service, they embody that same type of engagement for the employees. Managers are encouraged to get to know their employees and find out what’s going on in their lives and offer support and assistance. In turn, that is exactly what the employee is to do for each customer who walks through the door.

There are some other steps to follow to complete the process of creating a customer-centric culture. Here are some of the basics:

• Define the culture. Ace strives to be helpful. What type of service do you want to offer? It could be a word or a phrase, but you need to put into words what kind of experience you want to deliver to the customer before you can begin to make it happen.


• Hire the right people. You have to look at more than education and skills if you want employees who will embody a customer-focused culture. Attitude and personality have to be the right fit as well.


• Communicate and train. Translate your ideal customer experience into simple terms. Formulate a simple, memorable statement that everyone will understand, and then share it with your employees. Your employees come to you with varied skills and experience, and it’s up to you to train them in your core values and customer service expectations. And this means everyone – management included.


• Be an example. Everyone – but leaders in particular – should step up their customer service and be role models for those around them. Management should treat the employees with the same respect and dignity that should be afforded to the customer, and employees should serve each other as well.


• Empower employees to succeed. You have hired the right people and trained them in your customer service expectations. Once they have the tools, trust them and give them the freedom to meet your expectations in their own individual style. Don’t overburden them with rules that get in the way.


• Celebrate success. Let your employees know when they are doing well, both individually and as a group. Everyone loves appreciation. It could come in the form of an awards dinner, recognition in the company newsletter, or – do this one often – simply by saying “thank you”. Recognition is a great motivator and will encourage employees to continue doing a great job or even step it up to a higher level.

Remember, what gets rewarded and reinforced becomes part of the company’s culture. The internal culture of a company is the secret to delivering customer service. You can have all of the tools and techniques in the world, but they won’t make a difference if customer service isn’t deeply rooted in the company culture.

The Future Workforce: Imagining and Writing the Revolutionary Agent Job Description

In this exclusive preview of the Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange Chronicles: Customer Contact 2014, West, a panel of experts offer their insights on the workforce of the future, with an emphasis on evolving necessary skill sets, engaging millennials, and managing of remote employees.






MODERATOR
Michael DeSalles, Principal Analyst, Customer Contact, Frost & Sullivan

PANELISTS
- Denise Pullen, Assistant Director, Learning Innovation, Hyatt
- Kelly Ravsten, Director, Americas Audience Operations, Yahoo
- Ann Szymanowski, Global Director, Customer Service, Dow Chemical

TAKE-AWAY

With customers’ increasing ability to solve simple problems online, the questions that come in to agents are becoming more and more complex. Consequently, companies need to recruit for, train, and retain intelligent employees with the competence to solve challenging problems. 

What that means for contact centers: The skill sets of today’s agents need to favor problem-solving abilities and adaptability rather than rote memorization and adherence to scripts.

BEST PRACTICES

That doesn’t mean agents need to be technical experts; instead, the panelists said, companies must hire agents who can follow questions logically and figure out how to find solutions. In addition, agents need to be able to listen and have empathy for the customer. 

Look for customer-service-oriented individuals leaning toward sales, and recruit for college-educated employees on campuses. That strategy tends to work best in locations with high unemployment rates. Creating relationships with nearby campuses can allow the company to hire students part-time as they work toward degrees.  

ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT

Panelists agreed that education is important for today’s customer service agents. According to Ann Szymanoski, all agents at Dow Chemical have college degrees, as and they need strong critical thinking skills. Agents need understand the logistics of the company in order to serve customers.

All agents at Yahoo have degrees as well, Kelly Ravsten said. Her company looks for agents who can solve problems logically and learn. It’s impossible to use scripts to solve complex problems, she said. 

At Hyatt, college graduates are highly sought after but a degree is not specifically required, said Denise Pullen. The company is receiving much more complex calls now because most of the simple questions can be answered online. 

TAKE-AWAY

As the workforce evolves, organizations need to adapt to the generational differences of their employees. Younger agents tend to value different things than those who came before. Retaining millennial employees depends on engagement and motivation.

BEST PRACTICES

Companies must understand differences between the millennial workforce and prior generations, the panelists said. Unlike baby boomers, millennials often require a lot of feedback. They tend to be impatient and eager for promotion when they meet agreed-upon benchmarks, so it is important to ensure that these opportunities for advancement exist.

Don’t just rely on stereotypes about different generations. There’s a big gap between how most businesses view millennials and how they view themselves. For instance, according to Beyond.com:

• 35 percent of millennials consider themselves to tech savvy while 86 percent of HR managers say they're tech savvy. 
• 82 percent of millennials think they are loyal to their employer while just 1 percent of HR managers say so. 
• 86 percent of Millennials think they are hard-working, while 11 percent of HR managers agree.

Despite the challenges, panelists stressed companies should be excited about hiring millennials. Yes, they constitute a change in the workforce that requires a shift in motivation and retention strategies; however, they are the leaders of the future and, if properly engaged, have a lot to offer.  

ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT

The panelists recommended companies adapt their business structure to fit millennials instead of expecting them to adapt to fit the company. Create a work environment that challenges employees with clear parameters detailing acquisition of necessary skills and pay increases based on performance.

It’s important to help these employees with tuition reimbursement or loan assistance. The skilled college graduates companies are looking for will most likely have a higher debt ratio. 

For recruiting and retention, use groups and community outreach to help millennials feel connected to the company. For instance, Pullen said, Hyatt has created health and fitness club and a diversity group. Creating a fun culture that millennial employees fit into, fostering friendships, and allowing them to pursue a higher purpose will make them more likely to stay with the company.

TAKE-AWAY

Using work-at-home agents can help for recruiting, cutting costs and increasing agent availability. However, there are some challenges companies must overcome. According to the panelists, remote employment is a viable option as long as the right candidates feel connected to the company.

BEST PRACTICES

In today’s marketplace, it may be necessary to allow employees to work from home in order to hire and retain top talent. To avoid problems, companies must create a work-from-home environment that allows highly-trained employees to accomplish their work off-site.  

At Hyatt, about a third of agents work remotely. The training for them is key, Pullen said. The company uses a virtual classroom that’s completely interactive to make sure employees are engaged in the training.

ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT

The panelist recommended companies implement systems to ensure that remote employees are actively working despite not being physically present. Ongoing communication can help remote employees feel connected. Keep remote employees engaged with daily check-in meetings and frequent instant messaging interactions.

If you are considering a remote workforce but do not already have those capabilities in place, always test with a small alpha group. Allow highly-skilled employees who were originally trained in-person to migrate their work home.  Develop systems to monitor at-home work, such as remote desktop and webcam-based surveillance.

The creation of an at-home workforce may require realignment of leadership teams to service in-house, remote, and transitional employees.  Be prepared with a dedicated team of people taking care of remote employees to help ease the transition from in-person to remote.  

FINAL THOUGHT

Just as the workforce is changing, HR departments must also evolve.  Leaders need training on generational diversity and what motivates each generation.  

For more valuable information, order your copy of Frost & Sullivan's Executive MindXchange Chronicles: Customer Contact 2015, West, a unique collection of all the key take-aways and best practices discussed at the event