The winter of 2019 has been a nightmare from coast to coast. 25 degrees below zero in Chicago and blizzards on the west coast were only a couple of Mother Nature’s cruel tricks. Customers aren’t always understanding when it comes to delays in deliveries or services such as picking up their garbage. Often-times the only tool customer service representatives have at their disposal is to wait for updates on routes from the operations team and to hesitantly suggest service will be attempted “hopefully tomorrow”. We should be better prepared. We can surprise our customers with our great attitudes
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Action Versus Intention
In customer service our attention tends to go towards putting out fires. Goals for improving or changing a process are put on the back burner for so long that we forget we ever had goals. It’s exciting and motivating to be able to share with you how others have been able to improve and innovate while handling the day to day demands that revolve around customer care. For all of us it is about taking head-knowledge, what we know about, and putting it into action.
Let me introduce you to 3 women of action!
Cynthia has been a Customer Service Representative since 2016. During the annual Tooty Training program, we focused on selling services- business to business. The Tooty script is great, but CSRs admitted they may only get 1 or 2 calls for new service in a month and aren’t confident when it comes to recommending service. I suggested that if there was someone who was talented with excel that the formula offered during training could be turned into an amazing tool that would allow a CSR or inside sales rep to enter in some details from the script and quickly determine a service that would best fit the customer’s needs. Cynthia not only offered to do it but, followed through! The tool will also shorten talk time.
In her role as Customer Service Manager, Destini attended the webinar Tooty offers to managers. The office had staffing issues. Destini said, “Our jobs are more than head count and phone calls”, which is what she discovered after she used the work-time-study formula provided by Lori Miller to document the number of customers that came to the office, inbound and outbound calls and customer e-mails. This data helped Destini and upper management make an informed decision about staffing.
Deana had been a CSR for just over a year before receiving the award as a 2017 Top 10 CSR in all of North America for Waste Connections. Her average for 2017 was 99! Deana said, “If I can do it, I know that you can do it. Just use the tools provided and the sky is the limit!” While on site providing one-on-one coaching to CSRs we noticed that small details that impact customer service and accuracy were not given attention. Every CSR had a different level of knowledge and there wasn’t time to share facts during the day. As the new Lead CSR, Deana took a Tooty suggestion to create a “Did you know” board where CSRs are incentivized to share what they learn each day- ah ha moments.
We don’t get very far by thinking about or wishing for things to be better. Action steps and deadlines make a difference.
Scripts, Secret Shopper and Training
A few years ago I had a prospective customer tell me that they did not need the services that Tooty provides because they had the best customer service he had ever witnessed. He added in that the customer service department was well-run, sales were up and their customer satisfaction scores were all above average. The conversation reminded me of a scene from the movie Elf where Will Ferrell burst into a coffee shop shouting congratulations because he saw a sign outside that stated, “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”. He took the sign at face value and thought the claim was true.
Get Rid of the Robot
Five year old Hunter asked me why he couldn’t burp out loud in Chick-fil-A. I tried to keep from laughing as I told him it wasn’t polite. I didn’t know if a 5 year old knew the meaning of polite and I really wanted to make sure he understood that burping out loud was not a good habit for a 5 year old to develop. So I asked him if he knew what it meant if I said he was not polite. He explained to me from his kindergarten perspective that not being polite was the same as not being nice. He understood. In recent training with some millennial CSRs I overheard them using some words in ways
