How to Create a Job People Value

Unlike machines, people will provide variable output.  Some employees will go above and beyond, some will fall short.  With the high cost of attrition, replacement, and micromanagement – especially in a call center environment – employers should be increasingly interested in how to find the right person for the job, get them up to speed as soon as possible, and keep them in the organization as long as it makes sense.

If you’re wondering if you’ve built a job that people value, consider asking yourself the following questions:

Do I pay the absolute minimum?  If your pay scale for your position is the lowest in your marketplace, consider what that says to your employees.  Even if you are able to get the requisite number of applicants and fill the open spots, employee output is still a dynamic variable, and you’ve created a subconscious message that sets low expectations.  Can you really expect excited, engaged, and creative employees when you are the lowest number in the marketplace (or the legal minimum wage)?

Do I provide benefits?  Managing employees’ lives outside of work is a questionable practice, but we can all agree that the fewer distractions workers have, the easier it is for them to be 100% while on the clock.  It’s a requirement for many employers now but, even if it’s not, what are the benefits of providing health, dental, and other insurance?   Maybe you can increase productivity and reduce cost by ensuring your employees don’t have to worry about their kid’s cavity or their prescriptions (it’s important to note that health issues are a significant cause of issues like absenteeism and attrition: here’s some more info).

Do my employees see their impact on the overall organization?  Executives and managers often have a handle on the mission and vision of an organization and they often expect the same when they visit with front-line employees.  However, it’s important to ask what you do that will keep these employees engaged when their job description is often more tedious than it is visionary.  Do you have stock options that your employees benefit from as the organization grows?  Do you have a promote from within policy that helps add career-pathing to your list of positive attributes?  Do you share profits with the employees that are actually touching your customers?

Does your company do something exciting?  Maybe, maybe not, right?  I firmly believe that every company does something truly exciting, even in the most boring industries.  If your company does not have something it does better than everyone else – if your company doesn’t have a single true differentiator, then why does it even exist.  However, many companies do not do a good job of communicating what is so interesting about their company throughout the entire organization.  Ask yourself, can every employee of mine answer the question: why do your clients/customers pick you?

Are your offices where they should be?  Another way of phrasing this is to ask how much competition do you have for your workforce?  If your goal is to create jobs that are valued, you need to figure out who else wants to hire your employees and what they would need to do to get your employees to leave.  With modern technology, remote offices and work-from-home are real options that can be considered as a way to ensure that you’re not just another potential paycheck that your worker will give up for $X+1 down the street.

Building a Growth Plan for Your CS Team

When talking to newer companies, the typical approach to customer service is reactionary.  X number of contacts come in, ABC is the strategy used to take those calls.  While this is effective (at first), it circumvents the kind of proactive thinking that can ensure that, in periods of rapid growth, change, or other disruptors, there is a common strategy to revert to when making decisions.

Simply put, the plan in your head is great.  But when your responsibilities and your customer service group grow, it won’t always be you making the decisions.  That’s why I recommend designing a plan that answers the following questions, and is focused on building a simple, easy-to-use access strategy for your customers.

Define your customers:  Do you have different customer segments?  Is there a paid group vs. a free user base?  Do you sell to both end users and resellers?  Do you have different product lines that need different levels of support?  By profiling your different segments of customer, you can figure out what channels of support to make available to whom, make staffing estimates, and understand what metrics you should be measuring for which calls.

Define your interactions:  Determine what channels of support you are going to offer.  This is important formalize – as smaller teams grow and become more specialized, understanding who touches what can eliminate a lot of confusion.  Common channels are phone, email, web chat, social media, and online content moderation.  You should also take this opportunity to parse out sales vs. service, retention, and other categories.

Hours of Operation:  It sounds simple, but define this early on.  It has a huge impact on staffing, especially if you eventually decide to offer 24/7 support.

Service Level: Too many companies wait until they are completely swamped to set service level goals.  As this ties directly into staffing levels, it is difficult to make a business case for your department if you fail to include one of the most important metrics.  For phone, does the common standard of 80/60 (80% of calls answered in 60 seconds or less) work for you or is something like an 90/30 or 80/30 more appropriate based on the categories of customers your decided on above.  For email, service levels are typically more relaxed, often anywhere from 2-8 hours for first response.

Routing and Cross-Training:  Often your first few CS agents are cross-trained on all your contacts.  Is that an effective strategy if you make it to 100?  Figure out what skill sets go well together early on and you will benefit from higher SLA adherence and CSAT down the road.  Commonly phone and chat agents will be cross-trained on email, which helps increase utilization by giving them work that can be done at a lower service level in between more demanding contacts, but you need to figure out what makes sense for your business.

Hiring Profile: What does your perfect agent look like?  If you don’t have one now, building a defined profile makes it easier for your team to continue to grow itself, even once your past the point of handling the interviewing and job offers for every single employee.

Technology Requirements: What information do you absolutely need to be able to gather and access on each contact?  What technology needs to be available for agents to get to the contacts?  By building out this profile, you will have established guidelines for any future expansions on your CRM, ACD, order management tool, as well as associated pieces of hardware that are essential to the success of your department.

Change Management:  How often do you analyze and assess your results and who takes part in that process?  Especially as you grow, it can be easy to let this assessment fall by the wayside.  However, by creating a formal processes for steady slow adjustment, you can often avoid major course corrections that can come along down the road.

–

The Hiring Profile For Your First CS Rep

Technology is trainable.  Culture is not.  That’s a philosophy that has helped us build out strong, effective support programs for a number of well-known hardware, software, and platform companies.  Rather than looking for gadget-heads, software junkies, or experienced technologists to seed your support team, find people that you would make a perfect customer.  Narrow it down to those who are good listeners, empathetic, analytical, and sociable and figure out how to take those people and get them 110% up to speed on your systems, policies, and procedures.  If you can cultivate the perfect CS desk, it will look and feel like customers helping customers. Your first full time CS rep is a big hire.  Their role is an odd one, part advocate for the customer, part face of the company.  Part listener and trend-spotter, part advice giver and recommendation engine.  Below you’ll find a job description that you can customize to your own business.  Use it when as you grow, especially when your customer service workload starts shifting from “all hands on deck” to a specialized wing of the business. Oh, one last thing.  Add “while adhering to (insert your company name here)’s values” to the end of each bullet point.  If you don’t find someone who has a cultural fit with the vision of your organization now, when you need this person to step up and train additional reps, build out your desk, or otherwise contribute to the growth of the organization, you’ll have to fight the current the entire rest of the way.

Job Responsibilities

• Promptly answers customer contacts over the phone, through live chat and/or via email while providing high quality service

• Greets every caller with a friendly tone

• Follows all required protocol for the account

• Performs thorough troubleshooting for the customer’s situation

• Sets accurate expectations with the customer before ending the contact

• Quickly completes all required follow up after the contact

• Thoroughly and accurately documents the details of each contact (repair orders, trouble tickets, office messages, etc.)

• Maintains a high level of professionalism throughout the contact

• Consistently and accurately tracks worked time by using the automated time keeping system

• Adheres to posted schedule (including scheduled meal/rest breaks)

• Attends weekly meetings to discuss current project status, quality and upcoming events

• Proactively communicates new ideas and wins to the Supervisor

Skill Requirements

• Strong verbal and written communication

• Strong organizational skills

• Strong knowledge of PC navigation and troubleshooting

• Experience with Mac preferred

• Strong knowledge of Internet connectivity and troubleshooting

• Basic knowledge of word processing and spreadsheet programs

• Familiar with basic home networking

• Ability to multi-task

• Ability to type at least 35 WPM

• Ability to learn advanced technical concepts

• Ability to follow direction without close supervision

• Ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment

• Ability to work individually and as a team

• Strong attendance habits

• Flexibility with scheduling

Good luck as you build out your desk! Taylor

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Measuring Your Call Center Costs

Entire books have been written on the process of budgeting, implementing, measuring, and adjusting large call centers based on cost.  However, I haven’t been able to find a guide that helps start-ups, entrepreneurs, or other smaller entities discover their true cost of support in a scenario where expenditures cannot be easily amortized.

What you will discover as you grow is that the customer support function of any business resembles a snowball.  What starts with the founders is continued by your first rep, and suddenly requires support from IT, Human Resources, and the addition of new management function.  Software and hardware purchases enter the equation and quickly the value of people versed in things like Erlang, NPS, and Asterisk skyrocket.

This guide is meant to help growth-stage companies better measure not only their current costs, but also to see what lies potentially right around the corner:

Labor: This includes the hourly wage that you are paying the employee as well as any applicable taxes the company is responsible for.

Benefits: Include in your calculation the employer share of any healthcare benefits, profit sharing, and other perks, which can include things as simple as company-paid lunches and dinners (common in the tech space) to more lavish items like retreats.  Also included in the line items are peripheral benefits, like personal internet usage (which can be a huge bandwidth suck for larger organizations).

Management: An often overlooked item, especially in smaller companies, this is a line item that will bite you if not accounted for early on.  Early-stage customer support organizations often draw on spare bandwidth of existing resources for initial support functions (taking escalations, training support agents, providing real-time assistance on issues, etc.).  That does not mean that it cannot be measured.  Ask yourself what the responsibilities would be if you hired someone today whose sole job was to manage CS.  The answer will probably not fill their day, but you can get a rough idea of how much time that would take up.  You should then calculate that cost based on the people who are filling in that responsibility now (how much did you’re lead engineer or CEO make while discussing a password reset for a beta customer?), but another acceptable way is to calculate it based on the going rate for a CS manager or director.

Attrition: I have really bad news.  Your customer support people will not be with your forever.  In fact, unless you take initiatives to minimize attrition (a focus of mine and a subject for a later blog post), the larger your desk and your company grow, the shorter your average CS agent tenure will be.  In order to accurately calculate the cost impact attrition will have on your business, you need to understand the moving pieces.  Take a look at the HR cost associated with finding a new representative.  Look at it like you would a marketing expense – how much does it cost to get enough interviewees in the doors to find someone worthy of talking with your customers on a daily basis?  How much time does it take your manager / HR to go from accepting applications to training to sitting on the floor taking contacts?  Do you do background checks? Most importantly, what is the cost of the decrease in productivity you see from new representatives versus tenured ones?  It’s common sense that someone who has been doing their job for a while is going to be more efficient.  What might surprise you is that we find that a fully tenured agent (one who has been with you at least 2-3 years) often is going to accomplish more than twice as work as someone with a tenure of 3-6 months.

Real Estate / Office Space:  What is your cost per square foot per year and how much space does this take up?  Even if you’re using existing space now, as you grow, you will eventually be faced with the decision to add more space for other employees or relocate CS.

IT / Equipment : Cost of employee workstations, as a yearly recurring amount (they do need to be upgraded and replaced periodically, after all).  Add in utilities and telecom including PBX and handset costs while you’re in this section.

Software: Cost per seat of CRM tool should be easy enough – this section also can include dialers, chat software, an email client, and any database system your agents need to integrate with.

Odds are, it’s going to be challenging to add these all together without historical data.  At the end of the year, mature call centers are able to look back and break this down to two important metrics, cost per call and cost per agent hour.  Using those past numbers, they can budget for future needs based on forecasts.  Without a strong track record of info to go to, however, the important takeaway is to be prepared for these costs to rear their head.

If you keep these in mind, you can avoid reaching your peak season of business, just to realize your HR team doesn’t have the bandwidth to onboard the necessary staff, you didn’t account for 2 of your team members to leave for another position, or you’ve run out of space at the HQ.

Taylor

 

How to Start a Customer Service Team (from scratch)

So you’ve sold some product.  Well, you’ve sold a lot of product.  Now people have questions.  Where’s my order?  How do I make it work? It’s broken – how do I replace it?  Now, you see the value in a good customer experience – in fact you feel it’s going to be a big reason you’re going to bring it to the competition.  You know it’s time to hire some people to help you handle this volume.  Here’s how to start.

Open email as a channel first

Here’s a nasty fact about call centers.  You always have either too many people for how much volume is coming in or too much volume for how many people you have staffed.  You will be able to handle more contacts with fewer people at less cost (a savings you can pass along to your customer or invest in growth) if you are able to spread customer contacts out throughout the day.  If one fully time CS person can handle 50 contacts per day, they will not be able to handle 50 phone calls, as those calls will come in randomly and inevitably stack up so you get 3, 4, or more at a time.  These people will wait on hold and will view this as you going back on your promise to support them by phone (the one you make when you list a customer service phone number).  You can still engage customers through phone without publishing a line – it’s as easy as responding to an email with a request for their number.  The best customer service comes from having the right people in the right place at the right time with the right tools.  When you are small, this is going to mean not being caught off-guard by a rush of calls mid-day.  Set up an email address and a ticketing system first, which we’ll cover next.

Set up a CRM tool

Thank your lucky stars it’s 2014, this part is going to be pretty easy.  There are a lot of low-cost options out there, including FreshDesk, ZenDesk, and Desk.com, which are all customizable ticketing solutions with a pay-per-seat pricing model.  These will allow you to manage customer tickets, recognize trends, and will lay the foundation for what your CS desk may grow into.  Oh, here’s the other benefit of not launching phone right away – no expensive telephony solutions.  All you have to do is talk to a few companies with 20 or so customer support folks to realize that finding a quality vendor at a reasonable price can be a total time-suck.

Build a knowledge base and training NOW

One of the biggest challenges I see with growing companies is when they grow to the point that they need a formalized training program and haven’t even started to think about building one.  At the very least, build out that searchable wiki (a function of most CRM tools) and keep a robust list of FAQs and common procedures that you can use to get someone new up to speed in a short time, if needed.  Also, determine what gets escalated to whom.  Maybe on day 1 you can have your customer-facing team call out escalations verbally, but as volume grows, this can result in unnecessary work disruptions.  Know where credit card questions, usage feedback, and order questions need to go and write it down.

Don’t overreach

I’ve already written a post about not lying to your customers.  This falls right in line with that concept.  If you promise 24/7 support you will be answering your cell phone in the middle of the night.  You can (theoretically) cover 5 8-hour days with one CS rep.  You can (theoretically) cover 5 12-hour days with 2.  To simply cover 24/7 you need at least 5 and that’s a stretch.  Make promises you can deliver on.  Kickstarter campaigns get away with murder by communicating clearly to their backers why they are behind on their targets.  This is a similar concept.  If you say you will respond to emails in 24 hours and can manage 4, that is great!  Don’t get cocky and shorten your timelines until you have the funds to back it with personnel or a strong track record of meeting that SLA.

Actually deliver quality customer service

Customer service is not measured by average handle time (AHT) average speed of answer (ASA) or number of tickets answered per day.  Short handle times might increase how quickly you get to new tickets/calls, but might result in customers reaching out again because their issue wasn’t completely solved.  If you’re just increasing your total volume, maybe you should be focusing on first call resolution (FCR), instead.  There are a few great ways to measure the impact of your customer service team.  My favorite is NPS (Net Promoter Score), which is a popular model rigth now that measures not just whether or not your customers had a good experience, but if they will recommend you, creating a cheap stream of new customers.