if people care, they matter. treat them that way.
My instinct is that this is a generational thing, but I rarely think of phones when I think of outreach, interaction, etc. Phones, to me, inherently mean sloppy, delayed, and often impersonal, when used in connection with products, services or brands. However, I just read something on Seth Godin's Blog that got me thinking:
Shouldn't every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn't there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn't you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn't you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn't there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?
This more or less dovetails a lot of what I was saying when I wrote about social media relations. A phone is a tool like anything else, but my own little fishbowl skews towards the digital, I often forget that this is a simple thing that can be done better. I feel like the entire industry does, too.
One of my core tenets is that information is precious, and it should be held on to for the good of everyone, on either side of the transaction. If you leave it on the table, whether through less-than-stellar CSR service on the phone, or by ignoring online communities, I immediately wonder how seriously you take your customers.
People who care enough to pick up the phone are the same as people who care enough to contribute to an online community. They keep the lights on at your company, because people who care are people who pay. Keeping them happy isn't always cheap, but it is almost always worth it. Learning from them is priceless.
Why do we assume that interacting with the people who care is something that belongs at the bottom of the ladder, when interacting directly with corporate clients, and keeping them happy would never be outsourced, or left to the inexperienced.?
1 comment:
Oh Jon. So many flaws with this position.
1) There are way, way too many people that call in because they have problems. It's too many for even the CSRs to handle, much less a manager.
2) Because of this, engaging deeply on each of these people means that you just don't talk to at all some of the others. This is referred to as "Poor Customer Service".
3) Often the problems are trivial or non-interesting from a business standpoint.
4) Even if they are interesting, it's difficult to get everyday joes to explain in a useful way what the problem is, you need to pry it out of their brains in a Freudian manner.
5) For most companies, this is not worth doing. Especially if you were, say, a large telecom that only operated in a single country with a small population and wide surface area. And you have a monopoly on the type of network you use, so customers that want to use cell phones of a certain type have no choice but to go to you.
You know, just for instance.
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