Customer service is as easy as baking a cake
Step into the kitchen and follow this recipe for great customer service from your chef, Ellis Turley, of Western Provident Assocation
ONE of the most overused phrases uttered by mediocre managers across the land is We believe in excellent customer service.
What I would call real customer service is not a simple platitude but a way of life and something that is deeply ingrained into a corporate culture. Here, I’ll give you a taste.
There is always room for improvement, but at least the beginnings of real customer service rather than some management speak which usually means quite the opposite.
Good
quality ingredients To bake the best c u s t o m e r service cake you need
to start with good i n g r e d i e n t s : people. If you have the faintest
doubt, don’t hire. Get p e r s o n a l l y involved in the r e c r u i t m e n t
process. Do not delegate this to anyone, especially professional HR people! I
look for only three things, attitude, attitude and attitude. Smart people with
attitude will ensure you have a fresh cake, full of life.
Measure the ingredients, but don’t be afraid to add your own personal twist Tear up the scripts! So often, managers seek to over control and use the false corsets of scripts to make up for poorly trained people. Instead, try something radical: train your people to think for themselves. If they make a mistake, back them up and explain where they have gone wrong. This doesn’t mean that you must accept sloppiness or laziness, quite the opposite; you will find the good people are inspired by the freedom, the less good will leave for a call centre down the road. The challenge is getting people to take ownership which is best achieved by helping them to understand all aspects of your organisations functions; enabling them to make better decisions.
Halve the cake mix and increase the filling Pay your people double and halve their number. This works well with the previous ingredient to cause something extraordinary to happen. You get people that are free to think and well remunerated – they won’t leave and turnover rates fall to virtually zero.
Mix with a good kitchen blender Technology, technology, technology. Take away the boring jobs and let electrons and silicon deal with it. So often, the reality of being a call centre worker is doing the 21st Century equivalent of packing biscuits into boxes. No, no and again no! In my business, health insurance, there is an enormous amount of data inputting and paper shuffling all of which gets in way of good customer service. Use technology, automate wherever you can, outsource – whatever you do make sure it leaves your people with only one job - focusing on their next customer call.
Bake slowly to avoid burning Measure outputs not inputs. It is oh so easy to measure how many calls a member of staff may take in a day, far harder to measure their outcome. Another way of putting this is to measure effectiveness NOT efficiency. An efficient call centre will handle hundreds of calls a day, an effective call centre may take far fewer calls but the outcomes will actually answer the customers needs and in time reduce the call volumes.
And, the Icing Lead don’t manage! If you are not prepared to do the job yourself, roll up your sleeves and get on with it in a crisis, then change your job. Simple question, but how many managers of 100-strong operations know the names of all of their people? OK, I hear the yells of protest now, the excuses and best intentions. Learn the names of your people, know what’s going on (the gossip) and be human. And never, never, never ask a personal question (how was your weekend) if you’re not going to actively stick around and listen to the answer. Ring any bells?
Profile
Ellis Turley is general manager, major corporate division, at Western Provident Association (WPA), a not for profit health insurance company. He has worked for WPA for more than 20 years and is now responsible for the delivery of first class real customer service to some of the largest companies in the UK.