2012 Call Center Demo & Conference Re-cap

I attended the 2012 Call Center Demo & Conference last week in Dallas, Texas. If you are like me, you find it hard to keep track of all the brilliant ideas, inspiring speakers, and helpful contacts you come across at a conference like this. And, it's sometimes just too difficult to choose between going to one session or another! 

With this in mind, I put together a re-cap of some of the conference highlights. 

Conference Overview
If you didn't attend, you may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference:

• Twitter Backchannel: #ccdemo12
• Conference Schedule
• Speakers Overview and Bios

Day 1 Site Tours
Day 1 of the conference featured site tours to several call centers in the Dallas area. (See tour schedule.) This was a travel day for me, so I missed out, but participants were definitely abuzz about their experiences. The tour of the NOVO 1 call center generated a lot of conversation in particular:

• @chammarb: NOVO 1's customer doll, Laura Adams, reminds the team that the customer is always front & center. pic.twitter.com/Yu72CtNp
• @justinmrobbins: Having a "way cool" tour of the NOVO1 call center! pic.twitter.com/At8OooLo
• @PaulJRoberts: attended day one with site tour of Novo 1. Good learning event!

Day 2 Keynote: Ann Tardy
Ann Tardy opened Day 2 with an inspiring keynote, Rousing the Remarkable: The Secret To Unleashing Moxie in a Mediocre World. Ann's credentials:

• Author: LifeMoxie! Ambition on a Mission
• Founder & President: LifeMoxie Mentoring

There were plenty of quotes from Ann's presentation on Twitter:

• @MartaKelsey: "To influence your team members you must understand them and how they tick"
• @sstealey: "People love to make a difference! Leaders are key to influencing their success." Ann Tardy is giving us those keys!
• @bobfurniss: "Give people permission to fail. Fear of failure is a barrier to success but a powerful opportunity to learn."
• @hawgbald: "Reject "lookism"... making assumptions about people by their appearance."
• @chammarb: Ann Tardy tells us, "Declare a battle cry." What's YOUR battle cry?

Day 3 Keynote: Garrison Wynn
Garrison Wynn kicked off Day 3 with a humorous and energetic keynote, Mastering the Art of Influence. Garrison's credentials:

• Author: The Real Truth about Success: What the Top 1% Do Differently, Why They Won't Tell You, and How You Can Do It Anyway!
• Keynote Speaker: GarrisonWynn.com

Once again, Twitter made it easy to collect inspiring and helpful quotes from Garrison's presentation:

• @DanielDougherty: "Trust is built on 2 things: compassion and competence."
• @justinmrobbins: "The #1 thing that people value is feeling valued."
• @hawgbald: "The leading cause of stress is knowing exactly what you need to be doing and doing something else."

Day 3: The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture
I facilitated a session on day three that discussed ways to build a customer-focused culture in your call center. The participants were wonderfully involved and energized, making it a fun session for me. Here are some resources from the session in case you missed it:

• Presentation: The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture
• Handout: The Journey to a Customer-focused Culture
• Resource: Sign-up for free Customer Service Tip of the Week emails
• Bonus Video (same topic, but filmed at a different event):
  • The Power of Goals
  • Good Goals vs. Bad Goals

More Learning
Going to a conference (or missing out on one) can sometimes generate a strong desire to keep learning about a particular topic. Here's another opportunity to gain more knowledge:

Webinar: Three Hidden Causes of Call Center Service Failures
Date & Time: Wednesday, November 7; 10am - 11am Pacific (1pm - 2pm Eastern)
Cost: Free thanks to our sponsor, Voiance Language Services

Click here to register

If you attended the conference, what was your biggest take-away?

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Jeff Toister is the author of Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It. The book is scheduled to be released on November 1.

You can learn more about the book at www.servicefailurebook.com or pre-order a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell's Books.

3 Strategies to Keep Your Incentives from Backfiring

Note: This post original appeared on August 28, 2012 as an article on the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) website. I'm reposting it in honor of my upcoming session at ICMI's 2012 Call Center Demo & Conference. While it focuses on call centers, I believe the lessons are universal.

Call center managers often turn to a variety of incentives and rewards to encourage good performance. Examples include games with prizes awarded to the winning teams, cash bonuses paid to reps who meet certain performance targets, or gift cards given to recognize a special achievement such as a perfect QA score. Before implementing a similar program in your call center, you may want to examine evidence that suggests incentives and rewards can actually cause poor performance if used incorrectly.

Here are three examples of problems that can be caused by incentives or rewards, and the strategies to help keep them in check:

1. Problem: Reduced Motivation
Psychologist Edward Deci conducted an experiment in 1971 where subjects were asked to solve various puzzles with a set of blocks called a Soma cube. Participants were given some free time between activities and Deci noticed that many people continued to practice solving the puzzles on their own. When Deci announced a cash prize for each puzzle completed, participants spent even more of their free time practicing. However, when Deci stopped offering the reward, participants correspondingly stopped spending their free time working on the puzzles.

The lesson from Deci’s experiment is that an external incentive can reduce internal motivation. Let’s say you introduce a contest where agent can earn a gift card for meeting their schedule adherence goal for the week. Chances are you’ll see schedule adherence go up over the next week as people try to earn the prize.

But what about the following week when the contest is over? Schedule adherence will probably get worse, perhaps even sinking below pre-contest levels. You can keep running the same contest each week, but those gift cards can start getting expensive.

Strategy: Ask for employee input. Rather than holding a contest to promote better schedule adherence, engage employees in honest and open dialogue to identify obstacles that prevent them from doing better. You’ll likely gain new ideas for improving schedule adherence while earning your employees’ commitment to implement the solutions they helped create.

2. Problem: Diverted Attention
Another side effect of using incentives is they can divert your agents’ attention away from the desired performance. Perhaps your call center offers employees a cash bonus if they achieve the target score on a customer satisfaction survey. Your goal may be improving customer satisfaction, but the incentive will focus employees on earning good survey scores.

It’s a small, but important difference. Employees may offer happy customers extra encouragement to complete a post-call survey but not mention the survey to upset customers. They may try to blame problems on other employees or departments so unhappy customers will still give them high individual marks. They might even be too quick to transfer difficult calls to other departments to avoid a negative survey score. All of these actions can skew the survey results while helping employees earn their bonus.

Strategy: Enroll employees in a collective cause. Rather than incentivizing survey scores, set a team goal for customer satisfaction. Share survey results in team meetings and one-on-one discussions and solicit employee ideas for improving results. Asking for employees to contribute to a team effort creates a powerful connection to internal motivation.

3. Problem: Unethical Behavior
Incentives can also lead to bad behavior if the reward far outweighs the risk. For example, a software company might hold a contest with its technical support team to see who can close the most trouble tickets within the time specified in their service level agreement (SLA). If the prize for winning the contest is valuable enough, reps may be motivated to close tickets before the problem is fully resolved. This tactic may result in meeting the SLA, but it will also undoubtedly frustrate many customers and cause a spike in trouble tickets.

Strategy: Recognize, rather than incentivize, great performance. In his best-selling book, Drive, author Daniel Pink demonstrates that rewards can be more effective when they are unexpectedly given after the performance occurs. Rather than holding a contest to see who can close trouble tickets the fastest, you can periodically recognize reps for going above and beyond the call of duty to fix a problem for a customer. This sends the message that their contributions are valued without diverting their attention away from their job.

Conclusion
Studies have consistently shown that managers believe employees are much more motivated by external incentives than is actually the case. As you can see from the above examples, tapping into your employees’ own internal motivation is often a better way to improve performance.

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Jeff Toister is the author of Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It. The book is scheduled to be released on November 1.

You can learn more about the book atwww.servicefailurebook.com or pre-order a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell's Books.

What to do if your copy of "Service Failure" is a service failure

A limited number of copies of my new book, Service Failure, were shipped out this week, well in advance of the planned November 1 launch date. Unfortunately, some of the books in the initial run had a problem with the binding that causes some of the pages to fall out. The problem has been corrected, but a few people who pre-ordered the book may receive a copy within the next few days that has this binding issue.

I assure you this is not a guerilla marketing stunt!

Embarassingly, my parents first noticed the pages falling out. I was tempted to accuse them of being overzealous in exploring my new book, but then remembered the iceberg theory and went looking for more examples of the same problem. Sure enough, other books had the same issue.

Fortunately, it will be very easy to get a replacement book if you do receiving one with a binding problem. 

1. Call 800-250-5308 and speak with someone in customer service at AMACOM, the book's publisher.
2. You'll be asked a few questions such as your name, address, and where you bought the book.
3. A replacement copy will be shipped out to you.

I've also been assured that the binding problem has been corrected, new books are being printed, and we're on track for a release around the original November 1 date. You can still pre-order your copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, or visit the Service Failure website to learn more about the book.

Etiquette tips for airline passengers

I've been on the road a lot lately, which means a lot of time spent in airplanes. In a moment of deep reflection, prompted by the passenger next to me spilling over into my seat, the passenger in front of me putting his fingers on the back of his headrest (too near my face), and the passenger behind me resting his open newspaper on the top of my head, I realized why I'm often so grumpy at the end of my flight. 

There are many times when other passengers are literarlly assaulting our senses.

Something has to be done! 

I asked some of my friends to share some etiquette tips for airline passengers to follow. Thanks to John, Sally, Sardek, Grace, Nicole, Katherine, Amber, Paul, Michelle, Judy, Adriana, and David for sending me such a fantastic list!

Sight

• Sweatpants - even the "fancy" ones are not appropriate attire. Especially because everyone knows you slept in them the night before and rolled out of bed to catch the flight.
• Please cover up your really jacked up feet. It ruins peoples' appetite and is just all around uncool.

Smell

• Bathe (sometime) before flying.
• Bringing aboard stinky food is not very polite.
• If your kid needs a diaper change then change it!!! No one wants to smell your kids crap the whole flight.
• Don't take your shoes off if you feet smell.

Sound

• Our team had a conversation about this exact topic just this morning. Top of list - loud mouths on phone. And, with internet now available on some flights, voice over calls while in flight. Keep conversation to people next to you, not the entire cabin.
• No arguing with co-passengers; in your party or not.
• If someone is sitting with their eyes closed like their trying to sleep, don't talk to them. 
• If someone is wearing earphones then they are trying to tune out the world. Please don't tap them on the arm so you can share your story.

Touch

• Keep your elbows INSIDE your seat boundaries. (And knees. Please.)
• Keep carry-on stuff under the seat in front of you, not in front of the person sitting next to you.
• If your hips are wide, please don't bump the heads of people who are sitting in the aisle seats with your wide bottom.
• Along those same lines, when boarding, don't bump your wide bottom, carry-on, small child or anything else you might be carrying on the heads of each passenger as you go down the aisle -- some of those big purses hurt.
• The person in the middle seat gets the arm rest! Just because the person is small does not mean you should wedge them in and take all arm rest space so they can't move.
• Store your carry on above YOUR seat only, don't use up someone else's space because you carried on more than you should have.
• (Don't bring) your entire bedding set with you. I don't want to touch your dirty pillowcase from your king sized pillow.

Taste

I didn't get any responses for this category. That's a good thing.

What etiquette tips would you add to the list?

The hidden dark side of good service

I recently traveled overseas and had to get a loaner phone from Verizon since my iPhone 4 wouldn't work in the UK or Ireland. If Verizon had sent me a net promoter-style customer satisfaction survey about their Global Traveler Program (they didn't), I'd probably give it a 7. You can get an overview of Net Promoter scoring on the Net Promoter System website, but a 7 is a relatively neutral score.

It may be tempting to classify my service experience as good, but not great. However, my slightly positive overall perception of Verizon's Global Traveler Program is really a rough average of elements that were truly fantastic as well as some frustrating service failures that greatly diminished my enthusiasm. In other words, Verizon was one step away from either turning me into an enthusiastic promoter or an angry detractor.

What is Good Service?

Customer service is a function of each individual customer's expectations and experience. Outstanding service happens when experience exceeds expectations while poor service is the result of experience falling short of expectations.

What happens most often? Good service. This is when the experience meets expectations. There's nothing wrong with good service per se, but it isn't memorable. We only tend to notice, and remember, service that's outside the norm.

A Collection of Experiences

My perception of Verizon's Global Traveler Program was really a collection of experiences. There were at least seven distinct moments of truth that shaped my overall impression. 

My overall impression of Verizon's Global Traveler Program wasn't just impacted by the average of each moment of truth, but by their sequence.

Starting Perception. This signifies where a customer's perceptions are at the start of the experience. Good, or neutral, impressions are relatively easy to sway but strong perceptions are not. That's because a phenomenon called confirmation bias causes customers to selectively filter out information that doesn't match their existing beliefs. If they're a raving fan, they'll look for evidence that Verizon is awesome. If they hate Verizon, they'll look for any little nitpick to justify their feelings.

Primacy. My first two experiences with the Global Traveler Program were outstanding. Since my starting position was neutral, I was easily moved into a 9 or 10 positon on a 10-point scale. It's also important to note that first impressions are much more memorable than what happens next.

Mid-point. The two frustrating experiences were sandwiched between neutral or positive experiences. This, combined with an outstanding first impression, likely prevented my perception from being in the 4 or 5 range.

Recency. My last moment of truth was good since it was relatively easy to return the phone. Customers tend to remember their first impression and their last impression, so a good beginning and end can help overcome a few negative experiences in between.

What can we learn?

I see a few take-aways here:

1. Good service can hide distinct opportunities to be either great or terrible.
2. Companies should fall all over themselves to make a great first and last impression.
3. It's a good idea to collect data to help you spot the strong and weak points in your service delivery system.

What other lessons can companies learn from this experience?

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Jeff Toister is the author of Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It. The book is scheduled to be released on November 1. You can learn more about the book at www.servicefailurebook.com or pre-order a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell's Books.