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Help Your Workforce Become Ambassadors for Your Brand

Episode 89

As you likely know by now, I’ve been focusing on customer service for the past several weeks and interviewing my fellow Smart Customer Service conference speakers. Today, I would like to give you my personal takes on customer service. In this episode, I briefly discuss three of the most important aspects to keep in mind while building a customer support team and then I go in depth about the main component that often gets overlooked when working on these three things.

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!  So over the last couple of months, we have been really focusing in on customer service here at the Voice of Influence podcast.  And the reason why we’ve been doing that is that I’m going to be speaking at Smart Customer Service, which is a national conference for customer service in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st. So, I’ve taken this opportunity to connect with other speakers at this event and invite them to participate in interviews for the Voice of Influence podcast for a couple of different reasons.  First of all, to share customer service insights from some of the nation’s leading experts then also to be able to connect with them personally.  I wanted to kind of get to know some of the people that I’d be speaking with and then also to promote the conference.

Well, today, I want to share with you a little bit more about what my take is on customer service.  So, I think that we all know that service isn’t all about the other person.  It’s about connecting with them, helping them solving their problems, making sure that they’re having a good experience with your brand, with your company or with your organization.  You’re wanting to be there for the people that you’re here to serve.  That’s what customer service is really all about. But there are a number of things that can get in the way of really doing it well.  And some of those things have been already talked about in the last couple of months. 

One of those things is branding and brand voice and making sure that customer service agents really know what to say, how to say it, and how to really communicate in a way that is in line with the company or the brand.  So that the person who is calling or the person who is interacting with that customer service agent that they would always have a similar experience and that they would feel like they are really connecting with the brand when they’re connecting with that person.  That’s one really important thing.

Another thing would be the idea of essential skills or the ability to communicate well, the ability to empathize, and the ability to write well utilizing those centralized documents or branding elements and bringing that into how they communicate.  So communication is really another big piece of it. 

And there’s always the issue of “Well, how do you keep people?  How do you keep customer service agents?  It’s a kinda hard job.” If you think about it, there are people who are listening to complaints almost all day long.  Now, there are some benefits, I mean, one of the things that you do all day long is solve problems for people, and so in that sense, there is something that can really be satisfying about customer service. But in general, it can be a really kind of a difficult job.  You’re always putting yourself out there to help out, but you might not always be able to be the one to make the difference.  You might not always be able to solve the problem, and you might not always know what the next thing to do or where to send people.  Or you might be dealing with somebody who’s really upset and they’re not necessarily mad at you, but you’re the one that sort of taking on the brands of all of the anger and frustrations of the person you might be speaking with. So, customer service agents also have to deal with that. 

It’s a rough job; I mean it’s not easy to really do and to do it well.  And so it’s difficult to keep people in those positions.  So companies are always looking for ways to encourage people and to keep them.  And one of those ways can be rewards and recognition, giving a raise, or keeping track of how well they’re doing on things.  So, these are all really, really important aspects of doing customer service and having a customer service team and training them well to be able to handle all these situations and all these needs, and to know how to handle all of the technical things as well. But I fear that we can miss out on something if we just do those things.  If we are giving them everything that they need but they’re not still staying, you know.  Maybe they’re still leaving.  They’re still not sticking around.  The numbers aren’t as high as you want them to be or your customers are still coming back with a lot of complaints.  Customer satisfaction still isn’t where you want it to be. Maybe you’re hitting the status quo and it’s working out okay for you, but you know that there’s another level.  Like you know you could take it to the next level, but you’re not just sure how to do it because you’ve been working on all these different things like centralization of information and rewarding your people and doing all these things that you can to give them the skills that they need to be able to do what they need to do their jobs.

But I tell you, there’s something that is missing and that’s something gets down to the core of a person.  And it hits on a human need that is so, so vital for us to connect with and that is helping your people to truly connect and genuinely connect with your company’s purpose and your customer’s need. So, when I think of customer service and all of the issues that are surrounding it, the struggles, the solutions, the main thing that I keep saying not being present, at least not to the degree that I think it could be is helping the workforce to truly connect with the company’s purpose, with the company’s values, their mission, or their vision to feel like they’re really a part of it.  So that when they come to work every day, they feel like they have meaning, that their work has meaning and purpose.  So they’re not just going to work but they’re going to meet a challenge, to bring the best of who they are to the challenges in front of them.

And my guess is that it if you’re listening to this episode, this podcast; you are probably the kind of person who really does want to see that happen for your people.  You want them to feel purpose-driven.  You want them to have a sense of passion inside of them and care about what their job is.  You want them to have meaning and to feel like that their work matters in the world.

So on the podcast, I frequently ask guests “Why did you start getting interested in your specific area of expertise?”  “Why do you do what you do?” 

Well, let me answer that question for you.  So, Voice of Influence is born out of my background in actually singing.  When I was young, as a child, my family would sing together.  We would go around to different churches in our small community and put on these little programs and I would sing solos and my sister and I would sing duets, and our family would sing all together.  And we had this just little thing going on where we would sing a lot and I sang a lot growing up, and that was kind of what I wanted to do when I grew up.

When I was in high school, I ended up choosing a college that was a big music school, and I was really excited to be able to use my voice.  And the reason why I was excited to use my voice is that I knew that when I got up in front of an audience that they would be moved by what I would sing, and I knew it because I’ve done it over and over again.  I just knew how to connect to the meaning of the song and then invite other people into that experience so that they could connect to the meaning of the song as well.  So that they would feel moved.

Well, one of my college professors, she taught me something about my voice.  You see, voice is something that is really kind of personal.  It’s different than playing the piano or playing a different instrument, because a different instrument, it could go out of tune on its own.  You know a key could break or something could need oiled and that’s something that’s apart from the person who is performing. But a voice, on the other hand, this comes from your own body.  It’s something that arises out of you.  There is a certain natural ability that people have with their voice.  They are able to sing high or low.  They are able to have a certain kind of tone or hear the pitch so that they can make sure that they’re on key.  All of these things are very, very personal because they come out of the person themselves.

And so when I was in college, I had a voice teacher who was sort of different than the ones I’d had before.  Instead of just welcoming me into her room and starting our scales and then working on our technical details that came up within songs that I was practicing, she would start off by asking me how I was doing. 

Now, why would she waste time at the beginning of every lesson to say, “How are you doing?” I asked her this one time and her response was something to the effect that “If people come into my office and they’re all worried about something else that’s going on, they’re not going to be able to use their voice freely.”  And I thought that was so profound. 

I see that and I see how people use their figurative voice, their voice of influence, the one that comes out of themselves in order to be able to have an impact on others. And this voice that wants to make a difference, this voice that wants to help, that wants to serve well, this voice is just as personal as the one that I was using to sing.  It’s personal.  There’s a vulnerability to using it and to practicing it.  It can make a huge difference in somebody’s confidence level and their ability to really use it well.

So at Voice of Influence, we believe that everyone has the ability to have a voice of influence, that every voice is unique.  That we’re born with the ability to do certain things and we’re born with the passion to do certain things but then we can also gain skills.  We can get better in other areas as well. 

We believe that every voice matters on a human level that every voice in your company matters and every voice that calls into your call center or works with your customer service team, that every one of those voices matters. But at the same time, we can do things to make them matter more.  We can grow.  We can become more of a voice of influence, not by forcing technique, not by saying, “We have to push it out.”  “We’re trying to get people to do things.”  “We’re trying to force our customer service team to say it this certain way or to drop people in and not to be forceful but to be influential, because it’s not only our voice that matter, it’s also the voice of the customer that matters as well.”

So if you’re wanting your customer service team to be an influence, to build their influence with your customers, then they need to know what it means to have a voice of influence.  They need to be able to have a sense of their own personal identity and connect to the purpose of your company and really know what it means to be a voice of influence.

Do they need that knowledge?  Do they need to be able to know what it is that your company does and how to help your customers and what their job is?  Of course, they need that. 

Do they need skills to learn how to communicate and to be able to handle the processes and the people well?  Of course they do, but they also need to be able to connect to the purpose of your company. 

They need to be able to awaken their passion and feel like they can be a genuine ambassador of sorts for your company.  You don’t want your people to pretend that they care.  You want them to actually care and that’s what your customers want as well. And if your people, if your workforce actually cares and they really do feel connected to the company, then they are going to be able to connect more naturally, more freely with your customers.  And then soon your brand promise and your scripts, your centralized documents; those are going to become part of your customer service agents.  Instead of having them be an external tool that they use, that they’re trying to put on for your customers, they’re going to become those things so that they truly embody the brand promise.  The things that you really care about as a company, they’ll embody that and be able to be a true ambassador for your customers.

Now, one of the questions that always comes up is, well, if we know that this is what we need to do, if we know that it’s important to build culture, to do a good job of communicating our purpose and our values to our workforce, then why aren’t we doing it?  Or why aren’t we studying the companies that do it really well that they’ve had success? 

One of the answers that I’ve heard and I’ve heard it a number of times is that the executives feel like that’s beneath them.  It’s beneath them intellectually to go down to that personal level and help their people to really connect with their company. But I don’t think that’s the only thing. 

I think it might be to serve this level thing that you might see in some companies, but I think that more often than not leaders wanted to help their people do this.  They see it.  They see that it’s a good thing.  They can acknowledge that at least in their heads.  But deep down, they really don’t think that they have what it takes to pull it off. 

Leaders struggle to think that they can actually help their people and really turn around the culture this idea of connecting.  It may not be something that they’re good at, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t willing to go there.  It’s just that it’s so scary because it’s not familiar.

But let me tell you something.  If you have any desire, whatsoever, to really almost empower your workforce, to help them to embody your brand, your brand promise, to help them really become ambassadors for your company; if you long for that, if you want them to feel purpose and meaning in their work, that is all it takes to start the process.  If you start out with that longing then I’m here to tell you that you can do it. 

You do have what it takes. You may also need to develop skills.  You may need to gain a sense of your own personal identity and your own personal sense of purpose.  But if this isn’t purposeful, if it isn’t meaningful to help your people find meaning in their work to connect with your company in a deep meaningful way, then what it is?  It starts with the longing and then if you really don’t feel like you have what it takes, if you’re not sure what next steps to take, then that’s something that we can help you with.

As I mentioned, I will be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference here in Washington, DC in about a week.  And in that talk, I’m going to be talking specifically about what your people need in their training in order to be able to truly connect with your company and your company’s purpose.  I’m also going to be talking about how to get buy-in, executive buy-in, as well as buy-in from managers and frontline service agents in order to make this kind of transformation.

If you’re able to be at my session, I would love to have you there.  Please tell me that you listened to this podcast, I’ll have a special gift for you.  If you’re not able to be there, then email me at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net.  That’s andrea@voiceofinfluence.net.  We will find a way to share that information with you because just like the people who work for you, your voice matters, and you can make it matter more.

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Customer Relationship Management with Bob Fernekees

Episode 88

Over the past several weeks I’ve been speaking with other presenters who’ll be joining me at the Smart Customer Service conference in Washington D.C. starting on April 29th. Well, today I have a very special treat for you because I was fortunate enough to speak with the leader of the conference, Bob Fernekees. Bob is also the Publisher of CRM Magazine. In this episode, Bob discusses what led him to the customer service industry and why it means so much to him, the work he does at CRM Magazine, how the Smart Customer Service brand came to be, the changes and trends he’s noticing in the customer service field, his thoughts on A.I. and how it will impact the landscape of customer service and brand management, the details of his upcoming Smart Customer Service conference, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Alright folks, so you know that the last couple of months we have been focusing in on customer service, in particular, in leading up to the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1st.  And today I have with me Bob Fernekees who is the publisher of CRM Magazine and is in charge of this conference.

 

Andrea:  So Bob, we’re honored to have you with us today.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  I’d love being here, Andrea.  I love it!

Andrea:  Alright, so Bob, can you tell us, first of all, tell us a little bit about CRM Magazine and what you do there?

Bob Fernekees:  OK.  Well, I’m the publisher of the magazine and I understand that a lot of people may not know where the magazine is these days.  But it was the chief form of communication, especially in B2B 20 years ago.  We launched the magazine in 1998 actually as sales and field force automation.  Around 2000, we saw that things were changing and we changed the name of the magazine to CRM Magazine.

Sales and field force automation is still a thing, believe me, but CRM has grown well beyond the scope of just sales and marketing customer service.  But I’d say in the last 20 years, the big change has been that the customer service piece has really become huge.  And that’s reflected in the pages of the magazine or website Destination CRM.

And we actually started a second website, Smart Customer Service to support not only the conference, but really to give customer service people a dedicated place where they could get information.  Not much marketing automation or sales type of information, it’s 100 percent customer service focused.  So, we’re still going strong 21 years later, so it’s been an exciting ride and things have changed so much but I’m sure you know that as well, Andrea.  Things have changed, you know, unbelievably in the last 20 years in technology.

Andrea:  Oh, certainly.  So what are some of the biggest changes that you’re seeing now?  

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, it’s funny because every single year, there’s almost a theme of new technologies that are sort of bursting on the scene and really become just all over the place in terms of media coverage and messaging from vendors and things that people are concerned about.  This year, definitely I would have to say artificial intelligence and machine learning is sort of the big buzz.

As with most technologies that especially really large, you know, large life-changing technologies, it will take many years for these technologies sort of work themselves through the system.  And probably in 20 years from now, they’ll kind of dropout of sight almost like when, the turn of the 2000’s cloud computing was a huge change in technology.

It couldn’t even be thought of before that because, you know, in the 1990s, late 1990s, most people were still using dial up.  You just didn’t have the bandwidth or the infrastructure to support real cloud computing.  But now it would be really odd if you heard, end users or vendors touting their ability to kept cloud computing.  It just becomes everywhere and that’s probably what’s going to happen to a large degree with the artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know, in a decade or two. 

Andrea:  So it’ll be so normal that we won’t even talk about it anymore.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely.  I guarantee that that will happen.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And there are many, many different cases of that, but you know, just think cell phones, just think anything. And yeah that’s the way it’ll go but it’ll take a while.  

Andrea:  So do you think that AI will replace customer service to a certain degree or completely?  Or do you think that there’s always going to be a role for human to human connection in customer service?

Bob Fernekees:  Well that’s a really good question and we’ve done lots of webcasts and lots of content around this.  And I could tell you for the foreseeable future, AI, machine learning, you know, all the technology portions of it will do pretty much more of the same which is what the technology does great.  It takes low value interactions and automates them.  So that nobody really wants to talk to a human being, especially if they want to do something that’s fairly simple.

And that will just become, you know, web self-service on steroids where the AI or the machine learning portion of it will just make that so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient voice, which was a big thing 20 years ago is coming back around with all the conversational technologies and natural language, you know, conversion.  So that people will be interacting instead of using a keyboard, especially since everybody is on their cell phones right now, a voice will become huge.

And so all of that self-service that can be conducted through AI or machine learning will be done, but there will always be humans on the other side, especially for high value or really complex or just the out-of-the-ordinary types of questions and issues.  Now, from what I understand is that, that will really make the life of your typical contact center agent a lot more interesting just because they won’t constantly be asking, “How do I reset my password?”  “How do I do this?”  “How do I do that?”  They’ll just be dealing more or less on more interesting, less repetitive types of service issues.

Andrea:   High value, as you said.  Interesting.  I just had a question in my mind, just a second.  So how do you see AI helping being almost like a brand asset more than even just as a quick answer to solve a problem?  Is there a way the AI is or can be even encouraging the brand connection with the customer or is it mostly going to be just “This is the way we do it.  We get it done fast and that’s what we’re offering you here in this moment.”  Is there any kind of way to connect with the brand anymore with AI?

Bob Fernekees:  You know what, I think that really forward-looking business leaders right now are looking at that piece of it, AI and brand, really hard because you know as the old song goes, it’s really, you know, a lot more…well, put it this way, selling on price the old way doesn’t really create value for a brand because everybody can sell at a lower rate up to a given point.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm.

Bob Fernekees  But when you’re using AI, and that’s the other great thing about the industry and the technology piece that we’re in right now, Andrea, is that it’s not customer service and marketing have blended together, customer service and sales have blended together.  So in many ways, there won’t really be those kinds of delineations.  Yeah, there’ll be outreach demand generation and those types of things but building a brand that will be done through sort of a mixing or melding of all three.  So when you’ve got AI into the mix and, you know, machine learning, you’ll really have brand managers trying to capture the essence of what their brand is to a prospect or a customer.

Now, it’s really hard to see when we’re talking about consumer product goods.  I don’t know enough about consumer product goods, I’ll say it right now, but to build a brand around, you know let’s say laundry detergent is really hard for me personally to conceptualize.  To build a brand around mountain climbing equipment, that seems a lot easier because, you know, immediately you can say that, you know, “Hey, delivering high quality content, or somebody climbing El Capitan is something that could really enhance your brand.”  I’m sure you can do that on a laundry detergent side too, but it’s just a lot easier when you think of a brand that’s much more extreme.

So yeah, I think, you know, AI will definitely allow all those things and it’ll be able to do trillions of computations to say that Andrea Wenburg would really enjoy receiving this communication from us and here’s what we think will be her next action and, you know, all those things that you can’t really do right now.  And it’s probably very hard for a lot of people to conceptualize these things right now just because no one else has.  But we’re headed into that territory where there will be lots and lots of clever users that no one has thought of before.  I mean, just think of Facebook.

Andrea:  Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Bob Fernekees:  I mean, you know, everybody knew it’s a great idea just because there was social media before that, but to this extent, probably not literally changing democracy.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  Well, and I was even thinking about Facebook algorithms and how the other day I purchased a Growth Mindset workbook for my kids, OK.  And then the next day on both Instagram and Facebook, I’m seeing ads about another workbook by that same company that’s on resilience now.

Bob Fernekees: Right.

Andrea:  It’s a lot like what you’re talking about in terms of being able to predict what the next step would be for the customer.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely, absolutely. Now, I think the way that most companies, and believe me it’s getting way, way, way more complex, especially up to maybe two years ago, I think most companies did that type of ad serving, you know, in a very heavy-handed flatfooted type of way.  So that if you bought a Ford car and signed the deal last month for the next six months, you’d be seeing ads for Ford cars and it’s like “Ohh, I already bought one and I don’t know why I kept seeing this now.”

Now, you know, that’s just a technology in its infancy.  But, you know, now whether or not they predicted the needs of your children to get these workbooks, probably not, but they definitely predicted your likelihood of buying another workbook on a similar but different topic in serving you that ad.  And that’ll just get way more, way more creepy.

Andrea:  You know that’s an interesting way to put it, because I do think that people feel a little like creeped out by things like that.

Bob Fernekees:  Sure.

Andrea:  Yeah, they probably should.  But at the same time, it sounds like we’re going to be not creeped out by that in 20 years is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Well, yeah.  Like I said, I mean, you know, there’s an episode of The Office where Dwight is trying to sell his car to Andy and he keeps saying, “Buy this car, buy this car, buy this car.”  And that’s kind of what we’re getting right now in terms of the immaturity of technology right now.  So, yes, it does sound, you know, it is heavy-handed and not real subtle.  But, you know, possibly in the future there will be targeted offers for things that you really need, didn’t know about but could really use that ad value to your life other than just buying the exact same workbook with a slightly different content.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And, you know, in all the ramifications like how I could figure out how old these kids are and what they’re doing, you know, going along through every grade that they go into from now until they get out of school.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, that’s interesting.  I’m trying to think of what the subtle way of doing that would be, but it would be something less obvious is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Something less obvious but also could be completely, you know, obvious or it could be something like “Hey, you know, you bought a car and that one component of it, you know, that 100900 was bad and it could fail.” Well, you know, that’s just a recall issue but you kind of get what I’m trying to say that there could be some things that are like a lot more helpful to you and of value to you.

Andrea:  You were talking about forward-thinking companies and it sounds like they really do have to be forward thinking.  They really do have to be able to map out the customer experience and journey and what could possibly happen and all those sorts of things, so lots of innovation and forward thinking, like you’re talking about.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, I think one of the things that probably astounds people that aren’t, you know, sort of sitting in our seats where we get to see lots of different vendors and lots of different applications and end users.  So you’ve got a really broad view of things.  That’s an inch deep, but you do have a broad view of the customer service market.

And one of the things that really surprises me all the time is how much real thought, real effort, and real research goes into customer journey mapping and all of the different sort of strategic people process type, definitely the technology too.  But, you know, just sort of encapsulating the whole thing, obviously, you can’t just plunk technology and you really need a strong idea of how you want your customer to progress and all of those other things that go along with great technology, but it’s amazing to me.  And I’ve met such intelligent people that have really devoted a lot of serious research and I’m sure you have as well. That’s the part that is really encouraging to me.

And the other thing, having done this for quite a while and just seeing things progress, is how far people’s expectations have come.  I mean, it’s hard to believe that we used to do things the way we used to do.  It was the best you could do at the time.  But I think 10 years from now, we’ll be looking back on 2019 as a stone age, as how did we ever deal with having to dial a phone or, you know, just the simple things.  So it’s really encouraging and there are a lot of really smart people that have put a lot of time and effort into figuring that out.

Andrea:  So Bob, what drives you in this industry?  Like why did you get involved in the first place and what kind of, I don’t know kind of excites you about it or feels like it’s a purposeful for you?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, OK that’s a fair question.  Basically, I was involved in the professional broadcast video film industry on the publishing side.  I worked for CBS, but I also worked for magazines, you know, magazines that dealt with professional B2B broadcast video and film production.  So, you know, I kind of did that.  Me and another salesman actually split the cost of some sales force automation software.  I got really interested in at that point.

And around 1998, I guess it was, I heard of a magazine that was starting up.  I really liked the idea of it because that just, for whatever reason that’s what I did.  I felt like it was going to be a really interesting area to go into.  Like I said, the sales automation part of it really was eclipsed very quickly by much larger customer service aspects.

Marketing automation, people don’t really probably remember this, but really marketing automation, didn’t really start to take off until after 2010 in my opinion or maybe even a little bit earlier than that.  But you know, it’s relatively new, which is a really exciting piece of it as well but, it’s relatively new.  But that’s kind of how I got interested in CRM.  It was through Sales Force Automation which was the first iteration.

And when we launched the magazine, it did extremely well.  We changed the magazine to a name CRM Magazine.  At that point in time, I think there was only one analyst that was using “customer relationship management” as an acronym, so we kind of see where things are going. And for the last 20 years or so, it’s just been really exciting because there’s different  that kind of die out and the river changes course, and it’s just really an interesting way to just watch for patterns and see what’s coming up.

You know, we’ve jumped into technologies or different facets which haven’t exactly panned out.  Mostly things don’t pan out and then they come back in five years or so when there were more possible to do.  Like I said, when I started off cloud computing, I mean, there were people trying to do cloud computing in the late ‘90s and it was virtually impossible because they still tried it.  People still bought solutions, but trying to do cloud computing on dial up connections was, you know, hard.

Andrea:  Yes.  I’ve heard that sometimes it’s better to be the second one on the scene after the first person is kind of, yeah, yeah.  OK, so let’s talk a little bit more about the conference.  So what are the different aspects of the conference or the tracks and tell us a little bit more about it.

Bob Fernekees: Sure.  OK, so first of all, we’ve got the conference coming up April 28th through May 1st, Washington, DC.  It’s actually work distinct conferences co-located together.  So it’s a total of about eight tracks.  Now, you know, if you had a Venn diagram sort of the piece in the middle would be customer experience.  We’ve got speech tech.  Speech technologies are used in all sorts of things, conversational interfaces for one. We’ve got some great keynote speakers, which we’ll talk more about that.

But speech tech, huge with contact center, huge in many other different ways.  We’ve got CRM Evolution.  Brent Leary is the chair.  That’s three tracks.  We’ll be covering the breadth of CRM technologies and people and processes as well.  Geoff Ables is doing smart customer service.  Actually, it’s the first year that Brent is doing CRM alone, and Geoff will be doing smart customer service.  That looks like it’s going to be really exciting, super successful, and it’s a great place if you want to come and meet people.

As I was mentioning to you before, we’ve also got a digital experience as well, which is a newcomer.  That’s the fourth conference as well.  But just, you know, to stick with the customer service portion of it, the thing that we’ve done differently with, especially CRM Evolution Smart Customer Service, is that although we have speakers that are aspirational CMO’s of very large companies. We also got people that you actually read on our websites and in our magazine.

So lots of analysts, lots of well-known authors, industry gurus, thought leaders, and you know, you can put a name to the face.  It’s a conference where it’s very easy to talk to these people.  It’s not a large conference where, you know, the session ends and you can’t get near the speaker.  So if it’s a really good place to get out, meet people, and especially meet some of your peers and do some networking on the peer side as well.

Andrea:  Great!  OK, so who would you say it’s for just any company that’s dealing with these particular issues, or is there any more of specificity to the target audience?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, that’s a great question.  We do everything in a broad way.  So we’re like horizontal.  It doesn’t really matter to us if somebody is in financial services versus government applications.  For us, especially for Smart Customer Service, 90 percent of the people that go to the conference are involved in customer service probably at the manager or the director level, really depends on the size of the company.  If we had a VP from Zappos, they’d probably be speaking not in the audience but there could be a VP from a smaller company and that’s kind of how those things go.

But, you know, it’s great for all sorts of call center or customer service or people that are dealing with customer experience.  And like I said, there’s so much research and information out there to go to the conference and to be able to ask the speaker, “Hey, you know, I’m seeing some conflicting information,” or “Here’s my company, here’s our situation.”  And to get some positive feedback with an expert because a lot of the speakers are consultants, analysts, people that seen a wide variety of different types of end users and also have an in depth knowledge of a wide variety of industry solutions and technologies.

So, it’s a great place to come and ask those types of questions.  In today’s day and age, you know, a lot of people don’t like to pick up the phone.  But I still think that, you know, getting face to face and making connections with people is just a great way to go beyond, you know, remove the digital wall and make a human connection and there’s so many different ways things can go from there.

Andrea:  I can definitely attest to the personability or the way that the speakers are ready to connect and help out.  Because having interviewed more than a handful of them, I know that they all really care and they’re sincere and they are smart.  And I just really enjoyed connecting with them personally and so I know that your attendees are going to really appreciate being able to connect with the speakers as well.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah.  You know, as we were talking before, you know, one of the things that I really liked about this industry is the type of people and professionals that, you know, have made this career.  I definitely like working with people like this and just having them enhanced my life and definitely enhanced my professional life as well.

Andrea:  OK, Bob, so anybody that’s listening, if you’re on the fence, it’s time to sign up because it’s right around the corner here now.  And, Bob, if they can’t make it or even if they do make it, what kind of offerings does CRM have?  Do you have a magazine?  Tell us a little bit more about how they can connect with CRM Magazine and your other offerings.

Bob Fernekees:  OK, so, just right off the bat because I may not have mentioned this is that if you googled CRM magazine, you’d find our site.  Our site is actually called destinationCRM.  So you can go there, you can sign up for the magazine.  It’s free to anybody that’s qualified.  If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure you must be qualified unless you have a strange taste in podcast.  So just go there, sign up for the magazine, either site destinationCRM or smartcustomerservice.

You can sign up for any of our newsletters, any of our webcast.  By the way, we do webcasts once a week on different topics.  You’ll be notified if you sign up for one of our newsletters or promotions of what we’ve got coming up.  People really love those. We’ve been doing them for 20 years back in 1998 when there was no broadband and we were trying to do them live from a TV station through camera shoot when there was no broadband.  So that was an interesting thing.

So yeah, we’ve had some troubles with getting a little bit ahead of the technology.  But, you know, we’ve got that.  We got tons of white papers and we will have a bunch of the content on video that you can watch after the conference is over.  Most of it will be edited down.  So you’re getting more of a flavor or maybe some of the major bullet points, but I think we will have some long format video as well.  So there’ll be those opportunities, but there’s nothing like sitting in the audience of, you know, I’m thoroughly convinced.

Andrea:  Yes, I agree.  And you know what, if you happen to be there on April 30th, I’ll be speaking at 1:45 about transforming your call center from a customer service model into a customer’s ascension model for profit and purpose.  So I would love to see you there too.

So, Bob, thank you so much for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast and for providing this fantastic conference and connecting people to all these really important solutions around customer relationship management.  And we’ll be sure to link everything that you talked about in the show notes on our website.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  Thanks so much, Andrea.  It was fun being here and I just think you’re doing a great job.  It’s pleasure meeting you.  I can’t wait to meet you at the conference in person.

Andrea:  Great! See you then.

 

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Are Your Analytics Helpful or Are They Noise? with Robert Lamb

Episode 87

Robert Lamb is a customer interaction expert with thirty years of experience. He specializes in transformational strategies for virtualized omnichannel customer contact. He has multiple technical certifications for designing, implementing, integrating, and developing applications for various technologies. Robert has consulted for over 400 customers and designed architectures implemented for over 150 clients. He’s also a published author, an in-demand speaker, and a frequent blogger on customer contact. In this episode, Robert explains how he got involved with this field, what he means when he says he “makes the complex simple” and helps businesses do the best for them and their customers, how his work specifically applies to call centers, the other contact options a company can utilize besides a typical call center, the things a business needs to consider when evaluating feedback and analytics for their customer interactions, his tips for businesses that are looking to have their customer service representatives be their ear to the ground when it comes to customer feedback, and more!Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Robert Lamb Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg
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Counterintuitive Ways to Overcome Service Obstacles with Jeff Toister

Episode 86

Jeff Toister has written three customer service books; including his new book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. Jeff has been recognized as a top customer service thought-leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and COM100. More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning (a.k.a. Lynda.com). His training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture. In this episode, Jeff discusses his new book, how he got into the customer service field, why he firmly believes providing great customer service isn’t just a matter of using common sense, why customer service leaders shouldn’t be dismissive of angry customers, how customers sabotage the service they receive, a breakdown of the “Zone of Hospitality,” and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

86 Jeff Toister Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! 

So, if you’ve been listening to episodes in the last few weeks, you know that we are talking to experts in the area of customer service, in particular, because I’ll be speaking at Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1st.  And we’re speaking with some of those other presenters for the conference and today is definitely going to be a treat.  If you want to know more about the Smart Customer Service Conference, you can go to voiceofinfluence.net where we will have links to that conference there.

Today, I have with me Jeff Toister.  Jeff Toister has written three customer service books, including his book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service that just came out a week ago from this airing of this podcast.  He has been recognized as a top customer service thought leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and Comm100.  More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning Lynda.com and Jeff’s training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture.

Andrea:  Jeff, it’s great to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jeff Toister:  Oh, Andrea, thank you so much for having me and I have to commend you, it’s fantastic that you’re doing these podcast sessions in the lead up to the Smart Customer Service Conference.  So I’m really looking forward to see you in person at the conference but, of course, I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Andrea:  Yeah.  This has been really fun.  It’s been fun to connect with people and I think that what’s interesting is that everybody has a little bit different perspective and a little bit different of expertise to bring to the table and that’s always exciting to really hear that.  And I know that you just came out with your book; can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Jeff Toister:  Sure.  Well, it’s called Getting Service Right as you said, and the promise behind that is just that all of us have experienced poor customer service and if you were customer service leadership, you’ve seen your employees deliver poor service.  And most of the time their reaction is “It’s so obvious what they should have done, I can’t believe they didn’t do it the right way.” And what the book tackles are hidden, counterintuitive, sometimes unusual obstacles that get in the way.  And they’re all based upon real experiences.  I’ve done the research so you don’t have to but then I’ve also found solutions that actually work.  And so it’s kind of a fun look at how hard it really is to serve customers but how we can learn to be much, much better.

Andrea:  What was the kind of the origin story of Jeff Toister?  Were you always interested in customer service?  What got you into this field?

Jeff Toister:  Little did I know that I would start this book or get interested in customer service or training, and really I have a background as a customer service trainer.  The very first customer I’ve ever served, my very first job, it was a service failure and has spurred me forward. 

So what happened was, I was working in a retail store.  I’m in high school, so I’m nervous.  I don’t have a lot of experience and the person who was supposed to be training be gave me about 15 minutes of orientation and said “Well, I’m going on break, here’s the key to the dressing room, good luck!” And I was terrified and so I’m secretly hoping no one comes and talks to me until she comes back from break.  But of course, you know, my worst fear is a customer who approaches me and he was definitely had this kind of tension, like he was looking for something and he needed help.  So he comes right up to me and says “Do you carry Dockers?” 

And I didn’t know and now you know and I know and I’m sure your listeners know, if you don’t know the answers to a question, go ask someone who does. But tell that to a 16-year-old kid who’s nervous and barely knows what he’s doing.  I couldn’t stop my mouth from saying what my brain was thinking, which is I don’t know.  That’s actually a skill to stop your mouth from saying everything what’s going on in your brain.  That’s a skill you learn overtime.  And at 16, I hadn’t learned that yet, so I said very nervously, “I don’t know,” and I didn’t get a second chance.  He got angry “Kids these days,” stormed out of the store. 

I remember feeling in that moment like an idiot.  I knew I said the wrong thing.  It was my inexperienced that didn’t prevent me from doing the right thing. And so I wanted to get better and never feel that way again but I also realized that it was certainly my fault.  I needed to take responsibility.  I was also not set up for success.  The person who should have been training me didn’t put me in a position where I could answer that question with confidence.  So that’s always fascinated me how can we set people up for success, and in particular, in the customer service world.

Andrea:  It makes a difference for the company but it makes a difference for that person too.  I’m sure that as a 16 year old, you were feeling like, who am I, what am I doing and that sort of thing when it came to that difficult conversation that ended up happening.

Jeff Toister:  Well, of course, and you know, most of us, I’m sure you had that new job feeling.  I think we’ve all had that feeling at once whether it goes well or it doesn’t go well.  You have a certain level of nervousness and then to have a failure almost immediately on top of that.  You know, failure can be a powerful learning experience but it can also be a signal to a lot of us that “I made a bad decision.  I don’t even know why I’m working here.”  And often that happens to employees.  They have such a horrible first experience at first introduction that you lose their commitment almost instantly when they start a job.

Andrea:  Absolutely.  Yeah and then it has ripple effects for sure.  So I’m curious why did you end up writing this particular book?  I know that you’ve written a couple of other ones as well.  What led you to this one in particular?

Jeff Toister:  I think it’s the notion that customer service is easy.  I’ve heard so many people, even leaders talk about it in terms of common sense.  I wanted to debunk that.  I’m very curious about kind of the why behind how people operate.  So I would see somebody, you know, do something and I’d wonder why they did it, you know, whether it was good or bad performance. 

And I started kind of digging into research and the more I dug, the more I found. So as an example, one thing that’s always frustrated me as a customer service trainer is how dismissive many leaders are about angry customers.  And they’ll tell an employee, “Just don’t take it personally.”  I never like that.  I didn’t think that was very helpful advice.  So the more I looked into it, the more I realized, you know, we all have this instinct called the fight or flight instinct where when we’re confronted with an angry person, our instinct is either to fight them, you know hopefully not physically, but we argue with them perhaps or flee.  And that’s the flight part, in other words, to get away.  Yet, in customer service, we’re saying, you can’t argue with them and you also can’t run away, you have to smile and take it.

So our instinct as a human being goes against the very fabric of what you’re supposed to do in customer service.  And when I realized that I said “That’s something, right?  We need to help employees deal with this.”  And then if you look at the leaders, I discovered really fascinating study that it’s easier for our customer service leader to delegate something unpleasant to an employee than it is for them to do it themselves.

In other words, that customer service leader who is dismissive and says, don’t take it personally, they’re probably insulating themselves from those same angry customers.  So it’s easy for them to give that flippant advice because they don’t have to worry about taking it personally.  And those types of things over and over I kept finding that there are ways around these repeated service failures, we just need to find them.  And ultimately, that all the research became a book.

Andrea:  So is there some sort of purpose then that’s driving you to solve these problems, to dig into these questions and these things that you’re saying?  Why do you care?  Why did you go into this?

Jeff Toister:  Well, I think at a basic level.  I don’t want anybody to feel like I felt when I was that 16 year old.  But what I’m fascinated by is really helping people and teams unlock their hidden potential.  And this is very similar, I think, to what you do.  So I would call myself a customer service trainer, it was really what I started doing.  But there’s so much more than formal training.  There’s often different obstacles that are in the way that have nothing to do with training.  And to me, it’s both fascinating to figure out what the obstacles are but then immensely rewarding to help an individual or to help a team figure out a way to overcome the obstacle.

And sometimes it’s surprising.  And an example, a small company years ago hired me to do customer service training because the CEO felt that employees were being rude.  So the natural solution they jumped to is, let’s do a class to teach to teach people to not be rude.  It turns out most of us know how to be polite.  It’s situational, so what’s causing the rudeness.  And I spent 15 minutes with the team and it’s not that I’m some sort of wizard, it’s just I asked questions where the leaders in that organization did not. And what I learned was that, at certain times of day, certain days of the week, they were under staffed and they would have people waiting on the phone for 30 minutes.  Well, that creates this kind of tension, right?  “I’m nervous about how many people are on hold so I naturally get abrupt with the person I’m talking to because I’m trying to get them off the phone.  I’m anticipating the next person is going to be angry at me for keeping them waiting.”  And so that was really the root cause.

And for this company, fortunately, the solution was pretty easy.  They just needed to change their schedule to better match demand.  Sometimes they had too few people, but other times they had too many people.  And so without adding staff, they just needed to redistribute their staff throughout their week to better match when those people were actually going to be calling.  And that small adjustment was enough to dramatically change the perception of rudeness with no training required.  And so to me that is so much fun, but the reward is this great performance where before those employees were pretty frustrated with their jobs.

Andrea:  Hmm, I love that because I’ve noticed that with individuals, with teams that sometimes you think that something is an internal problem like I have a problem, there’s something that I’m doing wrong.  There’s something that I don’t know psychologically that’s wrong or whatever.  But when it turns out, it’s a piece of overwhelm or stress that could so easily be taken care of with a slight tweak like you’re talking about.  That’s fantastic!

Jeff Toister:  I guess the only problem is I end up talking myself out of doing the training class, but that’s OK.  I’ve learned to accept that.  I’d rather have my client be successful than to sell them to the cookie-cutter solution.

Andrea:  Right.  I’m sure that the training would still be beneficial though.  You seem to be really connected to why things matter and motives and things like that.  Have you found that values play a pretty important role when making customer related business decisions?

Jeff Toister:  Values are tricky and I’ll tell you why.  You know, almost every company has set of values.  The most common value, there was a study, and I apologized because it’s at the top of my head and I can’t remember who did the study.  It’s a few years old, but they looked at the most common corporate values, and the number one value was integrity.  And what’s interesting about that is Enron listed integrity as one of its core values. 

And you may know the story and your listeners may know the story, it’s one of the hugest scandals involving fraud in the history of US. So there’s a huge disconnect between stated values in what we say are our corporate values and what are values actually are. 

Values are actually are agreed upon norms that influence your behavior and thinking and it’s great if they’re explicitly defined.  But what really tell us what the true values are are the behaviors and how people act, how people communicate, and how people treat each other. And so in a lot of our organizations, I mean every organization, has values.  The question is whether or not their actual values match what the value statements are on the company website.  And I’ll give you an example from my own client work. 

A mid-sized credit union hired me to work with them to understand how well their values that they communicated to the entire organization and how well people are living them. And it was a fascinating project because almost everybody in the organization could recite.  There were five core values.  They could all recite them.  So they’ve done a fantastic job of that.  Where they struggled was there was universal disagreement as to what behaviors constituted a values match.  And even on the executive team, they could not agree as to what living the values actually looked like and not to coincidentally one of their values was integrity.

Andrea:  Sorry, it took me just a second understanding what you meant by that.  That was pretty good.

Jeff Toister:  It’s alright.  It was an Enron call back, right?

Andrea:  Yes.

Jeff Toister:  Everybody’s got integrity as a value.  It doesn’t mean that your…

Andrea:  Right.  That was good.  Yeah, I think that there can be such a huge disconnect but when those things are connected, it does seem to make a difference.

Jeff Toister:  It’s huge because then you can explicitly say, this is how we operate and you can share that with your employees and then they’ll know exactly what behaviors are appropriate and rewarded and what behaviors are frowned upon.

Andrea:  So I’d like to get into your book a little bit if you don’t mind.  There are few different things that came up for me that I’d like to ask you about and one of those really stood out to me.  You say that customers can sabotage the service that they receive, what does that mean?

Jeff Toister:  I’ll start with the research.  I always like to start with the research.

Andrea:  Great!

Jeff Toister:  Two things; one is customer service expert named John Goodman who has done a lot of research on customer service data and the sources of service failure.  In his research uncovered that about 20 percent of service failures are caused by the employees, about 60 percent, this is a rough-cut, are caused by poor product service or processes, so out of the employees’ hands, and about 20 percent caused by customer errors. 

And some of those errors are accidental “I’m confused by the instructions.”  “I don’t know how to operate this product,” and some are delivered. There’s this air of certainty that customer sometimes possessed that they’re doing it right even when they’re doing it wrong, which leads to something else that’s fascinated me on this notion that we have that the customer is always right.  And I think a lot of people believe that. 

And I in fact, I want to do a research, who first said this?  Like I was kind of angry, I wanted to track them down and maybe send them like a box of glitters or something.  I’m just not happy with this person and come to find out no one first said it.  What has happened is over the years, we’ve taken quotes and there are several potential candidates for the origin, but we’ve taken quotes and twisted them to mean something different. An example, one possible origin is Cesar Ritz, you know, the Ritz Carlton Hotels.  He allegedly said, from the research I found, he said “The customer is never wrong.”  And the context of that is not that customers don’t make mistakes, they do.  It’s just that we don’t argue with customers.  We try to help them be right. 

You can imagine if we’re both on the same side that can work beautifully.  But if there’s an insistence on the customer point of view that “No matter what I’ve done, I’m right and you have to figure out how to fix it,” that’s doesn’t lead itself naturally to great service outcomes. And unfortunately a lot of customers have that attitude and that leads them to, you know, withhold key information or dig their heels in and refuse to follow a sensible solution, you know, get unreasonably angry. 

There’s even something I lovingly call “the rule of three,” which is customer psychologically will exaggerate how bad things are sometimes by a factor of three just to make it feel like it’s actually bad.  You know, if I waited five minutes, I’m not going to get any of my friends to cry with me about that.  But if I say, I waited 15 minutes, maybe.  Or you know if the person was stern with me that won’t engender sympathy, but if they cussed me out, uh, well that was terrible.  So customer will often exaggerate about how bad things are as well.

Andrea:  Really, why do you think that they do that?

Jeff Toister:  I think it goes back to the customer is always right.  If you created this construct that I am right, you are wrong, the psychological defenses come up and they start protecting our ego by doubling down on “No, it’s your fault and you have to fix it, I’m the customer.”

Andrea:  You know, that’s interesting and I’m going to take this to an interesting, a different place for just a second.  But I’m a part of an initiative where were working on bringing more positive communication about our community to social media in conversations and things like this.  And one of the things that we’re noticing is that there are a lot of people who do this, who kind of exaggerate in those small groups. 

You know, I’ve got a group around me and maybe I’m getting my hair done and I start talking and I start making a little bit of exaggeration and I start placing the blame on other folks.  It’s almost like customer service.  It’s almost like the people of a community even looking at their town as a company that they’re not being served by but in a sense almost, I’m having an a-ha moment so, you know, forgive me.  But it feels like kind of what you’re saying, does that sound similar to you?

Jeff Toister:  It does, and part of it is I think positive fuels better.  We’re naturally wired to be more heavily influenced by the negative.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Jeff Toister:  So in a service situation, companies often talk about wowing the customer.  What we should really work hard to do is avoid angering the customer which is equally challenging.  But the impact of a wow versus the impact of a service failure, that service failure is far more impactful because negative things stand out more.  That’s why we see more negative new stories. 

That’s why, you know, we hear more people complaining rather than saying, that was really good.  It’s just how we’re wired. And I’ve learned to stop feeling bad about us being human and just try to better understand it, like in a customer service context knowing that people are naturally wired to think about things in more of the negative.  I’ve spend more time there and I think companies spend more time trying to prevent things from failing. 

And the funny thing about that is you can be perceived as brilliant by your customers if you’re just consistently good.  You know, forget the wow stuff.  That’s really tough to do and you don’t get a chance to do it every day.  Just be consistently good, make what people’s lives a little bit easier and somehow that stands out from the crowd.

Andrea:  OK, what is the zone of hospitality?

Jeff Toister:  The zone of hospitality is kind of a mindset thinking that anybody around me and this generally works, I think more so in face-to-face situation, so retail, restaurant, hospital, etc.  Anybody around me, I’m creating a zone of hospitality and I’m going to make them feel welcome and try to help them.  This can be a challenge because of the way people are led, so let’s use a retail example.  In retail, a lot of associates on the retail sales floor have customer service responsibilities but they also have kind of task oriented responsibilities, like rearrange a display or fold all of those jeans.

Well, at the end of the day, it’s easier for the manager to be able tell if the display or the task was completed versus whether or not that employee was servicing customers at a very high level.  So the default usually coming from the leaders is to focus on the task first rather than service first.  And so zone of hospitality is just kind of a mindset that says, I’m going to create a zone of hospitality around me regardless of whether or not this person fits kind of my job or my department. 

I’m going to help them out. I worked with a client that was on a college campus and they had people in a variety of different roles and it just wasn’t their job say to help a student find a classroom.  But the zone of hospitality says, I see someone with that lost look on their face wandering through my area near to me.  As a human, I can tell they have a need and so I’m going to approach them in a friendly manner and offer them assistance.  So that mindset says, despite it not being the task oriented part of my job, I’m still creating this zone to make them feel welcome and find a way to help them.

Andrea:  Yes, zone is so important.  You talked also about viewing our roles from the customer’s perspective and that there’s sometimes a difference or a dissonance between the way that we see or what we see our job to be and what they see our job to be.  Is this similar to what you’re just talking about?  Does that coincide with that?

Jeff Toister:  It does.  I’d say it’s little parallel.  The example there is have you ever had computer problems where you needed to contact support or IT internally?

Andrea:  Of course.

Jeff Toister:  Well all have, right?  So think about it and that could be a perfect example.  When you’re having computer problems, your need is to get back to work, to do whatever it is that you were doing.  It’s very natural for the IT support person to view your need in terms of the language you use.  My computer is not working, so it just naturally, they’ll focus on the task fixing your computer and there becomes a disconnect because you really need to get back to work.  You don’t care how they do that, and they’re looking at the kind of more technical aspect of providing solutions.  But the most technical and easiest solution might not be the best way to get you back to work. And so that requires kind of reframing things from the customer’s point of view saying “Well, how do I get you back to work?” 

An example, I was once hosting a webinar and I needed support about 20 minutes before the webinar started and I kind of panicked and nervous because I have all these people, you know, it’s a client that’s paying me to host this webinar and now things aren’t working.  And I’ll never forget the technical support walked me through the problem, but she was also very sensitive to my anxiety because I explained what was happening.  And she did something I’ll never forget she said, “I’m gonna stay on the line with you until your webinar starts just to make sure everything is working properly.” Now, she was focused on a task. 

She would say, “Hey, it’s working, I’m onto the next thing.”  If her job was evaluated based upon efficiency, that would be exactly the behavior that she should have chosen.  But in that moment, I was lucky enough to have someone who’s realizing that the real need here was to give me some relief that my webinar was going to go off without a hitch.  And by staying with me just a little bit longer, I had so much more confidence and peace of mind.  Then if she had simply fixed the problem, I still would have been really nervous about it.

Andrea:  I love that.  Almost like a safety blanket.

Jeff Toister:  That’s very true.

Andrea:  That’s fantastic!  So do you think that there’s pretty clear line or is it kind of difficult for companies to decide when customer service should be more based on, you know, completing the task and efficiency versus being able to provide that extra level of emotional support as well that that you’re just talking about?

Jeff Toister:  This is where it gets a little counterintuitive for leaders if we look at how things are measured.  We use contact centers an example because there are so many things that are measured.  I know how long an agent spends on a phone call and I know how long they spend on their average call and I know how much that costs me.  That’s very tangible.  So the default, because it’s easy to measure that and I’m trying to be efficient and reduce costs, the default is to measure handle time or how many emails per hour you can respond or how many chats you can handle at one time and clear out in your shift.

The challenge with that, of course, is when you put someone on a clock like that; their natural inclination is to speed through things.  I had one agent say, “You know I get a lot of really angry customers but I only have six minutes to solve their problem.  I don’t have time to make them feel good.  I just have time to tell them what to do.”  It’s counterintuitive but if you were to focus agents on solving the issue completely and fully but efficiently and take the clock away from them so don’t put it in front of them. 

As a leader, may be you still measure but don’t put it in front of the agent. When I talked to companies who have done this, it was really interesting.  What happens is they spend just a little bit more time making sure that the person doesn’t have to call back.  And if you were to measure that when people call back, now that problem becomes a lot more expensive because they had to contact you twice, but that’s just harder to measure. The other thing that’s counterintuitive when you’ve taken the clock away from the agent and say, “Just focus on getting the customer through this as quickly as you can, but in a way that they’re delighted about.” 

The average time it takes to resolve a problem either remains the same or goes down slightly.  And I hope I’m not getting too much in the weeds here but what happens is when agents know that they’re on the clock, they’ll speed things up. But here’s the other thing that I think a lot of leaders don’t realize it’s when agents think that they have extra time, because it was a short problem, it was easier to solve, they slow things down.  So they work, always work towards the standard rather than just getting the customers through as efficiently and fully as they possibly can.

Andrea:  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.  Jeff, this has been a great, great conversation.  I hate to stop now but we need to because of time.  So can you tell us a little bit about your session?  I know that you’re presenting with someone at Smart Customer Service, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jeff Toister:   I am so lucky because I am presenting with my good friend but also the, in my opinion, customer service writing guru, Leslie O’Flahaven.  And our session is How to Write Like a Human in the Age of Speed.  So we’re combining our expertise.  I’ll share research I’ve done on people’s expectation for response time, particularly email, and how those expectations influences sometimes to make mistakes.  And Leslie is such a fantastic writing coach.  She is going to send us through some very interactive exercises on how to better understand our customers and write better but also faster.  So it’s going to be a very interactive session and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Andrea:  That’s great!  And if you the listeners are looking to hear my conversation with Leslie, it’s episode 81, How to Write with the Voice of your Brand.  So I’m glad that I was able to have this conversation with you and Leslie in different times and I look forward to connecting with you in D.C.

Jeff Toister:  It’s going to be a lot of fun and thanks for doing this.  This is such a cool idea.

Andrea:  Alright.

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How to Align a National Team with Tisa Sinclair

Episode 85

Tisa Sinclair’s work experience has given her the opportunity to engage in several areas of communications from public relations to social media and digital marketing.  She currently leads a D.C. based team that forges the ongoing social care strategies, processes, and official responses to members and nonmembers as they interact with AARP’s digital content. This program is a key feedback component to the AARP customer experience strategy.

In this episode, Tisa talks about her role at AARP, how having a clear company vision and a centralized communication hub for all branches of the company allows AARP to keep their communication and messaging consistent across the board, how they were able to get their employees and representatives in 53 different states to buy into their communication strategy, how customers usually provide feedback to AARP and what she’s found surprising in all the feedback, how having company values and purposes are valuable to the service teams, what it was like building loyalty and trust with their social media followers and customers, the three Experience Pillars AARP aligns their values and messaging with, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tisa Sinclair Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! If you’ve listened to the last few episodes here on the podcast, you know that we are interviewing people that are going to be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1st in 2019.   These folks are experts and leaders in the customer service arena and it’s fun to have them here.  It’s fun to learn more about them, to be able to hear a little bit about their personal experience, what motivates them, and their expertise.   So I’ll be a fellow speaker at the conference, so there’s some personal enjoyment for me in just being able to connect with folks ahead of time too.  But I think that what you’ll find is that in this conversation with Tisa, we’re going to really have the opportunity to hear from somebody who’s really in it right now and has had some major success at AARP.  

So, I’m just going to share with you a little bit more about her here in a second.  But if you’re interested in attending the Smart Customer Service Conference then go to the show notes at voiceofinfluene.net and we’ll have links there for you so that you can learn more about it and possibly see us there.  

Tisa Sinclair’s work experience has given her the opportunity to engage in several areas of communications from public relations to social media and digital marketing.  She currently leads a D.C. based team that forges the ongoing social care strategies, processes, and official responses to members and nonmembers as they interact with AARP’s digital content.   This program is a key feedback component to the AARP Customer Experience strategy.  I’m really looking forward to hearing more about this.

Andrea:  So, Tisa, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Tisa Sinclair:  Hi, thanks for having me.  I’m excited to be here!

Andrea:  So tell us a little bit more about your role at AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Sure.  I mean, you explain a bit in the intro, but I lead the social response, or more widely known as social care function, here in AARP.  As you know, or for those who don’t know, AARP is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations that’s really dedicated to empowering Americans who are 50 and older, especially when it comes to choosing how they live as they age.   My team oversees everything from response governance to customer analysis.  And like I said, this program is a key feedback to the overall customer experience strategy, especially since that team or that area is responsible for really defining and developing the strategy and tactics that’s necessary to enhance the overall consumer experience.  

So we engage with and assist members in need.  We proactively share resources.  We answer questions and offer guidance.  And we provide that response for home governance, customer experience feedback, brand perception analysis and just act as an overall escalation point for our sensitive issues and topics that’s encountered by our organization.  

Andrea:  You just said something that I don’t even know what you mean, so you said, you provide escalation for sensitive topics that are relevant to people in AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah.  So the way that the response function operates in AARP is that we have an internal, sort of in-house, escalation team, and then we work with a third party vendor that works with our more transactional sort of items.  So they focus on interaction such as member questions, how to join. Membership items for AARP take up more than half of our volume.  So it’s really important that we have a team that’s dedicated just to that area, and they will then escalate anything more complex or nuanced to the internal social response team.   But all teams that engage with our consumers, they do so we’re aligned with messaging.  We all work under one tool so we can centralize our operations, and this also alleviates us not to have to respond natively and in each channel, so ongoing centralization is really key.  Hopefully that answered your question.

Andrea: Yeah.  So it sounds like AARP has done a lot of work on coming up with what that central ideas, the central principles or messaging, the way that you message things that that is all centralized, then you work from that.  Is that kind of part of what you’re saying then?

Tisa Sinclair:  Yeah, definitely.  So we’re a relatively new team, I would say.  When it comes to centralization and consistency, that was one of the major key initiatives that we wanted to really improve our overall experience.  The addition of our new operation has really kind of widened the interaction channel choice for the 50+ community so we can be there to meet them where they are.  And once we were setup and established, we then focused on a lot of initiatives but the main one was definitely centralization and consistency.   So by kind of funneling all of our social channels into one tool to engage, we were then able to really ensure that all of our answers across properties were consistent and then all of our processes scale. 

In addition to that, we’re pretty unique because in addition to the social response team, my team, we also have 53 state offices who have their own social properties. So it was important that we coordinate with them so then they can properly be equipped, and we can all be aligned with responses.  And that includes building out like an internal communications hub to create that further drive, that consistency of centralization to help drive those state contacts and information that will align with our guidelines.

Andrea: Sure.  So it sounds like you have done an incredible amount of work, number one, to just identify what needs to be in that tool, what needs to be in the communications hub, but then also to be able to communicate it to everybody that’s all that up there in the frontlines.  Do you mind sharing with us a few of the things that are in the communications hub, in the centralized documents, or the things that are key components that you’re trying to make sure stay centralized and consistent?

Tisa Sinclair:  Oh sure.  We have sort of like a master document or guideline so the states can kind of make sure they have that resource there, just in case they want to kind of grab under various topics, under various issue areas.  It’s really important that we’re aligned on how we do certain things.  So you know, the how-to’s, what to hide, what to block, how to respond to certain messages regarding membership, how do we respond to trolls, or how do we respond to partisan comments.  We get those pretty often as well.  

We also wanted to make sure that we provide a quick access to certain tools that we use because some of their tools are different, which is fine.  But the whole point is to make sure that we’re centralized in the resources that we have and the messaging and the talking points because it’s really important that we’re aligned across the board.

Andrea:  Is there anything in particular that you have done that really has helped to make sure that everybody is onboard and everybody is able to understand these guidelines, understand how to use the things that are in your communications hub?

Tisa Sinclair: It was definitely a huge effort to kind of create this centralized space to drive those state contacts.  I first did a discovery phase.  This is where we kind of find out the states challenges so we can better accommodate them and develop just better solutions for consistency across the organization.  

And then the next phase was kind of figuring out how we can alleviate some of those pain-points from a social response perspective to then start building out that page, and it did include focus groups and surveys.  So I work with various team members for each of the states just to kind of figure out their pain-points, figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and then after that just kind of doing my little analysis to figure out how we can better serve them and how they can better, you know, help us as well.

Andrea:  And then was there some sort of training that was involved as well?

Tisa Sinclair:  Well, we haven’t done the training yet.

Andrea: Oh, OK, you still in the middle of it.

Tisa Sinclair: You know, we’re still in the thick of things.  We’re still trying to get that hub, that centralized space up.  But when that does happen, because we work on a separate engagement tool that we will have to roll out a distribution plan to eventually get those states trained on the tool that we use because it would make sense, right?  If we want to be centralized, if we want to aligned, if we want to be consistent, it would make sense to engage under the same umbrella and under the same tool.  So we definitely have plans to roll that plan out soon.

Andrea: That would be really hard.  I’m just in awe and admiring the work that you’re doing, but I’m wondering too how are you able to get buy-in from folks that have to make changes?  Is there anything in particular that’s kind of come up and you’re like “Oh, this is something we’ve had to address to get buy-in.”

Tisa Sinclair:  Yeah and no.  It actually wasn’t hard at all.  I think even just from up top, there was this need to be centralized.  You don’t want to look like an organization that’s saying different things from different areas.  So everyone was really excited where everyone was really onboard.  You know, people are always maybe apprehensive to change but once they realize that we’re moving in the right direction and these changes are only for the better, I think that it was a lot easier to really get that buy-in.  It’s really no easy feat, right?  We’re talking about 53 states, to train, to respond, to answer any questions.  But from what I’ve seen so far in the thick of things and my work, it’s been that with positive response.

Andrea:  That’s awesome!  Is there one thing that you think has made the difference in the success of your customer service team or this whole process in this initiative?

Tisa Sinclair:  I think that goes back to the centralization and consistency.  Like I said, having everything under one roof, being able to scale, because of that we were able to grow our social properties.  And as a result, we had really surprising and engaging conversations which then revealed really new ways to increase member engagement and loyalty, which is key, which is really, really important for our function. 

And as we continue to kind of wire in more of our social properties to even widen the amount of channels that we service, I think right now, we’re at over 25 channels and that includes social media.  We service article questions.  We have a very expansive community forum that’s extremely active and we try to help out there.  We even respond to app reviews.  Because of this, we will be able to see those deeper effects that we haven’t seen before in the space, like MPS and membership renewals and just membership lifetime value for our members.

Andrea: I can imagine that working in customer service to provide excellent service or excellent experience for your members probably comes with its own set of challenges in trying to know exactly what they need for their age group, for their demographic.  Is there anything in particular that you came across that surprised you?

Tisa Sinclair: Honestly, we get a lot of misconceptions about who or what AARP is.  I don’t know, I found that pretty surprising.  I always felt like it was a brand that people kind of automatically equated or related to an organization for the 50 plus community but a lot of people think we’re an insurance company.  They think we’re aligned with certain parties.  So it’s always interesting to hear people give their opinion on the type of organization that we are.  I think that that really surprised me the most.

Andrea: And when you say they’re giving their opinion, does that mean that comes out in conversations, in social media; where do you see this coming out?

Tisa Sinclair:  Definitely, even under our own media.  We do a certain post about something that we support an initiative or a campaign.  You know, people very freely voice their opinions, as we encourage, you know, we don’t sensor people within reason.  We encourage people to have dialogue among themselves and with us.  And through that dialogue, we’re able to kind of glean sentiment and how people feel not only towards AARP but just toward whatever issue that’s plaguing them at the time.  So it’s really great that we’re able to be there and step in and show our support and share resources, anything that we can to help our members and nonmembers.

Andrea:  I would imagine that that’s really helpful for creating the documents that you need or the talking points that you need to put in your centralized hub.

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah.  It’s really kind of cool to see the work that we do and how it can help shape the conversation and that helps us report on trending topics and adoptions and really encouraging and facilitating those conversations among our members.  It’s a great, great opportunity these comments to identify opportunities to probably convert brand detractors to brand loyalists, to watch for member prospect opportunities, or to reinforce the multidimensional value of AARP.  There are just so many ways that we can tap into our engagement and our comments in the community.

Andrea:  Have you found that values or having a personal purpose are important in the training and empowering of the service team?

Tisa Sinclair: Definitely. 

Andrea: I’d love to hear about it.

Tisa Sinclair: You know, I think that your values, they really help to define your brand.  It’s important that you clearly define your core values and then act in accordance with them.  You want to show that in everything that you do.  You want to celebrate that.  You want to tell employees and customers what they are and you know, we do have our own strategic pillars to help guide our goals and that’s to monitor, to console, and to engage.   We want to act as that real time beacon for AARP outside brand identity and reputation and we do.  We try to deliver our value though our advocacy.  We try to deliver our value through our information and of course we try to deliver that through our service.  So it’s really crucial that we provide things like training that helps kind of reinforce that culture and really help strengthen your workforce commitment to those values.  And you know, hopefully, that will help provide that direction towards your goal.

Andrea:  Sure, and do you personally feel connected to values or feel like you have a purpose in this?  I can imagine that you do.  You sound pretty connected, so I’m wondering what makes this personal for you.  Why do you care besides, you know, it’s your job?

Tisa Sinclair:  No, no.  I care because, well, A: I love what I do.  And you know what they say, people who fully know and understand your organization’s value, they’re more likely to describe themselves as fully engaged with their work compared to people who do not.  I think that shows in the work that I do.  It shows in the work that my team does.  You know, I like to feel like I’m a part of something that’s larger than myself.  And this feeling of commitment and belonging, it really helps bring out the best in myself and in my team and I see that every single day.

Andrea: Do you feel like you have that sense of purpose, that you’re making a difference for the older adults in the country or that sort of thing?  Is there also that kind of lofty kind of purpose that you have too?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah!  I mean, we do so much.  And it’s really important to me and to my team that we develop and focus on a really intimate, empathetic relationship with our members through these conversations that we have with them day in and day out.  It really helps build trust and positive sentiment because with this demographic, we’re starting to see that growth on social channels.  

There was sort of apprehension at first, but once they start seeing that people were there, in the trenches, answering their questions, servicing them, and meeting them where they are, I mentioned that before, we started to see that trust kind of slowly, kind of like peeling the layers. And because of that, we started to see that engagement grow, which to me is a testament of the work that we do.

Andrea: Do you think that that took a certain amount of time, I mean, how long did it take for the sort of positive sentiment, this trust to kind of start to really grow for AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah, it didn’t happen overnight, right?  It’s a slow process.  First of all, having that empathetic language is really key to a lot of our conversations, particularly when we converse around those sensitive topics.  So it’s really important that we make sure that we kind of ladder up to our pillars by expressing our values with empathy, honesty, and humanity.  You know, that is how we inspire that trust and it’s not something that happens overnight.   Like I said, we’re very young and scrappy team and we’re less than two years old.  And we’re just now starting to see that change, which is really exciting because we know that it can only grow and scale up from here.  

Andrea: I know that AI is kind of becoming more and more in the conversation about customer service and how we interact with people, are you finding that that is coming up for people in AARP?  Is this going to happen more you utilizing AI more?  What changes do you see coming down the pipe in the next few years?

Tisa Sinclair: I think right now the focus needs to be or is going to be on the importance of customer experience.  You know, I think a lot of companies, from what I’ve seen from the conferences that I’ve attended and just being here in the organization, you know, brands and organizations across the globe are starting to really integrate that CX into a sort of broader range of business operations.   I’ve always said, you know, we all need to create a culture that has costumer focus which means that every decision is made with the customer in mind and everyone in the organization knows or should know, how they impact the overall chain of customer service strategy.  

And I think a part of that is a couple of things, you know, there’s personalization.  We need to create a more personalized, I would say, frictionless experience for our customers because they now expect more and more of brands and us to provide them with experiences that are just more tailored to their individual wants and needs since they do expect brands to be relevant and timely with things like promotions and campaigns and products.  Or just any services that’s based on their own personal data.   I find that more and more consumers are starting to find impersonal experiences really frustrating.  So I think companies really need to get, including ourselves, we really need to get on board with personalization and consumer expectations because it is continuing to shift and we should expect this to be more of the norm.

Andrea:  And I know that it has a lot to do with the people who are actually on the frontlines, the people who are actually having conversations with the customers, with your members.  What makes that person who is on the phone or maybe it’s through an email or whatever it might be, what makes that person a really trusted adviser to the customer while at the same time being a brand ambassador for the company?  Have you found anything in particular that’s helpful for that?  

Tisa Sinclair: You know, and, I feel like I’m repeating this, we always want to be direct, transparent, and human, which is why we make sure that we align ourselves or align our messaging and our voice with our experience pillars, and we have three.  The first is that we want to ensure they’re interacting with us is inspiring.  That can be anything from making your greetings personalized using that empathy and manners. You know, please and thank you go a long way, being authentic and even a little bit of surprise and delight, you know.  If you can or when you can, you want to go above and beyond to really provide members and nonmembers with the peoples’ community with back to back, that personalized service and that solution that they might have never considered.  

You also want to provide that effortless experience and that can be something as simple as making sure you’re meeting the members where they are and responding in the appropriate channel and being really specific with their resources.  You know, giving as many applicable details as possible and really sending those relevant links that leads directly to the actual needed information and resources that they requested.  You don’t want to send anyone down a rabbit hole and make them even more confused and just being concise in providing the right information while not overwhelming them. And then I would say the last pillar is making sure users are compelled to feel that AARP gets them. 

So that can be anything from being casual you know, you want the people who reach out to us they feel like interacting with the real person and not some like automated system.  That means customizing our language to match the tone.  Of course, you know, we have a template language as a guide.  

It’s always important to have that but also adding that customization for each response to kind of match the questions and the tone of the member.  Basically speaking their language, using the same words that they use if you can and I think it really shows that AARP is a trusted source.  And it makes you feel like you can open up and it makes you feel like, “Hey, I can come back to the same source and they would be able to help me in my time of need,” whatever that may be.

Andrea:  So many great things that you’re doing and it’s interesting to hear about this.  I’m sure that you’re going to be digging into this more deeply at the conference.  Can you tell us just a little bit about what your session will be about?

Tisa Sinclair: Sure.  So one of our major goals this year is to focus on thoughtfulness in the language.  To improve the customer service experience, via social and like I’ve said that empathetic language is key through a lot of our conversations, particularly when we converse around sensitive topics, particularly caregiving.  So we knew that a solution to this problem was to kind of enhance our interactions by crafting our responses to be more human and validating in nature, therefore non-template based.  

We want to kind of treating these new interactions at casual conversations among friends.  So members kind of feel reassured if they’re talking to a real human as opposed to a bot.  I’ll definitely dive more into this at the event but you know just showing how our team works really hard to kind of implement this more intimate and personal approach and the route that we took.  The trainings, working extensively within our in-house caregiving team to ensure that our voice and our messaging was aligned.  

I’m going to talk about the topics that we included such as overhauling our knowledge base to help agents find those relevant resources faster inserting that, sort of, appreciative language in our responses.  So this includes starting our messages by just thanking people for being a caregiver.  You know, a lot of caregivers, they don’t feel appreciated so that touch of validation alone can have a huge impact and some of these stories are just heartbreaking.  

So it’s really important that we let them know that before we go into our spiel about resources that we have which is really important, we just want people to know that we’re there.  We’re here and just thank you.  Thank you for just being such an amazing person.  Thank you for doing what you’re doing with your spouse, with your parent, just thank you.  And that little touch right there made all the difference and we started to see a shift in how people reach out to us in our overall engagement and I’m going to dive into how we did just that.

Andrea:  I love it!  I love that idea of validating the person that you’re talking to.  That’s huge.  I love it!

Tisa Sinclair:  Thank you!

Andrea:  Well, thank you for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast.  Tisa, I appreciate you sharing your experience and I look forward to seeing you at the conference soon.

Tisa Sinclair:  Same here.  Thank you guys so much for inviting me.   I had a great time.

Andrea:  Awesome!  We’ll see you soon.

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How to Convey Warmth and Competence with Chris Malone

Episode 84

Chris Malone is the Founder and Managing Partner of the research-based consulting firm, Fidelum Partners, and has previously held senior marketing positions at leading organizations such as Choice Hotels, ARAMARK, Coca- Cola, the National Basketball Association, and Procter & Gamble and has consulted to a broad range of Fortune 500 companies.

Chris is co-author of the award-winning book, The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies.  He is also a frequent guest and contributor to CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg TV, Wall Street Journal Live, Forbes and Businessweek.

In this episode, Chris talks about the work he does with his current company, what the warmth and competence human perception model is, what led Chris to study this model and write his book, what we can do to ensure others perceive warmth in us, the role confidence plays in both warmth and competence, how his work relates to customer service, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chris Malone Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

 

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From Interruption Marketing to Differentiating with Service with Stan Phelps

Episode 83

Stan Phelps is a Forbes contributor, TEDx speaker, and IBM Futurist who focuses on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business. He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a certificate for Achieving Breakthrough Service from Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discuss how Stan became interested in the field of customer service, how he believes marketing should focus more on the customer’s experience with your company or product, why he feels you either exceed someone’s expectations or you fall short, why he wrote his “Goldfish” book series and what they cover, the two sides of the customer experience coin, what he hopes those attending his presentation at the Smart Customer Service Conference will walk away with, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

83 Stan Phelps Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! I know you really want you and your organization to have a voice of influence, and I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best for the people that you serve.  Well, I’ll be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st 2019.  If you’re listening to this episode before that conference, we highly recommend you attend.   But over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring interviews with experts who will be speaking at that conference.  And each interview will feature insights related to different aspect of customer service.  So you can find out more about the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net.   Well, today, we have with us Stan Phelps.  Stan Phelps is a Forbes Contributor, TEDx Speaker, and IBM Futurist focusing on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business.  He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a Certificate in Achieving Breakthrough Service, which I’m curious about that, from Harvard Business School.  He lives in Cary, North Carolina with his wife Jennifer and two boys, Thomas and James.  

Andrea:  Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Stan.  

Stan Phelps:  Thank you for having me, Andrea.  

Andrea:  Well, let me just ask what’s in your bio.  What is this Achieving Breakthrough Service?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, it’s a certificate that Harvard does.  They offer it a couple of times a year.  You get a chance to spend a week on campus with some of their top professors talking about how the ins and outs of how to achieve service that kind of catch through the noise and creates differentiation.  

Andrea:  Which is exactly what your area of expertise is in, I realized that.  So why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what you do?  

Stan Phelps:  So yeah, I don’t do much.  

Andrea:  I believe that.  

Stan Phelps:  I am an author and a speaker, so I spend my time kind of looking at the future of both customer experience and employee engagement.  And I’ve been fortunate enough and speaking in 16 different countries.  I spend my time travelling either doing keynotes or workshops on the different areas that I write about.  

Andrea:  How did you get interested in this particular topic?  Were you involved in customer service before?  

Stan Phelps:  You know, really, it’s interesting.  I studied both law and business.  But undergrad, I was a marketing major.  I was always intrigued by marketing.  And that was my first two decades working on both the agency and the brand side doing marketing.  I just realized that the type of marketing that I was doing kind of the traditional tell and sell interruption marketing, I didn’t think it was going to be the marketing of the future.  All I knew from my days of being a brand marketer was I was not part of the solution; I was just a huge part of the problem.   Andrea, I didn’t really know that fast forward and back about 10 years ago, back in 2009, I spent about a year writing about every element of marketing trying to search for this kind of key aspects.  I had, what I call my moment of truth and, decided that marketing should be more about the experience that you provide and how you do that in a very specific way that gets people to come back but also gets them talking about the experience.  

Andrea:  We absolutely agree with you here.  So I am curious what was the actual story of your moment of truth?  How did you figured that out or how did you come to that moment?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I used to live in Connecticut and I was working for an agency that was a New York agency.  And I happen to be in Manhattan about to go in that working event with one of my colleagues and we were in one of these rooftop bars in Manhattan.  It was summer time, beautiful, and I joked, I was enjoying as you only can in Manhattan a $15 beer, if you can even enjoy that.  But it was a crowded place and we’re waiting for a couple of people to show up and I noticed this older gentleman sitting right across from me.   He was by himself, and everyone _____ scanned the room like he was looking for someone and, it becomes obvious to me that he was waiting for someone to show up.  And like a half hour goes by and no one has showed up for this guy, so I just started a conversation with him.  He started talking about the _____ you know waiting and being on time.  And this guy, Andrea, told me something that changed my life.  He looked at me in the eye and he said, “No one in life is ever on time.”  Wait a second, I been on time before, not often, but I’ve been on time.  He raised his finger to me, and you can’t see it but it gave me a kind of Dikembe finger wave and he said “No.”  He goes, “In fact, on time is a myth.”  He said “People in life are either early or they’re late.”   I took the train home that night to Connecticut and I thought to myself I said, “That same reasoning applies in marketing in business with the customers that we serve every day.  No one in business simply just meets the expectations of a customer that they serve.”  In fact, I think if the only goal that you have is satisfaction or meeting expectations, I think that’s a losing battle.  So people, you know, and brands in life you either exceeds someone’s expectations or you fall short.   And literally, I went on a mission that next week to say, I’m going to purposely look for brands that aside to do a little something extra to go above and beyond just the transaction, to stand out and differentiate themselves.  And that was the start of the journey.  

Andrea:  Hmmm.  So when you were back in marketing and you noticed this issue of being an interruption marketing kind of a situation and you said that you realized that you were contributing to the problems instead of helping solve it, was there something about that felt personal to you?  What drives you about this, like why did you end up going in this direction do you think?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean, like the old school thinking was how you measure effectiveness in marketing was through the concept of impressions.  How frequently did you get your brand in someone?  How were you able to tell that message?  Did you get any earned media?  Did you look at owned media, paid media?  And I just realized that “Hey, your brand is no longer what you tell people it is.”  It just isn’t.  It’s what somebody experiences.  It’s what they feel and most importantly, it’s what they tell other people about you.   I just thought that marketing, the paradigm needed to shift and I just realized that I had something to add to that conversation. And my goal was, Andrea, at the end of the day to get brands to think at least as much about the customer that they serve rather than the prospect that they’re chasing.  I think, we’re so concerned with getting people in the “funnel” that we fail to understand that the best marketing that we do is the experience that we provide to the customer that we serve.  

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s so good.  OK, so you obviously have this quality, and I’m talking about you personally, of being a thought leader.  You’re somebody who sees the problem and wants to help solve it from what I can tell.  I mean, that’s everything that you’ve said so far.  Is that a quality that you think you’ve always held?  Have you always have that desire to contribute to the bigger conversation to help solve these problems and that sort of thing?  Is that been something that you’ve always experienced?

Stan Phelps:  Yes and no.  I think I’ve always looked to see what the issue is or where I think thing should go and to try to be part of that change.  But to be honest, if I learned anything through my legal education was, to be able to look at a set of facts, to be able to spot any issue, to be able to understand what maybe the overarching rule or current practice was, and to be able to maybe look at a different way going forward.  But I think you’re probably giving me too much credit as a thought leader.  I saw what I thought was a problem and I wanted to be just part of what I thought the solution could be.  

Andrea:  Well, I think maybe thought leadership is a lofty term.  But at the same time when you’re a writer and a speaker, you’re certainly somebody who is contributing to that dialogue in a very important way and having influence on it.  

Stan Phelps:  What fascinates me and I tried to in all the books, Andrea, and there’s now eight different colors in the Goldfish series but all of them were based on the idea of looking at hundreds and hundreds of examples.  

Andrea:  Can you share with us for a second what is the Goldfish series?  I know what it is but I don’t think the audience knows yet.  

Stan Phelps:  Sure.  So after that moment of truth, I started to look for companies that did that little extra and so I needed a project or like a crowd sourcing name for it and so I called it the Purple Goldfish.  And the Goldfish has a lot of kind of, there’s a lot of plot behind that metaphor.  But just for now, it’s the idea that it’s something that small, right?  And the first three books were; Purple, Green, and Gold and that was a reference to Mardi Gras because the word that I absolutely fell in love with that I felt embodied this comes from New Orleans.   And so Purple, Green, Gold; and now there’s just been a series of books that I’ve tried to tackle of what I think is an emerging issue with an either _____ or the employee engagement side of the coin, which I think you can’t have one without the other.  

Andrea:  Right.  But why is that?  Why do you see that as pairing of both of those?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I think we’re all of the value driven.  A friend of mine _____ like the value zone is the distance between the frontline, you know the front of the brand, that person serving the customer and the customer themselves.  That’s the value zone.  That’s where everything is created.  So you can have this lofty idea in terms of what you think the experience you should provide.  But if you don’t have people that are bought into that on the frontline and that value zone then you’ll never going to be able to make that change.   So what I personally found is the companies that really got it for the customer, Andrea, even got it more so for the employees.  In fact, nine out of ten times they’re actually placing a greater emphasis on the employees and the culture that they want to drive than they are in the customers themselves.  

Andrea:  Sure.  Absolutely, I mean, if the frontline folks, like you said buy in, almost embody the brand in their conversation and in the way that they serve then it totally changes the game.  

Stan Phelps:  Right.  Yeah, so all the books in the series have kind of focused on, and some, I think, the best books in the series have touched both sides of it.  So for example, I wrote the Red Goldfish is entirely about purpose or the Yellow Goldfish is all about happiness.  But here’s the deal, purpose is magical because it catch across both the customer side of the equation as well as the employee side.  And yellow is all about happiness, so it’s about making sure that your customers are happy but, at the same time, your employees are happy as well as the fact that you’re looking at society and should then give back to societal happiness.  

Andrea:  OK, let’s take a look at some more specific around differentiation for customer service.  What are some different things that you talk about that are really important for somebody who wants their company or their brand to be able to have a voice of influence, to be an influence in the world and with their customer themselves?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, you know, so I’ll touch on Purple because that’s what I’m going to be talking about in DC and I hope everyone comes out for Smart Customer Service 2019.  Purple is really about understanding that I think there are two sides of the coin when it comes to customer experience.  The first side of the coin is all of the value that you provide.  And so throughout Purple Goldfish, there are six different ways you can provide a little bit of added value.   The other flip side of the coin is the concept that I call maintenance.  So value is all the things that you do for your customer.  Maintenance is all of the things that your business processes due to your customer.  Meaning, how easy do you make it for them to be able to do business with you?  And so how do you do the little things to reduce friction and improve the experience?  So I think at the end of the day, there’s no big magical answer but it’s about finding the small and little things that you can do that can make a big difference.   You know, this isn’t a Trojan horse, right?  There’s no one big catch all.  It’s a lot of little things that if you can understand your customers and what drives them and you can design these little things and you can deploy them effectively that’s going to be the key to success.  It’s something I called the “3D development.”  

Andrea:  OK, so do you want to take that any further, that 3D development?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean it’s not complicated.  Again, the first ‘D’ is Discovery and understanding who you are as a brand and what your customers value the most, not to over think it, right?  You want to be great to the things that your customers value the most and you want to understand where you want to be in the market place.  Once you understand those two things, you can then go to the “D” of Design.”  So you go from discovery first to design.   And Design is thinking ways that you bring those things to life.  How can you accentuate the things that matter the most to your customers and how can you do the way that reinforces who you want to aspire to be as a brand.  And then third is this idea of Deploy.  So how do you test, pilot, and validate those things as well as how do you make sure that your team has bought into it, that you create a process around it, and that you have the resources that you can do it again, again, and again.  And what do you do once you deploy, you go right back to that first day of discovery.  I say it as it’s a continuous development idea.  

Andrea:  Yeah that sounds great.  Alright, so do you have any examples of little things that you’ve seen companies do that really make that big difference.  Now, I realized that this might not be applicable to every single company that’s out there but perhaps there are some ideas that could spark other ideas.  

Stan Phelps:  So I’ll give you a couple on the value side of the equation.  And so we spend a lot of time on this idea.  One of the categories is first and last impressions and doing a little something extra to make that strong first impression.  You know, there’s this idea of _____,you remember the first thing and typically the last thing we experience and maybe it peak somewhere.   So like the DoubleTree hotel, they’re one of my hall of famers.  That chocolate chip cookie, it’s that warm, great first impression and it’s something that they have down to a science in terms of the consistency of doing it.  I think it embodies what they want to be seen as a brand.  They wanted to be seen as that kind of warm, welcoming place.  And so it’s very well-positioned as a great strong first impression.   Another example in the value category is a category we call sampling.  And so one of my favorite examples is an ice cream shop in St. Paul, Minnesota called Izzy’s Ice Cream.  It’s such a simple thing but when you buy a scoop of ice cream at Izzy’s, they let you pick a second flavor for free and this small little mini scoop and they actually _____, so you can’t copy if you’re an ice cream shop.  But it’s this small little mini scoop and that little mini scoop is called the Izzy.  

Andrea:  That’s cool!  

Stan Phelps:   It’s brilliant.  I mean, this is an amazing strategy for the customers that already do business with you, Andrea.  On average, they only know 20 percent of what you can do for them. So with the people that are already customers with you, why wouldn’t you invest a little buck to give them a little taste of something else?  So I think, unfortunately, we most often think of sampling as something we do for prospective customers.  Why can’t we use it for the customers that we already have?  So that’s the value side.  I’ll be giving an example or two on the maintenance side of the equation and so a couple of those over there, one is convenience.   So how do you do little things to be more convenient?  One of my hall of famers there is that company called TD Bank.  They’re on the East Coast open seven days a week.  Some nights there are open till 8 o’clock at night.  Even if they don’t decide to be open seven days a week or open till 8 o’clock, you can take this thing that they do.  They actually open the doors of the branch, Andrea, 15 minutes before what scheduled opening is and they actually keep the doors open 15 minutes afterwards.   So think about it.  Each day, you might have some people four or five customers that show up before the bank officially opens, but what do they do, they open the door and greet those customers as a way of reinforcing that convenience.  And we’ve all been there rushing to get to the bank before it closes; they open the door for 15 minutes for people and that scheduled in, right?  That’s scheduling in a little more convenience to reinforce what they’re all about.   Another great example is what we call an added service to make it easier to do a little something extra.  So, Safelite, when they come and do a repair of your windshield, you know, while that Epoxy is filling that crack and setting, it takes about 10 minutes, they typically will vacuum the interior of your car.  They’ll get glass cleaned or do all of your windows.  Now, that was never part of the deal, but they have that little extra time and they invest that as a little extra buck.  And their front line, I think each and every week, every person on the front line gets their own NPS score at Safelite.  

Andrea:  Nice.  That’s really cool!  Those are great examples.  Thank you for sharing those.  Alright, so Stan, why should somebody attend your specific breakout session at the Smart Customer Service Conference?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I’d like to think there’s probably going to be a lot of people that already understand the importance of providing that great customer service where I would say overarching experience.  My hope is that their perspective might even get slightly shifted and they’re going to walk away with kind of the recipe for being able to create signature differentiators for their brand to create that experience that people talk about, to read about, and post on Instagram about.  

Andrea:  Awesome!  OK, so how can people find you?

Stan Phelps:  A couple of ways, StanPhelpSpeaks is my personal speaking site and then I’ve got about eight other co-authors for these books, so purplegoldfish.com is kind of the Goldfish collective and the think tank.  

Andrea:  Perfect!  Well, thank you so much for taking time to be with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in DC.  

Stan Phelps:  Awesome, can’t wait!

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How to Connect Your Life to Your Customer Service with Derrick Ricca

Episode 82

Derrick Ricca is a 25+ year veteran of the hospitality industry who has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality Group for the past 17 years. His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food. In this episode, Derrick discusses how he got into the hospitality field, why he believes you have to drop your ego to provide good customer service, what he feels makes the biggest difference in getting a group of people to implement and adapt to changes, how he gets a transient workforce to embrace the “environment” of the business, why he strives for a blend of work and life instead of balancing the two, what he’ll be speaking about at the Smart Customer Service Conference, and more!

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Transcript Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Now, as someone who wants you and your organization to have a voice of influence, I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best that you can for the people that you served. So over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with the experts who will be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at, it’s called Smart Customer Service in Washington, DC April 29th to May 1st 2019.  And each of these interviews will feature insights related to a different aspects of customer service. So you can find out more the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes. Today, we have Derrick Ricca with this.  Derrick is a 25 plus year veteran of the hospitality industry.  He has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality for the past 17 years.  His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food; not in any particular order (he says).  Derrick is married with two sets of twins, which keep him actively coaching sports year round and trying his best to relearn algebra which I completely understand.

Andrea:  Derrick, it’s great to have you here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Derrick Ricca:  Thank you so much, Andrea.

Andrea:  Derrick, I have to tell you this.  This is a running joke in my house.  It’s not a joke though.  I worked in a hotel in college for probably about a year.  So whenever we go to a hotel, I tell my husband things or I would tell him things when we first got married about “Well, we probably do it this way because of this or that sort of things.”  And I would share with him some of the things that I’ve learned and he kind of makes fun of me for thinking that I know what I’m talking about just because I was at the front desk of a hotel.  But I think it’s a big industry.  It’s an important industry.  So tell me, Derrick, how did you get involved in the hospitality industry?

Derrick Ricca:  Well, you know, the first thing you can do is you can tell your husband, “You probably do understand what’s going on.”

Andrea:  That’s right.

Derrick Ricca:  Yes, the front lines of a hotel, especially when you’re a front desk agent, that’s one of the more challenging jobs that are out there.  So anytime that you see a really good front desk agent, you know, you can tell that that person has a lot of qualities that most people don’t possess.  And so you should be very proud of yourself because a year of doing that is many more years in other professions.

Andrea:  Thank you.  I will definitely do that.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, and I kind of back toward by accident in the hospitality.  It was never really a dream or a goal of mine.  And what I did growing up was I battled my dad who was in sales and said “I don’t wanna go to sales.”  He said, “Hey, you’d be perfect for sales.”  And I’m like “I don’t wanna do that.”  And for me, it was kind of one of those things where I had started a job working for a restaurant group and doing everything but food.  And then I realized that, you know, I was a big fan of food and I was a big fan of selling and I was also a big fan of really making people smile. So I put all three of those together and I ended up interviewing at this hotel.  And at the time, the hotels under construction and, you know, Kalamazoo was not really anything you jump up and down about, and the owner of the hotel said “Hey, this hotel is gonna be really something special.”  I trusted him and 17 years later, it is really a special hotel.  It’s funny to look back on it and say “Gosh, how did I ever end up here.”  But it’s been a really fun journey.

Andrea:  I love what you said about; you like to make people smile.  Is that something that you’ve always noticed about yourself or where did that comes from?

Derrick Ricca:  I think I’ve always been a people pleaser and those types of people belong in hospitality.  If you really care about people and you have a little bit of empathy that you can spread around and you enjoy interacting, you know, hospitality is such a great career.  And a few don’t enjoy that then that’s the last career you should probably get into.

Andrea:  Have you _____ in making people smile?

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, and that’s the whole thing is you have to really kind of have something happen in your life where you can really appreciate people going out of their way to make your life better.  Because a lot of times, in hospitality situations whether you’re a restaurant or a hotel or wherever you are at, it could be a retail situation.  A lot of times, you’re not comfortable in that environment.  It’s not your house.  It’s not somewhere you’re used to.  So a lot of times, people won’t go try out new restaurants because they don’t feel comfortable there. I’m just the opposite.  I’m the person that would go to any dive bar or any dive restaurant just to kind of check it out.  I think for me, it’s always been one of those things where, you know, I just enjoy life.  I enjoy meeting people.  I enjoy having conversations.  I enjoy so many different opinions and so hospitality I guess was kind of made for what I like to do.  And it’s kind of one of those things where as much as I have thought it in the past, I have been told, “Derrick, you’re kind of introverted but you’re kind of extroverted,” and it’s hard to really get out of it once you’re in it because it is really enjoyable.

Andrea:  Well, there’s something really special about that feeling of knowing that the other person is better off because of you.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah.  You know, to be good in customer service, it takes so many different things.  You have to really be able to drop your ego.  And if you can do that, you can really do some magical things in customer service because customer service has gotten harder and harder over the course of time.  And people, you know, always talk about going into places and just having such horrible customer service. And I agree, you go into fast food or you’re going to some of these places where the employees are hard to come by and they’re always short staff and they’re trying to get people in there.  Sometimes, they’re working with the younger group that doesn’t have the experience.  And it’s really hard for somebody to come out of there and say “Gosh, I really just have a great experience customer wise.  So, you know, it’s something that’s always kind of needled me a little bit where I just kind of have looked at it, felt it and said “OK, I need to embrace this and I somehow need to push a better feeling to those people so that when they leave the feel good.”

Andrea:  You just mentioned that you have to be able to drop your ego.  What is that look like for somebody who’s in customer service to really drop their ego, what do you mean by that?

Derrick Derrick:  I think that, for me, it’s one of those things where I really learned to drop my ego by coaching youth sports.  I know that’s sounds really strange but, you know, I’ve been lucky.  I’ve got some kids that are pretty athletic.  I’ve always been able to _____ the chips are down and they need to win a game and they come in and hopefully do something good.  But I learned that that’s not always the best thing to do and that sometimes you have to put some faith in some kids that may not have that much talent or what so that they can grow and develop. So it’s one of those things where there’s a person, the best thing that I can is get as much knowledge as possible and go into a situation to help the consumer or the guest or whoever it is.  Not brag and boost about what I know but try to help them and figure ahead of time “OK, where is this person going and how I can help them the best way possible?” So it’s little silly things that people do that make a big influence that you don’t realize.  You know, I had a consumer the other day or guest come in the hotel and he wanted to go off property and he wanted to get pizza but he was a little older and he just wasn’t sure of himself.  So I walked him down there.  And for me, it wasn’t a big deal.  It took about 10 minutes and we had a really good conversation on the way down.  I dropped him off for some pizza and it was funny he came back to the hotel and he asked, “You know, I’d like to go back there again tomorrow, would you come there and have lunch with me?” For me, it really kind of felt good like “OK.”  You know, I found exactly what this guy wanted and I put him in a place where he’s happy and he wanted to share that with me.  So you know, I went back the next day and made new friends.  So it’s kind of cool where, again, you can drop your ego and you can look at something and you can just understand like “Hey, I just want to help this person and I want to make their day more enjoyable.”

Andrea:  It sounds like good.  It’s not about you.

Derrick Ricca:  It was funny, I remember in college, I took a course and the professor was big on servant leadership.  And I never understood really what he was talking about even while I was in the class.  And then as I got into the real world, you kind of look back at things that you’ve done in your past and you say “Well, OK, now it all makes sense.”  You do things sometimes and it’s not about you, it’s about the situation.  So there’s a lot of times in my life where I looked back on it and I put myself in situations that don’t necessarily benefit me but they have taught me a whole _____ lessons. So today, I went to the grocery store and I decided that I wanted to make my kids a fun dinner.  So I was going to make them homemade mac and cheese and they really enjoy that and it’s a special treat.  So I went to the grocery store looking for some truffle oil and I find some truffle oil, and the gentleman was actually stocking in that area.  I looked at the price and it’s like $20 a bottle, and he knows like I am not going to pay $20 a bottle for truffle oil.  So, you know, I told him “No, thanks.  I appreciate you letting me know that you guys have this.  This is really not what I’m looking for.” So I went shopping around the rest of the store, and he actually came and found me and he said, “You know, I totally forgot, we have our own house olive oils that we infused of flavors and there’s a truffle one and it’s only $5.”  So it’s this huge bottle of truffle oil.  And I just thought it was cool that the guy understood what I was going through and I understood what I was concerned about and then helped me. Because for me, you know, like I grew up working in grocery stores.  And to this day, still people think I work in grocery stores because what happen is I come home from work and typically I’m dressed up from work in a hospitality and I usually have a suit on.  Every time, I go to the grocery store, I usually take my tiles and I walk to the grocery store and I get my groceries. Well, there was one time where I was in a extreme amount of hurry going through the grocery store because my wife was home and she called me with the “Oh my God, we need milk.”  And when you have four young children and you get a call “Oh my God, we need milk,” that is a “911 gotta get home.” So as I’m going through the store, I’m going towards the back of the store to get milk, and of course, I ran into a little lady who is so nicely asking me to get items off the top shelves.  So I slowed down for a second and I understand “OK, I should do this.”  And so I helped her get _____ top shelves.  Then she proceeds to ask me if I know where Marsala wine is because she was making chicken Marsela.  And where the wine was in the store, it’s not easy to find.  It’s not in the wine and it’s not in the vinegars, they put it somewhere else. So I walked her to get this then she says, “I need to find this.”  So literally for 20 minutes, I’m helping this lady go through the store.  We say good bye.  She says, thank you.  She was so sweet.  I go back to pick up the milk.  I finally get the milk, go to the front of the store and I just had milk and I was in this line waiting.  And I listened to the lady and she was checking out in the line next to me and she was telling the cashier about how this wonderful man helping her and the people at this grocery store are so very nice and he is such a nice man. And so at that point, I just kind of give _____ to myself and I thought “Gosh, I’m so glad I slowed down and I’m so glad that this grocery store is benefiting through my work.”

Andrea:  Yeah, exactly.  They were so glad that you stopped in that day.

Derrick Ricca:  Yes.  You know, it’s one of those things where I’ve run into people that I’ve worked with before and not knowing walking in the _____ or department store and they’re in front of me and they don’t hold the door.  And working in hospitality, I didn’t kind of get after a little bit like “Hey dude!”  And then they kind of understand and get through it but those one of those things where when you’re in hospitality it’s ingrained in you.  And when somebody, like today, where the guy understood what I was feeling and was able to solve my solution.  For me, it was a big deal like I thank him a lot and he said, “No, you don’t need to thank me.”  I was like, “No, I do because that was really, really cool!”

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s great.  I love the story. So what exactly do you do?  What’s your role or your job, your position that you do at the hotel?

Derrick Ricca:  So my job is basically to fill the medium space in the hotel guest rooms.  You know, we have 40 guest rooms and we’ve got about 50000 square feet of meeting space.  Typically a hotel that size has about 20000 square feet of meeting space.  So having that much more meeting space is something that obviously needs to be filled.  So my job is to get people to stay in the hotel to have meetings, holiday parties do all that.  And for us, it’s been a lot easier, I mean, when I first started there, it was not easy.  And as time has going on, we just continually added better people.  And last year, for the second time in the last five years, we won Renaissance National Hotel of the Year.

Andrea:  Wow, congratulations!  That’s really great!

Derrick Ricca:  Thank you.

Andrea:  You know, that’s an interesting point that you bring about that the people kind of change at a slow pace too.  I’m assuming this based on what you just said but maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong.  Is it hard to make big changes with like a current group of people and getting everybody to buy in to those things or that sort of thing?  Does it help to just kind of waited out overtime and start to replace people or what kinds of things made those people better and better as you went along?

Derrick Ricca:  You know, I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.  I think it’s getting a very good leadership group in and that makes the biggest difference where you have leaders that are compassionate and they’re trigging people with empathy, authentic, and they have high levels of integrity.  And then it’s also one of those things where a few people that don’t fit and they’re not on the right seat on the bus, you either reorganize them or you find a new place for them. And we have a ton of employees that have been there for a long time and it’s a test on it to just really what a great organization we work for, but it’s really when you look at everything in how it works.  We have managers that are leading by example.  We have people that truly care.  It’s just makes a big difference when you get good people and they’re all working together.  You know, with hospitality, you have a very transient workforce.  So for us, we’re in a college town, we have a lot of college employees and they don’t always stick around for more than two or three years.  Some of them do and we have a number of them that we’ve promoted from within.  So it’s a thousand little things.  There’s no silver bullet and it’s not necessarily, you’re right, it’s not one big sweeping0 change.  It’s so many little things.

Andrea:  How do you help the transient workforce to embrace the DNA of your hotel and sort of be the kind of person that you want serving your guest, how do you do that?

Derrick Ricca:  I think it starts off when we train our associate.  You know, we put a little extra TLC into it.  They have days amount of training before they even get out on the floor and engage with a customer or guest.  I think they see a lot and they observe a lot and they see people doing things.  I mean, that’s part of the big thing with customer service is.  You have to actually see it in action.  You can’t just teach it and expect people to do it. I think it’s basically, and I hate this word, I hate the word culture, because it’s so overused and sometimes misused.  But it’s more of like an environment I think.  And I think once people understand the environment of what we’re trying to do and you enjoy it and you’re working for the other people that you work with, I think that’s what changes that.  I mean for me, you know, I’m the floor frontline service all the time and so I enjoy it because I love to be out there and I love to interact with our operations team.  We have so many good people but it makes it fun like you enjoy when the hotel is really busy.

Andrea:  You enjoy when it’s busy because why exactly?

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, you get certain energy from it.  I mean, you’re working hard.  It’s fast paced.  It’s not stagnant.  It’s always moving and it’s not predictable.  It’s not easy, but you get this feeling of like, gosh, it’s really, really cool.  You see so many people and you’re interacting and there’s so much going on and there’s so many moving pieces.  And sometimes, you’re wondering like “How, did just happen, like how did we transition from a five person group to an 800 person group, like how does that physically happened?”  It’s a fun environment to be in because it is a fast paced moving organism basically.  It’s never boring.  So I think that being on your toes and always having to be up on a stage performing for all of these people, you know, you really have to put your game on and pull up your boots and work hard.

Andrea:  I like the way that you put that, the idea of being on stage.  Is that something that you talk about the team that you have?  How do you help them to think about that in terms of like you know when you’re with people on stage?  How does that go for you?

Derrick Ricca:  You know, we had that kind of discussion before where people were always watching.  And it’s really kind of cool because what we’ve done is we’ve used tons of metrics but we’ve also taken in customer cards.  So we get so many customers comments and we go through them and understand them so that it makes us better.  Because there were things we’ve done in the past that have just been cleaned out stupid and you learned not to do those anymore.  And then you talked to the guests more and they tell you “Hey, here’s really what we want.”  And so for us that helped us become better customer ambassadors because we can do small things to make their stay better.

Andrea:  Sure.  That makes a lot of sense.  OK, I know that you’ve mentioned your kids before and coaching, do you ever bring in your personal experience at home to be able to relate to how you want to do and you want your team to do customer service at work?

Derrick:  Oh God yeah.  You know, a lot of people say, you know don’t bring your home life to your work and vice versa.  For me, I’ve never been one of those people that says, “Oh you gotta have this work-life balance.  You have to do things a certain way.”  For me, it’s always kind of work out where it’s been great.  You know, if you work in a safe work environment where you have that feeling and it’s like “Gosh, I really belong working here,” it makes work a lot easier. But I’ve always been the type of person that says, instead of having work-life balance, why don’t you have a blend of work life.  I’m not saying that you always have to bring your home life into work but I think sometimes it is good.  I mean, there are times where I’ve had really good things happen to me outside of work and I bring that feeling into work and it just helps you perform in a better level.  Now, you look at the opposite side of the road, of course, if you’re going through rough times, it’s hard when you have to go to work. But for us and to myself, I work with such a good team.  But I’ve gone through some difficult times in my life and I’ve brought it to work and I’ve been helped out.  And so, I think if you have that greater understanding of what you’re trying to do and those people around you have that, it makes it a lot easier.  So yeah, I would say if you are doing while things are happy and things are good, bring those to work and share it with the people that you work with, your guest, your customers, or whoever you’re coming with, you know, who will appreciate that. It’s one of those things where people call my voicemail and leave a message and say “I really like your voicemail message,” and I laugh about it because I recorded it like six years ago and while I was recording it, one of my cube mates was trying to make me laugh so I’m kind of giggling on the message.  And I never really listened to the message and I went back and listened to it and I was like “Oh, it makes sense.”

Andrea:  Do you have any particular insights that have really hit you from home that you bring to work then?  You want to share any of those?

Derrick Ricca:  For me, I’m lucky because I was blessed with, you know, marrying somebody that really made my life better.  And so I think having that support system at home has really helped me out a lot and I’ve been able to, as I said, dropped my ego with my wife and I’ve learned a lot from her.  You know, there were times in the past where I may have offering a certain way and she’s able to kind of say, you know, you should do this or do that.  Or it’s things that I can watch that she’s done and see how she’s handled things and then kind of applied that to my own life. So you know, I think about times in which she’s had to do things and she’s been immersed in all kinds of drama and she’s chosen not to go through and respond like I would.  I would immediately say, “This is stupid,” or whatever the case was.  You know, I’ve been able to really kind of look back and say “OK, now I understand why she didn’t do that.”  And so it has helped me know when to just stop talking.  But she also too is one of the other people that has helped me as far understanding when you’re having something good, share it.  And when something’s bad, you can’t let it negatively influence you or really kind of change your mood. And it’s hard when you have two sets of twins that are all strong willed and they’re loud and they never stop, it’s sometimes is you get through the day and you just take the deepest breath possible.  But sometimes you just have to understand like “Hey, this is the time in our lives.  We’ll get through it and you have to just kind of enjoy it.”

Andrea:  Love that!  OK, Derrick, let’s talk about your session at Smart Customer Service, what are you talking about there?

Derrick:  So each year, I’ve always have a fun topics.  And my thing is, it’s always been important to me to go to these conferences and provide people to take something home with them.  Because there are so many times where you go to conferences and you sit there and you go to breakout sessions and you listen and it’s good information but it’s not really applicable.  You can’t physically or mentally take it home with you or make changes. So every year, I try to figure out something where somebody can look at it and have a little bit of inspiration to go into their work environment and make it better.  So this year, really more the discussion is talking about how do you fix customer service and how do you provide good levels of customer service without really truly focusing on customer service?  And what I mean by that is what are the ways that you set yourself off to provide better customer service to your guests, and a lot of it has to do with things that you don’t really think about. In our case, we have so many different things that have happened over the course of time that had been changed.  One of the big things right now is technology, and technology is pushing, pushing all the time and that’s a big focal point, and it should be a big focal point of every single customer.  I don’t care every single industry; I don’t care what customer you serve or what you’re doing.  And so for us, there’s time where we have to look as an organization and say “OK, this is not about our guest or a customer, this is about us and how we do things.  We need to change it so that we’re more customer centric and how do we do that?” So the best example is I actually went to a customer service conference about three or four years ago and I thought to myself “Gosh, do you what’d be easy right now is the hotel that I was at in DC and I won’t way which one it was, their customer service was lacking and ______.”  And I was challenged because I needed some help and I didn’t know where to turn to.  And I thought “Gosh, how great would this be if I could just text the front desk and they could then respond to it.”  I didn’t want to call and feel stupid about my question, especially somebody that works in a hotel that should know all the answers. I brought that back to our hotel as well where a lot of our travelers, you know, the first thing they do when they check is they have their phones in their hands.  And then the second thing they do is have their phone in their hands.  So as soon as they unpack, they’re on their phones.  So it’s a lot easier for them to just text, “Hey, I need some more towels or how do I turn the air up in the room?”  So for us that’s a win-win situation if we can figure out how to incorporate that for our guest.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, that sounds like a great idea there.  I think the session will be very interesting.  You bring a lot of great experience to this conversation and I thank you for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah.  I think you will have a very enjoyable time.  It’s a good group, and every year I’ve gone, I’ve picked up some things and brought them home and I think it has helped out in my journey in customer service.  So it’s a great conference.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Alright, if you would like to learn more about the Customer Service Conference, you can go to our website www.voiceofinfluene.net.

Derrick Ricca:  OK!

Andrea:  Thanks Derrick!

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How to Write with the Voice of Your Brand with Leslie O’Flahavan

Episode 81

As Founder of E-WRITE, Leslie O’Flahavan, is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges who has helped thousands of people learn how to write well. She helps customer service agents write on-brand emails, chat, and social media posts. In this episode, Leslie discusses what led her to create her business back in 1996, why she’s so passionate about helping customer services representatives, the top skills she helped several major airlines incorporate into their customer service writings, how personal connections with your customers offset repeat complaints about the same issue, what a “brand voice” is and how she helps customer service agents write in that voice, and more!

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Transcript Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Now, as someone who wants to have a voice of influence or you want your organization to have a voice of influence, I know that you’re pretty highly focused on doing what’s best for the people that you serve. And so in the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with experts who are going to be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at in Washington D.C.  It’s called the Smart Customer Service conference.  And it’s from April 29th through May 1st 2019. So if you are in that area, or if you are in industry where customers service is important to your business then that would be a fantastic conference to come to.  But even if you’re not, we have some really interesting interviews coming up for you.  And the one today is going to be a blast. So today I have with me, Leslie O’Flahavan.  Leslie has helped thousands of people learned to write well.  That’s right, we’re going to be talking about writing. As founder of E-WRITE, she is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges.  She helps customer service agents write on brand, email, chat, and social media post.  And Leslie has worked with several international airlines to update their style of communicating with customer.  She has done so many things.  She’s also an instructor for Lynda.com.  

Andrea:  So Leslie, is it great to have you with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, thanks very much!  I’m really excited to speak with you and thanks for inviting me.

Andrea:  Well, I’m curious.  How did you get started with teaching people about writing?  Is this something that you have always been particularly good at and then you wanted to teach or how did this go for you?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, I tell the story quickly and in reverse chronological order.  So my business is called E-WRITE and you can guess when I founded it by the name.  I founded it back in the e-hyphen era.  I founded it in 1996 and this is when email was just becoming a common way people communicated at work.  And I thought “Well, shoot, that’s gonna change everything.  People who have not been writing email to each other, now they’re gonna be writing email to each other.  They’re gonna need help writing it well.” And that was a little wrong and a little bit early because, you know, it was so trivial and mundane in 1996 when I started the business.  People didn’t really want any help learning how to write email well.  But what they did want was help learning how to write with web content. So, I launched the business in 1996, as I said, and started offering customized onsite writing workshops for people who wanted to learn web content, e-newsletters, and all other kinds of online writing because it really was quite new to them.  Before I started E-WRITE, I was a college writing instructor for nine years.  Before that, I was a high school English teacher.  Shout out to all the English teachers out there, and I did that for nine years.

Andrea:  That’s great!

Leslie O’Flahavan:  So that’s a brief history of my life as a writing instructor.

Andrea:  Love that you taught school.  I was a music teacher as well.  OK, so that’s your brief history as a writing instructor.  So you were teaching for a very long time and then you turn that into a business where you’re helping businesses with this. What do you do with that now?  What are you doing with your business now in terms of teaching people how to write?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, my business is like a nice big dining room table with many, many strong legs under, and that’s one reason that I’ve been able to stay in business for all these years.  You know, essentially, I’m a writing instructor.  I developed writing curriculum and I deliver it.  But it’s way more complicated than that and way more broad. For many years, I did offer web-writing courses for corporations, for associations.  I live in the Washington D.C. area, so there’s a lot of headquarters of nonprofit here and _____ agencies.  But somewhere around 2001, I started to learn more and more about the work life of people who had been answering 1-800 phone numbers in the customer services role. You know, many companies employed them in a hundreds or even thousands customer service agents or customer service reps, and their writing life was getting more and more complicated.  And it continuous to be quite complicated because, you know, back in the days, they answered phone calls and postal mail and then they added emails and then they added life check and they added social media and then they added text. And now they’re doing all those channels supported by a_____, so it’s really, really complicated.  And there’s a workforce, they’re not the most writerly.  It’s not like sitting down with a bunch of PR professionals or with a bunch of marketers.  These are not the most writerly people and they needed help.  They work in a factory of writing. So for about the last 15 years or so, I’ve offered a lot of writing training, custom curriculum, training delivery, and other types of support to large customer service organizations.  And as you mentioned in my intro, since maybe 2012, I’ve worked with, I think 10 or 11 big airlines to help them update the way they communicate with customers and enable their frontlines customer service agents, even their reservation agents to write better.

Andrea:  Hmmm.  Just briefly, I really want to get how you help write to customers in their company’s brand voice.  But what are just like some of the maybe top three or five things that you actually helped those airlines to incorporate into their writing?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, one is the skill of responding with empathy and replacing knee-jerk insincere sympathy with empathy.  So for an airplane when a person emails in and says “I am so angry, I have to sit at Baltimore airport for six hours for weather delay and when I looked out the window, the weather looked fine to me.”  That’s an angry email from a customer. Most airlines are built to respond, “We regret any inconvenience this delay may have caused,” which is just passive-aggressive nonsense. So one thing I do is train the frontline agents and gain support from their managers to have them respond with empathy and, if necessary, to apologize because airlines really needn’t apologize for the weather.  But what they can say is “Thank you for contacting us.  I do understand that travel is stressful and sitting at the Baltimore airport for many hours must have been especially tiresome.”  That’s empathy.  That’s I see your way.  And customers appreciate this.  It doesn’t make the weather delay go away but it does make the airline sincere.  Not only sound sincere, that is a sincere behavior.

Andrea:  Sure.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Shall I give you another one?

Andrea:  If you’d like, that’d be great.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  Well, lots of big customer service organizations airlines or other ways rely on formed letters or formed answers even if it’s not a full letter, they rely in formed answers or prewritten content.  One thing I do is help the frontline customer service reps learn how to customize those contents. So for example, if you have a little snippet of prewritten content that says when you’re open, when your stores are open, you don’t need to customize that if you’re open Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. till 9:00 p.m. that should be prewritten.  But I help them learn how to add a little bit of personal information such as, “So we hope you’ll come in this weekend.”  So the prewritten content doesn’t come across as robotic.

Andrea:  Hmmm.  I love that!  And it really does kind of speak to the personality.  All of a sudden, it’s not just a corporation and it’s not just a company, there’s an actual person behind that and you’re actually connecting with that person.

Leslie O’Flahavan.  Indeed.  That’s it and that’s what customers crave from a practical point of view that personal connection offsets repeat complaints about the same issue.  Because when you’re a customer and you don’t feel anyone’s paying attention to you, you’re going to make a lot of noise, repeated amount a lot of noise and that’s expensive for company.

Andrea:  So what is the company’s brand voice?  Let’s talk about this a little bit.  Let’s talk about first of all what a brand voice is, especially in terms of writing.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  OK.  Well, a brand voice is set of writing choices that support the personality your brand conveys through many means, through its logo, typography, mascot, or advertising campaigns.  Brands have personalities and personalities have a voice. And the definition of what your brand voice might be or what the writing choices you might make to sustain that brand voice.  This is information that is very commonly understood from marketing and PR and graphic designers, and all that community in any company.  But it’s information that’s rarely shared with people who work in customer service and they’re expected to kind of soldier on without it or to write the customers with not much awareness that they’re sustaining the brand voice. So a lot of my work involves taking the brand voice guidance that’s already in the big company and basically showing it to the customer service management.  We have just never seen it before.  It’s the bad byproduct of a siload organization.  They have often just never seen it before. So sometimes, I’ll ask “Can I see the brand voice guidance that your marketing team gives to your ad agency?”  And they’ll retrieve it and I’ll say, “Let’s figure out how are we gonna use this for the person with the headset on who’s answering the phone or the person who is answering your support Twitter handle.  You know, how is this person going to be able to read this guidance and make it real in their own life?”

Andrea:  Oh yeah absolutely.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  We want customers to have the same experience with your brand personality after they have a problem or when they have a question.  If they did before the spent the money with you back when they were falling in love with you.  And that’s why it’s so important that the people who provide support help service whatever you want to call it.  They’re aware of the writing craft that goes into sustaining that brand voice and they know how to make those same writing choices.

Andrea:  So how do you actually translate the document that you got from the marketing team and help the customer service agent to actually be able to write in that.  And whether that be the really big companies or even small companies, how do you translate that for them?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, sometimes I do within the form of customized onsite training or online training.  Sometimes, with the customer service management support, I will write a customer service brand voice guide, a separate reference work.  But mostly, I plant the idea and support the behavior change that enables people to write in their company’s brand voice.  Because remember when customers write for help that’s usually emotionally neutral, but when they write to complain, the people who answers those complaints day in and day out, often become very protective of the company.  They can sometimes become defensive, because all day, every day, people are complaining at them and it’s painful.

Andrea:  And it can feel personal.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  And it can feel personal, and defensive writing is rarely in a brand voice.  Because the more you’re trying to protect your company or insist on a policy or reject the fourth request for a refund, the more you’re trying to say no essentially, the more difficult it is to use that kind of candid a flirty language that we use in marketing.  It’s hard work.  It’s hard work.  But I forgot to say something that’s really at my core and that it sustains me as we do this hard work is, I believe workplace writing is a learned skill. While I completely accept and recognize that there’s some kind of gift involved with poetry, fiction, writing drama, or reading a play; I believe that for most people, being able to perform competently as a writer at work is something they can learn.  And I believe it’s not almost a civil right issue, to me, it is a civil right issue.  If you hire somebody to do this hard job and this person who’s a customer service rep is probably not bringing down the big box either.  If you’re the employer, you’re obliged to provide the training they need to do job well.  Power to the people!

Andrea:  Absolutely.  I mean, there’s so much to that.  I mean for so long, it felt like customer meant sort of like the dark people in the basement that have to deal with all of the yucky stuff.  And we just want you to get it done as fast as you can.  We don’t have to make this go away.  I don’t even want to know that it’s there.  But those people are the most powerful people in the company and they don’t even realize that there’s some definite contradiction there in between what they’re actually doing for the company and the amount of respect and support that they receive.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  That’s really true and really wise observation.  And perversely, social media has kind of blurred the lines between marketing and customer care in a way that some companies are managing very well and some aren’t.  But it doesn’t really matter in the sense that all of these customer communications are coming in through, for example, Twitter. So, some very big companies separate the functions of handling customers’ complaints or questions about purchases or about subscriptions or about account information.  They _____ separately from their marketing in social channels and some smaller companies can’t do that.  So the person who is pushing an offer for 15 percent off coupon or something is the same a person who’s answering questions about why, what to do, how to reload the app when it’s not working.

Andrea:  Right, right.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  And I think that’s actually giving the leaders a little bit more respect and the customer service rep are less like the people in the basement with the headsets on and they very gently chained the ankles to the desk, you know.

Andrea:  Yeah, absolutely.  And I know that there are lots of really great companies that are thinking progressively on that and doing some really good work and obviously hiring people to come in and help with this sort of thing.  So do you have any tips for writing in a brand voice?  For example, if a company’s brand is based on prestige and needing to establish trust with their customer that sort of thing, what kind of things do you suggest that they do or don’t do in order to write in that voice?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Let’s take an easier example because when you’re thinking of a prestige brand like a five star hotel or something like that?

Andrea:  Sure.  You can take whatever example you want to take.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  OK.  Yeah, let me think about that.  Writing in a brand voice has to do with some very easy to describe writing behaviors and some that are more difficult.  So for example, is usually branded language, so part of writing in a brand voice is using the very terms that your company uses for such things that people can purchase elsewhere.  So for example in an airline, do you call it a flat bed seat when it’s in first class or do you call it lie flat feet. So one part of writing in a brand voice is keeping everybody up to date on the term that we use and making sure they use it.  Another part of writing in a brand voice is choosing a level of formality and sustaining it through all your writing choices. So if you’re talking about clothing _____,you’ll notice that a lot of their writing, even the writing in some channels that we would consider kind of playful like Twitter, they’re rather formal.  They don’t use a lot of contractions.  They don’t use as wide a range of emojis this kind of thing.  They stay kind of formal because they’re close are kind of formal.  A lot of times when answering completely casual company will write “Oh no!”  Well, a form of company whose brand voice is formal doesn’t do that.  They’ll say “We’re sorry to hear that.”  Or “This is not good to hear,” these kinds of things. So the first thing is choosing and using the language our brand users, another writing choice is the level of formality in the word you choose or in the structures such as contractions or full form of the word.  Another is the kind of extent of the irreverence you use or the snark or the mock or all of that. In contemporary customer service writing, there’s a lot of irreverence and snarky writing and a lot of brands are built on snarks.  So we have to approve of it because if the brand voice before you purchase is snarky one or sarcastic one then it make sense that the brand voice app you purchased will be the same.  But kind of how much of the brand voice is snarky, that’s an issue or reverent.  I put snarky at one and in reverent at the other. And then I think another quality of brand voice is, I don’t know, how much of the responsibility for the service breakdown are you willing to shoulder?  And that’s come out in your writing.  Some companies by brand are extremely reluctant to shoulder much of their responsibility for the breakdown and others are quite willing to shoulder responsibility for the breakdown. So once that they’re unwilling, they might write things such as “We’re sorry to hear this, please contact us with full details of where you purchased the product and what kind of damage you observed in the packaging.”  But if they’re kind of less standoffish, they might be willing to write something like “Oh no, we hate to hear this happen again.”  Which comes across a schedule but it’s actually a different feature of the brand voice.

Andrea:  Hmmm yeah.  These are all really fantastic tips and examples.  I know that you’ve already mentioned that you care in a sense because it’s almost a matter of justice for you or taking care of these front line people, why do care about these topics so much?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  That’s the Adam and Eve of questions isn’t it?

Andrea:  Yeah.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, life work has been to help people write better.  So that’s kind of simple.  You know, I’ve been working in this field a long time and it means a lot to me for that reason.  I think, I’ve seen people grow a lot and that’s very meaningful to me.  Sometimes I help cause that growth, sometimes I was just at their shoulder while it happened.  I do think that having me around helps people believe they can grow and be better writers. I also think that when you’re at work, some of the widest range of skills you have to come up with are ones you exercise in writing, and you’re rarely notified beforehand that you’ll need them.  So if you’re a salesman or a saleswoman, you know you have to be able to give pitch and use it powerfully, you know that.  But did you also know that you might have to write a blog post about a new offering that your company had, maybe not.  But nobody says to you, “I just want you to get ready.  You may have to write a blog post.”  Nobody says that, they say, “Next Tuesday, we need you to do a blog post.” It’s kind of like being the person who picks up the golf balls at the driving range, you know, there’s just all of these things coming at you.  All of these writing responsibilities even something as mundane as a substantive email to your boss is a challenging writing responsibility.  So I believe people deserve the support to accommodate these changing demands.

Andrea:  Absolutely!  OK, Leslie, you are doing a session with another colleague, Smart Customer Service conference here in April 2019, can you tell us just a little bit about it?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  I’ll be glad to.  I’m speaking with Jeff Toister who is a close friend of mine and a much admired colleague in the customer service.  I think over the last five years Jeff has run a survey at least three times to find out what are customers’ expectations for email response time. So, let’s say you have an insurance policy, you have an insurance policy and you have a question about it and you email in to your insurance company asking the question, how soon do you expect an answer.  And it won’t be any surprise to anybody that people are expecting answers from companies via email really quickly, much more quickly than they used to. I believed Jeff did his survey for the first time in 2012 or 2013 and I think response time has shown by half.  So he’ll talk about the results of his survey and the insights he has _____ from it.  And I will talk about how to answer that quickly without using formed letters all the time or without sounding like a robot or a company that just doesn’t care.  That’s what we’ll be doing.

Andrea:   It sounds very exciting and it sounds interesting as well.  Thank you so much for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast.  We will have links to the Smart Customer Service conference in the show notes.  But also, I know that you offer some things as well, can you tell us just a little bit about that then, Leslie?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  I’d be glad to connect with anyone who’s listening on Twitter.  And I’m proud to say that there’s no photos of eggs Benedict in my Twitter.  It’s all about writing.  So I’m at LeslieO.  I’m not Leslie zero, I’m Leslie O, and of course, I blog at Writing Matters at my website ewriteonline.com. And I am really open to conversations about what’s bugging you as you write or how you’ve grown.  In fact, I’m the person who wants to hear how happy you are with something you wrote, because I’ll be happy too.  That kind of joy carries over. So if you have questions about how to respond to your customers or you want to show me something you’re using in a newsletter or another publication and just get my feedback, _____.

Andrea:  Oh that sounds great!  And you truly are a joy, Leslie.  Thank you for being here.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  It’s my pleasure!  Thank you for listening as we were talking before it’s an honor to be listened to.  I really appreciate it.  Thanks for the great questions.

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How to Build a Culture of Respect with Kristie Rogers

Episode 80

Kristie Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Management at Marquette University. Her research focuses on how people define themselves and experience respect at work. Kristie’s research has been published in top-tier management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review. In episode 75 of the Voice of Influence podcast, I talked about an article Kristie wrote in the Harvard Business review and I’m delighted to have her on the show today so can take a deeper dive into her work. In this episode, Kristie talks about how she conducts her research in a qualitative way and what that means, why she’s passionate about sharing the work experiences of people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so, the personal reason for why she chose to focus her research on the topic of respect in the workplace, her thoughts the definitions of owed and earned respect, how an employee feeling both types of respects benefits the employer as well as the employee, the detrimental effects to violations of respect in the workplace, the connection between respect and the employee feeling their voice matters, and more!

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Kristie Rogers and she is an Assistant Professor of Management at Marquette University.  Her research focuses on how people define themselves and experience respect at work. Kristie’s research is published in top-tier management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, which is where I found Kristie.  She wrote the article last summer, Do Your Employees Feel Respected?  

Andrea:  So Kristie, I’m so thrilled to have you today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Oh thank you, Andrea, I’m happy to be here.

Andrea:  This is going to be fun.  I already talked a little bit about your article in a podcast episode just a couple of weeks ago in episode #75.  So this is going to be a much deeper dive and we get to speak with the actual author of the article so that’s exciting. So, Kristie, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?  What is that mean to focus on and help people to find themselves and experience respect at work?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Certainly.  I’m a professor and I teach, of course, in the college of business and do research and organization related to topics like respect, identity, how people connect with their organizations and positive organizational behavioral topics more broadly.  My research is primarily qualitative, meaning that I collect data largely through interviews and observation to see important phenomena through the eyes of the people living it. So, I love getting out into organizational settings into different companies and trying to walk beside and understands those experiences.  I’m especially passionate about sharing the work experiences of those who may not, otherwise, have a voice to do so and may have really unique experiences that we can learn a lot from.

Andrea:  OK, what do you mean by that, the last statement that you made about sharing the work experiences with people who have, otherwise, the voice to do so, what does that mean?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yeah, so as I said, I’m a management researcher, and business school research tends to be in very traditional context.  So 9 to 5 jobs professionals, occupations that are studied quite often and there’s a lot to learn from left conventional settings and from the people who maybe don’t have as much power in the organizations but tends not to be the focus of research.  So that’s somewhere that is particularly interesting to me to capture those experiences that may not, otherwise, be shared.

Andrea:   I’m really curious.  I mean, this all relates back to your article and the research that you did specifically on respects here, but why did you decide to research this topic of respect?  Why these people and why…do you have a personal stake on this or if you have a personal kind of connection to you at all?

Kristie Mae Rogers: I do.  So before I pursued my Ph.D., I worked as a stage manager on remote broadcast for sports productions, so ESPN, ABC Sports.  And I remember having experiences that should have been very similar, like games that were roughly the same time of day had about the same profile of the teams; the scores weren’t even that different. And the experience itself, the way it felt, and how the crew gelled was extremely different across these experiences.  And I asked the sideline reporter; I said “What is the difference here?”  And he said “Respect plays such a huge ball, and without it, you can see broadcast fell apart, you can see some of those mistakes on air.  But when it’s there, it’s completely different and a far more pleasant experience.” So then when I got into the Ph.D. program, I came across an interesting puzzle in management research that aligned with my firsthand experiences and others I’ve heard.  So Christine Porath has surveyed tens of thousands of employees around the world and finds that respect is the number one thing that employee’s desire from their leaders.  And Christine is an stability and instability expert. I’ve looked deeper into this research and found that although other service indicate this is so important, we also see that a vast majority of people do not feel adequately respected at work.  So I asked myself, how can this be?  This is free to give and it’s invaluable to those who receive it.  There has to be more going on here.

Andrea:  That’s great!  That’s so interesting!  I love hearing the background of why you decided to pursue this.  So alright, so you decided to pursue this, and would you share with us a little bit about your hypothesis and how you were approaching your research for this article, in particular, and kind of a general description of what you did?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Uh-hmmm, sure.  I didn’t go in with a hypothesis because this was qualitative inductive research.  I was looking to build theory more than draw on what we already knew. So I was looking to fill some gaps by taking a really deep dive.  And my main research question going into this was, how do employees experience respect and why does it matter? So interestingly, as I got into this study which I’ll tell you more about certainly, I never directly ask about respect.  I was never the one to bring it up in the conversations.  I asked interview questions that I thought might lead there but I didn’t want to prime them with respect or shape their experience in any way.  So I think it really speaks to how important it was to the employees to think that I didn’t even ask directly about this and this is what I received back.

Andrea:  Hmmm, great.  Keep going, keep going.

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Alright.  I’ll tell you a little bit more just about the context why I chose it and how I ended up doing the research that I did.  So the setting for my research is a company called Televerde.  They do business to business marketing for high tech firms largely lead generation and those types of outbound calls. So I was working on my Ph.D. at Arizona State and the W.P. Carey School of Business had an awards luncheon where they recognized local businesses who were doing great things.  Honestly, I was unsure about whether or not I should attend this, “Was it the things I should be doing on that day?”  And I couldn’t be happier that I did because this was my initial exposure to Televerde. So this company won an award for the most innovative business model and they employ inmates inside the female state prison in Arizona.  And seeing of the accompanying video of the women working inside of call centers that are in the prison making very technical phone calls and doing sophisticated work, the women talked about how life-changing experience was on the video. The CEO accepted the award that day and he said, these women are just like any of the women in your lives that they’ve made a wrong turn and they deserve a chance to succeed.  And he was emotional and he was passionate and I was just in awe of what they’re doing. So I left telling my Ph.D. advisor, “This is exactly where I want to study, Respect, and pursue my dissertation research here.”  So there were many hurdles that came with that.  It’s quite difficult to do research in a prison but the company was receptive and so I’m so grateful for that.  Also, I got to be there and watch newcomers adjust to the job.  I followed those women through their program over the course of about 15 months, but I tracked quite closely the women starting the job and their experience over their first six to nine months working there.

Andrea:  What kind of things did you see that indicated that respect was such an important piece of their own success, their success as an agent and their success as just a developing person?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  So, I definitely saw both pieces, and many of the outcomes that I observed revolved around either individual or employee wellbeing or around their performance at work, and those two certainly tied together.  But I think it helps first to get into what respect is and that helps understand what drove those outcomes.

Andrea:  Sure!

Kristie Mae Rogers:  I think one of the reasons there is confusion around respect is that it’s used to mean different things.  So although the word respect is used often, when you dig into the literature on respect and the experiences that people have around it, there are really two types and they’re very different.  So, owed respect is a type of respect that’s given equally to every member of a group of an organization.  It isn’t based on anything unique to a person.  It can’t be earned, it can’t be lost.  This is important because an employee perceives their owed respect as signaling whether or not they belong in that company, in that organization and if they are included by others.

Andrea:  Can I ask real quick?  What is owed respect kind of look like?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  So owed respect is something you would see that is directed to everyone in the company or there would be norms around this that are not specific to the person.  So it might be policies that are very supportive and taken to account that these people are valuable and signals that in some way. So to give you an example at Televerde when I started observing the women, I watched them go through two weeks of intense classroom training where they earned community college business credits through the course of this.  And they were educated in business and organizational structure and technology, the things they certainly needed to know for the job. But there was also this granting of responsibility and were willing to invest in you and help you get going with your education.  It was an opportunity and a chance that the employee may not received before.  There is also can be something far more subtle that you see employees greet one another when they see each other in the hallway, just a general signaling of value and worth to others in the organization.

Andrea:  OK that makes sense.  So I’ve heard you say something along the lines of a regard and kind of honoring each other and that sort of thing.  That makes sense to me that people need that in order to feel that they belong and that they are a part of the group, that they’re a part of the company, really.

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Alright, so take us into earned respect, what is this?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  So earned respect is based on behaviors or attributes of an individual.  So this acknowledges of someone’s uniqueness, their performance in positive ways and lets the person know that he or she is positively regarded by others speaking to their need for status essentially or to feel that others value your skill set. So this is the type of respect that you earned by performing well and by meeting or exceeding the standards of the organization has played out for you or for your role, but this can also be about attributes. So at Televerde during the training period, the women had done personality profiles to understand who they were in this sitting and when the trainers help them make sense of it, they would say, “You know, OK, you are very extroverted and you have really high attention to detail and here how’s that gonna serve you really in the role that you’re starting.”  So recognizing that they are unique individuals and there isn’t just one mold that they needed to fit was very powerful. But then also knowing that there was a very clear standard that they needed to meet and it was a high standards, and when they meet that they were recognized for doing so.  Their accomplishments were celebrated and they weren’t left wondering “What is my performance compared to the person next to me?  Is this good enough?”  There were very clear markings of what was expected and how you were doing relative to that.

Andrea:  By taking these assessments or doing this personality training, they’re understanding themselves more as an individual and yet, this is a job that in many cases or in many situations, companies work at their call centers as a situation where you’re supposed to fit into a mold or there is a sense of, “This is what we’re trying to accomplish.  There’s a common goal with every call,” or that sort of thing.  So how do you see these two things coming together?  I think that they do and I think it’s beautiful, but what’s your take on the idea that they are individuals and yet being able to be that individual even though the goal still the same for everybody?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yes and especially given this type of work, I think that’s a wonderful question.  All employees want to feel that they belong to something but also feel that they are unique within that setting as well, not just an interchangeable part of the whole.  And at Televerde, they’re very clear that they didn’t have scripts for the calls and they wanted these women to be incredibly knowledgeable and to have the agency to drive the conversation. And I think by empowering them to interject themselves into what could, otherwise, feel very robotic, it was humanizing for them and helped them see that “Oh OK, I can be me and I can be this professional.”  And putting those two things together, potentially for the first time, was very powerful to how they saw themselves and envision who they would be going forward with their careers.

Andrea:  OK, so it’s so clear to me how this is so good for the individual, for the employee, how is this good for the company?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  So there are a couple of ways that I think this is great news for all companies.  The first is, the better you understand respect, the better you can see that this isn’t just something that’s nice to have, it’s something you need to have if you want your employees to be performing at their very best.  But because they feel that they are valued and that they are in a situation where they can become the best version of themselves, they’re willing to engage and to invest more. When they could strike that great balance of owed respect, the sense that everyone here is valued and worthy of being here but then also receiving their earned respect for the things that they were doing really well, it created the perfect recipe for performance.  They felt safe enough to take chances and to try things out but they also knew that when they did things well, it was recognized and that reinforce those behaviors. I think it’s especially important if you want to retain employees to help them see that this is a place where you can continue to grow and that we value you for who you are.  And regardless of the setting, I think that’s incredibly beneficial to both the company and the employees.

Andrea:  I do too.  It’s great to hear it from a researcher.  I think you mentioned something about the Televerde employees connecting to the values of the company, at some point I think I heard you say something about that.  How did you see that happening and what difference do you think that that made in their sense of respect?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yeah.  So the values were something a source of pride for Televerde and something they shared with employees on day one.  Having someone come in to the training session and say, here is this value and here’s what this really means, and to even give examples of here’s how this come to life in my day-to-day work from several people who would they would see at high levels of the organization. But many of them who have jobs with any large organization in the past would say, “I’ve heard this before; our company have values, they have missions but I have to be skeptical.  I have to question whether or not this is real.”  So on day one, they heard about this and it was their initial exposure but this really came to life through interactions with leaders but then even more so through their peers. So they would say to me that something becomes real when we hear it from someone in ‘orange’ or who had been an ‘orange’ because they understand the position I’m in right now and I know that they’ll give me the real story.  So, Televerde did a great job of closing the loop on that, you know, bringing women back who had been released and were successful in their careers and talking about their transitions and the hard part and the great part, giving them mentors who had more experience than knowledge but were similar to them and that who they felt were credible source of information. Once they got to that point that they said “I’m getting the same story from several sources,” they seemed more willing to engage and to be vulnerable and that’s when they really felt that they could give their all to this job and see where it took them.  Many of the women has helped them developed professional skill set, a resume.  They had transition workshops that helped them gain all the skills both for life and for work that they would need upon release and it dramatically reduce recidivism rate. The recidivism rate is typically about 66% for this population, and at the time that I was doing the research with Televerde, it was s11% of the women who had gone through their programs and who had worked for their company.

Andrea:  Oh that’s fantastic!  This is what it means to have a real cultural, you know, to be integrated into the culture and to really have it make a difference.  It doesn’t really just to say something to say you value something or to say that these things matter.  It doesn’t make as much difference until it envelops you.  That’s the picture I was having when you were describing women coming back and saying “Now, this is how it changed me.” And it just sounded like you know like when you’re really enveloped into a culture that truly believes on these things and does these things that you’d say they value, it’s just so significant in terms of what you can really believe and putting forth all that effort in making that change.  That’s fantastic! So how do you see this really applying to other kind of business situations across other call centers, but also other customer service or other situations where maybe the executive or the managers don’t even realize that they’re not being respectful or that they’re not communicating that respect?  How can they do a better job?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yeah and this was a large motivation for me in writing the Harvard Business Review article.  I wanted to get this idea out there for people who could really use them, and especially speaking to managers, and those on leadership roles to help them see that they might be buffered from this need.  So if you are in a leadership position, if you’re in a managerial role and people likely treat you quite well day to day.  And if that need is meet for you, you’re unlikely to be sensitive to that need in others. So my hope is that this would be eye-opening for many people that this is what others are grappling with when they’re at work, “Am I really valued here?  Where those cues coming from?”  And certainly the sense that avoiding at all cost, the no news is good news that people need to hear that they are valued and that the work they’re doing is meeting or exceeding expectations and that recognition goes along way. Now, violations of respect on the other hand, can have really detrimental effects.  The experiments show when people feel disrespected, they can’t be as attentive to the work they’re doing and either intentionally or unintentionally decreased their effort and their performance. So understanding the flipside of this is also very important as well.  But my hope is that this balance between owed and earned is on the radar for more leaders because of this research.  And this is a tricky balance, owed respect is all about treating everyone equally and earned respect is about equity, giving people what they’ve earned. And keeping both of those in play in ways that they don’t undermine one another is critical and may not be an explicit task for a leader or a manager but something they should be attentive to in an ongoing way.

Andrea:  OK, so one more question for you and I’d like your take on how respect plays into whether or not somebody has a voice and whether or not they feel like they matter.  So do you see these two things as being equal or what is the relationship between having a voice and respect?

Kristie Mae Rogers:  So, when someone feels respected, when they feel that they are valued that’s when they mostly to utilize their voice thinking that what they have to say will be valued as well.  If the power distance status differences are really clear in the organization and there’s not the sense that everyone here is valued from the lowest to the highest level of the organization, in a basic, way that everyone is treated with worth, why would you take the risk of exercising your voice if you don’t believe you’ll be heard.  So I see respect as something that leads in a positive way to utilizing voice constructively.

Andrea:  I would certainly agree.  Alright, Kristie this has been great.  I really appreciate you taking time to share your research and your perspective on this with our audience because it’s such an important thing for us to take into consideration.  I think just like we talked about privilege and being you know not realizing how it’s difficult for somebody else to go through their lives or experience the things that they experienced because we’d haven’t had to experience them herself we’re just totally ignorant to that. It sounds like it’s very similar to what you’re describing here about respect and the varying levels of hierarchy in an organization.  And so we all need to be more empathetic to everybody else’s perception and their need.  I think that that’s what influences about as well, is like really having that sense or what is the perception not just what am I saying, “How am I being proceed.  Do they really feel respected?”  So this is fantastic.  I appreciate also the difference between owed and earned respect and having that framework to think through this in the future.  So thank you so much, Kristy.  I appreciate you being here on the Voice of Influence podcast

Kristie Mae Rogers:  Yes absolutely, and thank you for doing this.