Today the phone will ring into your organization and if you are lucky, you will have a golden opportunity to sell your services, help a citizen or solve a problem. Having a great sales and marketing strategy or a fantastic CRM tool is one part of the equation. But, the customer’s impression of your organization through a customer service or sales representative can make or break the deal. At Tooty, we have a unique point of view to share with you because we FEEL what customers go through as we make secret shopper calls and listen into monitored conversations each week. Based on over 2,000
Voice, Attitude and Wording Shape Image
How many words does it take for you to determine if the customer on the other end of the line is in a bad mood? One? Maybe two? You hear your customer’s voice and you can’t help but start to pass judgment on cranky old Mr. Smith. After the conversation is over, you turn to your co-worker and say, “You won’t believe the jerk I just spoke with!” Your teammate nods her head and smiles as she says, “Wait until I tell you about mine!” Before you know it, everyone is talking about their customer as that jerk or that idiot that needs to get some manners.
How many words do
Training Your Second-String Customer Service Team
Summer vacations leave your office short-handed. Often-times you find you must recruit someone to help with the phones who has not been trained or who isn’t working in customer service for a reason! Customers tend to wait on hold longer when you aren’t fully staffed, and they are likely to get incorrect information or incomplete help which generates additional calls. Training your second-string customer service representatives allows you to utilize your personnel more effectively and to be prepared for anything that affects customer care.
Tooty Secret Shopper Calls
I Hate Scripts
You and I have heard the declaration “I hate scripts!” more than once. We aren’t going to dwell on why you or someone you work with might get angry at the mention of a script. I want to point out what you and your team are missing when these great tools are left to gather dust on the corner of the desk.
Celebrating an individual’s improvement
Hunter is a CSR at the Orlando District and she has been with Waste Connections for almost a year. Her Tooty scores were up and down and she was frustrated by the scripts. During our coaching session together, she shared that she was
Action Versus Intention
In customer service our attention tends to go towards putting out fires. Goals for improving or changing a process are put on the back burner for so long that we forget we ever had goals. It’s exciting and motivating to be able to share with you how others have been able to improve and innovate while handling the day to day demands that revolve around customer care. For all of us it is about taking head-knowledge, what we know about, and putting it into action.
Let me introduce you to 3 women of action!
Cynthia has been a Customer Service Representative since 2016. During the annual Tooty Training program, we focused on selling services- business to business. The Tooty script is great, but CSRs admitted they may only get 1 or 2 calls for new service in a month and aren’t confident when it comes to recommending service. I suggested that if there was someone who was talented with excel that the formula offered during training could be turned into an amazing tool that would allow a CSR or inside sales rep to enter in some details from the script and quickly determine a service that would best fit the customer’s needs. Cynthia not only offered to do it but, followed through! The tool will also shorten talk time.
In her role as Customer Service Manager, Destini attended the webinar Tooty offers to managers. The office had staffing issues. Destini said, “Our jobs are more than head count and phone calls”, which is what she discovered after she used the work-time-study formula provided by Lori Miller to document the number of customers that came to the office, inbound and outbound calls and customer e-mails. This data helped Destini and upper management make an informed decision about staffing.
Deana had been a CSR for just over a year before receiving the award as a 2017 Top 10 CSR in all of North America for Waste Connections. Her average for 2017 was 99! Deana said, “If I can do it, I know that you can do it. Just use the tools provided and the sky is the limit!” While on site providing one-on-one coaching to CSRs we noticed that small details that impact customer service and accuracy were not given attention. Every CSR had a different level of knowledge and there wasn’t time to share facts during the day. As the new Lead CSR, Deana took a Tooty suggestion to create a “Did you know” board where CSRs are incentivized to share what they learn each day- ah ha moments.
We don’t get very far by thinking about or wishing for things to be better. Action steps and deadlines make a difference.
Who Is Your Customer
During a recent training session, I asked someone who is designated as a back-up to answering the phones who her customers were. She was confident in her response, “I don’t have customers. I don’t have anyone from the outside call me.” I explained that customer service isn’t a job title, but a trait a person has. It is about understanding who you interact with each day and being intentional about helping him or her to the best of your abilities. It’s about serving people. She caught on quickly and came to understand that her customers were most
Inspiration for Sales and Customer Service Teams
Where does your inspiration come from? Let me be more specific. Where do you go for fresh ideas to motivate your team? Possibly you have had a rough month or two with weather related heartaches, price increases, technology or attendance issues. For some of you it has been all of the above! Some of you are watching your team’s performance scores like a hawk and others are in a rebuilding phase and want to finish the 4th quarter well so that they can build momentum for 2018. I had the honor of interviewing 3 Customer Service Managers who have
Do Unhappy Customers Scare You?
What is more intimidating than an angry customer complaining about service? An angry business customer complaining about service! Customer service and sales representatives have confessed that they are nervous when they hear a harsh tone of voice or have a business manager complain that he has called multiple times for the same thing. Costly short-cuts and ineffective solutions are used to get the unhappy person off the line as quickly as possible. Your team can confidently interact with the customers and provide right solutions, but it will take training and
Customer Service Training- Eye on the Ball
In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after a 108-year drought. The drought was not only the longest in major league baseball, but according to Wikipedia it was the longest in all major North American sports. They had great players, managers and games along the way and still didn’t achieve their goal of a World Series Win. The Cubs needed something. They were missing the special sauce needed to be a championship team.
Crane Kenney, the Cub’s President of Business Operations said this, “There’s a saying in business that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’
Customer Service Department Efficiency
I recently had a manager ask me why having a customer hold for over 10 minutes deserved a zero score. She rationalized her location’s long hold times by saying she had waited on hold for 30 minutes with a vendor when she called her corporate office. Although a 10-minute hold is better than a 30-minute hold, long hold times point out inefficiencies within a company or a department. The top reasons for having long hold times include:
1) short staffed
2) phones and/or computers go down
3) new business
How can you know if your customer service department
