quality assurance Archives

Unlocking Promise, Potential, and Purpose Through Effective and Personalized Coaching

10 February 2026

Great leaders don’t just want better performance — they want to help their people unlock something deeper: their inherent promise (the spark of talent), potential (untapped capacity), and purpose (meaningful direction that improves lives).

The most effective way to do this? A powerful combination of training and personalized coaching. But too many organizations treat them as interchangeable — missing out on real transformation. Here’s the clear difference, and why both are essential for human-centered growth.

What Training Does — Building the Foundation- Training

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Technology Can’t Replace the Human Touch

8 January 2026

Ever been stuck in an endless chatbot loop, typing “agent” 10 times trying to speak to a real person?
Customer service is being dehumanized- and it’s frustrating customers and burning out teams.
Don’t get me wrong: AI and tech are amazing for handling simple, repetitive queries quickly and at scale.
But technology can’t replace the human touch. Empathy, active listening, creative problem-solving- that turn frustrated customers into loyal ones.
Recent surveys back this up:
· 93% of consumers prefer

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Skills Base Program Improves Your Team and Customer Care

20 May 2025

Tooty Inc. has a solution to reduce costly mistakes, improve customer care, and establish higher service standards.

Lori Miller, President of Tooty Inc., stated, “Customers want to be served by representatives who are more than friendly personalities. They want to be helped by someone who knows how to assess their needs, provide accurate information and appropriate solutions in a timely manner. That level of service does not come about through a motivational customer service training program. It requires accurate assessment of customer service representatives’ skills

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Tooty Inc. Offers Skills Based Program to Improve Customer Care

30 September 2024

Tooty Inc. offers a time-tested solution to reduce costly mistakes, improve customer care, and establish higher service standards.

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Your Customers Detest 3 Things

19 December 2023

People everywhere detest long-hold times, being passed around from one person to the next, and yes- A.I. posing as a real person.

Long hold time stats from your phone system can point the finger at staffing issues but long hold times also diagnose inefficiency. Here at Tooty Inc., we listen to and evaluate thousands of customer conversations every year and have found that often times the calls stacking up in the queue are due to individuals being poorly trained on product and service information and being unsure of the protocols for resolving issues.

Passing

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Training Your Second-String Customer Service Team

26 July 2018

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 and employee performance evaluation scores do reveal what your customers are experiencing right now. My conversations with managers during June and July revealed that untrained back-up Customer Service and Sales representatives are causing more harm than good.

Selecting your second-string players

In a perfect world everyone within the office would be ready, willing and able to back-up customer service or sales. Use this check-list as you consider who your second-string players should be:

Must have a nice voice
Must love our customers and people in general
Can step away from other duties to talk with customers
Is a team player

Training your second-string players

No one performs well when they are thrown into something without training and practice. Training should begin 1-2 weeks before you expect the person to start taking calls, but it doesn’t have to take 1-2 weeks. The best process to develop someone who has helped in the past or who is new to customer service or sales should include:

Side-by-side training with your best representative where he/she can hear the conversation and observe how the technology is used. Let the individual handle customer calls

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Inspiration for Sales and Customer Service Teams

6 November 2017

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 invested time and tears in shaping excellent customer service representatives, and in some cases, turning around their teams. They have some great ideas to share which should inspire you to do something different with your team as you press towards the finish line for 2017.
Charelle is ex-military and she ran her team with the chain of command approach and had distanced herself from the individuals on her team. When the team was not achieving their goals, she re-evaluated what she was doing and adjusted her management style. She intentionally got involved with each person on a personal level and noticed that when she showed she cared, everyone performed better.
Unique motivation and rewards:
1) Individuals earn wings for every 100 Tooty score and they compete to see who has the most.
2) When customer service representatives, CSRs, achieve their 10th 100 score they are rewarded with a great lunch along with a letterman’s jacket.
3) They love games and frequently play Tooty bingo with a reward of a gift card for the winner. They spent 8 months playing Wheel of Fortune and if a CSR received a 100 score she would have 5 seconds to guess a letter and 10 seconds to solve the puzzle. The winner received a $250.00 gift card.
Rohannah has a big customer service department and moving their average performance score up by 10 points this year has been a monumental accomplishment for all of them. She has created 2 teams within the department led by her 2 lead CSRs. They created smaller teams of 3 individuals who take turns role-playing and scoring each other every month to make sure that when they talk to customers they are doing their best.
Unique motivation and rewards:
1) Parking is a big deal. The individual with the best monthly performance score and year-to-date-average will have the CSR of the Month Parking spot close to the door!

Talair has created a team culture in her department by strategically placing customer service representatives in smaller teams so they can help each other and work towards a common goal. Teams are changed regularly to build co-worker relationships. She has found that no one wants to let their team down, so they try harder and do better than if their recognition was focused on individual performance.
Unique motivation and rewards:
1) The manager will sing to his CSRs (which I have witnessed) and rewards high performers by having them be his co-manager for a half-day. He makes a big deal of their successes, but doesn’t gloss over failures.
2) CSRs can earn a mini fish tank to have on their desks if they have a 100-average score for a quarter. Talair didn’t anticipate what a motivator this was. The fish-tank-challenge brought them all together and stopped negative conversations as they talked about everything from fish food to decorating.

I’d love to hear from you regarding your teaching and coaching challenges and successes when it comes to training millennials versus GenX and Baby Boomers. We all need to implement more effective training techniques. Please contact me: lori_miller@tootyinc.com and I will be happy to share great options with you for classroom training and interactive webinars for 2018.

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Do Unhappy Customers Scare You?

23 August 2017

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 teamwork between the departments. It also means everyone needs to take an honest look at the difficult conversations your representatives are having each day and decide upon the right processes and solutions.

Using Tooty to Test Your Team
Do you regularly have customers (internal or external) asking to speak with a manager because they feel they aren’t getting answers or that the representative had a bad attitude? Not all customers are irrational and not all of your representatives have bad attitudes. The truth and the solutions can be found through a tried and tested process of using our secret shoppers to make calls into your departments. Testing each person on the same challenging situations allows you to determine who your best people are, what additional training is needed and whether a certain process is working or not. Tooty has the expertise to evaluate and train the following departments:
• Customer service
• Inside sales
• Operations
• Collections/accounting
• IT/Help desk
• HR

If you have a call monitoring program in place, Tooty has the expertise to evaluate those calls and provide you with fresh insights and new training tools. If your team needs some extra help in handling difficult customers, take the time to role-play demanding situations. The practice is necessary to overcome nervousness.
One customer recently commented that because Tooty secret shoppers projected difficult attitudes in the calls it has helped her to flush out specific areas that her staff needs to work on. Our classroom training is fantastic and helps to overcome the fear of dealing with difficult people. We have great tips including phrases to use to calm a difficult person and point out certain things you should never say to an unhappy customer. Most people have never been trained on how to use their voice to sound confident or calm, for example. Voice training is a regular part of Tooty training. A customer service manager recently shared that, “Tooty Training is excellent and the secret to our success.”

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Customer Service Department Efficiency

3 May 2017

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

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Patience and Understanding

3 November 2016

I did some volunteer work with a group of first graders and one of our lessons focused on patience. It is endearing when a 6 year old scrunches her nose and asks, “Patience? What is that?” But, I admit I am more likely to throw my hands in the air as I shout, “Patience? What is that?” because there are days when it seems as if people are unable to tolerate anything that doesn’t go according to plan. Like you, I have many inconveniences that cross my path every day. It could be unexpected computer issues, airport delays or unreasonable people. On a recent trip during the height of the TSA delays at O’Hare, I remember looking at my boarding pass and the usual TSA pre-check was missing. I did not prepare for the extra time it would now take to wait in the long lines like everybody else and risked missing my flight. I wanted someone to take responsibility for my dilemma. I wanted to lash out. Then I took a deep breath and remembered that the way I act and respond during the unexpected things that life throws my way matters.
In customer service we are often hit with the unexpected. A truck issue can put a route behind which generates unexpected calls from customers. The computers may be slow which means it takes longer to help a customer and adds to the hold time for others. Or, a co-worker may call off sick and now you are trying to manage short-handed. Each of the scenarios I described represents something unexpected over which you have no control, but they are also situations where you have an opportunity to choose your response.

Recently, we conducted a test during which we spoke with customer service representatives and said, “You people are impossible to get a hold of” as we stated that we left 2 messages and no one called back.
Some of the reactionary responses we heard were:
1) We have been really busy and only have 2 people in the office.
2) Where did you leave the messages?
3) Did you call in during our hours?
4) I’ve worked here for 2 years and people say the opposite- that we are easy to get a hold of.
5) Did you actually reach the voice mail?
6) We had a lot of call volume the last couple of weeks.
7) We just took over a new company and we’ve got tons and tons of new clients calling.
When the words a customer uses are accusatory and the tone of voice is negative we are likely to react with our words and our tone of voice. Take a breath, smile and be prepared to offer a response that doesn’t make the situation worse.
Consider using phrases such as:
1) Thank you for taking the time to call us today.
2) I can see why you feel the way you do and I will help you.
3) I am sorry to hear that you have been having issues with you service. I’d like the opportunity to correct them for you.

Let your patience and understanding be the unexpected customer experience that separates you from other companies.

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