Speak Up When Agents Make Mistakes | Speak Against Bad Customers

Call Center IQ looks at two stories today. One reveals the cost of a contact center agent’s silence. The other reveals the value of speaking against certain customers.

Speak Up In The Contact Center

No contact center is immune from poor customer service. No matter how well-trained the agents and how customer-centric the culture, mistakes will be made. Misguided decisions will be rendered.

When an agent makes one of those errors, do his peers report the error? Do they personally attempt to remedy the situation? Do they stay silent?

If they err on the side of silence, they could be costing their businesses customers – and profit.

Per a study sanctioned by VitalSmarts, "each employee who witnesses bad customer service and fails to speak up costs the company an average of $54,511 per year."

The cause of this problematic outcome? The clear link between poor service experiences and revenue.

According to the study, the average employee witnesses 19 instances of poor service. Collectively, those incidents result in a 17% drop in annual revenue per customer.

The link is unsurprising.

75% of B2C customers, the study notes, say poor experiences affect the business they do a company by 50% or more.

The findings are irrefutably troubling, but should we really hold silent agents accountable?

The data says yes.

VitalSmarts’ report adds that while only 7% of employees will consistently "speak up" when they witness poor service experiences, 66% are capable of solving the problems.

Silent agents are not, therefore, simply refraining from reporting failed service incidents. They are failing to report incidents that should have never occurred, let alone gone without immediate remedy.

Given the natural camaraderie that exists between employees, few will possess an affinity to "tattle" on their fellow agents. Eliminating the harm of silence is not a simple endeavor.

It is not, however, an impossible one.

Insofar as 66% of employees say they would have been capable of solving the problem, it is clear the business is facing issues with training, knowledge management, and routing. The agents who are best suited for a particular customer and/or issues are not necessarily the ones involved in the interaction.

That needs to change. To the best extent possible, agents need to be trained on the complete palette of relevant skills and information. They must also have a full suite of knowledge at their disposal. The idea of an agent being unequipped to handle all but the most unique and outrageous of inquiries should be unfathomable.

If specialization is deemed necessary, it is the business’ job to route inquiries based on agent specialization. The agent best suited for a particular issue should always be the one addressing that issue.

Culture also plays a relevant role. By stressing the idea that the voice of the customer – not the "boss" or his old-world metrics – is the ultimate barometer of performance, businesses foster an environment that minimizes errors and maximizes resolve.

The culture should be such that an agent never fears "deep diving" into a call – even if it results in a higher average handle time (the same also applies to transferring calls to better equipped personnel). The agent should never fear coming to the aid of an employee in need – even if it means he can answer fewer of his "own" calls in the interim.

In a customer-centric culture, the stigma associated with "reporting" a fellow agent to supervisors vanishes. The business, trusting that the underperforming agent is doing his best to put the customer first, would see the report as a call for better coaching rather than as an accusation of negligence. The business will take the initiative to help the agent who requires it, and the one who did the reporting will feel no guilt over a supposed betrayal.

Silence is costly in the contact center, but it does not have to be. Begin by removing the mistakes. If no agent’s behavior is errant, there will be nothing about which to stay silent.

When mistakes happen, assure agents feel as if reporting the matter helps the business, the customer, and the agent. Do not reduce the reporting process into a battle between agents, because the bond between leadership and agent will rarely eclipse that between agent and agent.

Speak Against Bad Customers

In the aforementioned story – and in most customer management articles – we view customer attrition as an inherent, irrefutable negative. It is the business’ job to retain customers rather than lose them.

In the real world, it is important to recognize there is nothing inherent, irrefutable or unequivocal about the aversion to customer attrition.

What if your business truly cannot help a given customer? By allowing that customer to leave and not attempting to sneakily or forcibly serve him an ill-suited experience, you build far more long-term trust. You prove the extent to which you are committed to maximizing the value of the customer’s experience, and you assure you will be the first brand the customer considers if and when your business does begin to meet his needs.

What if you do not want to be in business with a given customer? What if appeasing that particular customer would require you to abandon your values? What if rejecting that customer would actually reaffirm your commitment to others?

Those questions form the philosophical basis for "firing" a customer. Instead of silently accepting that the customer, no matter how wrong and no matter how disrespectful, is right, "firing" a customer involves saying "no." It involves saying "we do not agree with you, and we do not want your business."

Businesses should not fire customers liberally or haphazardly. At the end of the day, today’s customers do have power, and organizations that consistently honor that power are the ones that will secure market share. Moreover, a customer’s disagreeability often is the fault (whether directly or indirectly) of the business itself. If a business "fires" the angry customer without truly understanding what made the customer angry, it will miss out on a valuable learning opportunity. It will fail to understand what went wrong and thus fail to understand the need – let alone how – to make things right.

Sometimes, however, it is clear that the experience was either absent a mistake or at least absent a deviation from the brand’s core promise and identity. The angry customer – and/or that angry customer’s perspective – is an unwarranted, unwanted affront to the business, and the only course of action is to part ways.

That is the circumstance in which Anchorage’s Little Italy Restaurante opted to "fire" a disgruntled customer.

"Over the weekend we received a complaint about one of our delievery drivers. The customer wasn't simply complaining, he was ranting and foul. He informed us our driver was an idiot and strung out on drugs and was FURIOUS," explained the restaurant’s owner P.J. Gialopsos on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

The delivery driver, as it turns out, was not on drugs. He was not consciously devaluing or disrespecting the customer. He has autism, and occasional awkwardness and erratic behavior are the result of his condition.

In addition to complaining to the restaurant, the angry customer had apparently been disrespectful to the customer himself.

"When the driver returned, he came into my office a little shaken because the customer was angry (he had mixed up the pouch of food but quickly retrieved the correct order from his car," the story continued. "Mistakes are made all the time in the course of a business life, and when we make them we do our very best to correct the problem immediately. )...that didn't satisfy this man....he berated him and then called him a name I won't even elude to here."

While not the first to complain about the agent, the customer was the first to remain argumentative once the owner explained the agent’s condition.

Following the ordeal, the owner associated a "do not deliver" label with the customer’s phone number. It is no longer interested in the customer’s business.

Instead of igniting ire by proving that it does not believe the customer is always right, the restaurant’s story garnered passionate support and tens of thousands of likes from a public that, for the most part, sided with the business.

Was the customer entirely "wrong?" No. His delivery experience was imperfect, and conventional customer experience wisdom would suggest that the brand – not the customer – is the guilty party.

In this case, however, the business would have to sacrifice its core sense of value and identity to appease the customer. It would have to abandon its employees to appease the customer. It simply refused to do so.

When it comes to the customer experience, imperfection is not necessarily improper. For Little Italy, a commitment to employee happiness and to the protection of those with disabilities means more than an occasional, short-lived and always remedied snag in the delivery process.

Not simply an internal creed, the philosophy resonates with the business’ existing and target customers. It humanizes the business and thus demonstrates a unique appeal that could rarely be created by food or expediency alone. To abandon that for the sake of one angry customer would be to abandon its personal culture and the culture valued by its customers.

To enforce that culture, however, is to reaffirm the business’ identity and value structure. Yes, it means losing the occasional, intolerant customer, but it means reminding the balance of customers of the brand’s culture. It means attracting those who share the same ideals.

Of course there are slippery slopes associated with this mindset. Of course businesses can approach "firing" customers from a short-sighted perspective.

But if a business’ culture is indeed one worth preserving, then certain customers may indeed be worth losing.