Frontline Technical Support Conference- September 25-27,2000

Practical High-Recognition Customer Service Skills- Kate Nasser

· What you must show customers-

C oncern for their business, political, and time issues

A sk open-ended questions

R espond with positive "next steps"

E valuate options and follow-through

· There are several Don’ts that are very important when dealing with customers:

Don’t

Say I do not know- this can translate to the customer as "I do not care".

Do

Say "I do not know but I will check into it and get back to you by ……."

Don’t

• If you would just look at this logically….
• Why can’t you be more flexible?
• If you would focus on the facts rather than tangents ….
• Don’t be so sensitive and defensive…..
• Calm down
• But

Don’t

Air your dirty laundry in public!!!!! This will translate into doubt by your customers as to whether organization can provide great customer service.

Do

Note the customer’s complaints or concerns and then advise that you will raise the issues with all involved in this effort. Then really do it!

Don’t

String your customers along with sequential communication.

E.G., "This is where we are and we will get back to you in a couple of weeks."

Do

"This is what we have currently, here are the next steps, we will be taking, and we will have a project review in 2 weeks."

· A partnership must be formed with the customer. This assumes that there are responsibilities on both

sides and should be expressed beforehand.

· Benefits of logging/tracking every request:

• Follow through & follow-up

• Prevents requests from falling through the cracks

• develop trends on peaks/lows, repeat requests, abuses, etc.
• Information for justification of equipment, people, etc.
• cross train and reduce problem solving time with a learning Knowledge Base

· Important Keys to Great Customer Service Skills:

• Don’t take your customers back to the past. Use a future focus.
• Control the call not your customer.
• Step outside of your own perspective and into your customer’s
• Listen to you customer’s opinions. Take note. Avoid debating with them and doing the defensive dribble.
• Reset before each customer interaction. Answer the phone on the 2^nd ring. Breathe, Smile (inside or out)! Position yourself comfortably.
• Dance and deal with your customer’s personality. Don’t try to change it.
• Take ownership and responsibility not only for solving problems but also for preventing problems and alerting other team members to inaccuracies.
• Remember that courtesy is defined differently in different parts of this country and in different countries. Adjust accordingly.
• Work as a team. Support each other by sharing knowledge, allowing time for breaks, brainstorming improvements for customer service, understanding the diversity of personalities, considering each other’s individual ways, honestly communicating with each other.

· Develop a standard greeting but don’t make it so formalized that it sounds scripted. The basic makeup

should be to state the organization’s name, your name and then ask for the customer’s name. Then use

their name and ask how you can help them.

· Know the four C’s of Great Customer Service:

• Courtesy
• Clarity
• Commitment
• Completion

· Understand the different personality types and how to manage them:

• Amiable – focuses on personal information and speaks in a questioning mode.
• Expressive – talks a lot about the subject on hand and uses lots of examples.
• Analytic – like data, details and steps, love the logic
• Driver – end result oriented people

· Develop acute listening skills:

• Verbally cue the customer that you are listening.
• Focus on what is being said instead of thinking about the solution.
• Seek what is not being said through tone of voice, hesitation, wording and non-verbal cues (when speaking fact-to-face).
• Avoid using killer phrases like "SHOULD HAVE". Trash the "shoulds".
• Be aware of the "always" syndrome. Replace it with the blank slate attitude.
• Know your personality/social style. Learn to detect the speaker’s style.
• Understand your "natural" listening style. Learn to detect the speaker’s style.
• Understand and manage your stress reactions.

· Handling difficult customers:

• The Know-it-all - is looking for reinforcement of what they know. GIVE IT TO THEM! Use "we" terms. (E.g. Why don’t we check out the latest updates/changes.) Then proceed with specific questions.
• The Chat-a-lot – looks for connections with people. Transition them back to focus on the problem at had. Be patient.
• The Tinkerer – they are afraid to tell you what they did for fear of being chastised. Remember you are not trying to stop them from tinkering just to find out the problem. Ask them specific feedback questions. (E.g. "Please read the setting to me in order" versus "Did you change the settings?")
• The Accuser – accuses support group. escalate call to set up a meeting to hear their complaints and discuss procedures.
• The Non-Communicator – Doesn’t report problem until it’s a crisis or refuses to give detail of the problem. In first case, ask the customer when the problems first occurred. At the end of the call, encourage the customer to call sooner since it may result in a more timely resolution. In the second scenario, you may be asking them questions they cannot answer. Make sure you are not using technical lingo. Mention that you need their help to solve the problem and any information will greatly help you do that.
• The Non-Listener – pushes buttons while you are speaking or holds a second conversation or interrupts you. Button pushes are best handled through strong silence. If they hear nothing, they will usually stop and ask if you are still there. If they are holding a second unrelated conversation, use "excuse me" or "pardon me" twice. If they do not stop offer to call them back. Callers that continually interrupt are best handled with repeated "short silences". Then ask them to respond to a series of questions.
• The Power Player – Uses position/rank to get faster service. Use your important voice and it should diffuse them. Acknowledge their rank. Know what is acceptable policy and follow it.
• The Verbal Abuser – Uses profane language to vent frustration. Advise them that you will be happy to continue conversation if we can speak professionally to each other. Escalate call if they will not listen.
• The Irate Customer/Client – Upset, yelling (no foul language). Listen to them!!! Let them vent. After 30-60 seconds, when they take a breath, respond with " This is important." or "I appreciate what you are saying..." Avoid "I understand". Do not apologize unless it is clear the Help Desk made an error. In that case use the collective "we" approach. "We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you."

· The Ten Customer Service Tips

1. Remember the 4 C’s: Courtesy, Clarity, Commitment, and Completion.
2. Your disagreeable customers/clients are not more confident than you are.
3. Respect your customers’/clients’ time and respect your own.
4. Reset before answering the phone: Breathe, Smile, and Sit Comfortably.
5. Your tome of voice and infection are just as important as your words.
6. You do not need to know all the answers only where to find the answers!
7. Humor can both create and break tension. Be Careful!!!
8. Establishing control of the call is important. Being controlling is deadly.
9. Take pride in doing this difficult job well.
10. Support each other as well as the customers/clients who call.

Tell those Users to "Go to Help!" – Conrad Gottfredson

· Make help helpful:

• design a knowledge base that is job performance based

1. Use verb driven ideas to capture data- (e.g. How to.... create, build, etc.)
2. conceptual driven – use noun driven, answer about , provide links to conceptual information when presenting how to information.
3. multiple on-the-job access.
4. consistent structure
5. Trouble shooting components- FAQ’s, Decision trees, Proactive help,

· Model for training:

- Model for Training:

1. Ramp up – Ramp down
2. Help customers learn how to learn- Introduce them to self-help tools like, peers, support material, and technology aided learning.
3. Coaching to independence. Model for them and then have them do it.

E-Support: Tools to Help Your Support Staff Be Successful – Stephanie Cherrington

· Use the Internet to deliver tech support to any client anywhere, at any time.

· Enables machines to self-heal, customers to fix problems through self-service and help desks to provide

remote service through effective diagnosis and repair.

· Allows support professionals to provide extremely fast, consistently effective tech support experiences to

their customers.

· eSupport Solutions:

· Disconnected Self-Service Portal:

• Self-healing and self-service
• For remote employees or customers
• Subscribe to critical disconnected content
• Bottom line- call avoidance for most difficult to support customers.

· Self-Service Portal:

• Complete self-healing and self-service
• Bottom line: Biggest call avoidance.

· On-Line Assisted Support:

• Self-healing,self-service and assisted service
• Easy to deploy
• eSupport entry point for traditional help desks
• Bottom line: call avoidance and call time reduction.

· Full-Service Support Portal:

• Integrated self-service and assisted service support web site
• Simplest escalation from self-service to assisted service
• Bottom line" Most complete solution for all customers.

Knowledge Bases: Friend or Foe? – Ken Barnhart

· Pros:

• More facts, readily available and solution resolution
• Can have direst access to web, so customers can access knowledge themselves.
• People resources knowledge stays with knowledge base.
• helps to perform metrics

· Cons:

• Takes a lot of time to populate.
• May contain lots of obsolete and useless information
• Patch solutions may be obsolete- How would customer know which one to pick?
• Turnover rates may increase due to boredom of just answering questions from Knowledge base.

· Bottom Line- Do not expect Knowledge Base to be the "be all" solution. Need other tools in place.

Stop the Telephone From Ringing: The Truly Proactive Help Desk – E. Sandra Simpson

· Always listen with an ear for improvement.

· Don’t fix the problem, find the cure.

· Look beyond behavior to see the need.

· Use Trends to measure the need for Training.

Support Industry: Trends and Directions - Pete McGarahan

· We must have a vision for the Help Desk. Where is the business going?

· Customer needs are changing – customers are looking for self-service help, easy to use tools to make

their lives easier.

· We can not expect to be only 99.8% effective a month. This translates to 6 hours of downtime a month.

· We need an on-line solution for simple tasks, e.g. password resets

· We need to implement a disaster recovery plan.

· We need to have an e-support strategy. Self-correcting software that restores a system back to where it

was when the customer successfully connected.

· Before we implement new procedure like self-help, document the before and after statistics to see the

success of our new venture.

· We need to provide our customers with a reason to use our self-help services that will benefit them.

· We need to determine why we are getting repeat calls and how to stop them.

· Implement metrics for the implementation of new products.

· We can decrease the learning curve for help desk personnel by documenting the most frequently called problems and their solutions.

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