OTTER
So let’s talk about OTTER.
No, not the cute river animals that sound like terrifying river demons when they scream…
OVER THE TOP EMPATHY & RAPPORT.
OTTER is the gateway to everything. The door to a great Customer Experience.
Once you open OTTER, the sky's the limit.
How do you open OTTER, you may be asking.
A good question.
There are 5 keys that open the gateway:
Actual Empathy
Tone
Active Listening
Sense of Urgency
Going Above and Beyond
Once all five keys are turned, the Gateway opens and OTTER is yours! So let’s cover each of these individually:
The first key is Actual Empathy.
Now, customers can sense fake empathy easily. Call any bank and listen to their empathy response. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Well that’s okay my dude, I was only calling for my balance, you don’t have to be sorry about that. It’s okay, really.
See, it’s obvious if you’re just spouting off empathy statements because the person HAS to. Customers ain’t stupid.
Instead, practice REAL EMPATHY.
Put yourself in the customer’s place.
Imagine the smell of what they’re describing, the horror they feel at seeing sewage in their kids’ bathtub.
The pain of an unexpected financial burden they are facing, the unexpected price of plumbing gone bad.
Or the fact that they are being called to delay their appointment, even after they’ve made time for us and plans for the day.
Actual empathy is more than saying “okay” to their issue. It’s understanding. And care must be given to not let empathy slide into its toxic cousin… sympathy.
The second key is Tone.
The tone is the message. To be hyper-specific, it is the POSITIVE tone that is the message. Now, customers don’t care if you’re having a bad day. They don’t know about or even care about your personal life. I’m of the opinion that they should have some empathy too, but if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak. It sucks, but thems the breaks, as they say.
So, if you sound bored, disinterested, distracted, tired, sad, mad, any other negative emotion they’re not going to like that. You’re draining them. Stop.
Keep your tone upbeat, positive, and polite. That nice line between casual and professional. Customers love that. Take or make each call as if it was your first. Make them all count. Stay positive, stay focused, and stay awake.
Over the phone, whether you’re booking calls or dispatching them from the office, you have a grand total of seven seconds to make a positive impression with that customer. So make every second count.
The third key is Active Listening
There’s one simple trick when it comes to actually listening to your customer. I’m going to let you in on this little secret, one passed down through the ages of customer service wisemen and wisewomen, a secret guarded behind walls of stone and walls of fire. The trick to actually listening to your customer is ACTUALLY LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMER.
Pay attention to what they are saying.
Take Notes.
Asking your customer to repeat themselves isn’t just embarrassing to you or your customer, it’s the opposite of good customer service.
Getting their booking or order wrong because you weren’t paying attention is a big unacceptable oof.
Interact with the customer. The booking call and the dispatching call isn’t an interrogation. It’s a conversation. A dialogue, not a monologue.
INTERACT. Ask followup questions. Ask probing questions. Make sure you understand each other.
The Fourth Key is Sense of Urgency.
Okay, get this. Every call is urgent. Every call is escalated. Every call needs to be handled. NOW. The best customer service agent, the best dispatcher is effective AND efficient.
Don’t let anyone hang out on hold more than necessary IF AT ALL. Nobody likes being on hold. Nobody likes waiting to be answered. It doesn’t matter how snazzy you think your hold music is. Everyone hates it.
Don’t let anyone hang around waiting for an update on their appointment.
Make contact with them IMMEDIATELY.
“Your dispatcher will call you shortly.” means shortly. As in a few minutes, not in half an hour, an hour, two hour, three hours from now. SHORTLY. Like in a couple minutes. The more the customer knows the better. We ain’t keeping no secrets. Come on now. Would you like to wait? No? Me neither. Let’s not make them wait either.
Even if it’s bad news. Better for them to know than to keep them in the dark, giving them enough time to say “I guess they’re not going to call me back, guess I’ll call their competition.”
The Fifth and Final Key of CX is Going Above and Beyond.
Okay, so customers call, text, chat, and email us to be taken care of, to be serviced. What a concept in Customer Service. But if they could do it all themselves, most of them would.
If our customer service sucks, or is even mediocre, why would they just come back?
Why would they book a call in the first place? Or say okay when the dispatcher calls and is sending a tech, or decide to go with the options the technician presents if our customer service is bad?
There are a TON of plumbing companies in California, ranging from single vans to entire fleets. They all do the same thing. More or less.
What keeps them coming back to us? Well, it’s our customer service and their experiences with us. Their… CX as it were.
Now, those are all nice and good, but if you’re dealing with a customer over the phone, there’s an additional thing we need to remember:
YOU HAVE 7 SECONDS TO BEGIN BUILDING THAT RAPPORT.
Your keys won’t open the door if the first 7 seconds are trash.
The gateway of OTTER will remain closed.
The first 7 seconds is, in essence, your Greeting.
You want your Greeting to be attention grabbing, different from the rest of the companies the Customer has spoken to in the past.
The thing is, the better the greeting, the more likely it is to be stolen, and that’s okay.
The Rooter Hero Contact Center has it easy, with the automatic Rapport generating greeting:
“It’s a great day at Rooter Hero Plumbing,
This is Sally, how may I help you?”
What’s the worst a caller could say to that?
Here’s how it normally goes.
A CSR says the greeting, the customer responds “it’s not a great day here!” and then the CSR can just jump into the 5 keys and get that OTTER gateway unlocked.
“It’s a great day at Rooter Hero Plumbing! This is Sally, how may I help you today?”
“Well, Sally. It’s not a great day here!! My toilet is backing up!”
“Oh no, that’s not good. Good thing you’ve called us, we’ll get a technician out there to unclog that toilet and turn the day around for you!”
And like that let’s see what keys were turned:
Actual Empathy.
Tone.
Active Listening.
Sense of Urgency.
Going Above & Beyond.
So, what if they initiated the contact through chat/text, email, or Yelp!?
Stick with the channel they initiated the contact with. But don’t fall into the trap of using a template or copy and paste responses.
Customers HATE chatbots. They hate robots. Using templates and copy and paste responses turns you into a chatbot. Don’t do that.
Instead, treat each channel as a phone call following the Call Path or script. On email you can consolidate the script a little more, but on chat/text/yelp have a conversation with the customer. The key is to respond QUICKLY. Just like you’d answer the phone on the first ring to your headset, you want to answer the chats/text/yelp/email as quickly as possible.
For emails, 5 minutes is a good time limit.
For chats/text/yelp you want to think seconds instead of minutes.
Use the 5 Keys above to unlock the OTTER gateway, and you’ll be good to go.
But what if you’re calling a customer?
The same applies.
Call Quickly. If they need to be rescheduled or delayed, make that call NO MORE than 5 to 10 minutes of that call dropping on the board. There is no reason for the customer to wait longer than that.
If the call goes to voicemail… LEAVE A VOICEMAIL with specific information and your best call back number and/or email address. Feel free to follow up the voicemail with a text message.
If any changes occur that would affect the specific information you gave them on the call, voicemail, or text relay that information as soon as you find out. Do not leave the customer hanging on.
One of the worst things you can do is call them at their (new) scheduled time and tell them it’s going to be even later. Ask permission to see if they’d like updates texted to them.
And then update them.
To Recap:
CALL QUICKLY
GIVE SPECIFIC INFORMATION
GIVE THEM UPDATES IF THINGS CHANGE
If they don’t answer:
LEAVE A DETAILED VOICEMAIL WITH SPECIFIC INFORMATION
SEND A FOLLOW UP TEXT WITH YOUR CALL BACK NUMBER
And as always, leave detailed notes on the job.
Master these steps, and you’ll be opening the OTTER Gate with every interaction you have.
You’ll be happy. The Customer will be happy. Everyone will be happy.
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