CX RIOT RADIO

This post is intended to serve as a friendly reminder that YOU are the brand. YOU are representing the brand at all times, with every interaction. Interactions with customers, interactions with employees, interactions while on the call floor, the break room , hell… even online. People like to doxx those with opinions that may not be in alignment with theirs, and they’ll be quick to latch your behavior to the company that you work for, especially if the behavior is disgusting. Is it right? No. But it is real.  Not only do you represent the brand you work for, you’re representing your own personal brand. Your reputation. Be the employee that people come in to see or call in to talk to. Be the employee that people can count on. “But it’s just a job” you may be saying. Indeed, if that’s all it is to you, you’re 100% right. There really is nothing wrong with that. A job is a job, as they say. But why not be the best you can be at it? The way you do anything is the way you do everything....

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. ...

 Customer Service Week is technically over, but why? Here's a copy and paste of what I wrote on LinkedIn: Customer Service Week is awesome, and a celebration for your customer service departments is definitely in order. A whole five days to build up and praise your frontline employees! Decorations, treats, lunches, prizes, whatever. But what happens the week after? Or the week after that? Are they put back on the backburner? Do you go back to blaming them when the tiniest thing goes wrong? Do you go back to forgetting their names? How about this? How about instead of celebrating Customer Service Week once a year, and then forgetting about the customer service department, how about we place them where they deserve to be? At the forefront of the organization. These people are the faces and voices of the company. They are not robots. They are not mere numbers on a spreadsheet. Do not think of them as such. Appreciate your customer service professionals. Whether they be on the phone, g...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoTjpn_-oHA&t=58s Please please please please please please for the love of God, don't let your agents become Chatbots. Ever. Using templates, copy-paste responses, whatever is wasting time. If you want a chatbot, get a fucking chatbot. If you want to use real customer service over chat, have real customer service over chat. It's one or the other. Your people are not Cylons. Your people are not robots. Your customers unless they're weird, don't like robots.  Look, I get it. Automation is cool. It's hip. It's sexy. It's... whatever. But if you have LIVE humans answering chats... don't turn them into robots. Automation is NOT for human beings. \ If a customer has to ask if they are talking to a real person (either on chat or phone)... there's two possibilities: The chat or phone experience is really fucking bad. The chat experience was leaps and bounds better than any chat they've experienced, including those w...

  https://youtu.be/8x_YAQbau7Q

  https://youtu.be/JkZqLTurKv8 Here's a reminder: Keep CX Simple. There's no reason to complicate it. To needlessly complicate the customer experience, customer service, or customer journey... is being dumb. Use Occam's Razor to simplify the workflow. Here's a hint: it's all in who you hire and how you train your customer service agents. Period.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ3oOMfizEk Hey there! How ya doin today? In this short video we cover the three questions I ask every brand new Contact Center Agent on their first day of training. On the surface they seem silly, superficial maybe. But trust me, they are not. There's a reason these questions are asked. The Questions Who is Your Favorite TV or Movie Villain? What is the One Book You Would Recommend to Someone Who is Unmotivated or Undisciplined? What is the Nerdiest Thing About You? So why these questions? The first question measures listening comprehension. I still remember the one time I asked this and the response I got from the new hire was "The Lion King." WHAT?  The second question measures two things, if the new hire is into personal development AND helping people. Helping people is what they were hired for. Worst case scenario is you get a blank stare or something they read in high school. The third question measures vulnerability. Or at the very...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUPj_P5UTmY Just a "quick" introduction to the new Caffeinated CX YouTube Channel. Enjoy and stuff. 

 [Blogger doesn't like to embed YouTube links in mobile view for some reason, so for the posts with videos, just view on a desktop or laptop, I guess. Which is stupid, but I guess you can't have everything. Maybe Google will fix it soon, or maybe I'll dust off my HTML skillz I learned in the 1990's and fix them myself (unlikely).] Anyway, let's talk about the CSR and DSR dynamic. First of all, DSR is a stupid term.  We all know that CSR means Customer Service Representative, so that must mean that DSR means Dispatch... Service Representative... which doesn't even remotely have the same ring to it.  Dispatch Service Representative.  Cool. We'll just call you Dispatcher for now.  So, the CSR's job is to fill a bucket to overflowing with appointments, jobs, opportunities, whatever it is you fill your bucket with, and it's the Dispatcher's job to sort through that fucking bucket to find the best shit for your services. The best shit means the highest...

Welcome to the CXRebellion! If you’re wondering what CX is: it’s the Customer Experience. From their first contact onwards. Why is it a rebellion? Because we need a customer service revolution, and not just at our company. It’s industry and nationwide. Today, we are going to go over some disturbing facts, some frightening figures, some scary stats. These are not meant to be a scare tactic, but to wake you up. So let’s dive right in. According to the Accenture Global Customer Satisfaction Report of 2008: PRICE is not the reason for customer churn, it’s because of poor quality of customer service. A customer is four times more likely to go to a competitor if their problem is an issue with the customer service rather than an issue with the product or service. That’s from Bain & Company. For every customer complaint a company gets, there are 26 other unhappy customers who didn’t say anything, according to Lee Resources. In addition, 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, but 91% of e...

  Why is Customer Service such a dumpster fire in [current year]? One reason is that people have turned Customer Experience into a metric, and thrown away even caring about the Customer's Experience.  So which one matters, the Customer Experience, or the Customer's Experience?