Day: January 13, 2019

It May Be Worth 1000 Words, but You Shouldn’t Need That Many

Want a quick tip that will ease customer frustration and increase CSR efficiency at the same time? Don’t make your customer jump through unnecessary hoops.

I recently ordered a kit that was comprised of several pieces. When I received the kit one of the pieces — a fairly distinct item — was missing. I contacted the company’s support through the interface on their site:

I received my order, but it is missing the XXXX. Could someone please send that out to me as soon as possible?

I also included my order number and mailing address, because as a customer I try to make the CSR’s job as easy as possible. This is the reply I received:

We appreciate that you have brought this issue to our attention and I am more than happy to assist you. Please send me a photo of the items you did receive from this order. 

Once I review your photo, I will be able to provide a swift solution. If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

I’m sorry, what? Why would you ask me to do this? The missing item is not shaped like any of the other items included in the kit, so it’s unlikely that I’m overlooking it or mistaking it for something else. It might be tucked away in some packaging (it’s not — I’ve opened everything up and checked), but if that’s the case then just ask me to take a look in whatever box it’s usually found in and follow up if it’s still missing. And if I’m lying about not receiving it and trying to scam another one for free, well, I’d just leave it out of the picture, wouldn’t I?

In other words, the only purpose this photo request is serving is to delay fulfillment of my order and increase my frustration. It’s also adding extra steps for the CSR, as they have to have this back and forth with me instead of just generating an order for the missing piece to be shipped out.

Don’t get me wrong: there are times when you do need a photo. If someone claims they received a damaged package, for example, you might want a photo so that you can see where the packaging failed, or if you’re dealing with a customer who often claims damage it’s not out of line to ask them to prove the damage with a photo (though do be careful not to accuse them of anything — you’re still on their side, you just want to figure out why things so often go wrong for them). 

The bottom line is, make your process as easy for your customer (and your team!) as possible. You’ll ease frustration on both ends and create customers who talk about what great customer care you offer instead of former customers who warn people away.

The FAQ: Customer Care’s First Line of Defense

Roller coaster

One weekend this past fall I was planning to take my daughter and her bestie to an amusement park. It was Halloween season, so the park basically turns into a giant haunted house, which is not my particular cuppa. But, it is totally theirs and we have passes so it’s not like it cost me anything to get into the park and so off we went. I figured I’d just connect to the park Wi-Fi and get some work done, but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits if they even had park Wi-Fi. Surely the park’s website could fill me in! Their site’s UI is not great, but it’s not awful. I can navigate around it fine, even though some stuff isn’t where I’d put it. Most of the items under Plan Your Trip have very little to do with planning your trip and more to do with park operations
— not great customer experience design, but let’s put a pin in that for now — so I start there. Nothing under Park Services,  nothing under Tips for Family Fun. They do have an FAQ…surely other people ask this relatively frequently*? Apparently, judging by the content of the FAQ, not as often as they ask if laser pointers are permitted.

Wait, what? It is 2018. No one has asked about laser pointers in the last decade at least, and probably ever if you’re being really honest with yourself, Amusement Park FAQ Writer. (Except maybe for this gal:

via GIPHY)

People are also probably not asking if they can bring their selfie sticks, they’re just going ahead and bringing them, causing jams in the security lines.

selfie stick

Which brings me to my point:

The FAQ is for Frequently Asked Questions, not for Questions We Wish Customers Would Ask.

If it was, we would call it a QWWCWA and let’s all be glad we don’t have to try to pronounce that.

It is totally fine to have your company policies on the website. I would encourage it, even. But that is not the function of the FAQ. Your FAQ should be a living document, changing often to reflect…wait for it…questions your customers are asking frequently.  If 30% of your incoming customer inquiries are asking what your hours are, put that in the FAQ. If no one asks but people keep showing up or trying to contact you an hour before you open you don’t need to put your hours in the FAQ, you just need to find the underlying issue and fix it — those people aren’t visiting your FAQ anyhow.

Once you’ve added a piece of information to your FAQ, it doesn’t just live there forever now. 

( via GIPHY )

Most of the time, questions are being asked frequently because your customers aren’t able to find information where they expect it. Take a look at your analytics, ask your peers (and maybe even your friends outside the company) and try to pinpoint where the disconnect is. Let’s go back to business hours. Maybe you have them on every page, but they’re at the bottom and tiny. Or maybe you put them in the About Us section or the Contact Us section, but people aren’t clicking through to those pages. 

Fix that problem.

Make the text bigger, or move the information to your front page — use whatever feedback you’ve gathered and make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Maybe, in our hours example, you even want to add a menu item called “Hours” that literally just goes to a single page with the hours on it. 

Once you’re pretty sure you’ve fixed the problem (calls have slowed down, analytics show people are clicking where they need to click to get the information, etc.), turn that FAQ item off. If you don’t see a big uptick in related customer queries, related to that FAQ item, congratulations! You’ve fixed the problem. If you do get a big uptick that holds steady for more than a couple of days, turn the FAQ item on again and try something else to solve your problem. It is important that your FAQ be a living document, reflecting the questions that are actually frequently asked. If you never remove information from this page, over time it will begin to bloat, making it difficult for customers to find the answers they are looking for. Not only that, you run the risk of the information becoming wildly outdated. You know what’s worse than customers not being able to find the answer to their question? Customers finding the wrong answer to their question.

Do your customers, your reps, and your business a favor: make sure your FAQ is truly useful to customers, and use the information in the FAQ as a starting point for determining which customer pain points you need to prioritize fixing.

*A quick Google later confirmed that yes, Virginia, lots of people want to know if there’s Wi-Fi here. And, sadly, that there was no Wi-Fi. 

Light, Fluffy, Delicious Email

Customer care email is a bit like a soufflé: delightful to both the chef(CSR) and the consumer when done well, but can easily fail if proper care and attention are lacking. As with so many things in customer care, the key elements to running your customer care emails are proper planning and the ability to be flexible with those plans.

First, let’s talk about the different kinds of emails customers may be getting from you. It is very common these days for companies to use emails for everything from promotions to newsletters, so your customers may be used to those communications from you. These are not the emails I’m talking about when I say “customer care emails” (though I will talk about them in another post). Right now I’m talking about the emails generated by your customer care department in response to direct customer inquiries.

You may be using a customer management system (CMS) like Freshdesk or Zendesk, and that’s great. Anything that lets you organize your customer touches for maximum efficiency is useful. Being able to track information about customer contacts is so important that back before these systems were readily available I created a primitive SQL based call/email tracking system for the company I was at. I’m not a programmer, but the time spent learning the code to support this system was 100% worth it. We could identify frequently asked questions, easily find pre-formatted responses to those questions, and also track customer contact numbers: overall contacts, contacts by category, contacts by type, etc. That’s all really important information to have when you’re determining how best to allocate your customer care resources.

CMSs are fantastic because that’s all already built in. Plus, they function as an email queue, with agents able to assign tickets to each other, auto-sorting features, the ability to merge tickets, bulk actions, etc. Each of the big CMSs has advantages and disadvantages, of course, but overall any of them is a good choice. Just make sure you review the feature lists to ensure the system you’re looking at will do what your business needs them to be able to do. And if you don’t see something on the features list of a system you otherwise like very much, ask! Most of these systems are highly customizable.

Even with a great CMS, the sheer volume of emails can be overwhelming, especially if there’s an issue that affects a large percentage of your customers. I have had less tech savvy CSRs suggest “turning email off for the night” as a way to staunch the flow of incoming mail, especially when there’s an issue that touches a large number of customers. It probably goes without saying, but that’s neither practical nor desirable and would only serve to increase customer frustration. However, a well-crafted auto-response can ease that frustration while setting customer expectations. I’d caution, though, that specificity is not necessarily your friend here.

If you, for instance, say that someone will be in contact within three business days and you end up being short staffed or get overwhelmed by an unforeseen issue and unable to respond within that time-frame, your customers are going to be justifiably upset. It is also likely that you will have customers who just see “three days” and don’t allow for the weekend, or who think Saturday is a business day, or any number of other misinterpretations.

It is important to respond to customers quickly, but not at the expense of a quality response. However, if you find that your department is regularly taking more than a day or two to respond to customers, you need to find the underlying cause. Do you need to staff up due to an increased customer base, or are the issues that are causing customers to contact you solvable internally? For example, are your CSRs writing custom responses to each customer when a bulk email would do? Are other departments (marketing, fulfillment, etc.) causing unnecessary confusion or making promises without being able to follow through? Address those issues! Train your CSRs, talk to other departments, do whatever you need to do to ensure that you can care for your customers in a timely and efficient manner.

 

What’s In a Name?

Years ago I had my first “Customer Service Manager” job, and while I loved the job, I hated the title. To me, “customer service” and “customer support” both carry a very strong implication that something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. Even if that is in fact the case, it’s better to subtly steer the customer away from that impression. When a customer needs to contact me, whether it’s because something has gone wrong or they just need a little more information about something, I want them to have the feeling that I’m there to take care of them, to look after their needs. Thus, the title I prefer is “Customer Care.”

Over the years I’ve run into more twee titles, like “Happiness Expert,” “Service Ninja,” and of course we all know the Apple “Geniuses.” Those are fine, I guess, but feel to me like they’re trying too hard. “Customer Care” implies all the things we want – I’m on your side, I can handle of all your needs, I am here to take care of you – without feeling like maybe we’re all title and no follow through.

Not that these guys wouldn’t be great at customer care…

Throughout this blog, I will do my best to refer to the service we provide and the people who provide it as “customer care.” I think it is important that we think of it as customer care. We’re not just there when something goes wrong…we’re there when our customers aren’t sure how to use our products, when they want to make sure our product fits into their lives (literally or figuratively), when they want to suggest a new feature. And if we’re doing it right, we really do care about our customers.