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How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers 'Like' You in All Social Channels

The webinar “How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers ‘Like’ You in All Social Channels” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions during the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of the great questions submitted; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each one within our blog.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that the answers to these questions may also help you understand how to leverage social media for better service.

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

Sure, silence CAN imply that we’re “not clued in” and “not connected”….but what about when the mention is a rant? Or has definite potential to negatively spiral out of control?  How do we determine what’s safe and what’s too risky to respond to? Read more »

Webinar: How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers 'Like' You in All Social Channels

Customers are increasingly turning to social media to air their service issues – especially when they feel companies could give a tweet about them through other channels. In the process, your service reputation is now out in the open for everyone to see. But some companies are leading the charge to use services like Twitter, Facebook, and virtual communities to brand their 21st century service identity.

This webinar will show you how to leverage social media for better service if you’re new to it, and how to sharpen your virtual service image if you’re an old pro. Topics we’ll cover include:

• Why your service is going public and going viral: a look at today’s digital consumer
• Social media service success stories: Comcast, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and more
• Understanding virtual service channels: Read more »

Moving the Needle on Customer Satisfaction Ratings

More than once during my management career, I have been involved in successfully “turning around” customer satisfaction levels in customer contact centers. It isn’t an accident, nor is it just the result of hard work – it is a reproducible process that has more science behind it than you might think. Here are what I feel are the four keys to changing customer satisfaction levels.

1. Move from smile training to skills training
   The phrase “customer service training” has nearly half a million hits on Google. But many of these involve attitude-based “smile training.” In my experience – and more important, according to research – you need customer skills training targeted to specific contact center scenarios. So instead of hiring a motivational speaker to teach courtesy, teach people skills like active listening, defusing anger, delivering bad news, and managing customer expectations. More important, follow service leaders like FedEx and Southwest Airlines  and use role-playing for the most common scenarios in your organization. Read more »

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here. Read first part here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.” Read more »

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.”

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here. Read more »

Webinar: Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You

Most customer support teams are good at handling routine transactions. But what about a customer who is threatening to sue you? Or asks to have you fired? Or an employee who got so fed up with IT support that he smashed his laptop and then ran over it?

All of these are real situations that support professionals reported in a recent survey sponsored by Supportindustry.com and Parature. This interactive webinar, teaming communications skills expert and bestselling author Rich Gallagher with Parature’s VP of Marketing Gary McNeil, looks at how to handle situations like these and more. The open panel discussion format will examine the best practices, tools and technology behind handling your worst-case scenarios. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Discussing the Issue

If you have been following this blog series faithfully, you have seen the first steps in painlessly having difficult discussions with your staff: starting in a safe place, asking good questions, and acknowledging people. Now, in this final installment, we get to the fun part: getting the issue itself on the table, whether it is performance, attitude, or even personal issues like hygiene.

When you do these first three steps well, you will find that you can now be extraordinarily frank about whatever you want to discuss – IF you do the following two things:

Step 1: Boil the issue down into facts

I am a huge baseball fan. And do you know what my friends usually say when their favorite teams lose? Things like “they stunk” or “they choked.” Here’s the problem: these terms are not only threatening, they are completely useless. There is no such thing as an anti-stink drill or a non-choking procedure. What really happened is that their team dropped a critical pop-fly in the eighth inning, or the opposing team had a more accurate pitcher on the mound – and *that* is what you can actually change. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - The Power of Acknowledgement

When you coach someone, you are probably hoping it will go something like this: first, you ask someone to change something. Then the other person politely nods their head and says that forthwith they will start logging their cases better, being nicer to customers, coming in on time, showering more often, or whatever.

But it doesn’t ever seem to work that way, does it? Instead, you often hear excuses, defenses, and their side of the story. And I am here to tell you that these things are all *wonderful* to hear. Why? Because they give you the chance to use the most powerful coaching tool of all: acknowledgement.

You see, the only reason that people ever argue with you, push back against you, or “yes” you without buying in is that they feel you don’t see their view of the world. Think carefully about the last time your boss called you out about something – how did you feel inside? Ring-a-ding-ding. We all contain an almost magical ability to justify and defend ourselves, no matter how “right” the other person is. Which means that our usual approach of showing people how wrong they are is generally doomed to failure. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Be Curious, Not Furious

Once in a great while I have the ability to read people’s minds. Since you are reading this blog, I’ll bet that you are a good supervisor of customer contact professionals. I will also bet that you wake up every morning believing that you are a nice person.

And I will bet one other thing: when someone on your team does something you wish they wouldn’t, whether it is coming in late too often or snapping at a difficult customer, you get frustrated and it shows. And then when nothing changes, you wonder what to say to them.

That is where this blog comes in. I would like to change your perspective from what to *say* to what to *ask*. Because when you start asking good questions and taking a learning posture, even in really difficult employee situations, you suddenly gain the power to create real performance change. Compare these two situations and see what I mean: Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Start in a Safe Place

Do you manage customer contact professionals for a living? You probably dream about a workplace where everyone looks forward to coming to work in the morning, gives their very best effort, and creates consistently great customer experiences.

Well, guess what – I believe you can create such a workplace. Even in a world where it seems like your agents constantly say the wrong things to customers, act disengaged, fight with each other, or sometimes even forget to shower as often as they could. And best of all, you don’t need to surgically implant different personalities in everyone. You just need to change the way you coach them.

In this four-part blog series, we are going to look at a style of coaching that has little to do with what most managers do – namely, catching people doing things wrong and correcting them. This new strength-based approach to coaching has more to do with techniques from hostage negotiation, crisis counseling, and psychotherapy than it does with traditional management. And I have personally used this approach to create near-perfect customer satisfaction ratings, near-zero turnover, and high morale on my own support teams, as well as those of hundreds of training attendees. Read more »