Support Excellence: The Service Zone

Our last post discussed the importance of Call Centre or Service Desk staff moving to a Service perspective, instead of a Problem/Resolution or Question/Answer perspective.

To summarize – the Problem/Resolution or Question/Answer perspective is a straightforward approach that we can often see in the Service Desk/Call Centre area, where the agents answering the phones take the perspective that their role is to solve a problem/incident or answer a question, and nothing more.

We can certainly get decent customer experiences with this approach – customer calls with a question, or user calls with an incident, the agent answers/resolves it, and the call is finished. Everyone’s happy. Well, maybe not happy, but “satisfied”, at least.

However, striving to “satisfy” our customers isn’t something we want to strive for – it should be the bottom level of acceptable service. We want our customers / end users to be completely satisfied, to have had a great experience and be filled with confidence should they need to use the service desk again in the future.

And we do this by instilling in the agent’s minds a Service perspective. All agents should be thinking during each interaction with a caller that “My job is to provide service to this customer; not just answer a question or resolve an incident.”

A Service Desk that operates with this mentality will consistently satisfy callers at a very high level.

The first step in getting to this mindset is how we greet the caller when they contact us.

We’ve all experienced this when phoning a call centre or service desk:

“ABC Company, Jim speaking.”; or, “ABC Company, Jim speaking, can you start with your phone number please.”

This type of greeting, while not impolite or ineffective, doesn’t really set the mindset of the agent (or the customer, for that matter). It’s a standard, almost robotic approach. There’s nothing wrong about it; there’s just nothing great about it either.

The biggest issue with this type of greeting is that it does nothing to get the agent’s mindset where we want it to be – that is, in a Service mindset.

We want the agent, from the outset of the call, to be thinking: “My role with this caller is to assist them by providing a high level of service. I need to ensure that I work with them to resolve the reason they are calling, but be on the lookout for other possible reasons they are calling, or other ways I can help them.”

And that’s really the key word – help. The job of the Service Desk or Call Centre agent is to help the caller. Simply resolving their stated reason for calling doesn’t necessarily fully help.

So in order to get in the right mindset, we change the greeting. Instead of scripting our agents to simply state their name and a quick “thank you for calling XYZ Corp.”, we change it up.

How about having the agents add on a very simple statement at the end of their greeting: “…how can I help?”.

It’s amazing to see  the wonders a slight change in the initial greeting on a call can do. Your Service Desk’s goal may not be to get your agents into this mindset exactly – so come up with other options.

Some greetings we have seen used have included “…thank you for choosing XYZ Company” (a subtle yet effective wording choice that sets the tone for the call – in the mind of the agent and the caller), and “…we appreciate your business” (good where we need our customers to feel appreciated).

If you’re in an environment where you absolutely must gather the caller’s account number at the start of the call (and this is an understandable and reasonable situation in a lot of Service Desks), make sure that your agents greet along these lines:

Agent: “Thank you for calling XYZ Company, my name is Steve, may I start out by asking your account number please?”

Caller: “123456789″

Agent: “Thank you for that, now while I pull up your information… how can I help?“

I was recently talking with a colleague who has worked in the Service Desk / Support industry for quite some time, and I found it to be quite inspiring. This is an individual who is definitely very talented at his position; a managerial/planning IT role, and he had moved his way up and had previously worked and supervised several Service Desks.

During one part of our conversation, the discussion turned to discussions of some of the frustrating experiences we’ve both had while working Service Desks in the past. One comment he made left me quite thankful that, for his current employer, he no longer works at the Service Desk and doesn’t have to provide support to end users anymore.

He commented to me “I couldn’t stand those idiots who called in, usually late at night of course, and told me about some problem they were having, which could have been avoided by them just reading the half dozen or so notifications or warnings we’d sent them over the last two weeks.”

I can certainly relate; most of us can, actually, as I doubt there’s any of us who have worked at a Service Desk that have not heard something along these lines from a user, usually late at night:

“You have to help me, I’m running against a deadline here, and I need to get these proposal files sent out, like, yesterday. And now I can’t get into my email.”

It’s at this point we think to ourselves “Well, we sent several notifications that there was maintenance scheduled on the mail server and it was going to be unavailable from 10pm to Midnight tonight, and, lo and behold, it’s 11:15pm… and it’s tonight.”

And so we likely went into an explanation of this to the user, and perhaps the conversation got heated, perhaps not – it really depends on the attitude of the end user who’s calling. After all, we always react the same way to each call, don’t we? And we aren’t influenced by anything other than the situation at hand, right?

Of course we know this is wrong. And in fact, if our Service Desk staff think in their heads “I can’t believe this idiot is complaining about this, he was told a bunch of times the mail server was going to be down…” during a call, it’s almost guaranteed that on some level, this perspective will impact the call.

It’s a negative thought – justified or not – and it is a strong indicator that this particular individual’s perspective at the Service Desk needs to be refreshed.

They may be phenomenal support staff – from a technical perspective – but if we want to run a true Service desk, we need to provide service, not just support.

The perspective that this user is an idiot, or should know better than to call because of the notices that went out, or that this call is a waste of time, etc., is an Incident > Resolution perspective. It’s not a service perspective.

What’s the difference, you may ask? The differences are significant.

Perspective: My role is Incident Resolution

The Problem-Resolution perspective is one where the Service Desk analysts feel, or have been trained, that their role is to receive a call (or email), analyze the reported incident, and devise a resolution (or assist in getting the incident to the right experts in order for a resolution to occur). It’s a somewhat robotic perspective and is certainly efficient – and certainly results in a significant number of resolutions.

Unfortunately, it also leads to perspective that users who call in with non-incidents (like being unable to send mail when the mail server is offline for maintenance) are an annoyance or inconvenience. In this sort of situation, there is, in fact, no incident to speak of. We’re in the middle of a maintenance window, so no, you can’t send email, you should have read the notifications that were sent out all week, and there’s nothing I can do to help you because … there is no incident. Thank you for calling, send your email after midnight.

Now hopefully the Service Desk analyst doesn’t say it quite that way (although we all know ones who would), the call would end, and life would move on. The conversation with the user could even be one that was extremely pleasant, friendly, and left the user reasonably happy, even though their perceived incident wasn’t resolved (which is probably still frustrating to them).

Perspective: My Role is to Provide Service

This perspective is one where the agents who work the Service Desk believe that it is their role to provide service – not just a resolution – to the users who contact them.

There certainly are going to be calls where there is a simple incident > resolution approach. “Hi, can you reset my password.” is a great example – not much needs to be done here beyond a simple reset, being friendly on the phone, and then confirming the reset worked.

But the “my role is to provide Service” perspective is one where agents believe that they are not there just to resolve incidents. They are there to educate, to help, to resolve, to inform. Not just fix stuff. It’s about service, helping, assisting.

So for the user who calls in during the maintenance window and ends up encountering the “My Role is Service” agent is likely going to have a more fulfilling experience. The agent will have the perspective that they are there to help – by educating the end user about maintenance windows, telling them about the emails that come from IT and what to look for, and perhaps even devising a workaround to get that email sent out during the maintenance window.

The main reason that the agent is going to take this approach is because they believe that while there is not always an incident on the other end of the phone, there is always an opportunity to provide support.

So which Service Desk would you prefer? One which is out there to simply resolve incidents – or one that is actually going to provide Service, and wants to help? Which one at the end of the day is going to result in an overall higher level of user satisfaction, and a more educated and easy to live with population of users?

Of course, getting to this frame of mind isn’t easy. Over the next few weeks we’ll be going over methods for getting the Service Desk team into this frame of mind.

It isn’t easy – but the benefits are significant.

I was thinking this morning that I’d not only failed completely at my New Year’s Resolution, I could barely even remember what it was. Usually I’m pretty good at setting a realistic goal for myself for the year and a good portion of the time I actually manage to keep it. My 2009 resolution was to cut caffeine out of my diet and (for the most part) I have kept to it quite well.

Of course, you may be wondering what talking about New Year’s Resolutions has to do with providing support (whether it be in a call centre for basic customer service, or at a Service Desk for technical support). Well, it has to do with setting goals and targets – something that all service organizations should have – but finding a way to ensure that the front line staff are involved in the process of setting the goals.

Often times you will see situations where targets and goals for a service desk will be set by the management or supervisory teams, with little to no input from, or thought given to, the front line staff. Of course, from time to time this is going to be necessary. Targets and goals are often going to be set, or at least influenced, by the customers being served, and by whomever the service desk reports to. In other situations, the targets are (for the most part) outside of the front line staff’s control. A Service Level Target for average speed of answer (ASA) is an example of a target which, again for the most part, is out of the staff’s control. ASA is impacted by call volumes and staffing levels; the only element of control the agents have on ASA is how long they spend on calls. But that’s a bit of a vague relation in the front line staff’s mind, so it’s not something they really have much control over.

That being said, there are a good number of goals and targets that a service desk can have that the staff do have control over, or at least a reasonable level of control over. If end user satisfaction surveying is being done, the front line staff definitely have a great level of influence over that particular measurement. Average Call Length is something they have control over too (although you need to be careful about setting targets on this particular metric – as it can end in disaster if the target isn’t explained properly).

So, given that you can have some goals that the front line staff will have some control over, this provides you with a good opportunity to involve the staff in the decision making process for setting particular goals.

We recently launched an initiative in our organization that takes this concept and puts it into action, with the overall goal of having the front line staff feel a direct connection between the goals being set, the actioning/implementing of the goals, the work towards meeting them, and the final result.

What we initiated is a “New Month’s Resolution” plan. This plan involves the Service Desk agents as a whole, and is discussed and decided upon at our monthly agent meetings. At these meetings, we bring the team together on a series of conference calls and allow everyone to discuss their perspective on how things are going at their job, raise any concerns, and we use it as an opportunity to provide little motivators such as gift cards, etc. During the meeting we also discuss what next month’s “New Month’s Resolution” will be. The agents along with their supervisors and managers discuss what target they are going to shoot for over the next month.

There are some significant benefits to this approach. The first is that it forces discussion and dialogue – the agents know that the New Month’s Resolution winner receives a prize, so there is definitely a motivation to come up with something. With some gentle guidance from the management team, the agents discuss what metric they are going to set as the goal. One month it was “Lowest Average Wrapup or After-Call Work Time”. With management approval (this is critical – you don’t want the agents trying for a contest that sees them striving for the longest After-Call Work Time, for example…), the target goal is set and the agents begin working towards it.

Another benefit of this is that it allows discussions as to why these metrics matter and why they are important parts of service delivery. Now the agents are engaged and involved beyond just striving to achieve a target so they win a prize – they are striving to achieve a target they had discussed and come up with together as a team.

One final benefit of this – and it’s something that we never foresaw when we came up with the idea – is that you often discover interesting tidbits of information from the agent pool that may have never come up before. During the decision on the After-Call Work time target, some agents discussed their frustration with other agents taking too long, or unnecessary time in Wrap Up. This is unlikely something that they would have been mentioned if the discussion had not been created during the decision making process.

So, in short, a New Month’s resolution has been successful for us in that it provides the agents with a target to strive for, provides them with a feeling of involvement and ownership of the target, and as such it gives the Service Desk a motivated workforce that feels involved in the overall delivery of service and how they are being measured.

Welcome to the Support Excellence Service Zone.

We will be using this Blog to post information and updates about Service Delivery in the Call Centre Industry: from Complex Service Desks, Basic Helpdesks, Call Centres, and more.

At Support Excellence, we specialize in providing Call Centre Solutions to the Small and Medium Sized business marketplace. Our expertise is in two general areas: Service Desks (commonly referred to as Helpdesks) and “standard” Call Centres – information lines, order taking, etc.

In business for over a Decade, our operational co-sourced Call Centre and Service Desk provides services to dozens of companies across North America, and our Consulting Services provide businesses with existing Call Centres or Service Desks with our expertise to improve their overall efficiency, service delivery, and cost effectiveness.

Thank you for taking the time to visit our Blog; we hope the information you find here will be of use to you. If you are interested in getting in touch with us, simply leave a comment, or contact us via email: servicedesk (at) supportexcellence.com.

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Thanks for visiting,

Kyle Ostermann
President
Support Excellence, Inc.