What many call center leaders were not ready for, however, was the unbelievable mushrooming of not just e-mail but social media too. In addition to coping with technology challenges and coordinating “who does what,” managers recognized that not everyone on the front line could write as well as they could talk. So, how do you determine who can write e-mails and who can tweet and blog and chat?

Screening for writing ability in the call center area calls for something special. Here’s why:

• Choosing the right template doesn’t require good grammar. It requires good reading comprehension skills and critical thinking.
• Frontline agents don’t create essays; they respond to questions and complaints.
• Personalizing standard responses, as many companies are doing, requires the ability to choose logical words and convey a customer-friendly tone.

Managers at ABC Company were frustrated when the test they were using with multiple choice, true-false and fill-in-the blanks was obviously too easy because people who scored well didn’t write well on the job. So, the managers decided to try a writing sample test. They asked potential candidates to write an essay, “Why I Want to Work at ABC Company.” That didn’t work either. Although the managers “grading” the essays were excellent writers, they were relying on subjective opinions, either “I like it” or “I don’t like it.”

By having someone create a writing sample you certainly can identify who makes a lot of mistakes. That could be level one in an assessment process. It separates the people who have very weak writing skills.

What about someone we’ll call Agent Angela who does well on that test but on the job often chooses the not-quite-right template to use as a response? Angela might not have performed so well on a critical thinking or reading comprehension test.

If every customer wrote very clear, succinct messages, careful reading wouldn’t be as big an issue. The reality we deal with is that frustrated and angry consumers tend to offer lots of scattered thoughts and questions, and they may not pay much attention to organization. This presents an extra challenge for agents in charge of e-mail and social media.

In an effort to project a customer-friendly image, many organizations ask reps to adjust templates so they reflect the specific concerns of each customer. If Angela’s critical thinking skills are weak, she may have trouble deciding what sentences she should add to fit a particular inquiry.

Guidelines for Screening

Based on my own experience in creating a skills assessment, I recommend five guidelines to accurately predict who can write good consumer responses.

• Test for more than just grammar skills. Proficiency with the right rules is only a partial indicator of writing success.
• Avoid multiple choice questions because someone’s guesses can give you misleading results.
• Include at least some “eyes-on” scoring. Mechanically scored tests are risky. Although evaluation software is “out there” and you may have heard about university professors even using it to grade papers, it’s far from perfect.
• Establish objective measurement criteria to ensure that everyone is measured the same way. A subjective opinion about a writing sample may not be fair and may not accurately assess each person’s capabilities.
• Look for tone. If a writing sample sounds stuffy or curt and abrupt, you can expect the same on the job.

Ready to Write or Not Ready Yet?

When someone scores a 95 on a practical assessment tool, you know you’ve got a real winner. You can give that person extra challenging responsibilities. No need to worry — this person can take on the task and run with it.

What about Agent Alfred who scores 78, but he has other strong qualities? As long as you have content results, not just a score, from your assessment, you may decide Alfred has potential and just needs some coaching or training. One viewpoint to take is that Alfred is not ready to write yet.

People can improve their grammar, writing, proofreading, and critical thinking skills. Because they “missed it” in school doesn’t mean they can’t learn what’s right. Some of my clients give the responsibility for improvement to their reps by providing self-study materials. Other clients rely on their corporate writing and grammar courses.

When you’re confident your screening process is accurate and realistic, it’s easier to decide how much effort you want to expend on training and coaching.

This guest post was written by Joy Van Skiver, president of The Writing Exchange. http://www.writingexchange.com

Joy has had more than 25 years of experience as a business writing specialist. She is the author of The E-mail Companion, Simple Steps to E-mail Success, Selling on Paper — The Way to Write to Customers, and Beyond Word(s) — What Your Grammar Checker Doesn’t Tell You.

Joy has been a guest speaker at several chapter meetings for the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP). She also has had articles published in SOCAP’s Customer Relationship Management magazine. An active member of the New York Metro SOCAP Chapter for more than 10 years, she currently serves on the Board of Directors.

In her work with consumer affairs areas, Joy offers training, consulting and individual online assessment services. jvanskiver@writingexchange.com

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1. Have the right people training your employees: Your trainers should be experts in the subject matter.  Ideally, they should have been an agent themselves.  This first-hand experience will allow your call center trainers to be more credible.  Additionally, your trainers must be excellent communicators and be receptive to feedback from management, peers, and the trainees.

2. Use real-world examples: Use stories to engage your trainees. Spending too long on just content will get boring. You need to grab their attention and story telling is one of the best methods for communicating your message.

3. Deliver content for all learning types: Use a variety of learning tools. Include pictures and diagrams for visual learners, audio examples and discussions for auditory learners, and group activities and exercises for kinesthetic learners.

4. Introduce, cover, and recap: Introduce a topic and tell the trainees what they will learn, cover the topic in great detail, and then do a recap. Using repetition will ensure the message sinks in.

5. Include assessments throughout the training: Including assessments throughout your call center training is another way to increase content retention. Long tests can be intimidating, so keep the quizzes brief.

6. Include a role-playing exercise: At the end of your call center training, add in a session where the trainees can apply their newly acquired knowledge by role-playing a scenario you’ve discussed. This allows you to see what each trainee retained and what was missed. Additionally, you can determine which training techniques are most effective.

7. Evaluate your training from beginning to end: Ask peers or management to sit in on a practice training sessions to evaluate you and the call center training program. This will allow you to recognize areas for improvement before your training goes live. Immediately following a training session, ask your new employees for feedback. Ask again a few weeks after the training, once they have had a chance to apply the knowledge in the workplace.

We like feedback, too!  Share your tips with us about how you improved you call center training.

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Watch our Welcomer Tip of the Month to find out some quick and simple tips for customer engagement!

Providing excellent customer service is key to business success. Give your business the competitive edge, The Welcomer Edge! Click here to learn more about the Welcomer Call Center Training Program and to get started today.…

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What is Social Spam?

Spam is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but customer care professionals know it when they see it. For the most part, Social Spam is any post that’s not “actionable” from a customer service standpoint. In other words, if there is not a legitimate complaint, cry for help, or question that needs to be answered, it’s Spam.

This presents a special challenge for organizations who mobilize around the social web to offer customer service. In fact, some enterprises report that as much as 85% of their agents’ time is spent slogging through social spam. Now imagine if that were the case with inbound customer service telephone calls. To put this into perspective, consider the idea of 85% of inbound calls being “wrong number” calls or abandoned calls. If that were the case, agent occupancy  would be a nightmare. Such is the case with many social engagement operations.

How Social Spam gets Through?

Social Spam gets past your social engagement platform because it “piggy backs” on top of the key word search criteria used to build social engagement profiles. For example, if you are running a major grocery store chain, you might put a search query together for your produce department so people with customer service concerns can reach out to you on social channels. For example, you could use a simple query like: (“ABC Markets” AND Produce) AND (Help OR Complaint OR Problem OR Spoiled OR Rotten). This would catch tweets like: “Help, I bought bananas at ABC Markets today but they were rotten.”

Unfortunately, the same key word search criteria would also yield: “ABC Markets, Fresh Markets, and FoodGiant battle for produce shoppers with new help apps on web sites.” While the words are all legitimately “caught” in the profile fish net, the content of this post in not relevant from an individual customer service standpoint.

How Social Spam Impacts your Operation

Social Spam has a negative impact on your operation. Let me count the ways…

First, Social Spam ties-up your agents and causes their effective occupancy rates to tumble. When you add breaks, training time, wrap-up duties and sick time to the equation, you will be lucky to have ten percent occupancy if you have Spam problem that runs unabated.

Second, Social Spam blocks the ability to spend time on the issues that really matter and this means many customers go unserved. Clearly, if agents are spending more than 50% of their time reading and dispatching Spam, that’s 50% of the time they are not spending serving customer needs. This can ruin loyalty with customers – especially because it is a common expectation that social networking answers to questions should happen within hours and at the latest within a day.

Third, Social Spam can be demoralizing to your customer service staff. Imagine reading non-related posts all day. Imagine what that does to your enthusiasm and productivity. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to quit. If this is the case in your organization, it’s time to put an action plan in place to retain not only your customers, but your agents, too.

What can you do about Social Spam?

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to purge your operation of Social Spam or at least limit it.

One way to immediately improve the Spam situation is to tighten-up your key word search criteria for each social profile you have in operation. Depending on your platform, you can experiment with Boolean operands you may not be using. For example the operand “NOT” instead of just using “AND” and “OR.” You can also filter out certain sources, such as news blogs. News blogs are great for understanding what influential bloggers are saying about a brand or about the industry in general. But it is not often that an individual blogger says anything that is actionable for a customer care agent. (Maybe a brand manager or a public relations person, but not usually a customer care agent).

If your platform has advanced filtering capabilities, you can also throw out posts with particular attributes. For example, retweets. A retweet is basically someone mimicking or passing on what someone else said. Retweets are not original content, so it is rare that you can actually provide customer service to someone who is retweeting what someone else said.

A more modern approach to eliminating Social Spam is to leverage the capabilities of an NLU Engine (Natural Language Processing). If you have a legacy social listening platform you may be able to cobble-on a third party NLU capability. NLU engines have the ability to automatically analyze the words, phrases, syntax and overall morphology of text. With the correct mathematical algorithms at work, NLY technology can be used to “tag” social posts that are suspected of not being relevant. This takes some work and in fact the NLU engine must be “trained” just like you teach a baby to speak its first words. The training can take anywhere from a few days to a week but it is well worth it.

Ultimately, it may be too expensive to cobble together a Spam solution based on a legacy or first-generation social listening platform. A third approach is to deploy an all-in-one social engagement platform that natively eliminates spam. Some of these systems will also have a rules engine (sometimes called a decisioning engine). These allow you to automatically disposition or close posts with Spam or other attributes you can act on.

Conclusion

Social Spam can play havoc on your customer care operation if you don’t so something about it. You can lose customers, spend too much operationally and even drive your agents to quit their posts. But you can do something about it. You can tune-up your existing engagement platform, bolt on NLU technology or take a look at some of the new, all-in-one options out there that eliminate Spam. By addressing the issue of Social Spam, you can ensure a smoother operation that does a better job keeping your customers happy.

This guest post was written by Edwin Marguilies.

Edwin Margulies is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of SoCoCare, a company dedicated to cloud-based Social Engagement for Customer Care. He is a customer service thought leader, author and inventor with 33-years of operations and product strategy experience. Margulies has held executive posts at companies including Oracle, Dialogic and Telephony@Work. He has designed hundreds of customer service systems and contact centers. These experiences lead to the formation of Sterling Audits, a research firm specializing in service automation usability. Margulies is also a pioneer of social engagement for customer care, which led to the formation of SoCoCare. His newest book called “Social Engagement for Customer Care” will be available in May. You can email the author at ed@SoCoCare.com or tweet @SoCoCareEd

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Here are a few tweets from the day:

Gamification changes behavior by focusing on positive behavior @gzicherm #symp13

RT @gmogy: Use the power of gaming to change behavior. #symp13 @gzicherm.

RT @MRDUVA: Need to bake in to every interaction — feedback, friends and fun #symp13

(Authentic) Tribalism is an important motivator. @gzicherm #symp13

RT @lilSewnut: #symp13 recognition by your community is the strongest motivator: status, access, power and then lastly stuff; be engaged, be inspired

RT @astutesolutions: Who enjoyed learning about #bigdata and #voc at #symp13?! Learn a little more: http://bit.ly/11z8ey4  #custserv #crm

RT @bsdalton: “Technology is secondary. Modality first!” (Lather, rinse, repeat!!!) #symp13

The post Are you in the game? – Day 2 of the SOCAP Symposium appeared first on The Center For Client Retention.

For those who aren’t able to attend, here are some of our tweets from Day 1 of the SOCAP Symposium. – the day of data!

RT @bdcheung: #BigData best practices: Be the enabler. Involve the business from the start. #SYMP13 @MattAriker

#BigData best practice: start small @mattariker #symp13

RT @bdcheung: Interesting idea of thinking about a “data lifecycle” #BigData #SYMP13 @MattAriker

RT @JenniferatWest: “Avoid ineffective collecting of data that does not pertain to your initiative.” With Matt Ariker at #symp13

RT @DigitalRootsCRM: The “Big 3″ of #BigData: Speech, text & video analytics + behavioral data = predictive analysis via @MattAriker

If you don’t ask the right questions…you’ll get accurate answers to the wrong questions @mattariker #symp13

RT @scott_gluck: Big data helps you understand the Why behind the What…. With precision. #symp13

One of the things #bigdata does is dispel the myths via @mattariker #symp13

RT @bdcheung: #VoC is moving past surveys, and in to really really advanced datasets (@MattAriker) #SYMP13

#BigData lets you get answers to questions you always had but didn’t have the technology to answer #symp13

RT @bsdalton: Trend: empowerment and control – consumers are rapidly moving to self service. #symp13

For products, marketing and promotions, your existing #contactcenter data can make a big difference #symp13

“Offer consumers simple services to better manage their increasingly valuable time” @ubercool #symp13

“You’ve only got one touchpoint, make it the best you can” @ubercool #symp13 #CustServ

Great opening session at #symp13 with @blprnt – love your views on #data!

RT @gmogy: Cell phones are the virtual biography of our lives. #symp13 @SOCAP

Companies positioned to think about the future of data are in a better position than those thinking about the present of data. #symp13

Numbers are not just numbers, they are measurements of something – measurements of our lives. #symp13

RT @MRDUVA: Totally blown away by @blprnt graphs following global travel via twitter feeds. Very cool. #symp13 @SOCAP

RT @LeslieO: JerThorp @blprnt OOH/AAH principle.People say OOH when they learn about yr idea; AAH when they get it. I want that reaction

The most important thing in the data dialog over the next 2 years is data ownership. #symp13

The definition of data: data are measurements of something #symp13

Happy 40th anniversary @SOCAP! #symp13

RT @bdcheung: Very excited to hear about humanizing big data, from Jer Thorp (@blprnt) #SYMP13

Great welcome reception at #symp13! Thank you Stericycle!

Don’t miss out on the great content, follow #Symp13 on Twitter to hear about tomorrow’s sessions!

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Ask the right questions of the right people, utilizing the appropriate methodology, that survey length really doesn’t matter.

It is crucial to take time and consideration when creating a survey.  Don’t get bogged down about the number of questions.  Be smart about what you are asking and you will get all the information you need.

Ask the right questions

• What do you want to learn?  What are your objectives?
• Make sure the questions are clear, concise, unbiased and organized
• Use rating scales that make sense by defining the highest and lowest values and be certain the questions match the scales
• Don’t just ask for ratings, inquire why they feel that way

Ask the right people

• When you develop your survey objectives, define who you want to receive feedback from and survey them specifically
• Decision-makers should be asked one set of questions and users, another. Identify first time callers and ask them different questions from regular callers. Use branching throughout the survey to make sure you’re asking the right people the right questions

Utilize the appropriate methodology

• Know your population.  If they’re an older demographic, IVR or email surveys may not be ideal.  With younger people, an email questionnaire may be more effective
• For your best customers, a comprehensive telephone interview may garner more qualitative responses
• Consider implementing a blend of methodologies so you give your respondents a choice of how to complete the survey.  This will increase your overall response rate

It is essential to conduct surveys with your customers and employees to measure performance and thereby improve your service.  By focusing on what you ask, who you ask and how, you will gather information and data that is vital to your company’s success.

If you’re just getting started surveying your customers or already have a survey program in place, check out our FREE e-book, Best Practices in Surveying, for some helpful tips.

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How to get started with your call center coaching weekly tips:

Think about a recent issue or question you’ve received from one of the agents. Design a weekly tip around that subject that contains four key components:

• Create a title that grabs their attention. It should be something that makes the agent want to open the email and look further. Don’t be afraid to use humor.
• Include an introduction that clearly defines the subject at hand. Your agents should know what you are referring to after reading the first sentence.
• Describe real work-place examples that your call center agents can relate to. These examples should resemble situations that your agents find themselves in regularly. At the end of the examples, explain what the agent did correctly and which parts of the interaction should have been handled in a different way.
• Communicate why doing this one thing the right way is so important. Following these steps will ensure you have added a valuable strategy to your training and development program.
• Ask if there are any questions or comments about the tip.

These weekly emails will act as call center coaching in disguise.  The tips seem more like friendly reminders, as opposed to formalized training, which can be intimidating. You can even make the process more interactive by encouraging representatives to suggest their own weekly tips. This is a terrific opportunity to learn what your agents may be thinking so that you can provide the specific guidance they need.

Need some help in getting your Weekly Tips for call center coaching started?  We’d be happy to help, contact us today!

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1. Virtual Connectivity: We are a high demand; need it now, on the go society.  Mobile usage keeps consumers in touch 24/7.  As consumer mobile usage increases, Point of Sale and Point of Service interactions will be critical for brands to continue to succeed. Contact Centers are ideally positioned to support this “on the spot” service. To do this, Contact Centers need to ensure they have technically architected a solution that allows them to support mobile consumer interactions. They also need to think through new metrics such as mobile service levels and agent productivity. For the mobile user, how quickly a brand responds, is critical to shaping their experience. Successful Contact Centers will understand this and have the technology and infrastructure in place to support the expectations of their mobile consumers and then be able to measure the impact of the services that are provided.
2. Proactive:  Contact centers should be engaging and interacting with consumers regardless of the channel they are on.  Social media allows brands and consumers the opportunity to continue the dialogue beyond the initial question.  Depending upon the industry, many contact centers are not very serious nor do they expect the consumer to call back when an agent states, “feel free to call us back if you have any other questions.”  However for on-line customers, encouraging a comment once a consumer has tried a product or service would not seem out of place. Brands want increased positive word of mouth and contact centers supporting social media engagement can encourage consumers to come back to a page and continue to dialogue post sale or service. In addition, the advent of social media allows contact centers to move from a position of passively waiting for the phone to ring or waiting for a post to appear on a page, to proactively seeking potential engagement opportunities within social media where consumers are struggling to find answers beyond the brands owned or rented social media sites.  Brands may choose to simply monitor these conversations, or they may be able to inquire if the consumer is in need of some assistance.  But at least they will be armed with data from the contact center that educates them to the potential engagement opportunities beyond a brand Facebook page.
3. The Intelligence Center: The opportunity has never been greater for contact centers to play a more strategic role within their organizations.  There is such a tremendous amount of data that resides within a contact center that no other area of the organization has access too. Contact centers need to start integrating this data from different channels and mining it for consumer insights.  Those insights can extend beyond the brand to include analysis of the competitive landscape, industry related issues & corporate reputation.  The Intel that could be provided could serve to assist in driving business decisions and in turn generating revenue.   Some have thought of the contact center as simply a cost center.  Almost a necessary evil to stay in the game.  Let’s start thinking of the contact center as a consumer intelligence center that is a valuable partner in developing strategic direction for the brands they support.

Becoming a contact center of the future is about what you are doing now.

What is promising is that Contact Centers do not need to reinvent the wheel.  Good centers today understand what it means to create a positive consumer experience. They understand the power of positive word of mouth, and the risk in allowing negative word of mouth to linger. They understand how to measure productivity and the quality of consumer interaction. The opportunities may be different, but there is always opportunity. Leverage what you do best and apply it to the future.

This guest post was written by John MacDaniel and Barry Dalton.

John MacDaniel, Sr. Director Voice of the Customer, Telerx

 John has over twenty-five years of experience in the contact center industry. His background includes contact center operations, training, quality, and customer experience. Since 2008 John has focused much of his attention on social media, with a bent on defining and expanding the contact center’s role in supporting brand social media initiatives. He works with a number of Fortune 500 companies – helping them leverage their contact center operations to provide engagement and monitoring services, as well as providing them a social media reporting solution that integrates traditional contact center metrics with new and emerging social related metrics.

John holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English/Communications from Niagara University. He has presented at industry related conferences such as the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), American Society of Training & Development and The Contact Center Association. He has also published articles on quality and monitoring in such journals as the International Customer Service Association, Best Practices in Customer Service, Customer Service: A Journal of Theory, Research & Practice, and for the Society of Consumer Affairs.

Barry Dalton, Senior Vice President of Multi-Channel Strategy, Telerx

As the SVP, Multi-Channel Strategy, Barry Dalton focuses on Telerx’s long-term strategy development and implementation.  He is a seasoned customer service and contact center leader with over 25 years’ experience consulting with Fortune 500 and mid-market companies in the implementation of customer experience strategies, operating models and leading-edge technologies driving revenue growth, profitability and customer loyalty.

Barry holds a B.A. from the University of New Hampshire and an MBA in Finance and Strategic Management from Rutgers University.  Follow Barry —a self-described “Social Customer Technology fanatic” and “ponderer of the impossible,” and also one of “Zoho’s Top 25 People in CRM to Follow” — at Customer Service Stories…and Other Thoughts.

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Contact center agents are trained to greet the consumer with a positive tone of voice in addition to thanking them for their call.  But how much effort is spent training representatives on what they should include in their closing?

Here are 5 quick tips for leaving consumers with a memorable last impression:

• Thank them for taking the time to call you – Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to call a contact center with a question or a problem.  Making the effort to acknowledge how much you appreciate that they took the time to allow you to help them or understand that a problem exists makes the customer feel their time was not wasted.  It also reinforces how much you care about their opinions and feedback.
• Thank them for their business – If someone is calling about an experience with your product, thank them for being a customer.  If they are calling because they are considering a purchase, don’t forget to thank them too!
• Ask them to call back again with any questions or concerns – Remind them that you’re always there to help if they have any questions or concerns in the future and that you want to hear from them. Don’t forget to provide the contact center’s days and hours of operation.
• Let them know about other value added resources you have – Whether it be FAQ’s on your website, a Facebook page, or even self-serve options on your IVR – rave about them to your consumers!  Tell them about the resource(s) and how they can be beneficial – they’ll appreciate it!
• What you say is just as important as how you say it – With all of these tips; never forget the importance of tone and inflection.  Make sure the customer hears the appreciation and interest in your voice.  A “thank you” with no inflection will not resonate.

What are some ways you train your contact center representatives to leave a positive last impression?

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