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Keep On Going - 9/22/20


Thomas Edison once said “Many of life’s failures are experiences by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” You are close to success – Keep On Going. Winston Churchill once said "If you’re going through hell, keep going."  This quote has been taken Read more

Lessons Learned for COVID Era Sporting Events


Since the sports world has begun inviting fans back to their events on a limited basis, CSS has been fortunate to work on multiple events with our sports clients.  Much of our work is fan research-oriented, where before or after events, we are engaging fans to identify expectations, potential Read more

Create a Common Definition of Customer Service - 9/15/20


Peter, Paul, and Marie are co-workers. They are all customer service representatives.  When Peter thinks of good customer service, he defines it as being friendly to the customer. “And I am friendly,” Peter says.  “That’s why I don’t know why they send me to customer service training.” Paul thinks customer Read more

COVID-19 Demand Management Strategies for Customer Service Channels


We all want demand for our products or services.  This helps us to generate revenue and to provide something of value to our customers and communities.  But customer demand does not strictly relate to products and services.  Demand also relates to communications, information, issue resolution, education, and other aspects Read more

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? - 9/8/20


This is a quote by Edgar Bergen.  He’s one of the most famous ventriloquists of all time, but I guess he wasn’t necessarily one of the hardest workers of all time.  By sharing this quote, I am not supporting the idea that we shouldn’t work hard…or am I? We only Read more

Reach Out More for COVID-19 Customer Retention


Ever since the Coronavirus pandemic became a reality for individuals, their communities, and their countries, it became clear that people were going to be hurting…that lives were going to be changing…that the realities of the past were going to be very different from the current and near-term future realities. When Read more

Using I, We, or You in Customer Service - 9/1/20


It’s amazing how many conversations can go horribly wrong or incredibly right, not because of the use of a 4-letter word, but simply because of the use of a 1, 2, or 3-letter word – I, We, You. The incorrect use of I, We, You in conversations causes problems more Read more

Get Your Guru On - 8/25/20


You may have heard of management gurus - these people who seemed to know all and be all, to have the wisdom of 1000 leaders.  Maybe you’ve heard it in your industry as a guru in sports psychology or the master of economics or sociology or human behavior. And so Read more

Whether You Believe You Can Do a Thing or Not, You Are Right - 8/18/20


This is a famous Henry Ford quote, and the quote is all about self-belief, all about confidence. We’ve often spoken about the need to be confident and how to gain confidence, because that confidence - or the lack thereof - is imparted on the customer. But how does a customer tell Read more

Grind it out Today for a Better Tomorrow - 8/11/20


It’s been said that You Learn Perseverance by Persevering.  You are becoming mentally tougher right now.  The pain and the difficulties and the change today are making you stronger for dealing with the uncertainties of tomorrow. We’re all having to be more flexible.  We are all facing less consistency, less Read more

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Re-Invigorate Your Clients – 7/30/13 TOW

Posted on July 30, 2013 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

The motivational speaker had his theme for the day – Re-Invigorate Yourself! He said, “In order to Re-Invigorate Yourself, you have to make two assumptions. First, ‘RE’ means you’ve been “Invigorated” in the past so that you can be invigorated again. Second, the idea that you are going to ‘Re-INVIGORATE’ means that you are not currently invigorated. Maybe your life is stale. Your attitude has gone negative. Your perception of yourself or your life has dimmed.”

Whereas this motivational speaker was focusing on how his audience could reinvigorate themselves, one of the attendees had a different twist on the speaker’s points.

Janet was an account representative for a pro sports team, and her focus was applying this concept to her clients.

“How do I determine if my clients are currently invigorated? How can I determine their relationship with my club, their perception of their game time experience, their feelings about the value of their season tickets? How do I determine if my clients are not currently invigorated?”

“Because that lack of passion can turn into apathy, and apathy can result in lost business. And to ‘RE’ invigorate them, I have to determine when they were passionate about our club and their relationship with us. . .and why?”

Sometimes, in order to keep customers for the long-term, we have to take Janet’s perspective. We need to uncover those customers who appear NOT to be enjoying their relationship or experience with us, those that don’t appear happy, seem more apathetic, aren’t responding to messages as quickly or frequently, or aren’t participating in activities as often.

We need to proactively go to them, gain their feedback, and understand why they were excited in the past – and maybe why they’re not so excited today.

Keep in mind that your competitors’ sales people are passionate about taking your customers, so match that passion.

Find customers losing their enthusiasm for your organization, and look for ways to re-invigorate their passions in your business.

 


View Touch Points from the Customer’s Perspective – 5/28/13 TOW

Posted on May 28, 2013 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

I received an email from my wireless telephone provider. They mentioned that I was now eligible for an upgraded phone at a discounted price (and if you’ve seen a 1990s flip phone, you’ll know why they want me to upgrade). Apparently the upgrade date had been reached, and I was eligible for the upgrade. One minute later, I received an email from the same provider telling me that it was an anniversary of sorts, and therefore I was eligible for an upgrade at a discounted price. About one minute later, I received a third email from the same wireless provider noting that I was now eligible for a discounted upgrade to my cell phone as a reward for my loyalty.

What the organization didn’t realize was that they were sending essentially the exact same e-mail at the exact same time with 3 different subject headings. The exact same upgraded cell phones were offered in each e-mail with those discounts available. So there may have been a Touch Point Plan that the provider had developed, but they were not looking at the plan from the customer’s perspective. Something that might have appeared very professional at first to the customer, turned out to be an aggravation after the third – essentially duplicate – e-mail arrived at my inbox.

If you work in a client relationship management role at your organization (for example, you’re a season ticket services representative for a sports team), this Tip of the Week is especially important for you. When you build your Touch Point Plans from the organization’s perspective, you determine when to send out information based on events or timeline triggers; make sure, however, that you’re not just looking at the plans from the organization’s perspective. Invert your Touch Point Plans to test them from the customer’s perspective to know what they’re going to receive and how they might perceive the information.

Develop Touch Point Plans from the customer’s perspective.


When Multi-tasking is Overrated in Customer Service – 5/7/13 TOW

Posted on May 7, 2013 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

I was meeting with a sports business client recently, and they were describing that they have allocated portions of different staff’s time to use in relationship development with season ticket holders. And while it is interesting that they were beginning to devote time to serving existing customers through account representative relationships, it is also interesting to note how they were doing it. They were not devoting staff full-time to relationship management. They were taking about 30 percent of multiple people’s time to develop relationships with their account holders.

It was their perspective that they were managing approximately 4,000 season ticket holders with five employees (a high 800:1 ratio). In fact, since staff only spent about 30% of their time managing those relationships, they were actually managing 4,000 accounts with about 1.5 employees (or an even higher 2,700:1 ratio).

It is very difficult for employees to spend the vast majority of their time doing things other than developing relationships and still be expected to do a great job in relationship management. In other words, it is very difficult for people to spend their time on many different tasks and be expected to be great in any one of those tasks.

As an organization, if you want to be great at customer service or great at relationship management, can you be great if it is a small percentage of a lot of people’s work?

If you want to be great at something as an individual, can you be great if you are doing 15 or 30 often unrelated tasks during the course of the day?

Organizations wanting staff to be generalists need to understand the difficulty in creating great performance.

As an individual, you need to organize your work so that you can spend as much of your time as possible in blocks focused on one or two activities. Continual shifting into/out of different tasks does not lend itself to efficiency and high quality.

In order to be great at one thing, we need to figure out how to allocate our time to focus on that one thing for longer stretches of time.

Multi-tasking minute-to-minute is overrated. Focus your work, allocate your time in blocks, and succeed.


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