Tanpola Articles Directory

Imagine what would happen if you had dozens of architects and hundreds of contractors all working on your business. Now image if there was no master plan and each individual spoke his or her own unique language. It’s not hard to imagine that you would have something that would resemble the Winchester House - the now-famous 160-room house that was cobbled together over a 38-year span with no master plan. The house is notorious for stairs that go nowhere, doors that open to a 2-story drop, and a maze of rooms, hallways and doorways that can perplex even the most seasoned of navigators.

Losing site of the big picture can happen to even the best of businesses. When short-term business challenges inevitably arise, decisions can be made in haste to address them. Without a master plan, those seemingly innocent decisions can begin to create a burden for the company in the long run. Independent and uncoordinated business initiatives can result in processes that don’t connect, systems that don’t play well with others, and departments that develop their own unique business lingo that is not universally understood by others.

Like the Winchester house, each individual project may seem like the right solution at the time. However, the compound affect of numerous independent and uncoordinated projects and solutions can result in an Achilles heal for the company: True change becomes increasingly hard to accomplish; integration and sharing of key business data slows to a crawl; and enabling cross-functional processes (aka end-to-end processes) becomes nearly impossible to accomplish. Each function may seem content, but the business as a whole can begin to suffer due to inflexibility, knowledge hoarding, and turf wars.

Indicators that your business may suffer from the ‘Winchester House’ syndrome:

1. Process Indicators: Business processes are not well defined or understood and each function prides itself on simply doing whatever is necessary to get the job done, even if it requires winging it now and then. Each functional area designs, develops, and manages its own unique processes with little or no sharing of best practices across functional areas.
2. Technology Indicators: Each functional area has its own set of business applications and data. Applications often don’t work well with others and data is not consistent across departments. Key business information is fragmented and stored in multiple locations and collecting data to conduct company-wide analysis is a long, difficult, and largely a manual process.
3. People Indicators: Individual functional areas have very specialized people, and it takes years to train new employees to learn the ropes of the business. Employees care only about their functional area, have their own set of performance goals and metrics, and don’t understand how or why other functional areas get things done.

Unfortunately, when companies lose sight of the bigger picture and become a victim of the Winchester House syndrome, the customer experience invariably suffers. Customers can be inconvenienced by inconsistencies between touch points, lack of integration between channels, and absence of a meaningful relationship between customer and company. The company’s internal processes, policies, and infrastructure often get in the way of providing the customer with what they want: an emotional connection to the company powered by great service.

SEE THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

Businesses that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. Furthermore, the enterprise blueprint can help a business to develop a detailed master plan for where the business is today and where it is going.

An enterprise blueprint can help any business to avoid the Winchester House syndrome by serving as a detailed model for how the customer experience is influenced and enabled by the compilation of people, process, and technology assets. A comprehensive enterprise blueprint will consist of a detailed definition and model for each major component that comprise the business. This model can be invaluable for identifying any current deficiencies as well as charting a future course for the business.

A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions:

1. Customer Experience Lifecycle (Customer): A formal definition of the customer experience lifecycle process from the customer’s perspective. The process includes a complete end-to-end view of how customers are attracted, acquired, facilitated, served, and cultivated well after the point of purchase.
2. Enterprise Business Process (Process): A formal and detailed enterprise process model that defines all major processes, sub-processes, and activities that comprise the enterprise. Ideally, the process model should be defined as a hierarchy to allow both low-level analysis and optimization as well as executive-level roll-up of detailed activities into larger process areas.
3. Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology): A complete information technology model that identifies and defines key IT capabilities, applications, data, and infrastructure. Ideally, the components of the IT architecture model should be expressly linked to the customer, process, and people dimensions of the blueprint.
4. Enterprise Organization Chart (People): An enterprise-wide organization chart that includes an up-to-date definition of the reporting structure, roles, and responsibilities.
5. Enterprise Business Metrics (Value): A standardized definition of all key business metrics that includes a definition of how the metric is calculated and where key data is sourced from in the enterprise.
6. Corporate Strategy (Strategy): A clear and well-defined strategy that sets the long-term goals and directions for the company. The corporate strategy should include components to define specific strategies for areas such as the brand, market, product, service, price, promotion, channel, and customer experience.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BLUEPRINT - IT DOES YOUR BUSINESS GOOD

Businesses that are seeking clarity to their current and future business environment can develop their own customer experience blueprint by identifying and analyzing their key business assets:

1. Assemble available business artifacts: Gather all available customer experience processes, business processes, technology architectures, organization structures, business metrics, and strategies that are available for the business.
2. Identify gaps and inconsistencies: Evaluate the existing business artifacts to identify what is missing, where inconsistencies or duplications occur, or where additional detail is lacking for each of the major dimensions (customer, process, people, technology, value, and strategy).
3. Create standard definitions and assemble the blueprint: Create and agree to a common set of standards to accurately define and describe each dimension of the blueprint and close any gaps that are identified. Consolidate and summarize all artifacts into a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint and keep them up to date. Use the blueprint as a management tool to guide the business going forward.

Developing and using a comprehensive blueprint has its benefits; businesses that define and maintain a comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint can improve their return on investments, increase productivity, and improve the customer experience:

* Improved ROI: Initiatives that are better aligned with the enterprise blueprint can result in fewer conflicts and duplication of efforts. Furthermore, short-term efforts can be better aligned with long-term goals so that all resources are rowing in the same direction.
* Increased Productivity: Business can run more smoothly and produce more for the same or less effort by leveraging common resources, speaking the same process and business metric language, and by using a common and consistent set of information. Furthermore, businesses can make better decisions based on a more holistic and consistent view of enterprise-wide capabilities, issues, risks, and opportunities.
* Improved Customer Experience: Businesses that have aligned their people, process, and technology components are better equipped to provide meaningful customer experiences. When aligned and consistent, the business infrastructure can serve as a true enabler - rather than a hindrance - to powerful customer experiences.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Over the course of the lifetime of a business various business challenges, opportunities, and issues will arise and be solved by numerous and seemingly innocent business decisions; decisions that result in new processes, organizational structures, and systems. Without an overarching blueprint to guide these decisions, however, the legacy of various and uncoordinated initiatives can be crippling. As more and more independent decisions are made, the weight of inconsistent processes, duplication of duties, and incompatible systems can burden both the company and the customer.

Business that want to avoid this fate can and should establish, adopt, and diligently adhere to an enterprise customer experience blueprint; a holistic model that defines how every component of the company should work together in a seamless and consistent manner to enable and optimize the customer experience. A comprehensive enterprise customer experience blueprint includes several key dimensions including a 1) Customer Experience Lifecycle Process (Customer), 2) an Enterprise Business Process Model(Process), 3) an Enterprise Systems Architecture (Technology, 4) an Enterprise Organization Chart (People), 5) Enterprise Business Metrics (Value), and 6) a Corporate Strategy (Strategy).

If your business were a house or building, what would it look like to your employees and customers? Would it be structurally sound, open, and inviting? Or would it be cluttered, broken up and difficult to navigate?

Having the right blueprint can make all the difference.

Robert Howard is the Founder and Chief Executive of ClearBrick LLC, a leading provider of customer experience business solutions, research, and advice.

ClearBrick can be found online at http://www.ClearBrick.com.

If you read my article a few weeks ago, you’ll know that over Easter I painted my living room a lovely cream magnolia colour.

I’m a big fan of the property programs that are on telly at the moment so I while I was feeling all excited about how fresh and pretty my living room was looking, I decided I was also going to do a subtle feature wall.

Now I’ve never used wallpaper before and to be honest, I’m normally not a big fan of it but in the DIY store I saw this cream swirl pattern that looked fantastic next to the cream paint and I decided I would give it a try.

So I did my homework - I logged onto the DIY store’s wallpaper guide and read it from start to finish. I then measured, re-measured and measured the wall again and put all the information into their online calculator and discovered I need just less than 12meters.

So I dragged my boyfriend back to the DIY store, got 2 rolls (20 meters worth) and happily strolled out to the car feeling as if Sarah Beeny would be ever so proud of me. Then very irritatingly our car wouldn’t start and we spent several hours fluffing around trying to get it going.

When we finally got home and got started hanging the wallpaper it turned out that we were 2 entire drops of wallpaper short. So now I’m stuck at home without transport and missing a strip of wallpaper about 1meter wide all the way down the left hand side of the wall. After hours of car problems and with wallpaper paste everywhere I was unimpressed to say the least!

Maybe the calculator malfunctioned. Maybe the calculator doesn’t work properly. Or maybe since I’m a wallpaper novice, I just got it wrong. I thought I had read everything and measured everything twice but perhaps I still got it wrong? Who knows…

What I do know though is that it wasn’t a great experience.

So here’s something for you to think about this week…
- Do you make sure your clients understand the services you offer fully?
- Do they properly understand the benefits and how to achieve them?
- Do they know how often they ought to book in?
- Are they buying the products that will give them best results?
- And most importantly, will they ask for help when they need it?

If the answer to any of these is no, what systems do you have in place to deal with this?

Taking action to make a booking or purchase a product is ultimately only a decision that your clients can make for themselves. But if you are able to ensure you provide them with every bit of help they might need, you are likely to end up with much happier clients as well as a higher income.

Rebecca Kepple specializes in helping business owners massively increase their client base and profits. To get instant access to her free insider secrets report ‘The Top 7 Secrets for Massively Increasing Your Client Base’ visit: http://www.wellbeingbusinesssecrets.com/freereport.

If you are looking for ways to improve your business and make more profits there is no easier or cheaper way to do it than through customer service training. Here are four simple tools to take your business to the next level and build that customer trust. Once you have read them I will teach you how to change your employees for the better in just 10 seconds.

First, always be on time. When you make a customer wait for you what you are telling them is that your time is more valuable then theirs. It is rude and disrespectful and will never invoke trust from clients around you.

When you are on time and ready for your customer, you set a tone for the rest of the interaction and send a powerful message. That message is that you care about their business. So be on time and set a tone for success.

Second, shake hands with your customers. So much can be learned from a hand shake. Each time we meet a customer they size us up in about five seconds, and many times it is our hand shake that is their first encounter. Different shakes convey a different message of who you are. Learning a proper handshake is easy through proper customer service training.

There is the limp wrist. The double hander. The sweaty palm. Take this opportunity to show them who you are and what your message is. Remember your success is in your hands.

Firm but not over-bearing, standing straight up, great eye contact, a small smile, feet firmly planted, clean spoken words, and the hand straight up and down.

The next step in your customer service training is developing great eye contact. A relationship starts with showing that you can engage with the other person. Eye contact is one of the most important steps in doing that.

When growing a relationship with a possible customer or anyone in your life, it is important that they know they can trust you.

Looking your customer in the eye lets them know that what you’re saying to them is honest and you stand by your statements.

Last but not least you must listen to your customer. Listening is an art form and can be challenging for many people. There is an old saying “you can’t learn anything with your mouth open” and that is absolutely true in the business world.

When speaking to a customer or potential customer the most important tool you have is the ability to listen to their needs. This will allow you to really hear them and reflect back. Only when you truly listen to your customers’ issues can you attempt to improve their situation.

Now take these customer service training tools to the next level. Gather your employees together for a meeting and show them what you expect.

First, be on time to the meeting. Second, shake each of their hands. Then look them in the eye and listen to their ideas about the business.

With customer service training on your side you can make certain that your customers feel appreciated and wanted. These four easy steps will help you to train your staff to offer extraordinary customer service.

Wendy Gillett is owner of www.ExtraordinaryCustomerService.com
A full service online membership site dedicated to customer service improvement.
Increase your profits and your Customer Experience Optimization with
http://www.ExtraordinaryCustomerService.com.

Encouragement is the key to performance. Reward is even greater source of encouragement when it’s beyond just words. Call centers have over the years developed a performance appraisal system that’s including all the components of good communication. Nowhere else does appraisals matter so much as much in call centre business, as its all about customer experience which sells and is at CSR discretion, he can make it most memorable or the worst at the same time.

Technology has turned the way in the favor of call centers and has reduced the hassle of managers and supervisors who had to listen to live calls to evaluate the performance of CSR, now with advanced software recording option; the calls can be replayed for evaluation of the quality and customer satisfaction.

A contact center should first offer quality training to the staff and then expect high performance appraisal, otherwise all the activity is useless. Whether you listen to live calls or recorded streaming, you should have well-defined standards for evaluation of scores and it should be pre-agreed with CSR, this way you can be in better position to motivate and advocate the CSR to improve his performance. Avoid such digital recording vendors who consider the length of call as a parameter of quality call, set your own professional parameters to evaluate the quality of call.

One of the best possible made evaluations models includes all the ingredients of good communication. The appraisals is made on the basis of one of the basic elements of good communication and it is expected from CSR to demonstrate these good practices to get good results towards the end for themselves and for the company.

The honesty level of the CSR can make real difference and in case the CSR is lagging short of words to depict his honest support, customer experience won’t me very appreciable. Next to honesty, performance is evaluated on the basis of the attention that CSR invest in his overall attendance. His reply will reflect his presence and if he is giving hundred percent, favorable comments will be added out of the overall experience. Interest level is also among the factors that are considered during performance evaluation.

Furthermore, duplication should be avoided and CSR should not ask anything twice, this creates really unpleasant impression on the caller. Refraining from making experienced based assumptions is really very important; otherwise the call will not be converted into prospect.

Sense of responsibility, control of CSR on the call, friendliness and professionalism are some other determinants of a quality customer service call on the part of CSR.

Many other factors need to be considered seriously when making call evaluation, other than just call handling and call quality. No one learns communication skills by birth and for the stuff that has not been able to enter main-stream careers, it’s even further a less realistic expectation. Training and skill development of s can yield considerable results towards the end.

Call Center Management expert http://www.steptocallcenter.com

Training is the key for any business success, as it prepares you to take-on the challenges with a lot more skill and belief and when its matter of creating good impression on the customer who is of other nationality, other culture and creed, the role of training gets even more pivotal.

Call centre training is the most crucial part to make the experience of your caller rewarding and to get repeat on sales, otherwise, you won’t get a second chance to create your first impression. The key areas which need strenuous training are product knowledge, technology and speaking soft with skill.

Special soft skills trainings would be highly required for your call center team before handling international customers. Starting with the accent, make the heavy and localized accent affordable for the US or other developed nation caller, who are money rich and time-poor, they do not want to take too longer in understanding the alien accents. You will need to train your call center team through accent-neutralization and by arranging smooth and easy to adopt monikers. With this you can overcome the challenges faced by your call center with your international customers.

The difference in cultures, should be highly considered as it is the most difficult challenge call center team might come across. Customers always have high expectations on the customer service representatives. They are in some sort of problem while they are calling, some credit card payment issue, discrepancy on a bill, want to get assistance for computer problem or are seeking delay in their already bookings for airlines, they are all calling you with high level of frustration and the agent ahs to be trained to handle such situations with cool head and a lot of common sense.

These already offended callers are not ready to relieve anyone who is short of words, solutions and way-out for their everyday problems, all the agents should go strenuous in-house training before they are exposed to callers that how compliance can be achieved. US based customers expects the rep to offer a certain level of empathy, put thoughtful questions across, use relevant words and get hold of the problem smartly. Whereas, reps of under developed countries show sympathy which is offending for the callers who are expecting sincere support.

Training can give customer service raps more word choice and way forward to lead the conversation ahead, they can present a confident gesture about offering sincere responses in the manner that echoes with your customer base. The more technology savvy your customer service reps are, the more their chances of converting a call into long-term relationship exist. Train the reps with all the innovative technologies to make them feel good about everything. This will improve their confidence and they will show better performance.

As a crux, the rep should be given adequate knowledge of the content they are supposed to handle, they should be given ample training in receiving calls in safe-simulated environment to get confidence and skills, a detailed perspective of the country which has most potential prospects for the call centre and last but not the least, an ongoing coaching to make their skill, their excellence.

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Call centre business has a reputation of being one of the industries that has high hiring and firing turnover and likewise, the mindset of the people available in industry is nurtured on the same philosophy. They are not much concerned about frequent switching like other careers where it goes against you. Finding and retaining right people for the call centre is a well known dilemma, as there are certain shortcomings which are attached with this particular business, so, all the measures can only contribute in reducing them and that’s the maximum achievable when it comes to call centre hiring and training.

Retention is highly recommended, go an extra mile to retain an agent who is a part of your call centre, he has prequalified, has got-on with the things and you are also able to evaluate his abilities. Make a correct judgment about the skills of the person and offer all that which the person expects by way of any of your company intelligence. Changing people is a never ending story for call centers; the need of the hour is to change minds of the same people. Recognize their needs and address them instead of preferring aggressive hiring and firing. You have already invested in their training, up gradation and grooming.

If for one reason or another, you are to hire call centre agents, make it a real task for yourself. Do a lot of homework about the interviews and selection strategy. Conduct an in-house meeting with Managers and supervisors to evolve an efficient and effective evaluation procedure that can end-up in picking right people for the job. Look for the accent first of all, that’s the biggest selling-point. Your second priority should be the evaluation of overall personality, find-out the sense of responsibility with the body language and the way of responding to questions. Put some of stupid questions across and detect the patience of the person, if he keeps his nerves cool and come up with respectable reply, go for this person. He/she will sustain.

Regardless of the facts elaborated in the article, time 7 again, the only short-cut to get good call centre agents is the experience. Nothing else can do it for you as good as this. So behave maturely, improve communication, enhance flexibility in overall decorum, and facilitate your agents to maximum extent, so that they can be at peace of mind to make effective sales or to offer quality customer service. Time has changed for the employee and employer, now both have to understand each other to fall into long-term relationship, so care for your agents and get care in turn and it works.

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The remarkable growth of call center industry has ushered to the opening of call center Training schools. Training schools may be accessed on line where all claim to be best in the field. There are two constants in the area of training; one is that training costs and it is actually consuming large portion of call center’s resources; two is the accounting of the result of the training, there must be an improvement in the performance that would justify the resources spent.

Training is made so as to improve and further develop the performance of an agent. The training satisfies two areas such the personal and individual professional growth of the agent and his delivery of good productivity to the company. With good training, the call center should expect the following results:

- Agents could handle themselves more professionally and with confidence.
- New hires could no longer be distinguished from the experienced agent.
- Better customer satisfaction.
- Better productivity.

Training is not a one time deal, it is continuous. It is an indispensable tool that would help to keep the performance of agents on target. Best agents are those that have both the training and the experience. A call center agent is developed as he faces and handles the widest set of situations in the day to day performance of his job. But an experienced and consistently trained agent performs best. Good training provides additional knowledge and confidence to the agent. An effective training is one that derives its training objectives from the business objectives. There are two truths with training; it could only claim to be effective when the results are seen and it is a continuing program.

Training is a part of growth and development resulting to a better performing individual. Here are some good reasons why a call center executive should be an advocate of continuous training:

1. It boosts morale. An agent would feel motivated will the newly acquired knowledge and added skills.
2. It costs less than recruiting and hiring. Call centers have the reputation of having the greatest turn over and this could be reduced if not eliminated through training.
3. Training stimulates the desire of an individual to improve.
4. Training keeps the pace with the rapidly changing technology.
5. It develops teamwork and thus results to better productivity.
6. Training is an investment that returns many times over. Because it raises morale it directly boosts efficiency and therefore productivity.
7. Training raises the rookie to a professional. Investing in training your staff or agents gives the feeling of being valued that could help build their loyalty to the company.
8. It eliminates stress. A good training provides agents with the skills and tools needed to handle stressful situations, especially in dealing with angry customers.

Considering all of these, management and supervisors can rest assured that the call center operation will run smoothly and customers will be satisfied with the service they receive from a motivated call center agent. All center training is not mere compliance to a system; it is an essential part of development and an absolute requirement, just like computers and head sets to a call center.

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