Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?
Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?
Episode 1 - Introduction (What is This All About?)
In introduction to David Wilson, Customer Service and Experience Nerd! In this episode, I will give the context on what the series will be about, and how this title sets up an ongoing discussion on how to create and manage an effective Customer Service program. Why do Customer Service Professionals (call them Agents if you want) use this phrase at the end of every conversation? Listen and find out!
Podcast – “Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?”
Episode 1 – Introduction and What’s This All About?
Writer/Podcaster – David Wilson
Copyright 2021 David Wilson
Good day and welcome to the first official episode of a new podcast series I’m calling, “Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With?”. The focus of this series will be on creating, managing and improving customer service or CX systems, and hopefully share stories, offer advice and maybe create a community around CX delivery that you will find valuable for your own customer service organizations.
It might be a bit out there to think such a podcast series is needed, and only time will tell if you keep listening and what you hear on this podcast spurs you to think differently, maybe validate what you’re doing now but at minimum, my hope is that you feel connected as a community, embrace the challenge of delivering the best in CX and maybe walk away with some new ideas for your own company.
So Who Am I?
My name is David Wilson, I live in Toronto, Canada and I have spent more than 25 years in roles that involve Customer Service or CX. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best brands out there, like Capital One and Uber, but I’ve also been a huge student of CS along the way, a kind of operational nerd watching, testing and listening to customers and trying to iterate on the way services are delivered and received.
This podcast is a representation of learnings I have taken away over the years from the many different roles I have been privileged to have. I have a true passion for Customer Service and Experience and think that my collective background has allowed me to understand human behaviour as it pertains to a service experience. I have said things in this podcast to many audiences over the years, both speaking engagements to being with the front line and delivering training. I’ve learned through mistakes, data and many mentors of mine who have challenged me to think differently about the way we deliver customer experiences.
I’m hoping to add new episodes each week, talking through learnings in QA as a program, getting the most out of your production floor, dealing with contact center companies to understanding what geos and agents are most suited to the experiences you want them to deliver. I’m excited to share and hope along the way to hear from you and also to learn from your own experiences.
To that end, you can email me at David@gettheedg.com, it’s a CX consultancy that is all about Experience Design and Delivery. Feel free to email me with questions, comments or suggestions for episodes, I love to hear back on the content and how to make this more relevant for you.
Context for the Podcast
I find context to be so helpful in this day and age, where things move fast, we may not make great decisions if we don’t take the time to look before we leap. We need to know why we are here, what happened before today to bring us to this point, and what is the desired outcome.
I’m also doing this podcast to act as a blueprint to understand how to craft the right environment to unlock the front-line to feel empowered to deliver at the highest quality. I don’t claim to have the only solution, I am putting forward ideas and thoughts that have been really helpful for me over the years.
You may want to change things up to customize your own solution and to that I say GO FOR IT! I am a huge fan of iterations, jumping in and figuring out things on your own.
Let’s get the title of this podcast out of the way first…
Asking a customer at the end of a call “Is there anything else I can help you with?” is probably one of the most often-spoken phrases in the entire world on a daily basis, but also one of the least useful. I have spent more than 25 years in customer service functions, from government to private sector to the entrepreneurial side. I have been involved with small to very large customer service teams, from very simple transactional interactions to very complicated and highly emotional situations. No matter the sensitivity, the complexity, the importance to customer expectations of the right outcomes, there is one thing they all seem to have had in common. At the end of the call, those familiar 9 words that have haunted me more and more over the years:
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
It hasn’t just been the greatest challenge of my working side, I’m also a consumer who has called customer service functions for many reasons over the years. I can easily say it’s the worst part of any customer service support interactions I receive. Every time I hear it delivered to me, I think to myself, “NO, I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING ELSE, I WOULD HAVE ASKED BEFORE NOW!”
Perhaps my frustration and hence the use of straight capitals above is me being too sensitive, based on hearing a constant stream of the use over the years from both sides. But mostly because since I don’t want to hear it, I cringe when I hear it being said over and over and over again to the millions of customers that hear it from the functions I managed.
So then why do customer service professionals say it? I’m sure there are some instances where truly someone wants to check in to make sure all questions have been answered. I’m also sure there are customers who appreciate the fact that an agent is being thorough on their behalf.
But not me. My own personal take on why almost every agent interaction ends with “Is there anything else I can help you with” is this…here’s the deal:
It’s a way out of the conversation. Period. You say this when as an agent, you believe you have reached the end of the conversation and are trying to find the exit door. You want to move on, and this is the way to instigate it. No one really expects a customer on the other end of the phone line to say, “Yes, in fact I have 18 more things to talk to you about, so thanks for asking.” As an agent, you have metrics to manage, supervisors will be coming to your desk soon if you are over the expected interaction time. Maybe you’re on some kind of productivity plan that rewards you for answering a quota of calls every day. (Boy I hope the latter is not true, I can’t imagine a less effective customer service strategy than call quotas!). Whatever the reason, the line comes out and eventually both caller and agent agree to end the call and move on. Note that no one EVER does it at the end of an email exchange. So if it’s a “standard practice” argument, then it should be written in emails too. However, it is more common in live chat, but for the same reason as voice, it is used as an exit path to the chat.
However, here is why I think this is a questionable practice: Agents are there to answer to their customers. They should be making the interaction all about the customer and not themselves. Looking for a way out of the conversation is less about the customer and more of a tactical act (even selfish) on the part of the agent or the company that directs them formally to ask it. As an agent, if you are even the most diligent and helpful person who takes pride in the very highest level of service, trying to artificially close the conversation now has taken what might have been the most insightful and personalized experience down a notch and made it about them instead. When you say it as an agent, you’re making your customer on the other end of the phone say to themselves, “Oh please, can we just get to the end of this call? Why are you making me answer this question? This is just so typical, and I dread it every time I come to the end of these calls!” Ok, maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration or quite possibly just how I personally feel about the end of a customer service call, but I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling.
So then why do so many people do it? How did this become the normal for all customer service interactions by phone? I can think of 3 contributing factors that would lead to where we are today
1) Everyone else does it, it’s a standard practice:
To that I say, if you want to be standard then go right ahead. I’m hoping by reading and researching the subject (here and beyond) that you strive for more than standard, whether you are delivering service or managing one. Perhaps you work with one or more call centre companies who have agents that move back and forth between programs and you have inherited habits. In the absence of clear direction on the way the calls should be summed up or concluded, the default situation is in place. It’s not that common to see a soft-skills focus on elements of the ending of a phone call. Much more likely there is clearer direction on how you want to start the call, meaning the name of the company, who you are, perhaps a reference to a differentiated service such as a loyalty program. Rarely is the same rigour applied to the end of a phone call. This is not about blame btw, this is about opportunities to increase the brand connection. But beware, I’ve learned that the forces of Is There Anything Else are strong!
Breaking this habit is definitely a hard one to do and the fight could be ongoing. I made an attempt at my current company to do this to varying degrees of success and I know that I still have work to do to help the agent ecosystem understand not only not to do it, but what to do instead. I have to think more about beyond New Hire Training or a QA markdown. Honing this skill is a training module in itself, with lots of role playing to get there. It is also incredibly important to bring the management layers of the BPO along for that same journey. BPO folks move between programs, get promoted from the front line and placed in your program without potentially going through your training, so they bring their own “baggage” with them. Note that baggage is a term I’ll use from time to time and represents the entirety of experience before the customer interaction happens, but more about that later. So to get out of this situation requires a very focused effort to extend the brand experience during the interaction.
2) An Opportunity in the Customer Experience Design phase:
Another contributing factor taking the first point further is that Customer experience tends to be an after-thought behind process, policy and product. I have been in many organizations where the customer service strategy team is not included up front, worst case scenarios have the service functions find out from customers when new products or process is sent out to the customer base. From experience I can tell you the best customer value comes when business intent creators overlap with customer service strategy. For example, while working for a credit card company, upgrading the plastic to incorporate the new chip technology was a huge endeavor that required a re-issue of 100% of their credit cards to customers. I remember having a conversation with the lead project manager who told me point blank the planning was not going well. Too many groups working in silos, trying to create a good experience but none of the team had actually had any direct involvement with customers. All too often companies think they instinctively know what customers want, or make assumptions about customer behaviour, trying to scenarioize all outcomes but may not think through the entirety of the customer journey individually. The project manager asked if our customer service function could get directly involved in the planning, which we were only too happy to do. We jumped in, helped also by bringing folks from the contact centres that might be touched by the impacts. The team then were able to update the overall plan by thinking about the entire cycle of the re-issue and the project not only was completed on time, but because we had thought through all the impacts, there were far less customer service needs than expected. Win-win! The outcome for the Is There Anything Else factor is that when you have agents who know why they are answering, what customers are hoping for can then lead to a well-thought out outro to the conversation.
3) Under-investment in customer service skills
The last factor I’ll mention here is that companies may not give sufficient thought about the value of customer service, instead looking at it as a “cost center”, thereby looking for ways to cut it down or make it more efficient. It’s a fairly common gap I see today that almost no company I have been part of, worked with or interacted with professionally has built a comprehensive understanding of the value of customer service. Analytics teams are always over-burdened with requests for other projects and somehow the value of one of the most important and costly areas of the business gets overlooked, except when they are bad experiences. If the question gets asked, “What is the value of Customer Experience?” a whole horde of smart people haven’t yet provided a grounded understanding of how customer service is value-add. I’ve never been able to do it either, but I’ve mostly been part of customer service teams and thus, didn’t get access to data analysts. But let’s pause and think about this for a moment. Customer Service ends up being the face, the voice, the human interactive side of a product or service-based company. Our opinions as consumers is heavily based on how we “feel” about the product AND the service that supports it. Customer Satisfaction at it’s core is a sentiment measurement and to focus solely on product or policy will leave out opportunities to include more emotional elements. As a result, there is little soft-skill investment in the front-line. There is likely no ongoing customer experience investment post-initial new hire training. Companies want Customer Service Professionals (CSPs) to be on the job and costing them as little as possible. No annual budget making exercise that I’ve been involved with has taken into consideration an amount to invest in soft-skill, brand-building or loyalty training. Furthermore, it’s rare to see a company’s marketing department directly involved in the evolution of the delivery experience from customer service. Seems like such a no-brainer to think that since such a significant portion of a consumer’s experience with a company is driven by their CSPs that marketing teams should be falling all over themselves to be involved. Alas, I’ve yet to come across such an example. There is a clear reason to do so – a recent study from Dimensional Research found that 52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive service experience.
Another drawback to lack of thought in Customer Experience is that the tendency is to go to the populist metrics of efficiency, quality and satisfaction. Organizations use Average Handle Time and Average Service Levels and Average Speed of Answer, all of which lead to an Average Experience. What if we thought more about what is the right amount of time needed to make sure the experience is what the customer wanted? How about not looking at a clock metric, but a ‘did I get the intent right and answer it correctly’ metric? We shouldn’t care about the length of a call if the answer is what the customer wanted. Success metrics should be based on what the audience wants and not be led by a pro-forma generic expectation. People aren’t generic, they have very different personality types and needs. Some folks want a fast call with confident answers, others want you to understand how their situation is impacting them personally, while others still ask more than the usual number of questions. We should tailor the responses to the individual on the phone, not drive an artificial stop point that at times will leave the caller unfulfilled and having to call back again.
Again, having a broader and separate strategy to understanding the emotional part of the relationship with a company is an opportunity seldom leveraged. I’m a huge fan of Gartner’s research, they have been immensely helpful to me over the years as an input into my own customer service strategy thinking, and they have a study out there that speaks to where 89% of companies today believe that CX is the new battleground for brands.
The Shift from internal customer service functions to outsourced experience delivery
There is an ever-growing distance from the spirit of a company’s mission to the front-line as more companies move to outsource their customer service. The goal is to find efficient ways to deliver customer service, so outsourcing to a Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) is a preferred route (see point 3 above). But in doing so, companies are also outsourcing their management of the experiences to a third party who has their own way of training and managing that may or may not be aligned to the desired experience. This is not to say that BPOs don’t try to do their best to bring in the highest customer satisfaction, the point here is that if a company does not have the clearest vision of the experience, then the reality is that BPOs will use their own soft-skill training, their own quality management and their own interpretation of your brand and that may or may not be close to what you want your customers to experience.
Executives would have a hard time admitting that the way their customers feel and appreciate companies is as equally reliant on the experience that a customer service agent delivers. Somewhere in a country such as the Philippines or India or Colombia an agent that is paid a very modest wage has as much ability to influence loyalty through their interactions as all the millions and billions placed into product development. A single disastrous phone interaction can end a consumer relationship in a heart beat. There are scarcely any products out there that don’t have competitors in today’s world. Consumers have choices and can move to the next product in an instant if there is any friction created in their relationship with a company. The greatest products out there will not be as successful if there is a terrible customer service function that isn’t aligned to the experience expectation. I’m not going to name any names here, you may have your own bad experiences to pull from!
If we circle back to the podcast title, what this all means is that over time, a customary end of all ends to interactions inevitably contains the dreaded “Is there anything else I can help you with?” The minute I hear it, I immediately say no, that’s it, you can now end the call.
It’s not suggesting the phrase is so terrible that it should never be heard. Sometimes customers have more than one question to ask, more than one problem to solve during an interaction. If you hit upon a very zealous CSP that launches into problem-solving, finds the outcome you need and then in their enthusiasm solves your issue so quickly that they get there before you have had the opportunity to ask the second question, you might appreciate the offer. If indeed that was the case, I wouldn’t mind being asked the question! Let’s face it, that would not be a normal expectation. Getting to all the questions that a customer has is the basic responsibility of the CSP and then researching and solving is the next step. The point being made is there is an appropriate time to hear that question and the end of the call is not the right time. If you have to wait until the end of the call to hear that question, then I would consider that to be a fail.
The right placement of the question is nearer to the start of the call. A CSP should ask all the questions they need to at the beginning, so they are doing the right research and providing the customer with a well-formed answer. Maybe the second question influences the primary question, perhaps there is something relevant in the follow-up questions that would be important to know while researching. If a company is looking for efficiency, then this is a good example of how to achieve it.
The end of the call is your opportunity to show how valuable the time the customer has spent with you can be. It’s an opportunity to wrap up the actions taken, the advice given, to advocate and educate, to deliver a brand-building relationship. Achieving the ‘exit plan’ may make your company happy for efficiency, but it doesn’t exactly make you a star with your customer.
Which is more important? That’s up to you to decide. I’m by no means suggesting I’m right or perfect, but think about the outcome of the call, the focus on the customer instead of the agent, my own humble opinion is the more we make our conversations about the customer, the more they appreciate it and will stay loyal.
Now who would have imagined you could create a whole podcast around the way someone ends a business call, but there you have it!
This is the end of the first episode, there are so many topics to cover and I’m excited to get to the next one! We are going to cover areas such as Agent Scorecards, Getting the most out of your production floor, what constitutes a great QA program? How to work with a BPO? And I’m also curious to hear what you might want to have covered as well, so again my name is David Wilson, my email address is david@gettheedg.com , please reach out and connect, tell me what you think, love to hear feedback.
And in the spirit of today’s episode, let me end by saying we have talked through some ways to improve your brand connection, provoked some thinking about soft-skills thought, experience design suggestions and if there is nothing else, I’m going to let you get back to your day!
Thanks Everyone, please subscribe to this podcast and I’m looking forward to connecting again!