Switch Hack

To be a good listener you need to understand your own listening style.

We are all disposed to listen to some people more than others and that is because we have preferences for different types of information. Some of us seek out new ideas while other people’s ears twitch at the details, some people find their attention is drawn to practical information and others gather in on orientated discussions.

More self-awareness about your listening preferences means better ability to manage the majority of interactions you become involved in.

Greater awareness will help you to pick up on the mood of the speaker and thus enable you to modify your responses to align with the speakers expectations. Your aim as a listener is to keep the person speaking on a balanced emotional state for the more negatively emotional they become the greater distractions they will experience. For example, if the speaker is not interested in, or does not believe your responses are genuine they are more than likely to just switch off. The interaction essential to any form of communication is easily lost and the chances of them actually disagreeing with you or challenging you quickly diminish. Furthermore, if  you yourself are not aware of your own listening preferences and mindsets the probability is high that interests will clash between you and speaker leaving all at odds.

Being aware of your preferences and what influences your mindset puts you in a strong position to manage your thoughts and emotions.

The more balanced you are the better able you will be to listen and observe the speaker and to identify what they really want to say, never mind the words that come out. Tune into the moment and align your listening and response to meet the needs of the speaker whilst at the same time influencing to achieve your own goals. It is a well know secret that when you have developed a strong, empathic relationship with a speaker the outcome is more than likely to be a positive one that is mutually beneficial.

How many times do you find yourself speaking to people and you sense they are doing their emails while you are talking to them?

You know they are not listening properly and are distracted by other things. They are not trying to actively listen and really understand what you are saying.

Next time you think someone is doing this just flippantly add something absurd into the conversation to test whether they are really listening to you or not.

If you didn’t catch this week’s Cutting Edge program on Call Centre misery, check out the Times article here.

Phone Rage made a valiant attempt to show the often neglected side of the call centre story, but largely missed the point.

Indeed, the brutal fact is that call centre agents have to endure frustrated customers – this may never change. The program certainly highlighted our long held opinion that call centres, (increasingly referred to as contact centres as consumer preferences shift from simply voice to a wider range of email, phone and Internet channels as a means of contact) have the power to transform relationships that brands have with their customers.

However, the program missed the opportunity to make an important point, namely that today in customer service it’s all about RESOLUTION - thereby achieving closure for the customer. To do this brands must use their contact centres to help them understand why the customer was calling, and not just adopt language to pacify them…but this is almost like sticking a big plaster over the bigger issue of why was the customer frustrated in the first place!

All the customers featured in the program were united in the fact that they just wanted their issue resolved. Having to repeat themselves, being passed from pillar to post, enduring endless queues, all merely contributed to the core issue – be it a missing phone or an incorrect bill.

Of course it’s important the agents are able to empathise with customers - that’s why our agents undergo listening psychometric to profile their listening style to match them with the brand project they will be most successful on.

But the main learning to be had from the program must be that contact centres are now a fact of life and they have proven themselves profitable, convenient and essential parts of the brand DNA. The onus now is on the organisations themselves to use the contact centre to listen to WHY their customers are calling and evolve their practices where possible to improve customer perceptions – perceptions which typically are formed before the contact centre becomes involved!

The program compounded the fears that all too often contact centres concentrate too much on the traditional measure of how quickly a call is answered, over the more important measures of resolution and customer satisfaction.

For further discussion on this post please visit the Call Centre focus forum.
 

Although it appears to require a lot of hard work the benefits from becoming an active listener can be well worth the effort. However, to make a genuine connection with the people we are interacting with requires being authentic in our desire to understand what is being communicated to us.

In fact the term ‘authentic listener’ is increasingly coming into play to differentiate the people who have mastered the skill of actively listening in ways that enable them to achieve a very high level of understanding.

‘Authentic listeners’ are those people who have developed a keen awareness that comes from learning to appreciate and acknowledge what is being said in spite of whether they agree or disagree with the one talking. The ‘authentic listener’ demonstrates an understanding of what the speaker is saying from the speaker’s perspective without making a judgment on the content until they have the full story. This naturally puts them in a very strong position to influence those they interact with. To try seeing the issue from another person’s point of view opens the way to discussion of the issues that both parties need to resolve.

Today’s consumers demand better access to the companies from which they buy goods and services. So it’s not surprising that the communication channels between consumers and brands have a far more important role in determining customer satisfaction and loyalty than they ever have had before.

With the emergence of the commercial aspects of the Web over the past ten years, touch points between companies and customers have come to include corporate websites and email as well as the telephone.

Research between 1999 and 2001 showed that many companies were slow to respond to electronic customer enquiries, with half of all businesses taking more than five days to respond – if indeed they responded at all.

This pattern has not improved in recent years. 78 per cent of British consumers report that they have been disappointed by a slow response to customer service email enquiries, and the average consumer is only willing to wait 24 hours for a reply. Customer expectations regarding their ability to reach suppliers have meant that communication channel management has become a far more important focus in CRM.

Consequently, communication problems have become a more central factor in explaining customer disloyalty, especially if part of larger failures to meet customer expectations. Unresponsiveness, for example, has been identified as a key indicator of ‘service encounter failures’ in customer service switching studies.

In light of the importance of electronic correspondence between businesses and customers in CRM and our understanding of customer loyalty/disloyalty, The Listening Company commissioned research to uncover current consumer perceptions and experiences with electronic and traditional communication with UK businesses.

1,000 participants aged 18 and over, from across the U.K were interviewed in October 2007.  TLC conducted the research  with analysis performed by Dr Alain Samson researcher at London School of Economics.

The report focuses specifically on current customer usage, attitudes and experiences with online messages and email, alongside more traditional marketing channels, such as the telephone and white mail. The results of the report provide information about customer communication preferences, how well companies are able to meet customer expectations, and proposes the implications for companies that do not live up to those expectations.

Summary of Findings

UK consumers prefer to contact online businesses by telephone rather than email. However, women tend to give higher priority to using the phone for both sales and service enquiries than men.

In contrast to consumer expectations, waiting times experienced for telephone enquiries is 113% higher than that desired by consumers (average of 7.2 vs 3.4 minutes). The difference is 81% for electronic messages (average of 25.8 vs 46.7 hours). Finally, traditional mail is 42% slower than wished for by consumers (average of 4.7 vs 6.7 days, with older people expecting a quicker service)

While consumers find it very easy to locate email information on company Web sites, three out of ten people find it difficult to find telephone numbers or mailing addresses on the Internet.

63% of UK consumers say that they have made a purchasing decision on the basis of inadequate response times for either telephone, email or mail queries. Looking at separate communication channels, the figure is particularly high for telephone communication (53%), but significantly lower for both mail and email (about 38% each).

Consumers with higher demands about email response times have not based significantly more negative purchasing decisions on speed of response, indicating that the effect of slow email responses on consumer behaviour is pervasive. For telephone enquiries, on the other hand, consumers with greater patience (i.e. expecting to wait longer) are 12% less likely to have made a negative purchasing decision due to a long wait or lack of response.

British consumers perceive personal information as being significantly more secure when given on the telephone (58.1%) than either on the internet (50.7%) or through the mail (51.1%).

Click here to download the full report

Listening is the most important facet of good communication

Isn’t it odd then that most people prefer to talk rather than listen? The probable reason is that listening is a far more difficult skill than talking. But listening is such a pivotal skill in all walks of life, at work and at home. So many issues in the home between partners and within families can be put down to parties not really listening to each other.

Listening is, of course, not just about hearing, but about committing the effort to try understanding what people want.

A good listener works very hard to truly understand what is meant by the words that are spoken. Active listening can be difficult; it requires undivided attention and concentration something many people don’t think they have time for.

So much success is dependent on the ability to be a good listener and yet there is so little advice on how to do it well.

When you think how many consultants and advisors are out there promising positive transformation, it is quite disappointing that they don’t offer training on how to listen properly first as this would be a huge benefit to both individuals and organisations.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed the latest corporate fashion is the environment.

I was recently asked to approve the company’s (The Listening Company’s) corporate environmental policy.

This got me thinking.

There are construction companies, mining companies, logging companies and automotive companies. Even with the very best intentions these organisations cannot help but have a negative impact on the environment.

I understand why companies like these want to make reassuring sounds to make consumers feel better about consuming. But, the awful truth is that the only way we can make a long-standing positive difference to the environment is by consuming less.

This flies in the face of commerce which is all about selling more stuff to more people.

The Listening Company exists by simple virtue of its ability to reduce the amount of human and mechanical exertion required to perform routine and complex commercial transactions for other businesses.

So, I would argue that by their very nature call centres reduce the impact business makes on the environment.

However, call centres employ a lot of people and tend to be in out of town locations. This can mean lots of travelling for lots of people!

It makes sense to me that call centres should be located in popular conurbations to reduce the need for commuting. The Listening Company is based in Richmond in Surrey and Portsmouth in Hampshire. We are never more than 200 yards from a Tube or Bus station so it’s easy for staff to get to us using public transport. What’s more - our bike racks are stacked and our car parks are tiny!

I’ve been thinking about the power thing which is more difficult because as we expand our business we will invariably be using more power – although that should mean more efficiency for another organisation.

We’ll try a few initiatives

Lights out until they are needed
Company flask service
Recyclable waste collection
Etc etc

I’ll report back…

Outsourcing has been a growing trend since the 1980s and remains at the forefront of the business agenda. It has proved an appealing option to more and more companies feeling the financial strain of their customer relations and sales departments as they grow to meet expansion.  And yet, the highly attractive commercial benefits must be weighed with other considerations as businesses operations steadily become more sophisticated.

In the call centre world, most outsourcing deals were originally decided on a quantitative basis weighing up the costs of averages on speed of answering a call, average cost per call, % agent time spent on the telephone etc. Companies analysed the cost base of the outsourcer to make a decision. Thus, an outsourcer with offshore facilities or one funded by government grants or job creation schemes would be in a strong position to win the contract. This often led to large inexperienced teams being paid an hourly rate who were then micro-managed by the outsourcer to deliver value.

While such savings look good on a spreadsheet, they often create the wrong focus. They miss the fundamental purpose of call centres – to supply an effective, available and scalable customer communication capability across all touch-points. Initially call centres just dealt with telephones and post but now call centres are expected to provide service along a myriad of communication channels, including SMS, webchat, video and mobile mediums.

Outsourcing should not simply be seen as a cost cutting exercise. Choices made in this way not only put specific business functions at risk but also infringe upon brand at a wider level, creating a question mark over the overall future of the business.  The call centre is a powerful machine that can significantly increase the revenue and profit of a business because it is positioned at many critical points in the customer journey.

Businesses need to take a wider view to the added value outsourcing can bring to the business and choose a supplier based on their quality and knowledge rather than simply the cost of their business offering. Indeed, because the outsourcer becomes effectively an extension of the company’s brand, value should be seen as the key differentiator when outsourcing operations.

It’s important to assess what influence the outsourcer has on customer behaviour. This concerns everything from customer purchasing decisions to customer loyalty and recommendations. Only after this has been assessed can a business be convinced that these services are being delivered in the most cost-effective way. Keeping costs down to a minimum in a call centre involves careful processing across technologies and is best run by experienced management. Cost base should not lead the argument; anyone can find a sales director for £15,000 a year but no company does, so why do so many companies hire sales or service reps on price alone?

It ‘s no good spending millions of pounds building up a reputation for being a reliable, customer- focused business, with fantastic products if you then deliver a sub-standard call centre experience; customers just think you are being insincere. It’s the whole experience of a brand that is important not just the product alone, and it’s this experience that determines whether your company will be one that people choose to use and recommend to others. 

In any event, many cost savings based purely on analysing the cost-base of the outsourcer are false economies. For example, if you halve your cost base but double the call length you have made no cost savings and probably aggravated your customer by keeping them on the phone so long. If you halve the cost base but the customer has to double the calls he makes to resolve the issue then your cost of resolution has not been reduced and what’s more the customer is disgruntled.

In truth, outsourcing is really about letting those who possess a particular skill or expertise in a given area do the work better. Therefore, one has to define what “better” means. One has to start with the business objectives. Normally, this revolves around increasing lifetime value and enhancing the brand.

The levers of lifetime value tend to be:

1. Number of customers,
2. How long they remain loyal
3. How much customers spend in relation to the company’s cost of servicing them.

The lever of brand is the management of customer expectation towards the corporate image that is promoted.

In response to today’s demands a new breed of outsourcer is flourishing. At the heart of their success is a different approach to the traditional “bums on seats” model.

These value adding outsourcers have:

• Operational Excellence
• Multi-channel technology platform - one that has single view of the customer communication and allows an agent to simultaneously use several communication channels across the phone and the web.
• A tailored approach - All activity should be bespoked to the needs of the clients, including the people, IT and processes.
• Transparency -The project management structure in place should deliver accountability and responsibility, resulting in the empowerment of staff.
• Financial alignment - A return on investment model is signed up to by both parties that is linked to the key strategic drivers.
• Brand understanding - It’s crucial to understand that every client is very different.  Even if they have virtually identical products; they have very different brands and strategies and the call centres will need to reflect this.
• Customer journey planning - The outsourcer has to be able to map the customer journey and plan how to effectively influence every customer touch point
• Customer intelligence - Call centres take millions of calls every month and provide invaluable information about the customers, the products, the propositions and the expectations. The feedback loop needs to provide effective insight.
• Listening skills - The outsourcer needs to understand their clients and understand their customers and help bring them together in a more effective way.

I recently phoned my bank to garner information on various mortgage options.

After a lengthy discussion (with the bank’s call centre) it appeared that there was a selection of about five mortgage products that appeared appropriate for my needs. The shock came when I asked for the literature to be emailed through to me and was told there were no email facilities available.

Imagine having to work for a business that ties your hands behind your back while no doubt demanding various sales conversion rates. On further investigation, it appears that many call centres still only use one or two mediums of communication rather than the full ambit of phone, email, web, sms, letter fax and video.

When you think about it it is rather odd as consumers have been using multiple channels of communication for some years now in every day life. So it would be reasonable to expect any organisation selling to you to be doing so on your terms.

At the moment and in the foreseeable future, the market for financial products (mortgages and loans to you and me) is getting tougher - by all accounts the mortgage lending business is at the point of collapse. This means that every aspect of customer communication will be required to operate fully in the battle to find, win and keep customers in this market.

Over the past few years Indian call centre companies have been particularly successful in attracting seats away from UK plc. This is because they often appear to be a cost effective  solution . However, if you yourself have ever been on the receiving end of one you will know that this article in India Education News has a familiar ring about it. Personally, I will never understand the logic of companies that spend millions and millions on building perfect brands only to offshore at the very point where their investment can be realised! Indeed, these scrupulous savers of fashion seem to be blindly wandering around dishabille.