Today’s guest blogger is Edward Caulfield, a Service Management Professional with over 20 years experience in customer service management for high tech companies. Throughout his career Edward has executed on a variety of fronts from his leadership of pre and post sales service teams for globally dispersed high technology companies, to service model conversion from free of charge to revenue & profit based strategy, merger and acquisition management in the global high tech market. OEM management at Cisco Systems, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu, and others. He was involved in Partner Managmenet at IBM, Brocade, NEC, Sun Microsysems, EMC, and Client Management at Google, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Colt Telecom, British Telecom, to name a few.  Although born and raised in America, Edward has been based in Munich for the last 15 years and speaks fluent German.

 For as long as there has been someone responding to a customer’s request for assistance, Customer Service has been struggling with the challenge of providing efficient, high quality experiences to those asking for help. Tremendous progress has been made as Customer Service has evolved from being a back room, money absorbing, overhead consuming operation to an intelligent, efficient and profitable aspect of most market leading companies. Today, most companies understand the importance and benefit of providing World Class Customer Service and a plethora of supporting literature and tools have evolved that help Customer Service Management professionals find their way.

 As much as things have moved forward, there still appears to be a consistent habit in most organizations of pressurizing the Customer Service team to provide an “instant answer”, oftentimes measuring performance on duration of calls and number of calls addressed in a given day or week. As a result, significant percentages of calls need to run the loop through several times before the client either gets the sought after information or gives up in exasperation. The greater the complexity of the product being supported, the greater a problem this becomes.

 There is one very small change that can be made which not only helps reduce the number of contact and information cycles needed to finally address the issue, but also gives the customer a much better feeling about the Customer Service staff actually working in a professional manner.

 Mirroring

 There is one very simple change to your call handling that can almost immediately improve your Customer Service productivity anywhere from 10% to 50%. The more complex your product is, the greater your savings will be. At the start of any Customer Service event there is an inquiry rocess in which the Customer Service professional or system will attempt to correctly understand the client’s issue. The classic Help Desk facility will have the Customer Service professional then take the client’s information and attempt to create a response that addresses the client’s issue. What’s wrong with that, you say? Isn’t that what they are supposed to do?

 Not really. What the overwhelming majority of organizations do is ASSUME that the information they received and stored was properly understood before being acted upon. What actually should be happening is that a clear and concise “issue statement” needs to be created and then mirrored back to the customer, along with “If xxxx happened, then this would solve your issue?” That is, you must not only mirror your understanding of the issue, you must also verify that the target solution is correct.

 After 20 years in the Customer Service business I have far too often seen situations where a customer service professional incorrectly understands the client’s issue and proceeds to provide an answer that solves the wrong problem.

 Equally distressing is the situation where the client’s issue is understood, however their target solution is not. Again, we end up with a solution that the client simply cannot use.

It is a most rare experience where a customer service professional will invest the time up front to validate my issue and target solution before responding with a resolution.

The main reason why this is not done is that the majority of calls are quite trivial and the client issue is obvious. “I forgot the password”, “I don’t recall the URL”, “The printer isn’t working”, “My system won’t boot”, etc… However, as the complexity of the client’s issue increases, it becomes far more likely that it will be misunderstood. Because the complex issues are less common, the methodology used to resolve issues is designed to address the most common rather than the most difficult issues.

 One suggested route is to allow a certain category of questions to go along the traditional path, perhaps requests which the client can express in two sentences or less. Even with this methodology, when a resolution is provided one must always ask “Does this address your issue?” If the answer is negative after the first resolution cycle or the client takes more than a few sentences to detail their issue, you should always mirror your understanding of the issue and their desired result before any effort is made to determine a resolution.

 It is also very important that the issue statement and the target resolution are stored in the call tracking system exactly as they are spoken to the customer. Any deviation opens the door to heading down the wrong resolution path.

 Because an increasing percentage of transactions take place across international borders, you are also dealing more frequently with individuals who are not communicating in their mother tongue, thus increasing the chances for misunderstanding. Not only are you challenged at the level of language, you are also going to run into difficulties with cultural interpretations. Someone from Japan will express their sense of urgency differently than someone from Italy.

Your ability to rely upon the accuracy of information provided will vary, sometimes dramatically, from country to country, and region to region.

 Because of this, once you’ve started mirroring you should always email your client the issue and resolution statements and include them in all written communication regarding the issue. This not only gives your client the ability to take their time to better understand your words, it also allows everyone to share information more precisely and gives you solid documentation should things get challenging down the road.

 As Customer Service becomes more and more automated, the easier problems are more often addressed via FAQs, Knowledge Engines or other tools. That means that by the time the client has reached a sentient being to address their problem, not only is it no longer a trivial problem, they have already scraped away at their first layers of patience and frustration is mounting.

Because the first human interface is now the “Level 2” support facility, it becomes all that much more likely that an issue will be complex, it will be more frequently misunderstood and thus resolutions will more often be wrong.

 My call to action for you?

Make a simple change in your processes to ensure that issues and desired resolutions are mirrored before you head down the path to a resolution. If you do this consistently, you’ll find that the average resolution time per call, the number of resolution cycles per call, as well as the number of flawed resolutions and re-opened cases will decrease and customer satisfaction will increase. You save money and get happier customers to boot! What’s not to like about that?

To learn more about Edward Caulfield, visit http://seriousaboutservice.eu//

What do you think?

Are you mirroring before heading toward a resolution? What will you do today to insure it?