How to Help Customer Service Agents Manage Emotions and Improve the Customer Experience
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The document discusses managing customer emotions during service interactions. It notes that customers often have both an emotional reaction and a problem when contacting support. The key is helping agents address both issues within the limited time of a call. Five common customer emotions - anxiety, frustration, confusion, entitlement, and frenzy - are identified. If not recognized and handled well, these emotions can escalate to anger. The document provides guidance on understanding how each emotion sounds and feels from the customer's perspective to help agents successfully redirect conversations. Managing emotions is important for reducing escalations, handling time, and improving customer and agent satisfaction.
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How to Help Customer Service Agents Manage Emotions and Improve the Customer Experience
- 3. GOAL TODAY
- 4. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster CONVERSATION
- 5. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster RAGE
- 6. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster RAGE What Customers Who Complain Really Want It generally won’t cost the business money Source: 2013 Rage Study sponsored by ASU Center for Leadership, designed by CMCC and conducted by NOVO 1
- 7. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Source: Beyond Philosophy, The DNA of Customer Experience TWO THINGS EMOTION PROBLEM
- 8. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster MATTER 250,000 15% 53% 84% first 3 days first month second month
- 9. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
- 10. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster Aug ‘13 Sept ‘13 Oct. ‘13 Nov. ‘13 Dec. ‘13 Jan. ‘14 Feb. ‘13 Feb. ‘14 Apr. ‘14 May ‘14 June ‘14 July ‘14 No dated transactions in portfolio; chart is based on a 1-year, 10,000.00 investment 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 This slide is a go Amazon, Costco, Marriott UPS, Apple, Delta, TD CXi Leaders Cigna, Humana, Cablevision, Travelers, Radio Shack, BB&T CXi Laggards S&P 500 Source: Google Finance, Portfolio Performance, August 2014; The Customer Experience Index, 2013, Forrester Research.
- 11. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONS WELL Source: “Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings”, Psychology Today, December 2010 “Emotions are not particularly sophisticated or precise, but their speed and utility make up for what they lack in sophistication and precision.” And this can turn out good, bad, or ugly. Especially when you’ve already taken 20 calls that day, and you have only 8 minutes to address BOTH parts problem and emotion.
- 12. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster Escalations – both your agent and your customers get “hooked” Unhappy people (with either resolved or unresolved issues) who say the experience was negative EMOTIONS WELL ROLE PLAY TWO THINGS EMOTION PROBLEM
- 13. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster HELP AGENTS MANAGE SUCCESSFULLY
- 14. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster THE BIG 5 ANXIETY FRUSTRATION CONFUSION ENTITLEMENT FRENZY HELP AGENTS MANAGE SUCCESSFULLY Each of these emotions, if not recognized and handled well, will lead to anger, and an escalation. This is a complete loss for your company.
- 15. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster How can we help ourselves and our agents manage them more successfully? What role do these emotions play in our agents lives? HELP AGENTS MANAGE SUCCESSFULLY ANXIETY FRUSTRATION CONFUSION ENTITLEMENT FRENZY
- 16. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONAL
- 17. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONAL ANXIETY FRUSTRATION ANXIOUS FRUSTRATEDHow they sound? What do I hear? What’s Underneath? What helps? What hurts? Action to redirect Trigger phrase
- 18. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster USE
- 19. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster EMOTIONAL Escalations Average Handle Time First Call Resolution Calls Per Day Employee and Customer Happiness
- 20. GOAL TODAY
- 21. @TaraPaluck @ unCustomerYExp ©2014 fassforward Consulting Group CXemotionalrollercoaster SUMMARY
Editor's Notes
- Understand how to coach yourself and your agent to navigate the messy waters of emotions
- Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for, what I consider to be, one of the most important and also baffling issues that we face on our journey to understand customer and employee experience: emotions. First let me tell you where you can start tweeting with us, if you’d like: hashtag Cxemotionalrollercoaster As you see on the screen. My handle is @TaraPaluck, and you can also interact with us at @uncustomeryexperience Some background on how this body of work came about. ….my mission is to make emotions a bottom line tangible for companies. That is, emotions are real. But, we don’t treat them like they matter in business. THEY DO. And we’re going to show you why they matter, and how to stop treating them like they’re either invisible, or don’t matter. We’re going to talk to you about how to use them as a tool to your benefit. (story about mute button, customer anger, employee anger and stress) Before I dive into the presentation, I want to share some background on my inspiration and understanding on emotions and customer experience. I started working with frontline employees and managers, in retail, in customer care support centers, in telesales, and collections, more than 5 years ago. I worked on co-creating many training programs focused on customer experience. Specifically, what is it and how does one deliver it successfully. I kept hearing one thing over and over from frontline managers and employees: customers emotions were uncontrollable, unproductive, got in the way of getting the job done and a source of great stress and exhaustion. For example (this story will sound very familiar to many of you, and which we’ve heard many times): Call center agents get a customer who is upset. The agent is tired, irritable, in a hurry, so how do they deal with the customers emotion? They mute them, and vent to their co-workers. The agent then unmutes and the customer is even MORE upset because they’ve been on hold and the situation has not progressed.
- Today our goal is to do three things: The first is to quiet the noise around what really matters to a customer – which is much less about give-aways, pricing and product features and more about how they feel. The second goal is to reframe the conversation you are having with your employees and customers about emotions –we want to put you and your customers on the same page, that means you see the world the same way they do. This will change the way you, and by extension, your employees think about emotions. Rather than as a necessary evil, we’d like for you to realize they are a tool. Customers bring them to the table, you and your employees bring them to the table. And last, our goal is to introduce you to a new way of approaching emotions.
- Main Point: Agenda 3 question Agenda Here’s how we’re going to do it. There’s a lot to cover on emotions and little time to do it, so we have a focused agenda that I feel connects some dots between 3 fundamental questions that should be answered: What role do emotions play in Customer Experience? Why are they so hard to “use” well? How can we manage them more successfully? This is by no means the end of this conversation, in fact it’s only the very beginning, but hopefully by the end of the hour we’ll all have a better understanding of: Why emotions are so important to our employees and our customers How we can begin to have conversations with our employees that help them with emotions
- Let’s start with why they matter. And why they matter is important for two reasons: they show up as a reflection of how well your company is doing, and they show up often. Look at our most social of all ways of expressing -- twitter. Let me read a few of the more expressive emotions… I am going to talk about this a lot because this is where the problem with emotions starts: companies don’t seem to think they matter. And customers are telling you that they do. They matter a lot. Now, all joking aside – this is very impactful and something to pay attention to. These emotions are doing more harm to the perception of a company’s competency, ease of doing business, and ability to deliver value than we should be comfortable with. Twitter isn’t the only way customers are expressing their emotions, though. They’re doing it when they call in, too. And customers are just wondering when we’re going to start taking it all seriously.
- And here’s something even more interesting: we deal with them the wrong way right now. That is. I hear constantly that we “credit” customers or give them something for free to make them feel better. This is unnecessary, in most cases. This is called the Rage Chart, and it’s based off of a study done by the ASU Center for Leadership on what customers really want when they complain. The results are shocking for the fact that most of what customers want when they get upset is FREE. The RED is what costs us money. The BLACK is what is a free solution for us. The top three are free, and they are about dealing with an emotion. This is proof that emotions are the most effective tools we have at our disposal. And, we have them in abundance. This struck me for 2 reasons: companies RUN, absolutely RUN, towards “credits”. And, it seems this doesn’t solve anything. And 2) this is confirmation that the value a customer finds, is found in emotional exchanges. JOKE: There’s a lot of bright sides to the insight this study is giving, but I have to say, the biggest bright side is the 2nd to last number – only 5% of our customers want revenge…which may be a little surprising to you.
- If we remember what we just learned, and you most likely already knew (which is approximately how much of your customer base may be calling into your centers), then the slide becomes monumentally more concerning: According to Colin Shaw’s book “The DNA of Customer Experience”, a customer’s perception of their experience with your company is built 49% on solving the problem, and 51% on the emotion the customer experienced while getting that problem solved. Main Point: Solving the problem accounts for less than 50% of the entire perception of the experience, and we’re ignoring that 50%. •Customers call in with problems. •These problems make them emotional. Let’s spend some time talking about the EMOTION. It’s important b/c it’s more than 50% of the experience for a customer. •May solve the problem, but if you’ve dealt with the wrong emotion, or dealt with it in the wrong way, what happens? The customer escalates, and you lose them. Make a Death and taxes joke regarding problems and emotions on calls Strictly speaking, it’s not good enough to ONLY solve customers problems. You must also make sure they feel okay when they hang up.
- Here are the numbers taken from a call center in a fortune 500 company. Within 60 days, someone is going to decide if they want to stay with you. This is a short amount of time to make the right impression. If you’re like most managers and supervisors and people who work in the call center world, you know your numbers. Here’s an anonymous case study for us to look at. The sheer volume of customers that call in make your place and importance in the customers relationship with the brand/company monumental. •As an example, we looked at how many NEW customers rely on a company (which will remain anonymous) after they become a customer. 15% have called in within the first 3 days. And we can guess a little, but also know that they mostly call about basic things: initial questions about bills, logistics, and basic “how does this thing work?”. If you had to guess, what sort of emotions are they bringing to the call at this point? •By the 2nd month of their “life” with a company, most of them have called in to customer care. This is a sample of new customers only. There are a few important points to make about this: market share, for any industry, is very hard to capture at this point -- a lot of money goes into marketing and promos to get customers, and a lot of energy goes into getting agents off the phone fast, but this may be misguided -- 84% of new customers are a HUGE amount of customer to have contact with and if their touchpoint becomes painful, you’ve done your company irreparable damage. And the obvious point within all of this: if this is the number of new customers you’re talking to, think of the number of existing customers you’re talking to. So the big question is: are they hanging up angry, or feeling good? The answer to this is critical to your brand. What we are pointing to is: how are you using this touchpoint to manage customers emotions? The answer is probably: we are not…we’re more concerned with how fast our agents get off the phone, how many calls they take in a day, and if they said particular things we wanted them to.
- Common stats and clichés that we all know. But why is this such a big deal? (what these numbers mean) Social media We know these numbers, but we don’t have a deeper understanding of them.
- What is the impact ignoring emotion is having on your business? For a long time we didn’t know, but now we don’t have that luxury. This is a snapshot of a customer experience index out of Forrester called the Cxi. The green group shows Cxi leaders -- they that are in the top 10; the light blue line is the laggards – they are in the bottom 10. We we are looking at is the trend of incline vs decline of their S&P 500 ranking. If you look at the S&P 500 as the bellweather for the stock market and the US economy as a whole (which many do), then we see the importance of this: companies that are leaders of the Customer Experience Index display continuous incline over time. The OTHER customer experience rating, theACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index), Professor Claes Fornell (who people call “the father of customer satisfaction” rating of a company does impact its stock market growth was already proven in 2006. Professor Fornell was able to find a direct link between stock market reactions and ACSI movements and fluctuations of a company What is even more convincing is that companies that don’t fluctuate much on ACSI (that is, their customer service rating stays stable, year over year), are less volatile and more profitable on the stock exchange over time.
- Main Points for this slide: Emotions can be used as a tool, but most of the time they aren’t. And the question is WHY? And the problem is that emotions are sort of terrifying -- to me anyway. If you’ve been around humans lately, you’ll know every one of us has them, and sometimes they’re not our friends. If you’ve been in and around a call center, or a retail situation, you know how easily emotions between Reps and customers can escalate, and the experience can turn ugly – antagonistic, condescending, frustrating, angering. The rep hangs up feeling stressed out and emotionally exhausted. So does the customer.
- There’s a term in call centers – it’s “getting hooked”. This means, an agent gets stuck in spiral reacting to a customers emotions. The agent becomes so entrenched that she or he can’t find their way to a productive place. They’ve lost control. If we remember what we just learned, and you most likely already knew (which is approximately how much of your customer base may be calling into your centers), then the slide becomes monumentally more concerning: According to Colin Shaw’s book “The DNA of Customer Experience”, a customer’s perception of their experience with your company is built 49% on solving the problem, and 51% on the emotion the customer experienced while getting that problem solved. Main Point: Solving the problem accounts for less than 50% of the entire perception of the experience, and we’re ignoring that 50%. •Customers call in with problems. •These problems make them emotional. Let’s spend some time talking about the EMOTION. It’s important b/c it’s more than 50% of the experience for a customer. •May solve the problem, but if you’ve dealt with the wrong emotion, or dealt with it in the wrong way, what happens? The customer escalates, and you lose them. Make a Death and taxes joke regarding problems and emotions on calls Strictly speaking, it’s not good enough to ONLY solve customers problems. You must also make sure they feel okay when they hang up.
- Now that we know why emotions are important, and why they’re hard to use, let’s start looking at what we DO know, and how to use that in our conversations with agents and their conversations with customers. We’ve had the same ones since the ‘80s we had the same ones as in 2014. And, although it can seem like there’s an endless amount of them, there isn’t. There’s actually only a few that all others stem from. And there’s a few that destroy your brand.
- For now, we’re only going to focus on the emotions that destroy, and in fact create a lot of issues (re escalations). Here are the big 5: Anxiety Frustration Confusion Frenzied Entitled Each of these emotions, if not recognized and handled well, will lead to escalate to anger, which is a complete loss.
- What role do these emotions play in our agents lives? They send them on an emotional roller coaster. They make, what should be, a simple conversation, a heightened and stressful “situation”. Their job gets exponentially harder when a customer brings an emotion to the table. Right now what you probably see and hear a lot from your agents is their own escalation at being on the receiving end of the customer’s emotion. Unfortunately, what you also see reflected in either their NPS scores or their CHT is an inability to empathize and navigate those emotions appropriately (NPS) or an over-empathetic lack of being able to navigate those emotions appropriately (long Call times). In either case, it’s almost inconsequential to your customer and to the business whether or not the customer’s problem has been solved.
- Main Points for this slide: Look at yourself and how certain emotions that customers bring to call are hard for you to handle – they may get you “hooked”. Which are the biggest obstacles for me? ID the one or two emotions that you react negatively to when you hear a customer expressing it/them. Trigger Phrases: trigger phrases are the “action to redirect”. Use that from the workbook (and your recent discussion) to figure out what the best and most simple thing is for you to do when you hear that emotion that is difficult to deal with. In my own words: write down how you will use that trigger phrase in your own way. What’s comfortable for you? How can you make it your own?
- Main Points for this slide: Get clear and specific words, actions, tones, that help and hurt this emotion. What are the distinct differences between what you hear in each emotion? Do you redirect every emotion in the same way? (NO)
- How can you use this for yourself and for your employees? As a coaching tool for employees – shifts the conversation from a lecture to a partnership where the employee takes responsibility for their own performance As an individual action plan for yourself of your employee As a way of figuring the balance on your team – who’s good at what, and how you can use that for entire team performance
- Today our goal is to do two things: Change the way you, and by extension, your employees think about emotions. Rather than as a necessary evil, we’d like for you to realize they are a tool. And, move you to action. Meaning, we’d like you to actively use emotions as a tool. Whatever you are closing for, whatever conversation you are having, there are only two conversations to have. The first is the conversation that frames. The one that puts you on the same page, that means you see the world the same way the person on the other side of the desk does. The second is the conversation that moves people to action – in other words – what you want to close for, whether it’s that next meeting, agreement to move to the next phase, or even just to explore more. The sweet spot happens when you’re talking about both. Every other conversation is just noise. It’s not worth having.
- We’ve come to the end of our time, and I want to leave time for questions. I’ll just sum up with this. There’s 4 dynamics, and 4 points of view working in every CX situation. They are driven, in part, by your business, and they absolutely inform you brand’s value. 2. 60% of the time, a customer makes a decision to buy or not based on the rep they’ve spoken to. 3. People aren’t born great salespeople, but there are behaviors that contribute to success. 4. There are 4 Biases that every person leans on. 5. Put you in a position that your salespeople really own it.
- Continue the conversation…azzz