Revving Up Contact Center Engagement
In this session we’ll tackle disengagement in customer service and its impact on attrition. We'll explore innovative engagement strategies, reveal the underestimated costs of attrition, and stress the crucial role of employee engagement in reducing attrition rates.
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All right, welcome everybody.
We're excited to get going here today.
We got another session we're gonna be talking about
revving up contact center engagement.
This is an important topic,
especially in today's environment and to do that.
We brought on a friend of mine now,
Lauren Pragoff, who's currently the Chief Customer Officer
at Medi-Cat, Lauren, thanks so much for joining
and how the heck are you?
- I'm doing great, I'm glad to be here today Gabe.
- Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about you and I,
it was just at CB, right, or at the Challenger
that you and I crossed past originally, was that right?
- Yeah, I'm doing some fun virtual events
during the pandemic when I'm sure that we had nothing
better to do, right?
- I would imagine actually, we were all kind of doing,
well, that was a weird time.
So I know you from the challenge,
but give us kind of, you have a fun backstory,
tell us a little bit about your backstory
and then also kind of this newer adventure
with Medi-Cat.
- Yeah, so spent the first maybe 10 years of my career
working on customer service and customer experience,
best practice research at a company called CEV,
which is now part of Gartner,
then kind of evolved into focusing exclusively
on our work around the effortless experience.
Many of you may know the 2013 book
that you are also hearing from Matt Dixon today about.
So spent some time working with Matt,
contributing to that research and to the book
and then building us a training suite
that we use with our clients across the next many years,
working with context center organizations around the world,
really thinking about how do you train your reps
on the effortless experience skills
and how do you sustain that through things like coaching
and quality assurance.
And then most recently at Medi-Cat here,
I've moved into more of a practitioner role.
So Chief Customer Officer,
we are the leading provider in college health software.
And so we are enabling college clinics
and both medical as well as counseling and athletics
to keep records of how they are serving their students
and to enable secure passing of information
between different entities across a college or university.
- Yeah, fun.
Welcome to, yeah, out of consulting.
Welcome to industry, I think they say.
So that book, the effortless experience,
that's like, there's timeless books in business.
And I'm trying to think of a few off the top of my head
but crossing the chasm.
That to me is fitting in that category, 2013.
How is that still like absolutely undeniably
applicable today, Cal, that's still a great one.
Good for you to be part of something
that doesn't feel like it has a shelf life.
So cool.
And then congrats on the new adventure.
Yeah, that sounds really exciting in a cool industry
to kind of go in and shake up
with your background of customer experience.
So appreciate it, you jumping on today
and want to see if we can pull out some of that background
now as a practitioner, but also kind of as a consultant
for those many, many years.
So let's start big picture,
contact center engagement.
It's, you know, we obviously came out of the pandemic.
That was just weird, okay.
We're now out of it, but it's still,
I mean, the economy is now, you've got a lot of these,
sometimes it feels like the perfect storm.
It's like, okay, now this is done, but this is on
and then we still have the companies are losing people
and everyone's yelling at contact center.
It just, it still feels like it's an interesting environment.
Big picture, what are some of your thoughts on this
or how do you feel like the trends in the space are moving?
- Yeah, I mean, look, I think employee engagement
is not a new topic.
It's not even a new pressing topic, right?
It's kind of a perennial thing for contact centers
in particular, these, you're frequently high turnover
environments and organizations really have focused
for a long time.
I will say though, I think perhaps it is now more important
than ever.
It's easy to forget just how weird of a time
the pandemic was, right?
And even thinking about the maybe five years leading
into the pandemic and here we are maybe three years after,
there's been a lot of stuff, right?
Just going on in the world.
So we've had a lot of economic uncertainty
across those years.
There are global conflicts going on, right?
Even just the state of our national discourse,
like things are tense.
And so that means that we as individuals are tense.
So your employees have a lot of stress going on
in their lives, but your customers are stressed too.
And guess where that comes back to roost, right?
It's with your frontline reps.
Yeah, yeah.
And they seem to continually take the brunt of it.
I thought they got the worst during COVID,
but it seems in a lot of industries
that it's still kind of going on in major ways.
So as you kind of look out at the landscape,
I'd love to go through some of the ideas that you have
that are some of the challenges specifically are seeing
and how maybe you'd recommend organizations and companies
think through those in a more structured way,
'cause I think everybody,
we're all looking for a little bit of help here.
Start at the top.
What's kind of one of the big things you're seeing to start?
Yeah, well, I think first think about
what the customer interaction is, right?
So that's perhaps the most important part
and the thing that your reps are doing the most
across a work shift or week, right?
So thinking about how are we making it easier
for our reps to serve our customers
and how are we preparing them
to have an emotionally fraught conversation,
particular industries, right?
You may experience this more than others,
people struggling to pay bills, for example,
but how are you giving your reps the right tools
but also giving them enough freedom to say,
"Hey, I gotta tap out."
Like, I just was on a really hard call
with somebody who was really upset.
It upset me and I need to take five, right?
Or I need to take a lap and really just kind of unplug.
And are we giving our reps permission
to ask for that kind of help?
Yeah, yeah.
And it does seem like with the current environment,
that's pretty hard to do.
You know, you've got so much time-based stuff
and you gotta make sure you're manning
that this channel or that channel.
Is there any advice you feel like organizations
can do to enable that?
It sounds like a good idea in theory,
but it's a little harder, potentially in practice.
I guess everything's always a little harder to execute.
It's awesome to navigate around that.
It is, I think, and yes,
like you can't have everybody jumping off the phone
after every call, right?
But so maybe think about giving them like,
"Hey, it's a certain number of these,
"like, I hate I gotta tap out per certain timeframe," right?
But the idea of, "Hey, if it's gonna take me five minutes
"to reset, when I get back on the queue,
"I'm going to be that much better
"at serving the next customer."
So you can ask people to work through that,
but what you're risking is the next customer in queue
and what kind of service are they gonna receive?
If your rep hasn't recovered, they're not ready to serve.
And so perhaps it's a bad experience.
Worst case is they're not actually solving the issue correctly.
You're creating a repeat contact, right?
And that's just gonna ultimately drive up the queue,
drive up the call time, et cetera.
So you have to think kind of bigger picture
than just who's in the queue, right?
Like they can wait a couple of extra minutes.
I know we don't wanna hear that.
We don't like to talk about increasing that whole time.
At the end of the day,
customers will trade off that whole time
for getting a better experience.
- Yeah, interesting.
That's an interesting kind of principle there
that again, it's a little hard-earned practice,
but I think the benefits probably outweigh the con.
Okay, so one is really understanding
and maybe allowing giving space for people
to kind of understand and be who they are,
what they're filling in the moment and recognizing that.
Where do you go next?
- Yeah, so I also think considering
how you can celebrate impact.
And I mean that in a couple of different ways.
So what's the impact that the service organization
as a whole is having on the company, right?
So helping people feel engaged to the overall mission,
that they're, yes, they're one person,
but they're part of this bigger mission.
And you read a lot about that
in management articles specific to millennials, right?
Like help them see the bigger picture,
help them see how what might feel like a road task
is actually going to have a bigger impact.
I think that applies to all of us, right?
Not just millennials.
So help them see that impact,
help them connect and make that kind of through line
between their work day to day
and what it's gonna do for the company.
And then I think second part of celebrating impact
is the individual customer feedback.
We all do surveys, take the time,
number one to read them, of course,
but pass along that feedback.
Final that verbatim back into your teams,
make sure that they're hearing not just the good,
but especially the good, right?
And let them know, hey, here's an area where we failed.
And how can we all learn from that
and improve on upon it,
but celebrating the customer feedback.
And I will say maybe one caveat here.
We all have heard the hero stories
across the customer service landscape,
like the guy from Zappos who spent a day
on the phone with the lady and like sent her to a week.
- Now it's been extended to a week.
- You know, I heard it was a whole year.
You know, like that sort of thing,
like legends are great,
but they're really hard to measure up to.
And so if that's the kind of story that we're supporting,
that we're celebrating internally,
that's probably gonna do more harm than good
because the rest of your reps are thinking,
well, you know, what above and beyond thing,
am I gonna have to do to get celebrated like that?
Like create a standard, right?
That everybody can reach
and let's celebrate hitting that consistently.
- Yeah, versus kind of these Zappo type stories
are the Nordstrom.
Someone said the Nordstrom.
- I don't tell them.
Anyways, you hear these,
somebody brought like tires back to Nordstrom
and they refunded them.
I'm like, "Norstrom doesn't even sell tires."
They're like, "That's the point."
You may be, I'm like, "This is, this is,
you're making, you're making stuff."
- Next time I'm in the market for tires,
I'll have to keep that in mind.
- I can't remember.
I just remember like, this is, dear boy,
I mean, it's one of these things that just kind of like,
oh, you roll your eyes type of thing
and it creates this environment of,
probably disengagement just 'cause it's, you know,
don't get me wrong, these things are great,
but it does create an unreachable boundary, I think,
sometimes.
So the celebrating impact,
I love the concept of getting to the why.
I mean, you hear this word like,
"It's not just about the why, what, it's about the why."
As we, as these reps who are facing the challenges
and call after call or message after message,
email after email, it's hard to even think
the company's winning, it's hard to think,
they're winning, it's hard to think,
you're just in the mud the whole day,
so you pull them out of it.
I love this idea of verbatim.
Again, just one click down on that.
Is there a way that you found to kind of mix
and match the negative verbatim versus the positive?
I mean, you know, if someone's getting two or three negatives,
like, how do you play through that scenario
so that you are getting some of that real time coaching,
but at the same time, not just kind of,
"Hey, hey, none of this is working."
- Yeah, so I think looking for the trends
in the feedback is important there, right?
So if you've got three or four
and they're all related to the same thing,
like, let's focus on what the actual issue is
rather than on what the customer said, right?
So it never feels good to feel like you're getting nitpicky.
- Right, right, yeah.
- And so when you can base something into a trend
to say, "Wow, like, this is consistently happening,"
then I think that feels more like coaching, right,
than just delivering feedback.
- Yeah, and that happens, I think,
in organizations a lot, right?
It's the one customer survey
and then we turn our whole strategy
or it's the one moment where we then take this employee
and say he or she needs to be disciplined,
but trends are more important than one more individual action.
Cool, okay.
Let's hit one more.
I think we've got time for one more
as we think about things on engagement
where you feel like we can potentially
drive some improvement.
- Yeah, so the other thing I would say is
think about how you can empower some decision-making
across your teams, right?
So the more that reps feel like they are in control,
the more resilient they will become.
And we did some research on this back at CEB,
the control quotient, maybe some of you
might remember that research out there.
It's actually excited in the power of MOMAN's book.
- Yes, you heard that one.
- Right, right.
- But the idea of having that control quotient
and the resilience that you build up
when you feel like you're in the driver's seat,
it's easier to shake things off.
And so what that looks like is finding areas
where you are unnecessarily making the reps escalate, right?
Like, so, oh, that's outside of my decision-making.
I've gotta like send that up to the next person.
There are probably areas where you could just tell them
to do it, right?
What are those low risk decision things
that you could let them do?
I also think making those kind of connections
between your reps.
So instead of having to raise my hand
for help to my supervisor every time,
how can you enable more peer coaching?
That actually helps them all feel more enabled
as a community of reps,
rather than having to depend on the management.
- Yeah, yeah, I just had the other day,
one of those experiences, I got past three times.
That one's really frustrated,
especially when you use those words,
you're kind of saying like,
really like, you know, you can't,
you gotta pass me to this guy to make sure
that my password gets reset or something.
Like you can just do that yourself.
And I got past three times in that control quotient.
Oh man, I haven't heard that for a while,
but that's a good one.
What was that part of kind of the original study or was that?
- Yeah, so that was again,
in some of our work we did around employee engagement, right?
So how do you get people to come to work
more fully engaged every day and enabling that CQ?
- Now I will say, since then the EQ,
I think, I mean, if we were to rerun that research,
we might see the EQ, the emotional quotient,
pop a little bit more because again,
customers are so stressed and so just tense these days
that while I generally speaking,
empathy is an overused skill in the contact center, right?
To a fault, but I think today's customer
maybe needs a little bit more than they did 10 years ago.
- Yeah, I love it, I love it.
Okay, well, again, fun talk track,
I know you've been in the space a long time.
The last thing I just kind of wanted to pose to you,
a lot of people tuning in are obviously in this environment
and they're kind of looking at this, you know,
how do we grow and scale and this type of environment.
Is there something you'd leave them with,
something we've chatted about today or maybe your summary
is they think about trying to kind of combat
some of the challenges as they go with their day-to-day work.
- Yeah, honestly, I think I would go back to the idea
of that trends, right, trends in the feedback,
both in the positive and the negative.
It is so easy and I do this too, right?
So every week I sit down and I look at our customer service.
It's so easy to say, oh, this one-off issue,
I better go tell whoever, right?
We gotta go fix this, we better go coach that person,
whatever, was it truly a problem?
Was it my preference that it could have been handled
differently?
So problem versus preference, my favorite kind of filtered,
I don't know if you look at things through,
but then again, the trends of it all.
So is this something we see both in an employee behavior
in the way that company is handling things
and the way that product functions
or wasn't more of a one-off and just resisting that urge
to just, you know, pull the fire alarm when it's a one-off?
- Yeah, I think that you're giving me advice
'cause I totally do that and my teammates and I'm like,
but I'd see one thing change and, you know,
it is one-off and we do work with a lot of customers.
So I think that's really valuable.
Okay, well Lauren, again, appreciate you taking the time.
Again, congrats on the new, new ish roll.
It's now almost a year, isn't it?
- About six months now, yeah.
- Okay, so it's still newish, but anyways,
we miss you in this space, but congrats on the industry,
industry experience, so I'm sure you'll rock it.
So have a great day and for the audience.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the sessions.
- All right, thanks Dave, this was fun.
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