Rachel Tait

We’re all going on a –social- holiday!

by Rachel Tait, on March 22, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , , , , .

It’s that time of year, when a lot of people are thinking about how they want to spend their vacation days.  Be it skiing in the Rockies, or a beach holiday in the Dominican Republic, or a simple city break – in my experience booking holidays often produces two polar emotions.  Excitement at the thought of time off work to relax, partake in some famous sites, maybe even a gin and tonic or two, and a lurking sense of foreboding as you wonder if you are getting a good deal, whether all reservations will meet expectations and if you’ve checked all the required boxes.  It’s a rollercoaster of emotions!!

I’ve been riding that rollercoaster for the last couple of weeks.  Top of the rollercoaster: “yay – we’ve booked a 2 week break to see 5 cities in Europe. Woo hoo!!!”  Bottom of the rollercoaster: “holy moly – travel between different countries is a complete nightmare! They want how much for some train travel??” (Off topic –they wanted $1200 for 4 days of train travel.  I can only assume that included taking part of the train home with you or shares in the company… /rant).

Rather than admitting defeat or alternatively crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, I took to the web and used every social weapon I had at my disposal to get advice, options and of course obtain the best possible deal that I could.  My personal social media arsenal included several different channels, with each as important as the other in the war against anything putting a damper on my holiday!

Social Media Weapon 1: Online review and advice sites.

I’ve been a fan of these for a while (I even wrote my first ever blog for Ciboodle on one!) and while some of the reviews you have to take with a pinch of salt, on the whole this in my opinion is where you get the best advice.  Websites like www.tripadvisor.com and www.yelp.com are written by the people for the people, with contributors providing reviews of activities, hotels etc. based on their experiences.  So you are getting a first-hand experience of someone that has literally ‘been there and done that.’

Even though these are written by end users based on their experience with your company, there is a really easy way for companies to positively influence reviews on these kinds of websites.  Wait for it… Provide good customer services and experiences in the first place!  Mind blowing, eh? But seriously, those that have the best reviews aren’t doing anything different to that.  More often than not those that stand above the rest are not the fancy pants 5 star or top dollar places.  They are the companies that go that extra mile and go beyond the call of duty, focusing on exceeding the expectations of their customers, and can be lower priced or unknown brands.  For example, I read one review where a couple who were staying in a three star hotel in Florence had got lost trying to find it.  They phoned the hotel, and not only did the front desk provide them with directions to the nearest obvious landmark to the hotel so they could get their bearings – they also sent a staff member there to meet them and guide them the final distance to the hotel and the nearest parking location.  Nice, simple and no additional cost to the hotel – but it went a long way with the customer and now lives forever on a review website for prospective customers like me to read.

For the service providers – restaurants, hotels, spas, etc. – I do realize there are still going to be times when things go wrong; it happens to everyone.  Many of the best reviews come from customers who started out with a negative experience that was turned around by exceptional attention and care after something went awry. So, when things go wrong, the best thing to have is a strategy to deal with it. All providers listed on social media sites should create a feedback policy which includes a regular check of these websites, reading reviews and gathering feedback both good and bad and doing something about it!  In simple terms, your reviewers are identifying service or product breakdowns, and they are doing it for nothing!   We all know the old adage about it being cheaper to keep a customer than recruit a new one, well now this is truer than ever because it’s even harder to get a new customer with negative experiences available to anyone with a computer or smart phone device.  Ignoring a problem is no longer an option, but if you deal with these in an effective, timely manner more often than not potential new customers will see you are listening and care enough to fix where you may have once fallen down.

Social Weapon 2: Online Communities

I’ve not spent a lot of time on online communities; instead my preference is to phone and speak to someone. I have a short attention span and when I set my mind on something I want to get it sorted then and there (ask my colleagues, my polite, unrelenting nagging is that of legend around Sword Ciboodle offices globally).  Phoning the call center was actually my first stop when trying to figure out our rail travel options and any terms and conditions pitfalls I should be wary of.  After a lifetime on hold listening to some particularly poor hold music, I decided to save whatever soul I had left and ‘resorted’ to posting on the company’s community.  My experience of doing this has changed my opinion of using online communities moving forward.

I posted on a Thursday afternoon and had an answer by the time I got to work on Friday morning.  Not only did the response completely answer my initial query, they went onto advise me of which trains I should look to catch and some other good ‘hints and tips’ that I didn’t even ask in my initial query.  Seriously, I nearly fell off my chair.  For a company I couldn’t even get on the phone, and to be honest was having second thoughts about, they completely surprised me and the level of service far exceed my expectations.

In the end the rail option wasn’t for us, but the service level definitely opened my eyes to what an influential asset online communities can be for companies who want to provide efficient and satisfying customer service whilst easing the demand placed on other channels.

Social Weapon 3: My Personal Network

I’m not going to lie, I know some pretty awesome people.  I’m also lucky enough that via various continent hopping manoeuvers on my and their part they are also nicely spread out around the globe.  Geographic proximity, travelling experience and a character reference because I know them all personally means their recommendations hold much more water than even those on online review sites. For this trip, I reached out via Facebook asking for any advice on anything in form.  I received some great replies and good options for closing out the final part of trip planning.  Like I said, my friends are awesome.

Organizations need to work on identifying these ‘awesome people’ who get actively involved in the online conversation and have influence within their social network.  Plug into these individuals and find out what they like, what they don’t like and most important find out how you can get them singing your praises.  More likely than not, if they are active on one channel they will be active on many more, therefore 1 or 2 positive experiences will multiply exponentially once you’ve clued into what floats their boat.

At the start of the blog, I referred to these channels as a social media arsenal, and that is exactly how organizations need to look at them.  Focusing and investing in just one social channel isn’t going to work, and neither will creating a social media strategy which sits outside of your overall customer service vision.  In traversing the social media landscape, companies must have an integrated social strategy that is laid out with timely, appropriate objectives and actions for all channels.  Finally, this should all be integrated into your central customer service platform – so that when social is no longer the weapon of choice for a customer they can switch to calling the contact center or going on the web and receive the same level of customer service and query resolution from an agent who is knowledgeable about their customer service journey to date. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I phoned up the train company and they could see that I spoke to Jeffrey on their community just 2 days ago and he solved my query about using a train pass for consecutive days in Europe, and therefore something else potentially more significant has befallen me.

Now we’ve got all our travel sorted, I suppose the next thing to figure out is what we’re going to do when we get there. Feel free to send recommendations my way – Facebook, twitter or other social channels all accepted by this now socially savvy Scottish traveler.  I will cheers to you all with a Daiquiri in the sunshine from Monaco :)

ps. For those of you that are wondering, that is indeed 2 Ciboodlers on tour, and was taken when Clare Dorrian our EMEA marketing genius and I took on Barcelona.  I think Barcelona won….

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Rachel Tait

Passion is Contagious

by Rachel Tait, on January 27, 2012, in Thought Leadership, about , , , .

Steelers fans

Passion: “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate” (Dictionary.com).

So, if that’s passion then what comes with it?  In my opinion: focus, learning, interest and continuous improvement. Passionate individuals and organizations never stop learning, and in terms of customers, your passionate ones are often those that are most loyal, most valuable and importantly most vocal across all communication channels.

I’ve got a long list of things that I’m passionate about. I don’t want to bore you but on there would be chocolate, wagamama (delicious noodle house in the UK… unfortunately not available in Chicago. Sad face), Scotland, NFL Football and of course marketing.  On marketing, I’ve always been passionate about it and I like to think I always will be.  I did it for 4 years at university, have worked in this field since graduation and everyday know that this is the job for me.  I’m not saying there are days when marketing isn’t the top of my fav list – ask some of my colleagues in the Sword Ciboodle office, the stories they could tell! But to this day, I’ve never got home and started looking into how I change careers to become a dentist, carpenter or Shetland Pony Breeder.  In fact, with my passion comes an interest in advancing my knowledge in marketing and supporting disciplines.

For organizations that want to make waves in their industry, and stand out as the best, one of the secrets is to get passionate about your customers, and make them get passionate about you.  Care about how they get treated, learn about what they want, and then go out of your way to deliver it! Don’t just find out why they like you, find out why they love you.  And when you know why they love you – make sure you’re delivering these products/services/traits to them, and others like them, in spades.  It’s important that you don’t just run through the motions in a predefined script or process  (yes Abercrombie and Fitch I’m looking at you…. the fact your sales associates follow me around asking if they can help me because they were told to do so whenever they see a customer is more than a little creepy, and annoying).  Go beyond what is expected or required, show off your passion and theirs will follow.

If you can grow this passion within a small customer base, you will often find it grows exponentially as beyond anything passion is infectious.  Just look at sports fans!  As a proud supporter of the Pittsburgh Steelers, I’m never more passionate, loud and proud than when surrounded by my other Black and Gold brethren.  And when I say surrounded, that’s not only when watch games but also in groups online.  I recently joined www.32loud.com which is a website which welcomes fans from all of the NFL’s 32 teams, and I joined because they are targeting those that are vocal to be part of their online community.  They got to me via a facebook group for Steelers fans based in Chicago, which has 400+ fans who post on the ups and downs of the Steelers on a daily if not hourly basis.  So what made me join?  They locked into my passion.   They have a leaderboard on the website, which ranks the teams in terms of number of members, number of posts, number of likes etc.  Can’t have the Bengals or Ravens out doing my boys so I got onboard and ‘got loud’.

Like 32loud, find passionate voices out there, and let them know you’re not only listening to them but taking on their comments.  Log into your company facebook, hold interactive focus groups, hey stand outside with a sandwich board speaking to people if that works for you!  Just do something, as passion isn’t something you can just say you are and that’s that.  It requires action, and not just one off action, but continuous action.  Anything less is just lip service.

I know it’s not as simple as just getting it done, and many ‘ducks need to be in a row’ for this to happen – including people, technology, budgets etc.  However, without a vision, and a commitment to achieving that vision, the norm will remain just that – normal, beige, ‘just ok’.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of many examples of cutting edge companies that are ‘just ok’….. and for Rachel Tait.com, marketing extraordinaire to the stars, just ok isn’t an option….

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Rachel Tait

Build customer service around your customer – and it could be Amazon-azing…

by Rachel Tait, on March 28, 2011, in Company Voice, about , , , .

We all have customer service from hell stories, which frequently come out in the pub and get increasingly hyped up as time goes by.  There is nothing better than comparing battle scars and putting down those companies that dared cross you.  However, is there a converse to this?  Have you ever sat in a bar and waxed lyrical about a customer service experience from heaven? A study from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs showed that happy customers who get their issue resolved tell on average 4-6 people about their experience – sounds good in practice but does it happen in real life?  With so many examples of pitiful customer service standards across various industries it’s hard to believe, however I have witnessed the promised land and it was magical!

The story starts with me purchasing a kindle from www.amazon.com.  A bit of a book worm, I was so delighted with it I wanted to ensure it was kept out of harm’s way so I went the extra mile and purchased a quite lavish leather case to protect it.  All went well, until my kindle started randomly rebooting itself… Not cool, especially as it kept losing where I was up to in the book.  It’s at this point that usual feeling of dread overcame me, time to call customer services…..

But with Amazon, the whole experience is different, and was probably unparralled to any I’ve had before.  And as a result I’ve been turned into the kind of customer every business wants, one that not only regularly uses the company but will tell anyone who will listen about how awesome it and it’s customer service is.

Firstly, you put your number into a website and they phone you!! And no, they don’t phone you when they’ve got a mo, they phone you instantly. Nice.

Once on the call with an agent I was then prepared for what I thought would be a tricky strategic negotiation to get to the end goal of what I wanted, not what they wanted to give me.  I’d spent an hour on the forums diagnosing the problem and I’d discovered what other customers had got in resolution of the same issue.  The series of events couldn’t have been further from this.  The lovely gentleman I spoke to acknowledged the problem, confirmed it was a product defect, refunded my case and gave me a credit in order to purchase the higher value case and sent me on my merry way.  The whole issue was solved in less than 10 minutes – I was agog…. I didn’t even have to pull on any of my much sought after ‘Tait negotiation’ skills!

Since then, I’ve been amazon’s golden advocate customer.  Sad but true, I do speak about it in the pub. Also at work, on the train, on the phone to loved ones etc etc.  To this day, the thing which continues to amaze me is that none of the steps taken were particularly revolutionary.  They were just a great example of a company doing the simple things really well, and the fact I’m so impressed by it should in itself illustrate how rare this is:

  • They were familiar with my account from the number I entered to be called on – so there was no “what’s your name, eye color, DNA profile” grilling.
  • The agent was empowered to solve my issue – he didn’t have to speak to a manager to get permission or bounce me around the organization in order to resolve my problem
  • They apologized – the simplest thing a company can do, and it goes pretty far.
  • They made everything as easy for me as possible, even sending me a link post call so I could rate my experience and the specific agent I talked to.

It’s not rocket science, but it works and the results speak for themselves – customer satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy and positive word of mouth.  I’m living proof!

My great grandmother always used to say – without the lows, you wouldn’t have the highs.  So while I’m not saying gone are the days when we put an organization’s customer service to rights in the pub, I’m hopeful that if more organizations can realize the importance of creating a customer service built around the customer then maybe more often these sessions will be lightened up with the customer service highs.  And, for me at least, Amazon customer service is definitely a high.

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Rachel Tait

Workarounds are Hard Work

by Rachel Tait, on February 14, 2011, in Company Voice, about , , .

Recently, I was using a program for an email campaign we were sending out. This particular program wasn’t intuitive, required me to copy and paste things from a different program, to notepad, then into that program for it to work. It also required me to figure out a number of, quite frankly, ridiculous workarounds which ultimately would enable me to get to my end goal. While I did get there eventually, I was completely frustrated, visually aggravated and would have quite happily had a nice gin and tonic to get over it!

While I’m lucky that I don’t need to go through this process all that often, some contact center CSR’s have to deal with this everyday. Finding themselves trying to find their way through an unintuitive interface, in an attempt to solve an often simple customer request. By good fortune, I didn’t have a customer, or potential customer, on the phone that I was trying to keep happy.  Because if I did, they would be completely in the dark about the system maze I was trying to find my way around!  I’m tired just thinking about that…..

While contact center agents may not get as frustrated as I did, many of them are very skilled at the art of distraction and small talk in an attempt to keep the focus off how long the system is taking and keep the caller happy.  However, regardless of whether they are great at talking the hind legs off a donkey, there are many, less than beneficial, side effects of inefficient systems:

  • Inability to reach first contact resolution
  • Long call handling times, leading to longer hold times
  • Customer and agent dissatisfaction
  • Long agent training times, and agent turnover

In addition to the obvious increased operational cost this kind of technology has on an organization, there are also larger opportunity costs which can sometimes be forgotten about.  While your agents are focusing on ‘alt-tabbing’ to the correct window, are they really listening to what the customer is saying?  With the call dragging on, are they focusing on just ending it or are they going that extra mile to provide top notch customer experience?  Do you want your customers to be greeted by someone in a bad mood, or someone that is upbeat and ready to help?

A contact center system should be intuitive, easy to use and ultimately not the focus of a customer interaction – but an enabler of an efficient, value-infused conversation.  Companies need to take a step back, and fit their technology around the customer experience, not vice versa.

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Rachel Tait

Holiday Message from Paul White (and Winston the bulldog!)

by Rachel Tait, on December 16, 2010, in Company Voice, about , , , , .

Never one to do things by the book, and because I’m a big fan of saving the polar bears, rather than send out traditional holiday cards this year we pinned down Paul White, our CEO of Sword Ciboodle Americas, and with his trusty Bulldog Winston he has done a video holiday message.  You can view the video below.

Happy Holidays everyone!!


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Rachel Tait

Bridging the gap between contact center heaven and hell…

by Rachel Tait, on December 9, 2010, in Company Voice, about , , , , .

In recent weeks, contact center heaven and contact center hell has been a hot topic around the water cooler here at Ciboodle HQ.  We’ve been around for a while (yeah i know, we look young for our age!) and have seen it all – the good, the bad, and the plain downright ugly.  However, we’ve also seen that whilst some organizations believe making that leap from a contact center that inspires fear and loathing, to one that satisfies and inspires all those that come into contact with it is more trouble than it’s worth, there are others that make massive strides towards saving money while improving customer experience in a relatively small timeframe.

Continue reading…

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Rachel Tait

Feedback is worth so much more than the paper it’s written on

by Rachel Tait, on October 13, 2010, in Company Voice, about , , , , , .

Recently I’ve become a ‘yelper.’ For those not in the know, www.yelp.com is an ‘online, urban city guide’ where anyone, anywhere can post a review on products and services ranging from restaurants to vets to state run facilities.  I initially used the social review site as a guide for restaurants, hairdressers, places to watch the Chicago Bears hopefully romp home to victory.  However, in the last few weeks, I’ve graduated from freshmen yelper, to at least sophomore grade, as I’ve also been writing reviews based on my experiences.

To date – I’ve written three reviews.  Of these, only 1 was good…. And to be honest, I only put that one in incase anyone stumbled across my profile and thought that I was a typical whining Brit.  So, do we provide reviews as a cathartic form of getting a bad experience out of our system? Or do we do it to provide honest feedback to the company and future patrons in the hope of improvements being made or to save someone from the same fate?

Continue reading…

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