Not in the mood for reading? Check out this week’s CX Talk Below!
We’ve all had those “unrecoverable” situations in customer experience. That horror story that follows us around. Spend enough time in any industry and you’re bound to gather enough scars to make Frankenstein’s monster appear to have great complexion. In my retail years, I had some confrontations with customers that seemed terrible at the time, but after moving to a B2B focused industry, you realize the stakes are much higher and the impact of the Voice-of-the-Customer can easily have six or seven digit implications to your top line of revenue. That will certainly impact your financial linkage analysis.
With Halloween festivities in full swing here, I thought it would be fun to tell a couple horror stories – even one with me as the accidental antagonist. Having spent my prior career as a mostly “backroom” individual, I did not spend too much time with customers prior to my role where I took the lead in client experience and management. I had been very lucky to have some big wins with some very recognizable clients, and usually stayed backstage running the operations and letting others take on the responsibility of interacting with the client. I enjoyed the operations of projects and took pride in applying my mathematics degree into the emerging field of customer experience.
It was one day when I was the only one in the office, that I got myself into trouble. A client, already in a frenzy because she had not been able to reach anyone, finally contacted me and asked me for help. Quite simply, she wanted to understand if we would be able to achieve a specific margin of error based on the amount of sample they had available for that area of the customer journey they wanted to measure.
I carefully took down the information, threw it into a formula, and returned an email quickly stating that we could meet their needs with a sample size of X which appeared realistic given a historic response rate of Y. Immediately following the email going out, I got another call from the client telling me my numbers were wrong.
Assured in my own confidence, I proceeded to protest the accusation that I was wrong, even going so far as to detailing the three different components of the central limit theorem. After my statistics lecture, the client simply asked, “who do you report to?”. It was then, I realized that – even though I was correct – I had still screwed up. She was calling to let me know that they had specific values that they used for the proportion of population distribution and to ask me to use those numbers. Instead, she rightly got frustrated.
At the time, it was our company’s largest account, and represented nearly fifteen percent of our division’s revenue. Not one we should talk back to. I can certainly say that was the first time I had been asked to be removed from an account, they even asked to have me fired, but fortunately my reputation in the CX division was strong enough that I emerged from that horrifying experience unscathed.
I’ve also had to be that manager on the other side. This one actually happened about a week before Halloween. The circumstances were nearly the same, a client had called an account executive on my team to ask about the sentiment text analysis for one the customer experience touchpoints measured across their customer journey map. It was one of many large programs we managed for this client which had many people that reported to this single account manager as recently the other account manager had left for another role. In this situation, the client left a voicemail with the request.
As can happen when speaking with a “machine”, she went into quite a bit of detail and hesitated many times to ensure she thought about her query as she passed it along. It had several pauses and momentary stammers as the voicemail was carefully crafted “on the fly”.
When returning the call, the account manager also was connected to voicemail. After providing a brief message, he thought he had hung up the phone, then spent a few moments mocking the pace and tone of the voicemail left by the client.
Unfortunately, he had not hung up the phone and his bravado was recorded for the client to hear. There was an immediate and swift customer feedback loop in this case. In tears, she had reported it to her supervisor who turned around and informed the senior client representative. As I was getting ready to pack up and leave for the day, my phone rang with the senior client representative telling me the story and replaying the voicemail recording for me.
No matter how often something like this happens, you are never prepared for one mistake of this magnitude. Without warning, I am listening to the complaint and being asked “What are you going to do?” There is no playbook for something like this in your customer experience strategy and you cannot use something like Outer Loop in your customer experience software platform to solve for this. Having learned my lesson, I just listened until there was an unbroken silence.
I proceeded to apologize for his actions on behalf of the company and said he would be removed from the project immediately. The client insisted that this individual be fired, but I had said that policy did not allow me to terminate his employment on the spot and that – even if I did – speaking about such actions would be detrimental to the overall Employee Experience of the company, which could have even more negative reactions.
The senior client representative was demanding to know who would be the account executive for the project since we were already missing one for several weeks.
With as much composure as I could, I asked if I could give him a response by the next morning and it was already too late to consult with most of my colleagues (most of which were on the East Coast while I was on the West Coast), to which he agreed. It was a very sleepless night for me, which was probably fortunate as I was able to connect with colleagues on the East Coast in the very early morning hours.
I had negotiated an immediate transition of an Account Manager that I had great experience with previously and was able to call my client before opening of West Coast hours to deliver my proposed approach. While I did not think the client would renew just three months later, I was surprised when he called my supervisor to inform the company that they would renew because a) I just listened, b) set expectations on when to expect an answer and c) delivered on the promise.
While there was still some “relationship healing” to happen, that client was still working with the company many years later (long after I had moved up from that role into a management position). What would you consider the value of those three actions? For me, it represented eight digits over fifteen years.
When you think about how scary some situations in customer service and customer experience might be, also consider you can take the “scary away” – just listen, set expectations, and deliver.
And don’t eat all your trick-or-treat candy in one night. Happy Halloween.
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