Keep finding fixes
Swenson might sound happier than you’d expect dealing with dissatisfied customers.
“I consider customer complaints a gift,” she says. “The fact that they’ve taken the time to call and tell us what is making them unhappy only enables us to take that information and do something with it to provide a better experience for customers who follow.”
That’s the next step of improving your customer service model: You have to use feedback to make changes.
“You can’t just listen and hope that something gets fixed by itself,” Swenson says. “You really have to bring that back
and make some trade-off decisions about where you’re going to take the product or the education process in the next step.”
If you’re like Swenson, you’ll have a lot of feedback to sift through — traditional customer satisfaction surveys, trending comments from social media and online communities, observations of customers using your service in the field or in your focus groups, and, of course, the customer and employee issues you observe while monitoring calls.
It seems overwhelming, but Swenson operates on the Pareto principle, which states that about 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. So she’s focused on those overarching issues.
“When you go at it as a continuous improvement, you really try to look for the themes across the organization,” she says. “Not surprisingly, you’ll find the same issues commonly across the company.”
Obviously, if you’re looking for companywide issues rather than isolated instances, you need to have your big-picture lenses on. Widen your view by bringing in various perspectives.
“We have cross-departmental groups that come together and bring that data from their particular discipline and integrate it so we’re not solving the same issue in a bunch of different places,” Swenson says. “We look at it more holistically across the company.”
It’s easier to detect those common themes if you set aside the origins of the feedback, at least momentarily.
“When I first joined the company, I went across the country and did employee focus groups along with my head of human resources,” Swenson says. “We collated all the information that employees were telling us — regardless of where they worked, what product they were working on — and we looked for common themes.”
During those sessions, for example, Swenson kept hearing that customer-facing employees had trouble transferring customers to the right place in the company. So the first leg of her analysis was how often the issue surfaced.
“We look for frequency of the distribution of that issue,” she says. “So if it’s happening frequently across a number of things, it obviously would get a higher priority for resolution than those things that are maybe one-off.”
After prioritizing the issues you want to address, turn them over to the employees who deal with them daily. They’ll have the best insight to solutions.
“Try to engage them and involve them as much as possible in developing the new method so that they can help support it,” Swenson says. “Sometimes I see leaders trying to be too prescriptive about what they want to accomplish, and it may not fit within how work gets done in the organization. So involving them in the design and implementation of that is really key.”
For example, if you notice an employee using a really effective process while you monitor a call, ask if he or she will champion the idea. Swenson either has that employee sit down with co-workers to share best practices or lead a training session about it.
“Sometimes that can work better than having your supervisor do it because it’s a peer,” she says. “It may not be exactly right, but people pick up these tips from each other, whether it’s how to use the system more effectively, or, ‘This is what I do before I call a customer,’ or, ‘Let me tell you how I’m able to resolve these issues with this department or that department.’”
When employees lead solutions themselves, buy-in for the change is already secured. They wouldn’t present a plan that they’re uncomfortable with.
To keep them on track, keep reminding them what you’re trying to solve and why. Swenson tells her employees she envisions a practical plan for improving the customer experience that’s efficient for both customers and employees.
“If there is no context or set of goals that they understand, then they’re going to not be as clear about what they should be doing,” says Swenson, who also sets up checkpoints to make sure employees progress toward the goal as they brainstorm solutions.
Using her employees’ ideas, she developed an intranet system to help representatives connect customers with the right person in the right department. Once your solution is in motion, the key is closing the loop.
“What’s really important is that there is a complete follow-up with the employee,” says Swenson, who keeps hearing and sharing reinforcement from both employees and customers about the revamped process. “Making sure you close the loop with the employee is important to show them that you’re really serious about making these things happen.
“The thing that will kill participation and engagement is not doing what you say,” she says. “If you’re going to ask people to be involved and to say that you’re making change for this reason, it can’t be lip service.”
Swenson’s focus on improving the customer experience added 123,000 new customers during 2009 and brought Sage’s revenue to $889.4 million for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. She keeps the cycle rolling through her employees’ 40,000 daily calls because a real commitment to customers — the kind she can hear in conversations — is never-ending.
“It is all about continuous improvement,” she says. “It’s really a journey and not a destination. You’re never going to arrive because customers’ needs are always changing.”
How to reach: Sage North America, (866) 996-7243 or www.sagenorthamerica.com
