There have been plenty of books written about pushing employees to their potential and encouraging them to work their hardest so they can reach their full potential. There are branches of psychology and management that focus on the subject. Like a lot of things, over analyzing it isn’t always prudent or feasible for smaller customer service organizations, so these smaller customer organizations just need to follow simple advice with pragmatic solutions.

An effective way to handle many employees that aren’t reaching their full potential is to simply set a deadline / performance requirement. Note that the performance requirement is just that - a requirement. Not a goal or an ideal point to reach in an ideal amount of time - a requirement.

Make it a requirement that they work on X number of tickets and maintain a customer satisfaction rating of Y or make it a requirement that they go through X number of calls with a first call resolution rate of Y. The metrics have to be simple, trackable, and sensical. Anything less than that and the nudge can easily backfire.

It is helpful to initially set the goal low. Set it only a little bit above what they are currently doing. As they meet that goal, increase it further and continue doing so until the employee is at the ideal level. Make it clear at each point that the goal is something that is going to be increased and that X performance level is the ideal level of performance. Praise the particular employee each time they reach a performance requirement (see this post). It is a simple thing to do and it can be very effective for employees that are talented, but seem to just lack the motivation to really do their best.

A lot of supervisors and managers underestimate the importance and value of praising employees. The size of the gesture is irrelevant - a simple email or positive tap on the shoulder can mean a lot to an employee. Customer service employees are typically under appreciated, so going just a little bit out of your way to make an employee feel good can make a huge difference. Praising publicly is another good way to encourage employees to do good work. All it takes is a simple email to make an employee feel good.

Letting the employee know they have done a good job will not make them feel good, but also encourage such behavior in the future. If someone is acknowledged for doing something well, chances are they are going to be more motivated to continue doing so in the future.

The idea is to do something to acknowledge good work. Some type of recognition is a lot more than what most employees get. And despite its simplicity, it can end up making a huge difference.

However, Alaska Airlines made that more difficult than she would have liked. To get to the customer feedback form on their web site, a customer would have to go through this entire process:

Home > More > Contact Us > Customer Care > E-mail Post Flight Comments

When you manage to the find the page (which you can jump to by clicking here), you are presented with a rather lengthy form that asks for a whole bunch of personal and flight information. The form doesn’t make it easy to just whisk off a quick comment (good or bad) and it makes the act of giving positive feedback quite a tedious process.

While it makes sense for Alaska Air’s form to be thorough, it would make more sense to have a way to expand the form if the customer wants to provide more information. For positive comments, a name and email address would be plenty. For negative comments, hopefully the company has a way to search for reservations using basic information (such as a name and flight number) and doesn’t need to ask for a whole bunch of information.

The page could ask “Is this a positive or negative comment?” If the customer chose positive, it could present them with a simple form. And if the customer chose negative, then the form could expand. It’s a simple thing to do, but it can make a big difference. Companies should never make it difficult to submit feedback - good, bad, or neutral.

Companies that find themselves having to lock customers into long-term contracts probably aren’t doing their jobs right in the first place. If a company is completely confident in its abilities, it will find little to no reason to lock its customers in. Happy customers that believe in your company and what it offers are customers that don’t have to be locked in. They will not only continue to use your company, but most likely refer it to their friends and colleagues.

Long-term contracts, on the other hand, lock customers in - including the unhappy ones. Unhappy customers that are locked into a contract rarely (if ever) become happy customers as a . They get even more frustrated and they start to dislike the particular company even more. They may actively tell others to avoid your company (and its restricting contracts).

A lot of companies with long-term contracts tend to employ some questionable measures to get customers into those contracts. Reduced prices for the first couple of months, waiving of setup fees, reduced prices for locking into a contract, etc. A lot of the methods are effective and long-term contracts undoubtedly reduce risk and make cash-flow more manageable. However, it can often do that at the risk of customer satisfaction. And if the customers aren’t happy and word gets out, there will almost certainly be bigger problems to address.

We had our nice dinner and by the end of the meal, we began to wonder if they had forgotten about our birthdays. No one mentioned it after we were seated or even after we had asked for the check, so we assumed the low key that we had we requested meant non-existent. However, the restaurant came through at the end and delivered two very nice piece of cakes with a couple of candles of them. There was no singing, but a couple of staff members did come over and wish us a happy birthday. They were also nice enough to give us the two pieces of cake for free and wish us a happy birthday on the way out as well.

Overall, the restaurant handled the birthday well. I’m not sure if waiting until the very end is the best way to do something like celebrating a birthday, but they did do it before the end, which is what ended up counting. Good restaurants (like this one) and exceptional companies take the time to make a special occasion not only enjoyable and fun, but memorable.

When you fortunate enough to have a customer decide to celebrate a special occasion at your restaurant, hotel, or business, take the time to make it special. Anything would certainly be unacceptable. We chose the particular restaurant we went to because we knew we would have a good experience and the restaurant came through exactly as expected.

Even with that fact of life and of customer service in mind, the answer of “I don’t know” is completely unacceptable. Any employee who says “I don’t know” and leaves it at that is actually an employee who does not care. Especially with technology and the Internet, looking up answers to problems and questions is even easier than before. It isn’t difficult to IM, call, or find a supervisor or another employee. It also isn’t difficult to Google a problem and figure out what it might be. It isn’t at all difficult to send the customer in the right direction with a few web links.

The point is that customers don’t want to be left at “I don’t know.” They want to hear “I don’t know that off hand, but I will be more than happy to find out for you.” As a service provider, you can offer to get back to the customer with the answer or ask them if they’d like to wait. Some customers will want to wait, others will want an email or a call back.

Do whichever they ask and do your best regardless of which way they prefer. Ask who you need to and look up what you have to look up. The goal is to find an answer for the customer that is both useful and accurate. If it isn’t useful or if it isn’t accurate, it doesn’t do the customer much good. If there is no direct answer that you can find, offer up alternative solutions (”X might not be possible, but Y is certainly possible”). Whatever you do, never leave the customer at “I don’t know.” “I can find out” is much better for you and the customer.

Here are some tips:

1. Rule number one is there is nothing to gain by proving a customer wrong. You have a lot to gain by explaining an issue to a customer and perhaps even explaining why they’re incorrect, what’s wrong, and how they can correct it, but essentially nothing to gain by proving a customer wrong. Proving a customer wrong is completely ineffective on both a business and a psychological level.

2. Always try to use positive language. Positive language are words and phrases that make you sound happy. If you aren’t a jubilant person, that’s okay (neither am I). As long as you give off the image that you’re polite, willing to help, and patient. Use phrases like “All you have to do is”, “To do that, just go do this”, “I’d be happy to help you with that,” etc. Don’t order customers (never say “You have to”). Instead, suggest what they can do to get the solution.

3. Try to explain the cause and effect in simple terms. Customers are usually interested in what caused their problem and they want you to take a little bit of time to explain it. You don’t have to and should not go into the exact technical details, but you should try to explain explain things at a basic level that the customer will hopefully be able to understand and make sense of.

For example, instead of saying “Your order was delayed because our processing system did not sync with our order fulfillment processes, thus causing your order to be removed from the order batch that was run at the end of the day,” say something like “Your order was delayed because of an error in one of our internal systems.” (Both of those examples are entirely made up. I’m not even sure if that technical problem is even possible.)

4. Tell the customer what has been fixed and how you did it. For the above mentioned issue, you would want to say something like “I have corrected the problem by changing a setting on your account in our internal system and have expedited your order so you will still receive it in the same amount of time.”

5. Tell customers how to prevent the problem from happening again. An important part of customer service is not only fixing the problem, but ensuring it won’t happen again and/or educating the customer to prevent it from happening again. A ticket closed does not mean a problem resolved. It makes more sense to invest some time now and resolve the issue completely instead of investing a lot of time later to resolve an issue that was only half-fixed the first time around.

These should serve as some good general rules of technical people that need to provide customer service themselves. For more reading on this subject, check out this post (general) and this post (specific).