The Planet Blog

Hi everyone! I started working at The Planet a few months ago in the technical support department, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience here. I’ve been on the customer side of technical support calls for most of my life, so I’ve never understood what it was like to be on the supporting side of the call. Now that my perspective has changed a little, I’ve noticed that the best customer support occurs when the support provider and the support requester work together to create the best experience possible.

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven’t seen many written about how to get great customer support. When you work with a service-based company, you’re likely going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue to technical support.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn’t working the way it should. When this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I’ve also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that regard, and with my newfound perspective, I came up with a few tips that might help you get the most bang for your buck when you work with customer support:

1. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter where the customer support representative is; they’re human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don’t have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it’s easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there’s a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it’s a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I’ll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.
2. Don’t assume your request will be ignored. I’m surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, “No one will probably see this, but …” or “Not that anyone cares, but …” Don’t assume that you’ll be ignored. That assumption is more of an overarching negative sentiment than it is a “reverse psychology” play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.
3. Don’t start with a threat. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities,” or “If you don’t respond within 25 seconds, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer” … It’s not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. Starting with a threat never helps your cause. It’s much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address.
4. Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it’s hard to understand what information is relevant, but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then “I can’t log in. Any ideas?” is not quite as clear as “Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.
5. Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what’s meaningful and figure out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you’ve got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets … different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.
6. More Tickets ≠ More Support. Don’t create multiple support tickets for a single issue … While it seems like you are drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you’re really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.
7. Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren’t satisfied with your support experience, then we aren’t either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support, and you’re much more likely to receive it.

- Sean

A couple of weeks ago, Flora posted a few questions in the comments section of our Call Calibration blog and asked for more information on our call-monitoring process: “I’m interested to know more about calibration and call monitoring. When representatives are appraised by different appraisers, how to ensure fairness? How to eliminate the effect of subjectiveness [sic] in call monitoring?”

As the Contact Center QA manager, fairness is always a main concern for me, so I’d like to take a few minutes to share a little more about how we’ve set up our system.

In the Call Calibration blog, you got a glimpse of what happens during our weekly calibration meetings: The management staff, supervisors, team leads and randomly selected agents monitor and review a sample selection of calls. We discuss the call, and each team member shares their view on how they interpreted the customer-agent interaction. The call is reviewed from a process-and-procedure viewpoint, measuring how it impacts customer satisfaction.

Subjectivity in call monitoring takes two distinct forms: the subjective goals when working with each customer and the subjectivity inherent in peer reviews of performance. The question of the qualitative or subjective aspects in each call is very important: An agent can hit all the points on the evaluation form and the customer’s needs may still not be fully met. Our goal is to satisfy our customers, and if we aren’t hitting that goal with these objective metrics, these sessions are counterproductive. As such, our call calibration grading sheets have evolved over the course of our reviews, acknowledging the importance of — and the subjectivity inherent in — one-on-one interaction.

For instance, empathy is probably the most subjective quality of a call, so we needed to learn the best ways to “grade” when is a call truly sincere and when it sounds forced and unattached. Is there an objective way to ensure this subjective goal is met? We want to move beyond responses such as, “I’m sorry to hear that,” to responses like, “I’m very sorry to hear that you are experiencing X issue. Let me see what I can do to help.” We work with all of our agents to get their input on the most organic, genuine ways to communicate help to our customers, and as we create these hosting call-center best practices, we get additional feedback that helps us build and shape the way we run our organization.

We know that it’s impossible to separate reviewers from their relationships with the agents being graded, so subjectivity will always be an implicit part of the review process. We’ve made the environment very positive, and we follow up with each individual reviewer after our calibration sessions if his or her perception of the call differs from others. Even on the calls scored very poorly, the agents being reviewed should never feel like they are being picked on or talked down to … Every review offers an opportunity to learn how to perform better — it’s not intended to harp on what was done wrong.

When we first introduced the calibration program, there were supervisors who did not want their teams monitored. The fingers always pointed to someone else’s team, and no one really wanted to hear what they did wrong on a given call. By making these calibration sessions much more casual and positive, the tide turned, and agents are now anxious to be selected for review. We made sure to establish the underlying objective of how our interactions affect The Planet’s overall customer experience, and that team-centric goal goes a long way in opening everyone to feedback and criticism.

Calibration is fun now. It’s an engaging process showing us how we did from the customer’s standpoint at the end of the day. If you have any additional questions about the call calibration process, please let us know!

-Arthur

I’ve got a serious case of ad blindness. I generally ignore banner advertisements online, tune out when a TV show goes to commercial (except when ShamWow! is being advertised), and I rifle through newspaper pages to read only the most important content — the comics.

“Use as directed.” “Prices and participation may vary.” “Your call may be monitored or recorded to ensure quality customer care.” “Wow, Kevin. You are incredible.” I hear those phrases all the time, so I’m almost desensitized to their meanings: Of course you should use a product like you’re supposed to … If a McDonald’s branch doesn’t give me a Big Mac at the $2 promotional price, that branch loses my business … The call “may” be monitored or recorded (so it’s probably not … right?) … And yes, I know I’m incredible.

In last week’s edition of “This Week* in Vending,” you met The Planet’s Manager of Technical Support Christian Plunkett. Four minutes and 25 seconds into the video, Christian sent my world into a spiral of uncertainty as he explained the weekly call calibration session used to monitor and score The Planet’s phone support quality. What? Calls are monitored and recorded for quality purposes? What does that mean for my other assumptions? Maybe Mitch Hedberg was right when he talked about the existence of a McDonald’s that didn’t participate in anything: “Cheeseburgers? Nope. We got spaghetti … And blankets.”

Once I was coaxed, shivering and confused, from the corner of the darkest room I could find, I pulled myself together enough to join in on last week’s call calibration meeting to get a sense of what all that monitoring and quality assurance looks like behind the scenes. The managers, supervisors and call center reps from our billing care, technical support and quality assurance groups meet in “The Attic” (an aptly named conference room on the lofty mezzanine level of our Houston headquarters) to hear and evaluate randomly-chosen calls from various reps. Our phone system automatically records, stores and indexes each phone call, which can be easily accessed and searched via Web browser. So, in a matter of a few clicks, we hear the “Thank you for calling The Planet” greeting from the first call.

Each person in the meeting has a quality control call monitoring form to grade the customer experience based on each conversation. Points are assigned in various categories to ensure thorough, friendly and consistent calls, with a maximum score of 100 per call. This monitoring process is constantly updated and improved as we meet and exceed the expectations we set for ourselves, with the overarching goal being able to resolve every problem quickly and easily on the customer’s first call.

Because you are probably interested in what one of these calibration sessions looks like, I’ll sneak you in behind the lines. This clip features a discussion about using of the caller’s name conversationally during the call to cultivate a more comfortable, friendly experience.

In addition to these call calibration meetings, individual monitoring sessions are held weekly between every rep and his/her supervisor. These meetings give each agent an opportunity to self-analyze and improve their own service based on what they hear as a third party. Beside providing direct and immediate feedback for each rep, we’ve used these monitoring sessions to evaluate our own support processes. As a result, we’ve changed serveral confusing or unclear policies in order to better streamline the path to a resolution for every customer.

The customer experience at The Planet has gotten even better, so we’re very happy to be constructively dissatisfied with our progress.

-Kevin