The Planet Blog

Continuing The Planet’s feature coverage on WHIRtv, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR sat down with our vice president of Customer Care Jim Picone.

Jim explains the major improvements we’ve executed in our customer care organization within the past two years and focuses on the benefits of our new phone, chat and ticketing systems. With these new systems, we can now track critical metrics to create best practices and monitor operational efficiencies.

Watch the video below to get additional insight into our call center and our vision for the continuous improvements we’re making in our customer care organization.

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

Non-verbal communication is becoming more and more a way of life in the customer service industry. In customer contact centers once dominated by phone calls, companies now communicate with customers via web chat, e-mail and ticketing systems.

Obviously, the technology industry has been at the forefront of this type of direct communication, with customers often placing more trust in these alternate methods than the traditional “give ‘em a call” approach.

Resolving problems with a ticketing system creates an entirely different support management paradigm than answering a phone call. Issues can be tracked and researched via the written record that exists in a ticket, but tickets don’t have the immediate feedback of a phone call. Because the vast majority of our support is handled through tickets, here’s a glimpse at the inner-workings of our support process.

When The Planet receives a customer ticket, the first thing that we do is conduct a “triage” to determine the problem that has been described and which department should take ownership. We have a staff of triage experts who do their best to insure that a ticket is routed to the right department as soon as it is received.

To avoid being “stuck in the slow lane,” give us as much detail as possible when you submit a ticket. While we can work with “my bandwidth is wrong” or “my server isn’t working,” advising us that different software showed a different amount of bandwidth traffic or that you can’t connect to your server will help us route tickets to the right department much more quickly. Give us as much detail as you can about the problem, and chances are we can resolve the problem more quickly.

Sometimes, ticket processing can be slowed when we request additional information from you by updating the ticket. If you have an open ticket, it’s important to keep an eye on it to see if we’ve asked for new information that will help us keep your account secure and resolve the issue. For us, there is nothing worse than missing one last piece of the puzzle, so we are often as anxious to hear back from you as you are to hear back from us.

When you do submit a ticket, there is a level of trust involved that we ARE working on it. It’s true that some take longer than others to process; it’s the nature of the customer service in technology. Resolving an incorrect server charge on your account will probably take less time than figuring out why a server won’t reboot, and it is our responsibility to keep you in the loop, so we have multiple systems in place to do so. Each department escalates tickets to higher priority levels when a ticket has been open too long without an update. We strictly adhere to these limits and take action when ticket times exceed our set warning levels. Our support managers are constantly updated in real time on the pending time to process all tickets we receive, and our support reps work diligently to get responses and resolutions to every ticket as quickly as possible. In the most complex tickets, cross-departmental communication or the need for additional research may keep us from resolving the individual tickets as quickly as we would like, but without these behind-the-scenes steps, we would not be giving you the best answer.

Moral of the Story: To keep your ticket humming along in the fast lane, please include as much detail as possible in your initial ticket and keep an eye out for requests for additional information. Please be patient as we work to resolve more difficult problems, and always feel free to request updates. We pay attention to comments made by our customers regarding the ticketing system, and we are always looking for ways to improve our work-flow and enhance the customer experience.

Keep this post in mind when (or should I say “if”?) you need to submit a new ticket so you can keep your tickets in the fast lane!

-John