Confessions of a Support Center Professional:

7 Ways Expectations Differ From Reality

- A SupportIndustry.com White Paper -

Sponsored by:

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Confessions of a Support Center Professional: 7 Ways Expectations Differ From Reality

Introduction

What would customer contact agents tell their managers if they were being totally honest? A lot. With contact

center turnover estimated at 30-50% or more1, tighter margins, and higher performance pressures than ever

before, your front line has quite a story to tell. This white paper is designed to help you see, as your agents do,

where your organization and your industry need to improve.

This paper explores simple ways that support managers can dramatically improve performance, ranging from

the latest technology, support channels, management practices, and more. Based on Supportindustry.com

survey research, industry best practices, and recent advances in support technology, this white paper will help

you form a knowledgeable game plan to improve your contact center.

SupportIndustry.com believes that your support agents - the people with the best ground-level view of both

your customers and the organization - have a lot of valuable things to tell support managers. Here we profile

seven common concerns of front line agents, together with recent evidence or survey research behind these

issues. All seven areas bear on productivity, customer satisfaction, or morale and turnover of your customer

contact organization. Let's examine how their perspective of your support professionals can boost the success of

your support team.

1) We do what you tell us, even when it drives your customers away.

We care about our customers. We always want to do the right thing for them. But if we get rewarded - or worse,

punished - for things like how much time we spend on the phone, how little we escalate, or how much we

upsell, then by golly, you will get what you want. Even it if means pushing people off the phone with poor

answers, refusing to get experts involved in tough cases, or exaggerating what we are selling. We mean well, but

human nature is a tough taskmaster.

Take many of our performance metrics. If we are graded on first call resolution, we will think twice - no, make

that three times - before we escalate a call, even if a customer asks for this. And even if it would be the best

thing for the customer, or our organization's overall productivity. We do have the very best of intentions, but it is

very hard for us to intentionally make you - our bosses - unhappy with our performance.

Metrics are like a genie that, once out of the bottle, are hard to push back in, even if they have a negative

impact on support performance. Once you start measuring things, it can be difficult to convince your upper

management not to measure them - for example, how do you inform a vice president that you no longer wish to

monitor your own productivity? And at a deeper level, how do you keep your support operation from becoming

like a "university without grades"?

1 Cornell University Global Call Center Project, United States National Country Report, 2005.

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/globalcallcenter/research/unitedStates.html

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Consider the example of people like American Express, who base 85% of a customer contact agent's

performance on customer feedback score nowadays2. Early adopters who have shifted away from over-

measurement have found that it often boosts performance in the long term. As a reasonable first step, consider

managing people public against "primary" metrics that matter to everyone such as sales, retention, and

customer sat, and reserve "secondary" metrics such as performance measures for those who vary far from the

group's norms.

There is a deeper motivational issue to consider behind your metrics as well. When you measure people against

too many criteria, you risk creating an environment where everyone fails at something, rather than simply

bringing unique talents to your support operation. Try managing more from your gut instead of your numbers,

and see what a difference it might make with your team.

2) Don't try to change our attitudes - teach us skills and give us resources.

You and your upper management constantly preach to us about customer service. You have "attitude" posters

festooned strategically throughout our customer contact center, and we have periodic meetings designed to

rally the troops around good service. During events such as Customer Service Week, there are balloons, banners,

and slogans reminding us to treat customers better. And to be honest, it doesn't really change the way we do

our jobs at all.

Here is the problem: we are already nice people. Bringing in motivational speakers to tell us to work harder, be

nicer, or have a better attitude will not change the way we work. In fact, when you do this, it is about as

effective as parents telling their grown children what to do on a Saturday night.

Do you know what will improve things? Teach us specific skills. We are always open to learning how to

troubleshoot technical or customer issues more effectively, how to calm down an upset customer, or how to

work more productively. Do this and the attitude part will take care of itself.

Customer contact operations are a little like customer service on steroids. They involve intensive interpersonal

contact, strong troubleshooting skills, and frequently the ability to deal with high volumes of unhappy people.

For example, when a new software release causes problems for lots of customers. Motivating people to be

"nicer" will have little effect on their performance, but research below shows that teaching them new skills will

improve customer satisfaction levels. More training is also likely to make for happier and more capable

employees.

2 Hagen, Paul, "Nine Ways To Reward Employees To Reinforce Customer-Centric Behaviors," Forrester Research blog,

http://blogs.forrester.com/paul_hagen/12-05-11-

9_ways_to_reward_employees_to_reinforce_customer_centric_behaviors

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According to results from SupportIndustry.com's 2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support

survey, three training factors correlate strongly with increased customer satisfaction: (1) training supervisors as

well as frontline employees. (2) simulating actual support calls, and (3) measuring performance outcomes. Of

these factors, there is a measurable jump in usage of the latter two among organizations with customer

satisfaction levels over 90%, as shown in the figure below. This means that the recipe for effective support

training is often as close as your CRM system, guided by the input of the agents themselves.

Training approaches used by survey respondents with customer satisfaction levels over 90% (Source:

SupportIndustry.com, 2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support)

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Strength-Based Communication: The Science Behind Soft Skills

The term "positive psychology" has little relation to the concept of "positive thinking." Rather, it is a serious

branch of behavioral psychology, with an Ivy League research center at the University of Pennsylvania and a

growing base of research literature.

Strength-based communication, where you structure dialogues in ways that benefit the person you are talking

with, are a proven way to create higher customer satisfaction and shorter transactions. Compare these two

exchanges:

Example

Not so good: "You'll have to wait at least three days before we can respond to this issue."

Better: "We will do our best to have a response to you within the next 72 hours. In the meantime, we don't

mind at all if you check back with us on the status of this issue."

Strength-based communication also serves as a basis for how to effectively coach people. For example, the

business bestseller Now, Discover Your Strengths, based around survey research from the Gallup organization,

puts forth the radical notion that coaching people to uncover and play to their strengths is much more

successful that trying to get them to improve their weaknesses3. This approach has become a watershed in areas

like athletic coaching and psychotherapy in recent years. In a support operation, it means that leveraging skills

and professional growth opportunities is a much better way to "turn around" performance versus logging and

correcting problems.

3) You hover over us too much.

If parents constantly critiqued how their children performed, would this motivate them or simply make them

sullenly go through the motions? According to marriage and family therapists, the answer is often the latter -

and the same principle is true with the grown men and women who come to work every morning in a support

center. We feel that there is one rarely-used management technique that would dramatically boost our

productivity and morale: less management. Trust us more, and we honestly believe you would be rewarded by

getting more from us in return.

That said, there are times we do need you. When we are struggling with tough customer issues, for example,

your backup means the world to us - not only in the context of helping the customer, but in helping us feel

comfortable and supported when we have difficult transactions. And despite the best of intentions, we

sometimes need your help when there are interpersonal conflicts within the team: telling us to "go resolve these

issues ourselves" often lets problems fester until they are untenable.

3 Buckingham, Marcus and Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths, New York: Free Press, 2001.

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According to personality psychologists, nearly 40% of people - and support agents - fall into a free-spirited

personality type that is well suited for creative problem-solving, but hates being told what to do4. And yet the

trend in many support operations is toward increased accountability and micromanagement. See where this is

headed? Look for ways to manage to outcomes instead of process, and see if it improves morale and

performance.

On the other hand, handling difficult technical and interpersonal situations remains a weak spot in many support

centers. SupportIndustry.com's 2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support survey showed that

over a quarter of support managers felt their agents were only "somewhat confident" when faced with

challenging support transactions. Addressing confidence as a skills-building process, with role-playing and

realistic scenarios, can increase the confidence level of your team in any customer situation.

Interpersonal conflicts are a different kind of skills-building process, where people need to learn to

communicate with different personalities, and use strength-based approaches to negotiate issues effectively.

Sometimes it also requires a dose of leadership: for example, it is not fair to expect team members to address

issues such as performance or hygiene problems among their co-workers. Getting the balance of autonomy and

intervention right can take time, but doing so will result in happier staff and happier customers.

4) It gets stuffy here in the silo.

We like our jobs, but most of us spend far too much of our time on inbound cases. Meanwhile there are critical,

strategic areas of the organization where our ground-level view of customers would be extremely helpful. Our

perspective can inform marketing, development, training, and many other areas, if we only had the time and

resource to connect with them. And for us personally, working cross-functionally can go a long way toward

reducing burnout.

In the opening scene of the 1980s movie Conan the Barbarian, children are led off into slavery and chained to a

treadmill. Many years later, a strapping young Conan is still chained to the same treadmill, but breaks free, and

acts like, well, a Barbarian5. Your workplace may have pleasant cubicles instead of treadmills, but when people

do the same job over and over without end, many of them risk turning into Conan the Support Agent.

Getting your very best out of agents often involves variety and change. Here are some creative ideas for turning

your support center into a cross-functional team:

Let your agents get off the phone to do periodic training, and leverage your trainers for peak period

coverage in the support center. Both groups inherently know your product well, and the experience of

interfacing with live customers versus support transactions can be beneficial for both groups. In some

organizations, this can also provide travel opportunities for your best support agents.

4 "Demographics from the Personality Questionnaire," PersonalityPage.com, 2012,

https://www.personalitypage.com/html/demographics.html

5 Conan the Barbarian (movie), Universal Pictures, 1982.

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Involve your agents in the onboarding process for new employees. Some support centers will have their

most recent employees turn around and train new employees as a means of consolidating their own

knowledge, while others will turn this over to more experienced agents, particularly with complex products

or services. When you delegate some of the training responsibility to the team, you make them part of the

process of building the team's overall quality.

Leverage the skills of your best agents as peer coaches within the organization, in areas such as

monitoring transactions and teaching new skills. This can be a win-win situation for everyone: agents are

often much more comfortable getting feedback from peers versus "the boss," and peer coaches learn to

think like a manager in looking at the skills and talents of the team.

Use agents as liaisons with other departments. Letting agents interface with other departments such as

development, product marketing or quality assurance allows them to serve as the "voice of the customer"

while embedding supportability into your products and services.

5) The debate is over about using the latest support technology.

We have always done our jobs better with the right tools. You often want to keep new capital expenditures to a

minimum. Today, however, current support tools make financial sense as well as supporting our jobs. Listen to

what we need to work more productively, such as screen sharing, web chat, and real-time access to knowledge

resources. Keep yourself educated on bringing affordable new capabilities onto our desktops and devices.

The past few years have been a watershed in support technology. Once upon a time, it seemingly involved

massive budgets and a cast of thousands, but now tools ranging from CRM systems to remote support tools

involve inexpensive, scalable component technology that are often embedded cloud-based software-as-a-

service (SaaS) applications.

This trend has become a great equalizer in the support profession. A comparison performed for

SupportIndustry.com's 2010 Service and Support Metrics Survey showed surprisingly little difference between

support channels used by small organizations (less than 500 people) versus large ones (over 10,000 people).

Tools such as web chat, electronic case submission, and knowledgebases are found equally in support

operations of all sizes.

The growing role of web chat, rising quickly to be used by over 37% of organizations in SupportIndustry.com's

2011 Service and Support Metrics Survey, is a particularly important trend, because it multiplies the number of

simultaneous live transactions an agent can handle. This, in turn, is fueling a trend toward more rather than less

live support over time.

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Utilization of support channels by large (>10,000 employees) versus small (< 500 employees) organizations.

Source: SupportIndustry.com 2010 Service and Support Metrics Survey.

The issue of using appropriate support technology is particularly pronounced in the area of remote support, with

remote control, screen sharing, and remote diagnostics in particular becoming ubiquitous in support operations.

According to figures from SupportIndustry.com's 2011 Service and Support Metrics Survey, over two-thirds of

support operations offer at least some level of these capabilities, and a majority of these sites report that they

prevent in-person support or site visits a whopping 50% or more of the time. With the advent of inexpensive,

scalable products such as Citrix GoToAssist, there is little reason nowadays not to handle support issues live on

the customer's own screen where possible.

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The Death of Telephone Support?

Beloit College's Mindset Survey (www.beloit.edu/mindset), which catalogues the cultural perspectives of

entering college freshmen, describes the class of 2014 as "a post-email generation for whom the digital world is

routine and technology is just too slow." As this generation enters the workforce in just a few short years, it is

becoming harder to imagine them sitting in front of a personal computer, cradling a telephone receiver as they

call for support. The 2011 Service and Support Metrics Survey by SupportIndustry.com found barely half of

support operations now use the telephone for 40% or more of their support transactions.

Another 2011 SupportIndustry.com survey showed the growth of mobile devices as a support channel as being

one of the biggest trends in the industry. For example, more than half of support sites either having a mobile

support strategy or planning to implement one6. With products such as Citrix GoToAssist, pictured below, it is

now easily possible to remotely support from any location from an mobile device.

Citrix GoToAssist live remote support on an iPad (Courtesy Citrix).

6 SupportIndustry.com, The Biggest Paradigm Shift in the History of Customer Support and Service: How Support Behaviors

are Changing for Mobile and Social Media Environments, http://www.supportindustry.com/mobileandsocialmedia.htm

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6) Want to hire the right people? Ask us.

Lots of people can talk a good game of support, or put the right things on their resume. But if you want to really

know how well employment candidates solve problems, handle tough customer situations, or work

collaboratively within a team, use our knowledge. More often than not, we can spot a diamond in the rough or

keep you from making a bad hiring mistake.

This is particularly true if you make hiring decisions based on credentials on a resume, or focus mainly on how

people communicate during an interview. Have you heard the saying, "Hire for attitude, train for skills?" Guess

what: you cannot teach someone to have an aptitude to solve difficult problems. And the candidate who talks a

good game of support, and has a great degree, may not be able to solve their way out of a paper bag. Unless you

leverage our experience and our "radar" to assess a person's real support skills, you are practically guaranteed

to guess wrong with a certain percentage of your new hires.

Of course, attitude does matter as well. Some people are natural collaborators, while others have a penchant for

causing drama. We can often spot these differences, no matter how nice someone may act during an interview.

Simply and frankly, if you aren't making your team part of the hiring and interviewing process, you are

contributing to your turnover problems. Their input and observations about candidates can add valuable data to

the hiring process. More importantly, recruiting efforts help people step away from their support tickets

periodically and share their expertise, and it helps build group morale to give the team a say in who ultimately

joins "the club."

7) We aren't as change-resistant as you think.

We know what your biggest complaint is with us: we often aren't on board with change. Whether it is the

introduction of new technology, initiatives to improve productivity, capturing better data for strategic purposes,

or other areas, our reactions sometimes range from sullen compliance to open hostility.

It would be more accurate to say that we often resist changes that we had no say in creating. Especially when

our insight could have helped you, in areas like new support channels, reducing case volume, or better internal

collaboration. Granted, we probably wouldn't have told you to lay a bunch of us off. But if you consistently gave

us a voice in the larger organization, there is a much better chance you wouldn't have to. And if we have even a

small role in co-creating the future of the team or the organization, we are dramatically more likely to buy in

to it.

One of the more subtle but important benefits of the other improvements suggested above - particularly giving

agents more of a voice in the future - is an increased sense of partnership regarding growth and change. It has

long been a truism that people accept change much better if they are part of the decision-making process.

Engineering greater agent engagement into your business processes can have a measurable impact on the

implementation of new tools, technologies, and approaches for doing support.

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An Actionable Game Plan For Effective Support Teams

Your agents have a great deal to tell you about how to create a better support center, in every dimension of

your operations - from morale and turnover to long-term strategic direction. Let's boil down this view of the

world into an actionable game plan for effective support, and how making your agents part of the process can

improve productivity, control costs, and lead to a much better customer experience. These four steps can help

you put this feedback into action:

Step 1. Accomplish more by doing less. The past decade's rapid increase in measurement, monitoring, and

support processes have increased the visibility of a support manager, at a cost of becoming Big Brother and

leading teams of adult employees who feel treated like children. Experiment with reducing the bandwidth of

being a support agent, and create an environment where most agents can play to their strengths without fear,

and watch what happens to your performance, morale, and support culture.

Step 2. Become a learning organization. Research is increasingly showing that "over-trainers" get better

results in customer satisfaction, while building the professionalism of your organization. Seek ways to build skills

and incorporate more training, coaching and learning into the rhythm of your support operations

Step 3. Invest in the right tools. Enabling technologies increase productivity and job satisfaction. Many of

these tools have become less expensive and more scalable than ever before, particularly with the growth of

cloud and SaaS applications. More important, the growing adoption of these tools means that not implementing

many of them risks putting your customer contact operation at a competitive disadvantage.

Step 4. Leverage the voice of your agents. Over a generation ago, the management classic In Search of

Excellence preached the value of being close to people on the front line, maintaining that no one knew how to

do a job better than the people doing it. Beyond getting valuable intelligence from your agents, there is an even

more subtle benefit to giving them a voice: it creates a culture of ownership that, in turn, can have a positive

impact on morale, turnover, productivity, and overall customer satisfaction.

Beyond these specific issues, consider organized ways to capture to voice of your agents in your regular stream

of business. For example, have regular meetings designed to expose agents to the larger strategic issues, or

build their input into future decisions. By leveraging this voice - which is, in turn, the voice of your customer -

you can truly become a customer-centric support operation that succeeds even better.

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About the White Paper Sponsors:

About SupportIndustry.com

Supportindustry.com provides senior-level service and support professionals with direct access to information

on customer support, including enterprise strategies, people issues, technology, trends and research. This data

enables support professionals to benchmark and improve their customer support operation. Members are

responsible for the help desk and customer support operation of their company. More information can be found

at http://www.supportindustry.com.

About Citrix

Citrix is transforming how people, businesses and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era. Its portfolio of GoTo

cloud services enable people to work from anywhere with anyone by providing simple-to-use cloud-based

collaboration, remote access and IT support solutions for every type of business. Learn more at www.citrix.com

and www.citrixonline.com.

Citrix GoToAssist remote support and monitoring tools empower IT professionals and support teams to provide

technical assistance and easily manage everything IT from anywhere. Learn more at www.gotoassist.com.

Written by Rich Gallagher, contributing editor, Supportindustry.com