Category: Customer Experience Design

Customer Experience Design by myragolden

You Get What You Tolerate (From Employees)

iStock-924918864.jpg

You get the behavior you tolerate. So, if your employees aren’t friendly, helpful, and showing empathy, you have to ask yourself, Have I been tolerating poor performance? Are you having conversations with your people about unacceptable performance? Are you coaching and holding employees accountable? If you want to see change, you have to set expectations, have coaching conversations, and be willing to deal out consequences.

Putting An End To Unacceptable Performance

Nipping unacceptable behavior or performance in the bud comes down to you doing four things. 1) You have to set clear expectations. 2) Then you must commit to addressing all issues that don’t meet your expectations. 3) You have to prepare in advance for coaching conversations, so you’re focused and confident. 4) And finally, you’re going to have to be willing to launch disciplinary actions for people who continue not to meet performance expectations.

1. Setting Clear Expectations

Continue reading You Get What You Tolerate (From Employees)
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

The 3 Biggest Mistakes Employees Make When Giving Bad News to Customers

iStock-1070539660.jpg

Telling customers what they don’t want to hear is one of the hardest things customer service employees will ever have to do. To make it easier for you to give bad news, I’ve made my popular How to Deliver Bad News online class free. At the end of this post, you can click to go right into my course.

Giving bad news is hard because of the fear of backlash and because so many customers will just escalate to a supervisor in hopes of getting a different response.

Giving lousy news usually goes wrong because of the approach employees use. The three biggest mistakes people make when telling customers what they don’t want to hear are: 

Continue reading The 3 Biggest Mistakes Employees Make When Giving Bad News to Customers
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

Three Simple (But Important) Things To Remember About Giving Bad News To Customers

iStock-989800648.jpg

No one likes to deliver bad news to customers, but for a lot of us, giving bad news is a regular part of business. You know the feeling – you probably get nervous, or you have to transfer a call to your supervisor because the customer won’t accept your word as final. It’s time to figure out how to fix that!

For more than 20 years, through my workshops, I’ve worked with customer service professionals just like you who struggle with how to say things to customers that they don’t want to hear.

Here are Three Simple (But Important) Things To Remember About Giving Bad News To Customers.

1. Never cause a sense of helplessness.

Continue reading Three Simple (But Important) Things To Remember About Giving Bad News To Customers
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

Most People Don’t Get That They Have Internal Customers

iStock-985029710.jpg

I don’t think that most people get that there are only two functions in a company. You’re either serving customers, or you’re serving someone who serves customers. There aren’t any other roles in business, as far as I’m concerned. I want to talk to you about how to fulfill your responsibility of serving, particularly when it comes to your co-workers – your internal customers.

The Importance of Follow-up

I love me some basketball. (#Thunderup) Follow-up is like an alley-oop on the court. An alley-oop in basketball is an offensive play in which one player throws the ball near the basket to a teammate who jumps, catches the ball in mid-air, and puts it in the hoop before touching the ground.

If a co-worker reaches out to you for research or response (that is, throws you the ball near the customer’s point of need), you need to run with the task (with a sense of urgency) and put the ball in the bucket. You make that call, do the research, or whatever, and close the loop by letting your colleague know you’ve followed through.

It’s Bigger Than You

Continue reading Most People Don’t Get That They Have Internal Customers
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

The 2 Most Important Things Small Businesses Need to Focus On with the Customer Experience

iStock-1031909280.jpg

Two months ago, I switched my company’s wireless carrier from AT&T, a relationship we’d had for nineteen problem-free years, to a low-cost competitor. We made the switch for one reason: To cut costs.

Seventy-two hours into the new vendor’s relationship, I knew we had a problem. Clients were always saying, “You’re breaking up,” or “I didn’t catch that.” The LTE service was laughable.

The new carrier was cheaper, yes. And the salespeople we worked with were delightful. However, the service was unacceptable. I had to breach the contract, paying out the big bucks to switch back to AT&T.

My brief stint with a low-cost competitor reminded me of two profound lessons small businesses must never forget.

1. Friendly Employees Aren’t Enough

Continue reading The 2 Most Important Things Small Businesses Need to Focus On with the Customer Experience
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

The 3 Fundamentals Everyone Always Forgets with Internal Customer Service

 

I do an exercise in my workshops using a pole. I tell participants to lower the pole to the ground. I give them two rules: The pole can’t lose contact with their index fingers, and they can’t use gravity to pull the pole.

This exercise is hard. Everybody’s focused just on their small section of the pole.
But, they figure out that to lower the pole, they must focus on everybody, not just their section.

This activity helps improve internal customer service. Just like with the pole, a good internal customer experience requires people to focus beyond their own tasks. You have to think broader.
When everyone focuses on the bigger picture, the result is an extraordinary external customer experience.

Here are three keys that will help improve your internal customer relations, which enables you to deliver a better external customer experience.

Continue reading The 3 Fundamentals Everyone Always Forgets with Internal Customer Service
Customer Experience Design by myragolden

That Time My Client Cropped My Afro In My Headshot, And Why This Is Not Okay.

I haven’t stepped into a Starbucks since two African American men in Philadelphia were arrested for merely being black in Starbucks back in April. But Starbucks isn’t the only company with issues with insensitivity. Consider three of my recent experiences with companies.

Myra Golden, Author, Trainer & Keynote Speaker

It’s Not Okay to Crop My Afro In Your Corporate Images

Minutes before a workshop, I was seated stage-right as my client gave me an impressive introduction to the audience. As part of the opening, a slide with portraits of all of the conference speakers was featured on the big screen. There were five of us, and I was the only African American.

I do not attempt to tame my hair with chemicals or heat. Unapologetically I wear my hair big and out.

The slide with the conference speakers showed headshots of each speaker. My headshot was positioned so that at least two inches of my Afro was chopped off. The portrait was odd and unflattering. 

Continue reading That Time My Client Cropped My Afro In My Headshot, And Why This Is Not Okay.

Customer Experience Design by myragolden

You Didn’t Know a 12-foot Pole Could Teach You This

IMG_1922.jpeg

One of the goals for my customer service training in Cerritos, California yesterday was to help employees follow-up with colleagues, to close the loop so that everybody was up to date on what’s being done to fix issues for customers.

I designed a short lecture and a small group discussion to address this. And then, three hours before my flight, I scratched the entire section.

A brilliant trainer of trainers once cautioned me, “Don’t do for participants what they can do for themselves.” Recalling her advice, I thought, I won’t tell them to communicate better, I’ll put them in a situation that forces them to see why not communicating is making their jobs so much harder.

Here’s what I did. I stood in front of the class and pulled out at 12-foot pole. And I told my group of 12 people that their task was to lower the stick to the floor. It sounds simple. Incredulous, the people merely stared at me, mute.

I divided the class up into two groups and explained the rules. You’ll start with the pole waist high, you cannot lose contact with the pole at any time, and only gravity can move the pole (that is, the pole couldn’t be pushed or pulled down).

After my instruction, I stepped back and watched (and took out my iPhone to film). Within seconds, the group learned that this exercise was anything but simple. (See video clip below from the training.)

Continue reading You Didn’t Know a 12-foot Pole Could Teach You This