Customer Service

“Before you can, ya gotta wanna!” Plain & simple. I would often hear the term “willing learner” from our Training organization @ Citi. If you don’t want to learn more, don’t really thirst for additional knowledge to increase your expertise or are unable/unwilling to see the relationship between knowledge & performance (“working hard vs. working…

We’ve all heard about supply & demand. It’s what business is all based on. We got something (a product, a service) that you want. It also works in more specific situations…customer service, application processing, research/investigation handling, problem resolution, car repairs/maintenance, plumbing, any skilled trade. What is sometimes just as important as “supply & demand” is…

Decisions, decisions, decisions. There are just so many to make every single day…what’s a leader to do? First off, most of them do not require extensive research. Now, you must possess self-awareness, an excellent working knowledge of your area & yes, a whole bunch of “restraint” (self-control?) so as not to over-analyze the situation. Analysis…

Just a few random thoughts about providing quality customer service… – Service is not sexy. It’s truly hard to measure, although there’s a plethora of various indicators (measured customer satisfaction, timeliness, second requests, accuracy, returns, problem resolution, customer retention, internally-measured quality, industry “experts”, error tracking, etc.) that can give you a PARTIAL view of what’s…

One of the best, most valuable activities you can ever do with your people are “calibration sessions”. In call centers, you listen to some recorded calls (it’s also great if you have “screen shadowing” where you can watch exactly what was present on the service rep’s screen) with some reps, a manager or two, someone…

I’ve always told my Customer Service people that I would like (love?) for them to treat each & every customer as if that individual was their Mother. Good ol’ Mom. Show them the same exact level of respect, care & concern that you would normally do for your own Mom. But then one day, one…

Whenever possible, try to build your business’s “rules, policies & procedures” right into the system. If there’s something that your people need to “check first” (before initiating a procedure), then always try to work with your Systems people to see if the application itself could handle that step. Most systems functionality, naturally, already covers this…

Everyone always talks about “problem resolution” & its importance in determining customer satisfaction. And, yes, it’s absolutely true! The real worth of Customer Service is how the company reacts when there’s been a problem or an issue that negatively impacts a customer. Regardless of “whose fault it was”. And even if it was (only) a…

A couple more tales of service improvement (opportunities) at Lehman Brothers & their mortgage-servicing subsidiary, Aurora Loan Services… (Perhaps you’ve heard of Lehman Brothers, the once-prestigious Wall St investment firm, and the company that the Feds allowed to go belly up during the onset of the Great Mortgage Collapse of 2008…while simultaneously pouring billions &…

Here’s another challenge I had working for Lehman Brothers in Nebraska. Although Lehman Brothers was a highly-respected global investment firm on Wall Street, the same could not really be said of their mortgage-servicing subsidiary, Aurora Loan Services, where I worked as VP of Customer Service. It seemed that the Midwesterners were deeply entrenched with the…