Identifying Opportunities For Awesome In Customer Service
In customer service, we relational, positive folks have a magical way of spinning the negative situations into opportunities for improvement. And, we should be darn proud of this!
Negative situations include:
- Customer feedback
- Employee feedback
- Everything in between
How do you do this?
We like to call these “Opportunities for Awesome“.
Employee Feedback
We empower our Tier 3 team, supervisors and support leads to mark tickets for “training”. We ask them to notate the ticket, after the issue was resolved, to understand the “Opportunity for Awesome” in which we can learn and improve for the future.
Our leadership team meets to discuss the support tickets marked for training.
We then have a full on discussion about what we can do to empower the team to make changes and what we can do to improve resources and training for our team. While the situation may not have been handled properly originally, we take what can we learn from it to make sure that it doesn’t happen again to any customer, ever. It’s not perfect but it’s ideal for our team. What often helps keep us fueled and motivated in these meetings is a nice cup of Starbucks.
Customer Feedback
We empower our customers to share feedback with us via a short and sweet support survey about their experience. We then reply to the negative feedback to try and repair the outstanding issues. I like to say we’re taking the lemons and making margaritas (or lemonade) for each customer. Then, we analyze the statistics for this feedback and use it as an overall guide to help us improve the customer experience.
Feedback is a beautiful thing and just requires a shift of perspective to see how the negative can really benefit your business. Read more about how replying to feedback can shift perspective on the customer side by clicking here.
For a story on an employee grabbing an Opportunity for Awesome by the horns, check out this story.
[custom_author=jenny]
There is a great concept packed into this small article: Opportunity for Awesome. Complaints are opportunities to rise to the occasion. But why wait for a complaint to be awesome. Every interaction you have is an Opportunity for Awesome – or as I like to say, an opportunity to create a Moment of Magic®!
Shep, you’re SO right–why wait? Every interaction counts. Thanks for this wonderful reminder!
Jenny – I really like the idea of marking tickets for training.
I’m assuming these are tickets where someone on the Tier 3 team notices a solution that the Tier 1 or 2 agent could have implemented, but didn’t for some reason. Is that the case? Or, are there other criteria for marking a ticket for training?
Yup, that’s exactly the reason. Our Tier2 supervisors and support leads can also mark tickets for training. Then, we work on finding areas we need to improve training, work with an agent directly (if it hasn’t already been done) and share the knowledge with the team.