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***Back to Voice of the Customer later this week – my job for the past couple of weeks has been trying to get my unemployment payments sorted.***

I allude to this below, but want to put it here so that it is very clear: this is not AT ALL about the people doing the frontline work to get claims processed and payments certified and directed where they need to go. As far as I can tell, all of those people are doing everything they can to make this as painless as possible.

Hi, Division of Unemployment [I like to keep things friendly and casual if I can] – I’ve been trying for the past few weeks to navigate the Kafkaesque process of getting the money due me. And based on your Twitter feed and the posts on Reddit (look for [New Jersey] in the post subject) , I am far from alone. But this is not about that.

I get that the system is completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of claims. I understand that things might take longer to process than they normally would. I am not surprised  when the system crashes on occasion. I think that responding to incoming emails with a potentially useful form reply is actually a great idea – those replies are well-crafted and contain lots of good information. BUT.

Those prefab emails, while they will be useful to lots of people, don’t contain the answers to everyone’s questions. To send those emails from an address that doesn’t accept follow-up questions is so incredibly frustrating and rude. To add insult to injury, the particular issue I am experiencing* is not listed anywhere in any of the FAQs or instructions on the NJ DOL website. But every time I send an email, I get another useless-to-me autoresponse, with no way to actually connect with a human who might be able to help me.

I’ve also tried to call [pause for laughter], and have been unable to get through. This is not unexpected, and I’m not upset that I’m among the many, many people who cannot get through. Really and truly, I do understand the magnitude of the situation and the limited resources of the DOL. What does upset me is that, after I listen to the unnecessarily lengthy recorded message recommending that I file my claim online (I did), assuring me that the DOL is doing everything they can to support unemployed workers, and so on and so forth, I am transferred to a message that says – no matter what time I call during your business hours – “Welcome to the Reemployment Call Center. Due to the high volume of calls waiting, we cannot take your call at this time. If you need to speak with an agent please call back on the next business day.” Are you kidding me with this???

First, what I think you mean to do is thank me for calling, not welcome me to you hanging up on me. I know it’s a little thing, but honestly, it just rubs me the wrong way, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be irritating people more than you have to right now. Second, and more important, how is it possible that between 7:39 and 7:40, which is when the message changes from “we’re closed” to “call back tomorrow”, that you have received so many phone calls that you know for sure no one will be available to talk to anyone else until tomorrow? Are you making people hold all day? Because that is not something I’ve seen commented on and I’m pretty sure it would have been, given how distraught people are from not being able to get answers from your department. Is there no hold queue at all? If that’s the case, then people should be trying to call throughout the day, not pushed off to the next day. I understand that you may be trying to control volume that way, but come on. Don’t make spurious claims that no one will be available for a full 24 hours when you and I both know that’s not true.

Listen, I’m not expecting miracles here. It would be really great if I could get paid the amount you’ve told me you’re going to pay me. It would be acceptable if you would just tell me why it’s not happening yet. It would even be understandable if the answer is “we don’t know what’s causing this, but we’re working through claims with this issue, please be patient.” What is unacceptable is that this is a known issue that remains unaddressed in any form on your website, and that those of us experiencing this issue have no way to actually contact a real person to find out what is happening. There are other large blocks of claimants with different known issues that are encountering similar frustration, too.

The system that you have set up to deal with this crisis is isolating, uninformative, and discourteous. You are doing not only claimants a huge disservice, but also your employees, who by all accounts are working very hard and moving things along as quickly as they can. I urge you to take a look at the systems you have in place, and work to make them as user-friendly as possible. Here are some suggestions:

  • When you see hundreds or thousands of people asking about the same issue, add that issue to your FAQ, even if you don’t have a definitive answer. Don’t just pretend it’s not happening.
  • I read that one of the stumbling blocks to hiring more people for processing is that claim information is sensitive and the systems are difficult to learn. That’s not unreasonable. What you can do is free up people who know how to handle those systems for more processing/fixing of claims by hiring frontline customer care workers who can answer emails, direct people to the information they need, and offer reassurances. It’s likely that there will still be a percentage of incoming emails that needs someone with access to the system, but if you set up a multi-tier support system (think tech support!) you’ll relieve some of the pressure on  your top tier people while providing better service to claimants.
  • When a claim or certification triggers a message that indicates the claimant needs to speak with a person (mine says, “If you do not know why your claim is not payable, please call your nearest Reemployment Call Center”), instead of throwing them into the pool and making them try get through to you against astronomical odds), let them schedule a call or at the very least, schedule one for them and let them know when to expect the phone to ring.
  • Better yet, open up a live chat system, just for the people getting that messaging from the system. If a chat takes more than a few minutes, or the issue is one that can’t be easily handled and/or explained, that’s when you refer it to your top tier claims people. Ideally, by scheduling a call or forwarding the chat transcript to the upper support tier for an email followup, not by telling them they need to call in via the overwhelmed phone lines.
  • Finally, fix your language. Don’t welcome people in the same breath you tell them you’re unavailable. Don’t tell the governor that all of the people not getting paid yet are the self-employed folks waiting for PUA – something that is patently untrue. Either answer everyone on Twitter, or ignore everyone – don’t pick and choose based on the positivity of the comment.

Thanks for reading, and considering how you can best serve the people of New Jersey. Please feel welcome to reach out if there is anything I can do to help you out with providing great customer care to your claimants.

*The issue I’m experiencing is that my claim has been approved and I have been assigned a weekly benefit amount, but every week when I certify I receive a message that my “claim is not payable at this time.” I have no appointments or interviews outstanding, nor have I been contacted about adjudication. Hundreds of other people seem to be experiencing the same issue. It’s pretty clearly systemic, which is not unreasonable, but it’s not being addressed anywhere, which is most definitely unreasonable.

If you made it this far, you deserve a cat gif. Looks like this one is hoping to get a live person on the phone at NJ DoL.

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When you think about customer care, do you picture a huge call center full of impersonal agents, all dressed pretty much the same, handling calls and emails as quickly as possible?

Or do you imagine a smaller team waiting to provide you, surely the only customer who needs assistance, with exceptional customer care?

There are really four types of customer care teams, all capable of delivering great service (and all equally capable of delivering abysmal service!):

  1. Call center: these can be in-house or outsourced. They’re probably not going to be able to offer super personal service, but they should be able to solve your problem efficiently and with a friendly touch. Noting here that I’m using “call center” even though much of the work done is answering incoming emails rather than actual calls.
  2. Standard in-house customer care team: usually a smaller team for a smaller company. The demand on these agents is often quite high, especially if the business is growing. Incoming queries are still likely to be pretty standard and don’t require much customization. Again, service is not likely to be particularly personal, but should be efficient and friendly.
  3. Bespoke: there are standard inquiries, but they often have unique elements. Answers are customized and effort is made to make each customer feel special. One agent will be the primary contact, though other agents may jump in occasionally.
  4. White-Glove: each customer is treated like the only customer. Most likely, only one agent will handle each customer (though an agent may handle multiple customers).

Which kind of team your company chooses to go with should depend primarily on two factors: the size of your customer base and the type of service inquiries you get. Amazon can’t provide white-glove or even bespoke service – nor do they need to. Their customer base is huge, and their service inquiries are largely going to be order or product related, with standard answers. A call center solution is perfect for them.

On the other hand, the makers of my favorite work bag*, gate io app, can probably get away with a smaller in-house team. They don’t really need bespoke or white-glove service — their inquiries are still going to be pretty standard order/product related, but there are going to be fewer of them, so a smaller team should be able to process them efficiently. Sometimes companies like this will have an small in-house team for customer care, but outsource phone orders to a call center that specializes in order processing. This is a very reasonable way to handle demand, but make sure the order volume justifies the expense!

Companies that offer bespoke or white-glove customer care are generally service-oriented rather than product-oriented. The interactions are likely to unfold over time rather than being a simple back and forth about a shipment delay or faulty product. Agents providing this level of care need to truly be empowered to be the voice of the customer — they’ll need to be able to bring concerns and complaints to various departments, and they’ll need to be empowered to find and implement solutions for their clients.

Whichever solution — or combination of solutions — is right for your company, great customer care should be your goal. This means empowering your CSRs to assist your customers, but even more, it means empowering your CSRs to bring you customer feedback, and being responsive to that  feedback. More than any survey you can do, your agents will have first-hand knowledge of your customers’ likes, dislikes, requests, and complaints.

Next up, more on listening to the voice of your customer through your customer care department.

*I have a Slate, in case you’re wondering. Fits a 15″ laptop + tablet, notebook, and various other sundry items I commute with, plus it converts easily from backpack to briefcase to messenger bag. 

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Back when I started this blog my day job was, let’s say, unsatisfying.

Only, you know, my work life instead of my home life.

This was true on a number of levels, but none more than the lack of empowerment to make a real difference in how we were serving our customers. In practice, this commonly boiled down to only being allowed to do enough to keep customers from complaining en masse on social media – not a very high bar (and one the team often wasn’t even able to reach, due to a lack of interdepartmental communication)!

To Serve Customers was a way to channel my frustration and bring my experience and expertise to people who are open to hearing and responding to the voice of the customer, who really want to know how they can best serve their customers. Plus, I really enjoyed writing blog articles, researching different methods, and learning about different customer care philosophies and tools. But then…

A few months after my first post here, I joined a great team at a company wholly invested in providing excellent customer care, and I got so caught up in utilizing my skills and knowledge there that I stopped posting here altogether. I thought about posting occasionally, and really missed it, but my new job required a good deal of focus and time. I was so invested in succeeding there that I didn’t want to funnel any of that customer care energy away.

That’s where I was!

Fast forward nearly a year: Covid-19 decimated my new company’s industry, necessitating a (completely understandable!) round of layoffs, which left me high and dry with all this pent-up customer care energy. So I’m back to posting again, and look forward to getting back into the swing of things starting next week. First up, I’m going to talk a bit about the different kinds of customer care companies provide – look for that on Monday. See you then!

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A few weeks ago, someone asked me how I design customer care systems from the bottom up, and it really got me thinking. Most of the time, even when I’m coming in on the ground floor, someone somewhere has some idea that customers require specific assistance. This means that it’s pretty easy to identify the high level pain points, and (hopefully), there will be a pretty good customer profile available, too.

^^ Pain point.

Those two things are where I start: I find out where the customers hurt, and by looking at who the customers are, figure out the best way to ease that pain. Sounds easy, right? Here’s the thing: the more problems you solve, the more you will find. This isn’t a bad thing. This is where you get to refine the experience you’re offering your customers.

Ideally, designing customer care processes will follow a linear progression:

  1. Identify the pain point
  2. Create a short-term fix that works for your particular customer
  3. Work with other departments to actually solve the problem

For example, let’s say people are having trouble signing in to your web site. That’s your pain point. Your short term fix might be writing a detailed step-by-step guide that will walk your customer through the process, especially if your customer isn’t very familiar with create logins for websites. But that’s not a great long-term fix — that hasn’t solved the problem, just slapped a band-aid on it.

Your next step is to work with the UI people and create a sign in process that doesn’t cause the customer pain. Solving the problem is your end game — customer care is all about making sure the customer is cared for throughout the company. Remember, you are the customer’s voice within the company.

Relieving pain points may take several iterations, and some things you try might not make the process better (or might even make it worse!). Don’t be afraid to make the changes you need to make to provide great customer care. And don’t get frustrated when new pain points rear their heads. It is completely normal — expected, even — that as you solve the bigger problems, you’ll start seeing the smaller problems.

Going back to our example above, let’s say you’ve solved the sign-in problem. Now, suddenly, you’re inundated with complaints from customers that they’re having trouble finding a particular type of product or piece of information on your site. You haven’t changed the site…why weren’t you hearing about this before?

Well, first, you probably were, you just didn’t notice it because this complaint was drowned out by the people who couldn’t get signed in. But also, now you’ve got a bunch more people who are signed in and eager to use your site. So now, this is the problem you need to solve.

This cycle will continue to happen — don’t panic! The more your refine your systems, the easier and faster steps 2 and 3 will be to implement. Plus, barring a huge relaunch or something like that, the problems will get smaller and smaller. Even if/when you have a relaunch or introduce a new process to your customers, now that you’ve developed your systems, it will be relatively painless to handle the problem solving.

Please do not build THIS system.

What will your system look like? I can’t answer that…it’s going to be tailored to the needs of your customer and your company. The systems I built for dealing with parents purchasing tutoring services for their kids are vastly different from the ones I’ve built for dealing with retail customers. And even within those systems, there are different components for handling bargain shoppers vs. those who require white-glove service. I deal with issues that require Marketing to make changes differently from those that require tech changes.

You should always be refining these systems to make them as efficient and tailored as possible. Don’t get so attached to your systems that you stop making them better. These are tools for different jobs. If you’re tempted to try to use the same system for everything, try to remember the old chestnut about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer. You should have an entire tool chest at your disposal if you want to provide really great customer care.

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When your company launches a new promotion or marketing campaign, how involved is your customer care team? What about when they make changes to the UI or product features? It seems to be a very cultural thing…at some companies, someone from customer care is involved in all marketing/user/product initiatives from the get-go, while at others it’s the customers themselves who end up telling the CSRs that a discount is being offered or a product has been changed, and of course there are many companies that are somewhere on the spectrum between those two extremes. I’ll bet you can guess where I stand.

At a previous job, we had a sign on the customer care department door that said, “Remember, if it touches the customer, it touches us (but not in a creepy way).” It was our lighthearted way of reminding the tech and marketing teams that not only did we have valuable information to share with them about the customers, but that we needed to know what our customers would be experiencing in order to provide them with the best possible service.

Sharing is caring.

I have also worked at companies where everything is done very secretively, so when customers would contact us about a promotion that wasn’t working or a feature they couldn’t find or get to work properly two things would happen. First, we would sound like idiots, denying that we were running that promotion or had that feature. Then, provided with evidence from the customer (or, occasionally, being overheard by a member of the team who implemented the campaign or change), we would have to hunt down the details, sometimes learning new product features or layouts on the fly so we could teach them to customers.

Which do you think resulted in happier customers and happier CSRs? To provide the best possible customer care, someone from your customer care team should be involved in processes and planning meetings from the beginning. We can pinpoint where customers are going to experience pain, and suggest ways to minimize those pain points. Even when there’s no way around a certain amount of customer angst, having your customer care team involved from the beginning will ensure that they are able to guide the customer through the issues that arise as smoothly as possible.

Sorry if I earwormed you with that title…here’s the video so you can sing along to the whole song:

You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

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Not many things feel less sincere than an apology from a corporation. It’s true in PR, and it’s true in customer care. It can be tempting to hide behind the safety of your company with a lot of “we” language — placing the blame on the impersonal behemoth. It’s especially tempting in customer care because whatever has gone wrong for the customer probably is not your fault, and may not even be in your control to fix. But, part of making that connection with the customer is apologizing to and sympathizing with them.

This doesn’t mean you should only ever use “I” instead of “we” in your communications to customers. In fact, there are a lot of times when you’ll be speaking as the company, and that’s totally fine. The key is to pinpoint those moments when you can build a personal connection with the customer. It seems like a little thing, but it can have a huge effect on how a customer perceives their treatment.

For example, take a look at these two delayed shipping emails:

Email 1: Unfortunately, we will be unable to ship your order until next week due to inclement weather in our area. We anticipate shipping your order by Wednesday, January 17th. You will receive an email with tracking information when your order has shipped. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.

Pretty cold, right? And why can’t this big “we” ship my stuff out on time, anyhow? Amazon always ships my stuff the day I order it!

Email 2: I’m so sorry! We’re having a bit of weather here and as a result our shipping schedule has gotten backed up, but we should be back on track early next week. I took a look at your order and it should be going out Wednesday (January 17th). We’ll send you an email with tracking information when it ships. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything else I can help you with, and again, I am so sorry for the delay!

It’s still the corporate “we” who has made the decision to shut down shipping, and who will be sending the package and tracking info…but now I have a buddy there who is looking out for me, who actually feels bad that I’m not getting my package on time. I mean, I totally understand that things happen. We’re all only human, right?

Putting a human face on when a screw up or delay happens not only helps the customer feel like someone at the company is looking out for them, but also reminds them that the company is made up of people just like them, who have their back and will do their best to make their customers happy.

 

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Contacting a company requires effort. Your customer has to find the company’s contact information, figure out what they want to ask, make the time to email or call. So even customers who are just asking for additional information have already experienced some pain points. Now they’ve reached you. Are you there to help them, or to hinder them?

When I first started in customer care, customer service was often touted as “the first line of defense.” Defense? You’re trying to protect yourself from…customers? That should be the opposite of what you want to do. You want to build relationships with your customers, you want them to join the fold and go forth and spread the word about not only what an amazing product you have but about what an awesome company you are to deal with.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out. This doesn’t mean “the customer is always right” (a fallacy I’ll talk about in a separate post). It means that your reps need to make your customers feel as if they have an advocate within the company (and your reps should actually be that advocate).

 

It is important to remember, too, that bridges work both ways. If there is information your company needs to make sure customers have, your customer care team should know about it so they can keep customers informed. Sometimes, that will be a policy or technological limitation that will make the customer unhappy. That’s okay. If your reps have built that advocacy relationship with the customer, they will still feel like they are part of the company’s team, and know that you are all working together to make your product or service as great as it can be.

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Not all that long ago, if you had a question about or problem with a product the norm was to call the company. Even when online commerce became common, most companies still provided a phone number in addition to an email address as a way to quickly get in touch. But Amazon, from the very beginning, made it very difficult to find their phone number. They offered extensive FAQs and it was pretty easy to find their email or use their contact forms, but it was very, very difficult to talk to person on the phone.

This was an absolute genius move on their part. Phone calls take exponentially longer to resolve than emails, especially those related to predictable problems. If you can predict — as Amazon could, when they were just in the business of selling books online — the majority of the issues your customers will encounter, you can have systems in place to handle those issues quickly and efficiently.

For example, let’s say I ordered a book from Amazon and it arrived with a torn cover. If I called, there would be pleasantries to dispense with, and then the CSR would have to find my order, and then I would have to describe the damage (which might take awhile, depending on how wordy and/or upset I was), and then the CSR would have to tell me what next steps were, and then I might want to argue, or I might have missed something and need them to explain again, and so on. We close up with more pleasantries and perhaps some small talk about the weather if I’m feeling chatty that day, and that simple return has now taken at least 10 minutes, maybe closer to 20.

That same exchange, conducted over email, would take half that time. Less, once you’ve got a handle on the issue and a procedure in place to handle it. Plus, any promises made by the CSR or requests made by the customer are in writing and easily accessible by all parties. Although there may be some initial frustration to your customers as they are still in the mindset of “talking to a person,” you will be able to quickly demonstrate through speedy resolution that there is no need for a phone call.

The key is that your responses to customer queries do need to be speedy and, even more importantly, accurate. Your CSRs absolutely must read and parse what your customers have written. They must know the questions to ask to tease the information they need out of your customers quickly and efficiently. With the right CSRs and the right procedures in place, you will save both your company and your customers time and money by making email your primary communication tool. Everybody wins!

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This is the first in a special series dedicated to rebuilding a single customer care team. The info in these posts will be less generalized than the regular posts here, but I thought it was a great opportunity to show you how I put into practice all the things I talk about here.

I’ve just been handed a  customer care team that is in need of rebuilding. Ratings for this company’s customer service are quite low, and I’ve been asked to reverse that. I’m really excited about this opportunity, and excited to have you join me on this journey.

So, first step: I’m making lists. I have a list of things I need (programs the CSRs use, information from various departments that I need to be able to give the CSRs, training on some things so that I know what the CSRs are up against). I have another list of questions. Some of these are for the CSRs, some are for various other department heads, some I’m going to have to find out who to ask. A third list is a draft for a PP deck that I’ll be presenting to the team as a starting place (and which I will share here in the next post in this series) for our new policies and procedures.

That third list is super important. I’m going to be meeting with the team this week, and they haven’t had written policies governing the department up to this point. I’m going to change that right from the start. But I’m also going to emphasize that if we find these policies aren’t working for us, we can revisit and revamp them.

In addition to the internal policies, I’m also going to be developing some procedures for the CSRs to follow. Currently, each CSR has their own way of processing a return, making a recommendation, or fulfilling a request for information. Unfortunately, this lack of uniformity means that things are slipping through the cracks. It also means that when it’s time to expand the department, there’s no training manual and worse, each current CSR will be teaching conflicting methods for handling tasks.

Unfortunately, one of the issues this team has is a tendency towards rigidity when they feel their autonomy is being threatened. I’m going to have to continue to emphasize that policies and procedures are living documents, subject to change as needed. Hopefully, we’ll quickly get to a point where they’re able to understand when policy can be flexible and why we need structured procedures in place.

Maybe not quite that flexible.

This week’s goals:

  • Get all software installed
  • Meet with team to introduce policies
  • Meet with individual team members to set goals and hear concerns
  • Meet with other department heads

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I read an interesting article the other day on the importance of being customer-centric as an organization. The article makes several strong points, especially emphasizing that if you are going to be customer-centric as an organization, as you should strive to be, you absolutely must have the buy-in of senior management. If you don’t, it’s unlikely that you will be successful in creating, much less sustaining, a customer-centric culture.

If you have senior management’s blessing, great! Go forth, be customer-centric, and reap the rewards! But what if you don’t? What if you suspect that you are going to have to drag your organization kicking and screaming into this new way of thinking? Should you just give up entirely on being customer-centric? Of course not!

You can start with some small changes in how you provide customer care. It’s easy for CSRs in a company-centric culture to be apathetic or even to position themselves in opposition to customers. Remind your CSRs that your department’s goal is happy customers. Their job is to be on the customer’s side, to make the customer feel that they have a voice with the company. That doesn’t mean giving them everything they ask for, but it does mean sympathizing with their problems.

Another thing you can do is ask to be included in planning sessions for other departments. Remember, you are the voice of the customer. Bring that voice to those meetings. That doesn’t mean you get to decide what every department does, or that you can just come in and magically everyone will buy in to your philosophies and ideals about the customer experience and becoming more customer-centric, but it does mean that when there are questions about what will serve the customer best – and there will be – you’ll be there to answer those questions.

As you attend more of these planning sessions and demonstrate that you have the best interests of the company, the department, and the customer in mind, you’ll become a trusted member of the team. Eventually, you’ll have enough of a voice to be able to steer things in a more customer-centric direction.

It can be hard to get established companies to radically change their orientation from company-centric to customer-centric. Change is scary, especially a fundamental change in underlying company philosophy. But not all change has to be big change. Small changes add up over time, and before senior management knows what hit it, your organization will be well on its way to a customer-centric culture.