Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hello, my name is Ron Kaufman. I’m the author of the New York Times best-selling book Uplifting Service,  the proven path to delight your customers, your colleagues and everyone else you meet.

Today, I’m answering questions posed by Ziarul Financiar, they’re the source of “ZF English” the most trusted source of information on Romania and its role in the region, bringing over 250 weekly stories from top publications and news services.

Now they’ve asked me a number of very good questions but rather than just telling them the answer I thought I’d make this video for them and for you.

Question number one: How do you see the future of customer service in those industries in which automatization and robots are replacing jobs?

This is a great question I have three answers:

Number one: During the transition period when you need to migrate customers from a face-to-face people-to-people service environment into a much more technology enabled environment, they’re going to need introduction, they’re going to need Education and they’re going to need encouragement; to help them actually step over that hurdle and get into the new service world that’s best done by people providing intimate personal service.

Number two: Things will always go wrong and when something does go wrong that’s the time to send in a real human being to help take care of and respond to a customer who is of course a real human being.

So, let the technology provide support and enablement but let the people show up especially when needed if something goes wrong.

Number three: This is for you as a service provider. Anything that cannot be digitized or automated is going to become more valuable in this greater technology utilizing the world for example creativity, imagination, emotions, ethics, empathy, having compassion, curiosity, caring, intuition, a sense of value, purpose and passion.

These are things that cannot be digitized and in a more technology penetrated world they’re going to become more and more valuable so if you’re concerned about your job those human areas are the ones where you should be focusing and developing yourself.

Question number two: How did the so-called gig economy change the customer experience and what can traditional companies learn from uber and airbnb business models in what concerns the customer experience?

Well, the biggest change I see is that service providers are now being rated by customers in real time all the time so if you’re doing ‘gig economy work’ every piece of your work is being evaluated by your customer and every potential future customer can see the comments and the feedback that your customers have provided.

In an uber or an Airbnb environment the actual service provider is constantly being rated and as a customer you know and I know we like to see what other people are commenting and saying about this is resulting in better service.

Let me give you an example, I recently stepped into a taxi not an uber and the taxi smelled bad like the taxi driver had just finished a cigarette before picking me up well what could I do about it I didn’t even want to say anything to the driver because I didn’t want to put him in a bad mood while I was in the car but if that were an uber I can assure you my comment would have gone out and uber would know and the driver would know and future customers would know and there’d be no more smoking in that vehicle.

Now customers are also being rated and that matters because I want my rating to be excellent so that a service provider wants to serve me so what can traditional companies learn- they should encourage this kind of real-time service real-time communication about service in both directions encourage your customers to comment on service providers and ask your service providers to comment about your customers.

Question: What are the main characteristics of a good customer service specialist and how do I think this profile is going to change in the future?

Well, the number one most important characteristic is a passion for listening, a curiosity about the world and concerns of other people and a genuine interest to make someone else’s life a little or a lot better.

Our definition of service is taking action to create value for someone else and people used to think that the key component of service was the action that you take no no the key component of service is understanding someone else so that you can appreciate what it is that they value now.

So you can then figure out what is the right action to take and different people value different things.

In fact, the same person could value something very different in a different situation so just taking the action that you’ve been trained or following the procedure is no longer the characteristic of a great service provider the most important characteristic is that passion and desire to appreciate the world and the concerns of some other person and then take care, take the right action to create value for them.

Next question: What are the most common mistakes that leaders make that affect services offered by the company and how often should a CEO interact with the clients of the company or the employees that are working in the world of customer service?

Well, that’s a great question and the two are connected, CEOs and other senior level leaders must spend time interacting with their customers in those customer experiences in their world in the customers concerns to understand their choices their opinions and their perceptions about you as a service provider and how often so two seats at a senior level do that?

Well my opinion is the majority of the time.

Now, I understand there are key decisions that very senior leaders must make and they’re the ones who are supposed to make them strategy, resource allocation, acquisitions but those key strategic decisions should be driven by creating a challenging and supporting environment for your employees and creating the kind of experiences that will make your customers want you, prefer you and come back to you, if you’re the senior leader how are you gonna most intimately know that you’ve got to get down and spend time with your customers and with your employees and do it a lot of the time.

Our next question: Where do I find it more difficult to train and develop customer service employees in B2C, business to consumer, or B2B, business to business, organizations?

Interesting question and the answers are actually different, in a B2C environment business to consumer and customer people already tend to be other focused, they’re already thinking that way because there is a clear end customer so there’s clarity but when you want to improve someone’s skills there can also be a certain sense of righteousness or even arrogance…

 “Oh we know that, oh we’ve been serving customers for a long time don’t teach us how to do it we know how to provide good customer service” 

So, when we work with organizations in a B2C environment that’s sometimes the challenge that we face, in a B2B business – business environment it’s a different challenge because these particular businesses don’t have end customers they have clients they have accounts or maybe it’s a B2B2C environment where business to business and then that customer business has the end customer.

So the real end customer may be a full step away but in these B2B environments we also have an advantage because people who work there tend to solve problems rationally and so when you give them an analytic framework, when you give them a solid definition with proven models and principles that they can apply they love it and it works.

I think there’s a reason why the majority of our clients all over the world are in technology and back-end and manufacturing and logistics and supply chain as well as the many customers that we serve in food and beverage and retail and transportation and hospitality.

Improving your service is something that’s important for every company B2B and B2C.

Q: Can you give us some examples of small actions that led to big changes in the customer service area?

Yes, let me give you two.

Number one, require your senior leaders to actually go down and do some frontline service work every month shoulder-to-shoulder with your other frontline service providers and what’s the big change that happens well the roadblocks that those frontline people face get very quickly removed.

There are things that will sometimes just stand in the way, legacy systems, old procedures, things they have to do because we’ve always done it that way.

Send your senior leaders to work shoulder to shoulder with them and those things show up very quickly and they tend to get removed and improved very quickly.

Number two, make your customer feedback highly visible so that it’s seen by people throughout your organization, not just those at the front line, not just those in the customer service department.

Why?

Well, the big change is you get much faster responses and a sense of urgency for making the change and a sense of pride when changes are made and customers respond by saying thank you.

Our final question today is this -How can you measure the effectiveness of a customer service training program and should leaders expect immediate changes in customer service employees performance?

Well, if you’re running a business and you’re the leader, the ultimate financial objectives you’re looking for are an increase in top-line revenue or bottom-line profit, share of market, share of wallet, shareholder value.

These however are what’s called lagging indicators in other words they come after all the service that you provide so what would be a leading indicator that you could look at that would let you know that your service training program is actually effective?

Well, that would be your scores, your customer satisfaction score, your NPS or Net Promoter Score, your customer loyalty index or your employee engagement score.

When all of these scores are going in the right direction you are going to achieve your ultimate financial objectives.

Now the problem with those surveys and scores is that you don’t tend to do them on a daily basis, they’re not going to give you real-time feedback and when you get the report you will have to take some time to figure out what all that data means.

So what would be an effective leading indicator that would let you know you’re going to get good scores, how can you keep your finger on the pulse day by day, hour by hour of what’s actually happening, whether or not your training program is effective?

The leading indicator for that is customer compliments, positive feedback, people you serve saying wow and thank you and gosh I didn’t expect that and I really appreciate it when you serve me that way.

If you’re getting enough positive feedback in compliments it’s a leading indicator of getting better scores and that of course will lead to your ultimate lagging indicator better financial performance.

Now, here’s the final question; What needs to happen for someone to give you a compliment, what needs to occur for someone to give you positive feedback ?

Well it’s not from serving them the way they already expect, it’s not from doing what it is you already do.

You’re gonna have to have your service providers look at service situations and the customers they serve with some new perspective, get some fresh insights, come up with some new service improvement ideas and then look through those ideas, choose the best and put them into action.

So, really the most important effectiveness of a customer service training program is how many new ideas are your people coming up with?

How many fresh insights do they have?

How many new actions are they taking to create more value?

If you’re a leader in a large organization that is what you should be looking for your service providers to do, that’s the change in customer service employees performance that really matters, taking new action that creates more value for the customers and the colleagues that your people serve.

Now, this approach is a little bit counterintuitive and I wrote about it with a colleague of mine professor Yochen Wirtz, in a white paper called “Engineering a Service Culture Transformation”.

It was such an effective piece that Harvard Business Review looked at it and turned it into an excerpt, an article that they published in the Harvard Business Review magazine called “Revolutionising Customer Service”

Now you may need a service revolution or you may simply want a continuous improvement in the form of an evolution but either way the rules that are in this white paper are available for you as a complimentary download you can find them at our website rknewstaging.wpengine.com where you will find this white paper available and I encourage you to download and read your very own copy.

Now, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Romania and so thank you again to everyone there who’s provided these questions and who will be welcoming me shortly to come and do a full-day workshop called “The Future of Service Excellence”

I’ve got a warm spot in my heart for Romania for a couple of reasons, one is my wife and I enjoy visiting our friends in Bucharest what a great city, what a country and the other is well my father’s father was born in Romania so there’s a part of me that, like you who may be watching this, comes from that part of the world but whatever part of the world you are from.

Thank you for watching, thank you for thinking about these questions and my answers and if you have other questions that you’d like me to answer about customer service, service culture, service standards, service recovery partnerships and service or making our world a better place by serving each other more effectively well you’re welcome to write in and perhaps I’ll answer those questions for everyone else to watch including and especially for you.