Where Contact Centers Are Still Missing the Mark

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a super interesting conversation with Darcy Perry.

[00:00:08] Steve MacDonald: Now, Darcy, you’re the Customer Experience Manager at the Franke Group Systems. That’s a manufacturing company. I’ll let you explain a little bit more about that, but you have some unique backgrounds. You actually started in customer service at age 12. I’m going to let you expand on that.

[00:00:25] Steve MacDonald: You’ve covered a lot of different industries, from contact centers for fire and dispatch—and that’s a very unique kind of role—to Postmates, and now where you are with the Franke Group Systems or Coffee Systems. If you wouldn’t mind expanding on that before we dig in, then we’ll get started.

[00:00:45] Darcy Perry: Yeah, so at age 12, it was an all-hands-on-deck experience. My parents both owned their businesses so it was all family to make sure we had food on the table. We wanted our parents to succeed so that we could also succeed in life. So we started doing Medicare crossovers and helping our mom with billing.

[00:01:06] Darcy Perry: We would sit around the dining room table and do that, and then it just progressed into customer service from there. I’ve always had a heart for customer service. I think I learned that from my mom, to be honest. I’m very grateful for that. From there, I moved into police and fire dispatching.

[00:01:22] Darcy Perry: I did that for almost 10 years of my life, and it taught me prioritization, how to manage calls, and how to hone in on my soft skills. From there, I moved into Postmates. Postmates was a fantastic position where I was able to take them from a contact center to an actual call center. Then I moved into manufacturing—something I’d never done before—but I took on the challenge, and I love being with Franke Group at this time.

[00:01:49] Steve MacDonald: Great. Here’s what I’d like to do. I think I can understand the answer to this question when it comes to fire and police dispatch, but the question is, for a contact center, how important is it to the overall growth and sustainability of a company? One, it’s not important at all. Ten, it’s critical to the overall growth and sustainability of the company. Where would you put it on a scale of one to ten?

[00:02:16] Darcy Perry: I’m always going to put a call center or a contact center at level ten because they are the face of your company. They are the people who interact with your customers daily. They can make or break a company. Putting them at that level shows the significance of what they mean to a business.

[00:02:37] Steve MacDonald: When you say they can make or break a company, elaborate on that for us just a little bit.

[00:02:43] Darcy Perry: You can have a good call or a bad call, a good email or a bad email. A great experience can elevate the company because the customer thinks, “Oh, this person was super knowledgeable. They understood my problem and resolved it immediately.” Conversely, it can hurt you if the customer feels, “These guys have no idea what they’re doing. They’re taking me for everything I’m worth.” With the power of social media, one bad experience can go viral, and we know how that can truly make or break a company.

[00:03:20] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it can. It starts to erode the trust and reputation of the company, and that’s all we have these days. Trust, according to all the surveys, is on a major decline right now. One of the things we want to do is build trust with our customers, foster word of mouth, improve NPS scores, and everything else we want. In this kind of context and environment, what, to you, are the key challenges in call centers? We talked about turnover as well on our previous call.

[00:03:52] Darcy Perry: Yeah. It is very hard. It’s an entry-level position, and sometimes it’s a thankless position. I think sometimes, in being able to mentor and coach employees, we tend to focus on the negativity because that’s what bubbles up to management. And we don’t always say, “Oh, my gosh, this was such a great call. Holy cow, you did a great job.” Sometimes we have to really take that and come back and focus on all the wonderful things that they’re doing—the hundred calls that went great, not the one that went bad. Because it is entry-level, there are a lot of skills that perhaps our employees don’t know, and it’s up to us as managers to coach and mentor them, teaching them the skills that perhaps don’t come naturally. Especially in the world we live in today, we have a lot of employees who are very into texting. I know sometimes when you read notes, it’s like reading another language because they’ve gone ahead and put in this kind of crazy notes where they’re using acronyms or something that you don’t quite understand because our younger employees are very used to all the kind of shorthand—not writing in the way that maybe some of us older people are going to look at.

[00:05:09] Darcy Perry: But I do appreciate the fact that even though it is an entry-level position, it’s a very important position. I think we need to do better at teaching them those soft skills—how to manage a call, how to take control of a call, how to manage their own emotions when they have an emotional call, or something that can be very difficult on a phone.

[00:05:35] Darcy Perry: I talk about that right from sometimes a 911 perspective into what would be healthcare or into a manufacturing position. It always feels like somebody’s in a rush—they want what they want right now. And how do we control that and make sure that our emotions are checked as we’re assisting that customer as well?

[00:05:56] Steve MacDonald: So that’s a really interesting analogy and what’s the learning from working in a dispatch of fire and police dispatch, where there’s life and death on the line? What did you learn there that directly translates over to the world of B2B and B2C and call centers, and how do you manage the call centers today?

[00:06:20] Darcy Perry: I think a lot of it would be prioritization. Sometimes it’s very hard to pick and choose how to prioritize a call. Obviously, in 911, that’s easy. If it’s a life-or-death situation, you’re priority one, and then you scale down from there.

[00:06:34] Darcy Perry: If it’s a fireworks complaint call because your neighbor doesn’t like you’re setting off fireworks, you’re usually a priority 10. And I’m going to take my police officers and put them where they belong, okay? But sometimes, when you’re coming into more of a B2C or a B2B, it’s a little bit harder to prioritize that.

[00:06:52] Darcy Perry: So what you have to do is look at it and make sure that you’re addressing the customer’s needs, setting timelines, and prioritizing their needs as well. I think one of the skills to teach is to give an actual resolution date or at least a check-back-in date.

[00:07:11] Darcy Perry: If you give somebody a time frame and you stick to it, that’s another soft skill. It allows them to know that you’re going to follow up. But if you set that date, make sure you follow up. Another skill we need to teach is ensuring follow-ups happen to give them that level of trust, to let them know, “Hey, I don’t know the answer to this yet, but I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten about you.”

[00:07:36] Steve MacDonald: It’s one of the biggest things when we talk to somebody, no matter if it’s chat or on the phone. We don’t always have a lot of trust that there’s going to be follow-up. So you’re right, a date is like, “Oh, okay, it’s on a list. It’s prioritized in a certain way.” That gives you a higher degree of confidence that you’re going to be taken care of right away.

[00:07:56] Steve MacDonald: So, you talked a lot about this being entry-level—not only how they communicate but also that it’s entry-level pay too. Yet we’re trying to treat them, bring them into a culture, and make them feel special. What are the kinds of things that you do, over and above pay, when it’s an entry-level position to make them feel like they’re a big part of the team and an important part of that team?

[00:08:22] Darcy Perry: I brought a lot of skills from police and fire dispatching, and I’ll probably always go back to that because I learned a lot there. One of the things that I encourage people to do is when talking about entry-level roles—and your hands do get tied on certain things that you can do, especially if you have temporary employees—you need to think about how you celebrate them.

[00:08:43] Darcy Perry: If I’m going to throw them a party to maybe celebrate or encourage them, what does this party look like? Have I put thought and emotion into it so they understand that what I’m doing for them is because I’m proud of them? Or is it just because I’m ticking a box?

[00:09:04] Darcy Perry: One of the things that I have thought through, especially when I worked at Postmates, is we had three shifts—morning, noon, and midnight. A lot of times, and you’ll see memes and other things about it, the midnight people come in all excited because we’ve all talked about this party we’re gonna have. Then they open up the box, and there are crumbs in the box.

[00:09:26] Darcy Perry: They’re like, “What the heck?” What I learned is that you need to think through when you celebrate employees. You need to make sure that everybody gets celebrated the same and that you’re being intentional in those kinds of things. Not only that, but you need to celebrate the small wins—the things that perhaps don’t normally get called out—so they understand they’re doing a good job.

[00:09:53] Darcy Perry: You find a lot of employee motivation in that. Also, sitting with your employees—there’s a lot that has to be said about that. You will be able to listen to them in real-time and coach them in real-time because you’re gonna hear all the small minutiae that you might not hear or even see if you’re able to sit with them.

[00:10:14] Darcy Perry: A lot of times, what I found when we were in call centers and we were actually in a building, I would go and do my shadowing with my employees. I’d be sitting there, and you could just see in their face that they were either confused with the information they were about to give or uncomfortable with what they were talking about.

[00:10:34] Darcy Perry: And I would make sure that I encouraged them through that. Once we got off the phone, we’d do a deep dive into that conversation so we could talk about how we could have changed it. I liked having that kind of personal one-on-one time. Do not neglect your one-on-one time with your employees.

[00:10:55] Darcy Perry: And if you are a manager of leads—so you’ve got so many different hierarchies—encourage your team leads to do things like this. Then sit together with your team leads and talk through: How did that go? What could we change? What, holistically, do you think we can do? But I will tell you, one of the biggest proponents is to listen to your people.

[00:11:19] Darcy Perry: They are doing this job every single day, and as a manager, you’re not. If you are not listening and not taking some sort of action to listen—even if it’s to remind them, “Thank you for your 100 suggestions. Out of your 100 suggestions, maybe only two or three will get done, but let’s prioritize those and figure out which ones would be the easy, low-hanging fruit we can take care of or the ones we can get done.” Listening to them so that they know they are heard goes a long way.

[00:11:53] Darcy Perry: It builds that trust and communication with your employees. And I am very into that. I love to be on the floor. I love to feel the vibe, feel everything that’s going on so that I know at what point my employees are struggling. Then I can step in at those times and say, “What can I do to assist you?”

[00:12:14] Steve MacDonald: Tell me if this is a factor in any of this because I love recognizing their performance but then giving them a feedback mechanism. So they feel like they can affect change. That makes somebody feel very important. But also, they’re talking to customers every single day, and that’s learning.

[00:12:36] Steve MacDonald: That’s key learning. It’s one of the most important things a contact center can do. How do you teach them to be good at assimilating lots of customer interactions into something that could help inform and teach the company to help it grow?

[00:12:57] Darcy Perry: I think there’s a feedback loop. So it’s one of those things where if you create a feedback loop, especially with your team leads or if you’re a direct supervisor, making sure that they know they have that feedback loop and being able to assist each other. I love “train-the-trainer” type of programs.

[00:13:17] Darcy Perry: Sometimes, taking one person off of the phone and saying, “Will you go shadow this employee? You’re one of my high performers. I think you could assist them and give them some pointers.” Sometimes just being given extra responsibility, like taking them off the phone, makes a difference.

[00:13:37] Darcy Perry: One of the things we have found is that, as a supervisor, sometimes your hands are tied. You cannot provide them with any kind of financial compensation or anything. But being able to say, “Here’s a couple of hours off,” or “Here’s a coupon for something so you can go do this,” helps. Thinking outside of the box is key. Sometimes all an employee wants is to be given extra responsibility so someone understands that they’re doing a really good job. That’s also how you’re going to build your future leaders. Because if I don’t have someone to replace me because I haven’t trained them appropriately, then I haven’t done my job correctly.

[00:14:20] Steve MacDonald: Makes perfect sense. If you could tell me a little bit about how you’ve gotten into this area of soft skills in customer experience—because in our last conversation, you spent a lot of time talking about soft skills—what would you say are the top three soft skills you try to train your agents on?

[00:14:46] Darcy Perry: Active listening would be my number one. I’m a talker—I love to talk—and sometimes I tend to talk over people. I have to employ my active listening skills. So that’s always number one. Empathy with a customer, but not to a fault. Don’t over-empathize and offer things you cannot provide.

[00:15:10] Darcy Perry: But showing the appropriate empathy so that they understand you grasp why this is a problem. And then emotional intelligence. Something I think is a lost skill. It’s a buzzword in corporate—we talk a lot about it—but do we teach it enough? Do you know how to control your emotions while you’re on a phone call? Maybe not. Don’t take on the energy of the caller. You want to maintain your energy, control the call, and guide the caller. If they’re coming in hot, you don’t come back at them hot. Emotional intelligence is a really hard one that you’ve got to hone in on. The reason I’m using that kind of big, overarching word is because it encompasses a lot of soft skills that can be used on the phone.

[00:16:02] Steve MacDonald: I tell you, that last soft skill—you’ll learn that as a parent. Your kids are like a reflection of you; if you’re upset, if you’re frustrated, it’s just going to escalate.

[00:16:12] Steve MacDonald: So, having four teenagers right now, I understand that. I want to take a little bit of a right turn, and I want to talk about your thoughts about AI in contact centers and where it’s helpful and where it’s not. How does AI fit into today’s contact center, and what’s the role of the live human agent?

[00:16:35] Darcy Perry: We all think that AI is going to do it better, and it’s going to save us money. There is a lot of truth to that. But what you lose is the human interaction, the human touch. And a lot of us are craving that human interaction. It’s really difficult sometimes to be a big proponent of AI when you are a customer experience manager.

[00:17:01] Darcy Perry: Because what you’re looking for is providing an experience that a customer’s not going to forget. And so, how do you utilize that AI and still give them that personal contact? I am an old-timer, so I love to pick up the phone, call my customers, resolve the issue right in the moment, and be done with it.

[00:17:22] Darcy Perry: But I also know that’s not always the best thing to do. I think that you have to be very careful in how you employ and utilize AI. There are some wonderful things you can do with it. You can route people appropriately and answer easy questions. But I think you need to be careful that you don’t use it for everything, that you, honestly, and holistically bring it in.

[00:17:47] Darcy Perry: You don’t lose that human connection. The human connection to your customers is always going to be important. And to be honest, I think we’ve got to be very careful. I think we walk a fine line when we bring AI into things because we’re like, Oh, I can cut back the workforce, or, Oh, it’ll eliminate all of these.

[00:18:07] Darcy Perry: But what you find sometimes is that it adds extra workforce or causes more problems, and you don’t usually know about those problems until they bubble up because you’re just figuring AI has been handling these all this time. So I also see that sometimes you get more complaints on social media because they’re like, I couldn’t get past your AI bot.

[00:18:31] Darcy Perry: Don’t make an AI bot be the end-all. You need to make it so that you can still reach a human to have those human interactions. I will tell you, I sometimes have a really hard time, even in my personal life, where I get caught in those AI bots and I’m like, All I want to do is talk to somebody and resolve this quickly.

[00:18:54] Darcy Perry: There is something to be said about resolving things quickly with just a person instead of somebody trying to figure out how to game your AI bot.

[00:19:03] Steve MacDonald: So tell me, are the agents worried about AI taking over their jobs, or do they see it as a help? From their perspective, what’s the perception of AI in the contact center?

[00:19:16] Darcy Perry: I think AI can be scary, especially when you count on your job or you really like your job, and so then it’s like, They’re just really trying to replace me. I think what we need to do is help employees understand the benefits of it and set the guardrails of what an AI bot or AI is going to do for them.

[00:19:35] Darcy Perry: How can it help them? It can be as easy as having an AI bot while they’re taking calls, where they can ask questions, and it can bring up knowledge articles for them to assist the customer. There are other things too in chat, where you’re sitting in chat, you’re talking to the AI bot.

[00:19:55] Darcy Perry: You need to make sure that it’s easy for that person to then just say real person, or I need to talk to a representative. Because what ends up happening is, again, that AI loop. And we need to be careful of the AI loop because it does frustrate customer service. Once you get on that phone and finally get to a representative, that person by that time is completely out of control because they’re like, Why did I have to go through all this to get to this person?

[00:20:26] Darcy Perry: Then your agents are working overtime to figure out how to best help this person. So I think, again, it’s one of those fine lines that we have to walk across to make sure we’re doing what’s best for both the company and for your representatives.

[00:20:43] Steve MacDonald: So what I want to ask is—because we’ve talked about a lot—but what haven’t we talked about? What’s important for us to know about the challenges of a contact center and creating that success? That 1 out of 10 is important, like, where it can make or break a company. What haven’t we talked about that’s important?

[00:21:02] Darcy Perry:  I think managing people’s time on the phone. When You’re going to hire someone into a contact or a call center, make sure they understand the time that they’ll be on the phone, and how often they’re allowed to walk away from the phone.

[00:21:18] Darcy Perry: Be upfront with that. I think there’s a lot of miscommunication on that, and I think that can be very difficult, especially if someone’s not prepared. You’ve got people who are contact center pros, and they know that they’re going to be either in chat or on the phone all day. Also, rotate them. So, if you have people who are in chat, people who are on the phone, and you can rotate those two things, give them the ability to get off the phone and move into just a chat.

[00:21:45] Darcy Perry: Guess what? We all get into people burnout, and I think we need to watch our employees and make sure that we’re identifying when they get to burnout. I can promise you it’s going to be a bad experience if you are talking to an agent that is completely burnt out. Talk to your employees about that. There are going to be things that you really need to make sure you recognize and address to keep them up here and not down here.

[00:22:16] Steve MacDonald: So that goes right into my next question, which is: You’ve made a lot of recommendations here, which is fantastic. But out of everything you’ve done in your career that started at age 12 in customer service, what are you most proud of that you’ve been able to accomplish?

[00:22:34] Darcy Perry: I think I can move through the world and into different areas—from healthcare into police and fire dispatch, back into healthcare, then into Postmates, which is a .com kind of thing, and then into manufacturing.

[00:22:53] Darcy Perry: The thing I’ve been able to hold consistent is my love for customer service and my knowledge in what I’ve been able to prioritize, understand, coach, and mentor my employees. Your employees are the most important thing that you will ever be a part of because even when they graduate from you and move on, I want them to look back at their time with me and say, “Wow, I’m very grateful for what this person has taught me.” But more than that, I want to look back at my time with them and say, “Wow, I’m grateful for what they taught me.”

[00:23:29] Steve MacDonald: So, this then leads to my last question. Are you ready for this? If there was one thing—just one thing—from everything that we’ve discussed here that you wanted people to take away from this episode, what would that be?

[00:23:45] Darcy Perry: Treat your call center employees like they are the most important employees that you have. Remember that they are, technically, some of the most important people you will have because they can make or break a company when it comes to that. Not only that but give them opportunities. Look at them for what they are. They should be growing for the next step. That doesn’t mean you don’t have your worker bees who love that type of work and want to do that.

[00:24:14] Darcy Perry: But look for your next leaders in your call center because I promise you, they’ve seen and done it, and they’re ready for that next challenge.

[00:24:22] Steve MacDonald: Darcy, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of these insights. If people had additional questions for you, would it be appropriate to give out a link to your LinkedIn profile for people to reach out?

[00:24:35] Darcy Perry: Sure. I would love to connect with anybody who wants to know more about my passion for customer experience.

[00:24:41] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you for sharing everything today. It’s been fantastic, and we’ll look forward to having you back on again in the future.

[00:24:49] Darcy Perry: Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it.