IN THIS CHAPTER
Encouraging and embracing customer feedback for improvement
Saving and gaining revenue
Improving the service process
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
— STEVE JOBS
Customer service is one of the most critical aspects of any organization and is arguably the next great horizon for scrum implementation. Positive experiences give us reason to go back to a product or refer friends and family to it. Yet customer service is the very area that many customers and clients state is the most problematic part of the experience. They like the product, but its perceived value decreases with poor service.
Customers can be internal, too. Inefficient internal support and incomplete communications lead to lost productivity as well as bad morale.
Customer service equals sales. A happy customer tells friends and family members and goes back himself for more services and products.
Customer service is a huge opportunity to increase sales and, therefore, revenue. This one department can propel a firm to new heights. If customer service is neglected, it can affect a company’s reputation and good will.
Knowledge of customers equals knowledge-based marketing. Finding new customers becomes more effective. Therefore, managing accounts for customers can be thought of as an extension of sales and marketing.
In this chapter, we explore opportunities to use scrum to improve both your external and internal customer service.
Customers: The Most Crucial Stakeholders
Your customers are great sources of product innovation ideas and improvements. Alienating them not only creates ill will, but also cuts off a crucial feedback loop that can lead to innovation.
Internet service providers, phone companies, and local utilities consistently rank among the highest in customer service complaints. Where service providers are limited, customer service is commonly (although not always) weaker than in other industries. Customers frequently encounter long hold times, frustrating service, and labyrinthine automated service menus. Pressures on the bottom line have caused many companies to cut the budget for customer service, yet customers are the most crucial stakeholders in any business, and they need to be provided good service. Without the customers, there’s no business.
Comcast is an example of a company that has experienced bad press regarding the quality of its customer service. Instances of customers unable to get refunds for bogus charges, wait times forced until closing, and an inability to cancel subscriptions are just a few of the claims that have been made over the years.
Although the need for service is enormous, quality is often lacking, and millions of people are willing to spend the time to make others aware of their experience. Customer complaints about the handling of their service calls abound.
The service conundrum
Perhaps the number-one failure in service is that customers often report that their issues aren’t even solved by the agent. Customers need and expect service representatives to be able to answer questions and solve problems regarding their companies’ products. Unfortunately, all too often, training in companies fails to provide the customer service representatives with the knowledge they need to meet this need of the customers.
The service representative may not understand the problem because the customer explains it poorly, or the representative simply doesn’t understand the situation the customer is describing.
Seventy-eight percent of customers state that their good customer service experience was due to the knowledge the rep had, while only 38 percent said it was due to personalization. Knowledge matters. Training development for representatives is a high priority. Preplanned answers don’t carry the weight of true depth of knowledge.
The cost of losing a customer is far more than the customer’s annual subscription rate. Customer service divisions are often thought of as being cost centers, but in fact they save and make their firms huge amounts of revenue. Following are some statistics that reflect how customer service can affect a business in ways that you may not have considered:
- It’s more than six times more expensive to gain a new client than to keep a current one.
- 78 percent of customers have forgone a purchase or transaction due to poor service.
- Loyal customers are worth up to ten times the amount of their initial purchases.
- Twelve positive experiences are needed to make up for one negative one.
- For every customer who takes the time to complain, 26 others tell their friends instead.
Information overload
In this day and age, too much data is quoted as a source of call center failures. Too much information can paralyze the effective functioning of a service representative. Service representatives can become overwhelmed with too much data that’s hard to use, and many centers haven’t managed this information so that it’s useful to representatives.
Perhaps you’ve been on a call with one representative and been transferred to another, only to find that you had to explain the issue all over again. Often, a client’s historical data doesn’t get fed to the rep. It’s frustrating for the customer to rehash his situation or to hear the ominous words “I have no record of your claim here.”
Getting the right information to the right people is part of the problem. Sixty percent of customer service centers say they aren’t even able to get certain pieces of customer information (for example, portions of customer history) to service representatives. On top of this, more than 30 percent of representatives don’t gather and record customer satisfaction data.
Sometimes, data isn’t consolidated between organizational divisions, or the data is hard to find. Firms are experts at gathering information, but timely and effective distribution of that knowledge is a problem.
Scrum and Customer Service
Most of the high-level issues listed in the preceding section can be improved by scrum. These problems seem to be daunting, but they’re not insolvable. Scrum offers solutions.
Inspect and adapt through feedback
One basic tenet of scrum is the feedback loop (see Chapter 7), which facilitates inspection and adaptation. In customer service, feedback is received from customers daily, hourly, and even by the minute. This feedback is on the product as well as the customer service department itself. This feedback structure is perfect for the per-call sprint cycle.
In each sprint event, customer service teams can ask themselves whether the data they have is what they need to provide the best customer service. Teams need to know whether the tools they have best serve the customer, and whether the knowledge they have is enough to solve most problems. You can use the roadmap of value to address these issues for the customer service team:
- Vision: The vision of a service call is simple: to provide customer with quality support that ends with the customer feeling better about the company.
- Sprint planning: During each call, tangible steps toward solving a problem can be inspected and adapted. Each sprint might involve representatives asking customers a certain question during a call to test their progress toward solving the broader problem. If call data shows that hold time is long, the representative might briefly ask the customer, “Do you feel that your hold time was reasonable today?” Collecting yes and no answers can validate whether progress is being made with existing processes or whether changes are required to solve the problem.
- Sprint review: A team of service representatives may not find it efficient to reconvene after every call for a review. Inspecting and adapting at the end of each shift, however, gives the team and the next-shift teams real-time feedback. Here the team can assimilate the information gathered from the sprint call to prepare for future sprint calls. They reflect on what they learned from the previous shift and determine what questions they should ask in the next sprint.
- Sprint retrospective: At the end of a shift, the team can ask whether a better way exists to gather information from customers. For example, do the existing questions bait the customer to provide a certain answer or are they truly objective? How well did they assess their findings? How well did they document them? What aspects of their process should they inspect for improvements?
- Team daily scrums: If service teams run daily sprints, the daily scrum naturally becomes sprint review and sprint planning. If sprints are longer than a shift or a day, individual issues and impediments can be raised for the broader customer service team to solve in a daily scrum. If a rep is having a hard time transitioning into asking the research question during the call, perhaps another service representative can offer to sit with her for a few calls a day.
Many service centers have enough representatives to require multiple teams, in which case vertical slicing or other scaled scrum models would be implemented (see Chapter 13) to enable coordination and integration of activities and shared knowledge. A scrum of scrums each day would be the natural place to share lessons learned and coordinate efforts across all the teams in a quick, focused manner.
A customer service product owner would be a key stakeholder on a product development scrum team that creates the products that the product owner supports.
Customer service product backlog
Training knowledgeable customer service representatives is the most important factor in creating satisfied customers. Training isn’t a one-time event. New products and services require updated training. Refreshers on how to handle complaints and miscommunication are also needed.
By making it incredibly easy for customers to provide feedback, companies can generate a product backlog containing issues that need to be resolved. These issues can be prioritized and addressed based on priority.
For new-product-development teams, release planning (see Chapter 5) is the time when customer service can mobilize to prepare training for representatives about the new product as it’s being developed (using the upcoming inspect-and-adapt changes to inform the training plan).
For customer service scrum teams, if a consistent customer need arises, finding a solution can be placed in the backlog and given a high priority, which shortens the triage cycle as much as possible. Customer needs can be discovered and addressed in real time. Prioritizing these needs and swarming on their solution helps customer service overcome product backlogs.
Customer service is a crucial stakeholder for product development teams. Representatives’ feedback should be considered to be as reliable as (if not more reliable than) market research. If customer service representatives aren’t represented as integral stakeholders with product development scrum teams, product owners can’t be sure that they know what customers want.
Customer service definition of done
The definition of done for customer service teams should clearly outline what it means for a customer to be satisfied with his level of service. The definition of done should include more than call length and abandonment statistics.
Going back to the roadmap to value, a customer service department should have a vision statement that specifically states what customer needs are, how the team meets those needs, and how the customer service role differentiates the organization in the marketplace and ties in to the corporate strategy. (For more on vision statements, see Chapter 2.)
The vision is the framework for defining what it means to be done when providing quality customer service one customer at a time. The customer service definition of done might look something like this:
- With each customer, I succeed in fulfilling our vision to [statement of how the need is met and differentiated] when I
- Fully solve the customer’s problem
- Add the problem and solution to product documentation
- Thoroughly review customer history before offering a solution
- Update customer history
- Search the (ABC and XYZ) knowledge bases for answers
- Seek subject-matter expertise from fellow representatives and/or my supervisor
- Keep my cool
- Help the customer keep his cool by [stated methods used by the organization]
- Follow up on promises I made to the customer
Representatives need to understand what’s expected of them to provide clarity about what success looks like.
Consider what the definition of done is in providing service representatives what they need to support a product or service. Whether this material is in the form of documentation, additional training, or some other metric, clarify it and then communicate it.
Look inward
Anyone who has worked in a large company likely has felt the level of customer service frustration described in this chapter. We’ve grouped external and internal customers together here because many of the dynamics are the same. The following are some common complaints of both external and internal customers:
- Companies grew too fast.
- Budgets are cut.
- Help desk staff has insufficient training.
- Companies have short-term vision.
- The feedback loops operate poorly.
Inefficient support causes lost productivity and frustration, which can lead to high turnover, missed deadlines, lost sales, and frustrated external customers. It’s no longer acceptable to use excuses such as “The system is down” or “I don’t have a ticket.” Scrum provides an ideal framework for handling these problems by making work visible and breaking down silos of knowledge through team cooperation and communication.
We’ve coached help-desk teams by using scrum and one-day sprints. The transformation of the team was amazing, and the team’s perception within the company went from poor to excellent in a couple of months. One group described the change in these terms:
- Better focus every day on priorities
- Better overall picture of the workload
- Clearer patterns (a few issues caused most of the workload)
- Greater transparency with customers and management
By making the work visible and applying shared knowledge, the team was able to remove some of the underlying causes of problems and received management support for future initiatives.
Information sharing is a critical component of growing proficiency. Make sure that the environment rewards knowledge sharing within the team as well as across departments. Be on the lookout for comments such as “She’s the only one who can do that” and “That’s not something I can do.”
Inspect and adapt in practice
Historically, emails are lower-priority than calls for call centers, so it’s common to hear complaints about lack of response to written inquiries. This priority makes sense in the context of Agile Principles. Customer service professionals understand the value of voice conversations compared with written conversations. Still, customers shy away from calling if they don’t feel that they have time to hold to speak to a live person. Their options become email and live chat.
A customer service center that’s truly inspecting and adapting looks for operational and procedural ways to make written service more successful and integral with call inquiries. After all, one rep can handle multiple chats concurrently but only one call at a time. At least one study claims that a service rep can handle up to six chats for every call.
Promptly answered voice calls that are competently handled are better than chats for providing great customer service, but chat is better than email because it provides instant response.
As we mention in Chapter 4, Albert Mehrabian, PhD, professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, proved that 55 percent of meaning is conveyed through body language and facial expressions; 38 percent of meaning is paralinguistic, meaning conveyed by the way we speak; and 7 percent of meaning is conveyed in the actual words spoken.
The importance of quality of communication simply can’t be overstated. Face-to-face interaction allows for real-time questioning and clarification, cued by body language and nonverbal signals. Lack of interactivity leads to misunderstandings. Misunderstandings lead to defects, and nothing is more damaging to schedule and budget, and consequently to bottom-line profitability, than defects — whether that be product defects or customer service defects, the cost is significant.
Misunderstandings aside, the same conversation that takes days of back-and-forth responses may take as little as five minutes by standing up and walking across the floor to another office or cubicle. With customer service, constraints may only allow a service representative to put on a headset and dial a number to have a voice conversation. Voice-to-voice communication will be much more effective than chat to chat or email to email.
Given the importance of voice-to-voice communication, perhaps your definition of done for quality customer service should include communicating by voice. For instance, you might amend the definition of done that we describe earlier by adding something like the following:
- Called an email customer after two passes back and forth to avoid further misunderstanding
- Followed up with a customer by phone instead of email whenever possible
Scrum in Action in Customer Service
Many companies use scrum but haven’t applied it to their customer service departments. These firms could greatly improve their customer service, and their bottom line, if they used scrum across the board. If an organization already uses scrum, it should have enough experience and knowledge to share with other departments.
So far in this chapter we have discussed several ways of adapting scrum through events, the definition of done, and the product backlog. Integral to this transformation is making sure that a customer service rep is present in every sprint review for product development scrum teams. Transparency and awareness stem from this integration between customer service and product development.
Service representative scrum teams can plan training and other process-improvement activities during sprints. Additionally, service representatives can learn from the product development sprint reviews and share this information with their teams.
