the gem blog

At our last management meeting I broke a plank of wood in two.   First time, no hesitation – I was strong, I was tough, I was focused.  Don’t mess with me!

I should explain that this was not a random act of violence on my part (as if!) but a planned activity to inspire team ability and demonstrate how focus and belief can deliver results.   

Having focus is important.  It is all too easy in any business to lose focus as there is so much to do and so little time etc.    One of the ways that we at gem maintain focus on issues of importance for our clients is through the use of cross-functional teams who are collectively tasked with business improvement and identifying and implementing best practice across all our clients.  Account Plans are created for all clients and areas of improvement and innovation continuously identified.   These plans are reviewed at senior management team and results carefully monitored. 

Recently this has included implementing new social media strategies, reducing customer contacts through improved First Contact Resolution and smart self-service strategies, introducing community moderation as a primary support model, creating a web reporting portal that provides our clients with real-time flexible reporting and analysing voice of the customer data among thousands of online comments.   

We even make these teams break planks of wood to demonstrate their focus.  A couple of months ago we fire-walked;  some months before that the team abseiled down the largest hotel in town, who knows what our CEO has planned in the next couple of months – cross-channel team relay swimming, anyone?

I live in the coldest place in Northern Ireland.  Officially.  The weather station positioned at Katesbridge, a few miles from my house, consistently records the lowest temperatures in the North – –12°C was recorded in recent days.   And, of course, living up a hill near the Mourne Mountains, accompanying these low temperatures are horrendously bad road conditions.  Getting up our driveway requires climbing equipment, going outside requires so many hats, gloves, coats, scarves and welly boots for the kids and myself that I’ve almost lost the will to live by the time we are ready to leave the house.  We have been able to sledge down the hill in front of us in recent days and yesterday I crashed the car into a ditch (well, actually, I did everything possible not to go into the ditch but the car refused to respond to any commands – loud verbal or otherwise).  

Despite the bad roads in my area, I choose to live in a remote part of the country and don’t expect the gritters to come right to my door.   However, I do expect them to clear the main roads that I need to travel to get the kids to school and myself to work and that hasn’t always happened.  There are a host of reasons provided – lack of machines, lack of salt, exhausted staff, the duration and severity of the cold spell etc – but I can’t help thinking every time I hear another excuse that this is just bad planning.

And this is not acceptable – we deserve better.  And I feel justified in demanding that because I know that in my professional life, gem delivers better.  gem manages a number of accounts that experience pronounced seasonal fluctuations in volume from the travel, technology, telecoms, retail and media industries.  We create surge management strategies for a number of scenarios for all our clients – in some cases, strategies can be activated within minutes, others within 24 hours.  We expect the unreasonable, we plan for the unexpected and we prioritise for the important contacts.

This might mean that we need to monitor community forums for our technology clients to identify and proactively address any emerging issues for our clients.  It might mean liaising with the operations sides of our telecoms clients to ensure that we understand any problems in the field and disseminate them immediately to their customers.

A good example, we have unfortunately encountered multiple times in the last few years, are security crisis affecting our travel clients which cause us to be both very reactive (handling excess inbound contacts) and also very proactive in dealing with the consequences (making outbound contacts to affected customers, IVR messaging, community forum updates) – manning 24 hour desks, using skill-based routing to direct complex enquiries, setting up triage services, making use of multi-channel communications to minimise handling times and extend our communications reach, using staff that we have previously trained for just such an emergency – in many cases getting all these methods active within 24 hours of the crisis starting.  Our responses then get better over time, not worse.  

We also monitor news sites etc to anticipate any potential problems affecting our customers and immediately start working on managing anticipated surges in volumes – we don’t wait until the cars hit the ditches!

www.the-gem.com

I’m coming out.  I am an X-Factor fan.  There, I’ve said it (and with only a small amount of embarrassment).  I watched the auditions, faithfully record each weeks show for viewing at leisure (who watches anything on TV these days when it is actually scheduled?), have been known to vote for favourite acts and never miss the finals.   I enjoy the judge’s spats (no matter how contrived), envy the dresses and have even bright-danced with my young daughters (what a great multi-channel advert from Talk Talk).   And while I know that many people prefer watching the bad auditions and the dreadful singing of some of the final twelve, what I really enjoy is seeing the contestants develop each week in confidence, style and performing ability.  

This mentoring and development of people is key to gem’s success also.  We invest a lot of time and energy in recruiting the right people with the right attitude – can-do, energetic, emotionally intelligent, passionate about gem and our clients.  We then develop their ability and give them work and life experiences that will improve them as people and increase their contributions to our company.   On the X-Factor, contestants are expected to publicly sing and dance.  gem develop people without making a song and dance of it.  How?

• We coach people and have won national training awards for our training and coaching programs.
• We foster an entrepreneurial “can-do” attitude within the company and encourage people to take personal responsibility for delivering a great customer experience and adding value to our client’s businesses.  We have even supported our employees in setting up their own businesses.
• We run frequent fund-raising activities with selected charities that encourage social responsibility and develop leadership skills in our work-force
• We support our staff in gaining external qualifications such as ILM, CIPD, CIM.
• We involve our middle management team in strategic decisions and ensure that they are bought into the direction of the company.
• We are Investors in People (and have recently achieved Gold Standard Status in IIP).
• We have fun – locking our CEO up in jail for charity (who wouldn’t enjoy that!), running LAN parties, abseiling down hotels, firewalking, movie nights

Finally, we hold awards nights – our own “live finals” to identify the X-Factor within gem – recognising that little bit extra that makes the difference.    Here, our staff dress up (á la X-Factor) and have a ball of a time recognising achievement within gem – awards that have been voted for by our staff as well as recognised by our senior team.  We don’t ask them to sing and the Karaoke that often accompanies this event would probably be ridiculed by Simon Cowell et al but the standard is usually better than Jedward.    Now, I’m no Danii Minogue but I think we do a good job here.

Last weekend my eldest daughter brought home Barnaby Bear.   Barnaby comes with his own suitcase of clothes and is much beloved of the children of my daughter’s Primary Two class.   He went everywhere with us at the weekend and was lovingly tucked into bed each evening by my enraptured daughter.  He does look very cute (especially when dressed up in his “Sunday Best”) but what is much more important to my daughter is what he represents – recognition for a job well done.  The best in her class each week gets to take home Barnaby Bear.

Recognition is important to everyone, no matter what their age.  And gem does their best to provide our own “Barnaby Bear” recognition. 

Every week gem highlight in our weekly staff newsletter “High Fives” – recognition from managers/peers to staff who have achieved something special or delivered above and beyond the call of duty.   Every month, gem applaud and award our high performers at our monthly management meetings.   And each year we have our gemmys – an award night that gives the Oscars a run for their money, hosted by two of our staff (dressed for the red carpet) who should really be in show-business and with most of the categories voted for by all our staff.   

gem also goes to a lot of effort to recognise and reward good ideas.  A recent restructuring of our BIG Ideas scheme means that we now recognise and reward ideas at multiple stages – bronze, silver, gold and platinum – depending upon how adopted and successful the new idea is within the company. 

And we know that all this recognition is valued by our staff through the responses we receive in our regular employee surveys.  

It’s also nice for the company to receive industry recognition for our efforts – recently we have either won or are finalists in national competitions for Coaching and Training, Innovative Use of Technology, Employer of the Year, Outsourced Contact Centre of the Year, Professional of the Year, Action in the Community and Customer Service Team of the Year.  As an employer and a provider of quality contact centre services we value any industry accolade that we get and know that it re-emphasises to our employees and clients that they made the right choice to work with us. 

I also know that many of our clients run similar schemes.  I recently visited a client site and sitting on one of their desks was the most enormous silver trophy (this impressive display of bling proving that the Celtic Tiger may be down but it’s definitely not out).   Every month the employee of the month gets to display the trophy and every visitor notices and comments.  I was proudly told about their achievements the previous month.  

Barnaby Bear was only with us for the weekend and has now been returned to the class-room where all the pupils can clearly see him and hope that this weekend they too will be considered the “Best in Class”. 

…and few of them are good.

I recently approached Ryanair’s “bag drop” desk at Stansted Airport just before the flight closed.  They took my bag and paperwork and asked for my passport.  As I bent down to retrieve my passport from my bag they closed the flight with no apologies and no respect for me as a customer or even as a fellow human being.  The decision cost me £100 and resulted in me spending an extra five hours in Stansted Airport.  But what was worse was the “I don’t care” attitude displayed by the Ryanair staff at the airport.  I felt completely devalued as a customer.

Ryanair would no doubt claim that they have processes to follow, timetables to meet, costs to minimise and “what do you expect for a £19.99 flight?” (although with all their extra charges my flight costs were considerably more than first advertised).  My response is that I still expect to be treated with respect.

Thankfully, gem’s experience as a contact centre indicates that most other companies do respect their customers. 

Customers want good value and a good customer experience, they want you to empathise with their problems, they want you to provide them with solutions, in many cases they want to interact with a real human being (especially where the problem is complex or urgent or emotive) and they want to be treated with respect.  And if they don’t get the right customer experience they will leave – a recent YouGov service stated that 61% of customers will abandon a purchase if the service is less than satisfactory and an Accenture survey this year showed that 20% of customers will immediately leave a company on receiving a poor customer experience.

gem’s corporate clients understand this and recognise that delivering a good customer experience and building customer loyalty is vital to their long-term success.  They also care about what their customers say, both directly via e-mail or voice and indirectly through community blogs and support sites which is why gem spend a lot of time gathering customer intelligence for our clients, analysing it for patterns and trends and using it to suggest improvements to our client’s services and products as well as improving how we support their customers.  gem care about our customers and our clients care about their customers. 

Ryanair is not one of our clients.

I’m Irish, my husband is Italian, I have a Polish sister-in-law and two of my closest friends are English and American. I’ve worked in five different countries and holidayed in many more. My set-up is not unusual and increasingly we all need to know how to survive in a multi-cultural world.

This is much more than just speaking the language, it’s appreciating national differences, interpreting cultural nuance and, in the contact centre world, designing and delivering customer experiences that are appropriate for each nationality.

At gem we manage customer contacts with consumers from almost 30 countries and some of our experiences in designing multi-cultural customer experience include:

• Spanish consumers like to talk so make sure you plan for lots of time on the phone but Dutch consumers like “no nonsense, no frills” in their answers, get straight to the point;
• The Swedish language has no word for please and sometimes that means they can seem more blunt than they mean to be but they still like you to be empathetic about their problem
• The Dutch like you to be informal in your communications with them, the Germans formal
• The French like you to spend some time apologising for any inconvenience whereas Americans and Indians tend to want you to go directly to the point

However, above all, everyone (no matter what their nationality) wants to be treated like an individual. gem is an interesting place to work with almost 50% of our staff multi-lingual and over 95% of them native speakers. We thrive on diversity and delivering a multi-lingual, multi-cultural service which recognises and respects diversity.

Meanwhile, at home, my five year old daughter is demonstrating her own diversity and can say “Hola”, “Fantastico”, “Gracias”, “Me llamo Aisling” and “Vámonos”. She tells me she’s Spanish. Should I tell her that it takes more than speaking the language?

Ciao.

And sometimes it’s better to be female!  In the business world, women still talk about glass ceilings, breaking into the board room and the impact of “boy’s clubs” but recently we had an experience in gem that broke the mould. 

Jack works in one of our teams providing technical support for a leading international brand via e-mail.   As with all our accounts, customer satisfaction is a key measure for everyone and Jack’s competitive.  He likes being the best and delivering the best.   He’s good at his job and couldn’t understand that while his quality scores were consistently good, he wasn’t scoring as highly as some of his (female) colleagues in our customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.  So he decided to conduct a test.  He became Jill.  For a period of time he signed all e-mails as Jill and saw an immediate increase in his CSAT.  

While I see a number of ethical dilemmas with his approach, it does raise interesting questions about what influences customer satisfaction and the impact of non-tangibles when designing customer experience.    Answering the customer’s question is important but attitude and approach – how we interact – also matter.   We all like to be treated in a suitable manner and as individuals.  Delivering a response, whether via e-mail, voice, chat or blogs, requires a tone and etiquette that meets the needs of different customers.  Check out any of gem’s current vacancies to see how important we rate attitude in the recruitment criteria. 

In Jack’s case, the tone (and signature) that worked best was a feminine one.  

Jack was elated at his higher scores (immediately boasting to his female colleagues) and the improvement was quickly noticed by management (unfortunately for Jack the name change was picked up pretty quickly as well by our quality team).   His team manager liked the increase in scores but wasn’t pleased with the name change.    We made him go back to being Jack and we’re working with him to let his personality shine through in different ways.  But we are also studying further the impact of gender on our quality scores.

We are pleased to announce that gem is a winner at the NICE Excellence Awards in the category of Technical Innovation.

The NICE Customer Excellence Awards program celebrates and honours organisations using NICE products and services to drive creative, inventive approaches to managing their operations and optimizing business performance. With a diverse range of solutions, including workforce management, quality management, interaction recording, customer feedback, performance management and interaction analytics

gem will be attending the NICE Customer Conference and will be giving a presentation on how gem’s innovative use of NICE enables us to represent our clients brand, build customer loyalty and deliver a superior customer experience.

Are you aware of the benefits of social media?

Are you Facebooking and tweeting your customers?

According to a recent article in TTG Live, Michael Fausette (group vice-president of software business solutions for San Francisco-based market analysis company IDC) has warned of the dangers to your business of ignoring new media.

“These tools are extremely powerful. If you are not involved you won’t know what people are saying about and that can be extremely dangerous. People will no longer accept service on your terms; they are looking for real time response.”

Some of the recent examples of how Social Media can have an effect on your business include:

Ryanair Employee Calls Blogger an “Idiot”, And Their Spokesperson Publicly Agrees.

United Airlines’ share price plummeted after a musician uploaded a satirical music video – called United breaks guitars – to YouTube after the carrier broke his guitar – click here to read more.

JetBlue was lauded for responding to a tweet by a passenger boarding one of its aircraft – click here to read what they tweeted back.

With the advances in mobile technology your customers can be tweeting from the check-in queue and rating your services as they are using them.

At gem we understand the importance of providing a “real time” customer support service and the need to tailor this service to the particular requirements of each of your customers.

gem is one of Europe’s leading independent providers of outsourced contact centre serviced across email, telephone, SMS, and live chat in 26 languages and providing a 24 x7 operation. We also tweet, blog and can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn. We understand the benefits of using Social Media. So do EA, Expedia and Match.com who are just three of our major international clients.

- Fiona Magee