the gem blog

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