TO HOLIDAY SUPPORTSummer Guide

This maxim rings true year-round, and even more so during the holiday season. It’s a busy time of year when people are braving crowded malls and surfing the web in search of the most popular toys, newest gadgets, and most fashionable gear for their friends, family, and loved ones. In many cases, those items turn out not to be “the perfect gifts,” and as a result, are returned by the recipients. Consider that, since they didn’t make the original purchase, this return process may be these customers’ first interaction with the brand. What will they encounter? Will their experience encourage them to buy from that company in the future? Or will it push them toward a competitor? Given these high stakes for customer support teams around the holidays, it’s imperative to start preparing in advance—and that starts well before the first seasonal hire is ever brought on.

Filled with insights, best practices, and case studies from around the customer support industry, Lessonly’s Summer Guide to Holiday Support is an essential resource for support leaders and teams prepping for the seasonal rush. This guide is designed to jumpstart the efforts of support teams around the world with insight and tips for developing training content, measuring rep performance, reducing ramp times, and increasing productivity. These are critical first steps in the long process of providing customer experiences that foster satisfaction and loyalty. And exceptional experiences do, in fact, have tangible benefits on bottom-line business outcomes. So, why wait to start preparing?

“THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS KING.”

-Shep Hyken

OUR INDUSTRY EXPERTS3

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BUILD TRAINING CONTENT

MEASURE KPIs THAT MATTER

CUT RAMP TIMES AND COSTS

INCREASE REP PRODUCTIVITY

CONCLUSION

Table Of Contents SHEP HYKEN Chief Amazement Officer Shepard Presentations | hyken.com

SHEILA McGEE-SMITH President & Principal Analyst McGee Smith Analytics | mcgeesmith.com

DAVID TULL Quality Assurance Manager CoverMyMeds | covermymeds.com

GEOFF ZENTZ Customer Happiness Manager Readers.com | readers.com

MATT BURNAFORD Customer Service Manager Headsets.com | headsets.com

Shep is a customer service and experience expert and a New York Times bestselling business author. As a customer service expert and keynote speaker, Shep works with companies who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees.

Sheila is a recognized customer care and enterprise communications industry thought leader. Her company, McGee-Smith Analytics, delivers contact center, customer experience, and collaboration knowledge and technical insight to help companies understand their application and deployment architecture choices.

David is an operations and content leader, specializing in the incorporation of team and individual development into performance management. He has worked across a variety of industries, including retail e-commerce, health information technology, non-profits, and arts management.

Driving to help people see more clearly so they can live happier lives, Geoff leads the Readers.com Customer Happiness Team. Focusing on offering high level, personal service in an e-commerce environment, their team uses individualized touches to develop relationships instead of transactions.

Matt has been with Headsets.com for over 10 years, and has found himself in nearly every function in the company during his time there. No matter what role he’s found himself in, he’s been finding ways to provide their unique brand of Customer Love to their Customers.

BUILD TRAINING CONTENTSection One:

Preparing for the holiday season starts by making a list and checking it twice. A list of what, you ask? Well, to effectively onboard and train support reps, a training plan needs to be in place!

The best customer support training plans begin long before the first seasonal hire is ever made. Planning ahead will give you time to identify gaps in your current training, build or crowdsource information from top performers, and organize a library of content for your team’s new and existing support reps to use. To accomplish this, walk through these 4 steps and determine what kind of training program you’re putting together:

• Identify the support channels• Define the rep actions• Plan the training roadmap• Decide the delivery mechanism

IDENTIFY THE SUPPORT CHANNELS

Every customer support thought leader and practitioner interviewed for this guide agrees that the first step toward building effective training is to identify which channels your support team will offer and cover. Some contact centers focus exclusively on one channel, e.g. answering phones, while some support teams efficiently offer phone, email, and live chat support. Once all of the support channels have been identified, the necessary training needs to be created.

Example: If your support team plans to offer phone, email, and chat support this holiday season, make sure to decide where seasonal reps

will fit into the existing team. If you are focused on improving the response time for customers through chat, direct the additional man-power toward the live chat team.

With support channels identified, decide where you’ll place new employ-ees to handle the increased demand of peak season. The next question to ask is: what actions does each role need to perform well, to achieve the goals you have set for them? If this seems vague, that’s okay—you’re not alone. Scoping support roles can be difficult, but there are ways to illuminate that process:

A critical step in building content for seasonal hires is looking at the most recent reporting and statistics on the distributions of interaction by channel, and then comparing that information with a previous time frame. I think the last 60 days give you the most valuable information. Look and ask yourself, ‘Which customer interactions are we trending toward?’ Only then can you understand what kind of content and what kind of training these people are going to need for the relevant channels coming in.

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-Sheila McS.

Think of it this way: there’s no use creating training for support over SMS if a contact

center doesn’t have that capability. Un-derstanding the scope of your support

team will both eliminate wasting time on unnecessary training and refine the devel-

opment process for incoming seasonal hires.

Example: Say hello to Ollie! Ollie has been hired on as a seasonal Customer Service Representative for an eCommerce support team.

When he’s been fully trained, Ollie is expected to handle 20 online support requests per day while maintaining a customer satisfac-

tion rating of 8 or above. To accomplish those goals, he needs to:

Ollie’s employer only provides live chat and phone support for their custom-ers, so he doesn’t need to learn support tactics for email, SMS, or Facebook Messenger. The scope of his training plan should be as focused and helpful as possible to drive the most productivity.

Look through metrics from past peak seasons, and the months leading up to them, to determine which channels need extra help. After decid-ing the channels that need to be covered, plan to allocate your seasonal hires accordingly. And once new, and existing, employees are assigned to their duties, the next question is: what do they need to do once there?

DEFINE THE REP ACTIONS

During the months leading up to the holiday season, training and ramp-ing up new hires takes precedence, but this planning also provides a good opportunity to reassess existing reps’ roles and responsibilities. With your channels defined, sit down and decide the responsibilities—and desired impact—of every team member. Identifying and defining these are critical in the early stages of planning, as they help shape the training necessary roadmap for each role.

Mapping out every act that reps need to carry out might feel a bit over-whelming at first. Fight the instinct to think of all the things that a team member might do, and prioritize the most important skills. Of course the ideal impact is always to solve the customer’s issue, but there’s also a larger view to take when deciding how your support team functions.

As Customer Support Manager at Headsets.com, Matt oversees a team of reps that is solely dedicated to great customer experience. On this team, call length and number of interactions are secondary to the quality of the customer experience. And a qualitative approach to customer support changes the type of training that is emphasized:

Are we looking to create new customers, retain existing customers, or just answer the phone? Depending on the answer to that question, it should drive the type of training for seasonal support reps. It’s good for customer service managers and teams to sit down and ask themselves a few questions to figure out what those topics should be for them specifically.

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-Matt B.

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• Receive notifications of new support requests • Respond to support requests using Zendesk• Understand each customer’s issues• Handle angry customers • Manage time appropriately to stay on pace • Log relevant information in Zendesk • Create delight in support

We focus 100% on ‘how happy is the customer?’ So if

you’re getting a lot of existing customer calls, you want

to tailor your training to make sure your level of service

during the holiday season stays at the level your

customers have come to expect from you.

-Matt Burnaford

Matt points out that existing customers may already have an expectation of service, which can translate to a different level of accountability during the holiday season. This doesn’t mean new customers should receive a different level of service than existing customers. But if you are expect-ing a wave of new customers during the holidays, training time is best spent on topics like showing new hires how your CRM and telephone technology work. Smooth, seamless support calls set a good impression for new customers going forward, and that one-time interaction could turn into a return customer that generates more business down the road.

Example: Matt’s distinction between new and existing customers is a subtle, but important one in building support training content. Let’s assume that Ollie, our intrepid Customer Support Rep, was hired onto Matt’s team at Headsets.com to answer support calls from customers. If Matt’s team is expecting lots of new customers, Ollie’s onboarding program might look like this:

• Our Phone System and How to Use It• How We Use Salesforce• Start With These 3 Questions

However, if Ollie is tasked with answering calls from existing customers who already have an expectation for Headsets.com’s awesome customer service, his Lessons might look different:

• We Don’t Punish for Call Length, Here’s Why• How We Go Above and Beyond for Customers• Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Me, Your Manager

Of course, in either case, Ollie will still be trained on soft skills and channel technology, but if the team’s focus is on excellent customer experience, his training and learning should reflect that.

Nuances like these may be difficult to decipher, but that’s an advantage to starting early in the year! After building out the functions of your support team, it’s time to decide what the roadmap for that training looks like.

PLAN THE TRAINING ROADMAP

With an outline of your team’s training content in hand, it’s time to decide when they should receive the training. This “when” breaks down into two phases—both of which are essential to developing strong support reps: initial onboarding and ongoing training.

When bringing on seasonal hires, the onboarding period between their first day in the office and full productivity is critical. We call this period the “time-to-productivity” or “ramp time” for new support reps. During this phase, relative deadlines work really well, but in peak seasons, time might be tighter. Try assigning lessons and training material anywhere from day one for basic information to two months after they attend an introductory session on a complex topic.

Example: The time before a new support rep ever steps foot into your call center or office is often underutilized in employee training. With online training software like Lessonly, support team leaders can assign quick, easy Lessons for reps to complete before their first day. Just be sure to keep these brief and focused on general information, such as:

• Parking information• Building access information• Company history• Mission, vision, and values of the company

There’s a balance between too much and no training at all prior to an employee’s first day. But a little basic information can truly help new hires get their bearings and hit the ground running on day one.

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Time-to-productivity for new hires should be filled with as much learn-ing as is needed to do the job well, without overloading them. Building a training path that guides new employees through a progression of content is another best practice. This incremental rollout of content lightens the initial learning load, and also builds connections between the information being presented in each step. And be sure that your training plan doesn’t end once your new hires are on the floor, interacting with customers. Learning doesn’t stop there.

New hires will eventually get to the point where they don’t need train-ing on the CRM, and existing employees might not need re-training on technology, but there’s plenty of new or changing information that can be assigned out on a regular basis. For example, new or updated products are often accompanied by lists of information that customer support reps need to know, and learning that refreshes soft skills never hurts, either.

Example: After reviewing hundreds of thousands of Lesson assignments in Lessonly, and nearly the same number of Lesson completions, we found that Learner engagement is highest on Fridays and stays rela-tively even across the other days of the week, including weekends. Who would have thought Saturday and Sunday engagement would be so high? You simply can’t activate that timeframe with classroom-style training.

Training roadmap in place? Excellent. But what good is a plan, if there’s no way to deliver the content to your team? With your training cadence mapped out for both new and existing employees, make sure to plan for how this information will be shared.

DECIDE THE DELIVERY MECHANISMAs with any communication, the medium through which you com-municate support team training will affect the way it’s received and remembered.

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Training isn’t something you did, training is something you do. You need to constantly train your support team. You want to have feedback at the end of the day to let people know how they’re doing.

-Shep H.

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I think that a weekly review of [learning] content is important because you’re building a feedback loop. You see how the first hires do on the floor, you see how they do hitting the phone, and then you fine tune the training that they received for the next group. Weekly training review doesn’t mean you’re revamping the entire curriculum, it means you’re fine tuning.

-Sheila McS.

Learner Engagement by Day of Week

Weekly training? That level of interaction likely isn’t scalable for all-team, in-person training sessions. Such team-wide training sessions can be effective for support teams, but in the interest of keeping customer service levels at acceptable levels, they are better used in a monthly or quarterly cadence. Instead, consider how your team can best use online learning in addition to other forms of training and coaching.

Look back at the training plan you have put together so far, and consider how each phase or type of content will be best delivered. Here are a few of the most common ways:

• Lessonly Lessons and Courses• Classroom-style presentation • One-on-one shadowing • Ongoing mentoring • Role Play • Activity • Document Review

Each of these methods has its advantages. For example, online learning is excellent for fundamental tasks that are better learned in a self-paced and measureable format, while more personal approaches are best saved for one-off and strategic material that requires real-time discussion. This hybrid approach to support team training balances online flexibility with dedicated in-person time that is key to reinforcing key support concepts.

Example: Ollie’s first week on the job as a seasonal Customer Service Representative has been a busy one filled with plenty of learning. But not all of his training has come in the same format. Here’s a snapshot of his first week of training:

• Start Date -2: Ollie was assigned three online Lessons that brought him up-to-speed on the history of the company.

• Start Date: Ollie has a 1-on-1 training session with his direct man-ager to talk him through his duties.

• Start Date: Ollie shadows a fellow CSR for the rest of the day to see what his job will be like on a day-to-day basis.

• Start Date +2: Ollie is provided with online Lessons that refresh and quiz him on knowledge that he should be learning during his in-person shadowing and training activities.

• Start Date +5: Ollie sits down with his direct manager who mentors him on his quiz scores and answers his questions.

Mixing up the types of training Ollie goes through has kept him light on his hooves. If he had to sit and watch 10 hours of training videos, who knows how much of that information he’d retain. But a combi-nation of in-person coaching, online learning, and training activities maximized his engagement throughout the week.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for support rep learning and devel-opment. Online learning is great for quick hits and reinforcing informa-tion over long periods of time, and 1-on-1 coaching is great for focused periods of personal development. The best approach is to evaluate the entire length of your reps’ employee lifetime and determine which train-ing methods offer the most benefits for each facet and phase.

Following these four steps should put you in a position to fully enable new and existing reps to provide the best customer support possible. And with a training plan in hand to make your support team better at their jobs, the next step is to measure how much better.

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MEASURE KPIs THAT MATTERSection Two:

According to the 2016 Global Customer Experience Benchmark, 71.5% of customer support leaders say analytics enable better rep performance; yet, 20% of contact centers don’t measure the benefits of training. As peak season gets closer and closer, priorities shift to getting ready for the accompanying onslaught of customer calls, emails, and chats. In the midst of this surge, it can be difficult to keep tabs on seasonal hires, but setting measurable goals for their training beforehand can have an immense impact on team—and business—performance, in the long run.

Countless metrics can be tracked, but which ones truly have an impact on the seasonal support rush? And how can you effectively track them? Our industry thought leaders and practitioners weigh in on which KPIs are worth tracking and why your team should start.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTIONCustomer Satisfaction (CSAT) is an index score, rated on a 0-100% scale, calculated by surveying the customer’s perceived value and quality of a support interaction. The rise of separate channels has placed more importance on CSAT because it measures the customer’s resulting sat-isfaction regardless of whether it was a phone call, online chat, email, or any other channel.

Sheila McGee: My preference for this metric is finding where customer satisfaction can be measured by parameters that are independent of a customer survey. For example, say we put together an algorithm based on actual CSAT, but that could also account for many other variables:• How long did the customer wait on hold? • Had they been to the website?• How long was the call?

• Did they get transferred during the call? • Was the call successful?

It’s an interesting way to think about what big data enables us to do going forward. In the best of all possible worlds, we’d be able to measure every single call. You could then have CSAT metrics for every single call.

Example Lessons for Customer Satisfaction:

• How We Track Customer Satisfaction—As Sheila points out, customer satisfaction can be calculated in different ways, depend-ing on the function of a support team. The most important training material for support reps should explain how you expect them to treat the customer.

• Going Above and Beyond for the Customer—Nothing helps to explain the lengths that support reps should go to for customers like first-hand stories. Crowdsource stories from existing reps, de-tailing times they went the extra mile to make sure the customer’s experience was excellent. This makes the content more real and approachable for new employees.

• How We Turn Angry Customers into Satisfied Ones—During peak season, there will be no shortage of frustrated customers. Build learning material that details the process for handling an angry customer, so that seasonal hires are well-prepared to turn the sit-uation around.

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FIRST CONTACT RESOLUTIONFirst Contact Resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of times that a customer’s issue is resolved on the first contact with a support rep. This metric has remained a good measure of support performance focused on support team efficiency in solving customer issues. 77% of customers who contact call centers have their issues resolved during the first call.

Geoff Zentz: Because our target demographic trends a little bit older, first contact resolution is something that I’m dealing with a lot right now. We were finding that tracking FCR on emails and holding our team accountable for that KPI was actually discouraging communication with our customers, because our team was worried “what if the cus-tomer replies back after this initial email?” So they weren’t asking the questions that they would naturally ask in the flow of a conversation.

For phone FCR, it’s been really interesting. I can almost predict the weekly customer satisfaction rating by looking at the FCR for phones—because they are almost identical. Taking care of the customer on their first contact is a huge thing, no matter what the channel. But, I never really understood that our customers happiness, or how they feel that we’ve done with them, really correlates to that first contact—right down to the money. So what we’ve talked about as a team is, on that first phone call, how can we do everything possible to handle the issue and any other questions they might have. It really influences how the customer views the interaction in the long run.

Example Lessons for First Contact Resolution:

• When First Contact Resolution Isn’t the Goal—As Geoff pointed out, FCR isn’t always the best metric for support reps to focus on. New hires will greatly benefit from a Lesson that lays out why FCR is being tracked and situations when multiple contacts might better solve the problem.

• The Most Common Customer Issues—If the goal is to solve the issues that customers have when they first contact your support reps,

listen to calls and review live chats to discover the most common issues that occur during first contacts.

• Brushing Up on Soft Skills—There’s never a bad time for customer support reps to brush up on soft skills. These skills come in espe-cially handy when trying to diagnose a customer’s issue and solve it within the same contact.

NET PROMOTER SCORENet Promoter Score is used to measure customer experience on a 0-10 scale by asking customers “how likely are you to recommend [this com-pany] to a friend or colleague?” A 9 or 10 rating means customers are actively promoting the company and can be a fantastic indicator of growth from the customer support department.

Example Lessons for Net Promoter Score:

• Why Do We Want Active Promoters—NPS can be difficult to understand. Explain why you track it and how it benefits the busi-ness at large.

• Turning Neutral Interactions into Positive Ones—The difference between a neutral customer interaction and an active promoter can have a big impact on the business. This Lesson might contain best practices and stories from top-performing reps on how to make the most out of every interaction.

• How to Ask Customers to Take Their Survey—NPS live and dies on the willingness for customers to take the survey so representa-tives know how they are doing. Give guidelines and scripts for reps to gently suggest how customers can fill out their surveys to make sure that NPS is correctly calculated.

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I love Net Promoter Scores, and they tell you a lot. If

you’re going to survey customers, make it easy on

them. If they called and spent 6 minutes on the phone

with you, don’t send them a 15-minute survey—that’s

ridiculous. But a 1-minute or 2-minute survey can net

some really important information. And, if you have

enough customers, you can do multiple types of

surveys. Just keep them all within reason.

-Shep Hyken

PERCENTAGE OF TIME ON HOLDPercentage of Time on Hold measures the amount of time that individual customer support reps place their customers on hold instead of actively talking to them. By measuring this, support managers can take a look at how much people are waiting during their support contact. The smaller the percentage, the more time reps are communicating and solving customer issues.

David Tull: We used Percentage of Time on Hold as a mini-KPI to keep an eye on how often we were using hold. To get away from the culture of calling in and being placed on hold while the rep is working, we don’t want to put customers on hold except for extreme cases. No, I want reps talking to the customer and walking them through what they’re doing.

This was usually a really good indicator, on a micro level, of support quality and customer satisfaction. It does me no good, as a manager, to say “Your CSAT is lower than the rest of the team. Do better!” Well, how are they supposed to do that? This was a good metric to look at and say, “I noticed you’re putting customers on hold about 10% of the time. The rest of the team isn’t putting customers on hold at all. Let’s figure out a better way to manage the situations where you’re putting people on hold.” Fixing something as small as Percentage of Time on Hold has an impact on CSAT, quality assurance, and even production.

Example Lessons for Percentage of Time on Hold:

• How to Avoid Putting Customers on Hold—As David mentioned, long hold times have created a negative image for contact centers. Every rep who interacts with customers could benefit from a Lesson that explaining how to avoid putting them on hold.

• How We Track Time on Hold—In a show of transparency, build a Lesson that explains how and why this metric is tracked, and how it fits into the bigger company picture. Showing reps this information will help them feel more secure and will also help them avoid putting customers on hold to more quickly solve their issues.

• Why Time on Hold and CSAT are Connected—Customers sitting on hold probably don’t generate great customer satisfaction num-bers. A Lesson that walks reps through the customer’s experience on hold can help them empathize with why it brings CSAT down.

EMPLOYEE LONGEVITYEmployee Longevity is simply a measure of how long a certain employee has been with a company since they were hired. But, as Shep Hyken points out, there are some interesting correlations between employees that have been with a company for long periods of time and the level of customer service that is being provided.

Shep Hyken: If you’re going to look at KPIs, one I’ve found very in-teresting is employee longevity. It’s a really interesting KPI. Support centers that are able to retain employees long-term are probably em-ployee-focused. When they’re employee-focused, guess what? They’re probably customer-focused. Now, it’s not always the case, but if you look at the correlation, it holds up pretty well.

Take a look at the best customer-focused companies. Go look at the American Customer Satisfaction Index and look at the best customer service companies. Then if you go to Glassdoor.com, and you start look-ing at those companies, you’re gonna find that those companies have a high rating with their employees as well. There’s a direct correlation, and you need to keep that in mind as you’re hiring people and training them. Create a fulfilling environment that makes them want to not only stay working with you but better engage the customer.

Example Lessons for Employee Longevity:

• Why We Invest in Our Reps—As Shep pointed out, employee longevity often shows a positive correlation with companies that have a good CSAT score. Lean into this and build training material that explains that dynamic and how it works best for both sides.

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• Our Company Philosophies—In addition to soft support skills and technical support skills, employees that are with a company for long periods of time are bought into their mission, vision, and values. Training like this sets up newer employees to align with the company’s mission and crate that longevity that leads to better CSAT scores.

• A Great Support Rep Looks Like This—If you wish to build reps and keep them around for awhile, creating a Lesson on what you believe a good team player is could never hurt

CONTACTS PER HOURContacts Per Hour (CPH) measures how much volume an individual support rep, or an entire support team, can take in an hour. This can also be measured in Contacts Per Day. Contacts include whatever ways the customer can get in touch with the support team: calls, emails, live chat, SMS, and other channels. As a volume metric, CPH is a good sign for how productive a support team is being, but doesn’t exactly shed light onto the quality of each contact.

David Tull: Contacts Per Hour was one of three different metrics we used as a heatmap for performance. CPH, CSAT, and Quality Assurance really helped inform who our top performers were and who needed attention and support.

CPH was specifically useful in balancing out the other major metrics. Customer Satisfaction was always kind of the guiding star so we could see how we were doing as a team. But then, we could look individually and say, “Yeah, they’ve got one of the highest CSAT scores on the team, but they’re not doing a lot of work,” based on their Contacts Per Hour. It helped keep us honest and to keep our reps honest at a performance level.

Example Lessons for Contacts Per Hour:

• Productivity is Great, but Not Everything—Contacts Per Hour is great until the quality of customer satisfaction starts to diminish. Keep this top-of-mind for your reps by creating training material that explicitly lays out when too many customers is bad.

• This is What We Expect for Production—Make CPH expectations known in-person during onboarding and build a Lesson around in case anyone ever wants to refresh their knowledge.

• Three Hacks to Up Your CPH—To help develop the talent of reps after onboarding, Lessons like these can provide new tools to use for increased productivity. More productivity means better returns for the company at large.

AVERAGE RESPONSE TIMEAverage Response Time measures how long a customer has to wait be-fore a support representative speaks with them. This can be measured different ways, depending on the channel that the customer is using, but generally speaking, the shorter the queue time, the better. This indicates customers are waiting less and support reps are being productive.

Geoff Zentz: Even though we lump three metrics into this one, Aver-age Speed of Response is probably our third biggest metric behind CSAT and FCR. Those three metrics that we measure vary across our different channels:

• Average Hold Time on the phone • Average Response Time for live chat• Average Wait Time for emails during open hours

In that number, we only count emails that come in during the time we’re in the building and open, meaning any emails that come in after 6PM or 9AM do not factor in. But, we work from the oldest emails to the newest, so we as a team have to get through the backlog before we get to the emails that come in during open hours.

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Email, phone, and chat response times are three pieces of our puzzle that give us a bigger-picture look at the quality of service we’re pro-viding. In today’s instant satisfaction world, it shows us how quickly we are getting back to our customers.

Example Lessons for Average Response Times:

• How ART is Calculated—In Geoff’s example from his time as a support leader, Average Response Times were a metric that combined three separate numbers into an overall scorecard for the support team. Explaining this for new and existing employees in a Lesson is never a bad thing.

• Etiquette for Answering Live Chat—The rules for answering phone and chat are not necessarily the same. Refresh reps on infor-mation learned during their onboarding, ensuring that chat message are attended to quickly and efficiently.

• How to Handle Customers Who Have Been Waiting—If some-thing falls through the cracks, reps can encounter angry customers. Explain best practices for dealing with angry customers and how to turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Knowing the Key Performance Indicators that most influence your cus-tomer support team is only half of the battle. Focus on what will get your seasonal employees up-to-speed faster, while also providing development for your existing customer support reps. When you combine training and development with customer service KPIs, you’ll begin to see a real return on investment from your seasonal hiring plans.

World-class support teams separate themselves from the pack reducing the time-to-productivity of their seasonal hires. Given the cyclical nature of peak-season hiring, improving these reps’ onboarding and training isn’t a one-time bonus; it is necessary for providing the level of service that customers expect. The benefits of better onboarding and training might seem abstract, so the graph below illustrates the productivity of two seasonal hires, each with different training.

Ollie and Follie are brothers, both starting seasonal customer service jobs. Ollie joins a company who onboards him with a mix of online and in-person training. After his first week of onboarding, Ollie is tasked with 5 daily support tickets for the next two weeks before reviewing of performance. Thanks to solid onboarding, Ollie is handling his 5 tickets

with ease and high satisfaction scores, and his daily quota is raised to 10 tickets. Ollie continues to exceed expectations and, within a few weeks, is fully ramped with a quota of 25 daily customer tickets to resolve.

After his initial week of onboarding, Follie is tasked with 5 daily support tickets for the next two weeks before reviewing of performance. At the two week mark, Follie has not been adequately meeting his KPIs, so his quota is reduced to 2 tickets per day. By the end of their first month, Ollie has resolved hundreds of customer issues while Follie is still struggling to find their footing.

The underlying fact is that good onboarding can reduce time-to-produc-tivity for your new hires. And that productivity can apply to many metrics other than support tickets. Improving onboarding is an investment into cutting costs as well.

CUT RAMP TIMES AND COSTSSection Three:

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If you give somebody a chance to do the right thing early in the game, just coach them. Make it a strong onboarding process. One of the things that’s really important is that your support rep has confidence, that they themselves are capable of doing a good job

-Shep H.5

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-5

(Q3) (Q4)

10 95 13 173 117 15 192 106 14 184 128 16 20

10

15

20

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New Hire Productivity

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Before adopting Lessonly, TravelOutlook’s all-virtual team struggled to successfully onboard new employees. But, being in an industry which focuses on exceptional customer service, TravelOutlook knew they must invest in solid training.

In the past, new hire onboarding consisted of two weeks of trainer-lead webinars. Trainers would check in on employees, as they were onboarded, to ensure they were retaining all of the relevant information. If not, the employees had to rewatch the entire webinar to refresh the information.

Effective? Maybe. Efficient? Definitely Not.

Since switching to Lessonly for new hire onboarding, TravelOutlook has slashed the time it takes to train new hires nearly in half. By uploading their existing training materials, alongside video clips from ilos videos, new reps are onboarded more quickly and effectively, and able to contribute to the team faster.

USES LESSONLY TO REDUCE RAMP TIME

INCREASE REP PRODUCTIVITYSection Four:

The final piece of Lessonly’s Summer Guide to Holiday Support provides you with tools and insights—from support thought leaders who have been through the season before—to get the most productivity out of both your existing reps and your seasonal hires.

Embrace Productivity HacksIf a process or task is difficult or convoluted, people naturally try and find an easier way to get it done. Reps—particularly new ones—are no different. Sometimes, such “hacks” are the wrong way to solve a problem; but oftentimes, new reps bring a different perspective to the situation at hand. David Tull suggests being open to these hacks, because there’s often an underlying issue with existing processes or tools:

David recalls a past associate who worked around a bug that was delay-ing customer orders. The seasonal employee found a back channel to

the warehouse to expedite orders for customers. Instead of shutting it down, David adopted the practice and even integrated it into the system for future customer support reps. It made them more efficient as a team and made things more official:

UTILIZE THE KNOWLEDGE BASEIn addition to onboarding and training, one of the biggest software purchases that boosts productivity is a well-populated knowledge base. They are made to provide quick answers to questions that come up in typical customer conversations. When looking for a knowledge base, look for a solution that integrates the searchable features of a knowledge base into the training solution that employees are already familiar with.

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It’s so easy to be corrective of seasonal hires during peak season, thinking ‘well these guys are new… they’re still learning the ropes.’ But, even at the part-time seasonal associate level, they can be the person that comes in and tells you that your tools and processes are not as helpful as you thought they might be.

-David T.

[Adopting this hack] also helped us track the behavior of our reps, because now they weren’t doing it through some backend system that we didn’t have visibility into. They were now using codes, and I could go see who was using it, and who was abusing it. We tried to embrace that kind of thinking, rather than trying to put them back into the inefficient task they were doing. Always try and figure out why they tried to resort to that method. -David T.

Finding the balance between too much information and not enough, is tough in a knowledge base: too much and reps might need a more in-depth explanation, too little and the customer might be left needing more. Information that lives in the knowledge base will vary by support team, but here are a few questions you could expect to see:

• When was your company founded?• What is the return address for this product I’m sending back?• What is the closest physical store to my location?

EMPOWER REP AUTONOMYIn today’s world, it seems the only thing between a normal business day and a viral media meltdown about awful customer service is the team of front-line support reps. United Airlines is the latest brand to experience this after company policy sided with forcibly dragging someone from a flight instead of resolving the situation another way. After the story captured the attention of the world, United stated in a press release that they were working to “ensure our employees are prepared and empow-ered to put our customers first.”

This exact situation might not have come up for United’s support man-agers, but you can be sure it’s in their training program now. Thankfully, you can learn from this example and work to ensure your front-line reps have what they need to avoid unpleasant situations with customers. If you’re continuously receiving questions from seasonal hires on a particular subject, it could be time to integrate that information into a Lesson earlier on in the training process.

PREPARE FOR CUSTOMER DEMANDSPart of the planning that goes into peak season is to understand and prepare for the customer demands your support team will be dealing with. Better preparing them for what they will be dealing with will make your team more productive. For example, companies with products that customers interact with should review past data to identify where the most customer interactions occur.

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The importance of knowledge management has been undervalued in the contact center space. As you head into the season, making sure you have an updated and current knowledge management system is going to help reps be more productive. They can be used for things as simple as cutting and pasting answers into texts and messenger. Tools like that allow seasonal hires to approach ‘super rep’ level.

You have to empower your reps to take care of the customer. If, in the training phase, the support rep cannot say ‘yes’ to the customer, or doesn’t think they can, then they should go to their supervisor and find out how to resolve the issue. However, that should be the last time the support rep should ever have to ask permission to do something or learn how to take care of a similar situation.

-Shep H.

—-Sheila McS.

I think you have to have some kind of 80/20 rule for

seasonal hires. 80% of your business and phone calls

are going to be about 20% of the product that you carry.

Really know your business—and customers—to the point

that you can narrow your team’s focus going into the

holidays. By knowing that, and preparing for that, you

can better enable your support team going into

the season.

-Matt Burnaford

This level of specificity allows peak season employees to focus on the in-formation that matters most. That doesn’t mean that support reps should be specializing in certain information, but the three-year-old product still on the website probably shouldn’t get much training focus compared to the new line of widgets launching this year. This productivity tip is best planned well before peak season ever gets into full swing, but it doesn’t mean that information can’t be updated on the fly as well. If customers latch onto something new halfway through the holiday season, make sure your training materials are flexible enough to keep up.

UNDERSTAND NEW HIRE LIMITATIONSOmnichannel support, besides being the biggest support trend of 2016, has changed the way support teams interact with customers. Giving front-line support reps more information and access to different touch points in the customer journey has significant effects on metrics like resolution times and customer satisfaction. However, be sure to decide if your seasonal hires are up to the managing this new level of customer context in their support interactions.

Avoid overwhelming your new hires by using Customer Journey Man-agement software to direct customers to specific reps. This helps mitigate difficulty on newer employees, and these software solutions can also

do a great job of providing the relevant customer context needed to get seasonal reps versed in the ways of omnichannel support.

AVOID OVER-SPECIALIZATIONHaving someone who is a “specialist” handling a support issue can give customers a good feeling. But specialization can be problematic when carried too far. For this reason, Geoff Zentz encourages his team to be well-rounded and able to contribute to every part of the customer support journey.

For Geoff, this tactic has been an effective way to ensure that every mem-ber of his team is productive in their role. However, this strategy needs to be laid out by support managers well in advance to reap rewards. If a rep has only been trained on answering customer phone calls, it would obviously be jarring to move them to live chats without the proper in-troduction.

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You can’t just give a laundry list of ‘these are the last 10 interactions we’ve had with this customer.’ Companies have to do a better job of providing Customer Journey Management systems that give reps information that they can easily digest.

We’ve started using data to see what our heaviest days are, so we can place teammates in positions where they can succeed. We’re playing to our strengths to help handle the volume that’s coming in, and always looking at the data to determine if we need to be all-hands on deck. Sometimes we need to be that way, and sometimes we need to switch up areas and have reps practice things they’re not as comfortable with, without negatively affecting the customer experience.

-Geoff Z.-Sheila McS.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF REP DOWNTIMEIt sounds simple, but downtime between phone calls or emails are pre-cious minutes that can be utilized to make reps and support teams more productive. Emphasize this from the top down. During peak season, there will be fewer downtime opportunities for reps with the increase in customers, but every little bit counts:

Produce positively productive support reps with these tips and tricks from our support thought leaders and practitioners who know best. A more productive team means more satisfied customers, more calls answered, and a better bottom line. During peak season, that can be the difference between surviving and thriving.

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When the phone isn’t ringing, there are other things that need to be done. Every now and then you’ll get someone who balks at that, thinking ‘I’m here to help customers, not cash a check or whatever else needs done.’ But, for the most part, we’ve found that people are just anxious to help when they’re not on the phone. No one really likes to sit there and not be working. Take advantage of people’s drive to work and find productive work that can help the team when they aren’t on the phone.

-Matt B.

So what are you waiting for? The holiday season will never be further away than it is right now. Armed with these insights, best practices, and case studies, start building the training content, measuring the performance, cutting costs, and improving the produc-tivity of your team today.

World-class support teams around the world use Lessonly’s team learning software to empower their support reps. Take the first step toward a more prepared holiday season by taking a tour of Lessonly.

hello@lessonly.com | 407 Fulton St. Indianapolis, IN 46202 | (317) 469 - 9194IL

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