Happy New Year!
I ran across this content from Jeff Toister of Toister Performance Solutions, Inc. and I really loved the idea of asking agents to self-identify great customer experiences and celebrate them while breaking them down and learning scalable, repeatable behaviors to delight customers.
After reading this -I would love to hear if you all have done anything like this where agents self-identify and analyze great experiences. What did that look like? Was the content shared to benefit other team members? How did the agents react to being asked to "find the good" versus getting corrective feedback?
Conduct After Action Reviews (all content written by Jeff Toister)
We tend to review the situation when things go wrong, but how about when things go right? The "after-action review" is a great technique to use when your customers are elated so you can figure out how to do it more often.
Here's how it works:
Step 1: Identify situations where customers are obviously very happy with the service they've received.
Step 2: Determine what you did to contribute to the customer's outstanding experience. (You may also want to take note of any factors that were beyond your direct control, such as a special sale or the customer was in a great mood, to begin with.)
Step 3: Decide what you will do to get a similar result the next time you serve a customer in the same situation. The idea is to deliberately repeat what's working rather than leave it to chance.
While I personally would rather eat a live spider than call out my own work as outstanding, I know that there's definitely value in using reviews to understand what you and your team are getting right. I think we're often more likely to point out things that could use improvement (and remember the negative rather than the positive) so we can sometimes forget to build on those things that we're getting right.
I agree with Valentina that a specific process for this can be helpful but I'd also encourage smaller less-process driven ways to implement this too. For example, when you see a great response to a frequent question, consider adding it as part of your help documentation or to your saved responses.
I also recommend checking in with your team about how they prefer to give and receive feedback and build the way you celebrate and learn from great customer experiences around that. Some of your CS agents may love to share their successes with the whole team, while others (like myself) would quietly wither on the inside when you turn the spotlight on them, even if you have only good things to say.
Happy New Year to you, too! This is a very helpful exercise, BUT it's also very culture coded. As in, it works really well in environments where agents are happy to (or expected to) call out their own achievements. It does not work well in environment where boasting about ones results might be perceived as narcisistic. Since in most teams you'll have people who are all across the board when it comes to "do I like to talk about my achievements" - I'd modify the exercise a little bit:
Both agents and reviewers can mark replies as #outstanding, using a comment tag. Every months or so you then get groups of agents together (maybe 4-5) and let them go through the filter with #outstanding tags (depending on access rights you might have to export the tickets) and have them work together at what went really well, with a specific not to what was actually in the agents realm of influence. We all know that CSAT is more influenced by swiftness and whether the customer actually liked the content of the response than by the way the agent framed it - so acknowledging that sometimes customers are really really happy just because (and hence, sometimes they are really really unhappy just because) can also be helpful.
If you do this in a team meeting via zoom, you could even divide the group into 2-3 breakout rooms, have them come up together with the list of things that can be repeated and the present it to the entire group. This way you get 2-3 presentation that you can then put together and get recommendations out of that everyone can buy in (because they've been part of the conversation).
And of course, you can do this both with outstanding and with horror conversations ;)