I recently read this LinkedIn blog post from Jeff Toister (I've been following him since I heard him speak at an ICMI conference a couple of years ago) about solving performance challenges through observation of agents who "get it right":

"Can you identify your Betty?

Early in my career, I learned that finding Betty was a great way to solve a problem.

My department was tasked with creating a training program to teach contact center agents to upsell credit cards.

Our success rate was 5%. It needed to be 20%.

The instinctive move would be to gather the management team in a conference room and invent something.

I'm glad I didn't do that.

Something told me to look at the numbers.

One agent, Betty, really stood out.

While the average was 5%, Betty was successful 40% of the time.

So I spent some time with Betty. Listened to her calls. Picked her brain.

It quickly became clear what she did differently, and better, than everyone else.

*That* was the basis of the training program.

Agents loved it because it came from Betty, not management.

Very soon, the upsell average went from 5% to over 20%.

That lesson has always stuck with me. Anytime I want to solve a problem, I try to find a Betty."  

I think this can help solve FCR challenges, be used to create more effective training, and also recognize top performers (instant morale boost).

•  Individual - as in the first support team agent to touch the case owns it through the last response from the customer? 
• Team - same as above but a case team handles
• None - the first agent answers the customer and closes the case. If the customer replies, it reopens the case and the next available agent picks it up, answers and closes. And so on..regardless of the number of customer replies.
• Something else entirely?

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.