Putting non-service employees on the phones For the article Vista Print puts its employees on the phones to Learn the Customer in the July issue of Customer Service Newsletter (CSN), editor Bill Keenan interviewed Jeff Esposito, a public relations spokesperson, and Dave Degrandpre, who headed Vista Print s Learn the Customer program. The conversation ranged over a number of topics related to developing and running the program. The complete transcript of the interview is presented below. CSN: CSN readers would be very interested in the Vista Print Learn the Customer program, and I d like to start with your telling us a little about Vista Print itself. Is it strictly an online entity, for instance, or is there a bricks and mortar component as well? Esposito: Vista Print is an online printing company. To date, over 12 million small business consumers have purchased products online from Vista Print. We do not have, per se, what you would call a bricks-andmortar store, but we do have an external partnership with OfficeMax, and its ImPress Print & Document Services, where they print business cards for you. That s actually a white label of Vista Print s products and services. So you could get them in a store if you wanted to technically speaking. CSN: Tell us something about the customer service operation. What s its size, and the number of reps that you have? What types of reps do you have? Are they differentiated in terms of their skills? Esposito: Globally we have 1,200 employees, and a rough count for the call center in Montego Bay, Jamaica, would be 200 to 300 employees. I ll let Dave Degrandpre take over from there. CSN: Dave, is there any additional data that you can provide us about the call center operation in terms of types of reps that you are using? Do you differentiate in terms of skills among your reps, or do you have different reps handling different channels? Degrandpre: The majority of our agents do handle the majority of our customers, but we do specialize to a degree, and with some of our more complicated products we will have specialists. We also have a variety of support staff within the call center training, workforce management, that sort of thing. We support our mailing services group specifically. And we just launched a new websites product, so we have a team that handles that specifically. We also have a creative services group they will actually do the design work for customers and walk them through that process. And we have a small group that supports our retail partnership with OfficeMax. CSN: What type of customers are your reps dealing with and what type of customer calls might they be getting what issues do reps commonly have to deal with? Degrandpre: Our customers generally are small business consumers, so the majority of the people we speak to are the folks that have a small office or a home office business, looking to get brand or business identity products, marketing products, etc., at a good price. From a service perspective the calls run the gamut from the very beginning, finding out who Vista Print is, what are our products like, what our pricing is like, and how do I design the products? to our post-order support, so if a shipment is late, a customer might be wondering where it is, and we will help them track it down. CSN: So the types of problems that customer might call about would be that they didn t receive an order, or that they weren t satisfied with the product? Degrandpre: Yes, basically delivery issues, if something is late. If it gets damaged in route, if it never shows up, then we get calls about that. Quality is an issue from time to time. Something might be mis-cut. Color might be off. And customers will call us for that sort of
thing. Those are probably the two main groups of problems quality and delivery. CSN: Now tell us about the Learn the Customer program. What is involved in that program, and what are its goals? Degrandpre: The Learn the Customer program is basically an initiative that we run here at our home office. It s where employees throughout the organization that don t typically speak with the customer are given call center training, and then we put them on the phone for two hours a week for a period of time. CSN: What are the goals to introduce everyone to the types of issues that customers are having and that customer service reps have to deal with? Degrandpre: That s definitely one of the main goals. It s really to form a communications bridge between our employees and our customers. We are an online company, we do a lot of online marketing and offline marketing, but one thing we ve realized is that the folks that are doing that marketing and the folks that are designing products and developing our website they don t have any real contact with the customers. So they don t know what the customer is thinking or saying, or what they really know about our products. We certainly run surveys and do usability testing and things like that, but we have never really had that direct line. So from our CEO and his experience in our call center in Montego Bay and that of other folks who have gone down there the idea arose: Why don t we put folks who aren t normally talking to our customers on the phone? CSN: And what is the process that they go through? Do they get two weeks in Montego Bay to go through a customer service training process? Degrandpre: No, we don t actually send the folks down to Jamaica. We set up a miniature call center in our home office. We have a 30-seat call center available here, and folks will go through roughly about six hours of training in the call center. That includes an on-the-job component with controlled calls, that sort of thing. And then for about 10 or 11 weeks, they will spend two hours a week on the phones talking to our customers. CSN: So employees get a real taste of the customer service experience. Degrandpre: Absolutely. The folks who have gone down to Montego Bay always seem to get a lot of great customer feedback as a result of being down there. So again, it s a question of: How do we get that up here? CSN: What kind of demand do you have for the experience among your employees? How many people do you normally have working in your mini-call center at any one time? Degrandpre: During the first quarter we ran this, we had 30 volunteers. And it is completely voluntary. We encourage as many people to sign up as we can, and we actively recruit for it. And at this point, we still have a list of volunteers of folks that haven t gone through it. So it s one of those things that people are interested in doing, and they want to participate. CSN: And what types of employees have participated thus far? Degrandpre: Pretty much everyone from executive level on down. We ve had a number of vice presidents that have sat on the phones with us, and we ve also had people who have been with the company for only about a week marketing associates. Jeff Esposito actually participated in the first quarter we ran it. CSN: Jeff, what was your experience? Esposito: It was interesting because, from a PR perspective, one of the things that we do is talk with the media, and we are promoting our products to people who read publications similar to yours. And you really don t get a feel for what a customer service agent has to go through. And when you are sitting there on the phones, you have to realize that, no matter what knowledge you may have of the company which is probably more than most agents have you kind of have to toss it out the window because they know more than you do about dealing with the customer. So it s a very eye-opening experience. And I saw more closely how some of the businesses use our products. For instance, we offer business cards, and we saw how a mother made them to be child cards like emergency contact cards for her children. In another case, a senior citizen had a card that he carried and gave to other people with his emergency medical contacts so if he had a certain allergy and something happened to him, instead of wearing one of those old-fashioned bracelets that have the information on it, there is a card in his wallet. Essentially you saw how people would use products in a different way than we would think of them being used for business purposes.
CSN: And those are all great ideas that you can turn around and market as potential uses for your product to others. Esposito: Definitely. I am not in a direct marketing position, but the vice president of marketing services was sitting next to us in that group, and she got a bunch of ideas, and our marketing content may in the future be directly changed because of these calls. CSN: Do you have any process for making sure that the lessons learned are applied back in the organization? Degrandpre: We try to capture as much feedback as possible and again, part of the purpose of this program was to kind of capture that directly, because having several hundred agents on the floor for example, it s hard to get everything they are saying. So what I do, running the program, is collect feedback from people on a weekly basis on what s working, what s not working, what did they learn this week. And then I disseminate that around the organization to folks that I think it could help and affect. From there, it s kind of left in their hands as to how they want to use it, but typically I follow up to see what, if anything, is going to come of it. CSN: What do you think is the typical takeaway from the process for participants? Degrandpre: Just perspective really understanding what our customers are all about. And as Jeff Exposito said realizing how customers use our products for things we don t necessarily think of. For our user experience team, for instance, they are learning how a website interaction is perceived by customers how our website flow is, realizing what the pain points for our customers are, how can we improve things. It depends on what the person s position is, but everyone takes away a different learning. But typically it s all perspective just how to look at your job, how to look at how Vista Print interacts with our customers. And it s interesting to see the difference for the folks that have been with the company for a long time, versus the folks that are brand new, what their perspectives are, because they are very different. For the new folks, they really take away a lot about the company as a whole that they may not have otherwise gotten or it would have taken weeks for them to get. CSN: Does that help the service department overall in any way? Degrandpre: Typically we get feedback about our tool sets and about our processes. For us it s kind of second nature as to how we do things, and this is getting us sets of fresh eyes on it, so we can get feedback about our tool set, for instance. We can look at it and say, you know, that comment really does make sense, but it s been that way for so long we haven t really looked at it with that fresh view. Then we get that feedback and go, hey, we can really improve that. CSN: Can you give me some other examples perhaps of how information learned from the process has helped in other parts of the organization? Degrandpre: In one of the biggest finds for us in the first quarter, one of our IT guys was on the phone when he ran into a customer who was having an issue saving postcards in her account. And from that we reported it back and found out the same problem was affecting a substantial number of customers. So we were able to use that information to find the problem and get it fixed quickly before it impacted even more customers. So that was certainly one of the big pieces. From our tool set perspective, we found there was an issue giving a refund or a merchandise credit to some accounts. We weren t sure why, but we were able to take that information back, track down the reason, and get that corrected as well. CSN: Are participants in the Learn the Customer program getting the full range of customer calls that a customer service agent might get, or are you screening the calls for those people? Degrandpre: No, we ve opened them up to the full range of calls. We try to break it down a little bit over the course of the program, for example, where we will start them on post-order calls, where they are helping customers who have placed orders, and then midway through the program we introduce them to taking new-order calls. That way they really get the broad spectrum of what a call center agent deals with. CSN: And if it turns out the customer has a screaming complaint to make, are program participants on their own, or can they escalate that call? Degrandpre: They can escalate it. So in the call center, typically I am up there along with a couple of other of our folks from the customer
service group. Usually there are at least two people up there in support roles, so we are able to take the calls if we need to, or walk the program participants through whatever process they need to walk through. CSN: Do customers ever know that they are dealing with a non-rep? Degrandpre: That s a fair question, and honestly, from my experience with customer service, customers might think they are dealing with a newer rep, certainly not an experienced rep. We don t necessarily discourage the folks participating from letting on that they are in a different role, and that they are helping out on the phones. Again, to go back to our user experience team, one of our information architects had a fairly lengthy conversation with a customer about the work flow of our website, which from the call center perspective may not be great for average handle time and things like that, but it was great for his experience. And it was great for the customer, because the customer really felt like they were being heard. So that guy was able to take the information back to his job and apply it. CSN: Speaking of average handle time, do you apply the same service metrics to the people in the program as you would to your regular reps? Degrandpre: Yes, we track the same metrics. I wouldn t say they are set necessarily as goals, as they are for our agents because this isn t their normal role, so we are not expecting them to have an 8-minute handle time, for example. Obviously their calls might be a little bit longer or they might be a bit shorter, but we do track all those metrics just to see how they look. And we do a bit of comparison to see how the folks up here are performing against our regular call center agents. CSN: And to give your other employees an experience of the types of metrics that customer service people have to deal with every day. Degrandpre: Yes, absolutely. We circulate on a weekly basis their stats from the week before, so folks know how many calls did they take, how many orders they did place, and that sort of thing. CSN: What do your real customer service reps think about the program? Degrandpre: All the response that we ve gotten from them has been very positive, because they recognize that it is giving folks that aren t normally exposed to their role, that exposure. So it s really kind of walking a mile in their shoes. So they are definitely behind it. CSN: What would you want to accomplish with the program over the long term? Degrandpre: I think it would be more of what we have accomplished now getting that perspective and giving folks who don t normally talk to our customers that exposure to our customers. And really just giving them an understanding of what customer service does. I think a lot of folks have a pretty narrow view of customer service you know, you have a problem and you call customer service. That view broadens greatly as soon as you take your first phone call. And with our reps especially, they have to know a lot of things. They have to know our tool set, they have to know our website, they have to know our products. It s a staggering amount of information, so for folks in marketing, folks like Jeff Esposito, when they get on the phone and customers ask them a question, they are like, wow, I have no idea what the answer to this is, but let me go and find it because it s not something that they deal with in their day to day job. CSN: What sort of advice would you give to another company that might be thinking of doing a similar program? Degrandpre: The most important thing to start is really to get buy-in from all levels of management, and certainly up to the executive level. Get them to agree to it, get them to support it, get them to participate in it. That s really the most important thing. Everything comes from the top, so to really establish this sort of program and to have it be successful, everyone from all levels down has to agree to making it work. Where it is voluntary, you know, that can be a challenge, but the folks who have gone through it love the experience and love the fact that they have had that opportunity. CSN: So be ready to promote it internally as well? Degrandpre: Absolutely. The biggest thing is always kind of selling the program as an opportunity. It s a learning opportunity, and even folks who leave Vista Print and go to another organization when they are interviewing this is certainly something they can bring up and talk about folks in marketing for example can talk about how they marketed this way, but they ve also
spoken to our customers directly, and that s influenced their view. CSN: Last question then. Are there any potential pitfalls that companies should beware of in trying to put something like this together? Degrandpre: I think the biggest one goes back to getting the buy in it s trying to do this without support. Because without support you can probably get somewhere, but you won t be able to get that far. And it definitely helps to make sure that the support of the customer service organization is there behind you. Because for us, especially in the beginning, we had one of our trainers come up and do the initial run of training, and we had a lot of support from our customer service group. Esposito: I think something that might be good to add to it is that during the entire first quarter of the program, participants took 1,563 calls and that s a small sampling. On a typical day in the Jamaica call center, 6,000 or 7,000 calls are fielded which is kind of a staggering number.