Are your customer service agents NPC’s? (not good)
This post came from a question I answered on Quora the other day…
The person asked something along the lines of whether it was possible for a customer service agent to ever be “fully trained” for every possible customer situation.
It got me thinking about the very nature of “training” in business, and especially in customer service.
Obviously there are certain things a person needs to learn to do any job, through training or otherwise. How to use the systems, what the products are, etc.
I’m not talking about that stuff. That stuff is fine, and is not my problem.
To spoil my answer to this question, I said that it is NOT possible for a customer service agent to be “fully trained” in the sense of the question. And even if it were, it would NOT be a good idea.
Why not?
Because “full training” creates what I’m going to call Business NPC’s
Let’s look at how they’re made…
Big, conventional, dinosaur businesses want to “handle customer service”. But they don’t know what that means.
And they’re operating with last century’s playbook. The industrial age. Mass production of standardized parts.
They apply that to humans. Their employees. They, in effect, turn them into meat-based robots.
They do everything they can to turn a complex human being into a simple, complient piece of office equipment.
“Training” is a big part of that.
“The company” decides how they want each repetitive task handled. How they want each easily preventable problem dealt with. How they want the questions they get 4000 times a day answered.
Then they hire the cheapest, lowliest, most obedient workers they can find.
They put them into a “training program” to strip away their humanity, reasoning skills, problem solving abilities, and confidence.
They replace it with blind obedience to the company, and “training.”
Memorized responses.
They turn them into an NPC.
For those of you living in a cave (or not on Twitter), NPC stands for Non Player Character.
It’s a video game term. Think the dumb enemy who gets stuck in a corner when his programming gets scrambled.
“If this, do that.”
Computers and AI can’t handle the “human communication” side of this yet.
So what’s the problem?
A lot of things, obviously.
One of the main problems happens when a customer asks about a thing that the corporate “training” programmers didn’t anticipate.
We’ve all dealt with this situation as customers.
You call up a company about a problem (always call, they love making you waste time on the phone!)
The meat-NPC who eventually answers enters into his script. He doesn’t care about you, he says what they tell him to say so he isn’t punished.
He suggests a bunch of things that you already tried, even if you tell him you already tried it.
When that doesn’t work, he starts to break down. He might say the same things again. He might start suggesting things that don’t make sense. He might ask to put you on hold.
Your question or request is outside his “training”, and he has been programmed not to do ANYTHING outside his training.
Not to trust his own judgment or even HAVE his own judgment.
Making a decision is a risk. If he’s right, nobody notices.
But if he’s wrong, there’s hell to pay!
He doesn’t care about you, or your problem, or the company, or anything beyond doing what’s necessary to keep earning his $9 an hour.
Excess training creates this monster.
So what’s the alternative? Something these big conventional dinosaurs will NEVER listen to.
Don’t “train enough for all customer issues.”
It’s impossible anyways. And it creates meat-NPCs.
Instead, “train” (if you want to call it that) people to actually understand the business, the products, and the customers.
Anticipate and prevent as many problems and questions as possible BEFORE they happen. Don’t just “handle” them. This MASSIVELY cuts down your customer service volume.
After that, EVERYTHING customer service deals with is a real, one off question or problem.
The stuff that breaks meat-NPC’s.
The stuff you need humans for.
This is where you need intelligent, thinking people, empowered to do what they need to do to resolve the issue.
This is so scary to the conventional customer service nerds that it will NEVER see widespread adoption.
They can’t loosen up on the controls.
“What if someone makes a mistake?”
You’ll handle it.
But instead, they make the much bigger mistake of making their customers angry and forcing them to deal with mindless meat-NPC’s all day.
My approach to customer service, the one this site is dedicated to, is different.
Humans, not NPC’s.
But before anyone “handles” a problem, we seek to eliminate or prevent that problem.
This basically eliminates the conventional “first level agent” role. The role that is usually occupied by a hoard of mindless swarming NPC’s.
It also makes customers happier, saves you time, money, and hassle, and increases retention.
That’s why I created the 80/20 Service Guide.
It shows you EVERYTHING I’ve learned over the years. All my insights, the 80/20 philosophy, and best of all, it walks you step by step through the process necessary to doing this yourself.
Customer service doesn’t have to be a nightmare.
Take the first step to getting it right here: https://gumroad.com/l/rkbth/VIP
