Productivity and Customer Service: What's the connection?

Definition of PRODUCTIVITY:

"Doing what you said you would do, in the time you said you’d do it." ~ Jason Womack

Recently, we were asked what Customer Service themes possibly have to do with Productivity. The ones we came up with were:

Keep your word, underpromise & over deliver.

Practical Tips to help stay on top of your service:

Then, I expanded on four practical tips people could use (the ones I use!) to enhance and maintain their connection to effective, efficient, memorable customer service. Here they are:

Tracking:
#1 Keep an "Agendas" list (topics/ideas you need to speak about with key staff/clients/meetings) &
#2 Keep a “Waiting For” list (datestamped & name/topic)

I have been using both of these since 1997...I find it is MUCH easier to review a list of potential items to discuss with a business partner or client than it is to remember what I need to talk about. Meetings go smoothly, phone calls are effective/efficient, and clients (especially) tell us that it's easy to business together...

Google Alerts:
Have an “online researcher” send you daily updates on your industry, key clients, your company and other need to know topics.

Stocks I follow, companies I work with, events I participate in, places I am going to (or intend to) visit, people I have recently met...anything I would like to see a little more regularly, I make a GOOGLE ALERT for it, and wait for it to show up in my E-mail inbox.

(Two more...continue reading below!)

Maximizing Email & the email fields:
How easy can you make it for customers to work with you?

I am a proponent of "letting people know" what I'm looking for by using the E-mail subject line. In a "back-and-forth" discussion, I tend to amend each outgoing subject line. And, if I am the one initiating the correspondence, I generally write the subject line AFTER drafting the e-mail. This gives me the opportunity to "advertise" exactly what it is I'd like the recipient to be thinking about "doing" before they even read the body of the e-mail.

Debrief:
Review events, meetings, client interactions. Learning from doing, and doing better each time.

Debrief everything...need I say more?

Comments

[Jason]

What a great, and rich, discussion going on here...

I appreciate the comments, ideas, and further development. Bottom line to ALL of what I share (personally and professionally):

Only do more of what works for you.

In seminars, I have said that "one thing I share today" could give back minutes a day of "worry-free focus time." For other people, it may not be one "specific" thing they do from our seminar, instead they may opt to implement an "expectation-focus." That is what I call it when I enter (for example) my e-mail inbox and say to myself, "I can handle all these opportunities."

[Robert]

I agree with Rick that it is annoying when old threads from weeks or months ago get revived by someone without changing the subject line.

I don't mind subject lines changing when the actual subject shifts. Although is can be difficult to determine when that occurs when new subjects slowly creep in to an ongoing e-mail discussion.

To expand on my problem #2 from my earlier comment... while this idea may have a short-term productivity benefit for those who are able to act quicker on the e-mail or do a better job of getting the attention of the (non-blackberry) recipient - it is a detriment to productivity in the long-term because it impacts the effectiveness of searching and threading when you want to go back and reference the e-mail discussions in the future.

[Rick Dassler, Alliance Science]

Jason, I understand what Robert's saying -- it all depends on how you use the sorting and filtering options in your email client.

If I'm simply replying to an email with an answer to a question, I'll keep the subject line in place. If I'm changing the subject or starting a new conversation, I'll change the suject line, oftentimes augmenting the existing subject line before the RE:

I find it confusing when I receive a new email from a colleague who starts a new subject from an old thread and doesn't change the subject line.

[Robert]

I find your maximizing email tip re: changing the subject line after every email in a "back-and-forth discussion" a bit maddening. It actually slows me down.

It may be because I get a lot of e-mail, but two things happen when you change the subject line that cause me problems:

1)

I'm expecting your reply to have the same subject line that I used on my e-mail. Everyone else's replies do. Because I'm expecting your reply to have the same subject I am looking for that subject when new e-mail comes in so that I can quickly get back to you and keep our discussion going.

The problem is even worse when I'm away from my computer and doing e-mail on my blackberry (which is at least half the time) because on the blackberry inbox the message subject is truncated to the first 10-14 characters. So there I'm really looking for "Re:" (to indicate this is an ongoing discussion e-mail and not a new e-mail) and the same start of the subject that I just sent (to indicate that this relates to that is in my mind). When you rewrite the subject you are removing the "Re:" and the new subject doesn't look the the response I've been waiting for.

2)

Every time you change the subject line it breaks the threading of our discussion within my e-mail program. So instead of each of our discussions sticking together as one thread I have a huge collection of individual e-mails from you linked with my one response to each of them before you changed the subject line in your next reply.

This slows me down in two related ways: 1) if in responding to you I want to review our prior e-mails from that discussion I may have to now go search for the other threads because they are not grouped together and 2) when searching at a later date to reference an old discussion with you (or even sometimes when not searching for our e-mails but other peoples e-mails) my search results are fragmented and cluttered with each of your replies showing as a separate thread of messages and so I have to review all of the messages in the search results to make sure I am not missing any of the e-mails that were part of that discussion (and even then I'm not always 100% that I found them all).

I hope you find my feedback constructive. I get that you try to answer the main question of the e-mail in a short sentence in the subject. That probably gets some people the answer they were looking for faster. But between my blackberry and the volume of e-mail I get your way of replying actually slows me down.