So, you’ve just wrapped up an event and feel pretty good about how it all went down. You want to confirm the success, so you send out a survey to all the attendees. But here’s the catch: those survey questions slyly nudge people towards certain answers.

And guess what? When you’re on the other side attending an event, you get hit with survey questions that seem to be trying to lead you to respond in a particular way. Chances are, you’ve either cooked up or been on the receiving end of a sneaky leading question. Tricky, huh?

Surveys are powerful tools for gathering information, opinions, and insights from diverse populations. They are integral in various fields, from market research to academic studies, providing valuable data for analysis. 

However, the effectiveness of a survey depends greatly on the quality of its questions. The way questions are framed in a survey can have a profound impact on the responses obtained. One subtle yet significant factor influencing the outcomes is the presence of leading questions. 

Before we delve into the role of leading questions in surveys and some leading question examples, let’s establish a clear understanding of what they are.

What are the leading questions?

A leading question, by definition, suggests a particular answer or influences the respondent’s perception. This can inadvertently introduce bias into the data, undermining the survey’s validity. 

Leading questions are inquiries that, intentionally or not, prompt or encourage a specific response. They often contain assumptions, presuppositions, or language that guides respondents toward a particular answer.

The subtlety of lead-on questions lies in their ability to shape the respondents’ perspective without them realizing it. This influence can stem from the question’s wording, tone, or structure, creating a potential for inaccurate or skewed data.

Leading questions in surveys

Let’s delve into the realm of leading question examples, explore their nuances, and understand their impact on survey results. 

Based on current data, approximately 90% of virtual event organizers use surveys to assess attendee satisfaction, aligning with 85% of marketers who view attendee satisfaction as a measure of success.

Surveys aim to collect unbiased, honest, and representative information. However, when leading questions infiltrate the survey design, the integrity of the collected data is compromised. Understanding how leading questions manifest in surveys is crucial for researchers, marketers, and anyone relying on survey data for decision-making.

Characteristics of leading questions

Leading questions aim to guide survey respondents into providing specific responses by incorporating particular language and phrasing. The five primary attributes that delineate leading questions are:

• Deliberate framing to instigate bias in respondents, steering answers toward the survey creator’s intentions.
• Inclusion of conjecture and assumption within the questions’ structure.
• Dependence on the respondent’s input for shaping the desired response.
• Focus on understanding the ramifications or outcomes of a given situation.
• Displaying a certain forcefulness in soliciting feedback from participants.

5 types of leading question examples

Leading questions in surveys often manifest in various forms, each with its distinct characteristics and potential pitfalls. Let’s explore five leading question examples to illustrate their impact on survey outcomes.

Assumption-based

Assumption-based leading questions presuppose a particular scenario or fact, similar to how individuals with a master’s in educational psychology approach it. These questions subtly guide respondents by assuming the existence of a particular condition. The respondent might feel compelled to conform to the assumed premise, even if it doesn’t align with one’s actual experience or opinion.

Example: “Given the overwhelming success of our recent product launch, how satisfied are you with its innovative features?”This question assumes the product launch was overwhelmingly successful, potentially influencing respondents to provide positive feedback regardless of their true sentiments.

Interconnected statements

Interconnected statements involve presenting multiple statements, with one leading the respondent toward a specific answer. The connection between the statements influences the respondent’s interpretation and can result in biased responses.

Example: “Customers who appreciate cutting-edge technology prefer our latest model. Do you consider yourself someone who values cutting-edge technology?”

In this example, the second statement guides respondents toward associating themselves with those who prefer the latest model, potentially biasing their response.

Direct implication

Directly implying a particular outcome or expectation characterizes this type of leading question. By suggesting a specific result, respondents may feel compelled to align their answers with the implied expectation.

Example: “Considering the exceptional reviews from our previous customers, how likely are you to recommend our services to your friends?”

This question implies that previous customers provided exceptional reviews, potentially pressuring respondents to mirror this positivity, even if their experience differs.

Scale-based

Leading questions in the form of scales can introduce bias by framing the scale to guide respondents toward a particular range of responses.

Example: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you agree with the outstanding quality of our service?”

By describing the service as “outstanding” in the question, respondents may be inclined to rate it higher on the scale, even if their true evaluation differs.

Coercion-based

Coercion-based leading questions involve subtle pressure or coercion to elicit a specific response. Respondents might feel compelled to answer differently due to the implied consequences or societal expectations.

Example: “Considering the current emphasis on environmental sustainability, how likely are you to support our eco-friendly initiatives?”

This question introduces external pressure by referencing the current emphasis on sustainability, potentially influencing respondents to express support even if their personal beliefs differ.

When to avoid leading questions

Leading questions tend to elicit biased or inaccurate responses because respondents often mimic the interviewer’s words. The phrasing of these questions can impact user responses and inadvertently provide clues about the interface, potentially leading to misleading feedback, even in customer satisfaction surveys.

Consequently, the feedback obtained might not authentically represent the user’s experience, mental framework, or cognitive process. Sometimes, these questions could alter a user’s behavior throughout the session.

For instance, an inexperienced facilitator inadvertently influenced a user by asking about the functionality of a button, revealing that the text in question was an active link.

The use of leading questions deprives you of unexpected insights from users. The more leading the questions are, the less likely users will offer comments that surprise, intrigue, or prompt you to rethink a problem or solution differently. 

While leading question examples might seem beneficial for confirming or “validating” designs, they prove detrimental in testing designs.

It’s crucial to note that sometimes, the most effective approach might not involve asking a direct question but rather guiding users to continue expressing their thoughts. When the need arises to ask questions, how can you avoid leading users without using leading question examples?

How to avoid leading questions

Avoiding leading questions is imperative to ensure the reliability and accuracy of survey data. Researchers and survey designers must exercise vigilance and adhere to specific strategies during question formulation. 

By incorporating these strategies into the survey design process, you can effectively identify and mitigate the presence of leading questions, ensuring the integrity and reliability of the gathered data.

Here are detailed considerations that play a pivotal role in identifying and avoiding leading questions examples:

Awareness of language and influence

The choice of language in survey questions substantially influences respondents’ perspectives. Certain terms or phrases might inadvertently guide participants toward specific responses.

Implementation: Review questions meticulously to gauge the potential impact of language on respondents. Consider how various wording choices could affect different individuals and modify questions to maintain neutrality and minimize suggestive language.

Pilot testing for refinement

Pilot testing involves a preliminary trial of the survey on a small sample group to identify any issues or biases in the questions. It offers an opportunity to refine and enhance the survey instrument before full-scale implementation.

Implementation: Conduct pilot tests with a small representative group to assess how respondents interpret and answer the questions. Analyze their feedback to identify leading elements and make necessary adjustments to ensure clarity and neutrality in the questions.

Framing questions neutrally

Neutral wording in survey questions is crucial to prevent leading biases. Avoiding loaded language or assumptions ensures that respondents provide unbiased and authentic responses.

Implementation: Rewrite questions to eliminate any implicit assumptions or leading language. Use objective and impartial phrasing that does not sway respondents toward a particular response, allowing them the freedom to express their genuine opinions.

Randomization to minimize order effects

The sequence in which questions are presented can influence respondents’ answers. Randomizing the order mitigates the potential impact of question sequence on participant responses.

Implementation: Shuffle the order of questions in each survey administration to reduce the risk of order effects. This practice prevents certain responses from being influenced by the placement of questions within the survey.

Seeking feedback and expert input

Collaboration with colleagues or experts in survey design provides valuable perspectives and identifies unintentional leading elements that might have been overlooked, a practice essential to minimize response bias psychology.

Implementation: Solicit feedback from peers or professionals familiar with survey design principles. Encourage them to evaluate the survey questions critically and offer insights into potential leading biases. Incorporate their feedback to refine and improve the survey instrument.

Leading vs. loaded questions

Leading and loaded questions share subtle disparities, yet both tactics aim to perplex, misguide, or influence users into favoring a specific choice. Whether deliberate or unintentional in their creation, modifying these questions can enhance user options and yield more accurate outcomes across various scenarios.

Like leading questions, loaded questions possess a knack for subtly or overtly steering users toward a predetermined response. The key characteristic distinguishing a loaded question lies in the implicit inclusion of an assumption about the respondent within the question itself.

While loaded questions might initially appear innocuous, they represent a form of logical fallacy pervasive in various contexts, from media discourse to everyday conversations. Let’s consider an example of a loaded question and dissect how it becomes loaded, similar to real-life leading question examples.

Loaded question: “Don’t you agree that the new policy is a disaster?”

The question is loaded because it contains an inherent assumption and leads the respondent toward a negative viewpoint. Here’s a breakdown of how it becomes loaded:

• Use of negative language: The question employs the word “disaster,” which carries a strongly negative connotation. It presupposes that the policy is undoubtedly a disaster, influencing the respondent’s perspective.
• Inherent assumption: By phrasing the question with “Don’t you agree,” it assumes that the respondent shares the same negative sentiment about the policy. It doesn’t allow for a neutral or positive opinion, steering the respondent toward a specific response.
• One-sidedness: The question lacks neutrality and offers no alternative perspective or room for a different opinion. It guides the respondent towards a predetermined negative viewpoint, disregarding other potential perspectives.

This question is loaded because it imposes a particular viewpoint on the respondent, limiting their ability to express an unbiased opinion and leading them toward agreeing with the negative assertion presented in the question. Loaded questions like these can influence responses, skewing the data by not allowing for diverse viewpoints or honest opinions.

Loaded questions span numerous facets of society, probing about products, individuals, or businesses. When directed at products, these questions presuppose the user’s unreserved admiration for the item. 

While seeking positive responses might be the intent in such cases, eliciting genuine feedback and transparent data necessitates framing each question devoid of preconceived notions or biases.

Unveiling the Impact of Leading Question Examples for Reliable Insights

In the intricate landscape of survey design, the subtlety of leading questions can significantly impact the quality and reliability of collected data. 

Understanding the various forms of leading questions and their potential consequences can empower your business’ researchers. It enables them to craft surveys that yield accurate and unbiased insights, mirroring the significance of real-world leading question examples.

As surveys continue to be pivotal in decision-making processes across various domains, mitigating leading questions cannot be overstated. 

Researchers can ensure that their surveys reflect the attitudes, opinions, and experiences of the surveyed population by embracing best practices in survey design, including tactics for avoiding negative feedback. Remaining vigilant against the inadvertent introduction of bias is key to achieving this goal.

The post Leading Question Examples: What Are Their Role in Surveys appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Crafting the right questions is an art. Survey designers must pay close attention to avoid common pitfalls known as a double-barreled question.

These types of questions, although well-intentioned, can induce inaccuracy in survey results. In this article, we will explore the definition of a double-barreled question, its problems, and how to steer away from it to ensure your surveys generate reliable and meaningful data.

Understanding double-barreled question

A double-barreled question, also known as a compound question, is a survey query that unwittingly combines two or more distinct inquiries into a single sentence. This often results in ambiguity, making it challenging for respondents to provide precise answers.

For example, consider a question like, “Do you find the product useful and affordable?” This question mingles two separate aspects – usefulness and affordability. It is thus impossible for respondents to express their opinions on each factor independently.

Recognizing the impact of ambiguity

The allure of double-barreled questions lies in their brevity and efficiency, as they appear to address multiple aspects in one go. However, this apparent efficiency can lead to significant problems when it comes to data accuracy and interpretation.

Common examples of a double-barreled question

Double-barreled questions often sneak into surveys unnoticed. Below are some typical examples, along with the common characteristics and red flags to watch out for.

“How satisfied are you with the quality and price of our products?”

• Characteristics: This question combines two aspects – satisfaction with quality and satisfaction with price.

Red flag: Look for the use of “and” or similar connecting words. If you see two unrelated components linked in a single question, it’s likely double-barreled.

“Did you find the website easy to navigate and informative?”

• Characteristics: It addresses website navigation and the informativeness of the website – two separate topics.

Red flag: Connectors that link unrelated elements are indicative of a double-barreled question.

“Do you prefer the current design or the speed of our software?”

• Characteristics: This question combines preferences for software design and speed, respectively.

Red flag: Anytime you see a question forcing respondents to choose or comment on two unrelated factors, it’s likely double-barreled.

“How often do you use our mobile app, and what features do you like the most?”

• Characteristics: It seeks to determine usage frequency and favorite features, which are separate inquiries.
• Red flag: When a question tries to elicit responses on both how often something is used and what is liked about it, it’s a double-barreled question.

“Were you satisfied with the customer service and the response time of our support team?”

• Characteristics: The question combines satisfaction with customer service and the response time of the support team.

Red flag: Any question asking for opinions on two distinct aspects within the same sentence should raise suspicion.

To summarize, the common characteristics and red flags you should watch out for when identifying double-barreled questions include:

• The use of conjunctions (e.g., “and,” “or”) connecting unrelated components 
• The combination of two separate topics within a single question 
• The absence of a clear delineation between the elements being addressed

Why double-barreled question is problematic

Double-barreled questions in surveys are problematic because they generate confusion. The following aspects showcase the unreliable nature of double-barreled questions.

• Respondents may provide an answer that applies to one part of the question but not the other. This vagueness hinders the interpreter’s ability to draw the right conclusions.
• Survey data is often analyzed to identify patterns and trends. Double-barreled questions can lead to misinterpretation of results, as the collected data may not accurately represent respondents’ true opinions or experiences.
• Accurate survey data is the foundation for informed decision-making. Misleading or unreliable data can lead to misguided business strategies, ultimately affecting the organization’s success.
• Decisions based on inaccurate information can be a waste of time and resources. Companies invest in surveys with the expectation of gaining valuable insights; double-barreled questions can undermine this investment.

The consequences of double-barreled questions in customer feedback

Here are three ways double-barreled questions can affect customer feedback quality, as well as alternatives to overcome these challenges.

Alienated respondents

Double-barreled questions often alienate respondents, as they may not clearly understand which aspect of the question to address.

How to tackle it: Use questions that address particular aspects.

For example, if a question combines feedback on both product quality and customer service, ask two separate questions – one about product quality and another about customer service quality.

Data ambiguity

Data derived from responses to double-barreled questions can be ambiguous, making it challenging to effectively analyze it.

How to tackle it: Break down double-barreled questions into separate questions.

If you need feedback on both the ease of website navigation and the checkout process, ask two distinct questions – one about website navigation and another about the checkout process.

Difficulty in identifying trends

Double-barreled questions make it difficult to identify trends or patterns in customer feedback, which may affect the interpreter’s ability to address recurring issues or make improvements.

How to tackle it: Use focused questions throughout surveys.

You need to ensure that responses are aligned with your research objectives. That will help you identify feedback patterns accurately.

How to avoid double-barreled questions in surveys

We’ve put together some actionable tips to help you craft clear survey questions.

Use simple and clear language

Keep your survey questions straightforward and easy to understand. Avoid complex phrasing, technical jargon, or ambiguous terms that may confuse respondents.

How to achieve it: Before finalizing a question, read it aloud to yourself. If it sounds convoluted or unclear, simplify it for better comprehension.

Avoid leading questions

Ensure your questions are unbiased. Avoid leading questions that suggest a preferred response or influence respondents.

How to achieve it: Review your questions for any wording that might lead respondents in a particular direction. Use neutral language to maintain objectivity.

Provide specific response options

Offer response options that are specific and mutually exclusive. This helps respondents select the most appropriate answer.

How to achieve it: Instead of using vague response options like “Somewhat agree” or “Neutral,” provide options with distinct meanings, such as “Strongly agree,” “Agree,” “Disagree,” and “Strongly disagree.”

Use closed-ended questions for quantitative data

When collecting quantitative data, opt for closed-ended questions with predefined response choices. This simplifies data analysis and ensures consistency.

How to achieve it: Design multiple-choice or Likert scale questions with a range of response options. For example, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you rate your experience with our product? (1 = Bad, 5 = Excellent).”

Pilot test your surveys

Before launching a survey, conduct a pilot test with a small group to identify any confusing or double-barreled questions.

How to achieve it: Gather feedback from the pilot group and make necessary adjustments to question wording and response options.

Examples of well-crafted survey questions

Practice makes perfect, even when it comes to crafting survey questions. However, it is always easier when you can leverage some existing examples to base your question crafting on.

Example 1: Customer satisfaction

• Survey question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your recent purchase from our store?”
• Why it works: This question employs a clear and straightforward rating scale, making it easy for respondents to provide feedback. The scale allows for quantifiable data, making it simple to analyze and identify areas for improvement.
• Pro tip: Adapt this approach to measure customer satisfaction after specific interactions or purchases.

Example 2: Net promoter score (NPS)

• Survey question: “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague? Please rate on a scale of 0 (Not at all likely) to 10 (Extremely likely).”
• Why it works: This question follows the widely recognized NPS format, which gauges a customer’s loyalty and willingness to recommend. It’s concise, uses a numerical scale, and prompts respondents to provide both a rating and a qualitative response.
• Pro tip: Use this question to assess the overall customer advocacy and identify potential promoters or detractors.

Craft precise survey questions to ensure accurate data

Clear and precise survey questions are the foundation of reliable data. They reduce the risk of double-barreled questions and improve the quality of your customer feedback. 

With accurate data, you can make more informed decisions, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business success.

The post Double-barreled question: Examples & how to avoid it appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Nonresponse bias poses a frequent challenge that support agents must address.

In the statistical literature, nonresponse bias has been a concern of researchers who used postal questionnaires since 1838. Today, with a modern approach to survey clients, we still face the same problems — different types of survey bias.

Luckily, we already know how to deal with them. Let’s look at how to avoid the most common mistakes in customer surveys, which lead to nonresponse bias.

What is nonresponse bias as a termine? 

Let’s first understand what nonresponse bias is before we explore ways to prevent errors in your survey. Nonresponse bias is a type of bias that can happen during survey research when the individuals chosen for the survey do not respond. This can lead to a significant difference in characteristics between the respondents and non-respondents.

Nonresponse bias is part of a list of some common types of sampling biases – errors that occur due to selecting the survey sample. This can include:

1. Nonresponse bias: differences between respondents and non-respondents lead to a non-representative sample.
2. Undercoverage bias: specific population segments are inadequately represented or excluded from the sample.
3. Overcoverage bias: some groups are overrepresented in the sample.

Nonresponse bias vs undercoverage bias

While nonresponse and undercoverage bias can lead to unrepresentative samples, they stem from different parts of the survey process and require different approaches to detection and correction. Nonresponse bias deals with disparities between respondents and non-respondents within the selected sample, whereas undercoverage bias is related to the exclusion of certain segments of the population from the sampling process.

How can you understand that the survey had a nonresponse bias issue?

Remember, a low response rate doesn’t automatically mean you have a significant nonresponse bias. 

Even with a high response rate of 80 percent, the information derived from the survey can be deceptive if the individuals who responded have distinctive characteristics or experiences, like race, ethnicity, or income level, or factors such as student placement or duration in special education, which significantly differ from those of the overall target population.

Let’s say a district survey showed that 35% of parents who responded have children with autism. However, in the same district, only 10% of students with disabilities have autism. This means that the voices of parents with autistic children are overrepresented, which affects the accuracy of the survey results. 

Similarly, if only 10% of survey respondents are Hispanic students, but 45% of all students in the district are Hispanic, then the survey doesn’t accurately reflect the perspective of Hispanic students in the community. In both cases, the results cannot be generalized to the entire target population without potentially problematic statistical adjustments.

The key question is whether the non-respondents differ in meaningful ways from those who did respond. If they do, your results may be biased.

Why is it crucial to avoid nonresponse bias in our surveys?

This is an issue because if those who do not respond have different views or experiences than those who do, the survey results may not accurately represent the overall population that the survey is intended to measure. This is a problem with the generalizability and validity of the survey results.

For an example of nonresponse bias, let’s say you’re conducting a phone survey on political opinions. Suppose a significant proportion of individuals who don’t respond to your survey (maybe because they’re at work during your call times or they don’t have a landline) have political views that are different from those who do respond. In that case, your survey results will be skewed, as they won’t represent the diversity of political views in the overall population.

Why nonresponse bias could occur during the surveys? 

It is several reasons why nonresponse bias occurs. 

Survey length. If a survey is too long or complicated, customers may abandon it partway through. This could result in a nonresponse bias if the views of those who completed the survey are systematically different from those who abandoned it.

Poor timing. If the survey is sent at an inconvenient time, such as right after purchase or during a busy holiday season, customers might ignore it. The responses collected might only be from those who have more spare time or are particularly passionate, leading to bias.
Lack of incentives. If there’s no direct benefit to the customer for filling out the survey, they may simply choose not to respond. Those who do respond might have stronger opinions or more vested interest, which could skew results.

Limited accessibility. If the survey isn’t mobile-friendly or easy to use on all devices, you could miss out on responses from those who primarily use their phone or tablet for online shopping. Again, this could result in a bias if the opinions of these users differ from those using traditional computers.

Negative experience. Sometimes, people who have had a very negative (or sometimes a very positive) experience are more likely to complete a survey to express their dissatisfaction or satisfaction. This could potentially skew the results away from the opinions of the average customer.
Privacy concerns. Some customers may choose to refrain from participating in surveys due to concerns about their privacy or how their data will be used, which could lead to bias if these individuals’ views differ from those who are less concerned about these issues.

Examples of surveys which is lead to nonresponse bias

• A survey designed to capture the opinions of individuals involved in illicit activities or those within secluded groups would probably experience limited engagement from these demographics due to their reluctance to disclose their unlawful behaviors or divulge their knowledge. Consequently, the received responses may primarily originate from individuals who do not accurately depict the research’s intended focus group.
• A survey based on outdated information could be the reason for nonresponse bias. Suppose you plan to distribute a survey to attendees of an event you hosted two years ago. You have all their email addresses stored in your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), but there has yet to be any updated information collected on them since that event. When you dispatch the survey, you observe very low delivery and open rates. It appears that these customers have updated their email addresses and no longer access the email accounts you have on record.
• Request for sensitive information absolutely will lead to nonresponse bias. Imagine you are operating a cybersecurity firm developing a novel email encryption method. You decide to issue a survey to understand your customers’ existing security systems, requesting them to share passwords for different accounts and explain their choice of these passwords. Unexpectedly, none of your customers participate in the survey. Moreover, a few of them even contact your customer service to flag your survey as a possible scam.

How to avoid non response bias

The common mistakes that lead to nonresponse bias in surveys

To minimize or anonresponse bias in surveys, you need to carefully consider the survey design, distribution, and follow-up strategies. Here are some tips:

• Clear and concise questions. Ensure that your survey questions are easy to understand and to the point. Avoid using jargon or complex language that might confuse respondents.
• Short surveys. Long surveys can deter people from participating in or completing the survey. Try to keep your survey as short as possible while still collecting the necessary information.
• Respect privacy. If your survey asks sensitive questions, make sure you communicate why you need the data and how you will protect the respondents’ privacy.
• Timely reminders. Send out reminders to people who still need to complete the survey. But avoid too many reminders, which can come across as spammy.
• User-friendly design. Make your survey accessible and easy to use across different devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers.
• Incentives. Consider offering some form of incentive to motivate people to respond to the survey. This could be a discount, entry into a draw, or some other small reward.
• Good timing. Think about the most convenient time for respondents to answer your survey. For example, conducting a survey about tax preparation services just after tax season might get you a better response rate than doing it at another time of year.
• Test your survey. Conduct a small pilot test of your survey to ensure it’s working as intended. You can also gather feedback on the survey’s length and question clarity.
• Include a ‘Prefer not to answer’ option. For sensitive or personal questions, this option can allow respondents to skip a question they’re uncomfortable with without abandoning the entire survey.
• Use multiple contact methods. If possible, use multiple methods to reach out to respondents (email, phone, mail, etc.) to increase the chance that they’ll receive and respond to your survey.

Remember, while these strategies can help reduce the potential for nonresponse bias, it’s nearly impossible to eliminate it entirely. Therefore, when analyzing and interpreting your survey results, consider the potential impact of nonresponse bias and treat your findings accordingly.

Bonus part. Examples of improper questions that may be lead to nonresponse bias

Check your survey with this checklist to ensure that answers are appropriate and polite. Here are some examples of uncomfortable questions.

Personal or sensitive information

Questions asking for personal or sensitive information can often lead to nonresponse.
For example:

• ‘What is your current income?’
• ‘Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?’
• ‘Have you ever been a victim of a crime?’

Complex or time-consuming questions

If a question requires a lot of thought or time to answer, people might just skip it.
For example:

• ‘Please list all the medications you are currently taking.’
• ‘Describe in detail what you like and dislike about our product.’

Controversial topics

Questions about hot-button or controversial issues can also lead to nonresponse.

• ‘What is your stance on abortion?’
• ‘Do you support stricter gun control laws?’

For example:

Poorly worded or confusing questions

If a question is confusing, uses jargon, or is ambiguous, people might not respond because they need help understanding what is being asked. 

For example:

• ‘What is your opinion on the Smith-Johnson proposal?’ (without explaining what the proposal is)
• ‘Do you agree with the utilization of dihydrogen monoxide in food products?’ (a confusing way of asking if they agree with using water in food products)

Remember, the goal of survey design is to create questions that are clear, easy to answer, and respect respondents’ comfort and privacy. If respondents feel uncomfortable or confused, they may choose to refrain from responding at all, leading to nonresponse bias.

How to detect nonresponse bias in the existing survey and handle with it

Nonresponse in sampling, particularly in customer surveys, refers to the failure to obtain responses from a selected sample within a survey. This can happen for various reasons and often leads to biases in the collected data, affecting the validity and reliability of the survey results. 

Calculating nonresponse bias can be complex, and the best method may depend on the specific situation. Here’s a simple hypothetical example for illustrative purposes:

• Variable of Interest: Income
• Respondents: Average income of $30,000
• Overall Sample: Average income of $35,000
• Difference: $5,000

This difference might lead to a nonresponse bias if income is relevant to the survey topic.

Detecting and avoiding nonresponse bias can be tricky. Still, there are some methods you can use to assess the likelihood and potential impact of this kind of bias in your survey results.

Compare respondents to the target population

If you have demographic information or other data about the overall population you’re trying to survey, compare this to the same data for your respondents. If there are significant differences, this could suggest the presence of nonresponse bias. 

For example, if your target population is evenly split between males and females, but 80% of your respondents are female, this could be a sign of nonresponse bias.

Wave analysis

Send out your survey in waves, and compare early respondents to late respondents. People who respond later often share characteristics with those who never respond. If you see significant differences between early and late respondents, it could be a sign of nonresponse bias.

Follow-up with non-respondents

If possible, try to follow up with a subset of non-respondents to understand why they didn’t respond. You can also try to get them to answer the survey. If their answers differ significantly from those who initially responded, you might have a nonresponse bias.

Analyze partial responses

If you have a large number of respondents who began but did not finish the survey, analyze the data you do have from these partial responses. If these partial respondents have different characteristics or gave different answers than those who completed the survey, this could indicate nonresponse bias.

Use external benchmarks

If there are external studies or benchmarks related to your survey topic, compare your results to these external data points. Significant differences may indicate nonresponse bias, although they could also reflect actual differences between your sample and the external population.

How to follow up with non-responders?

Follow-ups with nonrespondents can be crucial in increasing your overall response rate and minimizing nonresponse bias. Here are some strategies:

• Reminder emails or messages. A simple reminder can go a long way. Send a gentle nudge to those who still need to complete the survey, reminding them that their opinion is valuable and that the survey is still open. Be sure to refrain from bombarding them with reminders, as too many can come across as spam.
• Incentivize participation. If you haven’t already, consider offering a small incentive to complete the survey. This could be a discount, entry into a raffle, or early access to a new product or feature.
• Personalize your communication. Personalized messages can have a higher impact. If possible, use the respondent’s name and make the message relevant to them.
• Emphasize the survey’s purpose and importance. Let non-respondents know why their feedback is important and how it will be used. People are more likely to take time to respond if they know their feedback will have a real impact.
• Make it easy. Ensure your survey is user-friendly, quick, and easy to complete. If the initial nonresponse was due to the survey’s length or complexity, consider whether it can be shortened or simplified.
• Show appreciation. Express gratitude for the respondent’s time and effort, both in the follow-up and in the survey itself.
• Assure confidentiality. If your survey deals with sensitive issues, make sure to assure respondents that their responses are confidential and will be used responsibly.

Though, it’s essential to respect individuals’ choices not to participate. Persistent follow-ups can feel invasive and may harm your relationship with potential respondents. Therefore, it’s a good idea to give respondents an option to opt out of further communications about the survey.

Avoiding nonresponse bias is integral to the success of surveys, as it ensures that the collected data accurately reflects the views and experiences of the target population. Nonresponse bias, which occurs when the respondents differ significantly from those who choose not to respond, can skew the survey results and lead to misinterpretations, potentially jeopardizing strategic decisions based on these insights.

Moreover, treating respondents’ time and privacy with respect also bolsters the relationship with the customers, fostering trust and willingness to participate in future research. This proactive respect can facilitate a more accurate understanding of customer preferences and satisfaction, leading to more effective marketing strategies.

In conclusion, avoiding nonresponse bias isn’t just a methodological concern — it’s a matter of effectively understanding your customers and making informed decisions that drive success in your marketing efforts.

The post Nonresponse Bias: Your Guide to Avoiding Errors [+ Examples] appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Focusing on ways to reduce Average Handle Time will help you keep your team lean and powerful.

As customer support professionals, we’re not strangers to data and metrics. It seems we’re always measuring something. In fact, I think we might be obsessed with data. But data helps us do our jobs, and ultimately helps improve the customer experience.

The problem with being data-obsessed is that we can sometimes drive the wrong behaviors. For example, think about the time it takes to handle a ticket. If we optimize too far in the direction of efficiency, it’s possible to negatively impact quality. In this post, we’re going to look at Average Handle Time (AHT) and share five ways you can reduce Average Handle Time without sacrificing quality.

What is average handle time (AHT)?

Average handle Time, or AHT, is a metric used traditionally in contact centers where the point of contact is immediate (meaning phone calls or live chats, not email). The purpose of AHT is to measure the average time customers (and the agents helping them) spend on a call or chat, including hold time and conversation time.

While AHT is more commonly used in contact centers with phone or live chat support, it can be helpful to look at this metric in non-immediate contact channels (email/tickets) as well.

I think of AHT in non-immediate channels as a way to measure the time it takes to respond once the ticket is being actioned by the agent. In other words, the timer starts once the agent opens and begins reading the ticket.

Many help desk tools have time tracking features built-in, so that you can easily measure the time it takes to “handle” or resolve each ticket. By doing this, you’ll be able to get a better understanding of your team’s overall AHT, and you can use that data to make operational decisions and improvements.

How to calculate Average Handle Time (AHT)

Example:

Total Talk Time (1700 minutes), plus Total Hold Time (500 minutes), plus Follow up Time (300 minutes), divided by the amount of calls (120). The resulting 20 minutes is the Average Handle Time.

This calculation is better suited for call centers, but similar formula can be used to calculate AHT when using other channels, like messaging and chat or email.

Average Handle Time is one of my favorite metrics to look at because it involves figuring out ways to improve processes on the agent side, which ultimately effect the customer experience. AHT helps managers determine hiring and training needs, as well as identify issues with current processes and tools.

The longer it takes to handle a ticket, the longer customers have to wait and the more agents you will need to have on staff to handle the same number of tickets. Simply put, AHT can be looked at as a way to measure efficiency.

Benefits of a low AHT

It’s important to note that AHT, like most metrics, should be looked at alongside other metrics. In other words, don’t only look at AHT and make all of your decisions based on that metric alone. It’s important to consider other metrics as well.

For example, if you do something to lower AHT, and it works, but the result from that is a decrease in customer satisfaction, you might want to reevaluate your strategy. Having said that, there are several benefits to improving your AHT.

It can lead to happier customers

Customers love a high quality, fast response. If you can do that, you have nailed the ideal customer support interaction. Fast responses that lack quality often lead to a more negative customer experience than a high-quality response that takes more time.

If you already have the “quality” part down, there might be ways you can maintain that level of quality while reducing the time it takes to work on tickets. The faster you work through tickets, the faster you respond to all tickets in the queue, and customers appreciate that. In other words, average handle time has a direct relationship with average response time.

It can keep support costs down

Making the process of answering tickets more efficient will only make your support team as a whole more productive. Identify areas of friction throughout the process, and find ways to remove them.

Focusing on ways to reduce Average Handle Time will help you keep your team lean and powerful.

It can create happier support agents

Support agents love to work smarter, not harder. A clunky tool and process can lead to disgruntled and uninspired employees. Use tools and systems that enable the team to get the required tasks done quickly, and if they’re a delight to use, even better.

Happy support agents stick around longer, and provide that much more value to your customers.

5 ways to reduce Average Handle Time

A low AHT has a ton of benefits for your customers and your support team. Now, let’s look at some of the ways you can reduce Average Handle Time – without sacrificing quality.

1. Use efficient tools and processes to reduce Average Handle Time

Use the right tool for the job. If you’re a scrappy startup, you might not need the enterprise-level help desk tool right now. In fact, it might be bogging you down and having a negative impact on your AHT, ultimately affecting a lot of other business metrics. Avoid unnecessary friction in workflows, and always be looking for ways to work smarter.

Keyboard shortcuts and macros are your friend, use them! Most importantly, know how to use the tools you’re required to use. If you’re a manager, make sure the necessary training opportunities are in place when onboarding new team members.

2. Know the product(s) you’re supporting

Support agents need to know and understand the product(s) they’re supporting. Effective ticket routing can help with this, and there are tools out there that can do this really well. Getting the right tickets to the right agent can have a positive impact on reducing average handle time because it avoids the ticket being passed around from agent to agent, which just kills time.

Using a tool like Monkey Learn or Answer IQ, you can automate some of these processes to save even more time.

With agile development, products are constantly changing and adding new functionality. It can be hard to keep up with this rapid pace of development, but agents need to be trained on the subject matter they’re expected to handle, otherwise it will just take more time to… handle. It’s important to stay up to speed on product changes, improvements, and new features.

Set up regular lunch and learns, or weekly demos. Stay close to the product team or implement systems so that you know what has changed and how it works.

3. Make it a goal to resolve in the first contact

Resolving tickets on the first response always feels like a big win, and it is! By putting in the extra effort to deliver a flawless first response, you’ll avoid having additional responses to deal with which can improve the Average Handle Time. There are several things you can do to knock that first response out of the park.

Use screenshots and other visual aids like animated gifs. CloudApp is great for this. Collect information proactively, so that support agents don’t need to seek additional information out in the first response. You can ask for some of this information in the contact form. You can also build a custom integration that pulls in relevant data from your internal systems so that it’s easily accessible within support tickets.

Many help desk tools have integrations with CRMs like Salesforce to pipe in information for this reason.

Finally, provide the single best answer (try to avoid multiple options when possible). Options confuse customers, so be careful how you phrase them; you want to be as clear as possible in your first response in an effort to reduce room for questions or clarifications. Whenever possible, give customers a single answer that sets them on the path to success.

4. Look at other data

To understand how you can decrease your Average Handle Time, you first need to have an understanding of which cases have a low AHT and which cases have a high AHT. Then, you need to understand why that’s the case.

Are the high cases all assigned to a specific agent? If so, additional training might be needed. Is your AHT high across the board? Maybe you need to reevaluate the process of handling a support request; there could be too many steps and requirements in place, or internal knowledge might be difficult to navigate.

It’s also possible that your tickets are highly technical in nature, in which case, a high AHT might be expected, and you might need to hire more support agents in order to maintain a reasonable response time.

5. Know where your internal knowledge is stored and make it easily accessible

No support agent relies solely on their brain to store all the information they need to do their job. There’s too much information for that. That’s why most support teams maintain a library of internal documents.

Internal documentation is a support agent’s best friend. For example, when someone reaches out to cancel their account… what’s the protocol? This is the type of information that should be stored internally (and perhaps externally as well) to help new and existing team members find the information they need quickly.

Guru is great for making small bits of knowledge easily accessible to support teams. Another tool worth looking into for streamlining knowledge is Digital Genius.

How can Average Handle Time influence your CSAT

Average Handle Time can also have a big influence on your Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT).

CSAT is the king of the customer support metric scorecard, but speed metrics like Average Handle Time, Time to First Response, and Time to full resolution are the crowned princes.

While we all know that response speed in support is important, different customer bases have different sensitivities to response speed. Underestimate it, and you won’t be getting back to your customers as quickly as they expect.

Overestimate it, and you risk being overstaffed or wasting valuable team resources where they could be better used elsewhere.

Agents should not aim to lower their AHT simply to get the caller off the phone, or provide mediocre answers to respond fast as possible. That certainly harm the quality of your support and lower CSAT scores.

Conclusion

Reducing Average Handle Time isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about optimizing your processes and improving the customer experience. As you start to analyze your AHT data, make sure you keep a close eye on happiness and satisfaction metrics.

Speed and quality are tough to balance, but in most cases, I’d make the argument that quality should always be a priority.

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Average Handle Time Without Sacrificing Quality appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

What challenges can Customer Success teams face during the implementation of artificial intelligence?

According to McKinsey & Company, 52% of respondents at companies reported: their organizations invest more than five percent of their digital budget in artificial intelligence. Furthermore, 63% say they expect to increase investments in AI in the next three years. 

If AI still needs to be part of your workflow today, you can expect your customer success team to be augmented with a digital assistant tomorrow. Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service is a rapidly growing trend, with many businesses seeing the advantages of utilizing technology to provide better customer support. 

Global tech giants confirm the stability of the direction and increasing demand for AI products. Recently, Alibaba announced that it is testing its solution that could become a rival to ChatGPT. Chatbots and voice assistants are already used in customer work, especially in repetitive and routine tasks. 

Engaging digital assistants can be challenging, but there is an advantage to working with AI for every invocation. The key to successfully implementing AI in customer service is clearly understanding the current capabilities, potential benefits, and risks.

Challenge: It takes time to customize to business specifics

Depending on the size and specifics of the business, a chatbot’s initial setup and testing may take some time. Effective team interaction with the new tool is equally important. A careful and attentive setting is the key to successful work with AI in the support team. AI implementation for customer service can be costly due to the need for specialized software and hardware, as well as ongoing maintenance and training. Depending on the project’s complexity, it could take months or years to implement AI technologies into customer service operations fully. Additionally, AI implementation may require significant upfront investments, and an organization may need to hire experienced personnel to ensure its successful deployment. For efficient AI integration in customer service, partnering with top AI development companies is crucial.

Building effective interaction between a customer and a digital assistant at different customer touchpoints may be beyond the competence of the Customer Success team. In such cases, a new in-house support specialist or outsourced experts are involved. Businesses interested in working alongside AI can train employees to ensure they have the necessary skills and feel comfortable with new instruments.

Advantage: Automates customer service and saves time

AI technology can automate various tasks associated with customer service and significantly reduce the time it takes to answer inquiries and resolve issues. A well-configured bot or voice assistant will handle routine support tasks and frequently repeated inquiries. Moreover, it is available 24/7. By automatically responding to customer inquiries, AI chatbots can provide more instant responses and move the conversation to a human representative if necessary. If the issue requires the involvement of a specialist, you can assign the bot to collect the initial information. Such interaction is effective for both customers and businesses. 

An example of automation involving AI is a lead funnel: a bot will recommend relevant content, automatically send lead magnets, and calculate the probability of selling additional services.

Challenge: AI needs human supervision and audit

Recently, journalists asked ChatGPT whether it could replace humans. AI honestly admitted that it requires human supervision and direction to operate effectively. In customer service, it is also necessary to supervise the work of digital assistants to ensure that they are consistent with the level of service accepted by the company. Regularly checking the correctness of the bot’s work will allow you to make timely adjustments to its behavior patterns.

AI is still developing, so it is not as capable as a human at understanding complex requests, identifying and addressing customer needs, and responding in a way that meets customer expectations. As a result, AI can make decisions without proper oversight, which leads to poor customer experiences, outcomes, and potential legal liabilities. To ensure AI is used correctly and ethically, companies must have internal processes to audit and monitor AI-driven customer service solutions and responses.

Advantage: AI helps to engage customers and encourage interaction

A digital assistant can offer help, generate customized content recommendations, follow up on client interactions, and remind customers of product features. If you want to provide stellar customer service, AI can be a tool to achieve this goal. According to the Epsilon research report, 80% of respondents said they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. 

AI-powered chatbots can answer customer questions quickly and accurately, while AI-powered predictive analytics can help to identify and resolve customer service issues before they become a problem. AI can also help to create better customer segmentation and more personalized customer experiences.

Challenge: Keeping customer data safe and secure

To provide quality support and customer service, you must connect to a CRM and provide sensitive personal data to the assistant. Therefore, the security of customer data is one of the company’s most critical challenges.

Companies should ensure that data is only collected according to laws, stored securely, and that customers know how their data is used and processed. Furthermore, it is vital to ensure that customers can control their data and that any data collected is only used for the purpose for which it was collected. Businesses should also pay special attention to data storage, ensure its security, and ensure that fraudsters do not have access to the warehouse.

Advantage: Working with AI opens the door to the future of customer success

AI can analyze customer inquiries, track their experience, and generate insights that can be used to improve customer service. Working with digital assistants is a great opportunity for every customer support and retention professional to expand their skills, gain relevant experience, and prepare for the service industry’s future. If you want to provide better, faster, and more competitive service, AI skills are not an option, but rather a necessity.

Challenge: It is essential to maintain a balance between AI and human service

One of the significant drawbacks is the lack of human touch. AI customer service is highly automated, meaning that customer queries and complaints are often answered by a computer rather than a person. This eliminates the personal interaction that customers are used to with traditional customer service departments and can make them feel disconnected from the company. Additionally, customers may feel frustrated when the chatbot cannot answer their query or their question is answered with a generic response. Finally, AI customer service may lead to customer indifference, as customers become used to the robotic support and do not feel as though they are being heard.

According to a Clutch survey, 88% of respondents prefer speaking to a live customer service agent instead of navigating a phone menu. Remembering that a robot may lack the emotional intelligence to understand a customer is essential. Chatbots provide them with informational assistance instead of support and understanding of their problem. Let the client know that we want to help them and their issue is important.

Advantage: AI as an advanced tool for Customer Success

AI can be used not only to increase external customer satisfaction, but also to improve the support team’s efficiency. For example:

1. The assistant can combine customer data from different systems to help the agent see the complete picture. 
2. A bot can help sales and support automatically fill out the form of emails and tickets based on the available information about the client.
3. AI-driven customer service tools can automatically route tickets to the appropriate support representative based on the topic and severity of the customer’s issue. 
4. AI-driven tools can create a dynamic knowledge base, offering accurate and up-to-date information to customer service representatives and helping customers to find relevant information quickly. 
5. Predictive analytics tools can be used to predict customer issues, allowing customer service agents to address them before they become too pressing proactively.

Conclusion

Remember that AI will not replace humans, but is only a tool. Nevertheless, focusing on AI technologies is no longer optional if you want to grow and develop your business. Primarily, AI makes customer service operations more independent due to its ability to automate repetitive tasks. This can improve efficiency, reduce customer wait times, and improve customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, AI solutions can provide personalized experiences for customers and generate insights from customer data that can help inform strategy. However, there are potential challenges with AI, such as cost, privacy, and potential bias that should be considered when deciding whether to implement it. Delegate routine tasks to chatbots to see the prospects for development.

The post The Advantages and Challenges of Implementing AI in Customer Service appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Being a support manager is a demanding job that requires constant learning. These 17 books contain critical lessons that every support manager will benefit from.

Every customer support manager has a busy life. Priorities are constantly competing. But one should stand strong among all the others: to keep on learning. And what better way to expand your knowledge than picking up a book?

Books are a fantastic resource to develop a brand new skill or to complement and improve an existing skill—like leading a team or hiring effectively. They can also help refresh your memory with old knowledge and tactics you’ve nearly forgotten.

But when you’re fighting product fires, helping customers, and managing a team, you can’t afford to waste time on unhelpful books. You need proven work. Titles that have stood the test of time. 

This article contains a must-have list of books that will teach, inspire, and guide you to become a better support manager. Whether you’re a brand new support manager or you’ve been doing the job for years, you’re guaranteed to find some valuable learnings in these pages.

Books on communication

1. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive, and Others Die 

By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published: 2007
Length: 291 pages

Why do urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly while important ideas ―ideas from scientists, teachers, or journalists― often go unnoticed? By dissecting the anatomy of “catchy” ideas, this book explains how to transform your messages so they stick with your audience, be it the C-suite or your own team. 

Notable quote: “How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters

naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations…and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”

2. Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer 

By Roy Peter Clark
Published: 2018
Length: 295 pages

Support managers spend a great deal of their day writing. From strategic plans, to presentations, to customer emails, to training material for their team—the writing never ends. Strong writing skills are essential for communicating clearly, coherently, and effectively. This highly entertaining book will help you to polish and perfect this crucial skill.

Books on business acumen

3. The 4 Disciplines of Execution

By Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling
Published: 2012
Length: 296

As a support manager, it’s your responsibility to build a strong team and create a fantastic customer experience. Creating a plan is the first step, but then you’re also expected to drive its implementation. The 4 Disciplines of Execution helps with the latter. 

This book provides a simple formula for executing on your most critical priorities amid the day-to-day activities needed to keep a customer support team running.

A book about leadership skills

The Culture Map 

By Erin Meyer
Published: 2014
Length: 290 pages

The Culture Map should be an indispensable book on your shelf if you lead multicultural teams or have customers from different backgrounds (and that’s pretty much all of us).

We’re all human, but cultural differences play an incredibly significant role in business (and life), impacting almost every area. Through many real examples, this book gives plenty of actionable advice for succeeding as a support manager in a global and connected world.

Notable quote: ”Even with English as a global language, it’s easy to fall into cultural traps that endanger careers and sink deals when, say, a Brazilian manager tries to fathom how his Chinese suppliers really get things done, or an American team leader tries to get a handle on the intra-team dynamics between his Russian and Indian team members.”

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

By Julie Zhuo
Published: 2019
Length: 288 pages

Julie Zhuo became a manager at Facebook at 25, at a time when it was one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. In this book, she reveals how she got her start and became an influential design leader renowned for building high-performing teams. Packed with helpful advice relevant to leaders of all kinds—including support managers—this book shows the difference between leading and managing and comes with plenty of personal examples to inspire you in your role.

Notable quote: “Being awesome at the job means playing the long game and building a reputation for excellence. Through thick or thin, in spite of the hundreds of things calling for your attention every day, never forget what you’re ultimately here to do: help your team achieve great outcomes.”

6. The Effective Manager 

By Mark Horstman
Published: 2016
Length: 208

As you might think, The Effective Manager describes what “effective management” looks like in practice. From there, it digs into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great, teaching you how to adjust your behavior to lead your support team. This book is aimed at managers of all levels and comes with a behavioral framework that can be tailored to any team’s specific needs.

Notable quote:  “This book is about managing people. It’s about getting the most out of your direct reports, for two reasons: because most managers are very bad at that part of their job, yet that’s the most valuable thing they do as a manager…People aren’t easily placed into neat conceptualized models that can be analyzed and measured. People are messy.”

7. Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior

By Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
Published: 2004
Length: 304 pages

Why do some employees miss their deadlines time and time again, while others never do? An excellent resource for managers of all levels, Crucial Accountability provides insights into understanding what’s blocking someone from meeting their obligations―and how to help them get unstuck. Poor behavior can sap up to 50% of organizational performance, so learning to deal with unmet expectations and solve problems without harming relationships is a crucial managerial skill.

Notable quote: “Maybe you’ve experienced the same phenomenon. Someone repeatedly violates an expectation, and you play nice for several weeks until one day you can take it no longer, and so you launch a verbal attack on the offending party. The tongue-lashing seems to be going well until you notice that everyone in the surrounding area is staring at you, not the guy who kept breaking commitments. You’ve become the bad person in this scene. How did that ever happen?”

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

By Simon Sinek
Published: 2014
Length: 350 pages

What separates companies with a thriving culture from those where cynicism and self-interest abound?
Leaders Eat Last shows how, in successful organizations, leaders separate their teams from the challenges outside by building a protective environment. Leaders Eat Last is an excellent read for anyone looking to improve their leadership qualities to create healthy team cultures to help their team members flourish.

A book about customer success and customer support

9. The Seven Pillars of Customer Success: A Proven Framework to Drive Impactful Client Outcomes for Your Company

By Wayne McCulloch
Published: 2021
Length: 346

The Seven Pillars of Customer Success’ focus is on how to roll out and execute your customer success strategy. You’ll learn which tools every customer success manager needs in their toolbox and how to use them throughout the customer journey. You’ll also find a practical section on how to manage and measure your customer engagement and the effectiveness of your customer success model.

Notable quote: “Customer success is always there (physically or digitally), and this

philosophy should be spread out across the entire company. It isn’t just a little department that only owns the success of the customer; it is essential for the success of all departments. The reality of the situation is that you have to build a culture of customer success inside your organization because to be successful, you have to teach your peers how to utilize it.”

10. Call Center Management on Fast Forward: Succeeding in Today’s Dynamic Customer Contact Environment

By Brad Cleveland
Published: 1997
Length: 440

Packed with data, Call Center Management on Fast Forward is geared towards workforce managers. But it’s really a great read for every support manager, as it provides crucial details about how the business of customer support works to be successful. It covers every aspect of call center management―service level, forecasting, scheduling, resource calculations, metrics, quality, budgeting, reporting, and strategy―in a well-organized and easy-to-understand format.

11. The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service

By Jeff Toister
Published: 2017
Length: 190 pages

If your company or team culture sucks, your customers will be negatively impacted. No amount of coaching, training, or quarterly feedback surveys will prevent it. But this book can help you solve those problems and put customer service at the center of everything you do. Questions like how to align your company’s goals around culture and how to hire and train the right people are answered in The Service Culture Handbook.

Notable quote: “Culture creates hero moments on an individual level, where an employee strives to deliver the best customer service possible. That employee feels empowered to do what it takes to makes customers happy and takes pride in the company he or she works for. You see it in the way the employee greets customers, solves problems, and goes the extra mile when the situation demands it.”

12. The Best Service is No Service

By Bill Price and David Jaffe
Published: 2008
Length: 336 pages

The Best Service is No Service starts with a simple premise: Customer service is only needed when a company does something wrong. That means that eliminating the need for service is the best way to satisfy customers. The book guides readers on implementing a seven-principle strategy to deliver the best service, ultimately leading to “no service.”

Notable quote: “If companies want to rethink service radically, they need to rethink the need for service. This book is titled The Best Service Is No Service because too many service interactions aren’t necessary; they reflect, instead, as we’ve begun to show, the dumb things that companies have done to their customers: processes that customers don’t understand, bewildering statements, incorrect letters, badly applied fees and charges, or services not working as the customer expects.”

13. Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter 

By John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund
Published: 2007
Length: 320 pages

Human Sigma does to the sales and services industry what the Six Sigma methodology did to manufacturing: offer a research-based methodology to drive business success. This book  asserts that employee and customer experiences must be managed together to be successful. Implementing the authors’ methodology should help you create a support team that performs at a consistently high level.

14. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization

By Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon
Published: 2010
Length: 192 pages

If you’re looking for a customer support book that lays down the basis to deliver a consistent customer experience, this is the one. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit focuses on the “anticipatory customer service approach,” where companies give customers what they want before they ask for it (or even know they want it).

You’ll find this one particularly useful if you’re just getting started as a support manager. 

15. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

By Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi
Published: 2013
Length: 257 pages

“The way to win the loyalty of your customers is by delighting them.” 

As a support manager, you’ve probably heard this many times. But what if it isn’t true? 

The Effortless Experience presents research to debunk this conventional wisdom. It proves that loyalty has much more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic promises to customers—rather than how dazzling the service experience might be. It’s a premise that’s closely related to the popular Customer Effort Score metric, used by many support teams around the world. 

As a support manager, this book will help you think through how you can improve service, reduce costs, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “wow factor approach” fails to deliver.

16. Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

By Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
Published: 2012
Length: 272 pages

Uncommon Service makes a case for using customer service as a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. Companies can achieve this by weaving customer service tightly into all of their core decisions. This book illustrates the changes necessary to prioritize customer satisfaction by sharing case studies of companies that have successfully made this shift.

Notable quote: “Our message begins simply enough: you can’t be good at everything. In services, trying to do it all brilliantly will lead almost inevitably to mediocrity. Excellence requires sacrifice. To deliver great service on the dimensions that your customers value most, you must underperform on dimensions they value less. This means you must have the stomach to do some things badly.”

17. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose 

By Tony Hsieh
Published: 2010
Length: 246 pages

Delivering Happiness is a classic among customer support books. In this book, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh lays out a framework he used to create a unique and thriving culture at Zappos, a business that famously made company culture the #1 priority.

Continual learning is the key

As a support manager, your chief responsibility is to build a thriving support team.

You need to know how customer support contributes to key business metrics like profitability and retention. You need to be able to work cross-functionally with leaders from across your business. And you need to be equipped to build a team that can be successful for the long haul, through prioritizing employee wellbeing and engagement.

There’s only one way to do this: to keep on learning. 

Happy reading!

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Customer service vs. customer success. They both affect customer experience, but are they the same thing? And if not, what’s the difference?

Are you utilizing these tools to give your customers a positive customer experience? Finding the answers to these questions is something many business leaders have to deal with. In today’s world of saturated markets, discerning customers, and fast-paced technological advancements, it can be hard to keep up with the best business practices. 

Customer service and customer success sound similar, and they do have some similarities. But they’re not the same thing, and treating them so might do your business a disservice. You might have amazing VoIP providers for all your customer service needs, but what if you could expand your customer relations to even higher levels? 

Understanding both customer service and customer success as different concepts with some overlapping principles can offer you exciting new ways to grow your business. Let’s look at some definitions to get us started.

What is customer service?

Customer service is reactive. 

Customer service teams are on hand to solve problems when your product or service goes wrong. They answer customer questions, direct customers to self-help services, fix issues, and liaise with product teams to improve things going forwards. 

Customer service comes with high expectations. Customers want quick response times, an empathetic ear, and friendly resolution. Support teams can use a customer service platform to help streamline and improve the experience, but the essence of customer service is always going to be a reaction to a problem that has already occurred. 

By the time your customer service has kicked in, your customer has already reached out to you.

What is customer success?

Customer success is proactive.

Unlike customer service, which kicks in after a problem, customer success is an ongoing process. It begins the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand, and it doesn’t have a fixed end-point. It’s a relatively new concept compared to the time-old tradition of customer service, and therefore it opens up new growth opportunities. 

Customer success can help you:

• Build and nurture relationships with your customers. 
• Understand and anticipate your customers’ needs.
• Refine your product or service in an ongoing effort to improve the customer experience. 
• Help customers use your product or service most optimally.
• Satisfy customer needs at every step of their journey.
• Retain more customers.
• Create brand advocates by having loyal customers recommend your business to others.

Overall, customer success requires a more holistic approach to supporting customers. 

Here are some ways you can get started:

Customer journey mapping

Know your customers, their needs, and their goals. You can create buyer personas and map their journeys to pinpoint key places where your customers need to hit certain milestones or where they might need extra support.

Automation

Automation will save you time and resources. 

To get the best customer success data, you can use analytics tools to monitor customer experience. If customers are hitting roadblocks, you can preemptively reach out to help; if customers are hitting their milestones, you can see where your product or service is working. 

You can also use automated text or email services to check in every now and then–show your customers that you’re there for them.

Customer surveys

Data direct from your customers is the best kind of data. 
It’s straight from the horse’s mouth, which does something analytics can’t: take into account how your customers feel about your product. The data gathered from customer surveys is also given willingly, which is a good way to make your customers feel like you value their consent.

Customer service vs. customer success

To use both strategies effectively, it’s important to understand their differences.

Reactive vs. proactive

As we mentioned earlier, the main difference between customer service and customer success is its place in the customer journey. 

Reactive customer service is necessary to maintain your product or service. Good customer service gives customers a lifeline when things go wrong, which cuts down on churn. For example, being on hand to offer online customer service support if they have problems with one of your products or services.

Proactive customer success is a new way of turning customer service into a journey that supports your customers at every step.

Single interaction vs. ongoing interaction

A customer reaches out, support responds, and the issue is resolved—that’s customer service—short and effective. 

Customer success is a much lengthier interaction. It’s about building ongoing relationships with customers, understanding their needs, and striving to meet them.

Goals

The goal of customer service is to resolve problems promptly, leaving satisfied customers with a working product or service. This cuts down on churn and can mitigate refunds and negative reviews.

Customer success is more comprehensive and has multiple goals:

• Foster customer loyalty. 
• Create brand advocates.
• Cross-sell or upsell to existing customers. 
• Increase customer retention.
• Create customers with higher lifetime value.
• Increase repeat purchases. 

Metrics

Customer service metrics measure more tangible data: the issues your customers are having, your resolution time, and your customer service quality. For example, restaurant customer service could have metrics for time to seat customers, time spent waiting to be served, and time spent waiting for their meal to arrive.

Customer success metrics vary and span a wider range of data. They measure how your product or service impacts your customers in every aspect, whether that’s personal or business-related. Does your B2C product make your customer’s life easier? Does your cloud contact center meet your B2B client’s demands? 

These aren’t customer service issues since there is no specific problem to address; they’re issues that require a more holistic approach. Customer success measures the total lifetime value of a customer.

Skills

Customer service requires a broad range of skills. Some customer service teams are required to answer phones and be polite and helpful. Some require advanced technical or engineering skills to solve problems. 

Either way, businesses understand their customer service requirements and hire accordingly. 

The skills required for customer success are broader still, which can cause problems for businesses. Firstly, customer success is a relatively new concept, and so businesses need to consider what that means to them and embrace unique hiring and training methods. 

A customer success team might require data analysts, consultants, and empathetic leadership with a good understanding of people’s needs. Customer success teams need to be integrated into all aspects of your product.

Impact

Customer service is an essential tool for any business with customers. There will always be problems in need of a resolution, and somebody has to be the frontline between product and customer. 

Customers expect support, and businesses have customer service built into their operating costs. It’s a simple fact of running a business. 

Customer success is not essential—although many businesses are adopting it as such. With its much more holistic approach, customer success is harder to quantify. How do you budget for it? How do you hire and train the right staff? Do you need to purchase new tools such as KPI or project management software?

The impact of customer success on your business might be increased costs with uncertain outcomes. There is huge potential for growth using customer success, but it requires careful consideration.

Ultimately…

Your business probably has a customer service team. If you’re going to implement customer success strategies, it’s important to understand both the similarities and differences. 

They are two separate entities and should operate as such, but they should also work together and complement each other.

• Customer success teams can bolster customer service, and support teams can suffer less strain if customer needs are being met holistically. 
• Customer service will always be a necessity. Customer success can take you one step further in giving your customers a positive experience and building those all-important relationships.

The post Customer Service vs. Customer Success: What Is the Difference? appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

With customer experience as today’s business benchmark, delivering top-notch customer service is crucial for any business.

According to Gartner, up to two-thirds of companies compete on customer experience, making the experience more important than product and price. One of the surest ways to deliver consistent quality service is to develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for customer service teams.

What are SOPs?

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are detailed guidelines to assist an employee in performing specific tasks smoothly. Their main objective is to ensure uniform and quality service. By using a step-by-step guide, SOPs provide employees with information they need to effectively perform a task without confusion or ambiguity.

While some minor errors are inevitable in any workplace, standard operating procedures are a great way to minimize them, creating a culture of quality control and dependability.

SOPs help:

• Document detailed internal processes
• Describe the best actions to be taken in a scenario
• Define a specified timeline for each action
• Outlines the expected results of a task

SOPs are targeted to achieve maximum efficiency and quality output, while reducing miscommunication and confusion about a company’s quality standards.

Let us take a look at seven key benefits of creating standard operating procedures in customer service processes.

1. Ensures quality support 

The experience that customers have with a company, including what they hear from their friends and family, determines the perception they have of the company. This is why it is critical to deliver top-notch customer service consistently.

An ideal SOP uses identifiable KPIs and metrics to assure quality. By setting a non-negotiable standard for the product/service that your business offers, SOPs for customer service processes help maintain the quality of service consistently.
For example, standard operating procedures can have instructions for call representatives to not put a customer on hold for more than 3 minutes or to increase the net promoter score by 10% for the next quarter. Using the analytics collected after each call cycle, supervisors can analyze the metrics and give feedback to support agents to improve accordingly.

2. Prevents knowledge loss

For any business, one of the biggest challenges is the loss of knowledge due to employee exit.

With every employee’s exit, unrecorded knowledge can lead to information gaps across your team. When crucial knowledge is missing, different versions of the truth emerge. As a result, team members receive inconsistent information that affects their performance.

In addition, when information is scattered, accessing relevant information at the right time becomes a big challenge. Employees spend valuable time trying to find the information instead of focusing on solving service-related issues.

By organizing SOPs in one place, knowledge loss can be prevented with employee exit. Having all facts and processes collated in one standard format minimizes the risk of transmitting false information through word of mouth or hearsay.

Standard operating procedures can ensure process efficiency as well as ready access to essential information any time.

3. Reduces Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average handle time (AHT) is a customer service metric used to measure the average amount of time that it takes for a support agent to handle a customer’s query, from the time of contact to the time of resolution. It is typically measured in minutes and is used to evaluate the efficiency and productivity of customer service operations.

Knowledge management for customer service is becoming an increasingly essential focal point for effective operational efficiency for organizations across industries. SOPs are a great way to store organizational knowledge as they help retain detailed step-by-step instructions for employees.

SOPs for customer service processes are especially useful in call centers as they help reduce the average handle time (AHT). This parameter determines the time taken to resolve a customer’s query effectively. 

By using standard operating procedures to create guided workflows with interactive decision trees, the agents are empowered with the next best action at their fingertips. This helps reduce the time an agent takes to solve a customer problem effectively, reducing the AHT.

In a call center, the goal is to reduce the average handle time to as low as possible while still ensuring high-quality customer service. Including standard response templates in SOPs can save an agent’s time in solving common customer issues. This allows agents to spend more time on critical and complex tasks. 

Additionally, SOPs in call centers will also ensure that your support team follows your business’s communication guidelines, tone, and overall brand identity.

4. Minimizes error while maximizing productivity 

SOPs work as a ready reckoner for minimizing the chances of committing mistakes at your call center. 

While mistakes are inevitable, doubts and confusion can affect an agent’s confidence and impact his/her performance. Adopting standard operating procedures in customer service processes is a great way to ensure that customer service representatives can cross-check for solutions in case of doubts or confusion. This reduces the time and energy spent shuffling around to get the relevant information.

SOPs are also very helpful in decision-making and strategic planning. In the case of bigger organizations, responsibilities often get blurred and might even overlap. Clearly-defined SOPs allow you to structure your team’s scope of work systematically to ensure that work is distributed equally across employees without duplication of efforts.

In addition, clear SOPs reduces the risk of miscommunication and misinterpretation of information to facilitate smooth operational efficiency. In effect, you can maintain uniform service and business value irrespective of how many customers you serve.

5. Simplifies customer support training  

SOPs are a great way of training employees faster and more effectively. They provide an overview of the company’s operational preferences and standards.

New employees do not have to solely rely on memory retention of information briefed during the onboarding process. Instead, new employees can conveniently refer to the step-by-step guide in the form of standard operating procedures that have every detail for the best steps in any situation. 
This reduces the likelihood of making mistakes, enhancing the quality of customer service overall.

6. Improves employee performance 

At any job, employees have certain work targets to achieve regularly. These are KPIs that employees have to meet for their performance to be reviewed.

However, if there is no definitive framework for expectations and targets, supervisors and employees have no qualitative and quantitative standard to measure performance. This makes the employee review process an ambiguous and complicated one.
By having SOPs, agents have a clear understanding of the metrics and goals that are set for them. This way, there is a transparent and just method of reviewing any employee’s performance. Consequently, top performers can be rewarded while training can be provided to low-performers.

7. Ensures brand consistency

In an organization, multiple employees mean multiple work styles. While this is only natural, extreme variation in communication techniques and work systems would translate as inconsistent experience across contact channels to customers. Such inconsistencies could affect the quality of service that customers receive.

For example, a customer can get two different solutions to the same problem on the phone and on email, making them confused and frustrated.

To avoid such problems, having a ready source as a reference point would ensure a standardized response for a particular problem. SOPs can help you set up a knowledge management system to ensure the delivery of consistent communication and service. 

In addition, as standard operating procedures are well-thought-out guidelines, minute details like brand voice and tone are also highlighted, ensuring that customers get a unified brand voice across touchpoints.

8. Boosts agent autonomy 

Asking for help in situations of doubt and confusion is normal in any workplace. It happens with both new and existing employees. 

While colleagues readily help their coworkers with the necessary information and assistance, it isn’t without a cost. Research says that for every distraction, the human brain takes up to 23 minutes to fully get back to focus mode! 

This reality is especially alarming in a fast-paced ecosystem like a contact center, as such interruptions could impact your support team’s overall productivity and slow down turnaround time. In effect, the quality of customer service also gets affected, leaving customers dissatisfied. 

However, with SOPs in place, your agents have ready access to the information they need at all times. This reduces their dependence on colleagues in case of any doubts about processes and policies. This way, your agents become efficient problem solvers providing support that delights your customers

Summing up

Creating SOPs can be a long and intensive process. However, the effort is critical to set your organization up for success in the long run.

Companies create SOPs to help employees provide consistent quality service, irrespective of how many customers they have to serve. They also help standardize routine activities such as onboarding processes or project management for employees to execute, thus boosting operational efficiency. 

SOPs in customer service also help eliminate any guesswork in support processes and empower your representatives with the right information to handle difficult situations and solve complex issues confidently.

The post 8 Benefits Of Creating SOPs In Customer Service Processes appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

It can be overwhelming to sit down and start thinking about all of the things that you need to do to sort out the growth of your support team in the new year.

If you’re growing your number of customers or orders in the next year, you’ll need to plan how to support them. In an ideal world, your self-service support would scale so effectively that you’d never have to hire another support person ever again.

Customers would be able to find all of their answers on their own, and never have to reach out via email, chat, or phone. Honestly, it would be better for them, and better for you.

Unfortunately, though, we don’t live in an ideal world, and so it’s very likely that, as you move into a new financial year with your company, you’ll need to figure out what the growth of your support team will look like.

This can include anything from knowing how many people you need to hire and knowing exactly what metrics you need to hit, to determining if there are new tools that you’ll need to use in order to accomplish your goals.

Looking at it that way, it can seem like a pretty daunting task.

Luckily, we’ve got a few things to recommend that can make the whole process much easier.

Take a look at your history

Depending on how long your company has been in business, you’ll likely have some historical data about things like response time, number of conversations, and other important inbox metrics. If you can take a look at these things over time, especially in combination with one another, you can get what is the support equivalent to year-over-year growth—instead of finance, though, it’s what’s been growing and improving (or degrading) in your support team’s performance.

Several years’ worth of data can be useful in knowing what was just a flash in the pan, and what actually has been a trend that you can use to predict future growth and hiring.

For example, if one year you had a huge surge in ticket growth, but otherwise your ticket volume has grown by about 25% year over year, you can likely predict that it will follow that pattern, rather than the one-off surge.

Beyond ticket volume, metrics like first response time, contact ratio, and time to close can all be helpful for forecasting trends when paired up and looked at together—especially when considering how much you need to hire for to specifically push those metrics down or boost them up. For example, does hiring new people drop first response time, but not make any impact on contact ratio?

If so, what are some levers you might be able to pull to shift that metric, too? Taking a look at other company metrics might help.

Forecast on Company Metrics

Take a look at the metrics that you are using as a company—perhaps you’re using OKRs across teams to set the company direction—and correlate them with your past year’s metrics. Rather than performing in a silo, if teams collaborate and share knowledge, you create a much stronger impact on your company goals.

Combining support metrics helps to show how customer support can help other teams reach their goals.

If partnering with your marketing team, you could examine the correlation between NPS and response time, or NPS and CSAT to get a better handle on how people’s impression of the brand changes with how quickly they hear back, or if NPS and CSAT are positively aligned.

Understanding metrics contextually within the grand scheme of your company can help support make a much wider impact, beyond where they would usually be able to. Instead of just making changes that affect the inbox, for example, your reach can extend to make shifts and pushes on customers on your company’s marketing strategy, product strategy and beyond.

Think about the big changes you need to make

After you’ve compiled both your team’s metrics, especially comparing them to the past several years, and looked over company metrics to see where you might be able to pair with other departments, it’s time to look at the data and see where your suppoer team might be able to make improvements.

Despite, according to HBR, 80% of companies refer to their support offerings as “superior,” only 8% of their customers agree. Much of this is due to the perceived lack-of-value in support tooling and functionality—why pay more for a better help desk, for example, when you can put money into marketing and see the results in the number of leads going up?

Taking a more data-based approach will allow you to argue for the changes that you need to make to be a truly great team.

For example, if you notice a correlation between your customer’s satisfaction and the time it takes you to respond, try to track that a little bit more deeply: how can you maintain that speed as you move into the new year, especially with a potential forecasted growth of 25%? You need to hire more customer support agents.

For another example, perhaps you notice that your customers reach out most frequently within the first three weeks of using your product. When you take a look into the tagging in your helpdesk system, you notice that most of the conversations are about three key issues.

People who received a response to their question on these issues within a few hours had a much higher NPS and CSAT rating than those who don’t.

Though you’ve never had onboarding before, the data in this example suggests that maybe you should invest in some, especially if your customer base is growing and you need to scale.

Make a hiring plan

A study done by PLOS discovered that the larger the support team, the better their ability to handle complex inquiries and tackle larger scale issue—the reason being that more diversity on a support team allows for more diverse thinking and problem-solving.

So, while it’s excellent to stay small and lean in order to be able to move quickly, in order to be able to move with more intelligence and intention diversifying your support team is the way to go.

Take a look at the goals that you determined from the above step, and see if you will need to hire an additional role that you don’t already have on your team.

For example: if you are going to be building an onboarding strategy, you may need to hire an onboarding specialist or someone whose job it is to specifically focus on that subset of customers.

If you’re planning on changing your helpdesk so that you can get better analytics, you may need a support engineer to build out things like macros, or more functional API connections than you already have.

These kinds of niche hires are just as important to consider as the bulk hiring you’ll need to do just to keep up with volume.

For customer support volume just based on annual growth, use a model similar to the one that Bill Bounds created to chart your needs and be able to explain to your executive team where the exact numbers are coming from.

Get going!

It can be overwhelming to sit down and start thinking about all of the things that you need to do to sort out the growth of your support team in the new year.

But, if you take a look at your historical data for what you’re support team has done in the past, and then match it up with the metrics that your company is using to gauge success you’ll have a powerful indicator of where you need to go. From there, consider any specialists that you may need to hire—do you need someone more technical?

Do you need someone to design onboarding?—and add them to your model for hiring, along with the traditional support representatives that you will need to cover your predicted growth in volume.

Metrics and having a thumb on the pulse of what your company needs makes forecasting and hiring for growth infinitely easier.

The post 5 Tips for Planning the Growth of your Support Team in the New Year appeared first on Customer Happiness Blog.

Every customer service team has to deal with angry customers and haters. Use these practical strategies to create better interactions.

Let’s be real: haters will always be out there. Dealing with them is harder than talking to happy and satisfied customers, but these interactions can be valuable—for your company, your team, and for you as an individual.

How often do you find yourself dealing with severe and targeted criticism?

If you’re like most people, it probably isn’t that often—unless you work in customer service.

Interacting with people is part and parcel of customer service. Some of the best aspects of the job are interacting with customers. You get firsthand experience of how kind and clever some of your customers are. But if you’ve worked in customer support for a while, you know that it’s not customer conversations aren’t exclusively positive. 

Customers often seek help when they’re struggling, stuck, frustrated, or disappointed. As a customer service agent, you’re the first line of defense. When emotion runs high and frustration boils over, the resulting interaction can be pretty challenging. That’s when working in support can be draining and stressful. The trick is to approach haters in customer service with the right mindset.

5 steps to deal with haters in customer service

“Haters” refers to customers who are deeply unhappy with either your product or your service (or both!). They’re the people who complain loudly—across any (or all) channels—and make it clear that they are not satisfied with what you’re selling. 

Managing these conversations well takes practice and experience. These five steps will set you up for success:

1. Don’t take negative feedback personally.
2. Find the kernel of truth.
3. Respond graciously.
4. Create an internal support system.
5. Look for long-term solutions.

Don’t take negative feedback personally

It’s much easier said than done, but this is the foundation of any rational, constructive response to negative customer interaction. 

Haters can come in many forms. They might criticize your company, your product, or you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to interact with them via email, which gives you both time to process their negativity and think carefully about your response. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, you’ll end up dealing with a super frustrated customer on the phone, and you’ll need to be able to face their frustration and manage the emotions in the moment. 

Whatever the circumstances, striving for emotional detachment is essential. Here are some reminders that might help:

• Their frustration is a result of the circumstances and their experience, not your direct personal actions. 
• If your actions made the situation worse in any way, treat it as a mistake. Mistakes are unavoidable and provide you with an opportunity to improve. None of us are perfect. 
• These customers aren’t talking to you as an individual. They’re interacting with you as a representative of the company you’re working for. 

Creating distance between yourself and explosive customers makes it easier to respond appropriately.

Find the kernel of truth

One good thing about haters is that they often have a point. 

Few people get outraged about a product or service if they genuinely didn’t care:

• For every customer that complains, 26 others don’t say anything. 
• The number one reason customers leave a company is that they feel unappreciated.

Those haters that you see? They’re customers who are engaged with your product, want to fix a problem, and may represent more people than you think.

The fact that they bothered contacting you gives you a chance to improve the situation. While that doesn’t necessarily excuse unkind or outrageous behavior, it does create a potential silver lining. The goal should be to start by assuming that they’re right about something—even if you have to search hard to find it. 

When it comes to customer service, haters typically fall into two buckets:

1. The ones who give you extremely detailed and comprehensive feedback about what went wrong.
2. The ones who state something generic and broad, like “this product sucks.”

In the first case, you can pick out the parts of their experience that were badly handled and own up to them. Their detailed feedback can highlight product or service improvement opportunities. 

In the second case, even if your knee-jerk reaction is to disengage, you can do your best to get more detail so you can try to help. 

Respond graciously

The hardest part of all of this is crafting a response that works. 

Responding graciously to a furious customer is hard enough when you’re dealing with a one-on-one interaction. The stakes are even higher if you’re on a public channel, like social media or app store reviews. This might be why 79% of customers who share their complaints publicly get ignored. 

It doesn’t have to be that way. 

Jay Baer identifies two types of haters: 

1. Offstage haters complain privately. They’re more likely to reach out to your company and tell you why they’re unhappy.
2. Onstage haters consciously go for a public channel, like social media. They usually expect an immediate response and want to hold the company accountable.

Responding is essential in both cases, but you’ll need to use a slightly different touch depending on the situation.

De-escalate offstage conversations

When customers complain privately, you have room and space to fully engage with their complaints and try to solve the problem. 

The 5As of De-Escalation is a great framework for accomplishing this:

1. Acknowledge: Start by acknowledging their experience and being empathetic. An apology might be appropriate. The goal is to make the customer feel heard and understood. 
2. Address: Take time to address their feedback explicitly so that it’s clear that you care and are invested in understanding the customer’s perspective. This often involves active listening and reading between the lines. 
3. Assert: Once you’ve reached clarity, you can assert the company’s position or policy. For example, if a customer is unhappy because a feature hasn’t been developed, you can explain some parts of your product team’s process when they prioritize new work. It isn’t about being right, but rather about offering an alternative explanation for why the customer experienced that problem. 
4. Agree: Find something about their feedback that’s a fair point and openly concede it. Admitting when you make mistakes (as a company or an individual) is often the best way to disarm someone when they’re angry and frustrated. 
5. Appeal: Involve them in finding a solution, either by suggesting a workaround or offering some compensation.

De-escalation is fundamentally about calming down emotions so that you can address the substance of an issue. It requires hitting the right tone of authenticity and openness and a willingness to own up to mistakes—while still representing your company in the best light.

Respond (with limitations) to onstage haters

Responding to haters is significantly easier in an email when you have virtually unlimited characters available and you can craft the perfect tone. 

It’s way harder if you’re replying on Twitter or the Play Store (or during a live webinar). When you have to come up with a great answer on the spot, in front of tons of people, it’s very easy to make a mistake.

The best way to respond to onstage haters is to:

• Focus on displaying empathy. This is where acknowledging your customer’s experience and feedback can make a world of difference. Jumping ahead to anything else comes across as defensive.
• Reply only twice. Social media lends itself well to short, snappy comebacks. It’s not the best environment for a great experience or an extended conversation. 
• Switch channels. If you need to carry on the conversation beyond two answers, switching channels gives you a lot more room to delve deeper—ideally “offstage” and in private.

Say you’re an airline and someone tweets at you about a horrible flight experience they had. Flying can be stressful. Passengers are stuck in a small space for long periods. Virtually everyone has experienced a terrible flight, so publicly shared feedback usually resonates with many people. 

But the best response isn’t to ignore it. 

It’s to acknowledge that they didn’t have a great experience and to offer them an avenue to contact you privately. This gives you the opportunity to gather further details and make things right, wherever possible. 

Don’t discount how important a simple, public reply is as the first step. It signals to your entire customer base that you care about their complaints.

Create an internal support system

Dealing with haters is much easier when you have an internal support system within your support team. Here are some examples of what that looks like:

• Invest time in preparing responses in advance. Preparation makes a gigantic difference in how comfortable your team will feel handling tough customers, especially if you take the time to test the messaging out to see what resonates best.
• Make it easy for your agents to switch out if a case gets heated. Sometimes customers do get annoyed at that one individual. Having another person step in changes can be a game changer. 
• Have processes in place to offer compensation. Enabling frontline employees to make small gestures, like providing a voucher or a discount, extends a little bit of goodwill towards your customers. 
• Have a line that should not be crossed. Firing a customer is not easy to do, but if you’re the support manager, your team needs to know you have their back. Some types of hate are not acceptable. Get clear on where those lines are for your business and stand firm.

Look for long-term solutions

The cherry on top of dealing with really angry customers is finding long-term solutions for the issues that lead to the most hate.

Dealing with the same complaints repeatedly is exhausting for your team. Your customers will be significantly happier if you can solve thorny issues for good, but your support team will also get to breathe a huge sigh of relief.  

This could mean aggregating the most common customer complaints and passing them on internally to your product or marketing teams. You could also aim to provide proactive support to reduce the issues your customers are experiencing.

Engage with angry customers and all the feedback

Excellent customer service means dealing with all of it: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Talking down an angry customer and turning that into a positive interaction is one of the most rewarding parts of working in support—despite the knee-jerk stress response that these situations cause. Even when you can’t successfully turn a situation around, it’s worth remembering that it’s still an investment in your customer experience. 

Even if “haters gonna hate, hate, hate,” you don’t need to let them bring you down. Seize those opportunities to get better at handling all types of negative feedback.

Who knows? Your customers may even end up thanking you.

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