What is Great Customer Service Storytelling?
Customer service storytelling is a communication and coaching practice used with all employees. Storytelling allows you to deliver a message in a way that engages employees, inspires them, and helps them understand what great customer service looks like.
Great customer service storytelling is a communication method to gain employee buy-in, whether it's from agents or at the C-level. Compelling storytelling can capture both the hearts and minds of employees to deliver the intended customer service.
According to Vanessa Boris, telling stories is one of the most powerful means leaders have to influence, teach, and inspire. What makes storytelling so effective for learning? For starters, storytelling forges connections among employees and between employees and ideas. Stories convey the culture, history, and values that unite employees.
Each year SQM compiles a library of Agent customer service success stories from our customer service award-winning clients, including our Agent of the Year Award.
Customer Service Storytelling Can Facilitate:
- Understanding what great customer service looks like
- Creating and reinforcing customer service-centricity
- Describing great and poor customer service
- Inspiration and motivation to improve CX
- Making intellectual and emotional connections
- Helping customers and employees relate
- Customer empathy and caring
- Sharing of the business case for enhancing CX
- Selling and marketing of products and services
- Providing a memorable positive CX
- Background insights for improving CX
- What customers think or feel about their CX
- Bringing CX improvement ideas to life
- Engaging employees on how to deliver great CX
- Draw the employee into the story, so they listen
- Helping employees to remember what they learned
The Power of Great Customer Service Storytelling
Storytelling also helps with learning because stories are easy to remember. Organizational psychologist Peg Neuhauser found that learning which stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately and for far longer than learning derived from facts and figures.
Customer service storytelling communication and coaching include the following:
- customer issue or problem
- thoughts and feelings of the customer
- impact on company goals
- intended customer service experience
While many contact centers try to provide great customer service, only 5% provide world-class customer service, and only a few of those companies have become legendary for it. Many contact center leaders and agents struggle with understanding what great customer service looks like.
Great customer service storytelling is a best practice for contact center leaders to use to help all employees (e.g., C-level, support positions, agents) understand and emulate to deliver a memorable positive customer experience (CX). In addition, great customer service storytelling can help create and reinforce a customer service-centric culture, which can be the catalyst for delivering customer service at the world-class customer satisfaction (Csat) level.
To inspire you, we've presented 25 of the best customer service stories from award-winning agents. The agents referred to in these success stories have been certified by SQM as award-winning FCR and call resolution performers. The customer service stories are the "best of the best FCR and CX stories" from a collection of thousands of CX success stories submitted to SQM by our clients.
Each customer service story illustrates what an agent did to deliver great customer service. We hope the 25 stories provide you with some good insights into what great customer service looks like and how your agents can emulate it.
Agent Service Heroes Success Stories
SQM has found many contact centers have difficulty identifying and sharing great FCR and call resolution Voice of the Customer (VoC) success stories. Therefore, having a library of great FCR and call resolution VoC stories is a best practice.
These libraries should consist of audio, video, desktop screen, and text information capturing examples of great FCR and call resolution VoC stories validated with Csat survey ratings. Doing so helps to share what great FCR and call resolution and CX looks like with supervisors and agents at coaching sessions and meetings. Again, FCR and call resolution stories should be based on the customer's views (e.g., Csat survey results) as a great customer experience story.
Many managers struggle with articulating and/or describing the behavior an Agent should demonstrate to achieve world-class FCR and call resolution performance. By having a library of great VoC FCR and call resolution agent stories, managers can better describe and reinforce what world-class customer service looks like for their organization.
In addition, it is a great way to recognize agents that are providing world-class FCR, call resolution, and Csat performance. One of the best ways to create a world-class FCR, call resolution, and Csat culture within a contact center is to collect and share these stories consistently and with all employees, especially at the C-level and agents.
It is essential to state that the real hero of world-class FCR, call resolution, and Csat performance is not the VP of the contact center but the agent who handles 30 to 60 customer calls per day.
Quick Related Links
First Call Resolution Definition First Call Resolution PPT First Call Resolution Benefits
First Call Resolution Strategies First Call Resolution Operating Philosophy FCR Case Study Survey Data Calculate First Call Resolution Top 10 CX Metrics VoC Closed-Loop Outside-In or Inside-Out Journey Mapping Good to Great Customer Service