customer service

Yesterday, I interacted with a Geico agent for getting my plan changed and having a new quote. This official was amazing. I was trying to put a finger on what was making this consumer facing employee better than the other call center agents. Some of the points were:

1. Emotional Quotient (EQ):

The person seemed to be emotionally intelligent. High EQ helps the consumers as it becomes more of a social interaction rather than a routine call-center call.

On this front, I had a terrible experience with the IBM Thinkpad call center. With terrible, I dont mean that the SLA was violated or the person was nasty. The agent was simply too thrifty in the interactions and appeared socially inept, if you can say that.

McKinsey backs my empirical evidence with a more detailed study here.

This reminds me one of my Infy bosses (he was way up in the food chain but somehow I was reporting to him). This individual had good customer interaction due to higher EQ. What mattered was not only the action but also the reaction to certain events. His reactions were well-thought.

I think in sourcing management, companies must ensure this part in the vendor selection process - the EQ of the client-facing personnel.


2. Good knowledge of their domain:

The responses made by the agent while I was thinking out loud were critical to my decision making. Those inputs were well explained w.r.t. pros and cons.

3. Ethics:

"Only do things which if posted on front page of The Times will not make you feel ashamed." says Warren Buffett. There's so much truth in this.

One has to be consistently ethical in order to gain respect and save face. As the Oracle of Omaha says further "It takes 20 years to build the reputation and just 5 mins to ruin it" This is so true. It is reflected in Geico, which is his holding company. The frontline will be capable of selling more and more services with this attitude.

I conclude this post with the following:
Firms training customer facing employees must impart a foundation of base-values in EQ to all their customer facing employees. This is a knowledge-based era and the tacit interactions have outgrown the implicit ones and thus, the need of having a higher EQ.