Front-Line Advances

Customer service can be a difficult job. But can it be a mission?

It was the Monday morning after delinquent notices were issued, and calls flowed to the financial services group at U.S. Cellular's Mid-South Customer Care Center in Knoxville, TN. In one of the room's dozens of cubicles, Janet Marchisin listened through her headset while a disgruntled woman explained that she'd mailed her payment three days ago.

"You people down there are something else," the customer sniped.

Without responding, Marchisin looked at the account on her computer screen, then asked the customer to repeat the date on which she mailed the payment. In a matter of seconds, Marchisin assured the customer that she'd made a notation of the pending payment. The customer thanked her, then said goodbye in a noticeably more upbeat tone.

Similar scenes play all day at the center, where Marchisin and approximately 169 other CSRs respond to about 20,000 calls a day.

The reps are divided into three groups in one large room. Those in the customer-service area answer routine queries about billing and airtime usage. They also troubleshoot when customers report problems and answer questions about the company's handsets and services. Using a computer function known as a switch query tool, the reps can check network switches for problems.

In the financial services group, the reps talk to customers whose payments are delinquent and work with employees at U.S. Cellular retail stores setting up automatic debits from customers' credit-card accounts and posting payments made to the stores.

If a customer's account becomes more than 55 days past due, calls from the customer's phone are automatically routed to the company's financial services group.

The third sector of reps at the Knoxville center work in the company's National Roamer Support Center. Unlike U.S. Cellular's other service reps, roamer support reps often troubleshoot for other carriers' customers. Sometimes the customers are routed automatically to the center when they place a call to another number but are prevented from completing the call for some reason.

In some cases, the customer cannot access the network because the phone bill hasn't been paid and the home carrier has disabled the roaming function. Sometimes, the home carrier's fraud-protection system requires customers to enter a personal identification number (PIN) while roaming, and the customer has failed to enter the PIN.

Much of a roamer support rep's job involves transferring calls to other carriers for resolution. But occasionally something out of the ordinary occurs. Such was the case on the day one of the reps, David Darago, took a call from a Verizon CSR, who had one of Verizon's California customers on the line. The customer had trouble accessing Verizon's network from his home, and the Verizon rep wanted to know if U.S. Cellular could provide roaming service for the customer's home address.

The scenario made no sense to Darago. If Verizon couldn't provide service to the customer's home address and U.S. Cellular could, why didn't the customer become a U.S. Cellular subscriber?

Darago convinced the customer to switch from Verizon to U.S. Cellular. And that's an accomplishment about which he now boasts.

Typical Days

Unfortunately, life in customer service isn't always so rosy.

"It's really a hard job," said Tom Catani, director of the Mid-South Customer Care Center. "You're dealing with all of the company's sins all day long."

That's why the center's interior was designed and decorated to foster an upbeat atmosphere. The facility's training rooms feature multicolored walls with playful, bright colors. Time-out rooms on one side of the main customer-service floor have decorative lighting fixtures with colored globes and stuffed chairs where CSRs or guests can relax for a few minutes.

Since John "Jack" Rooney took over as the company's president & CEO this past April, the reps have received other incentives as well, Catani said. Part-time workers now receive benefits, vacation time can be rolled into the next year, and the ratio of reps to customer-service coaches has been decreased to 12 to 1.

The idea is to lure quality employees to U.S. Cellular's customer-service department, train them well and make them want to stay.

"A call center is the most measured environment in the universe," Catani said. "We listen to (CSRs') calls. We know exactly where you are. We know how long you're taking to do anything. Most people would never survive in an environment like that, unless we put all the positive stuff around it to make our associates feel good about what they do every day and feel valued and respected."

Catani, who joined the company four years ago as the center's director, begins a typical day by walking through the customer-service area and greeting the employees who are on the floor. Then he attends policy meetings or handles customer issues that the reps have been unable to resolve, periodically returning to the floor to greet oncoming shifts of CSRs.

He also hosts "town meetings," during which he and one of his managers meet with 12 associates to talk about customer-service problems. The human resources office rotates all of the reps through the meetings every other week. Two hours of every week, Catani meets with his management team.

Sometimes an executive from the Chicago office visits the center and hosts a "straight talk" session. During these sessions, the exec spends time alone with all of the center's reps chatting about issues that concern them. After the session, the exec meets with the center's leadership team and discusses feedback received from the straight talk session.

Catani also receives feedback from reps through the "Ask Me Why" program.

"We encourage people to ask why if they don't agree or if they don't understand," Catani said. "I get probably 120 inquiries a day, so many that it's hard for me to handle by myself. I don't do my e-mail all day long, because if I did, I'd be sitting there all day long. I can't do that. So I typically will go home, and in the evening, I'll crawl through 100 e-mails."

A red file folder in Catani's office holds copies of queries that need to be answered. During his daily walks around the floor, Catani stops and talks to the reps for whom he has answers. He doesn't like to respond via e-mail because he thinks that the written word can be misinterpreted.

When reps encounter customer problems they can't resolve, they forward the information to Catani, who keeps what he refers to as an escalation log of the troubles. The escalation log sometimes reveals trends that need to be addressed by the company's management team.

Sometimes the CSRs respond to serious problems themselves with an apology letter. CSRs send the letter straight to the customer from the company's call center automated resource system.

"When they fix a problem but think a customer was inconvenienced because of it, they'll click this letter, and they'll add 50 free minutes to the customer's account," Catani explained. "Then the letter goes to the customer. It says, `Really sorry we inconvenienced you. We think that we have the situation now resolved to your satisfaction. We've added 50 goodwill minutes to your account for your trouble.'"

The letter includes Catani's signature and the phone number to his direct line.

"When I put that in, people were like, `What the heck are you doing? You're going to get bombarded,'" he said.

However, when he added his direct number, Catani trusted that CSRs would fix the bulk of these problems so that he wouldn't be inundated with calls. According to his account, he was correct. Catani said he receives only one or two calls a month as a result of the apology letters, and he said customers love the letter.

"The customer loves it because they get all the attention in the world, and they believe that we're trying to convince them that we really do care about what's happening," Catani said.

Filling In

Dec. 11 was not a typical day at the Knoxville center. Snowstorms were stalling the Midwest and parts of the East Coast. Early in the day, U.S. Cellular's customer-service center in Iowa announced that it would begin staging down its operations by gradually sending people home. It likely would close down completely before the end of the workday. For the first phase, the Iowa center routed 25% of its calls to Knoxville.

Catani made rounds and periodically checked the board on a wall at the front of the customer-service area. Numbers on the board lighted in green or red to indicate whether or not calls were being handled in a timely manner. Regular customer calls are supposed to be answered within one minute, and calls from Power Club members (customers whose monthly bills exceed $100) are to be answered within 30 seconds.

The New England call center closed down and routed its calls to Knoxville. But the boards indicated that calls were still being answered in a timely manner. In late afternoon, the Madison, WI, center closed and forwarded its calls. But the Knoxville reps couldn't pull up customer records for Madison's customers. One of Catani's employees interrupted him to say that the system was moving slowly, and the computer screens were displaying all kinds of errors.

Catani told her to have the reps take notes about Madison customers' problems and fax them to Madison when that center re-opened.

"Just advise the customers that we'll get back with them tomorrow or as soon as the weather crisis is over for Madison," he said.

The Knoxville center has only closed once during Catani's tenure there and that was during the winter of 1999, when the weather in town became so severe that all of the employees had to be sent home. Catani had the calls forwarded to his home phone. All night long, he said, calls interrupted his sleep.

Then, in the early hours of morning, a woman from California called, a roamer who had tried to dial for help for her sister, who was in labor. But there was a problem, and the call had been routed to the Knoxville center automatically.

Catani told the woman to hang up and try 911. If that didn't work, he wanted her to call him again and he would figure out a way to get help for her. She didn't call again, and Catani was worried. The next morning when he arrived at the center, he checked the roaming records to make sure that the call had gone through. It had.

Thinking Local

The Mid-South Customer Care Center falls within Conrad Hunter's jurisdiction. He's U.S. Cellular's regional vice president for the East region, and his office is in the Knoxville center.

It's Hunter's job to make sure that the needs of the region's 1 million-plus subscribers are being met. He also tends to the financials as well as monitors profits and losses for the region. His number one goal for the region is to deliver complete customer satisfaction every time. In more pragmatic terms, the goal amounts to decreasing customer churn in the region to 1.55% in 2001.

"When I got here, the churn rate was 2.6% or 2.7%," Hunter said. "The last time I checked, it was between 1.8% and 1.9%, which is excellent. But we still have a long way to go."

Making sure that employees are well-trained is another big goal, as well as building a top-notch regional team.

"They've not had a regional structure before in the East, (management) was all up in Chicago," Hunter explained. "Building the staffing and getting the team put together was personally a huge objective, and we're still working on that because the job market is very tight. It's hard to find good people who are really passionate about the customer."

During 2001, Hunter said, U.S. Cellular's East region will work on SMS and WAP enhancements as well as improvements to its voice network.

"You hear this big hype about Internet access and data. Some of it works, but there are still a lot of things that need to get fixed and need to be implemented much better before we really meet the expectations of customers," Hunter said. "So I think we'll be working on some of those products also."

Hunter acknowledges that competition is getting pretty tight but says he plans to fight it in his region's markets with customer service.

"People still buy people. People still buy service," he said. "The big guys have a pretty standard approach to everybody. We try to have as much standardization as possible. But we also try to be flexible and do the right thing for the customer. I think Jack (Rooney) put it well when he said we'd like to be a chimpanzee going after all of them and stealing away all of their bananas. And if they don't watch out, we're going to steal a bunch of them."

Lessons From the Competition

Tom Catani, U.S. Cellular Mid-South Customer-Care Center director, subscribes to the wireless services of competitors because being a competitor's customer gives him a vantage point from which to evaluate customer service at the other companies and gather lessons for his customer-service group.

Mostly, he said, he's learned what not to do.

In one instance, he called with a question about the first bill he'd received from a company. But because he was late making his payment, he was forwarded to the company's collections group, which was unable to answer questions about his bill. So collections transferred him to someone in customer service.

"When I got to customer service, after going through all of the menus and all of the blah, blah, blah, they told me that they couldn't talk to me because my bill was delinquent," Catani said. "So they transferred me back to the financial group, and they told me that they couldn't read the bill.

"Finally I said, `Don't transfer me again. Answer my question about the bill.' And the guy tried to help me through the bill, but he obviously could not read the bill at all."

After going through the big hassle with customer service, Catani discovered that the extra charges he was questioning were an activation fee, which he'd forgotten about.

"The lesson that I learned is that there is a certain amount of knowledge that the (financial reps) have to have about the bill in order to get the bill collected," Catani said.

U.S. Cellular's East Region

The Mid-South Customer Care Center serves customers in the company's East region, which includes:

• the New England cluster (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont)

• West Virginia (parts of West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania)

• Virginia (includes Virginia, parts of North Carolina and parts of West Virginia)

• Eastern North Carolina

• East Tennessee (includes western North Carolina)

• North Florida and Georgia (encompasses the cities of Gainesville, Fort Pierce, Tallahassee and Valdosta).

Improvement 2000

During 2000, U.S. Cellular implemented customer-service improvements, some to benefit CSRs, others to benefit customers.

For Customers:

• Services sometimes must be disconnected because of delinquent payments. The company reduced the service resume fees from $25 to $10.

• Break fees are now prorated based on the length of a customer's tenure with the company. In the past, break fees were assessed on a flat rate.

• The company has added five days between the suspension and disconnection period during holidays to compensate for seasonal mail delays.

• The customer-service industry has an annual appreciation week. During that week, call-center managers usually honor CSRs. During 2000, the Knoxville call center honored customers during that week. The center's CSRs sent a dozen cookies each to 1,000 customers.

For CSRs:

• Part-time workers now are eligible for employment benefits.

• With the institution of a CSR coach-development program, the coach-to-associate ratio has been reduced to 12 to 1.

• Vacation rollovers now are allowed.