The Circle

training time. You feel
     ready?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “You need coffee or tea or anything?”
    Mae shook her head. “I’m all set.”
    “Good. Let’s sit down.”
    Mae sat down, and Jared pulled his chair next to hers.
    “Okay. As you know, for now you’re just doing straight-up customer maintenance for
     the smaller advertisers. They send a message to Customer Experience, and it gets routed
     to one of us. Random at first, but once you start working with a customer, that customer
     will continue to be routed to you, for the sake of continuity. When you get the query,
     you figure out the answer, you write them back. That’s the core of it. Simple enough
     in theory. So far so good?”
    Mae nodded, and he went through the twenty most common requests and questions, and
     showed her a menu of boilerplate responses.
    “Now, that doesn’t mean you just paste the answer in and send it back. You should
     make each response personal, specific. You’re a person, and they’re a person, so you
     shouldn’t be imitating a robot, and you shouldn’t treat them like they’re robots.
     Know what I mean? No robots work here. We never want the customer to think they’re
     dealing with a faceless entity, so you should always be sure to inject humanity into
     the process. That sound good?”
    Mae nodded. She liked that:
No robots work here
.
    They went through a dozen or so practice scenarios, and Mae polished her answers a
     bit more each time. Jared was a patient trainer, and walked her through every customer
     eventuality. In the event that she was stumped, she could bounce the query to his
     own queue, and he’d take it. That’s what he did most of the day, Jared said—take and
     answer the stumpers from the junior Customer Experience reps.
    “But those will be pretty rare. You’d be surprised at how many of the questions you’ll
     be able to field right away. Now let’s say you’veanswered a client’s question, and they seem satisfied. That’s when you send them the
     survey, and they fill it out. It’s a set of quick questions about your service, their
     overall experience, and at the end they’re asked to rate it. They send the questions
     back, and then you immediately know how you did. The rating pops up here.”
    He pointed to the corner of her screen, where there was a large number, 99, and below,
     a grid of other numbers.
    “The big 99 is the last customer’s rating. The customer will rate you on a scale of,
     guess what, 1 to 100. That most recent rating will pop up here, and then that’ll be
     averaged with the rest of the day’s scores in this next box. That way you’ll always
     know how you’re doing, recently and generally. Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Okay,
     Jared, what kind of average is average?’ And the answer is, if it dips below 95, then
     you might step back and see what you can do better. Maybe you bring the average up
     with the next customer, maybe you see how you might improve. Now, if it’s consistently
     slumping, then you might have a meet-up with Dan or another team leader to go over
     some best practices. Sound good?”
    “It does,” Mae said. “I really appreciate this, Jared. In my previous job, I was in
     the dark about where I stood until, like, quarterly evaluations. It was nerve-wracking.”
    “Well, you’ll love this then. If they fill out the survey and do the rating, and pretty
     much everyone does, then you send them the next message. This one thanks them for
     filling out the survey, and it encourages them to tell a friend about the experience
     they just had with you, using the Circle’s social media tools. Ideally they at least
     zing it or give you a smile or a frown. In a best-case scenario,you might get them to zing about it or write about it on another customer-service
     site. We get people out there zinging about their great customer service experiences
     with you, then everyone wins. Got it?”
    “Got it.”
    “Okay, let’s do a live one. Ready?”
    Mae wasn’t, but couldn’t say that. “Ready.”
    Jared brought up a customer request, and after reading it, let out a quick snort to
     indicate its elementary nature. He chose a boilerplate answer, adapted it a bit, told
     the customer to have a fantastic day. The exchange took about ninety seconds, and
     two minutes later, the screen confirmed the customer had answered the questionnaire,
     and a score appeared: 99. Jared sat back and turned to Mae.
    “Now, that’s good,