Mar 26, 2013

I Hate Calling Customer Service

Jeff Whelpley Christian Allen, GetHuman, John Hancock, Matt Cutts, Paul English, WFS Financial Career, Customer Service 1 Comment

Youthful, enthusiastic female model with a head set = customer service poster child = figment of your imagination.

Perhaps I am just unlucky or something but for every Zappos “wow” moment in my life, I have had a dozen more negative episodes that range from slightly painful to watching-2 Broke Girls-excruciatingly-bad.

Bad Customer Service

My worst customer service experience involved U-Haul. In 2003 I rented a 20 footer for my move from Boston to Los Angeles. The short story is that they gave us a lemon which kept breaking down but their customer service repeatedly refused to get us another truck. After breaking down for the third time outside St. Louis, I finally managed to get them to give us a different truck, but only after close to 6 hours of phone calls. Through it all, there were no heartfelt apologies and my general feeling that they didn’t give a flip about me or my problems.

That’s the thing about good customer service. At the end of the day, it’s all about showing you truly care. You can’t fake it.

My First Customer Service Job

Back in 1998 my first real job was in customer service as I interned with the John Hancock help desk. I will never forget listening to one particular agent routinely asking callers to send a good review of him to our boss…EVEN if the call went horribly wrong. It was amazing. There were others there, though, that actually cared about the customer and taught me a lot about the service industry. The “good” help desk agents showed me how things have a way of working out for everyone involved when you genuinely empathize with the customer and works has hard as you can to solve their problem.

My Second Customer Service Job

I ended up working again in the customer service industry a couple years later when I was hired as a consultant to build a new, custom CRM system for a small auto finance company called WFS. Up to that point I thought providing great customer service was simply an attitude and mindset. I quickly learned, however, that when people have the right tools and the right direction, it becomes much easier to care about the customer.

My New Customer Service Job

When I moved back to Boston last year, I re-connected with a friend and former co-worker, Christian Allen. He had been working for a couple of years on a website called GetHuman.com, which was started by Paul English (co-founder and CTO of Kayak.com). Christian explained to me that GetHuman exists because customer service generally sucks and consumers need someone on their side to help get their questions answered and their problems solved.

I almost immediately had an interest in what Christian was working on and how they were solving a problem that I knew very well. We ended up helping each other on our different projects throughout most of 2012. The more I learned about GetHuman, the more my appreciation of the company and what they were trying to do grew.

By the beginning of 2013, Christian was looking for someone to help and it just so happened that I was looking for a new job (a story for another time), so we decided to join forces. I am psyched because I get to work on something I am passionate about and which I think will truly help other people. My career has come full circle in some ways and I am excited help GetHuman make a dent in the universe

Most importantly, I am scratching my own itch and it feels good.

Feb 18, 2013

The Ridiculousness of “A” vs “B” Players

Jeff Whelpley Real Madrid, Ronaldo Career, Recruiting 0 Comment

I have always thought that it was funny people talk about hiring “A” players vs “B” players as if an individual person someone how the ability to produce 10x more than anyone else in any given situation. The reality is that:

The total productivity of the entire team is more important than the productivity of any one individual and
The productivity of an individual is almost always relative to the environment they are working in and the team around them.

During the 2003-2004 La Liga season in Spain, Real Madrid had many of the best players in the world, including Brazil’s Ronaldo in his prime. Yet, they lost 10 league games, finished a disappointing 4th place in the standings and bombed out all the international competitions. Some analysts believe the team had too many players with similar skill sets and not enough complementary players. Building a team isn’t just a matter of figuring out some mathematical formula that will identify “A” players. It is more of a mix of scientific method and an art form as you mix and match people and roles until you hit on that right formula.

In my mind the focus should be more on building “A” teams than hiring “A” players. The first and most important question on your mind when you interview a candidate for a job shouldn’t be,

“Is this person good?”

but rather

“Will this person help make my team better?”

That may seem like a similar question, but it is not. Someone can be very good at what they do, but they just aren’t a fit for your team. Don’t get me wrong, talent is important. It’s just that when you are making hiring decisions you need to put that talent in the right context.

Nov 5, 2012

Hacking Success

Jeff Whelpley Tallan, Wells Fargo Career, Lean Startup 1 Comment

I love to solve problems. Oddly enough, I hate problems.

In 2007 at Wells Fargo, I took over a development team that was responsible for maintaining a very large, very complex legacy system. When I first started looking at the 1,200,000 lines of confusing spaghetti code, reading the massive tomes of system documentation and talking to developers that only knew small subsections of the system, I was…well, quite frankly, sick to my stomach. I was overwhelmed and instinctively I felt the desire to avoid this mess, run far away and hide. Fortunately, however, I had learned early on during my consulting days at Tallan the steps to get past this:

Ignore my nausea
Get a general high level picture from different views without diving into the mess
Focus on a small piece that I can quickly and easily understand
Start chipping away piece by piece
If necessary, puke and rally

Really, it is all about persistence. You decide you are going to solve a problem or achieve a goal and you just do it (and keep doing it until you get there). I have found that persistence is much more effective in the long run than cleverness. In fact, cleverness without persistence can often make it harder to solve really big problems. The reason is that no matter how clever you are, it is not possible to solve the really big problems in a short amount of time. So, while you may be able to get past one hurdle or figure out a hack to fix one issue, you won’t have the strength to last to the end of the marathon.