If you want to solve a customer service problem, go and see it.

That's a performance observation. It's a process for observing employees doing their work to understand how they currently do things and what can be improved.

It's a go-to technique for improving performance, designing training, or identifying best practices.

You might worry employees won't be truthful if you observe them. Or perhaps they'll change how they do things just to impress you.

In reality, that rarely happens.

I've conducted over 1,000 performance observations. And ooh boy, I’ve seen and heard a lot! Most employees are brutally honest if you approach them the right way.

Here's my step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Prepare

A little preparation can make your performance observation much more successful.

Start with a specific objective. Here are some common reasons to observe employee performance:

Designing training that reflects how the job is actually done.
Improving performance by looking for obstacles that hinder employees.
Identifying best practices by watching what top performers do.

Next, identify the employee or employees you'd like to observe. The employees you select depend on your objective.

Do you want to observe a mix of top, mid, and bottom performers?
Are there specific employees you want to observe?
Is there a particular process or activity you'd like to see?

If you aren't the boss, be sure to get permission from the employee's boss beforehand. You don't want their leader to be blindsided by you showing up in their work area.

Finally, notify the employee or employees you'd like to observe ahead of time if possible. They should feel comfortable with you being in their workspace and understand why you're there.

I once worked in a contact center where employees were expected to pitch the company credit card to certain customers. Our average acceptance rate was just 5 percent, but an agent named Betty routinely exceeded 40 percent.

So I contacted Betty’s boss to get permission to observe her. Then I scheduled some time to observe Betty’s credit card pitch.

Step 2: Observe

The performance observation itself is generally easy with the right preparation. I've found employees are typically very accommodating and willing to answer questions.

Here are a few tips that can make it go smoothly

Avoid interfering with the employee's work.
Listen and observe carefully. You'll often see things you don't expect.
Ask questions. Avoid making assumptions about why an employee does something a certain way. Get their perspective on it.

Important: Employees tend to be very honest if they understand you're there to listen, observe, and be helpful. However, you might get some resistance if they believe you're there to catch them doing something wrong.

Betty was happy to share with me. In between calls, she explained her process for pitching credit cards and answered my many questions.

The observation revealed insights that I wouldn't have discovered on my own.

For instance, Betty pointed out that she felt the credit card had some features that frequent customers could really benefit from using.

This sincere belief helped her pitch the card with enthusiasm, an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen from other agents. I wondered if a lack of enthusiasm prevented other agents from making pitches.

Betty also had a unique approach to her offer. She’d congratulate customers for being selected to receive the credit card. (The card wasn’t offered to everyone.) I noticed this made customers much more receptive to the pitch.

Step 3: Follow-up

There are a few follow-up activities once you complete your observation.

Validate your observations with other data.
Use what you learned to take action.

After I observed Betty, I reviewed call reports from other agents and confirmed something Betty had shared. Many agents simply weren't offering the credit card at all.

I dug a little deeper and discovered many didn't understand the card's features and benefits. They were wary of the card's high interest rate and didn't feel comfortable pitching it to the customers.

There was also another reason agents didn’t pitch the card: it wasn’t part of the quality assurance process.

These insights helped me create a plan for rapid improvement.

Pitching the credit card was added to the quality assurance process. It would now be a clear job expectation for agents.
Agents received training on Betty’s unique approach along with the credit card’s features and benefits.

The “Betty method” was a hit. Many agents were much more enthusiastic about pitching the card once they understood how it could benefit customers. They also found Betty’s approach fun and easy to use.

The contact center's average credit card acceptance rate soon increased from 5 to 20 percent.

Take Action

I encourage you to conduct a performance observation on your own. You'll likely gain something you can use to improve training, fix a problem, and elevate the team's performance.

This short video recaps the process:

Conducting performance observations from Instructional Design: Needs Analysis by Jeff Toister

Want to go even deeper? My book, Getting Service Right, reveals ten hidden and counterintuitive customer service insights that came from performance observations. You’ll discover:

How incentives often make customer service worse
Why employees find it so difficult to pay attention to customers
What causes employees to give up and stop trying

Check it out —> download the first chapter

Early in my career, I lucked into a solution to a challenging project.

My department was asked to create a training program to help contact center agents pitch the company credit card to customers who called in to place an order from our catalog.

A computer program ran in the background during each call to determine if the customer was eligible for the company credit card. When they were, a little box popped up on the agent's screen that prompted the agent to offer the card.

Our success rate averaged averaged five percent. It needed to be 20.

The instinctive move would be to gather the management team in a conference room and invent something. That's how the request came to me: "Let's call a meeting to talk about what needs to be in the agent sales training program."

I'm glad I didn't do that.

Something told me to look at the numbers. You see, 5 percent was just the average. That meant some agents did worse, but a few did better.

One agent, Betty, really stood out.

Betty successfully pitched the credit card 40 percent of the time. Even better, she did it consistently, shift after shift. Nobody else was even close.

So I spent some time with Betty.

That conversation forever changed how I solve customer service problems. From that point forward, I always tried to start by finding a Betty.

Here's all you need to know about finding Betty in your own organization.

A smiling contact center agent is on the phone with a customer.

Who is a Betty?

Betty is an employee who already knows a solution to the problem.

It could be how to solve a complicated technical issue, calm down an upset customer, or pitch a company credit card.

Their knowledge is often not contained in official policies, procedures, or training programs. In many cases, the solution runs counter to the established way of doing things.

Bettys are often eager to share what they know. They can also be frustrated if they don't get the opportunity to pass the solution along to the rest of the team.

My Betty certainly felt frustrated.

She enthusiastically shared her credit card pitching secrets with me, but she also expressed disappointment that nobody else had asked her about it. Her team never met as a group and her boss was always too busy.

Betty cared deeply about doing a great job, and wanted to help others succeed as well.

How can you find your Betty?

There are a few ways to find your Betty when trying to solve a customer service problem. The important thing is to look for an employee who consistently generates great results.

Performance reports will sometimes make it easy.

There were over a thousand contact center agents pitching the credit card, but I found my Betty on a report. She was easy to find because her credit card pitch success rate was tremendous.

There are other times when you have to work a little harder. Here are a few things that have worked for me:

Visit employees on various shifts at various locations.
Talk to employees who encounter the problem most often.
Ask employees for input in team meetings.

When in doubt, I often start with the most experienced employees. Yes, some employees become set in their ways over time. Other employees, like Betty, use their experience to anticipate solutions to new problems.

What do you do once you find Betty?

Go spend time observing Betty doing the job. The goal is to discover their secrets so you can share them with the rest of the team.

Your role here is to observe and listen. A few things stood out as I watched Betty.

She made each offer with enthusiasm.
Every offer included a brief explanation of the credit card's benefits.
Betty closed the offer by inviting the customer to use the card right away.

Another thing I noticed was that Betty got excited and said, "Congratulations!" when offering the card.

It's helpful to ask questions while doing an observation like this, so I asked Betty why she used the word, "Congratulations." She explained that she wanted the customer to feel special, like getting approved for the credit card was a big deal.

Some people worry that employees won't be honest or forthcoming when you observe them. That's not been my experience at all.

I've found that Bettys are usually eager to share what they know. They generally want other employees to benefit from their discovery and are willing to share if they believe you are there to help spread the word.

What do you do after spending time with Betty?

It's often helpful to find out what other employees are doing so you can compare their process to Betty's. This often makes the differences even clearer.

For the credit card project, I spent time with other agents who did well, some agents who were average, and a few agents who never got customers to accept the credit card.

This really crystalized what Betty did so well.

The agents who had a five percent success rate simply read the offer to the customer when it popped up on the screen. "You've been pre-approved for our credit card. Would you like to sign up?"

Most of them didn’t know the features and benefits that came with the card, so they weren’t sure why a customer would want it. That led to an unenthusiastic sales pitch.

By contrast, Betty used a slightly different approach.

"Congratulations! You've been pre-approved for our credit card! It's a great way to keep track of all your purchases with us. Would you like to use it on today's order?"

[Note: this was before online ordering, when it was much more difficult to keep track of the orders you placed with a company. Using a company credit card to track your purchases was a big benefit back then.]

The contrast between Betty's approach and the agents whose success rate was zero was even more clear. Those agents told me they felt uncomfortable pitching the card, so they didn't.

I asked them if their supervisor ever talked to them about it and they all said no. One agent pointed out that the credit card offer wasn't on their quality assurance scorecard, so they weren't held accountable for the results.

If you had been there, you would have seen a lightbulb appear above my head.

How can you share what you learned from Betty?

The final step in the process is to share Betty's solution with the rest of the team. This could be a short update to the team, a new process, or even a training program.

In my case, I compiled a list of solutions that went beyond just a training program.

Add "Congratulations!" to the screen pop telling agents to make the offer.
Give agents a job aid with the credit card's features and benefits.
Add the credit card offer to the quality assurance form.

The training program I created lasted just 30 minutes.

Some agents were initially reluctant to try the techniques I shared with them, but almost all of them changed their tune when they learned the techniques came from Betty, not management. That’s another bonus that comes with finding your Betty: more credibility.

And the best part? Our average credit card success rate quickly climbed to 20 percent.

You can learn about using techniques like this from my LinkedIn Learning course, Quick Fixes to Attain Excellent Customer Service.

A LinkedIn Learning subscription is required to view the entire course, but you can watch a short preview here.

Welcome from Quick Fixes to Attain Excellent Customer Service by Jeff Toister