Welcome to the #FreeToHelp Project

#FreeToHelp is a project by Jenny Dempsey and Leslie O’Flahavan, two customer service experts who believe that great service can only happen when frontline agents are #FreeToHelp their customers. We believe most frontline agents are extraordinarily willing to help, but they’re often prevented from giving great service by rigid policies, stern managers, bad software, and ridiculous expectations. We want to capture the wisdom of customer service agents who speak with or write to customers all day, every day. We want to know what frontline agents wish they were allowed to do to help customers, so we can help managers think openly about empowering agents. We are on a mission to figure out how customer care organizations can stop getting in the way of frontline agents and trust them enough so they’re truly #FreeToHelp.

Please complete our #FreeToHelp Survey

We have a favor to ask, but don't worry; it's not a big one! If you are a customer service representative--or you're a manager leading a team of representatives--could you help us out with our new project?

Jenny Dempsey and I are trying to discover whether frontline customer service representatives feel they are free to help customers… or not. To gather input directly from frontline representatives, we've launched the #FreeToHelp Survey, which is just 11 questions long and will take less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is anonymous; we don't ask for anyone's name or company. Here's the favor: Could you share the link to this survey with your team of customer service representatives and ask them to complete it? The survey is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FreeToHelp . Our survey is open to all customer service representatives, whether they help customers over the phone, by email, by chat, in social or by text. We're trying to get as many customer service folks as possible to respond by August 21 (though the survey will be open and accepting responses indefinitely).

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