Liliana Montijo is Head of Customer Service & Direct Marketing (Mexico) at Uline, a leading distributor of shipping, industrial and packaging materials. At Uline, Liliana is responsible for the company’s customer service and direct marketing functions in Mexico. Prior to joining Uline in 2018, she held senior roles at Grainger and GE Transportation, among other organizations. With several years of international experience in managing complex business environments, Liliana has expertise in operations, customer experience, marketing, sales, supply chain management and strategic planning across multiple industries. She focuses on helping organizations achieve long-term success by accelerating business growth to boost revenue, building high-performance teams and creating good work environments.

Interviewed by Ritu Josan

// What significant challenges are you facing as a result of COVID-19, and how do you work around them?

Being used to providing the best customer experience, I find three challenges to business continuity:

• The internet infrastructure of the country (Mexico) to support remote work.
• How to keep people engaged? I am talking about dealing with emotions, situations at home and going beyond the numbers. This means that managing our employees will ensure the company goals are achieved.
• Adapting to the personal situations of our customers that are dealing with stress and problems that we all have.

// Have your customer service delivery levels been impacted by COVID? How?

Fortunately, no. We were able to maintain service experiences as per our customers’ expectations.

// Has rep productivity been impacted by COVID-19 circumstances? How are you addressing this?

Yes, working remotely and technical issues are the first cause of productivity loss. The second is that we noticed the customers want to spend more time talking, sharing needs that they did not have before and looking for support. That certainly has had an impact. 

“Manage what you can manage” is what I tell the team. We have to deal with some productivity loss while we ensure customer satisfaction. We established processes and monitoring to help our teams better control the interactions with customers.

 // What changes have you observed in customer behavior during this period?

Conversations have become more personal. There is a greater need to address difficult situations and our customers now have needs that there were not there before.

I can say that our customers want us to listen to them more than ever before and, at the same time, are more sensitive. We understand that social isolation is one of the causes of this change in behavior.

// Have you noticed a change in the difficulty level of calls fielded since COVID?

That's right! Curiously, it is not because of technical difficulties, as I have mentioned before, but the intimacy of the conversations and the emotions are a new opportunity to enable better connections. These emotions are transferred to our employees. That’s why we have to prepare our leadership team to guide the CSRs well. Emotional intelligence has become critical.

// How has customer satisfaction trended since the advent of COVID-19? Do you have any insight into why?

 Surprisingly, it has improved and this is because we have prioritized the needs of our customers in all aspects in order to serve them better. We have rebuilt processes and adapted our technology to ensure we maintain our service levels.

What has been your single biggest focus during this period?

Our primary focus is our employees. They are the ones that deliver the service every day. We have increased the initiatives that help them stay motivated. They are the ones that are telling us what they need and what the customers want.

// What will be the top strategic focus for your customer service function in 2021?

Our focus will always be on quality of service to provide the best customer experiences. We will continue developing solutions to be closer to our customers and be agile in the market. If a customer wants to talk, they will receive an immediate response. We don’t like IVR’s and have different channels based on the customers’ preferences. 

Additionally, we want to take a more fundamental approach to make things easier for our employees. Without their inputs, it is almost impossible to achieve our vision of customer experience. I want my employees to be happy and in the right frame of mind to enable better customer service.

What are the lasting industry-wide changes that you expect to see staying beyond the COVID phase?

I see the continuous growth of the internet and digital platforms to do business. The importance of logistics, remote work and teleconferences will also continue.

//  If you could share one piece of advice with the industry at large during this time, what would it be?

We have a new opportunity to enable a more human environment in the business world. We have to be prepared in the workplace with specific training dedicated to developing emotional intelligence and other leadership skills. We need to provide more empowerment to our people and be more attentive to the new laws and regulations in our respective countries. HR teams can help us establish new training methods that address these needs.

We also need to develop readaptation processes for the gradual return to offices. Earlier, we had to adapt people to remote work operations. But now we have the task of redesigning the processes to help them return to the office without disrupting their lives.