Why is customer service so hard to get right?
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Feb 2006
Poor customer service seems endemic in some organisations no matter what their strategy says about their commitment to service quality and their desire to focus on customers.
Strategy is about truth and keeping the truth in strategies is as important as the actual message — there is not point in making your strategy so aspirational that it departs from the reality of your organisation and its customers. Both your customers and your staff will see through it. So don't include things in your strategy about the importance of the customer if your senior executives have never been out to see or meet with a customer; and don't put customer service in your strategy if you're not taking it seriously, measuring your performance and continually looking to improve it.
Customer service is only a competitive advantage when your organisation's people actually live it. Your customers need to feel it. Almost every organisation includes some idea about customer focus or the desire to achieve high levels of customer service quality in their strategy. What separates the great organisations from those at the back of the field is their ability to actually execute on this vision. This requires that they embed an ethos of service in their business — and there are not that many organisations that are able to get this right.
Developing an ethos of service quality
An important thing to bear in mind when trying to improve customer service is that friendliness is not customer service. It is possible for your organisation to give a customer poor service whilst still being friendly. Quite often characteristics such as transparency, reliability and clarity are at least as important as friendliness in defining service quality. Customers need to be able to anticipate what they will get from your organisation – both in its products and in its service quality.
It is a truism that what gets measured gets delivered. If you're serious about customer service quality, then you should be measuring it. How to do that is worth another column, but the question of whether it gets measured at all is often a good gauge of whether an organisation is really committed to achieving a high level of service quality.
Technology can really assist in measuring quality. However, throwing technology at the problem doesn't seem to specifically improve service quality unless there is also a service ethic embedded in the culture. All the CRM systems in the world will help gather a lot of data about customer interactions, but will only serve to provide service people with information on the customer. It will be up to them to use the information intelligently to serve the customer.
It is not difficult to find examples of organisations that are not making their technology work hard enough for their customers. For example, try opening a bank account and you will find that you have to manually complete lots of forms despite these organisations investing billions in information technology. And then the questions on the forms don't minimise the effort that customers need to make – my favourite is when the form asks for your birthday immediately after asking for your id number. With all the technology in place, how difficult is it to extract a birth date from the first six digits of an id number?
Call centres should use incoming call data to identify customers – at least until the customer indicates they are calling on behalf of someone else. At MTN, their call centre can identify incoming calls from MTN cell phones yet they often ask callers to enter their cell phone numbers when their call is answered.
Bored staff are often indicative of poor training. The blame for ineffective service because of bored staff lies with management and not the staff members. It is popular in South Africa to think of poorly educated junior staff as simply incapable of good service. That is a view that is out of synch with a modern South Africa. The management challenge is to provide sufficient training, to find ways to make work interesting for people and to excite them about their role as service providers to customers.
Exclusive Books has managed to find a way to empower their staff. Walk into an Exclusive Books store and the staff are usually discussing books or some other high brow subject. Sure they can sometimes seem like intellectual snobs, but then they do create an atmosphere that matches the products they sell. And their staff are usually very knowledgeable about where to find books and are able to recommend books to customers based on their own opinions. Empowering staff can seem risky because it takes a business process out of your complete control, but if you're hiring smart people or providing training it makes sense to capitalise on their capabilities.
What can you do about it
The starting point for improving customer service is to recognise that service quality needs to be part of the organisational culture; it isn't a business policy or on a poster on the wall. It is also useful to recognise that good service doesn't need to cost a fortune either. Good staff, effectively trained are the next best starting point The culture will develop out of compelling stories of customer experiences that start building the right ethic into your culture. Instructions are not enough, and threats or warnings don't work so well with generation X type people that are used to making up their own minds – so define the expectations; get the training in place; measure your performance and then focus on continuing to develop and nurture a high service quality culture.
Why is customer service so hard to get right? was published as Strategym #34 in February 2006.
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