Cross-posted at LinkedIn
Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way. – Booker T. Washington
In my last post, I described customer service as the exhaust port of an organization. Every organization that is doing something of value produces some kind of exhaust. Most organizations know this fact of life and have instituted a way of working with their customers. Running the gamut from mediocre to good, these organizations have found some level of equilibrium, some below and some above average. There are some excellent organizations that work very hard to stay well above equilibrium. I’ll speak of those organizations and how they work in later posts. For this post, I’ll discuss the organizations that through one means or another find themselves belching smog and don’t know where to start in the clean-up effort. The steps below may sound obvious, but I assure you, I’ve seen some well known companies at this stage looking like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Every potential action seems to have a drawback and inaction becomes the norm. An award winning design firm with a highly desirable and trendy accessory business, that could not deliver their product on time and could not answer a customer email within a week, comes to mind.
As with an internal combustion engine, the first place to start is to quit using the leaded fuel. The leader who faces the problem must face facts and stop doing the things that they know are only creating customer-antagonists; those customers who feel so wronged by sub-standard service that they make it their personal mission to inform the world of your faults. The organization must stop shipping inferior products that they know are not going to meet customer expectations or at least honestly manage the customers’ expectations. If all of one’s data say that shipping times average 4 days, then stop guaranteeing 2 day delivery, until the logistics system can be fixed. If the routine phone queue wait time is 25 minutes, don’t put on a service message that says you are only performing badly, because you are “currently experiencing high volumes.” It is dishonest, the customers know it, and they treat the offending organization accordingly. If one knows their self-service website results in 65% of searches ending up with an email or phone call, then don’t send your customers there just to experience search hell. I’ll discuss how to fix these issues in later posts, but to start, stop forcing the customer there when it is a known pain point. These are tough decisions and may even result in things getting worse before they get better. However, with clear and honest communications, along with an honest attempt to turn things around, a new trust can be built. Think of Dominos Pizza admitting its old-recipe pizzas tasted like cardboard and building a world class online ordering system for a customer base that was used to getting busy phone lines.
The next step is to install a catalytic converter. The organization may not be able to completely stop all of the polluting habits immediately. Therefore, the actions need to be focussed on remediating the most noxious fumes. A quick survey of the most numerous contact types from the phone, email, and web will identify where most of the biggest and most persistent problems lie. Once identified, examine what the customer calls these problems, not what the organization thinks they are called. I had one client that had a ~20% usage of its self-help pages, merely because the relevant knowledge base article used the company’s technical language for the problem rather than the problem the customer was searching to solve. A quick re-write, using the customers’ search terms, and more prominent placement increased self-help usage to ~65% and resulted in a huge reduction in the daily volume of frustrated customers on the phone. This action is key, because it reduces the chaos in the contact center. The next action action of the catalytic converter is to streamline the contact methods and access to answers. Now is not the time to demand information that is not required, just because it may be of use. If the customer is already in a pickle with your product, the organization needs to remove the long contact form and replace it with – 1. What is your problem and 2. How can we contact you to help.
Depending on your product and customer profile, there are other similar actions, but there is one increasingly common type that I’d like to address. If one has a “freemium” business model, focus on the paying customers. I know this freaks out some purists, but, simply put, contract law is the best guide. A consideration paid for services demands timely service. Staggeringly, I worked for a large freemium product company that could not distinguish incoming contacts between paying and free customers. Our first order of business was to find an inelegant and blunt tool to identify the payers as they presented themselves in the midst of the 95% who were not paying. Additionally, we began to track the increased satisfaction of these customers to justify the ROI for the permanent-fix project. [Coincidentally and initially unrecognized by us, this had the added effect of reducing fraud which also reduced the chaos dramatically. Fraud thrives in customer service chaos.]
In summary, if you find you are a customer service polluter, take action immediately. First, conduct a quick, but brutally honest analysis of why you are emitting noxious fumes. Second, confirm the guiding principles that you want to be known for. Finally, begin acting coherently with those principles. Simple? Yes. Easy? No.
