Lip Service

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 17-May-2006 01:08 PM
How often have you seen a commercial about a company that's all about how great the service is--and then get treated like dirt by the same company? Guru Jim Barnes notes in his article, What's So Hard About Customer Service? in the May 22 Advisor newsletter that businesses have a hard time placing the customer front and center.

They want to provide good service, a good experience, if you will. But too often, they shuttle it off to the contact center and drop it, ignoring all the other departments that are involved in the customer (namely, every other department).

So I ask, have you seen this happen close up? Do you agree that it's hard to have a real customer-centric strategy? Who do you see failing miserably at service? Who's doing it well?

ksc
Member

Posted 22-May-2006 08:48 AM
I have a very long list of companies that have failed to provide even close to adequate customer service but it seems local services, such as cable and telephone service providers are the worse. Vonage outsources to India which is helpful if you are experiencing a textbook issue with your service, but when the issue isn't resolved you have to fight and fight to be transferred to the local service center in New Jersey. It takes several 2 hour phone calls to get any issue resolved which just goes to show that they only care about getting you signed on for their service, they aren't particularly concerned with how satisfied you are after that.

Evan Wood
Member

Posted 06-Jun-2006 10:45 AM
'Customer centricity', 'experience management', or just plain 'customer/client service'—whatever you choose to call it, sooner or later the latest monikers become part of corporate marketing plans everywhere. Call it 'corporate fashion', adopting the latest in-vogue terminology.

Ironically, while it is the larger corporate players who seem to propel the terminology onto the public radar, it seems these same organizations are too large, too inflexible, too bureaucratic to 'walk the talk'.

Having worked in both Fortune 500 organizations and in start-ups, it very apparent that the smaller companies lead in customer-centric practices. In big business, customer service is an artificially imposed policy; in smaller, successful companies, it is an inherent element for survival and competitive differentiation.

The magic question is how to bottle that passion for customer service that is so prevalent in under 100 employee companies, and sell it to their Fortune 1000 brethren?

President, JumpWood Marketing
www.jumpwood.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 07-Jun-2006 02:39 AM
Evan

I share your views about the failure of many larger companies to deliver something equating to passable customer service.

The $64,000 dollar question is why?

My own take is that there are two main reasons for the failure. They are best illustrated by comparing larger companies to the start-ups you mentioned.

The first reason is to do with the relationship between marketing, sales & service. In most start-ups, customer service is part of and in many cases inextricable from marketing & sales. They all work together as part of a bigger solution. In larger companies, they are split up and divorced from each other. Morover, they often sit under different parts of the organisation structure and often in different buildings, cities or even countries. As has been well documented, marketing, sales and service in larger companies often do not work well together. And because they do not work together they end up being part of a smaller solution than the sum of their parts.

It was partly to tackle this endemic collaboration failure in inside-out CRM that outside-in Customer Experience Management (CEM) was developed.

The second and often more insidious reason is to do with value creation. In most start-ups, integrated marketing, sales & service is simultaneously a cost (of sale and resale) and the source of sales revenues. In larger companies, marketing is often seen as a necessary cost (that drives revenues), sales drives revenues directly and service is an unnecessary cost. Period. There is no wonder that service is increasingly outsourced to low wage and low value added countries like India. Unfortunately, a lot of call center "consultants" exacerbate this problem by only looking at the cost side of the equation rather than at the bigger picture.

What is clearly missing is a more sophisticated understanding of the role that each plays in creating value and where the right balance between costs and revenues lies.

At the end of the day it all comes down to the achieving the right balance between costs, revenues, risk and how they individually and together drive value. As is so often the case, the devil is in the details.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Evan Wood
Member

Posted 07-Jun-2006 08:29 AM
Graham,

I like your breakdown. Off the top, perhaps the following 3 courses of action would help mitigate this customer service failure within larger organizations:

1. Every employee's performance evaluation and compensation should have some material component tied to customer service as measured by an annual survey. Managers should have a greater stake in this since they are able to influence and direct resource allocation.

2. Assigning value creation metrics to what have traditionally been seen as cost centres (e.g. customer service departments) is an uphill battle. Perhaps corporate management would be more attentive if they could quantify how much value was being destroyed, rather than gained, through poor customer service. At the very least, they would then have benchmarks from which to improve.

3. Adopting a corporate mantra of 'Every customer counts' and abiding by it. In large organizations with tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, it's easy to see why losing one customer through poor service is not perceived as critical. However, that kind of attitude cannot exist without a 'slippery slope' effect, as more and more customers fall through the cracks. In reality, there should be a 'zero tolerance' mandate for losing a customer (within reason, or course). After all, these are the front line individuals who directly influence customer rentention.

4. Place the customer service department on an equal footing as marketing & sales within the corporate hierarchy.

There are countless other possibilities that come to mind. It's not that great customer service is not possible (logistics and geographies can be overcome)—for me, it's simply that organizations are not willing to allocate the resources required because they still don't understand the extent to which they are compromising their own customer base.

President, JumpWood Marketing
www.jumpwood.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 07-Jun-2006 09:42 AM
Evan

Good ideas and worthy of further thought.

In general, I am no great fan of compensation linked to simplistic, linear measures. Not that they don't work; research shows that they work only too well, often having negative unintended consequences along the way.

Like the call centre agent who in the midst of desperately trying to help a colleague fix a phone problem asked if he wouldn't mind putting the phopne down and ringing him back on a direct number. When prompted for an explanation, my colleague was told that the telco had just had a new measurement system installed that punished agents for being too-long on the phone with a queued number. The agent wanted to help, my colleague wanted help but the call-center management were just too STUPID! Yes, it really happened.

Or like leaving a long and difficult meeting to discuss falling vehicle repurchase rates at a major US auto manufacturer's German operation only to go past another meeting room where staff were leaving after apparently celebrating. On asking what the celebration was, I was told that customer satisfaction rates had gone from the low-90s percent to the low-90s plus x percent. Huh. Something didn't add up. Not only is the low-90s percent a ridiculously high number for a US auto manufacturer's customer satisfaction score, but it didn't tally with the falling repurchase rate. Yes, it really happened too.

Measures need to be based upon a balanced scorecard of dynamically linked measures so that a broader range of contributing measures, interactions between the measures, non-linear interactions and interaction time delays, etc can be measured, monitored and managed systematically. And care has to be taken that staff don't game the system to get the results they need for their performance appraisals and particularly, for their bonuses. Money is a great motivator to cheat.

On another tack.

Take a look at a great report from the UK National Consumer Council entitled "The Stupid Company: How British Businesses Throw Away Money by Alienating Customers". It is an easy but powerful read. The recommendations are something every company should take to heart.

http://www.ncc.org.uk/publications/stupid_company.pdf

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

HaroldSays
Member
Picture of HaroldSays

Posted 10-Jul-2006 01:30 PM
I have developed and am working on a way for companies to improve their customer service. I created a web site and I take certain actions and steps to insure that companies provide at least satisfactory service or they receive a RANT on my web site. When their employees or team members performance is satisfactory or stellar they get a RAVE, however I do not just stop there. I actually contact the company and let the employee or employees and management know how they are doing, RANT or RAVE. I am told I am the only web site in the world that does this. I have resolved a number of issues personally with companies in the US as a result of my contacting them about my RAVE or RANT, and I have also helped others and do help others resolve their issues using the same process. It is called holding the employees and companies accountable for their actions-and it works!