This fourth session in the series on Customer Service Strategy looks at real world deliverables.
By this I mean what you actually deliver to your customers as a portfolio of services. In previous posts we have talked about:
- How to re-frame the perceived value of Customer Services to the rest of your organisation – session one
- The impact that service needs to have on customers – session two
- The importance of people and culture in the delivery of service excellence – session three
However we are still missing something. In fact something pretty crucial. It’s clarity and definition around what we are offering to customers. Before you pooh pooh this as only an issue for rank amateurs, stop and have a think. This is not as easy as it sounds because we seldom think in these terms.
Can You Define Your Service Proposition?
We might think we know what we offer but is this the case? I agree that from management information we can define what we offer in terms of the volume and type of activity that flow through our customer service centres. From other feedback systems, we also know about current issues, customer satisfaction scores, scheduling, budgeting, new technology deployments and so on.
But we do not often pause to think what all this adds up to as a menu of services that the customer has clear visibility of. In other words what are we offering them beyond the obvious that we are a customer service function?
Think as a restaurant owner. They don’t communicate their value proposition as food. That is far too vague to generate customer interest. Food is just the raw materials of their service. First they choose a style of cuisine. And if they are to survive, they also strive for something that is unique in terms of combination of ingredients, presentation or some ‘secret sauce’. Once decided on, it is the menu that communicates these ‘deliverables’. (let’s ignore service, ambiance etc for the moment).
So using that as an analogy, what are you actually offering your customers? Can you talk as clearly as a menu communicates what is on offer? Can you write a service menu that you would feel confident to give to your customers as an honest and accurate description of what you can offer? I know from asking this frequently at the best practice forums I hosted over a five year period that no-one ever claimed to have done this, despite understanding the logic for doing this. In fact let’s pause for a moment and pursue why this is a good idea and how it benefits both you and your customers.
Why Expectation Setting Works
Any productive relationship is a two way street. Both sides need to understand how and when to relate. So an effective way in which we can reduce customer frustration and manage expectations is help them understand the scope and function of our customer services. Yet we run away from making this easy or obvious.
- Why does online customer service traditionally hide contact details of the call centre despite much research that shows traffic is triggered from online customer service now looking for a source of live assistance?
- Within the call centre, we usually fail to actively promote new self service functions so that customers can avoid having to queue
- We don’t tell them when we are open and how they can still get help when we are closed
- We don’t commit to standards of service or make ourselves accountable when we fail to deliver
In short we don’t think service in the way a customer would.
Let’s go back to the topic of menus and how this would work in a service context. For instance, what exactly is your claims service if that is your line of business? Or the complaint service? Or the application service? Or the problem solving service? Can you describe to me how it works, the options I have to access it. When it is operational. What to do outside of hours. What to expect in terms of right first time, effort, and time.
Hopefully you are getting the point.
However before you trot off and start publishing glossy service brochures and mailing them, let me remind you about one criteria I mentioned earlier. Honesty. It is not worth pretending to be something you are not or cannot fulfill. If all you provide is a voice service that can only be accessed by queuing within certain times then concentrate on setting service standards and consistently beating them within that scope. But let me know about them! At least I will know what to expect as a customer. If you can do more then promote that.
I suspect that once you start working this out as a menu, you will discover holes in the customer journey, gaps in service provision and escalation links you had not previously considered. Most of which should not cost you more than time and creative care to fix.
Why The Service Sector Needs To Catch Up
By means of drawing this session to a close, let’s think about the service industry as a whole. Unlike products which we can see, touch and in general more easily test if it ‘does what it says on tin’, choosing a professional service and knowing what to expect is much tougher because it is less tangible.
But there is no reason why this should be the case. Apart from what appears to be the collective fright of the service industry. Anything is definable and can be made understandable.
I offer a final observation. I know from offering out this challenge before that in the main service leaders are nervous about defining customer facing deliverables and committing themselves to standards upfront. It is of course more dangerous to do so and tests the ability of the support team in a much more public and accountable way. But my point is that it is a trouble worth taking because as a customer I would welcome being better informed about how to interact with you. Don’t you feel the same as a customer of other organisations’ customer services? You never know, I might even become more tolerant in the process.
Describing what is on the menu is the very least of what we need to be doing as every successful restaurant owner will tell you.
Ready for more? Session five is here. It’s all about ensuring a successful launch once your customer strategy is ready to go.
After reading this article, the question that pops into my mind is ‘is your department/company customer or process-orientated?’
In my work with many companies, it’s amazing how many companies are actually process-orientated rather than customer orientated. For example, if you buy more than one flight with Easy Jet and have all the flights on one booking, they are unable to produce an itemised receipt for you, detailing the cost of each flight. I’m sure that the reasons for doing this are tied up with simplicity, rather than focusing on the customer’s requirements. Think how many commercial travellers actually want to receive an itemised receipt to claim expenses from different clients…
Heather,
An excellent example of what I’m talking about. I bet it has never occurred since the service will be a result of internal initiatives rather than a deliberate designed effort to satisfy.
When the real need emerges as you describe, the opportunity to be better than competition naturally follows.
Thanks for the example
Martin
Hi Martin,
I think your point:
“in the main service leaders are nervous about defining customer facing deliverables and committing themselves to standards upfront. It is of course more dangerous to do so and tests the ability of the support team in a much more public and accountable way. ”
is spot-on and the most serious challenge to making customer-service, ironically, more customer focused.
Do you think this is purely a process issue or is at cultural and performance management and appraisal issue?
Adrian
Adrian,
What’s the cause? Well having looked into many a service leader’s eye as I’ve challenged them, the experience they go into is fear. It’s an unknown. No precedent. So few seems to relish being first (at least in the UK). So yes it’s a culture issue. Performance and appraisal would naturally follow once there was a commitment.
But there is another issue I’ve noticed (which I’ve recently tested in a number of LinkedIn group discussions*). People really don’t get it. They cannot imagine what a defined service would look like as a customer proposition.
Try this for yourself. They are so immersed in the process of doing, they can’t seem to visualise that as a service. Which really makes me wonder what all the customer journey stuff has been about.
* During the group discussion, I tried to shift the discussion from theory to practice by doing a bit of imagining for myself. It did require effort. But here was the result (as an example of imagining a customer need)
My perfect ‘Is there anything I can do to stop my daughter’s teething pain’ service
Since I’ve probably got my hands full with an irritable toddler who I’m trying to get to sleep, first of all it’s important to me that I can access advice from the bedroom rather than go downstairs to the landline or laptop. Being able to choose the right category of service either via the TV remote or through voice commands on my Mobile really helped. I choose my mobile to continue.
I’m presented with both voice prompts and a series of screens that allow me to describe what the problem is and what I’m looking for. Given my hands are full I verbalise my needs which are translated back to me in text on screen. As that happens suggestions start to appear which I can control through voice commands. They all look rather familiar and not what I need which is some fresh ideas. I’m asked if I want to send my question onto a suitable live community(ies) and see if any that are current active can source any recent advice to the same sounding questions.
I agree. And within the next few minutes a live stream of suggestions come back which I scan until I see one that sounds ingenious and something I’ve never heard of. I ‘grab it’ out of the stream and a dialogue box appears offering to connect me to the author who is visible as being currently present and available to offer help.
Given the capabilities of our respective communication devices, I settle on a Skype style phone call to keep the costs low with the ability to receive any information by file transfer during the conversation.
We talk. Cures and suppliers are mentioned. A set of links are sent to both mobile and laptop for future reference.
Later when time permits I follow up by sending thanks and posting it on the helpers wall and make the advice visible to my parents support network.
That’s my version of a transformed NHS help line call at 3.00am
From that you could easily build a service that fitted such a need.
Regards
Martin
Martin,
That’s a great story and maybe it provides a clue to what is needed. Seems to me that we employ people who are good at ‘doing’ things or managing a ‘process’ but have no real experience or empathy of what it is like to be a customer of such a process. Perhaps, the first step to change culture is to hire people that have that type of customer experience or empathy rather than just those that are good at stuff.
Adrian
Great comments and dialogue! There is no doubt that “culture” beats “process” any day. Process is easy, so human nature kicks in and “voila” you are ordinary. Martin, I think as you summed up you nailed it: Be honest, commit to something specific, and challenge your organization to do as they say. This will create engagement, and people will have to bring their “whole self” to the job to make this happen, not just a copy of the SOP. I also believe companies need to measure their customer engagement, not by asking questions, instead they should monitoring their customer’s referral behavior. This will eliminate the CSI gaming we see today. Who doesn’t have a 97% customer satisfaction rating?
my .02
Bill,
I would hope that by publicly committing to a service profile, service teams would then become encouraged to engage and inspire staff to ‘whole self’ work as you called it. Zappos has reminded us of the power of that very well this year.
On the topic of strangely high CSI scores that fund the back pockets of execs in violation of every known consumer survey, this simply signposts their lack of genuine concern and is crass PR.
Paul Greenberg told an interesting story (one of many) at the London SCRM conference recently. He was talking about the shortfall of just using an NPS score. He then mentioned the work someone (an academic?) had been doing which combined customer lifetime scores + the likelihood to recommend + whether they actually did. No idea how you operationalise that metric mashup but the sentiment behind it is spot on.
In fact I was being shown some IVR derived feedback prompted by the famous ‘would you recommend.’ question. The customer said quite likely. Sounded OK until I found out he was still chasing money owned to him by the brand.
Much mud lies at the bottom of these ponds.
Martin
Love this point – “Honesty. It is not worth pretending to be something you are not or cannot fulfill.”
As a customer – I don’t want to be told you can do everything and equally well. If you take that approach you don’t have a prayer of standing out. Tell me what you focus on and why – show me your passion for something SPECIFIC!
And yet, how many recognise the strength in this approach? Being good at one thing is a great start but internal thinking only seems to fear the gaps in the overall proposition. Result? Nothing gets promoted. No-one can be passionate. Customers get wound up.
I just wonder which brand is going to be first at figuring this out.
Thanks for the comment Matt!