This session explores continuity and capability.
The first is about staying on track with your customer service strategy even when those in charge keep leaving.
The second explores the likely range of options for developing your customer service strategy in the first place.
Achieving Strategic Continuity Even When Leaders Go AWOL
Let’s deal with continuity first. Do a search on Linkedin for director level people with ‘customer service’ in their title. Pick a random selection from the search results and review their CVs. You will find that most trade jobs within a 24 month period. Good for them maybe. Bad for strategic intent.
So what’s to be done? If previous customer service strategy can get wiped so often, can the organisation develop a coping strategy? I believe so and here it is. Untried as far as I am aware. Waiting for the first innovative brand to make the most of the idea. This is it in a nutshell.
Q. How can organisations reconcile careerism with the need for continuity and long term commitment to excellence?
A. Curate a ‘Magna Carta’ that is inherited by each generation of leadership, who could refresh but not nullify that strategic direction
In tandem with this idea is a recalibration of how these AWOL leaders should be motivated.
If an organisation’s rate of attrition mirrors the trend described here, then a better way to fund this is to make the job a project based one, calibrated against the next set of strategic milestones in the ‘Magna Carta’ plan. Thus they are paid handsomely on deliverables not duration.
Help! Customer Service Has No Tradition Of Strategic Thinking
Back in the first session of this series, I stated from my own frequent polling of conference and best practice audiences that less than 10% ever claimed to having a customer service strategy. To state the blindingly obvious, that means the overwhelming majority of service teams have no practical experience in either design or use. And that probably includes the new director who turns up every two years!
The management implications are pretty clear. So what’s to be done? Here are some ideas you can build on.
- If the culture of strategy development and execution is foreign to Customer Service but thrives elsewhere in the organisation, then the transfer of best practice through mentoring and ‘field visits’ to strategically driven functions should be encouraged by the executive.
- If strategy is an unknown throughout the business or if the ability to transfer that expertise is not practical, then external expertise ought to be considered with the proviso that the development of a customer service strategy is a shared task and a future in-house planning process is put in place as one of the key deliverables.
- If none of the above proves possible, then the questions and suggestions provided in this series could be used as a template for a self run workshop by the customer service leadership. The only cost is their time and the necessary biscuits!
- For those starting out, it is worth repeating that it is more effective to build your plan in stages over the course of a year than achieve an unfinished masterpiece superseded by market events.
- The framework for business cases in customer services ought to be reviewed in the light of whether they incentive successful change. This can be established by digging out the last few years’ worth of business cases and comparing the intended benefits with whatever has been realised. The gap will almost inevitably raise questions.
- The way in which tasks in the annual planning process are divided up amongst functions should be reviewed to establish if this helps or hinders the cause of joined up customer management. Possible candidates for closer collaboration are Sales, Marketing, Customer Service (both call centre and online). Alternatively the executive could provide a visionary set of unifying guidelines to align these plans if there is anyone at that level capable of such articulation.
- Once a strategic plan emerges, revisit everything that is affected. Job profiles, competency development, remuneration, business case logic, budgetary allocation and so on. Avoid the mistake of having a perfect plan being undermined by tactical misalignment.
Finally the litmus test of a customer service strategy is to become a customer of your own organisation. Live and breathe the experience. If it makes you proud, then you are on track. If not, learn and get back to the drawing board.
I hope something in that list sparked off a useful idea of your own. Let me know.
Hi Martin,
Some very practical points here yet what concerns me about the two year turnover and, the 10% pole issue is that something is wrong deeper in the organisation. If an organisation allows this to happen to its customer service strategy surely it will do this with most of their other strategies? Customer service and the customer experience requires that all departments and functions work together so is the issue not deeper and really a CEO problem?
Hi Michael,
I think there are a number of factors at play which are producing this effect. First HR practice in the typical global business as in professional government (civil service) encourages ongoing rotation so that people become familiar with the business as they ascend the management chain. The unintended consequence of that is time pressure on strategic thinking and a lack of ‘feel’, expertise or passion for the function they preside over.
In parallel, the accepted wisdom for years has been to move jobs on a regular basis to fill out one’s career. That is also understandable since organisations started downsizing since the late ’80s and effectively broke the trust of middle management whose loss of expertise was another unintended consequence.
So if you add all that up, it strikes me that the best way to go forward is to model things on the way they actually are! Divorce strategy from individuals and have it run as a stakeholder exercise, which social media is certainly encouraging. And secondly phase out certain permanent roles, then hire on a project, outcome basis with all the rewards calibrated accordingly. Obviously the skill to this is the balanced scorecard of outcomes that is needed to prevent eve worse short termism.
Personally I have witnessed too many that literally take the money and run. They arrive, audit, sell the big idea internally, trash existing projects, change direction, set up an expensive transformation, then leave before the results are in.
Hi Martin,
Love your final comment to Michael, above. I’ve yet to see anyone put on a resume, “Came into a well functioning operation and was smart enough to leave it alone!”. There is some press to institute change to demonstrate one’s managerial impact.
More broadly to your post, I think strategic thinking around customer service has to commence one level up from the function itself. Last week I interviewed the head of guest services, who shared the following dynamic: They have decentralized sales but centralized customer service. As a result sales are still offering all sorts of one-off deals to drive customer acquisition and revenue, but customer service is often unaware of such customer commitments and driven to provide a more consistent customer experience. Moreover, the metrics of customer service (as are many call center operations) are driven by cost savings, not customer intimacy.
So a sustainable customer service strategy has to move back and forth between the mission, goals and positioning of customer service on one hand and the interplay of different functions – sales, marketing, IT, finance, HR and customer service.
Marc
Hi Martin,
I agree that to combat this lack of or changing strategy the organisation has to hold onto its own Magna Carta. The following link:
http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/CEO-Turnover-Study-sb28.pdf
shows that even CEOs that are fired for performance issues last more than 4 years (median data). However, does that not make it a board and CEO issue to combat careerism?
Adrian
Hi Marc,
Oui, je suis d’accord. In fact what really needs to be created is a cross functional strategy simply called the customer strategy that runs as well as functional ones. Over time it might even become the dominant plan and the one that informs the other functional plans of which customer service is one.
To get that off the ground however, the gravitas/big stick of the chief customer officer or COO is needed ‘facilitate’ joint goals, metrics and incentives between all the major customer facing teams and act as referee as vested interests get bruised. Your example of current practice simply reminds that it’s either 100% or nothing.
Hi Adrian,
I suspect the average CEO would merely comment that this is the way of the world these days. Such a shame then that so few exceptional ones evidently exist!
Agree fully…. the challenge for any CCO (Chief Customer Officer) is to make sure their strategy addresses the business as a whole, and not be seen as a one function advocate. IT, HR and Marketing heads have tried to do much the same, often with limited success. The success factor, I believe, is to get everyone up on the balcony together, rather than negotiating from one camp to the next.
Damn right. At the risk of breaking the rhythm, have you ever been asked to run a ‘balcony’ session? I’ve done similar things in more of a training ‘break down the silos’ but not for formal planning. Would love to though.
Sorry. I was under the impression that leaders were supposed to challenge the status quo, change the agenda and leave the place better off than when they arrived (or maybe it’s just them). So, who is in charge then?