Customer Service: Nirvana or Necrosis?

Hello, and that after an incredibly straight jacketed last article (I realized it later – was that me?!).

Image source: http://goo.gl/Ck1P4B

Today, we discuss about that component of the organizational value chain that is incredibly critical – and that can single handedly impact the end users’ perception and experience, and that can affect the profitability, credibility and the sustainability of any customer conscious organization in the long run – Customer Service.

Suppose you buy a product off an internet portal, the said product doesn’t work as intended, you call up customer service. Now right there that is one function that can straight-away transform your customer experience. Post your conversation, you can leave feeling elated, dejected or angry, depending on how serious is the customer ethic within the organization. Sometimes, even with a good customer service team, you can be left feeling disappointed – but then, there are marks for trying.

Even with a great product, if the customer experience is sloppy – well then, it is not a great product at all. We as customers are nearly always disappointed in our customer service experience. Does this qualitative sentiment matter to organizations? Consider this - 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

Customer service worldwide is perceived to be not empathetic enough, not considerate enough and customers are left feeling dejected – sometimes despite the other functional experience being satisfactory (great product, good in-store ambience, prompt after sales).

So what is wrong with customer services today?

Well, a lot, apparently.

1.    Organization’s DNA

Organizations invest in product development, they invest in marketing – these are important, even somewhat aspirational functions. After all, working on cutting edge technologies, developments is always exciting. On the other hand, customer service appears to be a dull and drab function – handling calls from irate customers to whom we can read out from a list of preprogrammed monotonous discourse, trouble shooting using assembly line templates. Really, customer service? To those who are not yet aware of the influence that this function wields, please remember that even a single negative customer service experience can deter potential customers from spending money with a company (Halpin, 2016). Also, customers do remember negative customers as much as positive ones, though it would appear that they would remember negative experiences more. I, certainly, would. After all, who wants to make the same mistake again?

So, customer-centricity needs to be ingested at every level of the organization. Customer first, questions later.

2.    Lack of training

In continuation of the problem above, lack of training is cited as a major factor in poor customer service interaction. An urban upwardly mobile customer would get frustrated on being grilled on the obvious questions that the customer service team thinks are mandatory to assess the problem and offer a solution. A smart customer service team will be agile and nimble footed, and will adapt to the requirements of the customer.

To learn any of the other disciplines (engineering, product development, marketing, you take a standard course, labour over the course duration, learn a little there and a lot on the job. What do you do for customer service? Is there a course that can highlight how important is the customer? Are there any industry recognized standard certifications? In India, it is possible to gravitate toward customer service even if you are not customer friendly. Paradoxical as it sounds, it is true.

3.    Lack of empowerment

No handbook can ever lay out all possible customer experiences scenarios. Rule of law. We don’t know yet how what all permutations of product failures could result in what customer reaction. But in the real world, things do go wrong, in ways not specified by handbooks, manuals and templates. As research points out highly scripted employees may be less imaginative about a customer’s true needs (Revolutionizing Customer Service, Harvard Business Review, April 2016)

Customer frustration arises when customer service teams resort to standardized protocols and redressal solutions (Sorry we cant help you because of x and y wherein the customer is actually thinking: How does that help me?).

Customer service needs to act as the nerve center of the entire customer interaction – they are the ones receiving complaints about cart failures, product returns, tardy after sales. They are the ones that are most informed about what are the requirements of the customer.

What is needed is empowerment – why are organizations hesitant to empower their customer service team? They are the ones interacting with customers daily, they are the frontline barometers for customer sentiment. An empowered customer service team, not afraid to take decisions to solve the real time customer service problems would set the benchmark for all the others in its industry (DeRose and Tichy, 2013)

Some of my best customer service experiences came from customer service employees who went beyond their call of duty to help out a distressed customer.

4.    Wrong / misplaced incentivization

How are customer services team incentivized, judged, evaluated? If they are judged solely on the volume of the calls logged, then you can extrapolate where their maximum efforts would be directed towards. Too often the emphasis is on streamlining internal efficiency-based metrics, meeting tightly monitored call routing and time SLAs, while the detailed assessment of the customer experience and the outcome of the call are largely ignored (Rosier, 2013).

Are customer services team ranked on customer satisfaction surveys? Great – you know how those surveys pan out – complex to understand, complex to fill – but even more importantly, how many times you as a customer have actually taken the time to provide feedback for every sub part customer experience that you’ve had?

5.    Complex Business Environment: No scope for obvious mistakes

In today’s business environment of instant quick fix solutions, absolute multitude of options, competitive substitutes, social media word-of-mouth, low customer loyalties, how can someone take customer service lightly? But you’d be surprised how so many organizations still do. Apparently they haven’t heard of a term called “Customer Lifetime Value”, which is very unlikely. More likely is that they don’t care.

So what can be done?

Lots - this is just Part 1 of the entire Customer Service series - so watch out for more!

Till then, have a nice day.

References

Halpin, March 2016: Customer service experiences are more important than ever in the age of e-commerce, Business Insider, http://goo.gl/HWv8z2

Revolutionizing Customer Service, https://hbr.org/2016/04/revolutionizing-customer-service

Chris DeRose and Noel Tichy, Here’s How to Actually Empower Customer Service Employees, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2013/07/heres-how-to-actually-empower-customer

Rosier (2013) Six steps to successful monitoring of your customer service, http://goo.gl/qDYMQC