Is your customer service the difference?
We live in a speeded up world. This is particularly true in respect of product and service innovation. A new idea loudly trumpeted by one company as a breakthrough in efficiency, effectiveness or quality is rapidly copied or improved upon by the competition. In some areas of industry – telecommunications, utilities, major retailers, internet service providers – the actual products may be identical. In these circumstances competition falls into two possible areas – price and customer service.
With price comparison websites and the best deals available at the click of a mouse, the option to commoditise the product offering – pile it high and sell it cheap – is one which many suppliers have chosen. But the low margins and keen cost control which accompanies such a move reduces flexibility in the other key competitive area – the ability of your people to deliver great customer service. As the really successful suppliers have found, price is only one area of the marketing mix. Where products are indistinguishable and promotions are expensive and, in a web enabled world, place is everywhere, they have moved beyond the traditional 4 P’s of marketing and added – amongst others – a fifth: people.
A Backward Step
It wasn’t that long ago that customer service training was ubiquitous. Everyone from the Chief Executive to the cleaner from the sales manager to the service engineer was exposed to customer service training. But as times become increasingly competitive and margins squeezed, this move seems to have been reversed.
In 2007, the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) surveyed major firms in Ireland. Almost all the firms in the survey regarded customer service as a source of competitive advantage. 80% of respondents either agreed or agreed strongly that customer service standards should apply equally to internal customer transactions – services provided to colleagues in the organisation – as well as to external customers. The ICS found that while 87% of customer facing staff, were trained in customer service skills, only 50% of non customer facing staff received similar training programmes. Only 50% of organisations provided refresher training to staff on customer service.
Of those who participated in the survey, 90% assessed levels of customer service – and unexpectedly it was the larger, multi-national companies who didn’t do so.
In the 80’s and 90’s I think there would have been a very different picture of customer service focus in organisations. At that time, customer care training, internal customer programmes and a focus on the client in all things was very much flavour of the month. So how did customer service training fall out of fashion? How did it go from the bedrock of all programmes to become the loon pants and cheesecloth shirts of the training room? More importantly – why?
Oversimplification
To some extent, customer service training became a victim of its own ubiquity. The pat phrases and the easily mouthed mantras became common place and meaningless. Have a nice day turned from a cheery greeting to the stamp of insincerity. And beyond the jolly simplicity of treating people nicely there was…. well, not much really. There was a lack of real robustness about customer service training. At the base of much which was delivered at that time was a disconnect – simply put, treating customers well when the organisation treats me badly was never going to work. Management approaches and work processes which didn’t enable me to satisfy my customer undermined all the investment in learning to smile and being an active and empathetic listener as my customers complained again and again about how my organisation had cocked up.
Paradoxically, the increase in technology in organisations seems, in some cases, to have actually dissociated the individual customer service agent still further from control over the service levels promised but rarely delivered. While some organisations have sophisticated call resolution systems and incredible back office support, that only serves to highlight our negative experiences when the contact centre staff seem to be wrestling with  systems designed by people who clearly have not thought through the myriad of customer requests. ‘Computer says No’ was once funny – now it is delivered unapologetically after 40 minutes of being told how important your call is and asked to navigate through menu after menu on your telephone key pad.
In these circumstances, actually being nice to your customer – especially as they get angrier and angrier – is really not enough. In some organisations – perhaps those where margins are lowest and costs squeezed ever downwards – the role of customer service agent is an apologetic and thankless one. If we ever believed that customer service was about an individual smiling and being pleasant, this over simplification of what it means to actually satisfy customers in a demanding world of undifferentiated products and services needs to be reviewed. Providing great customer service needs to get back to the top of the organisational development agenda. Some organisations have certainly responded to negative coverage on social media sites and blogs, but others – seemingly uninterested in their reputation or believing that customer will put up with anything so long as the price is right – continue to play a highly inefficient numbers game.
The challenge
So what to do about it? Learning and development teams should have been focused on ensuring that what they do supports the achievement of business objectives for some time now. The ICS survey says that 90% of organisations think that customer service standards are a source of competitive advantage. It seems that failing to address customer service training issues is unsustainable.
If what happens is going to really make a difference, however, it can’t be simply about focusing on answering the phone in three rings and always smiling. It needs to be fundamentally about establishing a feedback loop starting with what customers expect – and what would make them choose your service over the alternative. What stops us delivering what they want? How can customer facing staff best be enabled to provide the excellent service we expect and what processes, procedures, systems and support needs to be enhanced and improved to enable this to happen?  Enlightened companies are now encouraging their customer service staff to ignore the statistics or call resolution guidelines in order to provide higher levels of customer service, so it is possible, but as with any new ideas, the rigid resource allocation based on projected numbers stifles opportunities to properly care for the person across the counter or on the end of the line. But of course, if the ICS figures are correct and half of non customer facing staff are not participating in customer service training, then we can assume those monitoring performance will revert to blunt statistics – call duration, speed to serve, etc. Let’s imagine that you want to get customer facing staff, support staff, systems designers, people from the supply chain, head office staff, branch office personnel and management all together into one session to really focus on the customer. Think of it as a kind of ‘encounter’ session in which what customers think, why we sometimes fail and how we can avoid disappointing our customers in the future is the basis of a massive action learning set, across all levels of the organisation.
Such a campaign would be expensive and if you were going to get everyone together you’d probably not want to spend the first half of the day – when the energy level would likely be highest – doing endless presentations about customer service standards and how we compare to others in the national indices. You’d want to activate everyone’s energy, frustration or enthusiasm and knowledge as soon as possible. You’d want to know everyone was on the same page – sharing knowledge of customer expectations and the standards to which the organisation aspires – standards which significantly differentiate the organisation from the competition.
Sounds like you may need some pre-workshop programme, preferably an activity that you can monitor to make sure everyone has done it; something which features videos of customers explaining their experiences, what good looks like, how they feel when it goes wrong; something which outlines your business’s performance statistics on customer service assessment and how you compare with similar organisations; something which outlines what to expect in the workshop and how the views expressed and the plans formulated will result in real and sustainable change.
Impossible?
It isn’t. This is exactly the kind of programme which organisations which not only talk the talk but walk it as well are engaging in. They are using e-learning programmes to reinforce standards, to put the customer viewpoint and to set the agenda. They are following this up with programmes which really engage the organisation in sorting out the processes, systems and values which will really differentiate the service levels across the whole supply chain. They are ensuring that the relationship between management and team members reflects the highest level of customer service. They are capturing good practice and communicating through new technology success stories, system enhancements and a flexible and customer focused approach through everything that the organisation does.
Put simply, the complexity of delivering difference is recognised and as much effort is put into service enhancement as into product innovation. As much effort is put into selling the promise internally as is expended on making the promise externally.
Sustaining the Promise
Having delivered the big push on customer service, it isn’t job done. It is only the start. The real customer service evangelists ensure that customer care training isn’t some bolt on extra, a tick in the box to ensure that you have been informed of the standards expected and the penalties for failure to adhere to them. In these organisations customer service runs seamlessly through every intervention. From the CEO’s monthly newsletter to every training programme, the customer service messages and focus run through everything like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock.
And it does make a difference. Read the business pages. See who is doing well in financial terms – the growing businesses with increased market share. Is it their products which have achieved the breakthrough? Not often. Is it superior advertising and marketing activity? It helps but isn’t the whole answer. Is it that they are never beaten on price? It is a hygiene factor – competitive pricing for the same or similar product is expected but not a differentiator.
Most often what really makes the difference is the ability to standout as an organisation which tirelessly offers excellent customer service, which is able to reduce marketing spend through retaining more of its customers, which is able to rely on free word of mouth and recommendation to build an increasing and loyal customer base. These are the businesses which win and to pursue a different route to success seems destined to end in misery.
