Moving Up from Customer Service to Customer-Focus

I have just published on SlideShare a deck.

Moving Up from Customer Service to Customer-Focus
10 Lessons Learned by a Seasoned Customer Service Consultant

“You Are Richer Than You Think.”

In my previous blog entries I have argued about the validity of the People > Service > Profit idea, the importance of Hiring Right and the fact that often good people are stopped by bad processes or bad management.  I am obviously of the view that the road to success for great customer service and experience excellence goes through People Management that is aligned with strategies that make customer service and customer experience into a sustainable strategic differentiator. 

Today’s business environment is constantly changing as companies work to stay competitive. But change only happens when people change their thinking, beliefs, and behaviours. This is hard and requires constant effort from employees and executives. Forrester analyst Claire Schooley reports that “Seven in ten - seventy percent - of change management initiatives fail. That is a dramatically high rate of failure.”  It could happen to you unless you take into account that any change in business process or strategic direction  is strongly related to personal change — that means your people — and this is often the component that gets shortchanged.

This blog entry pursues the line of thought that organizations often fail to realize the impact of change on the employees it will affect. This can be change due to process re-design or strategies and initiatives for sharpening Customer Focus.  They often do not plan and execute carefully enough to address the people issues through all phases of change management.

That means that frequently people are insufficiently informed and engaged and therefore not enabled or allowed to contribute what they could otherwise bring to the table, based on their experience, knowledge and creativity (that everybody has). Over the more than 25 years I have been involved in many types of organizations I have developed the cynical view that more often than not “the enemy is within” and that many organizations unwittingly go to great lengths to give the competition a leg up. I will be so bold as to estimate that thus many organizations are not getting one-third to one quarter of the payroll dollars (and benefits plus overheads) they spend.

My message to a great deal of organization is therefore what it says in the headline (a tagline of a ubiquitous Canadian bank campaign): You Are Richer Than You Think... but you are likely not getting what you pay for. Often organizations don’t know what they don’t know and what they could get from the people they are paying anyway.

Affecting change successfully is admittedly not an easy thing. There are many models, approaches and philosophies. In addition to a clear vision and capable leadership, among others, there is one critical element which I want to highlight here: Communication. Yes, how hard we try, there never appears to be enough of it. It shows up as an improvement opportunity in virtually every employee survey, doesn’t it.

One of my standard recommendations to my clients is to undertake making Communications a forethought rather than the afterthought it so often ends up being. That means they could benefit from appointing a member of a change steering group as Communications Advocate. At each and every turn, decision, new project etc. this person raises the question of What and How for Communication. Of course having a strategy to guide the process always helps...

To conclude, I would like to share with you how impressed I was by the use of an off-the-shelf technology that is cloud based (and does not interfere with or depend on IT infrastructure), to act as enabler and catalyst of customer-driven change. Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts is known for its exemplary service. Just like award other companies competing successfully on a sharp customer focus such as South West Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, Zappos, USAA and Costco, it understands the value of hiring the right people and enabling and empowering them to do right by the customer. Four Seasons decided to employ a Social Intranet (with very similar features to Facebook and LinkedIn) to carry and facilitate its customer service / experience strategy. This platform was simple and quick to deploy technically, but of course needed to be populated with thought and efforts. However, once Redwood eLearning’s BOOST was up and running it took very little effort to manage it. Who did manage it then?  Their people of course... A sure way to ensure that they get from their people what they paid for, and more...

What stops you from harvesting your richness? 

The 85/15 Rule: Get at the Root Causes of Poor Customer Service

I am a fervent fan and former associate of author, speaker and consultant Jim Clemmer. He is insightful, pragmatic and accasionally coins some new expression such as "snoopervisor". He is about as pragmatic as I am.... here's what he wrote:

Last month I was approached by a misguided manager looking for training and motivation programs to “fix” their frontline service staff. This is a fairly wide spread and common problem showing a lack of understanding about basic customer service cause and effect. And it’s focused on treating symptoms rather than the underlying disease.

How reasonable would it be to hold a shipping dock worker responsible for the quality of the goods in the boxes he or she is shipping? Not only would that be unfair, it would be bad management. A good manager would argue, quite rightly, that the manufacturing process should be traced back to find the ultimate source of the defects.

So, how reasonable is it to hold the frontline server responsible for the quality of the products or services he or she is delivering? Sometimes poor service is their fault. Some servers are rude, sloppy, or uncaring. But most often the person on the front serving line is a symptom carrier, not the source of the problem. While he or she may be contributing to low service delivery, blaming him or her is also not only unfair but looking for answers in all the wrong places.

Even if poor service did originate with the service deliverer, who hires, trains, rewards, coaches, and measures that person? Like so much about culture, performance, and leadership it really is common sense; if you put a good person into a bad system, the system will win most of the time. This obvious observation has been proven so many times that it has become a truism called “The 85/15 Rule.” The 85/15 Rule shows that if you trace service breakdowns back to the root cause, about 85% of the time the fault lays in the system, processes, structure, or practices of the organization. Only about 15% of the service breakdowns can be traced back to someone who didn’t care or wasn’t conscientious enough.

But the last person to touch the process, pass the product, or deliver the service may be burned out by ceaseless service problems, overwhelmed with the volume of work or complaints, turned off by a “snoopervising” manager, out of touch with who his or her team’s customers are and what they value, unrewarded and unrecognized for their efforts, given shoddy materials, tools, or information, not given effective coaching and feedback, measured (and rewarded or punished) by results conflicting with his or her immediate customer’s needs, unsure of how to resolve issues and jointly fix a process with other functions, trying to protect themselves or their team from searches for the guilty, or not knowing where to go for help. All this lies within the system, processes, structure, or practices of the organization. And all this is a leadership, management, and culture issue.

Many of the manifestations of the “our staff are the problem” assumption stem from the all too common, but badly misguided, inclination to go on “seek and destroy missions” by asking “who” rather than “what” went wrong. Symptom carriers of the organization’s system and process problems are hunted down and hung by the neck on lampposts. The result is a culture of fixing the blame rather than the problem. This creates a culture of fear, cover your backside, and finger pointing. That’s clearly not a culture that creates higher customer service.

Treating symptoms can provide quick relief and make us feel like we’re fixing the problem. But until a management team is prepared to treat the underlying leadership and organizational root causes by applying The 85/15 Rule, they will be locked in a repeating loop of mediocre or poor customer service.

82% Of U.S. Consumers Bail On Brands After Bad Customer Service

Read on TechCrunch:

The spotlight — or maybe the flood light — shines on bad customer service online. Companies should worry about public complaints and reports of their brand failures more than ever, suggests a new report from RightNow and Harris Interactive. Contrarily, they stand to make more money if they can deliver a superior experience, the report says.

The Customer Experience Impact 2010 report reveals that 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience. Of these, 73% cited rude staff as the primary pain point, and 55% said a company’s failure to resolve their problems in a timely manner drove them away.

Almost everybody surveyed, a full 95%, said after a bad customer experience they would “take action.” 79% of U.S. consumers said they blabbed about their negative customer experiences in public and amongst friends. Of consumers who took to social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to publicly air a complaint, 58% expected a response from the company, 42% expected a response from a company within a day, but only 22% said they’d actually gotten a response as a result of griping there.


In 2007, 60% of U.S. consumers said when they had a negative customer experience, they wanted to speak to a live agent about it. At that time, 26% preferred email, 5% chat, but Facebook and Twitter weren’t used by corporations to handle complaints and resolve problems. This year, 83% of U.S. consumers said they wanted to speak to a live agent, 66% preferred email, 12% chat, and 7% choose social networking sites when trying to resolve a problem.

The more digital communication options that consumers have, the more they crave human interaction in real time, apparently.

The cost of bad customer service

There are two types of costs that can be attributed to ‘BAD SERVICE’:

VISIBLE costs; for example:

• cost of complaints handling
• ombudsman issues and compensation
• re-work
• cost of incorrect invoicing
• commission paid to sales people for services later cancelled or compensated
• absenteeism and staff attrition
• Poor ‘word of mouth’ requiring increased defensive advertising resulting in higher customer acquisition costs etc…
  

And, INVISIBLE costs, for example:

• multiple contacts and hand-offs to deal with a single issue or complaint driving increased Customer Service FTE
• hidden Activities to deal with poor service problems
• lost sales due to lack of confidence in company service standards and ability to meet requirements
• lost revenue based the lifetime value of the customer when ‘churn’ is caused by service issues,etc…

The saying is: Quality is Free. Investing in Service Quality makes good business sen$e.