Episode #136: Customer Service - Problems and Solutions

Things go wrong. Deliveries don’t turn up or are incorrect. Dates and deadlines are missed. The quality promised doesn’t eventuate or live up to the promise. Internal communication isn’t working well so the coordination of the delivery of the service is confused. One part of the organisation oversells the deal and the other bit cannot deliver on the inflated promises. Customers complain. Japanese customers in particular, really complain. Most of this society is rather muted but they let it all hang out, when they are unhappy about some service or product delivery gone wrong.

PRIDE is the problem. This is an acronym for the usual five suspects causing the issues.

1. Process

This is the accumulation of how the organisation has divined how to best operate. This involves communication and aligning the features and value of the product or service with customer expectations.

2. Roles

Who does what in the organisation? This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japan is genius at making sure no one takes responsibility for anything. The consensus decision making system means we are all responsible, so none of us are individually responsible.

3. Interpersonal issues

How well do the customer service personnel get along with each other and with other departments. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty. Marketing hates sales, sales is hated by the back office, everyone hates IT. Because mistakes are so seriously frowned upon in Japan, everyone tries their hardest to shift the blame elsewhere. This leads to internal feuds, strife, vendettas and internal guerrilla warfare.

4. Direction

How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is critical. Japan is curious in that those at the bottom can quite wilfully ignore what those at the top want to happen, if they don’t agree with it. Poor performance and not following direction won’t get you fired in Japan, so in a way, the troops are in constant state of rebellion. Senior management imagine that middle management is making sure everyone is on board with the direction of the company. Not true. The “what” is communicated and the “how” is worked out, but the “why” has often gone missing in action.

5. External pressure

The resources available to the customer service department such as time and money can be insufficient. There may or may not be capacity to control your own destiny.

Okay, so what can do about all of this PRIDE coming before a fall? We need to get consensus and collaboration about solving the issue. We begin by involving people from each section to form a project team to look at the root causes of the issues. Putting a band aid on the wound doesn’t deal with why the wound was there in the first place.

We craft a statement of the problem. We need to define exactly what is the issue we want to deal with. There may be a lot of noise surrounding the problem, but we need to cut through to the essence. Having identified what the issue is we now need to look for the drivers, the causes. We need to trace back to the source of the problem. If that is not forthcoming then that tells us that our systems are weak and unclear. Using brainstorming techniques we now look at possible solutions we could apply. There are no dumb ideas at this stage and no evaluation taking place. We want to be awash with ideas and we will sort them out in the next step. Taking the ideas, we attach priorities to them, to isolate out which ideas are the strongest.

We now attach names, milestones, budgets, evaluations, etc. to the plan, to put the solution in place. We monitor it and make changes where needed. We need excellent communication about what is happening. We need to make sure the key people are involved and that everyone is committed to fixing the issues.

Despite all of this excellent planning, future issues will arise. We have to be vigilant and ensure that we can take quick action, employing this system immediately. Making modifications on the way through is way better than having to build everything from scratch. Keep this template handy and roll it out whenever major incidents pop up. We never lack for challenges in business so there will always be plenty of scope for refining our skills through opportunities to practice.