Episode #147: Why We Mess Up Customer Service

Poor customer service really irritates us. When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the fIrm. We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it. We don’t see the processes as separate. In this Age of Distraction, people’s time has become compressed. They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much permanently. We all seem to have less time thaN before so we become cross if things from the internet don’t load or load too slowly. If we have to wait we don’t like it, regardless of what the circumstance. We are perpetually impatient. Here is a deadly breeding ground for customer dissatisfaction.

There are five elements usually driving customer unhappiness with us.

1. Process

We need processes to run our organisations on a daily basis. This includes how we communicate and align the features and value of the offering with the customer’s expectations. In constant drives for great efficiencies, we tend to mould the processes to suit the organisation’s needs, in prefer to the customers. Japan is a classic in having staff run the business based on what is in the manual. If a decision requires any flexibility, this is usually dismissed because the staff only do what the manual says. As the customer, we often want things at the odds with the manual or we want something that diverges from what the manual says.

Take a look at your own procedures. Are there areas where you can allow the staff to exercise their own judgment? Can you empower them to solve the customer’s problem, regardless of what is in the manual. Our processes often become covered in barnacles over the years and from tine to time we need to scrape them off and re-examine why we insist things can only be done in this way.

2. Roles

Who does what in the organisation. This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japanese staff, in my experience, want their accountabilities very precisely specified and preferably to be made as tiny as possible. They are scared of making a mistake and being held accountable if things go wrong. They have learnt that the best way of doing that is to become as small a target as possible.

The usual role split works well, but what happens when people leave, are off sick or away on holiday? This is when things go awry. Covering absent colleagues requires flexibility and this is not a well developed muscle in Japan. What usually happens is everything is held in abeyance until the responsible person turns up again. Customers don’t respect those timelines and they imagine that everyone working for the firm is responsible for the service rather than only the absent colleague. We need a strong culture of we pick up the fallen sword and go to battle to help our customer, if we are the only person around. This is particularly the case with temp staff. They are often answering phone calls or dealing with drop in visitors and they need to be trained on being flexible and fixing the customer issue.

3. Interpersonal Issues

How customer service personnel get along with each other and other departments is key. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty. Sales overselling and over promising customers drives the back office team crazy. They have to fulfil the order and it is usually in a time frame that puts tons of pressure on the team. This is how we get the break down of trust and animosity reigning inside the machine. This leads to a lack of communication and delivery sequences can get derailed. When colleagues are angry, they tend not to answer the customer’s phone call as sweetly as we might hope. We need to be careful to balance out these contradictions and have protocols in place where we can minimise the damage. What are your protocols and does everyone know and adhere to them. Now would be a good time to check up on that situation.

4. Direction

How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is key. This is the glue. We need this when things are not going according to plan. When we grant people the freedom to uphold all of these highfalutin words in the vision statement with their independent actions, then we introduce the needed flexibility to satisfy clients. Are your people able to take these guiding statements issued from on high and then turn them into solutions for clients?

5. External Pressures

The resources available to the customer service departments such as time and money become critical to solving customer issues. How much control do we give to the people on the front line to solve problems for our customers? Often we weight them down with rules, regulations and procedures, which make them inflexible. Check how much freedom you have granted to your team to fix a problem for a client? You may find that during the last recession you wound that whole process in very tight and forgot to loosen it off, after times got better.

We need to get under the waterline and check for a build up of barnacles impeding our customer service provision. Scrape them off wherever you find them and have a steady routine to always take a look and see what has built up over time. Invariably you will find something that can be removed or streamlined, that the customer will appreciate. Remember, if you can do this and your rivals can’t or don’t, that is a big advantage in the customer satisfaction stakes.