Delivering the Service that Customers Want.

Change for most businesses is accelerating and customers, prospects and others are becoming more demanding about the service they want and how and when they want it.

It’s a challenge for any organisation to ensure that its service quality meets the increasing expectations of those who contact us for help or information or to buy something.

Here’s a story about customer service and new technology from over thirty years ago that still has resonance today:
 
I worked for a large New York bank that pioneered ATMs in its branches to take the pressure off its overworked and high-cost tellers. It was a big step and, notwithstanding extensive customer research, no-one was quite sure how customers would react to these “impersonal” machines.

To encourage their use the bank reduced transaction costs for customers using ATMs and soon found long lines for the ATMs and eerily empty banking halls staffed by under-occupied tellers. It transpired that rather than having to deal with an irascible teller most customers preferred to deal with a machine and were actually prepared to pay a premium to do so.

The lesson I learned from this story is that it pays to understand how customers, prospects, and the rest of us want to deal with an organisation and why. In doing so we need to challenge conventional wisdom, especially since today, new media, particularly social networking, is changing how people expect us to communicate.

These new media also ensure that news of outstandingly good or just bad service gets disseminated very quickly to our customers, prospects, competitors, shareholders and anyone with an interest in our business. The costs of repairing the damage can be very high indeed.

Even though technology-delivered-service is often seen as more cost efficient (and therefore to be maximised) and good customer service people costly (and therefore to be minimised), designing your customer interactions only on this basis won’t win the support of your customers.

(By the way, if you haven’t already discovered it, you’ll almost certainly find that because they deal with your customers and prospects daily, your front line customer service people probably know more about the nuances and problems of your customer-facing processes. And they’ll almost certainly have many more potential solutions than the Marketing Department.)

The survival of the fittest

As technologies and software evolve, communications improve and costs plummet, service can be delivered from almost anywhere on earth where language and infrastructure permit.

At the same time the costs of well-trained people capable of delivering high quality service people has increased.
    
Companies have also discovered that many people have preferences for being served by people located in the UK.

Combine these factors with an environment where second class service is punished quickly and ferociously and where organisations - whether public or private sector - are being squeezed for cash, then the question is what to do.

The place to start is to understand the minutiae of your customers’ journey and the detailed impact this journey has on the design of your customer-facing processes. If you can design automated business processes and systems that deliver what the customer wants without having to resort to complaining to a human being then you have the solution. You will still need to continually upgrade and extend the system to handle the increasing number of media that your customers will want to use.


Japan has shown how a dedicated six sigma approach delivers automobiles with superior reliability and design. What the Japanese did for cars so we can do for our service businesses. Over time people will become increasingly comfortable using good automated systems rather than people.

In the mean time both are needed.


Peter Wesley

Peter is a partner at BusinessNext Limited, an experienced Marketing Director in and Consultant to Service Industries.
If you’d like to contact him to talk about any aspect of this article call him on (+44) 07887 944850.