Critical Priorities for Extraordinary Service
What are the vital few ideas and actions that really make a difference with customers and clients?
After reflection, it seems there are thousands of
tiny things that all make a necessary and positive contribution, but just
five areas that are make or break.
Hire People who Care
You can teach a person to do a better job of faking a service attitude, but
why not just start out with people who actually care about your customers.
They cost the same amount (unless you're paying so little that McDonalds is
stealing your best reps), but the caring person will actually go the extra
mile and solve problems for clients when it counts. Anyone can provide great
service when everything is going well, but you need the big league empaths
to share the love when the customer is scared and angry, all the systems are
down, and the management team is out on the links wooing the next client.
One very large retail store in New York City had signs posted by all their
cash registers: If any employee is particularly discourteous, please let us
know. Normal discourtesy they don't care about, but that particularly
discourteous clerk was going to be toast.
Invest in the Value Chain
There are many variants on this value chain idea but the simplest
formulations still work. Happy employees create happy customers, which
creates happy shareholders; in that priority order. Break any link in this
chain, reverse the order, and the entire focus on quality falls apart. These
are not just words, they have to be supported by the budgeting process, by
the actions of senior leaders, and by the company's investment priorities.
If you tack up the value chain banners and then cut your service staff to
make the quarterly numbers, you've just wiped out the last five years of
happy talk about quality.
Automation
We did a study of employees processing claims manually versus employees
processing claims with an automated system. It wasn't the greatest automated
system in the world, in fact it was ugly and rudimentary. The error rate for
the manual solution was 74% higher than the automated system. People are
blessed and cursed with highly flexible short-term memories. So flexible
that they forget tasks they haven't completed and remember, as complete,
tasks they haven't even started. Automated systems just have memory, no
flexibility, no forgetting, and no daydreaming.
Modern CRM systems can raise the bar on service quality so high that no one
can compete effectively without them. Client expectations are raised beyond
the performance capabilities of legacy implementations.
Training & Re-Training
The commercial insurance brokerage industry relies primarily on on-the-job
training. That is a euphemism for no training. Their error rates typically
require 30-50% of their transactional activity to be corrected and their
files have enormous gaps in both accuracy and completeness. By contrast the
financial service industry invests 5-10 weeks of classroom training in each
front line employee and then assigns a coach to each employee for another
one to six months. Their error rates are usually under 5% and their files
are highly automated, and predominately, both accurate and complete.
On-the-job training has a fatal flaw: the trainers themselves don't know
what they're doing or they don't know how to teach. They're happy to teach,
but they might as well be teaching juggling or macramé to the employees; at
least the going out of business sale might be more entertaining.
Leadership Involvement
Everyone thinks of leadership involvement as the Chairman or CEO wandering
into the service center twice a year and pretending to answer calls. Senior
involvement and symbolic support for quality initiatives is certainly
important. But the real leadership involvement has to start with the
supervisors. Very few companies invest in their supervisors. Often the
supervisors are experienced front line representatives selected for their
first and last promotion in the company. The reality is that these
supervisors are accomplishing one of the most difficult development
transitions in the organization; from individual expert to team leader.
Those 10-25 people who are now in their charge will succeed or fail with the
customers based on how well they are led by someone who is often leading for
the first time in their career. Having highly technical supervisors in place
who are also accomplished coaches and leaders is a make or break for world
class quality.
Focusing on getting these five areas right will establish a solid foundation
for the delivery of an extraordinary customer experience; and afford you the
time needed to take up the other thousand tasks that complete the picture.
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