Mrs. K and I went shopping this morning and found a wallet on the floor.  It belonged to…well let’s just call her “Mrs. Smith” for the sake of the story.  Mrs. Smith’s purse was stuffed with pretty much every kind of plastic card you can imagine except for anything with a personal address or phone number on it.

But we thought that’s not a problem.  Mrs. Smith is a Barclays Bank customer and we can just phone her telephone banking hotline and then Barclays can pass our phone number to Mrs. Smith and she can come and collect her purse.  Simple; after all, what bank wouldn’t want to help a valued customer stressing out about her lost payment cards and personal data.

Or so we thought.

After the IVR labyrinth, we got a “human”.  Let’s not name names, but imagine that he’s called Edwin.

“Hello Edwin, we’d like to advise you that we’ve found a purse belonging to one of your valued customers.”

“Yes madam…”

“Yes.  It doesn’t have any of her personal contact details, so we phoned you.”

“Just drop the card into a local Barclay’s branch.”

“Great idea, but it’s a whole large purse full of lots of personal things and we know that she’ll be worried about having lost it.  Please can you contact your customer to tell them the purse has been found and pass on our contact details.”

“One moment please … I’m sorry madam, we don’t do that.”

“But what about your valued customer wasting her whole Sunday trying to find her purse?  Then spending Monday cancelling all her cards.  When you could just phone her now.”

“I’m sorry madam.  It’s company policy.  I suggest you hand it in at your local police station.

Causes of call centre customer service failure

How does a call centre end up being so utterly rubbish?  Here are a few thoughts:

1. Employee micro-management expunging any sense of personal initiative or responsibility.
2. Compliance culture ditto.
3. Management of outsourced call-centres through strictly detailed service level agreements.  If management by target worked, the shops would be full of great products from North Korea.  They aren’t and it doesn’t.
4. Badly scoped outsourcing arrangements and strict silos between inbound and outbound teams.
5. Outsourced call-centres are often run as projects.  The essence of good project management is to deliver exactly what’s expected. The essence of good service management is to deliver above expectations.  These are two opposite management “values”.

Over Sunday lunch, we imagined Mrs. Smith cancelling the rest of her day in a futile search for her purse.  While Edwin clocked up another exemplary day of customer service by handling our call in less than 60 seconds.

We’ve left the text of this blog post in Mrs. Smith’s purse so that she can discuss the meaning of customer service with her bank.

Related posts:

1. New utility customer service challenges
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
3. Contact evasion and how to avoid it

Can any company with bad customer service survive in a world of ubiquitous social media?

Here’s a small round-up of the many ways in which my local train company, First Capital Connect, is committing customer servicide.

• Twitter feed of real-time feed of passenger angst.
• Search YouTube for First Capital Connect and results are full of documentary evidence of lousy customer service.  The most witty reflection is below:

• Online government petition to end First Capital Connect’s franchise here.
• First Capital Connect official Facebook page (364 members).
• I hate First Capital Connect Facebook page (2,548 members).
• FirstCrapitalConnect parody site (Page 1 on Google for ‘First Capital Connect’).

Can’t help but think that as a shareholder, I’d be worried.  I can’t help but think that this weight of authentic, peer condemnation neutralises any investment that FCC could make in its brand.  Putting it another way, your customer service is your brand.

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3. New utility customer service challenges

• If it was a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world.
• 50% of UK mobile internet traffic is Facebook.  Imagine what that means for customer service word of mouth.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content.
• 200 million blogs exist and 34% of bloggers post opinions on products and services.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  14% trust advertising.

Bad customer service begins to sound like customer servicide doesn’t it?

There’s a great video here, which explores the social media revolution:

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1. Customer service or customer servicide?
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If you need to go to a health clinic, it’s useful to know how long you need to wait.  By giving customers this information, clinics can cut costs by smoothing out service demand peaks.

1. Check the clinic map  (here, or click on the map image).
2. Click a red circle to see a live webcam of the queue at the clinic.
3. Click a yellow triangle to see average and peak queue data.

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But I thought this was such a great presentation about why “online” continues to be a disruptive technology.

It encompasses beautifully why putting “eLipstick” on the pig of a fragmented legacy organisation doesn’t meet customers’ service and experience expectations.

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1. Contact evasion and how to avoid it
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
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I get unreasonably impatient with bad service but turn into a love-struck puppy when a company really impresses me.  But to do that, doesn’t just mean exceeding expectations.  It’s increasingly about doing the seemingly impossible.

My wife and I are just back from holiday in Cyprus.  The amazingly lovely Elysium Hotel gave us one of the best customer experiences of our lives.  So this is a ‘customer service postcard’ from our holiday.

The Elysium Hotel's warm customer service glow.

Day 1:  We get to our room late.  Drawing back the curtains we’re rewarded with a fabulous view of … the hotel car park.  This is NOT the view we thought we’d paid for.  Heather (the head receptionist) is apologetic even though we work out it’s probably a mistake by the travel agent not the hotel.  She sorts out a sea-view room, offers us dinner while the bags are moved and doesn’t even mention the fact that the new room is an upgrade.

Day 2:  Quite a few people have been marooned by the Icelandic volcano and the shutdown of Europe’s airspace.  Today they’re finally able to leave.  Lots of them are hugging the staff to say thank you and goodbye.  You don’t often see that at hotels…

Day 2: Alexis, the Head Porter says “Good morning Mr. & Mrs. Kirby”.  Four hundred guests are staying here and he remembers our names.

Day 3:  Our room key malfunctions.  My wife sits waif-like in the doorway while I go to reception. But a cleaner recognises her and lets her back into the room while I’m at reception.

Day 4:  Karl, the personal trainer at the gym, stays in his own time to give us a workout.  He’s a brilliant trainer too.

Day 5:  Our waiter, knows where we ate two nights ago and which restaurant we’re booked into the following night.  There are five different restaurants at the Elysium.  Aggelos, the Restaurant Supervisor tells me he remembers what his guests drink even if they haven’t been back for a year.

Day 6:  It’s our last night.  At the manager’s drinks party Aggelos, the Restaurant Supervisor, asks how our stay was.  We’re honestly and glowingly complementary … three hours later a box of chocolates is sent up to our room to thank us for our comments.

Staying at the Elysium left me with four thoughts about customer service:

1. Processes, journey mapping and experience design are necessary but not sufficient.
2. People need to be so highly trained, that they’re allowed to be themselves.
3. Everyone does customer service.  At the Elysium the cleaners are better at customer service than some hotels’ front-of-house staff.
4. Memory is one of the hotel’s service signatures.  I don’t care that some of it is done with a CRM system.  It gives the impression of a magic trick.  Every five star hotel is good.  So only something that seems impossible is really going to impress.

My only complaint about the hotel:  it’s so good, it stops me from seeing the rest of world.

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Related posts:

1. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
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The problem is that service is complex, cross-functional, rational and emotional.  In our experience,  there are five archetypal failure points of service management:

Five archetypes of customer service failure

1.  Drinking from the fire hydrant

Problem: High volume of unwanted and avoidable customer contact that soak up contact centre resource and add no value.  Most of this kind of contact isn’t caused by the service team.

Solution: A service management framework that makes root cause ownership of unwanted avoidable contact visible, quantified and owned by the function that caused it.

2.  Customer contact evasion

Problem: Managing down high volumes of contact by making it really, really hard for customers to contact us, even if it’s really important to them.

Solution: When avoidable, unwanted contact has been managed out, it’s possible to provide services when, where and how customers want.

3.  Dear ears

Problem:  Insight from customer contact is used to manage operations but not for strategic innovation of the product, proposition and service.

Solution: Analyse customer contact for strategic insight and make sure that senior, strategic executives get direct experience of the voice of the customer.

4. Scapegoat

Problem: Blaming the Customer Service department for problems that are caused by other functions or teams.  For example, the call centre blows up because of an widespread error sent out by the Billing team.

Solution: Identify root causes of service failure and make sure that the functions or departments that cause the problem, also carry the financial cost through transfer-pricing.

5.  Operation successful, patient dead

Problem: Using operational metrics (like Average Handling Time and First Contact Resolution) that don’t necessarily measure things about which customers really care.

Solution:  Implement a balanced scorecard that measures customer experience against brand and which tracks unwanted, avoidable contact.

Related posts:

1. Contact evasion and how to avoid it
2. How service teams can inspire product innovation
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Customer insight arms race

For £10,000 a report, anybody can buy as much customer surveying, benchmarking, customer ethnography, usability, psychodemographic segmentation, social network monitoring and integrated listening capability as they want.  There are two problems with driving innovation from this kind of insight:

1. Lots of organisations have deep pockets, so the pursuit of a commercial edge through third party solutions becomes an arms race rather than a competitive advantage.
2. These approaches are a step removed from reality.  They’re constructs.   They are to real customer experience what television is to reality or what air conditioning is to climate.

Contact centre Cassandras

By contrast, service teams are the most under-exploited resource for driving product and service innovation out of customer insight.  If this isn’t self-evident, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who spends the day in constant contact with customers?
• Who has most emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst?

Contact centre staff know exactly what customers love and hate.  They experience it viscerally every day.  But, Cassandra-like, their voice is often overlooked in strategic marketing and new product innovation.  Why?  The reasons boil down to a)  narrow service management focus on cost and operations, b) silo’s between service management and marketing c) service staff without the skills, systems or incentives to make a strategic difference and d) physical and cultural remoteness from the Board.  Visually, the problem looks like this:

Service management barriers to product innovation

The most powerful customer insight you’ll ever have?

All of these barriers can be broken down fairly easily, and for far less cost than many customer insight approaches.  Here are four key ways of doing it:

1. Get service agents to listen and probe for what customers are saying about competitors, products and features.  Make sure that this kind of insight can be captured and reported in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
2. Track service performance against brand values, and not just operational targets.
3. Conduct regular reviews of raw customer service feedback, searching for strategic product and service insight.
4. Give the Board regular, visceral, experience of the customer.  Board members should sit in on the call centre at least every month and should regularly listen to representative recordings of customer contact.

Related posts:

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2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential

People have dreamed of omniscience –of “knowing everything” – since the start of history.  Google brings it a big leap closer – free of charge – and gets eighty-million “Hate Google” search results for its trouble. “Hate Skype” gets an ungrateful 8.3 million and “Hate Facebook” a curmudgeonly 79 million results.

Existentially, customers may be hitting out at the utility’s reach and pervasiveness.  But there’s another profoundly controllable reason.  Customers are demanding a great service experience and that’s exactly what the new utilities struggle to provide when things go wrong.

Customer service asymmetry

The essence of the problem is the asymmetry between a massive customer base, low average revenue per user and therefore relatively tiny service resources.  For example, the generally accepted cost of taking a single call in a contact centre is about 5 times bigger than Skype’s average annual revenue per user.

This is compounded by customers’ high service expectations and the technologically-intense nature of online propositions.   The inherent risk in all of this is that a dark pool of customer angst, propagated across social networks, could undermine the sector, damaging its brands and putting a brake on monetising the user bases.  Visually, this is the calculus of the problem:

The customer service meltdown which Google experienced with the launch of its Nexus One phone is a vivid example of this problem.  See here.

The solution is to avoid customer problems, create elegant, effective self-service and then, intelligently, open up to customer contact.

Evading customer service?

Like tax, there’s a subtle but important difference between contact evasion and contact avoidance.  Evasion lands you in jail and avoidance makes you more money.  Utilities need to move away from strategies that evade customer service contact.

New utilities need to declare a zero-tolerance war on all forms of value-destroying customer problem.  If a process causes customer issues it gets redesigned; if text causes confusion it gets re-written and if technology doesn’t work it, gets replaced.

Self-service needs to be elegant, highly usable and integrated with all the other service channels so that customers have a choice.

With these approaches embedded, it should be possible to reduce like-for-like service demand by 50% a year on a repeating basis.

Achieving that begins to provide the headroom to open up to customers intelligently and without “drinking from the fire hydrant”.  Initially, this could be through premium service offerings, call back or intelligent click-to-chat utilities that match service demand to capacity.

Ultimately, the goal should be to make brilliant basic customer service available to everyone.

Related posts:

1. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
2. Contact evasion and how to avoid it
3. Bad customer service is dead

Making it really hard for customers to contact us (even if it’s important).

Just like taxes, there’s contact avoidance and there’s contact evasion.  One is a perfectly sensible, reasonable response to high volumes of customer contact.  The other lands you in trouble.

Service experiences that make you go grrr…

This weekend, I landed in trouble with a service “experience” (I use the word loosely) provided by a well-known DVD rental company.  I wanted to cancel my subscription.

Despite being a web business, the only way of doing that was to phone.

After twenty minutes of muzak … click.  The phone went dead.  My emotional stance went from “this is a fine company, but just maybe not for me” to “I hate this bunch of time-wasting charlatans”.  Definitely unfair, but that’s customer emotions for you.

What is contact evasion?

Contact evasion is an easy response to high call volumes that makes customers angry.  In a service economy, customer anger is toxic.   From experience, here are the top five contact evasion strategies

1. Being closed when the customer needs help, e.g. bank branches that are only open in working hours.
2. Not providing channels that the customer wants to use, e.g. a website that doesn’t provide a phone channel.
3. Hiding contact details deep in a website or behind a labyrinth multi-level options.
4. Not empowering or training agents to be able to actually help callers as opposed to just taking messages for other departments.
5. Glacially slow response times that don’t meet customers’ expectations.

How to avoid contact evasion

There’s no reason why any organisation needs evade customer contact.  What’s needed is an active service management framework that lets you be easily contactable without drinking from the fire hydrant of customer demand for service. The service management framework needs to:

1. Makes the root causes and cost of contact visible.
2. Makes expensive, avoidable and unwanted contact the clear responsibility of the team, function or department that actually causes it.  Usually, that’s not the service department!
3. Builds helpful, highly usable self-service.
4. Mitigates things that predictably cause peaks in service demand.

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Related posts:

1. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
2. New utility customer service challenges
3. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron