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
3. New utility customer service challenges

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