The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
If You're Doing So Well Now, Why Do You Need To get Better?
Wednesday - December 07, 2005 02:18 PM in
I've mentioned before how, while attending various speeches and seminars on call centers and customer care, that testing service quality for ease of use and caller satisfaction was seldom addressed, and if mentioned at all, was as an afterthought. At VocaLabs we're most pleased to see that changing into a "You must test" message. So now our challenge is to get the world to understand that there are satisfaction and usability test methods that give false impressions of service levels, data easily misinterpreted and a false sense that the company is serving its' customers well.
Peter and I are just back from a seminar given by Enterprise Integration Group (EIG) on how to design self service phone based customer care applications, where we gave a short presentation on testing methods to find design issues and so improve caller satisfaction. I do want to praise EIG as these guys really know their stuff, and if you want to learn how to build a quality customer care automation system, there is no better source of expertise than EIG; but the point is that one attendee in particular kept asking questions about how to change management attitudes about the customer service operation as a back office cost center rather than the department delivering first impressions of a company and a critically important part of the business.
I had to answer this person's query, both in front of the group and later in a long one on one discussion, by saying the call center manager was often his own worst enemy. The gist of my answer was that the manager spends 11 months of the year telling the executive team what a great job they're doing in customer care (often via the use of questionable statistics that give faulty impressions of service quality). Then come budget time when the manager asks for money to spend to improve service and gets shot down; she shouldn't be surprised. Management thinks: "Why do you need this expensive solution to a problem you've been telling me all year we don't have?"
I can easily see how that mix of seemingly disparate impressions can make for some tricky dancing, and the best advice I could give this fellow was to alter his tactics into: "We do this thing X well with these results today. X is an improvement over last period's X minus and is consistent with our competition. But if you'll let me do this project, by spending $, we'll go to X+2 and the +2 will contribute more $$$ to company revenues (give the reasons why backed by solid data) and put us well ahead of the competition.
By taking the manager role from the "reward me because I lowered costs" mode and putting him/her into the "reward me because I contributed to revenues" mode is a sure path to getting the capital needed to improve service quality. And a darn good career enhancing strategy besides.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
I had to answer this person's query, both in front of the group and later in a long one on one discussion, by saying the call center manager was often his own worst enemy. The gist of my answer was that the manager spends 11 months of the year telling the executive team what a great job they're doing in customer care (often via the use of questionable statistics that give faulty impressions of service quality). Then come budget time when the manager asks for money to spend to improve service and gets shot down; she shouldn't be surprised. Management thinks: "Why do you need this expensive solution to a problem you've been telling me all year we don't have?"
I can easily see how that mix of seemingly disparate impressions can make for some tricky dancing, and the best advice I could give this fellow was to alter his tactics into: "We do this thing X well with these results today. X is an improvement over last period's X minus and is consistent with our competition. But if you'll let me do this project, by spending $, we'll go to X+2 and the +2 will contribute more $$$ to company revenues (give the reasons why backed by solid data) and put us well ahead of the competition.
By taking the manager role from the "reward me because I lowered costs" mode and putting him/her into the "reward me because I contributed to revenues" mode is a sure path to getting the capital needed to improve service quality. And a darn good career enhancing strategy besides.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
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