The Customer Service Survey
The Internet Will Save or Destroy You
Thu - March 8, 2007 03:18 PM in
"Dysfunctional consumer companies know only two modes of customer service: Abusive contempt, or slobbering, cringing remorse."
So begins the summary of Cory Doctorow's column yesterday in Information Week, describing his girlfriend's experience trying to get a Sony laptop repaired under an extended warranty.
Abusive contempt: when the outsourced repair company refused to fix the broken laptop after they reassembled it improperly after a service visit.
Slobbering cringing remorse: after posting the story to a popular weblog, Sony dispatched a SWAT team of five senior executives to move whatever mountains required to get the laptop fixed.
Of course it would have been more efficient to simply fix the laptop properly in the first place. That's not Cory's main point.
His point is that large companies tend to be organized in functional silos, and things often go wrong when a customer needs to cross between silos. There's simply nobody with the responsibility of making sure that everything goes smoothly at the boundaries between silos.
I see the same thing a lot, even within the narrow confines of customer service. For example, many companies manage their live customer service agents separately from their automated customer service. The two are often measured separately, with different performance goals, different customer satisfaction surveys, and sometimes they are even controlled by entirely different departments.
One astonishing symptom is that surprisingly few large customer service operations even have the ability to record an entire phone call from end to end.
Given that the customer perceives the phone call as a single interaction (part automated and part human), this is absurd. No wonder customer service gets such a bad rap: maybe the remarkable fact is that service is as good as it is, given the organizational handicaps which are so often imposed.
Cory's proposed solution is to create the position of corporate ombudsman, someone who's job is to bridge the different organizational silos, find the gaps, and act as the customer's advocate. But really, isn't that supposed to be the job of a customer service representative? Sadly, CSRs are usually the most firmly siloed employees in the entire organization, and very few are empowered to do anything outside their narrow responsibility.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Abusive contempt: when the outsourced repair company refused to fix the broken laptop after they reassembled it improperly after a service visit.
Slobbering cringing remorse: after posting the story to a popular weblog, Sony dispatched a SWAT team of five senior executives to move whatever mountains required to get the laptop fixed.
Of course it would have been more efficient to simply fix the laptop properly in the first place. That's not Cory's main point.
His point is that large companies tend to be organized in functional silos, and things often go wrong when a customer needs to cross between silos. There's simply nobody with the responsibility of making sure that everything goes smoothly at the boundaries between silos.
I see the same thing a lot, even within the narrow confines of customer service. For example, many companies manage their live customer service agents separately from their automated customer service. The two are often measured separately, with different performance goals, different customer satisfaction surveys, and sometimes they are even controlled by entirely different departments.
One astonishing symptom is that surprisingly few large customer service operations even have the ability to record an entire phone call from end to end.
Given that the customer perceives the phone call as a single interaction (part automated and part human), this is absurd. No wonder customer service gets such a bad rap: maybe the remarkable fact is that service is as good as it is, given the organizational handicaps which are so often imposed.
Cory's proposed solution is to create the position of corporate ombudsman, someone who's job is to bridge the different organizational silos, find the gaps, and act as the customer's advocate. But really, isn't that supposed to be the job of a customer service representative? Sadly, CSRs are usually the most firmly siloed employees in the entire organization, and very few are empowered to do anything outside their narrow responsibility.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 03:18 PM | | | | |