With great power comes great responsibility

A good day in the office for most of us involves meeting targets, cracking that tough code or just making sure your boss is happy. But what if your job description involves bringing a smile on a customer’s face?

Imagine walking into your favorite breakfast place in the morning and encountering a smiling staff who responds to your requests, proactively helps you and gives you top class service. On occasions such as these even the quality of the food can be overlooked to an extent. This can set the mood for the rest of your day. At the same time, I’m sure you can imagine the opposite. Not a pretty picture at all, therefore I shall not paint it.

Customer Service representatives need to realise that they have great power in their hands to lighten up a customer’s day (As seen in this video)  By doing this they can ensure loyalty to not just a tangible i.e. the product but also an intangible which is the service. Companies need to understand how strong a differentiator this can be and devise ways and means of getting their employees involved.

How can companies help set the tone for the day for a customer?

Take the 'easy route'

Matt Dixon and Lauren Pragoff in their HBR article ‘Call Center Confidential: The Underbelly of Customer Centricity’ remind us of the following 3 statements you always hear when you call into a Contact Center

 

Excerpt

·         "This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes" 

·         "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

·         "How satisfied are you with the service you received today?"

When you hear them, these phrases are good warning signs that you're dealing with an organization more focused on internal priorities than on what customers actually care about.      
                                                                                                                                                           

The true problem here is that these questions help in determining certain metrics which are religiously churned up but never converted into anything concrete.  Companies concentrate way too much on numbers which are really internal measures and not looking at specific customer needs which begs the question – ‘Are you reducing effort and making interactions easy for your customer?’

Companies obsess over metrics such as post call CSATs, quality assurance ratings and call closure. They have people working on just improving these stats but rarely is anyone working on making that conversation, which generates these stats, easier for the customer. Efforts need to start shifting to reducing customer effort. A customer should admire a company for quick response and resolution time as it is surely, what they want.

There is an urgent need for top management to start looking at metrics that indicate ‘ease of use’, ‘lack of effort’ and the like. They need to realize that customer centricity can be about metrics such as reducing customer effort and that driving these numbers up can also considerably improve service delivery.

So can customer service leaders begin to usher in an era where ‘Ease of Use’ becomes the defining metric?

Oshawa's Customer Service Strategy

We as consumers are tuned to demand good customer service from product vendors we deal with. Yet never seem to expect the same from our government and municipal bodies. We resign with an attitude that ‘this can never change’. This sentiment holds true across the world. We always seem to expect a lower standard from our government bodies. When we go to pay our utilities bill or enquire or complain, the response is far from satisfactory. Generally, having several contact points or multiple locations offering government service may cause a barrier to efficient service delivery for citizens.  As a result, service delivery strategies that worked in the past need to evolve to reflect changes in attitudes and expectations of customers. So why aren’t we demanding better service? And more importantly are our elected bodies looking for solutions?

The city of Oshawa in Canada is an exemplary example of a city that made customer service a priority. The city hired RBosch Consulting to execute this impressive plan. A study was initiated through interviews with the Mayor, city councilors and a Working Committee instituted for this purpose. Using data from these interviews, RBosch designed a set of guiding principles which define Oshawa’s customer service. They identified opportunities for service improvements and finally delivered a roadmap for them. Goals were drawn up which would be assessed time to time and a plan for a Contact Center implementation was also put into place to enable a centralized service delivery mechanism.

Many elements came together for the city of Oshawa to get it right. The critical success factors for this ambitious project were:

• Senior Management and Political Support
• Adequate Resources
• Staff Buy in and Communication
• Clear Vision
• Enabling Technology

The above points are important for any customer service strategy implementation irrespective of the scale and scope of the project. This initiative by the city of Oshawa isn’t unique because it is a city municipal body realizing the importance of good customer service, it is because when expectations are low on that parameter, they still went ahead and executed a strategy that can only improve customer satisfaction and goodwill in the long run. That is true vision, something many service and product vendors need to learn.

So why is customer service not as important a priority for companies jostling for market share and mind share today?

Making your Brand All Pervasive

In the HBR article by Anand Subramaniam, ‘Six Ways to Build Your Brand Through Customer Service’ highlights the manner in which companies seem to forget brand building, as an exercise, at the customer service level. Building on this thought, he further outlines steps which can be taken by companies and the next ten minutes of reading shall, hopefully, take this thought to its fruition.

Expensive advertising, flashy brand ambassadors, thousands of minutes of prime time television space and ‘shout at the top of your voices’ ambient campaigns seem to be the only way companies believe a brand can be built. They cannot be blamed for this view as it as an approach that has worked effectively but only in the short term. Companies do not realize that the only significant outcome of the above measures is creating excitement and not necessarily building the brand. So how about using ‘customer service’ as a game changer for your brand building efforts?

To build your brand using customer service, aligning your brand intent to a strategic intent becomes imperative. A company needs to look at its overall strategic direction and brand related communications. From there it should look at its available resources and develop a plan around its existing customer service practices to ensure the brand spends more time building itself in the customer service stage. To do this a company has to put certain checklists in place.

-          Companies need to ensure they can build brand aligned processes into the various touch points accessible to the customer. This can start from a quick response system to customer complaints to even human assisted customer service over self service in case of high touch brands. Care of this magnitude will always be rewarded with greater brand recognition and loyalty.

-          Companies need to follow up the above measures with brand aligned metrics that allow them to judge success and work on improvements. Brands which are high touch need to look beyond routine customer service metrics to numbers that can help map service intent to the brand intent.

-          Unifying knowledge bases and customer service touch points can be another valuable step in aligning brand and service. By brand aligning your touch points a company can ensure similar treatment of customers across channels which guarantee the customer hearing the same brand message across channels.

The above measures mainly emphasize the need to align your brand with all customer service related activities. By doing that a customer can easily connect with the brand, instead of just connecting with the product, which in the long run builds stronger brands with defined brand commitments and not just flashy flirtations.

This is what we think, what do you think?

What I took away from Chapter 7

Just done with the two day Custommerce National Convention Chapter 7. Wonderful event. Good speakers and some key insights.

Experience is clearly here to stay. Heard from the speakers: “Business IS Experience”.  Focus on growth, scale and acquisitions, probably drives attention away from delivering critical and promised customer experience. Data presented to establish the co-relationship between great customer experience and bottom lines. The focus on customer experience is a new way of doing business.  More data and some hilarious anecdotal evidence showing how companies promise an experience only to deceive.

Bruce Temkin first articulated the thought of experience as a differentiator in 2007. Having said which generating a desired experience and using that to differentiate is as old as marketing thought , as old as positioning, as old as differentiation itself, or any of the core tenets of marketing. Closer to home Servion articulated the thought of customer experience as the key differentiator at the time of creating its contact optimization model.

Employees are critical to the process of creating a differentiated customer experience at the service point. The examples were uplifting particularly in the case of the Taj employees under attack on 26/11. There is a moment in every conference where the entire crowd is caught up in it mind heart and soul – and I must say that that moment belonged to the Taj. Much is spoken and written about employee engagement and empowerment in this space – there has been little measurable action on the ground.  Senior management sit up and take notice.  Pushing out the vision around the desired experience to the employees and translating it into behaviour on the ground is YOUR job.

Sub context – that of alignment. Every part of the organization needs to align to the thought and goals of the thought of customer experience.  Enough examples of great copy and tag lines and completely divergent behaviour on the ground. Not surprising – each of us as customers experiences this dissonance every day between what the brand promises and how we get treated by our service providers.

Last and not least was the thought around change. Change IS the only constant.  Lot of insights around changing generations (X,Y,C), changing ecosystem (connected, mobile), changing information/media eco-system (ability to blast dissatisfaction across thousands in seconds) Increasing disloyalty. Startling fact – 75% of SATISFIED customers changed their brands! Scary!!

Going out on a limb:  “the changing nature of the human being” is something that is wrongly ascribed (IMHO) solely to all these ecosystem factors and changing technology. Mostly we (businesses) TEACH customers to be disloyal!  Every day in every way most of my service providers tell me that I am in NO way benefitted by being an old and loyal customer. “Change brands as often as you can” - they tell me. And who am I to resist?! J

Reflects the core points made by all the speakers. Too much focus on scale, growth, acquisition and practically everything at the cost of experience.  Disengaged, un-empowered employees consistently fail to internalize and deliver the promised experience.  Non-aligned (desirable as a mechanism of foreign policy perhaps, but here, disastrous!) structures, systems and processes.  Teaches little old me to be disloyal!

 Check out the presentations – lots of data around these points!

The views expressed are mine, ONLY mine, and nobody else can be put in jail for them! 

G.Shankaran Nair

President - Corporate Strategy

Servion Global Solutions

Service? What service?

What's the problem with customer service — money or the lack of empowerment?

All of us are consumers and some of us are service providers and every consumer is different in her own way. Some of them are constantly teaching us a thing or two while most of us obstinately refuse to learn or change. Having made some dramatic statements that run the risk of sounding pompous, let me cut to the chase and to my own story and see if there is any learning. It started on a Sunday afternoon, which, incidentally, happened to be the third day of the Nottingham Test which was at an interesting stage. At least, it was, when I was watching it at the airport waiting for my flight to be called. England and Bell were just turning it around.

I am sure you are asking me why any sane guy would travel on Sunday evening, particularly on the third day of an important Test match. But then I am a committed executive (!) serving his company and (hopefully) his clients in the bargain and more importantly because I wanted to start a training programme at 9 a.m. the following day. At times my own dedication shocks me!

But less of me and more of my travails as a customer, as I flew into Mumbai on the day that city received the maximum rainfall this year.

King, pauper or in between

As I am a King Club Member, I flew with the “king of good times”. After all, who wants to be a mere passenger when he has the option of being a guest at Mr Mallya's house? The flight was on time, which was great news to a passenger to whom delayed flights are as common as Praveen Kumar's altercations with umpires, who are reluctant to raise their fingers to fervent and frantic appeals. But that was later. Before that, I settled into my seat ready to watch a third-rate Hindi movie as has been my habit for several months now. I kept pressing every button in the seat and kept looking anxiously at the screen as a teenager might at the bill when he takes his girlfriend to an expensive restaurant. There was no light at the end of the television screen and there was neither a C-grade movie nor a news channel which might have the score at the bottom of the screen. I almost lost it.

But then I remembered I was on good behaviour (which my family might not believe). I have these bouts of geniality, which, sadly though, are not all that frequent but come to the rescue of service providers. So I politely asked the stewardess what the problem was. She smiled sweetly. Sometimes I wonder how airline stewardesses can smile after pouring scalding hot coffee on your thigh! While she had done nothing as exciting or as hot, she said politely that the entertainment system was not working.

Of course, while there was a glossy brochure in the pouch which listed all the programmes and which is one of the reasons why I travel by Kingfisher, the reality was that the entertainment was not working. While mechanical failures are a fact of life, human failures are a little more difficult to stomach.

I wish, I only wish someone had made an announcement or better still made an apology for the entertainment not working. Is that too much to ask for? Do guests have a say, or is all this talk of treating passengers as guests a mere line?

Ian Bell has a good time

Whether I was having a good time or not, Bell was having a great time as Indians were treating him to long hops outside the off stump and full tosses on the leg stump. He was being truly treated as a guest in the Indian dressing room. Well, soon the batsman was thinking of scones and tea and trooped off for tea even before the umpires called for the break.

The Indians woke up and pulled off the bails and the dozing Bell suddenly realised that the party was over. Soon the Indians had a couple of guests in their dressing room as they tiredly sipped their tea. The English captain and coach promptly made their appearance. After all, mental disintegration is complete when the opposition team is not allowed to have its tea in peace, right? Anyway, they asked Dhoni to reconsider the appeal and Dhoni, perhaps recalling what his ancestors were regularly doing till 1947, agreed, albeit reluctantly.

I had missed all that though I was being flooded with Blackberry messengers and text messages. I went to my hotel, keen to catch up.

Who wants TV; radio is the medium of today

Our hosts had put us up in a hotel called VITS. I had never heard of that hotel, but trusted the judgment of our hosts. I was pleasantly surprised to note that it was from the same group as Orchid, a hotel I had stayed in several times in the past and where the South Indian restaurant Vindhyas had effortlessly increased my weight.

The room was nice, the layout similar to the Orchid and I switched on the TV set, in pleasurable anticipation of an Indian revival. Imagine my horror when I realised that the TV set had a mere 15 channels and Star Cricket was not one of them!

My geniality evaporated and my scowl matched Harbhajan's expression, which has been a feature of this English tour. But one of the features of the Ramanujams is that we don't take things lying down, particularly when it comes to the gentleman's game, more so when Dhoni had done the ultimate gentlemanly thing even if it was under duress!

I called the duty manager and there was a Maharashtrian gentleman there. I asked him in my sweetest tone as to why there was no Star Cricket in the room and as a Maharashtrian whether he watched the cricket at all. One of the basic principles of service providers is not to try to be fresh, particularly when their customers are angry. Perhaps thinking he would endear himself to me, he said that he too wanted to watch the cricket but what to do the cable had a technical problem. I asked to speak to his boss and he said I could do so the next morning.

I was quickly losing it and ran the risk of being banned as I asked for the number of the boss. He politely refused. I was ranting now and asked for the technician. The technician promptly arrived and said in his truthful way that Star Cricket was not being subscribed to. I was mad, but not mad enough to not follow the match and did so on my computer, as I heard the Test Match Special as I had done three decades ago, even as I waited for the next morning and the general manager of the hotel.

The morning after

Morning followed murkily, India was in the doldrums and I was getting more annoyed by the moment. I promptly met the Front Office Manager of the hotel, who was all smiles and said he knew about the problem and would fix it. I reminded him that the match started at 3.30 p.m.

I went back at 5 p. m., after the sessions, hoping against hope. Well, nothing had changed, neither India's fortunes nor the TV channel. When I confronted the manager, he said he had called the cable operator and there was a ‘technical problem”. I was amazed.

Did he really think I was born yesterday? Even an eight-year-old would know that it was DTH, which could be subscribed to at short notice and I had volunteered to pay! In hindsight it was probably better that I did not watch India's humiliation but my misery was complete when Geoffrey Boycott compared India to Bangladesh and unfavourably at that on radio, my now trusted media partner.

I walked morosely out to dinner to the restaurant to be greeted by posters of Mr Kamat, the owner of the hotel (someone I admire enormously), speaking of his inspirations. I just thought that he might have been better served worrying about his customers. But then who am I to complain about big hotel magnates? And yet as a customer, I started wondering about what ails customer service in the hospitality industry specifically and in the country in general. What was the problem? The money or lack of empowerment?

Do we empower routinely?

I believe we handle routine service issues well but get into trouble when the issue is non-routine. Should the lobby manager have been empowered? Should the manager of the hotel not have tried to be “smart” with his guest and told him something that was patently false? Should I have quietly gone away thinking dark thoughts? Sadly, I am today's customer. I have a voice and I will share it. But, if only, if only the hotel had shown the slightest empathy for me or even tried to handle my problem I would have been satisfied. I would have told the whole world of how much they cared. Solving a customer's problem is the easiest way to her heart and wallet.

But is someone listening?

I flew back by Kingfisher. The entertainment system was not working. Now, of course, I am used to this.

And yet, I believe some good came out of all this. I was so mad at everything that I cancelled my trip to England and shelved my plans to watch the third Test at Edgbaston.

Who knows, that might well be the change of fortune that India needs!

Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO, brand – comm.
Read my blog @ http://www.brand-comm.com/blog.html
Facebook: facebook.com/RamanujamSridhar
Twitter: twitter.com/RamanujamSri

The Freezing Point of a Customer Iceberg

A Customer Iceberg as explained by Avinash Narula, the man credited with this concept, is simply put; every dissatisfied customer who in time turns into a Customer Iceberg. The more unhappy he is, the more dangerous a Customer Iceberg he turns into.

The concept though simplistic is very relevant to companies at many levels. Dissatisfied customers become even bigger icebergs when they are ill treated continuously. Customers are way more vocal of their concerns these days with innumerable avenues to express their disgust with companies available. Social media has become the favorite melting pot for many Customer Icebergs. They seem to find haven on these outlets and companies have to dedicate resources to tackle them at this stage. But to do this, companies need to thoroughly understand the threats posed by this phenomenon.

Like an iceberg, only the tip of the Customer Iceberg is visible to a company at times and therefore they react with very little decisiveness. The hidden part of the iceberg is where the danger lies as companies ignore the damaging abilities of these Customer Icebergs until they get hit head on by it. If companies can dedicate resources and time to discover threats before they run into them, they can immunize themselves from mass attacks from unhappy customers.

Working this concept to your advantage is what every company should aim at. Breaking down customers into various sizes of Customer Icebergs and laying out plans to tackle them should be top of mind for every company. Customer Icebergs are not a phenomenon new to companies but at the same time it also is something companies have shown great incompetence in managing. So can this concept be a tipping point for customer service in companies or drown like so many other ideas bandied around?

This is what we think, what do you think?