After 25 years dedicated to providing world-class service to a variety of Fortune 500 organizations, it is important to look back and determine; What really matters? What were the few vital ideas and actions that really made a difference with consumers and customers? Upon reflection, it seems that there were thousands of little things that made a necessary and positive contribution, but only five areas were decisive.
Hire people who care You can teach a person to do a better job of faking a service attitude, but why not start with people who actually care about their customers? They cost the same amount (unless you’re paying so little that McDonalds is stealing their best reps), but the caring person will really go the extra mile and resolve customer issues when needed. Anyone can provide great service when things are going well, but you need the big league empaths to share the love when the customer is scared and angry, all systems are down, and the management team is on the links courting the next customer. . A very large retail store in New York City had signs posted at all of their cash registers: If any employee is particularly rude, please let us know.. They don’t mind normal rudeness, but that particularly rude employee was going to be toast.
Invest in the value chain There are many variations on this value chain idea, but the simplest formulations still work. Happy employees create happy customers, which creates happy shareholders; in that order of priority. Break any link in this chain, reverse the order, and the entire focus on quality falls apart. These are not just words, they must be supported by the budget process, by the actions of senior leaders and by the company’s investment priorities. If you put up the banners of the value chain and then cut back on your service staff to make up the quarterly numbers, you’ve just erased the last five years of happy talk about quality.
Automation We did a study of employees who process claims manually versus employees who process claims with an automated system. It wasn’t the best automated system in the world, in fact it was ugly and rudimentary. The error rate of the manual solution was 74% higher than that of the automated system. People are wounded and cursed with highly flexible short-term memories. So flexible that they forget tasks they haven’t completed and remember, as completed, tasks they haven’t even started. Automated systems only have memory, they don’t have flexibility, they don’t forget or daydream.
Modern CRM systems can raise the bar on service quality so high that no one can compete effectively without them. Customer expectations rise beyond the performance capabilities of legacy implementations.
Training and Retraining The commercial insurance brokerage industry relies heavily on on-the-job training. That’s a euphemism for not training. Their error rates typically require 30-50% of their transactional activity to be corrected, and their files have huge gaps in both accuracy and integrity. By contrast, the financial services industry spends 5 to 10 weeks of classroom training on each frontline employee and then assigns each employee a trainer for another one to six month period. Their error rates are typically less than 5% and their files are highly automated and mostly accurate and complete.
On-the-job training has a fatal flaw: the trainers themselves either don’t know what they’re doing or don’t know how to teach. They’re happy to teach, but they could just as well be teaching employees juggling or macramé; At least the closing sale could be more entertaining.
leadership involvement Everyone thinks of leadership involvement as if the president or CEO walks into the service center twice a year and pretends to answer calls. Senior management involvement and symbolic support for quality initiatives are certainly important. But real leadership involvement has to start with supervisors. Very few companies invest in their supervisors. Supervisors are often experienced front-line representatives selected for their first and last promotions in the company. The reality is that these supervisors are making one of the most difficult development transitions in the organization; from individual expert to team leader. Those 10 to 25 people you now report to will make or break with clients based on how well they are managed by someone who is often leading for the first time in their career. Having highly technical supervisors in place who are also accomplished trainers and leaders is a deciding factor for world-class quality.
Focusing on getting these five areas right will lay a solid foundation for delivering an extraordinary customer experience; and give you the time you need to take on the thousand other tasks that complete the picture.
Copyright © 2007, Lotus Pond Media
