Venture Capitalists always say “find the pain and address it”. Sometimes it is totally simple to find the pain and identify what is needed – cure for cancer, cheap renewable energy – but not so easy to come up with a solution.
Customer service seems to fall into that category. We have all cried at times. Sometimes somebody will make us laugh about it (as all the best humor taps into something real). NPR also has three hilarious customer service from hell stories.
There has to be a solution and it must be easier than a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy. Can this really be the uncrackable problem? Are we doomed to endure this forever? I doubt it. Its such a big opportunity, people will figure it out.
The big issue is economic. The price of products keep coming down, from a mix of Moore’s Law and Globalization. The price of service does not. Service involves humans and they have to be paid and to get them to provide great customer service you have to pay them well, give them great training, motivate them beyond money to reach their potential in what can be perceived as a dead end job, create a pleasant working environment, provide great IT systems so that the front line person really has the information they need, empower the front line person to make decisions on the spot that may cost you short term but enhance your reputation and so on. All of that costs real money.
For example, the best margin in the PC industry is warranty. It works as hardware is pretty reliable. The trouble is, most problems are software related and almost all of them fall into the “stuff happens” category that nobody will take ownership for. It’s like Sicko for your PC, all the “insurers” are running a mile to get away from your nasty, expensive disease.
This is particularly bad when the cost of service is bundled into a transaction or subscription fee. Think travel services and ISPs. They simply cannot afford to take the call.
Nobody wants to take the call. Everybody is working hard and smart to “take the human out of the equation” and this is what gets us all the automated nonsense such as “IVR hell” where there really is not a human available, forums where people pontificate and have attitude because “hey I am not paid to do this” and various other attempts.
Yes, the really radical solution is to design products and services that work so well out of the box that live customer support is not needed. There are examples like that. Software is getting better. But this still leaves a mass of products and services that absolutely do need support, lots of it.
Here are 4 major ingredients for success in customer service:
1. Get labor costs on your side. The lower cost of offshore centers CAN enable a better service. As we all know, it does not always result in a better service. The other pieces have to be in place as well. However simple economics will dictate policies such as wait time and average call time which directly impact customer satisfaction. Being able to afford to spend more time is a strategic advantage.
2. Be passionate about providing great service. If the offshore team is told its all about reducing cost, they will act accordingly. You cannot say “we are passionate about great service” and put in place policies that clearly demonstrate exactly the opposite.
3. Understand and measure the real competitive advantage of great service. If you cannot do this, then all the passionate talk will disapear. Is it about retaining customers versus the cost of acquiring new customers? Is it about cross/up selling? Is it about reputation damage from a few high profile mess-ups that get into the Blogosphere?
4. Make user experience the key to process design. This may sound obvious but it is not always or even usually the case. The way we are passed from one person to another and have to explain the same information many times over is done for good reasons, but user experience is not one of them.
