The Hindu Business Line : I vs me – the customer service paradox

I have a split personality. I confess. On the one hand, I am a purveyor of customer service in my work life — I fondly hope I am a purveyor of good customer service. On the other hand I am a consumer of customer service (as all of us are). Unfo rtunately, I encounter far too many instances of poor customer service. Is it the same for you, this poor experience of customer service?

Have you, like me, wondered why this is so? With all the advances in management thought, in corporate practices, in service processes, in technology — why is it that online consumer blogs, posts and user comments are practically full of instances of service failure?

Why does practically anything written or spoken on this subject talk of declining levels of customer satisfaction, increasing levels of customer disloyalty and increasing levels of customer frustration? Why are there so few examples of organisations that have built a truly great service culture that has demonstrably paid them back in terms of financial returns?

Apart from a split personality I also suffer from a severe case of over-enthusiasm — which leads me to attempt to construct an approach that I believe would address this issue at a concept level.

Most practitioners of customer service and the tools and metrics that promise service nirvana tend to define service as a set of activities the enterprise will perform, which will result in a set of numbers that will establish to the enterprise and to themselves that the job has been well done. My first submission is that this approach to service starts at the wrong end. Let me switch personalities for a moment and be my other half, my customer half, and start at that end. What do I as customer understand by customer service? Do those metrics mean anything to me at all?

To me it is actually very simple and if I am asked a question randomly, I am very unlikely to tell you that I expect my call to be picked up in three rings (the ASA/‘average speed of answer’ metric) or that I expect to spend only 4.37 minutes (the AHT/‘average handle time’ metric) in discussion with your agent. I would probably tell you that I expect to be treated politely, it would be nice if I were recognised, and I expect to be able to achieve what I wanted and carry on with the rest of my life. I may not necessarily expect that my need would be met in one interaction (although that would be nice – the FCR/‘first call resolution’ metric), but I do clearly expect that once my need is known my service provider would proactively resolve it with minimal further haranguing from my side.

Note the key word: Expect. All customers have expectations of their service provider, be it a bank or a phone company, a refrigerator manufacturer or an automobile company, a travel agent, hotel, or an airline. Important questions: Where do these expectations come from? And are my expectations the same across all my service providers?

Let’s take the first question. My expectations are born of a view I have of the enterprise; it does not exist in isolation. That view is coloured by everything I have seen, read and heard about the enterprise — all the advertising, all the literature, all the impressions gathered talking to the sales folks, all the word of mouth from friends. This view I have of the enterprise is, in fact, nothing short of a brand perception that I carry.

Are my expectations the same across all service providers? I have a view of Jet Airways as a brand — which informs and influences my service expectations. Equally, I have a view of Kingfisher Red, which informs and influences my service expectations of that brand. And clearly, these expectations are very different. So my perception of brand defines for me differing levels of expectation from different brands.

Two conclusions that I want to draw from this line of reasoning:

To me as the customer, service is nothing but meeting or exceeding the expectations that I have of you as a brand. Service failure means to me that you have failed to meet my expectations and therefore I have to revise my opinion of you as a brand.

Leading from that point, the starting point of customer service failure is the failure to align service strategy with brand promise.

I believe a customer experiences a brand in one of only two ways, through the use of the products/offerings of the company or through the interaction with the company or the extended enterprise in the service cycle. In the service cycle, my experience is purely a function of my expectations and how they are met. And the expectations I carry are purely a function of my brand perception. The loop is very clearly closed.

The very first step towards creating great customer experience in the service cycle is to understand and integrate this thought into the service strategy.

Customer service is as much a part of building the brand as is advertising, or positioning, or any form of communication — and needs to be treated as an integral part of the marketing mix. How many organisations today can truly claim that their service apparatus, whatever it may be — contact centre, channel partners, extended enterprise – is truly integrated with the way the brand is positioned?

While it may not be possible for all businesses to aspire to Tagore’s inspiring thought on service as being the only goal in life, it is very necessary to have a clearly defined service philosophy and culture that is tuned to the business. And that is the starting point of great customer service. Fundamentally when you create an expectation in your customer through your brand promise, meet that expectation and if possible, exceed it in the service cycle. You will have a bunch of happy and loyal customers!

How do you actually execute such a thought? Here is a simple four-step approach:

Get all the key stakeholders who influence the customer experience your organisation generates. The heads from marketing, advertising, and branding, the chief customer officer if you have one, the head of finance, the heads of service delivery and quality, the contact centre head, the head of technology, everybody who plays a larger role. Lock them in a room for a day or two and ask each of them to define what they believe will meet the expectations of your customers.

Get all these definitions, merge and align them (there will, after all, be multiple perspectives) into a single service strategy for your organisation. It will be unique to your business, your positioning in the market, your financial capabilities, your product/offering and, of course, your culture and values.

Break this service strategy back into design documents and deliverables for each stakeholder. What level of churn is acceptable? What kind of voice should be deployed on the IVR that matches the brand personality? What should the average wait time be? What cost per call? What levels of automation? Training? Hiring profiles? And so on.

Train, train and train across the organisation and the extended organisation as the case may be. In the final analysis, customer service is all about people.

To my mind the gap that all of us experience as customers, the gap between service experience and brand promise, is a simple function of this fundamental process of aligning the whole organisation to a service strategy that synchronises with the brand.

Shankaran Nair is President (Corporate Strategy) at Servion Global Solutions, a specialist in customer interaction management. Servion has incubated the Custommerce movement that is a platform dedicated to building world class customer service standards in India.

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