Ways to deliver good customer service

Customer service is core to any organisation’s success. Businesses create products to attract customer attention. However, their long-term success largely gets driven by the service delivery architecture that businesses create for their customers to experience what the business has to offer.

Mapping customer expectations is the first step towards developing strong customer service protocols or a strong service delivery architecture.

The most important element within the framework is accessibility. Customers today use multiple screens, which give businesses multi-modal opportunities to enhance accessibility economically. Traditional brick-and-mortar touch points attract huge investments and hence an innovative technique through adoption of technology is paramount.

The second important element is responsiveness.

We need to understand that it might not be always possible for businesses to prevent all problems, however they need to know how to recover from such situations and perform to expectations of their customers. To achieve this, there are five key areas of focus.

Mine customer problems and develop strategies to address them: Businesses need to talk about customer problems internally and analyse them well. The focus should be to identify fail points and work towards changing process which helps remove such fail points. There is nothing that ‘fits forever’. The flexibility to change and managing the change internally to facilitate process re-innovation is the direction that businesses should focus on. This will also help businesses to anticipate customer recovery needs and train personnel to act timely and appropriately.

Create a process that helps them act fast: Customers want their problems to be addressed fast. Defining what is ‘fast’ is the next step. The answers lies with the customers themselves and hence mapping customer expectations with problems will help organisations to develop protocols and service delivery mechanisms that can move fast. Businesses need to analyse the processes with respect to three key components.

Process elements which are above the ‘line of interaction’ – These are core touch points through which customers interact with the business. These are parts of the process which deliver experience to customers based on which customers assess if their experience was good or bad. They learn about the process through interaction with employees and who gave them commitment on delivery.

Process elements which are between the ‘line of interaction’ and' ‘line of visibility’ – These are elements through which the customers do not interact, but see how their problem is being addressed. These are also a part of the front end, though there no direct interactions. Based on what they see here, they decide whether commitments made to them will be fulfilled or not.

Process elements which are ‘below the line of visibility’ – These are process elements which are purely back end and customers have absolutely no idea about them, but might have perceptions about them or will draw perceptions based on the quality of final delivery. They learn about progress through regular updates that businesses share with their customers.

Businesses need to work towards refining processes to ensure that they deliver to customer expectations. This approach will help them locate the fail points and how they should address them. Essentially, the focus is to act fast.

Train and empower people, especially the front line personnel: Training is an ongoing process, the effectiveness of which largely depends on how well an organisation consumes and acts on customer experiential data. Developing a ‘customer-centric culture’ is what organisations should strive for. Employees need to understand that not only the front line staff, all employees need to work and contribute towards improving customer service. To achieve this businesses need to develop a customer connect programme, which will help all employees to experience customer expectations directly. There is a need to sensitise all employees, which will ensure that there is believability in processes and there is quick adoption of change that is brought in to improve service delivery. Results of problem-mining and redress strategies should be a key part of the training module.

The employees need to be empowered to act. Clear protocols should be created for all problems and the front line staff should be empowered to offer resolutions which customers expect in their first contact with the business. Alternative processes should be created so that the front line staff can use them depending on the actual situation. Not all decisions can be taken by them, of course, but they should be empowered with at least three levels of decision-making so that service delivery is quick.

Close the loop with the customer: Customers appreciate receiving a formal communication from the organisation or a follow-up call to ensure that the service was as per their expectations. The results of this exercise should also be shared with all internal stakeholders, as it is important to close the loop within the business as well. The final step in this process is to develop case studies which employees should be taken through in training programmes.

Monitor continuously customer service delivery: This is the final step in the customer service delivery process. One important point to remember here is that, while for any organisation this is a feedback process, customers see this as a process for them to report pain points with a clear expectation that timely action would be taken. To ensure that this is done, businesses need to adopt technology in the enterprise feedback management (EFM) space. It is important that timely interventions are carried out for customers who are reporting an unfavourable experience, which can be only done when feedback is reported and consumed in real time. EFM empowers an organisation to do exactly this through the following:

Multimodal data capturing capability helps customer take part in the initiative when they have the time.

Real-time reporting of customer feedback, where results can be viewed on automated dashboards; slicing and dicing of data further adds value

Integration of the reporting platform with the organisation’s CRM enables timely interventions.

Hot alerts to process custodians and key business managers ensures immediate visibility of unfavourable experience, which enables immediate timely interventions directly with the customer. Closed look feedback mechanism further enhances the service recovery process and helps in disseminating actions internally.

As we move forward with ever evolving customer, technology in the customer service delivery will be an important differentiator and will support timely service recovery actions.

(Raja Amarjeet Bunet is Executive Director, Ipsos Loyalty & Lead – Financial Services Center Of Excellence, India)

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