Richard Parker's blog

http://www.ccpact.com/

Pick up the phone and call almost any large corporation, and it is likely you’re going to have to wrestle with more than just the issue that prompted you to call in the first place. What’s worse, though, is to tell your customers that – after they’ve spent 30 minutes on hold – they need to ‘go online’ to raise a support ticket, or email them instead.

If that seems odd to you, then you’re very lucky you’ve never had to deal with companies that operate in this manner (yes, they exist).  Just last week though, I had encountered a problem with some of the servers at our hosting company that we couldn’t fix (network issues). This meant I had to make a support call. That call went something along these lines:

• Good afternoon, [Acme] support. How may I help you?
• Yes, hello – I’d like to talk to someone about [the issue].
• Sure, can I take your account number?
• [I give the account number]
• Ok, what’s the problem?
• [I describe the problem...]
• I see. Have you tried [this]?
• Yes, that didn’t work. It’s a network issue, we can’t resolve this ourselves.
• Ok, sir, I’m afraid you’re going to have to raise a ticket in your online control panel so that we can direct our engineers to take a look at it.”

Now, at this point, if you’re that someone at Acme who decided that’s what needed to happen, you should be sacked. Or at least beaten a few times with a printed version of Wikipedia (yes, that would be a lot of paper, and yes - that would sting). Let’s review the reasons why:

• The person calling you is a customer – which means, they’ve given your company some money
• The product or service they’ve bought isn’t working as it should, or they need some help getting it to work
• They’ve made the decision to phone you, on a number you’ve listed as a support line, rather than email you, probably because they need or want a speedy resolution
• They’ve waited on hold – probably patiently – and even put up with your repetitive music loops and reminders of how important we are to you
• And they’ve described their problem to your agent on the telephone
• Your agent made some suggestions, but they didn’t help

So when you ask them to hang up the phone and repeat everything they just said but in writing, you’re wasting their time. More importantly, however, you’re telling the customer that you [as the agent on the phone] just don’t care enough about the problem – and by extension the customer – to raise the ticket internally to get it dealt with.

Ultimately, the customer doesn’t care – and shouldn’t have to care – about whatever processes you have to go through internally in order to get a result. As far as they are concerned, they’ve reported a problem to an agent of the company. If that person does not have the ability internally to take whatever steps are necessary to get a resolution to the customer, then I’m sorry, but the management of Acme is failing its customers. Every person in your company should have the customers at the forefront of their minds. If they don’t, you don’t want them working for you. That’s not some wishy-washy mantra, either: it’s based on a rather solid principle:

“You will get more customers, and keep the existing ones happy, if you make them feel valued.”

‘Value’ is a relative term, agreed. I think most people would agree, though, that ‘value’ in this context during a typical conversation between them and you is:

• Quick reply
• Informative reply
• Speedy resolution
• .. and I’m not even talking about ‘going the extra mile’ here, this is just the standard stuff.

Every time you tell the customer that they need to do something else to satisfy your own requirements, you’re just putting up barriers. Do it for them, or, better still – remove the barrier, because you probably don’t need it. If your own support processes are so inflexible that an agent on the phone can’t walk over to, or call, the 2nd level support guys, change your support processes.

Human beings live connected lives. We are social creatures. As individuals, we don’t see the point in lengthy processes or bureaucracy because we should just be able to explain a problem to someone and have them deal with it – and get us the response we need. But ‘business analysts’, and those who go to ‘customer service school’, believe that a flowchart is a much better way to provide a service. And they’d be wrong, simply because your customers can never follow your own ‘critical path’ – they don’t know it. And they shouldn’t need to.

The bottom line is, there should only be one critical path when a customer calls you. It goes something like this:

• Receive call/email/fax/letter/visit in person
• Take the time to understand what they’re saying and what their concerns are
• If you can’t deal with it there and then, hand over to the person that can and inform the customer what is happening, then, crucially:
• FOLLOW IT UP

This process can of course only work if every person in your company is dedicated to putting the customer at the heart of what they do. If you don’t think that’s something you can achieve, then you should be looking at your work force and firing those that don’t think your customers are important, because your customers are who pays your salaries. Happy customers = more customers = fat paychecks, bonuses and a less stressful environment for everyone.

The problem is that common sense seems to have gone on holiday in some organisations

I don’t think management books are required, here. If you’re that company with the problem, all you need is to stand back and take a common-sense approach to structuring your teams. Better still, common sense says that if you have a bunch of people who all share the same principles, they’ll organise themselves to get the job done.

Customer service oriented process diagrams only exist because companies are frightened that the service they provide to a customer will be inconsistent between employees.

Providing the quality of interactions remains high, then surely it doesn’t matter what route the employees take to get the job done? At the end of the day, if all the employees subscribe to some of the basic principles of good customer service, they’ll all reach the same goal – and this leaves you the task of managing quality, learning more about your customers and how you can improve your products.

And let’s face it, spending your time improving your products is probably much more rewarding than ruining your customer’s day while you drag them ass-first through your ugly, bloated processes. Scrap them. Keep it simple, and remember:

That’s the end of my rant, feel free to leave a comment. If you’re looking for more inspiration, head over to http://www.ccpact.com/ and learn more about the Company-Customer Pact. It’s a great starting place to improve your relationships with your customers.