Seeing Through The Customer Service Trap

"We should forget about customer service", says Dr Ian Brooks, who argues that organisations which concentrate on what they are doing for their customers instead of giving those customers what they actually need to make them successful, are falling into a trap.

It is common to hear businesses complain that customers these days are not loyal, that they are fickle. We moan because customers take their business elsewhere at the drop of a hat. But could it be that we are at fault because we are not doing enough to gain their loyalty? Certainty our customers appear to believe that.

Results from a number of research studies show that customer satisfaction with all products and services has been steadily declining over the past few years, and this is particularly true for airlines, banks and hotels. In one recent US stud~ 8o% of people surveyed said that service is very important to them, and half of those said they were not getting the service they expected.

The service trap
The problem is that we have fallen into the customer service trap. Most business people would agree that customer service is the key to commercial success. It was nearly 8o years ago Conrad Hilton said that the only difference between one hotel and another was the level of service provided. This made a lot of sense, of course, and when the global marketplace became very competitive in the late 1970S, people remembered Hilton's words.

Towards the end of the 1970S the first books on customer service were written, and since then thousands of books, hundreds of videos and countless training courses and seminars have been developed - all on how to deliver excellent customer service. For over ten years, most companies have employed customer service representatives to work in customer service departments headed by customer service managers.

They have all read the books, been on the course and seen the videos. They even have the t-shirts to prove it! Moreover; senior managers have spent hours of their valuable time developing vision and mission statements proclaiming their commitment to their customers. This has gone on for a longtime now and yet 8o% of the people in audiences I speak to say they personally have experienced poor service within the last two weeks. How can that be?

Because customer service is a trap! Service is what you do for someone else and, therefore, if you aim to deliver excellent customer service you will think about what you are going to do. But what you do for your customers is not important. It is what they need you to do that matters most.

Frog in the well
By focusing on what you will do for your customers, you look at the world from inside your business out. You become like the frog who sits at the bottom of a well, looks up and sees a patch of blue sky. "Wow!" says the frog. "That's the entire universe." He believes this because the sides of the well limit his vision, and just like the frog, you sit inside your organisation and your vision is limited by your policies, your procedures, your traditions, and the way you were taught to do things. Your customers, on the other hand, look at your business from the outside in and without such blinkers. They see a huge expansive horizon and sometimes the disconnect between what you see out your little window and what your customer sees is so great they cannot understand you.

Think about it. What are you doing that makes great sense to you but no sense to your customers so that when you do these things your customers shake their heads and say 'What planet do these guys live on? Why would they do such a thing?' Business is all about creating value and value is either created or destroyed. There is no neutral position. If you do things that make no sense to your customers, or if you require them to do things for you that make no sense to them, you will not simply have failed to create value, you will have destroyed it.

You will have required your customers to pay a price - be it in time, effort or some emotional cost -and to get no benefit in return. In a crowded and competitive market place, you cannot afford to be destroying value. Your customers will avoid you like the plague.

Another good question to ask yourself is whether you are working for the customer, or whether, through your policies, procedures and the way you do things you are making your customer work for you. Again, anything you make your customers do to obtain the benefits from your products and services, they will perceive as a cost. The higher these costs are, the less value they Will believe they are getting, and the greater the risk you will be seen as a value destroyer, not a value creator. How easy is it for your customers to contact you, for example? 'We're sorry, all of our agents are busy right now...'

Satisfaction is better
Aiming to satisfy your customers rather than just servicing them is a much better proposition because it forces you to enter your customer's world. Satisfaction is the emotional state people experience when their needs are met. If you aim to satisfy your customers, you will start by finding out what their needs are and, more importantly, you will measure your success by how your customers feel after you have done it.

This is quite different from what many call centres do, for example. Call centres typically measure such things as the number of rings before the call is answered, the time customers wait in the queue, and the number of customers who abandon the call before talking to someone. Many call centres have found their numbers looked good but when they went back to customers later and asked them how they felt about their experience, an alarmingly high number of customers were very dissatisfied. These companies were processing the calls effectively by their standards but they were not producing satisfied customers at the end.

Customer satisfaction is not a warm, fuzzy, nice-to-do concept. It contributes significantly to business success because satisfaction translates directly onto the bottom line. Some companies have discovered that simply by increasing customer satisfaction by one percentage point, they can increase their annual revenue by more than £30 million. What would increasing the satisfaction level of your customers do to your financial performance, I wonder?

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