Fixing the In-Built Design Flaw in Service

This article is Part II of a series. If you missed Part I of this article, you can find it here: The In-Built Design Flaw in Service.

Scroll to the bottom to find an infographic summarising this article.

A Quick Recap of Part I...

Psychological distance is the enemy of Empathy. If your service centre people can’t empathise with customers, they’re likely to care less and take less responsibility for customer’s needs. Psychological distance happens when customers appear ambiguous rather than concrete to a service centre staff.  This infographic outlines why psychological distance is an in-built flaw in customer service centres. Leaders should pay attention because psychological distance is a root cause of customer complaints, poor service and employee apathy. 

Fixing the Design Flaw

How do you get service centre teams members to treat customers as they themselves would want to be treated, as opposed to just another transaction? How do you remove the barriers that cause people to be distant, uncaring, uninterested?

Strategies to close the psychological gap can be organised as (1) Before the Moment and (2) Within the Moment-of-Truth:

1. Before the Moment-of-Truth

These strategies are designed to prepare mindsets ahead of interactions with customers:

Customer visits

In the manufacturing sector it is common for operations staff to spend a day or two a year at the frontline – to observe what goes on, put a name to a face etc.. This happens less at banks for several reasons:

• Service centres are geographically distant making the cost of travel uneconomical;
• Divisional lines constrain people from working across business units;
• People over rely on technology to communicate in the belief that these channels of communication are adequate - this includes workflow tools, email and chat. They might get the job done functionally but create a psychological distance between customers and service staff.

Leaders who schedule regular customer visits reduce the psychological distance between customers and their team members. For example, broker servicing team members could spend half a day with brokers once a year to do joint visits, observe the broker complete a transaction, listen to their concerns etc.. The objective is to change mindsets from “John the broker is so lazy” to “How can I make this easier for John without breaking any rules?”

To overcome the cost of travel, leaders can send a team member, say, once a quarter, to visit a broker, branch, lender or internal customer within the bank. This team member would report back to the team. In the following quarter, a different team member would visit a customer, and so forth. Where it makes sense, service staff can visit customers locally rather than incur travel expense 

Bringing customers inside

Leaders can take the initiative to “bring” the customer in-house. This might be face-to-face, for example the customer could address the whole team at a team meeting, or it can be done over video conference. The customer can be prepared to talk about their needs, tell a story, describe their business, or simply answer questions.

Personas and Customer Journeys

One of the banks we work with recently put all service staff through training that involved the creation of customer personas and customer journeys. By getting team members to “work-out” atypical set of customers, and to “imagine” the the step-by-step process customers go through to fulfil a need, team members embody a deeper understanding of customer needs and their pain points. This is a game changing investment that comes with a large price tag (when you factor in the cost of trainers, administrators, travel and the reduction in productive capacity i.e. reduction in customer facing time). It can be harmful to do it on the cheap:

• We often see the creation of personas and customer journeys done by a Product or project team, without involving the service staff who actually deal with customers.
• Done poorly, the outputs can look like stereotypes rather than personas e.g. “Business customers are demanding”. Stereotypes can be harmful because they cause service staff to make snap judgements about customers rather than genuinely listen and empathise.

Sharing Case Studies

In the medical profession it is common practice for doctors and nurses to gather regularly for a “Teaching” session. A case study is presented by a one of the team members, a nurse or a doctor. The case study is presented in as a narrative: patient symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcome. Consider the case study in the sidebar.

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Sidebar: an example of a medical case study

A patient came to the hospital with chest discomfort. Vital indicators including blood pressure appeared normal. The patient was given heart burn medicine and sent home. Patient returned to hospital after three days with persistent chest pain. Blood pressure normal, temperature a little high but not alarming. Doctors assumed there might have been an infection and prescribed antibiotics, and sent the patient home. Patient returned the next day with severe internal bleeding. A cyst on his aorta had burst causing blood to haemorrhage throughout his body.

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Like doctors and nurses, service centre staff often hand over work to their team mates. A single transaction can be touched by several people. Errors are often handled by someone else. And there is low likelihood that a team member at fault is given feedback on the trauma they caused to customers. They move on to the next transaction with the same nonchalance. Case studies help counter the psychological distance by getting people to see the consequences of their actions and decisions.

Case studies can be a challenge to use at a bank because they can cause embarrassment to individuals. And coming up with the right case study can take a lot of investigation.

Using scenarios. Over the past 6 years, Xempli has been working with clients to amplify service teams by using scenarios. We're running a program at a major Australian bank at the moment, where:

• Team leaders gather their people once a week to tackle scenarios. 
• Team members are asked to vote for a course of action using their mobile device. 
• The team’s vote is tallied by our platform and presented to the team. 
• This acts as a catalyst for discussion. 
• We coach leaders to create a safe environment by asking questions like: what are the merits of one decision over another? How is the customer feeling in this situation? What could be some of the consequences?

Here is an example of a scenario:

The scenarios close the psychological distance by:

• Getting service team members to put themselves in the shoes of the customer. For example, it helps people to see the human behind a business loan application rather than just a set of documents.
• Getting team members thinking about consequences of their action, to see the bigger picture.
• Using the power of social norms to compel team members to reach higher standards. When the majority of people agree on a standard of behaviour, others follow because of our herding instinct.

Rebalance training

When a new employee joins a team, what proportion of their orientation training consists of “technical knowledge” i.e. knowledge relating to systems, policy, procedures and risk? And what proportion of this training is made up of skills needed to deliver outstanding customer experience (such as asking questions, influencing others, framing options, maintaining equanimity under pressure etc.)? At most banks, orientation is mostly technical – that is, the employee is prepared to get the job done, as opposed to embedding behaviours to deliver outstanding customer experience. 

This is true of overall training and communications within a bank. Service centre teams are affected by two heuristics:

• Availability bias – the tendency for people to focus on the things that comes to mind easily[1].  Look at any service centre team member's inbox over a week, and it is likely you’ll find that the majority of internal communications relate to technical matters: compliance rules, systems and process changes, product updates.
• Headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry – the tendency to overweight the memory of negative events (this is described in one of our earlier articles: Stamp Out Negativity. Treat a customer like a number and nobody notices. Breach a procedure and it attracts the ire of managers and risk and product compliance officers. The latter isn’t easily forgotten.

It is no surprise that despite the plethora of corporate communications and culture programs encouraging service teams to be customer centric, many continue to think of their job as “handling transactions” and “sticking to rules”. 

Rebalance Communications

If you’re a first level team leader, sending people in your team to do empathy training might not be within your decision rights. It may be difficult to convince your boss of the business case for soft skills training – particularly in a tight expense environment. You can however make a conscious effort to rebalance what you communicate to your team. For example:

• At your daily team huddle, be conscious of how much time you spend updating people on technical matters such as procedure changes, performance metrics and upcoming activities, as opposed to helping team members focus on customers. 
• When Product or Risk issues a new policy or procedure, help team members empathise with customers by asking questions like: How do you think the new policy will impact customers? How would you feel if you were a business owner? What would you do or say if a customer lodges a complaint against this policy?

2. Within The Moment-of-Truth

There are a set of strategies bank leaders can adopt to help team members empathise with customers within the moment-of-truth. This is the focus of Part III of this article. You can find it here: Staying True in The Moments-of-Truth.

For now, here is an infographic we created summarising the article. Please feel free to share it with your team!

What do you think?

Can bank service staff improve in terms of empathy?

Leaving a comment benefits other leaders, as well as increase your profile amongst them.

Credit

We'd like to thank David Beavis for reviewing our article and pushing us to think deeper. Note that the views in this article are not representative of David's nor of his employer.

[1] Developed by Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos. A great book on the topic: Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow.