Customer Service Excellence? Competence, with consistency is number one say customers

No one likes it, yet everyone has, at some point or other, experienced it. Dodgy customer service is a social malaise that raises hackles other annoyances fail to reach.

Later in this post:  four organisations that turned around their poor customer service records and soared to new heights of success.

A very specific type of anger stems from bad customer service: the affronted feeling that someone tasked with attending your needs and requirements has let you down, even when thevery nature of the relationship means that they are not meant to drop the ball. That’s the most vivid reaction, anyway. If you happen to have experienced consistently bad customer service from the same provider over and over again, though – but may be locked into that relationship either by a contract, or scarcity of expertise – then the feeling is more likely to be one of endless, jaded resignation.

It’s time to get real… and responsible. Providers of goods and services cannot afford to let their paying customers down, either on the spot, or through the long, drawn-out torture of continuous disappointment. Clients and consumers now have an almost dizzying array of choice before them, and it’s only going to get wider. For just one, major example, think of the dramatic shifts that are currently taking place within the finance world, where agile and nimble financial technology – or ‘fintech’ – firms are beginning to encroach upon territory once stubbornly occupied by hitherto indomitable, traditional institutions.

For customers of those new entities, fintech firms provide more flexible services, and indeed are prepared to lend more widely than big banks with complex criteria and onerous terms and conditions. For the first time, the sands are shifting beneath the feet of the finance industry’s longstanding incumbents. And isn’t it telling that recent research from UK advocacy group the Institute of Customer Service shows that banks are scoring poorly with their public on empathy and engagement in their handling of complaints?

Vital values: giving people what they deserve
The crux of the matter here is that the problem doesn’t just affect customers on a one-by-one basis. If you offend, anger or annoy enough customers in your orbit, then that groundswell of ill feeling will serve as a dreadful, broader reflection upon the organisation that’s doing all the offending, angering and annoying – very much as though the company in question is intent upon poisoning the well from which it’s trying to drink.

In a pure shop-floor or client-facing context, the latest index from the Institute of Customer Service has given leaders plenty of food for thought about what excellence in the field should look like. In a poll of 10,000 customers, the index showed that the Number One quality people look for in those who are serving them is competence, with consistency – ie, workers “doing what they say they will do” – coming second. Helpfulness and friendliness also emerged as major factors, with customers broadly ranking evidence of healthy attitude and behaviour over more procedural matters, such as the condition of goods received – although that was still very important for many respondents. The Institute is keen to stress how vital it is for firms to brush up their customer service competence, as more than 70% of British workers are employed in customer-facing roles.

However, other organisations have more of a big-picture perspective on what it takes to create customer service excellence. For those entities, it’s not merely about strengthening the presence of key qualities in a workforce – it’s about structuring the entire company, four-square, around the need to deliver strong customer service. Otherwise, they argue, companies simply won’t be able to survive in the long term. Welcome to the glaring difference between customer service… and customer experience (also known as ‘CX’).

Going deeper: end-to-end customer culture
In a recent column for the Harvard Business Review, Bruce Jones of the Disney Institute – the media brand’s corporate-coaching wing – defined CX as the “sum of all interactions a customer has with a company”. That’s everything from stepping through the door to shaking a sales rep’s hand, walking through the premises, exchanging emails, speaking on the phone – in other words, the entire, physical and digital process that’s required to turn potential customers into paying customers… and keep them coming back.

That definition clearly has a cultural basis, and the role of culture in impressing customers should never be underestimated. For a reason why, look no further than Sports Direct, which in the past week or so has dropped out of the FTSE 100 after a damning Guardian probe of its culture and practices not only slowed the flow of customers to its doors, but deterred investors, too, causing the retailer’s share price to plummet. Customers and backers were unwilling to tolerate what they’d learned about how the firm works behind the scenes – choosing instead to support its rival, JD Sports, which has posted stellar profits for the same period in which Sports Direct nosedived. Mike Ashley’s chain has learned, the hard way, that you can’t fool all the people all the time – and that, increasingly, the public demands high standards in an organisation’s internal values.

As if to underline that point, Bruce Jones reflects in his column on a coaching exercise that the Disney Institute undertook on behalf of an auto dealer that had decent sales, but low morale, and wasn’t entirely convinced that it was providing optimum customer service. As Jones explains, his team assisted the dealer with “an intentional effort focused around exceeding customer expectations at every key touch point [emphasis added]. The entire organisation – the employees, the processes and the facilities that created their customer experience – were realigned, and the results were dramatic. Over the past few years, the dealer has achieved a 26% increase in sales”. (Are you listening, Sports Direct?)

Another, passionate CX advocate is business research and advisory firm Forrester, which is so committed to spreading the gospel of customer service excellence that its once-annual index on the subject is now published quarterly. As part of its index for the third quarter of 2015, Forrester arguably went even further than Jones, urging every company to run a“customer-obsessed” business. In that vision, strategic thoughts on a firm’s structure, culture, talent, metrics, processes and technology must all be devoted to ensuring that the organisation is i) customer-led, ii) insights driven, iii) fast and iv) connected.

It’s a huge mission for company leaders to wrap their heads around. But with the rewards so clear to see, there’s really only one, logical move: start now.

They tried to make them go to rehab…
And they said yes, yes, yes – four organisations that turned around their poor customer service records and soared to new heights of success…

CITIGROUP
The financial firm was listed as one of the “most improved” companies in Forrester’s customer service index of 2011, thanks to a beautifully simple solution for its customers’ phone-in woes. After analysing recorded calls to its customer service line, the firm realised that 90% of callers were getting in touch about one of 10, dominant questions that were actually pretty easy to address. Bosses then equipped their call-centre staff with readymade answers to those questions, minimising call transfers and smoothing out the CX.

DENNY’S
One of America’s top comfort-food restaurant brands, Denny’s was plunged into a PR and financial nightmare in the mid-1990s when thousands of black customers launched a class-action lawsuit claiming that they’d routinely faced racial discrimination from service staff. The settlement cost the firm $54 million. In 1995, new CEO James Adamson implemented a top-to-bottom training programme to weed out racial discrimination, and an ad campaign specifically targeted at ethnic groups. In 2013 and 2014, the company appeared in Fortune’s Top 10 charts of best firms for ethnic customers and staff.

OFFICE DEPOT
Another bright star of Forrester’s “most improved” list, Office Depot grappled with availability issues in the first decade of the millennium, largely as a result of its status as a sprawling, nationwide, US chain. After engaging in a feedback exercise with customers, bosses stocked more fashion-led stationery items for women, and simplified the supply chain so it wouldn’t keep running out of popular items. The availability blues were banished, and customers’ happiness was signed, sealed and delivered.

LAX
At about the same time that Office Depot was struggling with stock, the world’s sixth-largest airport was struggling with everything: huge queues at every customer-facing point from check-ins to information desks; poor quality of information; endemic stress – not a great recipe for service excellence. But after it implemented a sweeping, new CX regime, its reputation improved dramatically. All the information desks’ functions were turned over to an online system accessible via phones and tablets, the info itself was smartened up, all queueing points were streamlined and widely hated luggage-cart charges were abolished. It had dragged its customer service out of economy.

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