Staying True In The Moment-of-Truth

This is the final instalment of a three-part series on how service operations leaders can amplify customer service. If you missed the previous articles, here is part 1: The In-Built Design Flaw in Service Centres, and part 2: Fixing The Design Flaw.

Problems in customer service occur in the heat of the moment

For example:

• John's team lost the grand final last night and he arrives to work grumpy. When confronted by an irate customer, he is defensive: “It’s not my fault, why are you yelling at me?” – and failing to be empathetic: “why is this customer upset?
• In a recent appraisal, Sue is told she needs to be more detail-oriented, so she adheres to technical rules at the expense of customer outcomes.
• The backlog has grown out of control. David gets the job done by ticking all the boxes, but fails to anticipate problems that cause rework and delays.

When people are fatigued, distracted or under pressure, they lose empathy. 

Whereas our previous article looked at ways leaders can prepare mindsets, this article looks at what leaders can do to help their service staff remain customer-centric within the moments-of-truth. 

Employee Presentation Layer

It is common for service staff to be required to access data from up to five different bank systems in order to service a single transaction. And within each system, there are codes to remember, non-intuitive interfaces, and numerous screens to navigate through. 

Banks leaders can:

• Put in place a presentation layer that synthesizes data and “services” from multiple applications
• Enable one-click access to the most frequently used transactions covering 80% of the volume. Widgets enable customisation to a department or job role.
• Use desktop automation software to automate highly frequent actions such as extracting recent customer information from one system into another

This capability frees up service staff from multi-tasking during calls so that they can concentrate on listening to the customer. (It also has the added benefit of boosting productivity.)

Bank leaders can make this a reality by leveraging existing capability from technology providers such as Backbase and Pega.

Augmented intelligence

Imagine this: 

• John, a mortgage officer, takes a call from a customer who wants to check on the status of a loan application. At the same time, an intelligent computer listens in on the conversation and transcribes voice into text. Let’s call this intelligent computer 'Gertrude'.
• The customer says he can't find the loan number. Gertrude hears this and calls up the “search-by-name” screen. This frees John up from needing to do manual data entry.
• As the customer tells John the details, Gertrude turns voice into text and conducts the search. Meanwhile, Gertrude has also called up the loan status screen in a different system, and entered the customer number to produce the information John needs.
• John tells the customer that the application is still pending. The customer sounds anxious and asks if things can be expedited. John is about to say “it’s not in my control”, when the computer prompts two questions for John to choose from. John picks the second one: “May I ask when is your settlement date?”
• Based on the tone of the customer’s voice, the computer senses the conversation isn’t going well and offers words that John might use: “I see that things haven’t gone smoothly so far, and getting more certainty from us is what you need…”. John uses these words and this has the effect of making the customer feel more assured.

Whilst the scenario might sound far fetched to some bank leaders, AI companies like Gridspace are already making it a reality. 

Some leaders may have experienced a bit of the technology first hand without realising it. Try this: grab your iPhone (no need to unlock it). Say, “Hey Siri”. Siri on your iPhone will “wake up”.  Ask Siri, “Can you read me my emails?” and Siri will read the subject lines of the most recent emails. 

It’s easy to fall victim to expecting too much from artificial intelligence. Despite claims by AI companies, voice recognition accuracy rates aren’t yet high enough, and it takes a long time to train a machine to understand whole sentences. A senior tech executive at a bank said: “in the short term, bank leaders should rely on trigger words rather than assume an intelligent machine can understand whole sentences.”

Nudges To Humanise Interactions

When you book a stay using AirBnB, you are asked to write a brief note to the owner. The tactic is about humanising what would otherwise be an anonymous transaction. 

This has the effect of bringing out the empathy on both sides – the host is more likely to make the stay a pleasant one, and the renters are more likely to treat the property with respect. 

Bank leaders can employ similar behavioural nudges. Here are a four examples:

1. Include something personal about the customer prominently in every transaction file - such as what the customer does for a living, or a brief description of the customer. The challenge here is to inspire empathy rather than judgement, and without breaching privacy.
2. Share personal details of team members with customers during an interaction. By including something personal, customers are 'nudged' to treat service staff like real people. (Plus, by making a team member’s profile more public, they are more likely to take ownership of the customer’s affairs. Our article “The Bystander Effect” explains this further).
3. Get service staff to maintain a tick sheet that prompts them to visualise the customer in every transaction: Who are they? How are they feeling? What are their unvoiced concerns?
4. Use catchy slogans to trigger a desired behaviour. Kit Kat subconsciously prompt people to “Have a Kit-Kat” when it’s time to “Have a Break”[1]. Using similar behavioural science, Xempli created a series of postcards to help a bank client embed new mindsets across 850 service staff - here is an example:

A Framework to Put Ideas into Action

Bank leaders need not wait for strategy teams or their bosses to put some of these ideas into action. Ideas such as “rebalancing communications” from part II of this series are everyday things that leaders can do to close the psychological distance.

To empower every leader to amplify their team, we intend to create a self-assessment framework for leaders:

In 15 minutes, leaders can assess the extent their teams suffer from the ill effects of psychological distance. The output is a set of quick-wins and pragmatic strategies to close the psychological gap.

If you are interested in joining a panel of early users to try out a beta version, please contact us: [email protected].

Thanks

We'd like to thank David Beavis for reviewing this article. His mix of strategy expertise and extensive line management experience is invaluable. We’d also like to thank Cameron Meindl, one of the smartest people we know in technology, for acting as a sounding board. Note that the views in this article are not representative of David, Cameron, nor of their employers.

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Xempli is a tool leaders use to amplify teams. Harness the power of behavioural science and technology. Find out more: https://xempli.com

[1] Jonah Berger, 2016. “Contagion: Why Things Catch On”.