Businesses Are Asking The Wrong Questions About Service Delivery

Businesses Are Asking The Wrong Questions About Service Delivery

One of the reasons why many businesses are stuck in customer experience stasis, is because they pursue service delivery strategies that do not yield best results for the customer. In order to move the experience needle, the results have to make sense to the customer and if the right questions are not being addressed, the right strategies will continue to be elusive.

Let’s take a look at some of the wrong questions, shall we?

“How many customers do we have? This question commingles customers into a single mass, which includes one time, repeat and loyal customers. It’s important to remember that “all customers are Not created equal.” Let’s not fall for the popular slogan.  Without disaggregating its customer count, a business will not know how to create unique strategies that target  unique customer segments. A more useful question would be, “How many customer segments do we have and how can we serve these segments better?”

“Are we satisfying our customers?” A satisfied customer is one of the biggest threats to a business. I’ve shared this reasoning in a previous article. When customers are satisfied, this means that their service experience is satisfying only their minimum expectations. In other words, they are not being “wowed.” Therefore, an underwhelmed customer becomes a soft target for a competitor that’s doing a better job at service delivery. A more useful question would be, “How many customers have left, are leaving and how can we prevent attrition?”

 

In order to move the experience needle, the results have to make sense to the customer and if the right questions are not being addressed, the right strategies will continue to be elusive.

 

“What are our customers’ pain points?” So often, when I begin service transformation projects, I discover that clients are asking this question in a breezy manner, without the attending motivation to fix issues, permanently. Now, the essence of the question has value, the problem is that without contextual relevance, the question is meaningless. What is to be done, having discovered the customers’ pain points, is not addressed. A more useful question would be, “How can we eliminate friction for the customer along his or her experience journey?”

“How can we get our employees to serve our customers better?” I encounter this question all the time. It says more about the questioner, than it does about the value of the question. Whilst for many businesses, it’s an innocent and well-intentioned enquiry, for many others, it’s a window into the abdication of the responsibility to delve into why employees are underserving customers. A more useful question would be, “How can we serve our employees in such a way, that they would become eager to serve our customers?”

“How can we get our leadership team to buy-in to a new approach to achieving service excellence?” This, of course, is a million-dollar question and a question which I enjoy rephrasing. The reframed question would be, “What are the leadership strategies for building a green culture, engaged employees, operational efficiency and an exceptional internal customer experience?”

 

“How can we get our employees to serve our customers better?” I encounter this question all the time. A more useful question would be, “How can we serve our employees in such a way, that they would become eager to serve our customers?”

 

The reframing of this question is meant to generate reflection by the leadership team, on where, how and to what end, leadership energy is being utilized to support customer success. Interestingly, when this reframed question is dissected, you’d notice that, in many businesses, its components tend to lie in different accountability domains.

Generally, the culture component is assigned to the human resources domain. Employee engagement is diffused across the managerial domain.  Operational efficiency is relegated to the operations function, whilst internal customer experience lies with the customer service department.

This scattering across domains poses some problems, starting with the silo effect. When domains (essentially, departments and units), do not collaborate effectively, this sabotages the creation of breakthrough conversations that can prompt the unifying of leadership energy and invigoration of a shared approach to designing solutions to issues.

 

“How can we get our leadership team to buy-in to a new approach to achieving service excellence?” The reframed question would be, “What are the leadership strategies for building a green culture, engaged employees, operational efficiency and an exceptional internal customer experience?”

 

By keeping the domains unlinked, leadership energy will forever be disconnected. One way to overcome this problem is to make answering this reframed question on leadership buy-in and its components, a mandatory responsibility of the total leadership team. Only through a shared approach to achieving a goal that benefits everyone, that of service excellence, can an effective response be deployed.

If your business is stuck in service delivery stasis, there’s some good news. Jump-starting the process of becoming dislodged just got a boost with the reframed questions that I’ve shared in this article.

Happy dislodging.