One of the biggest mistakes that I have come across in my work as a service transformation consultant, is businesses trying to create a great customer experience by applying quick fixes to their broken (hit and miss), customer service. These fixes remain shiny and new for a short while and lose their effect sooner, rather than later.
Let me say here, that if the intention is to achieve a superlative, consistent and standardized customer experience, quick fixes do not work. What’s worse, is the overall disruption to the value chain that requires the business to keep restarting the service improvement process, by having to fix the problems created by the failed quick fixes.
The quick fixing approach is driven by a “just enough” mindset that is rooted in expending the minimum effort and investment needed to keep the service delivery boat afloat.
Think of someone visiting a doctor because he or she is experiencing excruciating stomach pain and the doctor simply prescribing pain reducing medication and sending the individual home. Any sane individual would be horrified at the level of superficiality of the approach, wouldn’t you agree? Whatever happened to trying to figure out the root cause of the pain, using the usual methodologies (x-rays, MRIs etc.), so that a permanent solution could have been achieved?
Same applies to the fixing of broken customer service. By broken I mean any level of service delivery that fails to meet the expectations of customers, on a sustained basis, every time those customers either interact, or conduct transactions with the relevant business. By this definition, it would be interesting to name the business brands that can claim to have an “unbroken” service delivery pattern. The other question that will suggest itself, of course, will be, “Is your business one of the brands with an “unbroken” reputation?”
Attempting to fix problems in their isolated areas, disregards their connection to the value chain and the other parts of the chain that may have contributed to the problem areas in the first place.
The quick fixing approach is driven by a “just enough” mindset that is rooted in expending the minimum effort and investment needed to keep the service delivery boat afloat. This mindset is not really about achieving service excellence, service leadership or experience superiority. It’s about, “let’s expend only the level of effort required to ensure that our service delivery is not chaotic.” Unfortunately, this means aiming for the lowest common denominator on the service delivery continuum.
This mindset shows up in effort and investment prioritized to those areas that are deemed “problematic,” and applying error correction fixes. This approach ignores the equivalent relationship between service delivery and the many moving parts that must work in tandem, for the ultimate goal of superlative customer experience to exist. Attempting to fix problems in their isolated areas, disregards their connection to the value chain and the other parts of the chain that may have contributed to the problem areas in the first place.
Let me explain with an example. If the non-execution of follow-up calls, as promised to customers, has been identified as a service failure and customer pain point, assuring that those follow up calls are made by frontline staff will only fix part of the problem if communication, teamworking and a sense of urgency are pervasive issues within the business. If frontline staff have to wait on the back-end staff to resolve issues and the latter take their good, old time to push the information to the frontline, (don’t forget the pervasive issues I mentioned earlier), the only calls that frontline can make would be apology calls, whilst awaiting the resolutions.
Achieving and sustaining a superlative level of customer experience takes a colossal amount of effort.
The eventual result of all of this busyness? Irritated customers and frustrated frontline staff, who are fed up with the absence of permanent solutions. This is one of the results of only fixing parts of the service delivery chain and ignoring the wider issues that contribute to systemic brokenness.
While the good news is that this piece-meal approach is avoidable, the challenge is that mindsets and habits are hard to break and businesses can be unyielding if they have been following a familiar formula for a while. Onboarding a change to the modus operandi will be back-breaking, even in light of the evidence showing that the traditional approach is ineffective.
Another impediment that causes an impasse in adopting a progressive way forward, is that many businesses are rooted in survival, rather than a superlative intention, regarding their vision and ambition for customer experience. The businesses that have achieved global acclaim for their brand of customer experience, have arrived in that space through their holistic approach to and steadfast focus on customer success.
It also means that the time has come to recognize that a holistic customer success strategy, in which all functional units of a business will be required to enunciate their contribution to delivering customer value, is the new business strategy.
Achieving and sustaining a superlative level of customer experience takes a colossal amount of effort. Only those businesses that are fully committed to becoming “global” in their customer experience branding, will step away from being satisfied with incremental improvements and migrate to methodologies that deliver quantum shifts.
This migration will mean movement away from a hard-wired intransigence towards change, that has no place in a world that is evolving around every business.
It also means that the time has come to recognize that a holistic customer success strategy, in which all functional units of a business will be required to enunciate their contribution to delivering customer value, is the new business strategy.