The Best Service is No Service

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Author: Bill Price
The Founder and President of Driva Solutions and Co-Founder of the LimeBridge Global Alliance.

Review:

Those of us who have been in the customer service world for the past 15+ years have struggled mightily to apply new technologies such as intelligent call routing or automated speech analytics, identify and hold onto the best possible talent to answer email or handle phone calls, and implement better training, scheduling, and other systems to pull it all together. Unfortunately, for all of our efforts, billions of dollars, and blood, sweat and tears, customer satisfaction is essentially flat while operating, capital, and support budgets are under tremendous stress. Customers have more and more choice and are expressing their frustration by switching companies at the drop of a hat, often sharing their disquiet with thousands of others on Internet blogs.

When two ships on the high seas or even in protected waters approach each other, there are very clear international “rules of the road” that dictate which ship gives way to the other; however, if the ships appear on a collision course ( called being “in extremis”) they must adopt more drastic reactions – both need to take bold course corrections, signaling clearly that they recognize the dire situation and that they intend to fix it.

By the same token, despite the customer care investments and attention mentioned, we are “in extremis” and need to make bold course corrections; instead of coping with customer demand, building more capacity and trying to figure out how to improve the customer interactions, we need to challenge that customer demand and find other, more sustainable solutions that will enable a win/win/win for customers, our companies and our agents. This new course is what I have been calling “The Best Service is No Service”, meaning that everything should work perfectly such that customers do not have to interrupt their busy day to call, email, launch a chat session, walk into a branch, or in other ways have to interact with a customer support person.

This might sound like nirvana, or it might even worry you – after all, don’t customers prefer to speak to a real person instead of a machine? Won’t we risk losing all of those cross-sell and up sell opportunities if we get rid of customer contacts? Stay with me as I paint the picture with two quick stories, and then I’ll lay out how to start the journey for Best Service

THE STORIES

One of the early inspirations I had for Best Service was in the early 1990s at MCI Telecommunications, a renegade upstart in the US battling the AT&T long distance monopoly (MCI is now part of Verizon). MCI offered low cost home and business phone services, originally with fewer bells and whistles than AT&T provided but increasingly closing the gap. In California, MCI’s services appealed to immigrants from Mexico or Asia who placed long distance calls to those countries and craved lower rates. MCI’s Sacramento call center was growing fast as more and more customers signed up for the company’s services, but an MCI customer service manager figured out by listening to calls that most of the time the bilingual agents were simply translating the English language invoices for the confused customers, not adding “value” but rather eating into MCI’s then tight profits. He decided to take a bold course change by asking, “Why don’t we produce invoices in different languages?” Shortly after MCI launched this program, the calls started to plummet, the call center could shrink in size, and customers were delighted, so much that they remained loyal to MCI even after AT&T bombarded them with offers to convert … to AT&T’s English-language only invoices. Clearly a win/win/win.

Amazon has been the poster child for Internet commerce, now a USD 11 billion juggernaut selling products in 41 different stores and 7 Web sites. Amazon’s early products were BMV (books, music, and video like DVDs or VHS tapes), so when the rare shipping mishap damaged one of the products Amazon would send a free replacement, no questions asked. This helped Amazon to develop its reputation garnering the second highest score for the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index), and yet this customer-centric strategy wasn’t scalable when the company launched electronics or sold back-up generators – no way the company could send free replacements but, instead, it had to follow standard “reverse logistics” practices by issuing RMA (return merchandise authorizations). Customers started calling Amazon’s centers to explain why they needed to return one of these more expensive products, describe the reason to a patient agent, request the RMA, and wait for the RMA to arrive in the mail. Amazon decided to take a bold course change by challenging its vaunted Web self-service team to work with reverse logistics, marketing, and customer service to produce what we called “downloadable return labels”. In short order calls plummeted, agents could service other issues, and customers controlled the RMA directly from their home or office printers. Another win/win/win.

THE IMPEDIMENTS

So what’s stopping us? What are the impediments to achieving Best Service? Let me count the ways:

  1. Metrics that keep getting in the way. The contact center world can measure and report (too many) metrics, but unfortunately not the ones that matter. ASA (average speed of answer) has nothing to do with quality or customer satisfaction, but CPX (contacts per driver X, such as orders or transactions) is a much better one to create.
  2. Shooting the messenger. Think about it – Customer Service “causes” fewer than 10 percent of the contacts into its service centers, the vast majority as a result of broken billing systems or poor supply chain discipline. Sure, if Customer Service makes mistakes by providing incorrect answers it needs to “own” the resulting upset, but instead of blaming Customer Service for missing service levels or exceeding budgets, it’s essential to “pin the tail on the donkey” and create true ownership of the underlying reasons across the organization.
  3. Getting to the solution space. All too often agents ignore the “golden 30 seconds” that customers share with them and zoom to the so-called solution space to fix the problem. Our over-emphasis on AHT (average handle time) and on inbred quality monitoring scoring criteria exacerbates this situation.
  4. Cross-sell mania. Sales and marketing executives, and even many CEOs, believe that “we want customer contacts because we can sell them more”, or cross-sell mania. But how many customers encountering a missed promise or 3rd-consecutive billing error are willing to listen to a sales offer?
  5. FCR. We obsess over providing first-contact resolution (FCR), but think about it – if a customer tries first to serve themselves online or in an IVR system (for example to check their account balance or cancel an order) but can’t figure out how to navigate the self-service, and then needs to call or email or launch a chat session, that customer interaction with an agent cannot be FCR. At the most it’s a second contact, or what we call a “snowball” that will continue to roll downhill and get bigger (and more upsetting).

THE BEST SERVICE JOURNEY

MCI’s and Amazon’s experiences are not unique, and they share the same stepwise approach that your company can apply to take a bold course change and reshape how customers can get what they want. Underpinning the Seven Best Service Principles is this simple yet powerful thesis: Companies need to (1) challenge demand for service, instead of coping with customer demand, and (2) sort customer contacts into valuable or irritating for the customer and for the company. This will, instead, lead to four clear paths: (a) eliminate contacts entirely (irritant/irritant); (b) automate contacts or provide proactive alerts (valuable for customers/irritant to company); (c) simplify or improve contact handling (valuable to company/irritant for customers); (d) leverage and spend more time on contacts (valuable/valuable).

Here are the 7 Principles in this Best Service journey:

  1. Eliminate “dumb contacts” (the irritant/irritant category which is usually 20-40 percent of the customer contact volume, defined as numbers of agent-handled contacts X average handle time X cost per hour).
  2. Create engaging self-service using Web and IVR tools, aiming for 80 percent “success rates”.
  3. Be proactive, sending timely alerts, instead of waiting for inevitable contacts.
  4. Make it really easy for customers to contact your company, instead of burying toll-free numbers or ignoring the growing blogosphere.
  5. Own the actions across the organization, pinning the blame for customer contacts with the departments whose broken products or mistakes or confusing policies are actually causing the contacts, usually 90-95 percent of them.
  6. Listen and act on what customers are saying, or WOCAS, since customers convey tremendously useful information about your products or what they want to buy from you, your competitors, and brand-affecting issues.
  7. Deliver great service experiences, ensuring how to delight customers with awesome support when they need it.

By following these Seven Best Service Principles, and taking the bold course instead of investing more effort and scarce resources coping with customer demand, your company can raise the bar and achieve the rare win/win/win for customers, the company, and your agents, thereby achieving the book’s subtitle: How to liberate your customers from customer service, keep them happy, and control costs.