Building blocks of building customer service from the seminal work - Outside -in paraphrased in my words!
Service Strategy
Best defined as intended experience, what is the kind of experience that you wish to extend to your users. Is it going to be COSTCO or Apple? Is it going to be an Airtel or LG? It is important to clearly define what is it that you wish to extend to your customers as experience. The strategy, therefore, is an expression of intent more than anything else.
Understanding of the customer
Knowing who your customers are what is it that they want? What their expectations are from the organisation? Understanding customer expectations is only the half job done. What is it that they call good service? Archetypical segregation of customers is a good way to devise a strategy that will fit different kinds of customers that have to be dealt with. The methods that can be deployed range between
Solicited feedback and other unsolicited ways.
Surveys and using various opportunities to interact with the customers to form an understanding about them.
Communicating the findings with the staff is another equally important thing to do as only after they understand what the expectation is, will they be able to deliver on them.
ServiceDesign
Everything between envisioning and implementation of interactions that create the customer experience. It is about being intentional about designing the process, people, technology, platform, and inter-departmental exchanges to tailor the kind of customer experience that the brand wants to extend. It also is about opening a lab kind of a concept in which, feedback from customers and understanding of the staff and the partners on the impediments to excellent exchange between the customer and the company can happen, to be discussed and solutions to be found. It is about making sure that no bad design makes it to the real customer world. It is about bringing intentionality into the entire process.
Measurement
Is a discipline that makes the organisation measure the quality of customer experience by assigning relevant metrics to it, that matter the most to customers, in a consistent manner across the organisation. The end goal of measurement is to give actionable insights to the organisation uncovering areas of improvement, alongside given pointed descriptions of :
What must be fixed immediately?
What should be improved over time?
What should be maintained at the same level?
What should be touted as the strength of the organisation?
The goal is to understand what are the elements in the organisation that help customers be loyal and then create systems to make sure that those things are taken care of.
Another important utility of measurement is to put the quality of customer service parameters right up there with business metrics like sales and profitability.
Governance
If customer experience strategy is game-plan, governance is the referee and the rule book. The job is to constantly monitor and weed out bad causes from creeping into the customer service design. It is responsible for holding people accountable to the commitment to serve. It can be the conscience keeper and at the same time also a practice that has the ability to steer things back on track, if and when things go wrong.
Culture
A set of shared values and behaviours that focus employees on creating exemplary customer service. Culture is the bloodline of any organisation, getting it right is most daunting and time-consuming. It requires constant reinforcement. Three key steps are
Hiring - Hiring for value fitment, “hire for will and train for skill”. Commitment to service, customer centricity are a few traits that must be evaluated in hiring people.
Socialising - The stories of the great customer experience must be told and re-told. The objective is to find the right rituals and the routine to reinforce the need to value customers and act in keeping with the highest standard of customer service delivery in mind.
Reward - It is important to link both formal (promotion, raise, confirmation) and informal awards (spot awards, RNR) to customer experience. Behaviour consistent great customer experience must be rewarded.
Customer centricity gets spoken about a lot, don’t believe me? Tune in to any corporate briefing and you’d invariably find executives speak highly and passionately about customer focus, customer experience, and how they find 'excellent service delivery' to be central to their business strategy. Take a brief moment and do your own brief research first, resume going through this article after that.
You back?
Thank you, know that you are very welcome here!
Tell me, did you not find the observation that I made about organisations uttering ‘customer centricity’ valid? Let’s take this experiment a little further to validate the claims made by these corporations. This research doesn’t have to be extensive or exhaustive. Just take a mental note of the brands that you searched, earlier. You’re most likely to find that these brands, which appear so similar in their assertions on the need to build a customer-centric organisation, seem vastly different, disjointed, and staggered all over the place, in reality, don't they?
Why might that be, you may ask?
If I may borrow from the seminal book on customer service,"Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business”, written by the tremendously talented duo, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine- No department or single individual does anything intentionally to inconvenience the customer but it is the collective effect of the unconnected, unintegrated and ununderstood actions that cause customers to sometimes get exposed to sub-optimal versions of the organisation. (** I’ve paraphrased from memory, this is not an exact quote from the book)
Organisations, nowadays are increasingly becoming complex, encompassing and encapsulating all manners of diversities and differences to cater to a wide range of and ever-evolving customer needs and desires. In an unforgiving hyper-competitive market organisations are forced to blindly chase their growth targets with maniacal focus and in doing so, in more cases than not, customer-centricity becomes the first casualty. Successful organisations are those that do not let aspiration of growth interfere with their commitment to delivering stellar customer satisfaction, look at Amazon, Apple, Zappos, Hyatt etc.
There is merit in understanding what are the elements that separate these spectacular successes from the forgettable failures. Or in other words, how does one weave customer obsession into the very fabric of their organisation? What are those building blocks that leaders should lay, own and put a lot of effort and focus into preserving? Having spent a lifetime in the customer services industry, I can tell you that - there is as much science in getting customer experience right as there is art in it. I like to think of building customer obsession, as a two-part process.
Disciplines that go into making an excellent customer experience machine.
Tacts to building pervasive customer obsession.
# 1: Disciplines
Outstanding customer service departments must focus on organising their efforts around the below three aspects of its set up, with precision and passion.
Mechanics of service: It is about getting the arithmetic of the department right.
Demand estimation (forecasting): What is the expected volume of service, use historical trends from either your own organization or from your competitors to create a demand chart/flow.
Staffing: Taking into account the time needed to handle each class of transaction that customers reach the corporation for, combined with service level aspirations (95/5). Derive from them the kind of support hour that will be required to be made available and therefore how many support staff must be onboarded and of what skillset.
Tech stack: Omnichannel/CRM/Social Media stack and physical infrastructure that needs to be augmented to make the support desk functional.
Training: Support staff without a proficient understanding of the products and the services that they are to support, will not be able to deliver an excellent customer experience. Hence, intelligent knowledge management systems and practices will need to be developed and operationalized.
Quality management: You need to be able to measure if the intended level of service is actually being delivered, and there comes the quality management practices and systems. Shortfall identified by the quality function becomes the input for the training function.
Purpose of the department: This is about getting the philosophy of the department right.
Service philosophy: What is the kind of service that the organisation aspires to deliver, it is this question that needs answering. Is there a specific service model of their own that the organisation is pursuing or do they wish to get inspired by another successful service model? From the clarity of service philosophy, emerges details of the kind of capital and OPEX investment that is required to be made in order to enable delivery.
Service design: Service design is laying bricks to make the agreed service philosophy come about. It involves ascertaining the process, the platform, the technology and the people that will have to be brought together to realise the service aspiration.
Long-term objective: The measure of success must be determined in advance so that teams can work backwards from it. You could look at the metric that you like, NPS, CSAT, Churn, Repeat Buy, Life-time value of a customer etc. Choose the metric that compliments your overall business strategy well and then optimise your service design for it.
Usefulness: On a scale of 1 to 5, how useful would you want your service to be? Customer effort is the metric here. Simply put, how easy or hard is it for the customer to transact with you.
What will you measure?: Operational excellence is key to success. Input metric measurement is being spoken about here. How many people are needed, how long will they take to work on something, how can the time be shortened etc? Process re-engineering routine will have to be adopted to make sure that the delivery mechanism improves continually.
Define target and tolerance: How good is good enough for you? Set targets for every measurable metric that you can think of, define control limits. So that process can be optimised to operate within it. Remember, lesser the variation, tighter the control, and better the experience.
Reward and penalty: Score-card approach is a good way to approach it. Organizations need to define clearly what level of performance they consider reward worthy and the levels at which they think it right to impose a penalty.
Consequence management: Details approach and process documentation to handle exceptions, on every aspect of the service operation.
# 2: Building blocks of customer obsession: In this section, we will try to explore the science of building a customer-obsessed culture by talking about its 6 building blocks.
Customer effort Index: We briefly touched upon it in the earlier segments too. The point that is being made here is that various departments come together to make customer experience happen, therefore, it is important to work with stakeholders to reduce customer effort. The idea is to make availing service or using the product so simple, so seamless and so straightforward and so intuitive that the customer doesn’t have to think before using the service.
Anticipating customer need: Careful study of the customer data to preempt customer needs and then work towards meeting them. Latent, unfulfilled needs of the customers are being spoken about here. If we can devise a way to find out what is it that the customers would want next, we can make the thing available even before the customer needs it.
Customer feedback: Device the framework for collecting customer feedback, they are the most valuable piece of information that a brand can hope to lay its hands on. Study them intently to take cues on the process and product refinement. Use customer feedback to understand the need Vis-a-vie the capacity of the product and service to meet the customer better.
Creating “WOW”: Creating breathtaking and memorable experiences for the customers should be the only goal of the organisation. Make sure that this expectation is understood and people responsible to create these experiences are empowered with resources to do so.
A set-up that exceeds expectations: What is great today, will be good tomorrow and just about ordinary the day after, to keep ahead in the race, the organisation needs to keep raising the bar of service. Devise newer methods to meet the customers where they are and to deliver them whatever it is that they expect from you.
Let the customer know that they are your number one priority: #1 responsibility of the leaders in an organisation is to make sure that customers remain at the front and centre of every decision, every consideration, and every plan that is ever made. Bring the focus of every organisational process back to the customer, evaluate everything from the point of view of the customer and you will get there.
Remember, there are a billion known approaches to success in business, not taking good care of your customers, is not one of them.
Without a robust knowledge management practice in place, customer/seller/merchant/client, or just about any other kind of quality support is impossible to augment. Customer experience and quality of support get spoken about a lot, but rarely would you come across 'knowledge management' getting the same attention, as a topic. Modern-day organisations are immensely complex, inherently multidimensional, and almost always non-linear, given that it is humanly impossible for 99% of the staff to commit details of products, outlines of policies and intricacies of the processes, to memory and therefore a knowledge repository is both essential and vital to support, the queries/requests and complaints that customers might bring to the notice of the brand for redressal.
The knowledge management practice of an organisation is much more than a stockpile of information though. It needs to be, as they say, 'smart', 'contextual', 'wholesome' and 'relevant' because more than customers being in a hurry the organisations of our times are hard-pressed to be painfully efficient. They wish to squeeze every second spent on customer support, more than a few times. So if you do not have a consummate assistant in form of a robust knowledge management practice in commission, you would invariably and uncontrollably commit one of these errors more often than you'd like or your customers would permit.
Taking too long to respond - causing dissatisfied customers.
Dishing out wrong information - Helps neither the customer nor the brand.
Spilling incomplete or no information at all - no prizes for guessing what it does to cause of experience.
What are the building blocks of a good knowledge management practice, then? In my view, it should essentially have these three elements.
A digital platform, the market is rife with knowledge management products. All of them claim to be unique and better than the rest, the fact is that all of them piggyback on one another. A feature gets copied/stolen (pick the term you like) quicker than you would read this post. All platforms are the same, to the extent of 70% to 80%. Don't worry too much, you won't be wrong in picking any off the shelf running product, look for a good organisation backing it. If you have an industrious team you can develop an awesome and fully functional repository all by yourself too, on platforms like Notion, Google site, even WordPress.
Dynamic, Intelligent and near real-time, linking of the knowledge repository to 'top call drivers' and 'skill level index' of the front line agent - makes the platform intelligent. The idea is to spend as little time as needed in finding the information that is to be given out and that the information should be presented in as legible as short and as simple a form as the frontline staff would like.
Content management strategy must be in place. Without correct content input, the smartest platform won't be of any use. You need to make sure that the information on the portal is updated, correct and complete; at all times. Put in place a robust audit mechanism.
If you can get these three blocks right, not only will you have improved the quality of conversation between the corporation and the customer but also created data sets that can be used to better training efforts, finding out what kind of articles are being referred to the most etc. You can then also build features like quizzes to gauge understanding of the staff, co-creation of content and support logging; the sky is the limit really. You can get as creative with the use of the date as your thought would allow.
Remember in ways more than one, the quality of knowledge management practice determines the richness of support.
Go review your systems and make changes, if needed.
We discussed the intricacies of B2C service design in the last essay, thank you indeed for receiving it so well - it was read 11K times in the last week, a number I am appeased with. I have been getting request emails since to address the same topic for the B2B (business to business) universe. So here I'm .. your wish is my command.
Let me begin this by posing a question for you.
Who buys a Rolex to see time?
The right answer for a vast majority of people who can't afford the watch is likely to be: No one.
The right answer for those who buy a Rolex to go with their Rolls Royce is likely to be: Well, I do. It is a fine timepiece.
Somewhere between these two different islands lies the water in which the dolphins of the B2B universe come to play. The popular view on service is that it naturally applies to B2C engagements better. Well, that is because it is an easier frame for people to imagine: a corporation serving a customer. If you think (deep thought) you would understand that there can't be a B2C without a B2B. Let me take an example of the ITES industry (as it puts food on my table, currently). For a BPO A to serve the end consumer of brand B, it is important that it serves Brand B well first because a disgruntled brand B, will cause the relationship to end abruptly, leaving no room for the end customer to be served.
The goal of both efforts (B2C and B2B Service Design) is the same.
Increasing comfort and convenience and reducing effort, thereby making the experience pleasant. It is vital to note here that, unlike a B2C arrangement in which the customer more often than not has limited resources and time to invest in changing supplier, in the B2B engagement it is literally someone's job to see if a relationship is serving the business interests. Someone assessing you 8 hours a day every day.
Needless to say, you gotta deliver better.
So in the equation of service design with the core delivery and economic imperative, a whole lot of other considerations make entry too, listing a few here:
The search, who can provide the same level of service cheaper?
Is there a provider who would provide better service for the same price?
How do they (service provider) operate as an organisation, does it inspire confidence?
Do I dislike the person, I interact with in the service provider organisation?
Can changing this partner add to my equity within my organisation?
By supporting them (service providers) will I be seen colluding with them?
They don't pay me, I am paid by my organisation so I should make sure in the face of a conflict the one who pays for the invoice wins, which is my employer.
How does one deal with these complexities and come out as a winner, is the question?
Covid has not particularly helped the situation get any better.
The key to winning is to know your customer well and give them reasons beyond financial fitment to remain in a business relationship with you. The follow-up question is how do we do it?
It is important for us to find a way to meditate on below three aspects, with an extreme sense of urgency.
Are we giving enough reasons for the B2B clients to continue doing business with us in these stressed times? If so, what are those: quantified.
How is specific work that we execute on behalf of our client projected to be in short term (0-90days)?
How strongly are the clients placed to continue in their operation and in relationship with us?
Extended lockdowns and weak productivity have substantially reduced the goodwill of efforts put in to ensure business continuity. The toil of making the computing infrastructure, software platform and the employee (though in a reduced capacity) available for operation, is when scrutinised with objectivity, comes out to be an effort guided to secure self-sustenance of the service provider: self-preservation. You see if a service provider doesn't work, they go belly up. Therefore continuity can’t be seen or quoted as a differentiator.
A framework to provide the service providers with a basis for initiation of measured and informed action to meet the below objectives is needed.
Secure short-term and medium-term fiscal interest.
Create authentic short and medium-term projections.
Categorise risk exposure on the clients.
Evolve solution offering so that it remains relevant in the changing landscape of business and related operation.
Create exit plans on high-risk relations and adjust the cost accordingly.
Make investments in areas that are to remain positive.
There are four structural elements in the framework that I would like to put forth. The service provider should collect qualitative data/intel from their B2B clients on these.
Who is your customer/client?
What is the client busy with these days?
How are they planning to engage with their end customers?
What experience principle are they contemplating at the moment?
Let's explain these building blocks.
Who is your customer/clients?
The objective is to create personas for the clients so that we better understand the nature of our clients and the ways in which they are coping up with the turbulences of their business. In our qualitative input collection, we have to ensure the below.
Contextual research to develop a deep understanding of the client.
What is the need of the client business in the current times, from us and from their paying customers?
What actions are they taking to secure their needs?
What is the symbolic image of the service provider in the minds of the clients?
Do they view us as key strategic partners?
Do we have a role to play in restoring normalcy at their end?
Is the crisis helping us upgrade our standing in their assessments?
Who are the other partners that they are doing business with?
What is going to be the impact on those relationships?
What are the clients busy with, these days?
The Pandemic has brought about a change in the routine and expenditure of all organisations. While some spending is still being done a lot of the cash outflow has been wilfully stopped or greatly restricted. From a set of activities that are being performed, when we collect the subjective input, we can determine the below.
Perspective.
What have they gone through?
What are they doing about it?
Dreaming.
Which are the areas in which they have placed their aspirations into?
Planning
What has been their business continuity plan at an org level?
What does the restoration look like?
Purchase.
Have they made a significant purchase recently at an org level?
Acquisition?
Major investments?
Experience.
What steps have they taken to shape the experience of the below important stakeholders in their business, in this crisis?
End customer.
Employees.
Vendors.
Review/ Sharing.
What kind of public perception are they trying to build for themselves through the interactions that they have with their end customers?
How are they planning to engage with their end customers?
Value creation happens at the point of interaction between the brand and the customers. In the knowledge of this principle, we need to start becoming present in the medium in which they are willing to conduct these exchanges.
Mobile Application: What is the thrust of the change? Learn and adjust.
Website: How is the website changing? What is it trying to become?
Physical visits: What is the message that the brand is sending out? From the promises that they are making will emerge your business opportunity.
What 'experience principle' are they contemplating on?
Organisations within all the limitations of the market and their own cash flow constraints will have to return to full-scale operation assisted either by fresh capital infusion by means of borrowing or other methods like sale of equity for additional capital, etc. When they do so they will need to devise a strategy for functioning wrt.
Value preservation
Growth within the segment
Expansion
Diversification
We need to understand which way are they going so that we adjust our collective post-COVID plans accordingly.
Exploration based.
Are they planning to venture into new market segments geographically, demographically or in-class/price segment?
Communal.
Are they planning to milk the existing customer base to cross and upsell other service offerings?
Hospitable.
Are they planning on parting with some portion of their revenue to re-kindle loyalties within their customers?
Local.
Are they expected to get local or hyper-local? Is contraction their game plan?
Who in our (service providers organisation) should do it?
These strategic inputs have to be collected at an operational level. Therefore, the deep links within the client ecosystem should be put to use.
Sales and Operation leads are required to conduct this exercise for all the active customers/clients.
These have to be collected somewhat covertly, I do not need to tell you why.
A very high degree of integrity and sincerity will have to be displayed in conducting this exercise. Actively fight with the natural push of applying +ve bias to input.
A +ve report if it eventually meets with the -ve outcome; the world will know that in the exercise we lost objectivity and as a result added overheads.
Absolute confidentiality should be maintained in this task therefore delegation of work is not to be done.
If we succeed in conducting this exercise well, we will have all the inputs needed to base our service design on. To know what are the elements of service design, read the article published last week.
(Link to the article: https://www.lavkush.co.in/2021/06/service-design-for-indian-customer.html )
I must however point out that the distinction between a B2C and B2B is stark. In a B2C endeavour, we devise and design for groups of customers but in B2B set up we design for each customer separately. Personalisation pays better dividends in B2B.
At the cost of repetition, let me say: there is no B2C without B2B.
At all times keep your B2B clients updated on both your intentions and tangible actions that you are taking and are planning to take to make their run pleasant with you.
Go design!!
Most importantly, do get vaccinated and take very good care of yourself.
“If you happen to be wearing red glasses then red flags do not appear RED!”, said a wise man, nearly a decade ago. (Trivia, find out who said it)
The point of invoking this is to say that ‘knowing’ the way things are, is not a naturally occurring phenomenon or even a process. Knowing is a deliberate act. Many a time we get separated from reality by our own biases, beliefs and past experiences. We unknowingly often miss and sometimes even misread the signals present right in front of our eyes. Neither youthful exuberance nor arrogant assertion helps us reset the view as well as failure does. The failure, which comes out of the ‘I know it all" attitude.
Enquiries guided at gaining knowledge about a subject, thing, concept, group of people or a set of circumstance can’t begin until the bearer accepts that those are things that he does not know well enough. Efforts invested in the discovery of knowledge enrich our understanding and from following our resolve, we gain strength. Whilst, many agree that these fundamental principles apply to most walks and disciplines of life, many take these to be especially applicable in the context of customer service. We intend to expand on the very theory today.
‘20 years ago, the act of answering a customer on the phone within 5 minutes of wait time (The time between customer latching on the helpline number and a representative answering the call.) and then an assurance to remedy the issue in 10 business days would have been considered the gold standard of service. Contrast that with what might be categorised as supreme service today.
Do you realise the point that I am trying to make? You might expect me to ride on the wave of technological advancement, to surf around Omnichannel discussion and to throw in the mix axiom like ‘retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one’ etc. But I won’t do that. Instead, I would like to focus on the nature of the beast we call the great Indian customer. A group, all of us are a part of.
I would like to put stress on, knowing the customer, beyond the categories that are populated in a spreadsheet based on usage, age on the network, net worth and other transactional markers but by a more fundamental predisposition - the consumer behaviour, as a subset of human behaviour. And to make it work understanding the motivations and the nature of the customer is perhaps the most important thing to get right. While no form of generalisation can ever capture the true sense of the various types of customers that a brand can expect to find in a continent-size country, India. Some categorisation will have to be agreed upon for ease of this discussion.
From the collective expression of behaviour around buying we can safely take these four characteristics out.
India is a time rich and resource-poor country.
Trust deficit runs really deep in the country.
Typecasting customers one way or the other is not the wisest thing to do because the same person behaves differently in different contexts.
Offline purchase is still huge in the country.
Let’s go over them, one by one, in some detail.
Time rich and resource-poor country
On per capita income India ranks 33rd and 2nd on population - I hope you get the point. We have too many people with too little wealth.
To understand it a little better, remember last time you were in a mall, you saw way too many people just loitering around without making any purchase? We’re so good at ‘Window shopping’ that if it were a category in the Olympics we would have bagged gold every single time. According to a survey for every one person making a purchase as many as 6 are present in the shop who do not buy.
We’re a country in which people wait in queues to avail small discounts, drive kilometres to attend the sale of grocery. Buying the product that we want at the cheapest price is an art that this country has perfected.
India is among the most discount spammed countries in the world because, here merely mentioning the word, ‘discount’, ‘off’ or ‘free’ will get you eyeballs.
So when you are deciding your service strategy keep that in mind. Well, this does not mean that because Indians are not short on time, one can make them wait. Making a customer wait is one of the stupidest things to even think about, must be avoided at all costs. The reason for mentioning it here was to make you aware of the motivation and the driving force behind a customer making a choice in the country.
Lack of trust is deep.
Do you wonder why most advertisements/Commercials in India do not talk about the product at all, but how the product will elevate the ‘prestige’ of the buyer? Ads highlighting feature of a product is as rare as finding sense, news or even a true fact on Republic TV.
Advertisement for wall paint - Does not speak about how good the paint is, but how the pain will make the neighbours jealous and the passers-by take a note of the house.
Jewellery ads - Speaks about strengthening domestic relations more (women bonding, couples coming closer ) and less about the core quality of the precious metal or its design prowess.
This sounds too good, ‘what is the catch’? Don’t we hear it way too often? It is just hard for someone born and brought up in India to naturally trust something, without doing their own set of due diligence. Indian people are not bad, we are just poor. Lack of resources has been found to be indirectly proportional to the sense of trust.
To overcome this just do something nice and honest without any hidden terms or leading exercise for the customer and chances are that they will never forget you.
Do not typecast customers.
Any given customer in India exhibits different traits when they are shopping for these segments.
Shopping for self.
Shopping for a life partner.
Shopping for children.
Shopping for parents.
Shopping for social events.
Shopping for professional ground in social events.
The shopper may skimp on things that they purchase for themselves but when they do so for their kids, and their parents, they behave differently. They are willing to go right at the top of their buying capability. When you estimate buying capacity of the Indian customer, think about these dynamics.
So the thing to do is not just looking at the behaviour but also the contests in which the purchase is being done, or a service is being requested for.
Most of the country is still offline.
PVR published some of these numbers a year and a half ago.
Nearly 54% of all its booking still happen over the counter.
84% of these bookings happen 30 minutes before the showtime.
Corroborate this with the earlier example of people loitering around in the shopping complex that we spoke about. They form their audiences, mainly.
What this tells us is that even at the urban centres, where PVRs are, more than half of their purchases are offline and that too highly driven by impulse, so when you’re trying to solve a problem do not get blinded into believing that everyone behaves as you do, take this movie viewing example, as a marker of difference. Having said that, it is absolutely ok, should you want to only focus on those who book from an application and then land at the show.
In light of these facts, we can think about including these in our service design.
Be on the display
The customers will need to get a real feel of what is it that you offer up and close before they choose to trust you with their money; so try and be as available and be so comprehensively as possible. The customer should see you as an approachable brand, aspirational and yet attainable. Meet the customer wherever they are.
Brand communication should not alienate any section of society.
Let people know that you're there to serve them all.
Transparency
A trust deficient country can be won over by transparency. Organise yourself in a manner that there remains nothing to be found by an over-enthusiastic customer whose life mission is to find out what you may have hidden.
Keep no hidden clause.
Bring in the open, everything that is there to be offered.
In making schemes/offers sound incredible and unbelievably amazing do not hide the portion of reality from the communication that could take the lustre away from your message. If there are such facts, know that your offer is not good for your long term business interest.
When you do make a boo boo accept it and say sorry unconditionally. Do not defend or deflect.
Be out there for your customers and when you do walk the extra mile, do so without expecting the customer to do something in return, for it. Customer effort has to be minimised, at all cost.
Just be nice, without a reason.
Personalisation is vital.
Knowing, ‘what’ is probably not going to be enough. You need to know ‘why’ and ‘forwho’ so that you can make the essence of the brand response be an informed one, one that is addressing the context too and not just the content of the request that the customer is making.
Knowing the customer and his motivations in some detail will help you establish a special kind of bond with the customer, one which outlasts any other shortcoming that you might have in your proposition/offer. To know more is to serve better.
Let the customer know that you care for the ‘reason’ for which they make the choices that they do. Let them know that you are with them in their decision totally and completely. Make sure that you through your actions make it clear that the brand stands right alongside the customer, in this and in every other endeavour.
Diversity is cool.
Being present every step up the way and in every shape imaginable, way and form in which your customer expects you to be, is the real way to create the base from which your batch of brand loyalist will emerge.
Do not think, that you know any segment well enough, keep exploring.
Keep re-validating your stance. Data based decision making is key.
The offline or less savvy customers would also be willing to pay you just as conveniently as the customer who is ready to reach you on a web platform. If you decide to provide the offline customer with just as much care as you display for the one who plays on the app. Do not differentiate between customers.
Most importantly, be on your guard from - ‘I know, what the customer wants’ syndrome.
“We know how the customers feel, what they need, want and desire, because we have been in the industry for so many years”; Whenever you come even close to this sentiment know what you’re about to make is an error of judgment, quickly take a step back and think again. Ask for more evidence, data, instances to revalidate, your prior knowledge.
In this ever-changing world, the customer is not static, either.
In your service design, you’ll need to be inclusive, understanding, compassionate and above all empathetic.
9623 comments on the last article: Thank you indeed.
Yes, I am guilty of not having responded to all of them (yet) but there is no way I am going to leave them unattended indefinitely. Revealing a little routine to you, I have budgeted around 2 hours every Sunday afternoon, which is between 4 and 6 PM to respond to the comments. Most weeks, I manage to get to anything between 90% to 95% in this period and the balance, I attend to late in the night, between 10 and 11 PM. Because the volume has grown, 4 times the usual, the time allocated is proving to be grossly inadequate. So I have decided to add another two hours on Sunday morning, between 6 AM and 8 AM to this, so before you read my next write up, not only I would have completed responding to all the comments but also, made a way to make the exchange near to real-time, that is by allocating 30 minutes each day of the week, between 9:30 and 10 PM. We will see how it goes.
Thank you again!
Going by the most requested title, I wish to talk about "service in the age of Pandemic" with this article.
Guided by the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as customers and bussiness mature, expectations that they hold from one another also evolves. In the last decade or so we have witnessed 'service' move up in the value chain, from being one more thing that organisations did some more reluctantly than the others to the prevalent norm now in which superior customer service/experience is increasingly being showcased as key business differentiator. Service in the modern age has gained strategic importance. Enormously successful service stories can be found in the growth of : Apple, Amazon, Legos, Zappos and Hyatt.
You can’t deliver an exceptional experience without investing time, effort and money in building a customer-centric culture in your organisation.
If the customer service department is often projected as solely responsible for both driving and delivering customer experience in your organisation, then the pathology is suggestive of the absence of customer-centricity in the thought process of the organisation. Service, unfortunately, is one of those things that requires involvement from everyone, so either everyone in the organisation is delivering customer service or no one is. It is binary in that sense. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Customer pays to keep you in business and therefore there is every reason for you to serve them to the best of your delivery capability and fiscal ability. You can’t cheat or shortcircuit your way into the heart and the mind of your customer, it just does not work, that way.
I draw on my 1.6-decade long experience delivering service to say that ‘Best service is when the need to seek service is not felt by the customer, so no need for service is the best form of service’.
It is not easy to attain, and given how complex, conflicting and competitive the business landscapes can get and how dynamic, ever-evolving and demanding customers expectations are in today's world: the road to customer service is constantly under construction. It won’t be wrong to say that your best service experience will be the one that you’ll deliver in days to come (the underlying assumption being that you’ll learn from your experience of past delivery)
COVID19 disruption has also given an unusual opportunity to organisations to wipe their slate clean, hit refresh and reposition themselves as caring service brands, even if their past has not been a particularly peppy or pompously proud one. Question is how to do it? It is vital for us to recognise that for the case of service to exist and for a brand to gain from its benefits in the shape of unflinching customer loyalties and becoming a magnet for new acquisitions, the business itself has to sustain commercially. Business adapts to survive the changing economic, societal, and political climate in the geographies that they operate in. So let’s spend some time to understand the shift that COVID19 has brought about so that our plans can become informed.
McKinsey conducted a study to understand how the pandemic and related economic turbulences have impacted buying behaviours in the Asia Pacific (India, China and Indonesia) region. Before I present some of the findings from the study, we must compulsively apply cautious optimism on our outlook and accept that different regions within a continent-sized country like ours can experience different pandemic progression and economic revitalisation. Impact on no two sectors of the economy is alike too. So, let’s comprehend the below findings in that light.
Discretionary spending amounts to 1/4th to 1/5th of the GDP in the Asian countries.
There has been a dip of 90% in the overall discretionary spending.
Acceleration in intent to use digital channels over stores to experience products has been found.
Citizens are hopeful of recovering the money that they lost by the end of the year.
The ticket size of purchase has changed: Large items like the vehicle, construction and jewellery have been put off indefinitely.
1/3rd said that they plan to spend less than initially planned.
Trusted brands are at the top consideration for their purchase, alongside purchase being good value for money.
Guilt and unease coming from the social context have also prevented large spendings.
Higher intent to visit exclusive brand store than multiple brand outlets was expressed.
Getting it first time right is more valuable now as customers do not have the luxury of ‘touch and feel’ of the physical store or the cash to lose on trial and error.
Let’s superimpose -5% GDP growth outlook that the reputed Moody has proposed for India, on the changing customer behaviour that we just read about. Value polarisation is palpable. The unprecedented rise in unemployment has accentuated the damage the economy is suffering from contracting demand. India is slowly reopening, supply chain interruption instigated loss on value, however, is of a scale that can’t be recovered easily. Therefore, writing them off seems like most practical though not as a fiscally prudent option, at the moment for most businesses.
Thankfully, we are not without intelligence, ground realities and evolving market reactions are unfolding at least in our sight if not pleasantly and predictably, at every turn. We no longer have the benefit of reaction time, though, adjustments are required to be made on near realtime basis. How do we then approach service design, should our customer service philosophies change, are the questions that are on top of the minds of the business leaders today? Let’s address those. Organisational goals have to be re-written not just the financials but also performance and learning goals, to accommodate the recent developments. From the customer service perspective, the one metric that organisations must go after, in my view, is.
Reducing customer effort: Lesser the customer has to toil to use your product services the better will your chances of beating the competition be.
Harvard researchers have tabulated multiple studies to gauge how customers deal with difficulties that brand inadvertently put in their way and how do these difficulties influence their decision making on purchase and continuity. Here are some of the findings that can be used to formulate an effective service strategy.
High effort interaction is more likely to lead to churn.
Hard conversations had just 6% chances of conversion while easy conversation had a high 80% propensity.
Difficult category interaction doubled from 10% in pre Covid19 times to 20% in the pandemic.
Financial hardship related interactions appeared most difficult to handle for the organisations.
Actions :
At this stage, it is essential to conduct a detailed customer journey mapping exercise, to understand how easy or difficult are each step of the engagement are for the customer. Remember, to conduct this exercise from the point of view of the customer and not from the perspective of operational viability. You can use any of the below methods.
Focus group
Survey
Intelligent control group study.
If you can, make sure that this special project is managed by someone who did not design the existing process. It is vital from an intellectual integrity perspective and also to actively avoid, conformance bias. You have to study every aspect of customer engagement, from start to end, of the relationship.
Interest
Exploration
Education
Sign up
Subscription
Usage
Complaint handling
Feedback
Billing
Communication
Upgrade
Churn
Every aspect of your existence in the customer’s universe of both 'experience and expectations' must be studied. Map all the processes in a manner that output of one process becomes the input of the next process, in a long and detailed ‘input - process - output’ string. Then code each step on a level of difficulty. You can mark them based on the time needed for customers to interact with your offering Vis-a-Vis the best in class in your industry segment or on the simplicity of understanding and the cognitive effort that your setup mandates the customer to put in to fully comprehend your product/service. Label them, as high, medium and low.
As you have the entire process in front of you must know that processes marked as low must be made even simpler; target to bring down the existing complexity/time taken by at least 20%. The medium and high must be restructured, reorganised or altered, as the case may be with the highest sense of urgency. It must be done as of yesterday. When you conduct these exercises be mindful of the limitations of the environment in which your staff must be working in, given the distributed and digitized delivery that seems to have become the new normal, in the work from home era of delivery, things like:
Unstable phone connections.
No one to ask support from (in person).
Patchy internet connection.
Hardware issues.
The noisy environment of operation.
These limitations have to be accommodated when you form your responses, in the new (to be) process.
‘Customer advocacy’ is critical, you have to champion the cause of the customer, never let it go out of sight. I outline it over again here because process mapping is going to be a longspun, difficult and daunting exercise. Remember, that when you hide behind policy limitations you give the customers a reason to choose your competition over you. You have to find a way to do what your customer expects you to, keeping in mind that the service offering has to remain competitive, lucrative and at the same time financially and operationally viable. On the rare occasion that you have to say no, make sure that your delivery is as empathetic and as information-rich as it possibly can be. Note that customers do not reach you to find eloquence but resolution. Even if you were to put conversationalists par excellence like Dr Shashi Tharoor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Dr Richard Hans, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy- the customers may still walk out unhappy and unserved if the issue is not resolved to his/her satisfaction in time lesser than he/she expected to and is willing to invest on your brand. It is hard ...very hard .. but that is the fun of it all if you ask me.
There is another element to the COVID19 crisis- what must be done here and now. What must the first responders of the service industry do, to save the day? Thankfully, a well-researched framework from Harvard is available for it as well.
Professor Ted Waldron (Harvard business school ) and Professor James Wetherbe (Texas tech university) in a jointly conducted research have come up with the 'HEART concept' of dealing with customers at the time of crisis. What you’ll read now is my understanding of the framework.
Humanise your company.
Remind the customer of what they love about the experience and the products, that they have been using.
It is vital to say that you understand what they are going through.
If fiscally possible find ways to re-pay them from your profits.
Like extending warranty or subscription etc.
Downtime waiver.
Educate customers about the change.
Customers must know the changes that you had to bring in the way you operated, to deliver in these unusually tough circumstances.
Customers are smart and most importantly they are also living through the horror themselves, so communication, at this stage if kept sincere will be received with greater warmth than usual.
Assure stability.
Customer needs to know that you’re going to be around. That you are committed to making it work.
List all the great things that you are doing and are willing to consider to make the transition seamless for the customer.
Revolutionise offerings.
Underscore the product, process and tech innovation that you’ve introduced in your business. Demonstrate a few if possible.
Communicating more is better.
Take on the future.
‘Going above and beyond’ is to be illustrated to the customer
Convey the things that you have learnt from the crisis.
Your customer should know that you as a brand are willing to listen and to learn.
The humility of the brand is respected by the customer.
Thus far we have covered,
Changing customer behaviour.
Service philosophy re-design.
'Here and now' action items.
The last thing that I wish to bring to your notice is the emergence of the digital.
As you can see in this chart, close to half of the adults in this country are ‘online’ and so should you be. Because to reduce the customer effort you should be present where the customer is, the customer should not have to invest energy in shifting mediums to find you. The trick is not in achieving digitization alone, you will have to make digitalization and digital transformation; all three of them happen to gain long lasting competitive advantage. Organisations need to find a way to make digital more human so that it can compensate for the loss of real human connections that people are experiencing with the COVID19 imposed social distancing.
The character of technology is impersonal; no matter who you are ‘cmd+C’ is only going to copy; therefore there is a need to massage the message well so that customers on the digital platform, feel how human your intent is.
I hope this has been helpful, see you on the other side.
Building blocks of building customer service from the seminal work - Outside -in paraphrased in my words!
