Satisfy customers, make money

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Why don't they get it?

My company Vocal Laboratories (VocaLabs) is a service bureau in
the business of testing all forms of inbound customer care for
ease of use, caller satisfaction and the impact good (or poor)
service has on a business. I can confirm the same findings as
the article mentions. Given that no one actually begins with the
goal of delivering poor service, and that article after article,
consultant after consultant preaches that good service is good
business, the question of why there is so much poor service
looms large.

The reasons are several with the lead one being that call center
managers are usually rewarded for lowering costs rather than
giving good service. This in turn begs the question why? And
the frequent answer has been that it is too difficult to measure
the revenue impact of service quality. But the truth is more
simple. Many executives pay lip service to serving customers,
but they don't follow their words with action. They lowball hire,
under train and under reward. Line managers come to feel that
they are thwarted when trying to improve (in part because they
can't figure how to relate good care to company income either).
In the end, the attitude prevails that they can either provide
better service OR they can lower costs...not both. Good service
has to be top down driven, and to do that, executives have to
see clearly how spending money on service improvements will
deliver good ROI. And the customer care technology industry
does little to help. The sales mantra is "Buy my shiny new thing
and improve ROI by lowering costs!" The sales person who says
buying my product will allow you to sell X more widgets and add
to customer loyalty saving Y sales (and can prove it) is rare.

Outside the scope of this rant, I'll just say it CAN be done. If a
company simply shifts to a good service focus first and cost
control secondary, it is possible to do both.

My second observation surrounds human nature. Most everyone
believes they are doing a better job than they really are and
simply don't recognize where they fail. A common example is
the call center manager who spends as little as possible on a
survey and then chest thumps about improving satisfaction 5%
from perhaps 70 to 75% this month. They simply fail to
acknowledge they are still annoying 25% of their customers and
that back in school a 75% was a D or F. What do they do? They
report the "improvement" to top management who gives the
report a cursory review and he too believes they are doing ok.
No one questions the survey technique; often fraught with bias.
No one bothers to understand that in the mind of the consumer
"satisfied" is a neutral to slightly negative rating (As in "I didn't
expect good service, didn't get it and so was satisfied."). No one
questions that the margin of error in the survey was greater than
the supposed improvement. In the end, truth gets lost in the
filter of human nature and we all suffer from mediocre service
quality as a result.

Posted by: Rick Rappe   Posted on: 08/16/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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