Here’s a thought for the New Year. It’s a simple, fail-safe formula to improve business performance, boost the economy and make the entire nation happier. What’s the magic sauce? Good customer service.
It’s an obvious point, but widely ignored. The standards we are routinely forced to endure are a national disgrace.
This applies to Labour’s revered public sector as much as to profit-making companies. The cost of being given the run-around, whether by the NHS, the tax office or your insurance company, adds up to billions of pounds of lost productivity as well as soaring collective stress levels.
The irony is that organisations spend a fortune trying to convince themselves they are wonderful at service and that their customers love them.
They obsess over ‘net promoter scores’ and other ‘satisfaction metrics’, along with the inane ‘smiley face/angry face’ mini-surveys that infest their websites. The more they do it, the worse their real-life relationship with customers becomes.
As they dabble in corporate wokery on every subject from gender identity to Palestine, too many companies have jettisoned basic service.
Frustration: Customers are made to feel we are nuisance callers, with whom personal contact is best avoided
They have become corporate vampires, draining us of time and energy through processes that appear designed to thwart us at every turn. So-called ‘Help Centres’ frequently do the opposite and ‘Contact Us’ should be renamed ‘Don’t Even Think About Phoning Us.’ Customers are made to feel we are nuisance callers, with whom personal contact is best avoided and that we should not be polluting their phone lines with our concerns.
The result? The latest report by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) found satisfaction with big UK businesses is at its lowest level for 15 years.
It makes no sense for firms to behave so badly that they are despised by customers, regulators, government and society at large. And it is expensive: the ICS estimates dealing with service failures and problems costs UK companies £6.8billion a month.
So why do they do it?
In some sectors such as water or rail, there is little or no competition.
Even where there is, many senior executives seem to underestimate the misery of poor service, perhaps because they rarely suffer it. They don’t do their own life admin, they have spouses and PAs who do it for them.
CEOs of customer-facing companies should spend at least a day a month on the shop-floor, at the bank branch or in the call centre to stay in touch with reality. Boards should have a director responsible for customer service.
Senior executives complain it is hard to recruit good staff into customer service roles. These jobs could be much more fulfilling if service were approached in a positive spirit. In many companies it is seen as a cost rather than a potential driver of revenue and profit, so ambitious employees see it as a backwater, not a route to the top.
Nor can it be much fun for frontline staff trying to placate people who have already spent ages finding a well-hidden phone number and then been kept waiting because ‘we are experiencing exceptionally high levels of demand’ (pull the other one).
Artificial Intelligence could help, if it were not deployed as another weapon with which to confound the poor customer, but used in combination with competent and empathetic humans.
The number one thing we want when we have a problem is to be properly heard and treated as if we matter. Can that really be so hard?
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