Customer Service - Often Outstanding or Always Average?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest foray into blogging from your friendly everyday ICONZ team.

As Operations Manager at ICONZ I’m responsible for all of the customer-facing parts of our business – so if our clients have a problem, the buck stops with me. Sales have targets as a measurement of success but my team’s yard stick is centred on one thing - service and service delivery excellence. Today I’d like to talk about that elusive art of customer service - something which lots of companies talk about, but very few actually do well. 

Two Steps to Excellence

In my opinion, good customer service is a very simple process;

1. Identify what the customer wants (often very different from what they initially say they want)

2. Deliver it quickly and to a high standard

Seems pretty straightforward, but as we all know there are any number of barriers that can get in the way of this seemingly easy process. 

Challenge 1 – Getting Through to Someone

Our first struggle is actually getting the customer to speak to someone who can help as quickly as possible. This problem has generated a wide range of different solutions over the years – intricate mazes of IVR options, “intelligent” speech recognition, overflowing or outsourcing calls to external call centres, the list goes on. However, the simple truth is that none of these things are a proper substitute for actually speaking to a person who has the knowledge and skills to help you. That’s why most service companies employ Account Managers, Service Delivery Managers and the like – so that key clients can pick up the phone and speak to someone who knows their business, cares about it, and has the ability to action change.

The traditional call routing model has significant disadvantages for the provider too. In a standard calling queue environment there is no easy mechanism for the provider to prioritise service calls as they come in. 

For example, Customer A has an urgent issue which is, in fact, not a fault with their service provider. They don’t know this yet – all they need at this point is a moment of time from a qualified person to verify that this is the case, and they can get on with the important business of fixing their problem. However, their request is stuck in a queue behind Customer B, who has a non-urgent enquiry about their account balance. And when they do finally speak to someone, that person doesn’t know the answer (or worse – they give them the wrong one). How do we prioritise these issues appropriately without constant escalation to AMs, SDMs and Senior Managers?

Challenge 2 – Getting Through to the Person You’ve Just Got Through to

The second major challenge is ensuring that, once the call is answered, the person who picks up the phone is actually able to help your customer. Often the folks who work in call centres don’t actually know a lot about the product or service they’re supporting – if they did, they probably wouldn’t be working in the call centre!

To script or not to script?

The traditional answer to this problem is call scripting (ie. literally writing a script for how the call should go). There are, clearly, a number of problems with this approach.

I'll give you an example. Many years ago, I worked in an outsourced call centre answering phone calls for a wide range of customers. As is normal for such environments, we had heavily regimented call scripts. One of our customers was a wildlife organization. For this customer, the call script started with "Welcome to xxxxxx, are you calling to report a disease in farm animals, bees, fish or birds?". I asked this question for 2 years - do you want to guess how many times the answer to this question was “Yes”? Once. In 2 years. I nearly fell off my chair when it happened. 

Clearly this is an extreme case - call scripts can be effective in certain environments if they are well defined and delivered. However, at the end of the day all most customers want to do is speak to an actual person who can help – or at least direct them promptly to someone who can.

So how do we solve this problem? I believe the answer lies in moving away from the classic, transactional, call centre model. You can put in as many systems and processes as you like, but at the end of the day the experience of your customers comes down to the person who is on the other end of the phone. 

The People vs The Process

Of course the first step is to get good people – staff should have great customer service skills, and also an in-depth knowledge about the products they are supporting. 

But that’s only half the battle.

The problem with the traditional call centre is that good people are often shackled by overbearing process, or worse still demotivated to the point that they stop being any good. This is just wrong - if you have great staff, why are you crippling them rather than using their talent?

Empower your people. Give them the tools, knowledge, and (most importantly) the permission to make meaningful change for your customers. The phrase “shooting the messenger” is often used with reference to Call Centre Operatives. By making your call centre people a part of the decision making process, you make them more than just the messenger – because they are involved and engaged in the decision-making process for your customers, they are more likely to be able to explain these decisions to your customers and make suitable exceptions where necessary.

The Downside

Inevitably, there are some downsides to this approach.

Training is much harder - it can take people a few months to properly come up to speed (because there’s a lot more for them to learn), and that can really hurt in an environment that demands immediate resource. But when newbies do finally make it, their outputs are so much better, because they are invested in what they’re doing rather than just following a script.

Also your team will not be perfect, so sometimes mistakes will happen, but these can be addressed through training, implementing the proper system controls and effective people management. At the end of the day - wouldn’t you rather have an inspired and engaged team who deliver outstanding service to the vast majority of your customers than a pack of drones who give average service to everyone?

What we do

At ICONZ, we don't run call scripts. Quite apart from the fact that I despise them (see the aforementioned call centre example) they don't suit our business or our customers. Our range of products and services is far too diverse to nail down to a set script, and our clients often need an immediate response to priority issues – they simply don’t have time to jump through hoops to get there.

Freedom to help

Rather, we give our frontline staff the knowledge and the autonomy to actually be able to help our customers. You need to speak to an engineer? Fine, we’ll put you through. You’d like your cloud server reconfigured? No problem, we’ll arrange that for you. Instead of starting with abstract questions, our calls begin with "how can I help?" and continue with someone actually listening to your answer. 

Naturally, we utlitize change management controls and appropriate security restrictions to prevent issues, but we don't create hard ceilings for our staff where they may have the skills to help you but are not “allowed” to because it’s “not their job”. 

As a result we do have a steep training curve for new people, but when they do get there they really know their stuff. Our staff churn is very low for a call centre (most stay for at least 2 years and often move up into other positions within the company). 

But most importantly, our people really care about what they do, and they’re happy to be doing it – which means our customers are happy too. 

And when it’s all said and done, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?