CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SERVICE QUALITY:THE CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT

1. THE CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT

Companies at the forefront of customer satisfaction have found that positioning, organizing, and staffing a department for consumer affairs / customer satisfaction is essential. The growth in impor- tance of customer service departments is dramatically shown by the proliferation of professional associations and professional newsletters. The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP, at www.socap.org) serves to professionalize the industry and provides a range of training, educational material, and meetings. The Customer Service Newsletter, offered by the Customer Service Group (www.alexcommgrp.com), is part of a set of useful newsletters and practical materials for improving and understanding a company’s customer service offerings.

Organization

Organizing a department whose top executive reports to the CEO is likely to send a signal to the organization that customer service / satisfaction is important. Direct reporting to the CEO allows policies about customers to be made at the highest levels and reduces the probability that these policies will get lost in the history and bureaucracy of the business.

Centralization

There is much to be gained from having a centralized customer service initiative. These advantages include economies of scale, greater practicality for using state of the art computers and telephone strategies, adaptability, easy adherence to standards, better access to top management, opportunities to create career paths, and being well suited for manufacturing and consumer products businesses. Probably the greatest advantage of centralization is the centralization of information. Information is easily aggregated and analyzed for use by the strategic areas in the business.

Setting Service-Quality Standards

Service standards are the measuring stick that guides a customer service report card. Standards must be carefully engineered to be consistent with the operational and strategic goals of the business. One of the more common standards in customer call centers may actually be antithetical to the customer satisfaction goals of the organizations. Forcing customer service agents to take too many calls per hour or make each call as short as possible (both metrics logical under a cost cutting / control mission) may interfere with a mission to maximize customer satisfaction (which might require longer calls and therefore fewer calls per hour).

Mystery shoppers, mystery callers, and quality monitoring are all techniques used to monitor service quality standards. Unfortunately, more attention is paid to how those standards are measured than to the establishment of standards that are really related to outcome measures that matter.

Simply stated, what gets measured gets done. What gets rewarded gets repeated. Telling front- line people that they must greet the customer within 25 seconds can easily be monitored and will increase the chance that the front-line person will greet the customer quickly. If a standard is estab- lished, it should be related to satisfaction, purchase, or loyalty in some way. Standards should be related to issues of bottom-line significance. Unfortunately, many customer satisfaction and service quality standards are set because they can be easily measured and monitored (greet customers within 25 seconds when they enter the store, answer the phone by the fourth ring, respond to the e-mail with 24 hours). Or they are set because they have been historically used in the organization.

Creating meaningful customer service and service quality standards plays a role in establishing the company as an outstanding customer-oriented organization. Few companies and organizations have standards, and those who have them do not tie them to strategy and mission. But a few have standards that they have found to be causal determinants of customer satisfaction and profitability. These companies are leaders in their fields.

Managing Complaints

At any time, almost 25% of your customers are dissatisfied with your products or service. Yet fewer than 5% of these consumers ever complain. Complaints are a fertile source of consumer intelligence. Businesses should do everything to maximize the number of complaints from dissatisfied customers. Complaints define what companies are doing wrong so that systemic changes can be made if needed. Second, research is clear in showing that a dissatisfied consumer who complains and is taken care of is significantly more loyal than a consumer who does not complain. Complaints are strategic opportunities. Most consumers who complain are not irate. Systems and employees who are not responsive create irate consumers. Training and empowerment allow front-line employees to reduce anger and create loyal customers.

Companies that understand the strategic value of complaints have instituted systems and access points that literally encourage consumers to complain. Internet access sites and e-mail addresses are the wave of the future, and companies will need to be prepared for the volume of contacts received in this manner. More likely today’s companies have a call center at the center of their complaint- management system.

With simple training and sound procedures and policies, most consumer complaints can be re- solved quickly and effectively at the lowest levels of contact. It costs five times as much to get new customers as it does to keep customers. Call centers, and in the future e-mail and Web access, provide companies with the cost-effective ability to manage complaints, turning a dissatisfied customer into a loyal one. But maybe more important, a company that recognizes a complaint as a strategic op- portunity encourages complaints and is more likely to use the information to make strategic devel- opment and marketing decisions. What you do not hear can and will hurt you.

Call Centers

The call center has emerged as a vital link between customers and businesses after the consumer has purchased the products and / or services. These centers range from small operations to massive op- erations employing thousands of telephone service representatives.

The birth of the 800 toll-free number made access to companies cheap and easy for consumers. Subsequent advances in telecommunications technology have enabled businesses to handle volumes of calls unimaginable five years ago at affordable costs.

Call Center Operations and Logistics

Inbound and outbound communications form the thrust of call center operations. The Internet is forming the basis of low-cost communication for the business-to-business and consumer-to-business enterprise. EDI (electronic data interchange) was a novelty five years ago. Now consumers (and businesses who are consumers of other businesses) would probably prefer to be able to order, check order, check inventory, locate where the products are en route, pay, and follow up without having to touch or talk to a live person.

Sophisticated natural language recognition voice recognition programs (interactive voice response technology [IVR]) are replacing the boring and ineffective first-generation IVR (‘‘press or say 1 if you . . . press or say 2 if you . . . ’’). IVR can become a cost-effective means of handling 50–75% of all incoming phone conversations. Telephonic advances allow a consumer to speak in his or her natural voice about the problem he or she is experiencing and the call to be routed so that the most qualified customer service agents will get the call before it has even been picked up.

More importantly, switch technology allows routing of customers based on their value to the company. High-priority customers can get through quickly, while lower-valued customers can wait in the queue.

Hiring, Training, and Keeping Customer-Oriented Professionals

The customer is the most important part of a business. No customer means no sales means no reason to exist. If the customer is so important, do we see few executive-level positions with customer satisfaction in the title? The financial side of the business is important, so we have a vice president of finance. The marketing side of the business is important, so we have a vice president of marketing. The consumer is important, but we do not have a vice president for consumer satisfaction.

Where to begin:

1. Make a commitment to exceptional customer satisfaction by making certain that job descrip- tions have customer satisfaction accountabilities. Have a person whose only responsibility is to think about how the operations and marketing and recruitment affects the customer. Because we believe that hiring minority individuals is important, we put into place an executive who audits all aspects of this part of the company. Without a key individual whose focus is customer satisfaction, customer satisfaction may be lost in the day-to-day pressures.

2. The expression is, if you are not serving the customer, you’d better be serving someone who is. Thus, positions should include some accountability for customer satisfaction. What gets measured and rewarded gets done. If customer satisfaction is important, then monitoring, mea- suring, and rewarding based on customer satisfaction are critical.

3. Customer satisfaction must be lived by the top executives. Customer-oriented cultures wither when senior executives only talk the talk. Every Saturday morning, executives at Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters gather for a meeting that is satellite linked to each of their 2600+ stores. They do a number of things at this meeting (point out and discuss hot items, cost savings, the Wal-Mart cheer, etc.), but nothing is more important than the senior executive at the meeting getting up and asking all there, ‘‘Who is the most important person in Wal- Mart’s life?’’ and then hearing all respond, ‘‘The customer.’’

4. Hire for attitude, train for skill. There is simply too much looking for skilled people and then hoping they can learn customer service skills. In studying at the best-in-class companies, we have observed that selecting people at all levels who are ‘‘eagles’’ (show evidence of the ability to soar) and then teaching them the skill set for the job is better than getting people who have some skills and hoping they will become eagles.

5. There are any number of commercially available screening and selection tools focusing on customer satisfaction.

Selecting, training, and developing a fanatical devotion to the customer in employees is the critical piece of the puzzle.

4.6.1. Training for Exceptional Customer Service

Most companies expect a great deal from their customer service professionals. Yet formal training is sketchy and infrequent and lacks specificity and impact. Training works well because it sets expec- tations, teaches skills, and allows employees to be successful in the job.

Instituting customer service training in companies with established training programs requires a customer-orientation module in existing training programs and the development of a complete cus- tomer service representative training program for those individuals with total customer service func- tionality.

Some companies find that a call center is the best place for any new hire to gain experience. Few engineers at Ford will forget the customer in their later jobs after spending some time in the Ford Customer Call Center listening to problems and complaints. In addition, after working in a call center, these future leaders of the company (whether they come from sales, finance, marketing, legal, or administration) become sensitive to customer satisfaction issues and see more clearly how customer service fits the big picture.

Stories of companies with exceptional customer service orientation and excellent training obscures the fact that training alone will never work. The organization, its people, and its processes must support the jobs of people who have direct customer service functionality. Customer service training is a continuous process. Measuring performance, holding people accountable, providing feedback, cross-training, refresher training, and customer visits all allow the growth and development of a customer service culture and mission.

4.7. Serving the Internal Customer

One of the greater gaps found in organizations attempting to become more customer focused is the lack of attention to the internal customer. A good example of an internal customer orientation is provided by the Haworth Company, an office systems manufacturer. Their quality-improvement pro- gram revolved around the internal customer. Each work unit identified all its internal customers. They prioritized these customers, identified key work output in measurable terms, set standards, and mea-

sured their performance with their internal customers. Many companies have instituted internal help desks to which employees can call to get answers and solutions to their work problems much the same way that external customers use call centers for answers to questions and solutions to problems.