The myth of customer service

The September Harvard Business Review includes an article “What Service Customers Really Want” by Dave Dougherty and Ajay Murthy.

Read it for yourself, but the basic premise is that you need to delight your customers with the customer service you provide.  There’s a interesting graph illustrating that what we customers want, more than anything, is to speak with someone knowledgeable and they want their issue resolved on the first call. If we, the customer don’t receive this level of service, we will take our business elsewhere.

But I caution you before heeding this seemingly sage guidance.

In my experience, this guidance holds in only a certain percentage of cases, and if you are in a business that falls outside of this customer satisfaction Venn diagram, then you are wasting time and money.

In the book Rethink I say that once you understand the “whats” that make up your business (before looking at “how” they are done), you then mark which are high and low value, and then mark how they are performing.  In my definition business value of any given block of work is the combination of three things:

1) Does it relate to your brand or identity in terms of why customers, partners, or employees do business with you or work with you?

2) Does it have a direct connection to a key performance indicator of the organization?

3) Is there value in improving the performance of that block of work?

I offer several examples of common blocks of work that fail all three tests, including Pay Employees, and then ask people to apply the same work they do in their department, division, or the organization as a whole.

While I agree 100% that you have to stay in close touch with what’s most important to your customer, I reject the notion that customer service is always high on the list. I can think of lots of companies that I don’t like, but I still buy their products or services because they are the best at meeting whatever need I have, whether the primary measure of satisfaction is quality, price, timing, or something else.  Remember the “soup nazi” from the TV show Seinfeld?  People didn’t like him and he didn’t like his customers, but his soup as so great people put up with him (and that character was based on a real soup chef in NewYork).

There are plenty of examples of this in business, but one directly from the pages of Rethink is the online bank ING DIRECT.  Here’s a bank that focuses on delivering very high interest rates to the savings accounts of their customers.  They are so focused on this as their #1 goal, they cut way back on the level of phone support they offer their customers.  They don’t care if a customer has a bad experience on phone support because that’s not what they are “selling” to the customer.  While that is an example of an organization that wants you to take your business elsewhere if you are unhappy about the level of customer service.

If I buy a Snickers candy bar and it tastes bad or the wrapper didn’t seal the product correctly, will I expect great customer service from the makers of Snickers? Nope, and I bet they don’t spend a lot of money on that – Snickers is a well established product and for a product that’s usually less than a dollar, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would expect to be delighted with their customer service.

From there we go to amazon.com, where I may search for a new pair of shoes and I may want the best price for a big name – in that case price is my number one goal, so if I have a bad experience with the product, I am not going to expect amazon.com to delight me with their customer service because I put price ahead of everything else in terms of what I as the customer valued in that transaction.

So if you are thinking about beefing up your customer service because of this article, be sure you are really in touch with the value proposition you have with your customers, or you might do yourself a huge dis-service.

-Ric