The stats are well known and well documented.
It’s quoted as costing 5 times more (Forbes.com) to attract a new customer than retain a current one, and a dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people (LinkedIn) about their poor customer experience.
So why do so many companies not take note of this and develop their MOS (Management Operating System) accordingly?
The UK has long had a poor reputation when it comes to customer service, and much warranted in my opinion. Far too many UK businesses seem to take their customers for granted, and don’t put the focus on looking after customers the way they should.
I could pick the example of a well-known national telephone provider that I know many friends have encountered with their offshore call centre that works to a very strict process asking a series of questions driving down a fault tree to get the ‘right’ answer. No deviations or humanity allowed, even when the fault tree clearly does not cater for the example presented, yet when you finally find a crack and get the phone number for the UK operations team, everything changes, and you can talk to a real human and actually get things done in a sensible manner… But that’s not the example I will use in this article.
I am currently working for a client who lives in Australia, and has done so for 30 years. She lives in a motorhome and travels round the country visiting friends and family and just staying in beautiful places. She sold up her homestead after it got too much for her to run on her own and after all the stress of too many close calls with forest fires. With this lifestyle, receiving text messages with login codes that expire in 5 minutes and needing a stable internet connection just didn’t work. She needed some help.
To fund her new lifestyle she wanted to pull in her old UK pensions and start drawing on them, a process she started with her pension provider several years ago, but was unsuccessful. She took on my services to act as an ‘agent’ to make this all happen quickly and efficiently…an hour of calls, a few emails, and it would all be done I thought…
I won’t name the pension provider, but it’s a big name, with a nice website, a secure customer portal and a phone line you can talk to someone on (provided you call at 08:30 when the lines open – at that time it’s about 3-5 mins wait time, any later and it’s 30 mins plus – I have given up at 90 mins before….). Almost 12 hours of phone calls, and as much time in other admin (writing emails etc.) and over 25 different individuals spoken to, later….payment was finally made.
Whilst I wouldn’t suggest that my experience with this service provider was typical, what I would say is that the failure modes I identified will definitely repeat, and the impact on a customer wanting/needing to access their pension is very dissatisfying.
So what were the failure modes:-
- No consistency of contact (even after it was clear I should be categorised as a ‘different’ type of customer due to the number of issues that had arisen) – which resulted in different responses to the same question, multiple delays and confusion.
- Provider having multiple out of date copies of key documents that meant incorrect ones were sent out
- Inability to address issues with the secure messaging system, or come up with an alternative whilst working on it
- People/system allowing calls to go on hold for over 30 minutes ( I don’t know about you, but if I am held for over 5 mins, I think they have dropped the call)
- All processes open loop, with no verification that things have happened – i.e. if a customer sends a form, you would hope to get acknowledgement of receipt
So if it took me 12 times longer to achieve my objective than planned, let’s say the average is half that. So what we are saying there is that to achieve the same response times, if all the issues were fixed, the call centre and all costs associated with it could be reduced by 83%!!! Now that’s what I call a saving!
Aside from that, the people I spoke to were lovely, and the company had clearly invested in a process to deal with customer on the phone…but here is the problem. The tool being used was standard work, but just using a quality tool does not solve all your problems. Tools are just one part of a system and unless recognised as such, failure is inevitable (if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail)
Sadly, standard work gets a really bad name from call centres such as this. But it shouldn’t. If the exceptions, as well as the norm are catered for, and the data reviewed and acted on (not in this case, I raised at least 5 separate issues and they all got logged as one complaint – lost data) then success is not just possible, but inevitable – PDCA (Plan – Do – Check – Act).
I have offered my services to help this business improve, I have even written to the CEO offering to take him through my experience, so he can understand, first hand, what it feels like to be a customer, but I doubt I will be taken up on my offer. It is not for me to complain, something I would rather never do, I would rather help others improve. It’s such a shame when that offer falls on deaf ears.
So, if you have gotten this far, pause for a moment and think, what is it like to be a customer of your business?
Do you really know how it ‘feels’ or is your informed position based on data, for which you do not know how it is derived?
I learned my customer service the hard way – I will never forget ordering premium freight vehicles to get parts to customers all over Europe to save letting them down. The day I booked the Antonov at Stanstead airport (I never actually used it thankfully) and it cost £27k just to put it on standby….and then the day most of the major underlying issues were resolved and an audit by Volvo (a very demanding customer) pronounced that we were an exceptional supplier based both on audit of processes and on reviews from customers and supporting data on how the business operated. Success was measured on degrees of calm, or predictable perfection as I have now come to call it.