I’ve been thinking about customer service for some time. I’m a marketer (or at least I was before I started screwing off and surfing most of the time) and I’ve always considered customer service to be a marketing function. After all, what good does it do to go out and find new customers if lousy customer service is tossing them away faster than you can replace them. Plus, it’s easier to optimize customers you have than sell to people who don’t know you. Every good marketer knows that the way to save a bad quarter is to sell stuff to the people who already have bought from you.
I read Seth Godin’s blog pretty much every day, and recently he riffed about a way to make customer service better by pushing problems upwards if they can’t be resolved at the current level. Not a new idea, most people know about “problem escalation”, but he proposed software to make it happen. I think he’s on to something, only it doesn’t really require software unless your company is huge. You can do it on 3 X 5 cards. The critical piece is that the problem HAS TO BE RESOLVED at some level, even if that means it has to go all the way to the CEO. Incidentally, resolving a problem doesn’t necessarily mean caving in to a knucklehead customer–telling them to go away is legitimate resolution, but someone has to take the responsibility for that. Saying “I know you’re right, but I can’t help you” is NOT resolution.
At first people will pass on problems willy nilly, avoiding the responsibility of fully executing the authority they have. But unless their boss is really stupid, they’ll start wondering why they need this dead weight, and the shirker will find it very worthwhile to operate at the limit of their authority, attempting to resolve every problem as cleanly and cost-effectively as possible. Because that’s the second critical piece–he cost of resolution has to be examined.
Imagine if your cell phone company did this. When you were two weeks away from qualifying for a new phone and your old phone died, someone in the store would make the deal happen. You wouldn’t walk out of the Verizon store all pissed off and go to Cingular to start a new round of lousy, by the book, non-service. The person who saved you as a customer would have a resolution to their credit, and the cost of saving you as a customer would be whatever that two weeks of contract is worth–darned close to nothing.
At my company–Babcock & Jenkins–we developed lead distribution software ages ago that we called “self deploying and self healing”. The idea was that leads could be forwarded down the org chart of a sales force until they reached the person that should handle the lead. If that person didn’t do anything with the sales lead it would be shoved back up a level so it could be redeployed (and the salesperson would get a ding on their lead handling score). The lead “bouncing back” up the ladder could be ignored and passed up all the way back to the top. Sounds complicated, but it was really pretty easy. We could see instantly where all the leads were in the system, how many had been turned into revenue, and how many had been rejected. In literally days the system stabilised and leads were being handled with remarkable efficiency. So remarkable in fact that the company we built the system for tried to “appropriate” it from us.
It occurs to me that we could do the exact same thing for customer service. Hmmm…
…Nah. I’m going surfing.
