Service is a sales channel
Everybody in the organisation is a sales person (i.e. contributing to the customer’s perception of the product/service and their relationship with it). Good customer service makes the customer a repeat buyer. But excellent customer service turns the customer into a champion for your offering. Many organisations seem to have forgotten the old metric that it’s five times as expensive to find a new purchaser as it is to resell to a current customer.

Service is a chance for humans to help other humans
And that’s the other thing they’ve forgotten. Your employees are your customers too – they’re customers for your remuneration services of course, but also for your workplace culture, and if you make it attractive to them, for your strategy and vision as well. What those banks and telcos are calling “Customer RELATIONSHIP Management” should more honestly and accurately be called “Transaction Management”. They don’t want a relationship, they just want you to transact (preferably at minimum cost & maximum margin) with them.

Here’s my story – one of many. Standing at the checkout at the supermarket the other day, I’m 2nd in line with about 5 items, behind an elderly woman. Who wants home delivery. That’s okay, shouldn’t take long. But it does – I don’t know why, but it seems to require a lot of writing things down, swiping a card and asking questions for the simple outcome of tagging the bags with the delivery address. About five minutes later, it’s my turn. WHen the cashier gets to the two packs of light bulbs that were labelled on the shelf $2.55 or 2 packs for $4.00. They go through for $2.55 each. I object. She goes for the intercom (couldn’t possibly assume we’ve got an honest customer could we?) and I point out that the shelf I got them from is ‘just there’, 5 metres from the cash register. Which she’s not allowed to leave. Fair enough though, I’m already trying to gyp them out of $1.10, I’d probably be just the type to raid the cash drawer, never mind the instore surveillance cameras. So we wait for ‘Grocery, price check on aisle 6′ and the customer behind me points out to the cashier that there’s a shelf-filler in that aisle right now. “Can’t he check it for you?” ‘Oh, I think he’s just on work experience’ Oh, yeah – a Year 10 education these days means you can’t read or add up.

It took me more time to wait in the queue than it did to find the 5 items. Next time I need milk I’m going to the milk bar. And I’ll get my lightbulbs at the hardware store.

I didn’t mention it in the post but when something isn’t quite right with the netaccounts application we usually get some “sentiment recovery” with the customer through good support. Good customer support will help customers tolerate missing features that aren’t quite available or existing features not optimised for performance.

The second put 2 minutes between me and a person. Then I was bounced around 3 times before I got someone who told me my request would be completed “some time within 5 days” – but couldn’t tell me when or notify me, or their other department (who needed the information), when the action had taken place.

In both interactions I was blocked by technology, not assisted by it.

I think the telling thing is that I am no longer a customer with either of these companies (well, technically I am with one, but not for want of an alternative) – in part because of poor service like that.

Bad service means I’m waiting for the chance to switch to something better. Unfortunately “something better” is not always available.