Grouping customer service activity
This week three of us spent some time at the UK Institute of Customer Service Annual User Conference where I learned to articulate better a few groupings of activity that improve customer service.
The grouping activities were:
Monitor Customer Service
Surprisingly few people do this. Peter Drucker told us “What get’s measured gets managed”, so it logically follows that measurement will lead to understanding where improvements can be made. We only do this currently around certain processes and thinking about this a bit more made me realise that we need to measure more ourselves, and help other people with this measurement.
By seeing where improvement is needed we can genuinely help make improvements. Asking customers often in a non-intrusive way at the point of service is practical. A complaint is a gift – poor feedback at the monitoring point can collect useful information and we should welcome the opportunity to know how we can improve, where we need to – and that we are known to be good when we are.
Engaging with customers
Engaging with customers helps to understand how one can improve and delvier value better. This is blindingly obvious, though we are often too busy to engage with customers, whilst doing something wherein we cannot see the correlation between customer value and what we are doing instead. This is a self-criticism – not one of you – I am sure that you speak to at least 10% of your customers/prospective customers each week and have the active voice of your customer driving what you do. It is tough and there are distractions, what is the “main thing” and are you doing it?
Blogs and forums are an obvious easy step. Polls, surveys and complaints/feedback make a lot of sense. How about a top 5 requests widget for the extranet. A newsfeed on your extranet homepage that is contextualized to the customer. My favourite – why not allow your customers to engage with each other?
Improving Customer Service
Actually doing Customer Service better by tearing down the walls. Put support online, and all of your documentation. In files, or perhaps in a wiki. Make information available to customers that your Customer Service Folks have access to (heck – why do I need to call somebody to read some infomration on my behalf?). Whilst we are there why not share information that the customer wants with the customer. We already mentioned the feedback process – what else do you do by telephone/post/fax that you could do online directly with the customer?
Fulfillment (comprising CRM, Project and Time Tracking, and Intranet processes)
On the other end of this there is fulfillment in the form of CRM, Project Tracking and Time tracking , and the internal bits of data necessary to make it all happen (availability management). Of these sharing project and time/billing information is obvious as is sharing all appropriate infomration with the customer. It turns out that giving your people better tools allows them to delvier better things to customers, and they want to. IN a few presentations this was summarised as “unified desktop” which on the one-hand was disappointingly technology focused, but on the other-hand the motivation was the same.
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