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A marriage made in heaven or a road to hell?

Why is it that so many technically based businesses are able to make great products that are incredibly reliable, yet deliver a service experience that is seriously flawed? We see this everywhere - a car that hardly ever goes wrong but a routine service experience that’s awful, a laptop that’s fantastic but a helpline that’s anything but helpful, or a mobile phone that bursting with new technology but a support line from the dark ages. It’s something that’s interested (and irritated) me for a long while so I decided to investigate and I think I now know how this happens - and have a suggested solution.

I believe the problem often lies in the way technically based organisations approach improvement projects. They are usually highly skilled in the application of Total Quality, Lean Principles, Six Sigma, and/or whatever other process improvement techniques they favour, so they understandably turn to them when confronted with the challenge of improving a service experience. These approaches are undoubtedly excellent for what they were designed for, improving a process, but they are not as good at improving a service experience, which they were not designed for. 

I have found this ‘process improvement’ approach to service can create three issues when used. I call them Heartless Systems, Paralysis through Analysis and Foreign Language.

There are two key elements in any service experience – competence and character. Competence is the efficiency, accuracy, speed, value for money, etc., of the product and/or transaction; character is the friendliness, honesty, attitude, ease of use, etc., of the systems and people conducting the transaction. Competence is a science; character is an art. Competence requires the use of your head; character requires the use of your heart. And that is the crux of this first issue. 

Most people in these organisations were hired, and perhaps have been promoted, because they are great at using their head for science. It’s natural to them, they love doing it, they’ve probably studied it and have qualifications and maybe even awards for doing it. But using their heart for an art is alien to them. It probably makes them feel uncomfortable and awkward, and therefore it’s something they will avoid if possible. So they tend to develop systems that are very efficient but dull, perfect but boring, slick but heartless.

 Worse still, they assume that so long as the process is right, it doesn’t matter if the person delivering it to the customer isn’t. So they naturally put lots of time and effort into removing variances and/or inaccuracies from the product or process but spend little or no time and effort ensuring the customer service people have a natural ability and are trained and equipped to do it superbly.

This is not their fault. It’s just that their nature and training can easily make them blind to the fact that the character element of any service experience is as just important as the competence (some would argue it is more important).

If you’re an engineer, a scientist, or an accountant you love numbers, formulae, measurements, and analysis. That’s probably why you chose that profession. So when you decide something needs improving, the first thing you do is measure and analyse things, looking for the facts that prove what you should do and why you should do it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but service experience improvements need a lot more; they need imagination, creativity, and experimentation. This is the core of issue two. 

The natural and understandable approach of technology based organisations and people is to over analyse any service improvement challenge. This can result in paralysis, because the precise proof of what needs to be done can’t be found, or even the death of the project, because people get fed up and lose interest doing nothing practical and/or something else that needs to be done comes along and takes precedence. 

Again this is not the fault of the ‘analysts’, it’s just what they’ve been trained to do. It’s their standard approach which works for them in process improvement projects; but it’s too narrow an approach for service improvement projects.

It’s really hard (maybe impossible) to convince someone of something if they don’t understand the language you’re using. This is the third problem. 

The language service improvement people use is basically different to the language systems or process people use. But there are similarities, which creates another problem because we can easily then be fooled into thinking we’re talking the same language when we’re not. 

For example, we can each mean something completely different when we use the phrase ‘service delivery’. Service delivery to a process person usually means providing what was promised, perhaps as defined by a Service Level Agreement or a Key Process Indicator. But service delivery to a service person means (or should mean) the total experience a customer has, which involves what any SLA or KPI says it should be but also includes the way it is delivered and how that makes the customer feel. 

This too is nobody’s fault, but it’s important to be aware of the problem so that it can be overcome.

So if those are the challenges, what are the best ways to overcome them? 

During the past year or so I’ve had the opportunity to work with 5 technically based businesses. This has enabled me to learn what works best. My recommendations for success are therefore as follows.

The goal is not to replace the science based approach with an emotional one, it is just to ensure that both key components, competence and character, have equal prominence. 

I’ve found that in all the organisations I’ve worked, there are always a few people that ‘get’ the emotional, character stuff. Often though, because they are surrounded by people that don’t get it, and maybe resist or mock it, they go native and keep their emotional side hidden in order to ‘blend in’. The key is to find them, ensure they have equal status on the planning and implementation teams, give them tools and techniques to work with that will help them find and develop the emotional customer connections and then encourage and recognise the part they are playing. 

There’s nothing wrong with doing some measuring and analysing, it’s a good way to find where best to focus attention, the key is to ensure that it is used as a step towards taking some action and doesn’t become the only action that is taken. 

So as soon as the results of any analysis start to show through, get people thinking of as many ideas for improvements as they can and then ensure they go and test them with customers to find the ones that work best. What’s important is to quickly find things that show success (often called ‘quick wins’). They give a boost to morale, show the efforts are worthwhile and encourage people to carry on and start tackling the things that may take longer but will be worth the extra effort in the long run.

One of Dr Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood’. I think this is the best way to approach the ‘Foreign Language’ issue. Before you have any right to expect people to speak your language, you must first to make the effort to understand theirs. 

For me this was not too difficult because my early career was spent as an electrical engineer. However I still needed to do a lot of studying of the latest process improvement techniques so as to feel confident talking to the likes of Six Sigma Black Belts and Lean Practitioners. But then I found I could express the service experience concepts in a language with terminology they were familiar and comfortable with. This enabled us to eventually find a ‘common language’ for service improvement in their organisation that worked.

There are also a few general principles I’ve learned that are worth sharing.

Prove the case – Science based people need proof before they will accept anything new. Just because you know something to be so is not enough for them, they need to find it out for themselves. You must therefore be prepared for this and have the examples, case studies, existing customers, bench marks, etc., available as necessary. I have found that it’s hard (sometimes impossible) to make any worthwhile progress until the case for change is conclusively proven.

Transfer the knowledge – Technical people don’t want you to do it for them; they want to do it for themselves. So the best approach is to commit to helping them learn all the techniques (and their sources) so they can do their own research and decide for themselves which ones are most appropriate to their situation. (I have found that providing Experience Engineer Black Belt Training is really helpful)

Support the challenges – All change programmes throw up unsuspected challenges, no matter how much analysis and planning has been done in advance. It’s a step into the unknown, so precisely what will happen is obviously unknown. People therefore need to understand this, that’s it’s OK to stumble and flounder a bit as they get started and feel their way, and that there will be ongoing support and encouragement for them to find success.

This article has the subtitle ‘A marriage made in heaven or a road to hell?’ My experience suggests that if the challenges are approached correctly this is definitely a marriage made in heaven. 

The opportunities for technically based businesses to use service as a source of differentiation and competitive advantage are I believe, immense; especially in today’s ever more competitive markets.  It’s also a fact that in most markets, if one supplier gets a reputation for having a service experience that is substantially better than the competitors, it can lead to many other worthwhile business benefits. I would therefore encourage all leaders to investigate this and discover for themselves how they too could make service excellence a key element of their competitive strategy.

© copyright Chris Daffy