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Companies that make excellent products are often poor at customer service – why?  Chris Daffy investigates whether such technically based businesses can forge a marriage made in heaven with service or is it a road to hell?

 

We see examples everywhere of technically based businesses that are able to make great products that are incredibly reliable, yet deliver a service experience that is 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’s 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 as someone that has a passion for helping organisations deliver service excellence I decided to investigate.  

Over the past year or so I’ve had the opportunity to work on service improvement projects with 5 large technically based businesses. This has enabled me to observe and advise and I think I now know some of the reasons why these anomalies occur. I’ve also had the opportunity to test and learn what works, so I have a few suggestions for fixing the key problems.

I think the root of 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. 

Technical people will have been hired, and perhaps promoted to senior positions, 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 won awards for doing it. But using their heart for an art does not come as naturally to them. It perhaps makes them feel uncomfortable and awkward, and therefore it’s something they are likely to avoid if possible. So they tend to develop systems that are very efficient but dull, perfect but boring, slick but heartless.

 Worse still, they often 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 invest lots of time and effort into removing variances and/or inaccuracies from the product or process but don’t go on to ensure the customer service people have a ‘natural’ ability and are trained and equipped to do it superbly.

So the nature, training and experience of technical people can easily make them blind to the fact that the character element of any service experience is just as 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, service experience improvements benefit from good analysis; but they need a lot more. They also need imagination, creativity, and experimentation, and 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. 

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, where it’s difficult to predict how customers will react to something they haven’t previously experienced, so the best way to find out is to keep testing and developing techniques that will create the desired results.

It’s really tricky (maybe impossible) to get someone to comprehend something if they don’t understand the language being used. The language service improvement people use is basically different to the language systems or process people use. There are however similarities, and this creates the third issue because we can easily then be fooled into thinking we’re talking the same language when we’re not. 

For example, the phrase ‘service delivery’ can mean very different things. 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 customers service person means (or should mean) the total experience a customer has, which involves what any SLA or KPI says it should be (competence), but it importantly also includes the way it is delivered and how that makes the customer feel (character). 

I’ve found that realising this is important so that any foreign language issues can be addresses and potential problems overcome.

So if those are the challenges, what have I found are the best ways to overcome them? My recommendations for success are 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, are given equal prominence. 

I’ve found that in all the organisations I’ve helped, 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 (‘quick wins’). They give a boost to morale, show the efforts are worthwhile and encourage people to carry on and perhaps start tackling the things that may take longer but will be worth the extra effort in the long run.

In his best selling book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, Dr Stephen Covey explained that one of those habits is to ‘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 important to understand.  There are -

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. It’s therefore important to 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 the Experience Engineer Black Belt Training I’ve developed can be really helpful with this)

Support the challenges – All change programmes throw up unexpected 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 posed the question is this 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