Good Customer Service is Hard to Find

April 17, 2006 |

Over at BOPNews, Ian Welsh has an article discussing why you can’t get good customer service:

The better your CSRs understand your products and the better they understand why procedures exists, the more problems they will be able to deal with and the happier customers will be. If they have the knowledge then giving them the authority is not particularly dangerous (give them a budget, set a point beyond which if they go beyond it you will investigate, and let them go). Get them to the point where they know the difference between routine exceptions and non-routine ones. Get them to the point where they know what is illegal, what is protecting profitability, what is a technical constraint which can be manually gotten around, and what is a technical constraint that might as well be a law, because it isn’t something they can manually work around. Make sure they know how the product works, why it works that way, and the common way is it can go wrong and how to fix it .

The problem is that CSR jobs fall into a certain class of work that is pretty much doomed to be done badly (software testing is another example). That is, it’s job that is usually very tedious and routine, but every so often a special case comes up that is actually very difficult to handle. Ideally, you want the job to be done by the people with the intelligence and skills to handle the unusual cases. The problem is that such people can usually find more interesting and better paid work.

An organization that is determined enough to change this can do so, of course. If I was trying to fix the organization Ian discusses, I’d consider basically treating the CSRs as sales staff–tie compensation to the profitability of their customers and use the retention rate and volume of business from a customer as the measurement of performance. It’d be a bit more complex than that, of course, but the basic idea would be to transform it into a profit centre–because it really is. Retaining a customer is a lot more profitable in most cases than finding a new one, and the CSRs are the people who make that possible.

This won’t work for every company, because a lot of companies don’t have the level of direct interaction with specific customers that Ian’s had. Even there, though, I suspect that putting customer retention figures into the compensation of the VP responsible for that area would lead to some improvement.