Customer Service – Page 4 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 18, 2021

Self-determination

I’ve spent the whole of the day re-setting and rebuilding my computer. Windows simply refused to restart. No reason was given, no error messages, no hint of what might have caused it, just an escalating series of interventions that culminated in a factory reset.

That’s my day gone. I don’t have a choice. My laptop is infrastructure. I need it to work.

Imagine if corporations like Microsoft decided to do that to us on purpose.

It’s easy to miss where power really lies.

January 12, 2021

Meeting Spec

Specifications highlight the difference between value creators and value extractors brilliantly.

Value creators treat specifications as minima. They’re always looking to see far they can go above and beyond, within the time and financial constraints they face. For them the spec is a starting point.

Value extractors, on the other hand, view specs as maxima. They’re always looking to see how little they can get away with, how much they can bend the definitions, while still being able to say they’ve met the specification. For them the spec is the bar, and they’re always trying to lower it.

Extractors win in the short term. But the future belongs to the creators. Especially if they collaborate with each other.

The picture is 2 days worth of lunches for a Finnish schoolchild during lockdown last year.

December 11, 2020

She changes

“Good Services” principle number 13: “A good service should respond to change quickly”

The key here is ‘respond to’. This is about reflecting relevant changes in the user and understanding the implications of those changes for the user.

A simple example: I’ve just had a call from my insurance broker. They wanted to speak to my husband about renewing his car insurance. He was insured with them, until he got rid of the car a couple of years ago. Somewhere that change has not been propagated through the system. Of course that doesn’t mean that they should never call him – he may have bought a new car since – but it would be a different, more appropriate call, that doesn’t start with “We see your renewal is coming up…”.

Automatic propagation isn’t always appropriate of course, so the best option might be to let the user notify a change then let them also specify where it should propagate to, perhaps with the least contentious options pre-checked to make the ‘usual route’ easier.

This could have an interesting side-effect of making people more conscious of where their data is held and for what purposes, putting them even more in control.

Giving back control – there’s a thought.

December 9, 2020

Them and Us

Here’s a scary set of statistics from “Good Services” :

A 2014 study found that up to 60% of the cost of UK government services arose from calls and casework. Not that surprising perhaps, until you delve deeper and find that of those calls, 43% were chasing the status of a case, 52% were ‘how-to’ questions, 5% were complaints, and only 2% were to do with complex cases that needed human intervention.

In other words, at least 95% of all calls received were unnecessary – should have been unnecessary, either for the caller to make or the responder to handle

That’s a lot of wasted effort, that could have been better spent designing systems that helped people get what they needed.

Designing and implementing good services is not rocket science or cutting-edge, or even particularly expensive. All it takes is empathy and care.

Putting yourself on the side of ‘them’ instead of ‘us’.

December 1, 2020

Dead ends

Arguably, my experience with Screwfix the other day was due to breaking this 10th principle of service design: “A Good Service should have no dead ends.”

When the local store had to close unexpectedly and temporarily, whoever was responsible for closing didn’t have authority to update the main company website. They had reached a dead-end in the process for closing a store, which in turn led to a dead-end for me, the customer.

When you’re designing a service or process it’s a good idea to start with the most straightforward and most frequently occuring case. But as soon as have this, you need to consider likely exceptions, and include them in your documentation. One important exception many forget, is that your product or service is simply ‘not for’ the person trying to use it. This is a legitimate ‘dead end’ in a way, but helping them to make an orderly and elegant exit will do no harm to your reputation.

Often, dead-ends occur when you haven’t fully considered who your users might be. Not every shopper is 100% fit and able-bodied. Heavy doors and steps become dead-ends for the disabled, frail or heavy-laden. Small print makes a web-page a dead-end for someone short-sighted. Small buttons or too-precise hand-movements create dead-ends for the arthritic or shaky-handed. As my husband found out recently, 2-factor authentication makes online banking a dead-end for those who don’t have a mobile phone.

Of course, you’ll never be able to predict every possible exception or variation, so you need to make sure your service or process always has an ‘escape route’. A good start is to enable a user (whether customer or team member) to talk to a human being with sufficient experience and authority to handle anything.

If you find this backstop is called on regularly or too often, you’ve discovered another common exception you didn’t allow for.

As long as you learn from the times the backstop is called for, your organisation will quickly learn to minimise the need for it.

October 28, 2020

Maintenance

Maintenance. None of us want to do it. Most of us don’t even want to know it’s being done. We hide it. We put it off, and off, and off again, even though we know that ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’.

Why is that I wonder? Animals and birds seem to do maintenance instinctively. Birds pop food in one end of their nestlings, then tug poop out of the other. Nests and dens are rebuilt or cleared out regularly. How have we humans lost this?

Maintenance of all kinds is what keeps our systems and ecosystems going, but we don’t value it. We don’t even want to see that it’s being done. We hide it in basements and cupboards, offsite, even offshore. And we certainly don’t value the people who do it, we turn them into quasi-servants, invisible, ‘low-skill’, and therefore deserving only low wages.

Until something breaks. Then we love them, applaud them, can’t thank them enough. 5 minutes later, we’re ignoring them again.

Maintenance isn’t sexy, but it is essential. It’s high time we got better at it.

As a start, perhaps we should all do more of it ourselves?

I’m off to clean the oven.

September 28, 2020

Exhausted

I spent the weekend looking for a cooker hood. I don’t like them, I’ve never had one, and I’d rather not have one now. But I am obliged to put one in my new kitchen, so have one I must.

Finally, after hours of searching online, I find one I can live with. It’s available all over the internet, under different brand names and SKU codes, from at least a dozen retailers, some of whom are clearly using the same database and software to present their goods. Every one of them is the same price. Competition here is clearly an illusion.

But what is really infuriating is that not one of those dozen retailers sells the associated carbon filter I will need to make the thing actually work. Nor do they give the manufacturer’s model number that would enable me to find the correct filter elsewhere.

More hours of detective work follow, to track down the ‘manufacturer’ (actually just a ‘brand’) and therefore find the model number I need to find a filter that will fit. Spares sites tend to be independent, and restrict what they ‘stock’.

Finally, I manage it, and get both things safely ordered. All in all, it’s cost me a day and a half to buy a simple cooker hood and carbon filter online.

But what else should I expect, when this is how most companies see ‘the buying process’?

High streets are struggling, we are told. IMHO , all they need to do is offer a truly helpful, rather than a merely ‘convenient’ service, even if only as a front end for an internet purchase – imagine Argos with expert human beings and the best possible product database.

After all, it’s the front end that really matters.

September 16, 2020

Software error

It turns out that yesterday’s AWOL veg box wasn’t down to a new driver, but to a problem with the navigation software.

The driver did a great job of sorting things out. He bought a new phone, double-checked his route and corrected the mistakes. He took responsibility and did what needed to be done to really keep us happy.

Meanwhile head office was offering refunds.

Technology is brilliant, but you need a systematic way of identifying when it’s broken, as quickly as possible. Analogue visual indicators work well for this e.g.the address label on the box, a line marked on a bottle that used every day.

You also need a fall-back manual process for when the software breaks. That way, things may take a little longer, but nobody is taken by surprise, and nobody is let down. And you don’t have to compensate unnecessarily.

Do you check your phones are working every morning? Do you have backup phones? Do you keep an up-to-date back-up (maybe even hard copy) of your contacts? Do you have a process for learning from mistakes and accidents?

I’d be surprised if you do.

September 15, 2020

New driver

My veg box supplier has been growing really fast. I’m not suprised, it’s a great scheme.

Today’s veg box has gone AWOL. It’s been delivered to someone else by mistake.

I’d bet an artichoke that there’s a new driver.

And no Customer Experience Score.

September 14, 2020

Interference

Last Friday, the materials for our new roof were delivered. Tiles, ridge tiles, clips, battens, everything the roofers would need to start the job the following day.

Except, I spotted, the membrane that goes between joists and tiles. Without that the job couldn’t even start. To be honest, we’re relaxed about the schedule, but I knew our building company prides itself on being ahead, rather than behind, and our choice of tiles had taken time to source, so they were only just ‘on track’.

I could see the delivery driver had a pallet-load of it on his truck, so I asked the question, just in case. It wasn’t on his delivery sheet, so he called the office. They didn’t have it in the order either.

“Well I’ve got a pallet load here, so I’ll take a roll off and we can sort out the order with our client back in the office. That saves me coming back later if it is missing.”

When I told our project manager, she said that’s why they always use that building supply company, because they focus first on foremost on taking care of their clients and end-users, rather than sticking rigidly to procedure.

I’d interfered in the process wrongly, as it happened. The membrane wasn’t missing. When the roofers turned up next day, they brought a big roll of it with them, and put it back in their van once they saw it wasn’t needed.

Obviously what was really missing was a clear understanding of who’s responsible for what, apart from inside the project manager’s head. Does it always work this way? Or does that depend on the roofer? If everyone (including the client?) knows it’s always the supplier’s job to supply everything, this sort of mix-up wouldn’t happen.

What could remedy that? A Customer Experience Score.

Not a procedures manual to consult every five minutes and follow slavishly. Rather, a high-level picture of ‘what happens when’ that can be quickly and easily learnt by each new person or business that comes on board. Something that says “This is how we do things, so if you join us, you need to understand this too”. That way everyone is empowered to make sure things happen as they should, even if they don’t actually work for you.

In this case the mix-up happened the right way round. The roofers finished at 10pm on Sunday, having worked their socks off for two days. Our build is back on schedule, and I’m happy to recommend our building company to anyone.

But I’m also going to suggest a little composition.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Service