In these tricky economic conditions that we currently face, I believe the major question that businesses need to answer must be, "how do we differentiate ourselves in a time of great competition?"
If price differentiation and novelty are short-lived; costs can be matched and initiatives are easily replicated; then the two clear options appear to be continuous innovation and customer service. Continuous innovation is both costly and only attracts the 'early adopters' over a sustained period, whereas; customer service is both enduring and attractive to all.
That does not make customer service excellence a cheap or soft target.
Review the cost of market research on customer behaviour or the consultancy needed to understand and set up a customer care programme. But if the goal is so important, surely the cost is worth it; or is it?
Every organisation that has an IT help desk has all the evidence and direction they need to understand customer service and a clear insight into how to achieve customer service excellence. Why?
Every employee, in their other life, is a customer and therefore their reaction to the products and services that are supported from the IT help desk are a perfect microcosm of that other world that is inhabited by our external customers. The metrics that are kept as standard performance measures by the help desk contain a wealth of information that consultants will charge a king's ransom to deliver.
Let us look at just a few to realise their relevance. Delivering customer service excellence without the necessary support will lead to work related stress – check out the staff turnover figures and the number of calls taken per person per day. Customer satisfaction can be gauged by the first call resolution rate and the stress being put on the customer relationship is indicated by the call waiting time. Call duration is a factor of efficiency of dealing with the customer's query, and the abandoned call rate identifies lost opportunities to deliver customer service excellence.
So much for the research element, but how do we learn what must be done to improve things. Customer care is all about delivering to the customer what the customer wants at a price that is attractive to them and financially sustainable for the company.
Again we can turn to our excellent source of insight into customer behaviour; our own staff. What do they really want when they call the help desk and what do they positively not want?
They are customers with a question or a problem. They therefore want an answer or a solution; it really is that simple. They do not want to be held in a queue with regular apologies for the delay. Nor do they want to be dragged through a problem analysis process so that the problem tracking system can be kept up to date (they really don't care about helping you to maintain statistics, honestly) and they don't want to be passed back through the phone system to another and another expert. Lastly, they definitely do not want to be so frustrated that they hang up – with their question or problem still in place.
Strangely, this evidence has been with us for some considerable time. It has helped us create the 'log and flog' culture that is characteristic of so many help desks and call/contact/service centres.
Breaking the cycle must therefore be an imperative, not only because it will make our enterprise healthier for both the organisation and the people within it, but because it points the way towards delivering customer service excellence to the external customer.
Gartner predicts that web services will dominate the deployment of new application solutions. People are becoming more and more comfortable with the use of a web browser to access information. In the USA there would be surprise that any other form could be contemplated, and we are always only a small step behind them in adopting these things. Simple customer self-help is the way ahead. Research by Gartner will tell us that 43% of help desk calls are associated with questions on how to do things. This is ideal material for self-help; think of it as a form of e-learning (create the answer once and deliver it many times). I don't think that I know of a help desk manager that would not want to have 40+% of their calls diverted; imagine the level of service that could be delivered to the remaining customers.
Further, if all the available information needed to answer questions was made readily available, the most appropriate answer could be delivered by the help desk agent quickly and consistently; the time saved here could help to eradicate the abandoned calls.
And finally, what happens if the first line of response does not have the information or expertise to answer the question? The allocation of the next level of response has to be right first time. Expert assessment and location that is specific to the question that is being asked is needed. This has to be a system-based solution as guesswork and "I always ask Bob" have proved to be woefully inadequate and a long way off our aim of customer service excellence.
The effectiveness of this solution to the troubles affecting internal help desks is directly transportable to the outside world. Admittedly, deploying a system like this to the entire enterprise would be no small undertaking without evidence of its success, but even that is available by looking at that microcosm within the organisation. Every aspect of the change can be checked whilst accruing benefit to the company. The cost of deploying a system like this on the help desk would probably be covered by the reduced cost in replacing and retraining help desk agents alone.
And the consultants? Well, you could probably forward your success story to them the next time that they are doing expensive research on behalf of your competitors.
Published: Sunday, January 5, 2003
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