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An interesting set of occurrences yesterday got me thinking about how our interaction with customers tells us a lot about the growth barriers for our business:
A. An email arrived from Microsoft, with this clickable link right at the top:
“Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007″
Huh? Microsoft are sending emails that can’t be read by their own software?
B. Coming out of the Post Office, I found someone’s credit card lying on the ground. I called the 800 number on the back to report the lost card. The operator asks for my name, address and telephone number. I tell her that that information is irrelevant, I’m merely reporting the lost card, and all she needs to know is the card number and the cardholder’s name.
The operator proceeds to tell me that it is ‘mandatory’ for me to supply her with my contact details (remember, I’m not even a customer of these people - merely an innocent bystander trying to help), and that unless I do supply those details, she cannot report the card as lost. [I hung up and cut the card in pieces.]
Lesson? Every organization is either in growth mode or in decline. One of the decline modes is what I call ‘Bureaucracy’ - where systems and process have taken over any sense of actually achieving real results.
You know you’re in Bureaucracy when not only are you providing terrible customer service, you’re in fact actively trying to tee your customers off - like sending out stuff to your customers that doesn’t work with your own product, or preventing the provision of real customer service because of some silly rule that is neither enforceable or relevant.
Ask yourself these three questions to find out if your systems are tipping your organization into bureaucracy:
1. When was the last time the CEO, an SVP or a department or division head personally test drove your customer service processes - from both ends (as a customer, and as a customer service agent)?
2. When was the last time you called up a group of customers and asked them about their experiences? (And no, I’m not referring to your ‘customer service surveys’ or anything else you do to formally measure customer service. Whatever you have in place, I guarantee that it’s manipulated, misinterpreted and miscommunicated to you, to appear better than it really is.)
3. When was the last time you got a (genuinely) unsolicited testimonial of how great your customer service is? A month? A quarter? Last year?
Here’s the bottom line - if you’re not doing (1) and (2) at least every quarter, and getting at least one unsolicited testimonial a month, you have a problem - and no amount of surveys will fix it.
Don’t kid yourself that your ‘customer service department’ is actually improving customer service - too often it’s just a self-perpetuating process that is doing little more than holding back the tide of dissatisfaction. Sooner or later you’ll find you no longer have a ‘customer service’ department - instead you have a ‘customer recovery’ department.
Get your senior managers out on the front line, asking real questions of real customers, and get those unsolicited testimonials flowing.
Les McKeown is the President & CEO of Predictable Success, a consulting firm specializing in organizational and executive development.
You can read more of Les’s work at http://GetPredictableSuccess.com
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