The Six Dimensions of Customer Service

Do you really know what your customer service is for?

If you know what it is for, do you understand exactly what you should be doing to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver this to your customer?

Customer Service is a concept that is usually presented as a collection or patches of complementing activities done by an individual or a group of individuals.

It is seldom presented as a process or a system that an organization manages to seamlessly and effectively deliver solutions (product or service) to customers.

The conventional approach is to teach people to respond to customers using the telephone or handle a live person-to-person interaction especially when there is a dissatisfied or complaining customer.

The way I see it, you never have to resort to complaint management or scripted response to customers if you have done service delivery or created a truly satisfying product in the first place.

Most of the customer service programs are actually damage control or image protection ploys.

I am also a customer for many services and most of these customer service programs are really just cheap scams or are downright shameful tactics to evade doing additional after-sales commitments.

You never have to handle complaints if you avoid hiring callous and stupid people.

You never get callous and stupid people if you didn't promote a callous and stupid person to be a supervisor or department head who got this person in the first place. 

You never promote much less hire a callous and stupid person if you have a good recruitment policy.

Even if you did hire the right person, this person will not be able to function if you don't have a sensible service or product. 

They can't handle customers if you don't have a good process to allow them to get their job right. 

Your support staff won't be able to do his job right because he can't understand his job description (if you have one).

What I'm telling you is that all the components and dimensions making up your customer service program are tightly connected to each other. 

You need to understand that you will not be able to build a customer service program by simply training people or coming up with the process.

You need to tie all components or dimensions together. 

You must serve the right customer with the right product or service concept.

This concept must be supported by a seamless process and effective tools. This process must be managed and tools used by members of your staff having the right attitude and aptitude for the job.

You cannot maintain the right process, invest in the best tools or hire good people if you do not have a business plan that will make you viable.

You cannot have or make all of these dimensions happen or come at the right moment if you don't work as a team.

It took me more than five years to discern that most of the things I have done to build programs in support of customers seem to fall in a logical cluster of relationships and processes within the organization.

When I plan my approach to build a good customer service program, they all seem to fall almost always into six logical components or what I call dimensions.

I like to refer to it as dimension because it seems easier to perceive it if it is not seen as a logical sequence of events or time-specific evolution in an organization.

In my experience, you can literally deliver customer service in a box if you can build all these dimensions gradually and then tie them all together.

You can do it simultaneously or you may choose to work on one dimension at a time. It does not matter. 

What matters is that you must work on it with the intention of tying it together sometime, somehow.

All the things that you will do to build your customer service program will most likely be within the realm of the following dimensions: The Customer, The Service Concept, The Service Process, The Tools, The Business Plan, and The Team.

Indicators of Weak Customer Service Programs

I don't know if people who buy service or expensive products do this but ever since I started getting evaluated for customer service quality, I began to compare everything I do in customer service to every store or shop that I patronize.

I am very optimistic that those who are good at the basics of customer service will grow whether they like it or not.

Do you know why I truly believe this?

There is so much bad service out there that doing the basic things like courtesy, listening, and actually doing something for customers will look exceeding exceptional in the eyes of a customer.

Let's take a look at a great number of indicators to open your eyes on things you should NOT or NEVER do!

The customer is often or usually talking to the owner, supervisor or general manager regarding issues of service delivery that are basic or mundane better delegated to rank-and-file.

Customers who call by phone will not get ready answers to inquiries nor get issues resolved within minutes or will not be referred to the "right" person who can resolve the issue or respond to the inquiry.

Service agreements or terms and conditions of delivery are filled with clauses of what the customer cannot have or what the customer will do that will void the agreement or violate the terms & conditions of the service. Some of the terms and conditions I've seen in computer maintenance are so full of things that can't be done, the sales people were finding it hard to explain exactly what they will deliver.

Written communications related to customer issues are evasive and are normally written in a legal or lawyer's editorial style or tone. You may have heard of service companies who take their customers to expensive lunch meetings because that's the only thing they can really do right and which they don't deliver themselves.

Service personnel are overly cautious when responding to issues related to terms and conditions of delivery and will be non-committal when communicating with customers regarding action to be taken.

Personnel responding to customers are curt and seem to exhibit arrogance when requested to clarify issues or when interacting with customers. There are even truly obnoxious and rude characters who are just being arrogant as a ploy to hide a plain old fashion rip-off. These are genuine con artists who should be behind bars rather than behind the service counter.

Service personnel are not keeping records of tasks or are using forms (some don't even have them) that are either poorly designed, printed in so many copies or going through unnecessary layers of procedures that tend to frustrate customers rather than help them.

There simply is no system in place for the business to gather information or data about customers. The service people seem to have the habit of passing you to different people or offices in the guise of "escalation" without explaining why.

The people are just downright or simply sloppy exhibited by dirty work area, poorly groomed service personnel, inappropriate uniforms, bad layout of service area, poor communication skills, and apparent lack of training even in the most elementary procedures of phone handling or management of customer complaints.

Poorly labeled or misleading labels on products or services.

The business is simply selling products or service with a branding strategy that smells like a scam or rip off more than anything else.

Exaggerated and use of worn out claims in advertisements. If it's too good to be true, it's really too good to be true.

It takes so long for a walked-in customer to get prompt human contact or interaction from frontline staff. If you're standing in a reception area for five minutes without any staff acknowledging your presence, you're in there too long.

Had enough?

You should!

I had enough of bad service a long time ago!

I'll take you down a road where you never have to be the bad guy in Customer Service.

You might think that I have some secret or sophisticated technique behind all these customer service concepts but honestly, I don't.

What I have is an experience in the simple things in business and lots of common sense. I want you to read and read between the lines.

The best Customer Service managers are very good at the basics. 

You will too.

Nurturing Relationship with Customers in the Face of Global Uncertainty

The financial crisis that swept the US and sent tremors to most of the European Union is definitely one of many global uncertainties we hope we never have to face but unfortunately has now entered our front doors. 

There is no escaping this.

Those who are still in denial and have not planned contingencies will find themselves with a company with no more assets or working for another owner.

During the Asian crisis, the only thing we could do was prepare for the worse. 

I was working for an IT company providing maintenance services to computer network systems. 

We had to get down to the painful process of re-assessing what we really have in terms of receivables, projected sales, and current cash flows. 

Managing a marketing group at that time was so painful because I was there witnessing and causing a lot of good people to leave.

I trained these people and some may have to use what we have taught them somewhere else. 

The Asian crisis hit us at a time when most of our projections were already carved in stone. 

Dropping brands and replacing others was such an emotionally loaded process for some of my salespeople who have built their relationships and competence around a certain product brand.

Even before that crisis, I already knew that the only way we can assure constant profitability and sustainability was to nurture a critical mass of customers.

We have to do the math.

We have to calculate to a certain degree of confidence how much each of our customers was contributing to our annual revenues: which ones provided the highest margins and which ones were the least costly to serve.

It was a learning process for both Marketing and Technical Support teams learning that less than 20% of our more than 300 customers under contract yielded 80% of our revenue in the maintenance service category.

Maintenance services contribute 40% of our overall revenue every year.

It also contributes the most profit margin after the first year of the contract.

We ranked and grouped them in such a way that those who constitute 80% of our revenues were now assigned to the most dependable Account Executives.

No account executive was supposed to handle more than 10 of these accounts.

I handled the most difficult accounts (accounts with mission-critical servers).

It was a tedious process of looking into each of our accounts and doing the following:

• Updated their profiles.
• Determined the impact of the crisis on each of our customers (ability to acquire, expand, continue maintenance, recruit new people)
• Current products and services we have delivered and projected to be delivered to the customer
• Impact of the crisis on our own products and services and our ability to deliver them
• Impact on pending orders (delivery period, price, discounts, etc.)

It was a top priority to start doing courtesy visits instead of cutting down on the visits or customer calls.

In an economic crisis, sticking to the basics can force you to consider what you totally ignored in more complacent times--your existing customers.

You will start getting the most simple and elementary notes on customer service: Using basic customer service strategy for customer acquisition and retention.

Let's get back to basics about acknowledging who are your customers.

When identifying Customers in the Customer Service perspective, you are only looking at two (2) major kinds: Internal and External Customers.

People in your organization who need your products or services to get their jobs done are your Internal Customers.

On the other hand, people or organizations outside yours who require and buy your product or service to satisfy a need or solve a problem are your External Customers.

You need to know the distinction between the two for purposes of managing processes and measuring results.

Both require respective Customer satisfaction metrics in some way to measure the quality of service or product delivery.

Your concern for Internal Customers is cost-driven while for External Customers it is revenue and profit-margin-driven.

The approaches to communication and service delivery will be different.

The proximity of Internal Customers to you makes it relatively easy to deliver Internal Customer service.

External Customers however will require different media or channels to communicate to you.

You will have no way to determine where your External Customers are, physically and in mind, at any given moment to specifically trigger communication.

If you are working for a retailing organization selling microcomputers and their accessories and providing maintenance service, you will have Internal and External Customers.

Your Accounting Department may have people who will be using PCs that will need your maintenance service.

It will be quite odd to tell accounting to go call your competitor for the service you already have in-house.

Your External Customer may be a company, individual or any organization using PCs that may need your services.

The quality of the delivery and the constitution of "good" Customer Service is hinged on the expectations of that Customer and execution of service.

Beyond the measurable results, the quality of the service or product is really based on how close we are to meeting and satisfying customer expectations.