Don’t Shoot the Messenger

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Always remember that your customer service people are not the cause of your problems. They lie elsewhere and they need to be addressed. Identify the real owners of the ongoing problem and make them accountable to set things right. Empower your customer service people to do the right thing for customers.

It’s a myth to expect your customer service manager to be responsible for all the reasons why customers contact your company. In reality, contact centers generate very few reasons for customers to be unhappy at all. It’s time to get rid of the silo mentality and let the true generators of the problems customers strike stand up and be identified.

1. Tear down the walls–identify who is truly responsible for the issues
2. Make accountability stick–let the issue owners resolve root causes
3. Empower the front line–so they can do the right thing for customers

1. Tear down the walls: identify who is truly responsible for the various issues that end up at the customer contact centers for resolution. If you identify the underlying root causes of issues, then the real owners can be encouraged to take action. This allows customer service to get beck to supporting the customer rather than making an attempt to mop up problems caused by the company shooting itself in the foot.

The real problems here are usually:

Lack of information: because contact centers tend to report on how fast they handle customer complaints rather than the underlying reasons why the contacts occurred in the first place.

Ignorance: no genuine attempt is made to ascertain who owns the root causes of the most common problems faced by customers. It’s not at all easy to decide who or what is the cause of dissatisfied customers, and therefore this often gets in the “too hard” basket. To get to the bottom of problems, its often necessary to ask “Why?” at least five times. For example:
1. “Why did the customer call us?”
2. “Why did he or she get that letter from us?”
3. “Why didn’t we know he or she had already paid?”
4. “Why doesn’t our system allow for different methods?”
5. “Why doesn’t past payment history get factored in?”

You can always tell when you’ve identified the real owners of customer problems because that person will own the part of the business that drives the customer contact and the person will have the authority and budget required to fix the root causes. If the owner you’ve identified doesn’t meet two criteria, keep looking, because you have not got there yet. In most companies, the real owners of root causes tend to be direct reports to the CEO.

2. Make accountability stick: let the issue owners analyze and then resolve the root causes. Deciding who is accountable and who in theory “should” be doing something about it is all well and good, but that’s just the beginning of the story, not necessarily the happy ending everyone wants. More than likely, the owner of the problem will respond with:

Denial–”Your data is obviously incorrect.”

Anger–”Don’t be absurd.”

Refusal–”Even if true, we’ve got better things to do.”

Bargaining–”Our budget is already allocated.”

To overcome these kinds of reactions, there are really only three approaches you can take:

Get some old-fashioned sponsorship: which usually means getting the CEO to champion accountability and make it an important part of his or her agenda. If the CEO won’t apply pressure from the top, it’s hardly surprising nobody else takes any notice of the issue.

Reset your targets to make them more meaningful: or in other words, develop new targets that incorporate the needs of customer service. Add performance indicators that draw attention to the changes required to improve customer service delivery. Get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Provide financial accountability: by charging customer service costs to their true owners. Make each department show the true costs of providing customer service that it is generating in its financial statements. This is a certain way to draw attention where it genuinely falls due.

3. Empower the front line: so they can do the right for customers. Allow the people who come face to face with dissatisfied customers make decisions and take actions that will produce the best results for customers. Let them do this with minimal supervision or oversight. Drop having a blanket policy that must be followed whenever a specific situation arises. Instead, train customer service people to be “enablers” who are free to figure out what it will take to make things right from the customer’s point of view. Then back these people to the hilt.

When you empower customer service personnel in this way, you demonstrate that you trust their judgment to act responsibly. You allow them to structure solutions that make sense to customers and that are also fair and reasonable for the company. Inevitably, this also generates cost savings for the company, because you don’t need to provide ongoing supervisors to sign off on everything customer service people want to do. You liberate the front line and turn them into customer satisfaction generators rather than cost minimizers.