Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Do you taste your own service?

How do you know your service? Do you test it? How do you test it? When I speak to companies about testing their service I usually get a positive answer ("yes, we do QA"). Excuse me, but testing the service is more than doing QA. I propose that you taste all aspects of the service from OUTSIDE your corporate wall - that means: experiencing the service using conditions similar to your clients, and calling customer service with real problems. To see how good do you taste, do the following:

  • Use your service from outside your corporate network - use your customer's PC/device if possible. What if there are problems with their ISP? or some other thing outside your corporate network? Do not use any corporate advantage or identify yourself as an employee - do not seek preferential treatment. No VIP pass for you.
  • Taste during high peak times - no experimenting at 3 AM when the servers are at 0.0001% utilization (unless that is your peak time). Do not use an super-machine with an infinite bandwidth connection (routed through NASA and a private line to the president).
  • Call customer support with real problems - but use the customer's line (don't listen from the call center or call from HQ). I recently had a call with a company's customer service. I am pretty sure my call was between me in the US, one customer rep in India and another company's customer rep in the US. The quality of the call was horrible and it dropped several times.
  • Do experiment with different ways to use the service: PC, iPad, Laptop, old PC... and call from landlines, cell phones, international phones (get your overseas relatives involved). 
Live your service from the outside. Get the real picture and the real taste.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Balancing growth is a must!

Every company dreams of getting larger and having more customers (hopefully capturing more value out of each transaction). Unfortunately, uncontrolled growth can disrupt your finely tuned-processes, it can overwhelm your Customer Support infrastructure, and thus, creating a situation where you are growing but dropping in customer satisfaction and repeat customers (it happened to Dell a few years back). So, what is the right choice? Control your growth? or Grow and fix things latter?

If you just grow and expect to fix things latter you may be in for a surprise: bad habits will have set in, your reputation may be already tarnished, your competition will be runing ads making fun of your service, and your customer will be looking for the next new thing! Internally, because of your hurry, you didn't build things the right way, you lost good but overworked persons and lost employee goodwill. Fixing things will cost you a fortune. I believe myspace would have been the Facebook of today if they had manage their growth better and kept their ears to the market.

Controling your growth may be the better answer. It allows you to keep your existing customers happy, while making shiny new customers. The difficult question for me is: what is the optimal speed for growth? The way to gauge your optimal growth speed is to use your "ears" to the market to determine when you are sacrificing quality for growth and shift your focus accordingly (hint: it isn't easy).

This is where your Product Management and Customer Service organizations are invaluable in getting a readout on the market (if you don't know what your customers think about you, you are in trouble). You need to be bold and put new infrastructure in place to support your growth, but as soon as customer satisfaction drops, you need to refocus on getting things under control again. If you keep doing this as fast as your organization is capable of, you are getting the best of both worlds. Hopefully, you will be fast enough as to not give your competitors a window of opportunity.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Don't let Customer Service ruin your customer's experience

There doesn't seem to be a customer service bone in some companies this day. I sent a scathing letter to an airline after five consecutive trips where every trip was either delayed or canceled – Their response was that they didn’t have time to answer my letter because they have received so many complaints lately that they couldn’t respond to them all.
After the initial shock was a sense that the company was no longer interested in customer service. The text of the response was neither apologetic nor palliative. It was matter of fact with no promise to address issues in the future. It was a customer’s dead end.

I have to wonder where does Customer Service at this airline sits with Product Development and Marketing – Is Customer Service even present when the company is addressing service problems. My guess is no. The communication showed no interest in their product, no Product Manager that I know of would sent that letter; and no rational Marketing person would sent such a diminishing communication. Their customer service board must have been asleep at the wheel on this one.