Getting Paid Not To Work

Do you want a quick response while on the phone with customer service?  Should you?  A new book by Bill Price and David Jaffe, The Best Service is No Service, asks that very question.  I haven't read the book myself, so I'm referring to a review by David Price.

In theory, we should be living in a golden age of customer support. Blogs and Web sites make it easier than ever for consumers to reward good service and punish bad. Companies, for their part, can avail themselves of sophisticated customer-service technology and, thanks to the rise of Indian call centers, less-expensive workers. But reality hasn't seemed to follow theory.

Nope, not by any measure.

When calling an 800 number, we expect to find ourselves in voice-response hell. We dutifully follow instructions to key in a 10-digit policy number – only to be asked by the customer-service rep for the same darn number. Waiting on hold for 25 minutes? Well, that's what speakerphones are for. A simple email query languishes for days.

We know there are exceptions... Southwest, Amazon, and Apple come to mind.  So why the disparity?  It comes down to management... or leadership.

Senior executives at most companies, the authors believe, are simply in the dark. "The standard across most service operations is to report and track how quickly things were done," they write, "not how well they were done or how often, or why they needed to be done at all." Thus typical measures like "pickup within three rings" or "email response within 24 hours" hide more about customer service than they reveal. And the measuring is easily gamed.

Instead you should figure out why service is required at all.

The authors contrast these crude metrics with Amazon.com's focus on "CPX" – contacts per order, contacts per unit shipped, contacts per transaction and contacts per customer. In other words: Don't just ask how long it took to help the customer, ask how often the customer needed help and why. The goal is to avoid creating a need for a customer to contact the company in the first place.

The goal is to work customer service out of a job... not get them to work faster to handle more service calls. 

This reminds me of a very innovative company I visited over a decade ago, well before total productive maintenance became a core part of the lean lexicon.  It was a large molding operation that paid its mechanics... when they didn't work.  If the goal was to keep machines running, then why incent the practice of repair?  With the new compensation program, albeit difficult to implement in certain states with rigid labor rules, mechanics were paid on a sliding scale based on the percentage of the work day when they weren't directly working on a machine.  The response was immediate: preventive maintenance became the norm and the mechanics spent considerable time educating the operators in the proper care and feeding of the machines.  Everything revolved around keeping them up and running.  Putting off the inevitable simply created more pain later.

Are you measuring... and incenting... the creation of value to the customer?  Or just how well you respond to problems?

Comments

[Lee Walker]

This article has struck a chord with me it is so insightful.

In my experience of leading an IT support team, we analysed the demand being placed on the service desk and immediately noticed that the bulk of demand (80%) was demand caused by the failure of our system to achieves its purpose.

Within 2 months we were able to reduce the number of calls from an average of 3500 per month to 2500 per month.

The impact on the customer was immediate, less calls meant more time to spend on the value demands, and more time to spend on improving the system.

The impact on staff was amazing, they felt they had a purpose which was to atain the perfect IT service desk.... NO CALLS.