Customer Service is an essential element to deliver remarkable customer experiences and several trends are changing the way companies can offer a remarkable customer service. I personally believe that we still haven’t seen the full impact the web will have on customer service but small companies and startups provide a glimpse how the future of  cost-efficient “online customer service” might evolve. For an example take a look at www.getsatisfaction.com and check out the profiles for O’Reilly and Seesmic (a Californian Startup).

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

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Dealing with service failures and customer complaints requires more than just fixing the immediate problem. The key for companies is to ensure that they capture and manage the full range of customer complaints and ensure that processes are incorporated, that fix the root causes of the customer complaints.

An article in the Wall Street Journal from September 2008 titled “Making the Most of Customer Complaints” from Prof. Stefan Michel, IMD Lausanne, David Bowen, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston, Warwick Business School summarizes challenges and strategies to ensure the successful management of customer complaints.

Here is an excerpt:

Nobody’s perfect. That’s a fact, not an excuse. Which is why it’s crucial for companies to realize that the way they handle customer complaints is every bit as important as trying to provide great service in the first place. Because things happen.

Customers are constantly judging companies for service failures large and small, from a glitch-ridden business-software program to a hamburger served cold. They judge the company first on how it handles the problem, then on its willingness to make sure similar problems don’t happen in the future. And they are far less forgiving when it comes to the latter. Fixing breakdowns in service — we call this service recovery — has enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth.

But unfortunately, most companies limit service recovery to the staff who deal directly with customers. All too often, companies have customer service sort out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation, and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging because it does nothing to address the underlying problem, practically guaranteeing similar failures and complaints.

Read the full article “Making the Most of Customer Complaints”.

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Patients that are regularly watching medical TV series develop unrealistic expectations about hospital service and are less satisfied with their patient experience than patients who don’t watch medical TV series.

Influencing Images

The images and situations depicted in many medical TV series create the wrong expectations in patients which lead to disappointment and negative experiences during their stay in a hospital. The scenes depicted in medical TV series are set to create engaging stories and increase viewer numbers and are not necessarily meant to reflect reality. That’s the reason why doctors are carrying the infusion bag next to the patients bed by themselves, show no reluctance when they are called to the hospital at most uncommon times and are in general extraordinarily committed, generous, competent and patient-oriented.

Frequent TV viewers have higher expectations

Kai Witzel, a German doctor, interviewed patients about their television viewing behavior and their satisfaction with the time spent by medical doctors, service and general experience. He found out that patients who regularly follow medical TV series and think that the scenes shown in these TV series reflect the reality of hospital operations are significantly less satisfied with the time doctors and nurses have spent with them. Additionally they rated the satisfaction with doctors lower than those that prefer game or quiz shows. These patients also believe that the scenes in medical TV series do not reflect reality.

The Implications for Doctors

It becomes increasingly important that doctors not only focus on the outcome of patient treatment but also on the atmosphere and experience that is created while interacting with patients. And it becomes increasingly important to understand your patients – and the amount of medical TV series that they watch – in order to provide a remarkable patient experience. I wonder which hospital will be the first to ask patients whether they watch a lot of medical TV series in order to provide differentiated services to these customers.

The Implications for other Industries

Remarkable customer experiences are the result of delivering an experience that exceeds a customer’s expectations. The most important task that companies have to do is to understand customer expectations and how they differ in between different customers. The key is then to deliver on and exceed these customer expectations with differentiated but customized products and services.

Further Links (Only available in German):

• Arztbild in den Medien: Dr. Stefan Frank hätte sich mehr Zeit genommen
• Einfluss des Fernsehkonsums auf die Angst vor einer Operation

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Empathic behavior and empathic employees are one of the essential success factors for extraordinary customer service. Knowing this, the big question is: How can your employees be more empathic? Are your employees empathic?

Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, reported about an exercise (see article "Your Boss Really is Clueless")that one could perform to find out the degree of empathy. Just ask somebody to draw a letter on his or her forehead. In which direction does it face? Is it written so that you can read it? Or is it written so that others can read it?

More than a decade of experiments have shown that people who write the E in a way that is legible to themselves but backwards to others have not thought or cared about how others might perceive the letter. On the other hand, people who draw the E backward to them but legible to others have considered another’s point of view.

Still, this is a nice exercise, how do you make empathic employee behavior real? How can empathy contribute for a remarkable customer experience?

Xavier from Notebooks.com provides a great example of a concrete manifestation of empathic employees providing extraordinary customer service. He shares his story of a broken Apple MacBook Pro and how he was treated in the Apple Store.

I was greeted by a very friendly Swiss Apple employee who was on his last day of training in the U.S. before returning to Zurich to help open a new Apple store. […] Obviously my MacBook Pro has already had its fair share of downtime and I don’t think it’s reasonable for a notebook to be subject to three major repairs within the first four months of purchase. He said he completely understood my frustration and asked one of the Genius Bar managers to assist.

The Genius Bar manager then asked me something that I’ve NEVER heard before from any computer customer service person. “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?,” he asked.

That might seem like a simple question, but it’s something that more companies should ask to resolve customers’ issues. It shows that they’re actually trying to solve your problem rather than just run you through their standard operating procedures.

I told him that all I wanted was to walk out of the store with a machine that I could count on and not have bring back for yet another repair. […]

This single question is such a powerful statement and shows that employees care about the customer and that he is taken serious. They are interested in the customer’s opinion and the desired outcome that he imagines.

But wait? What if I cannot deliver the customer’s desired solution?

Well there is always the risk that you might not be able to deliver your customer’s desired solution and meet his expectations, explain why you are not able to deliver the solution. If you have valid arguments, your customers will understand. However, without asking him directly, you always have to guess what the solution might be and the process towards a solution is much more complicated.

What are the implications for your organization?

There are probably extensive handbooks and trainings for “front-line” employees in your organization. They might include guidelines about replacement policies, dress code, and how employees should talk with customer, just to name a few. If these handbooks include the guideline to ask the question “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?” you are already on the right path, if they don’t include it then it is time to update your handbooks and training manuals.

 

Read  the full article My Apple Curse Strikes Again, but Apple Store Saves the Day

Read the full article Your Boss Really is Clueless or the complete research paper "Power and Perspectives Not Taken".

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Companies are increasingly shifting to self-service technology as a way to substitute expensive “human services” with cheaper solutions that empower customers to use an organization’s products or services.

Examples can be found at airports (check in counters), train stations (ticket counters), banks (ATMs and Internet banking) and even in selected McDonalds restaurants where you are able to order your BigMac with a self-service terminal in a restaurant.

Many customers prefer self-service over traditional service interfaces because when working properly they help to save time. When you look at it holistically, a service designer should try to reduce the number of human interactions to increase the efficiency of a service system. But while focusing on continuously increasing efficiency, service designers should not forget about effectiveness.

When “human services” fail, there is usually somebody around who could at least help you. If a self-service system fails, there is nobody around who might help (that’s the point of self-service) and customers are usually lost. Obviously you should design for self-service failures but not everyone is doing it. But how do “smart” companies solve that problem? By assigning employees that help customers with the self-service system.

Three of my personal experiences with such “workarounds” were at the Swiss Air check-in counters in Zurich, Deutsche Bahn (German railways) ticket counter in Cologne and United Airlines check-in counters in San Francisco. Why would you put a “half-baked” self-service terminal there, when you know that you probably need employees that can help customer’s to use them?

If you want to make a difference, first you have to ensure that you do everything possible to prevent self-service failures (a.k.a. user testing, user testing, user testing). Additionally you have to plan for self-service failures and design for self-service recovery through the self-service terminal.Designing a self-service terminal with “human backup” is only the last solution. If designer ignore this and something goes wrong, your customers will be lost and without any recovery efforts they will become ambassadors of negative word of mouth.

Image courtesy of [HippiHippo]

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