RUTH SUNDERLAND: Corporate vampires need to stop treating us like dirt
Here’s a thought for the new year. It’s a simple, foolproof formula to improve business performance, boost the economy and make the entire country happier. What is the magic sauce? Good customer service.
It’s an obvious point, but widely ignored. The standards we are routinely forced to endure are a national disgrace.
This applies to both Labour’s respected public sector and profit-making companies. The costs associated with this turnaround, whether done by the NHS, the tax authorities or your insurance company, amount to billions of pounds in lost productivity and rising collective stress levels.
The irony is that organizations spend a fortune to convince themselves that they provide excellent service and that their customers love them.
They are obsessed with ‘net promoter scores’ and other ‘satisfaction metrics’, along with the pointless ‘smiley/angry face’ mini-surveys that plague their websites. The more they do it, the worse their real relationship with customers becomes.
As they engage in corporate work on every topic from gender identity to Palestine, too many companies have thrown basic services out the window.
Frustration: Customers get the feeling that we are nuisance callers with whom personal contact is best avoided
They have become corporate vampires, robbing us of our time and energy through processes that seem designed to thwart us at every turn. So-called ‘Help Centers’ often do the opposite and ‘Contact Us’ should be renamed to ‘Don’t Even Think About Calling Us’. Customers get the feeling that we are nuisance callers, with whom personal contact is best avoided and that we should not pollute their phone lines with our concerns.
The result? The latest report from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) shows that satisfaction among major UK companies is at its lowest level in fifteen years.
There is no point in companies behaving so badly that they are despised by customers, regulators, the government and society as a whole. And it’s expensive: the ICS estimates that dealing with outages and problems costs UK businesses £6.8 billion a month.
So why do they do it?
In some sectors, such as water or rail, there is little or no competition.
Even if they do, many senior managers seem to underestimate the misery of poor service delivery, perhaps because they rarely experience it. They don’t do their own life management, they have spouses and PAs who do it for them.
CEOs of customer-oriented companies should spend at least one day a month on the shop floor, in the bank branch or in the call center to stay in touch with reality. The board should have a director responsible for customer service.
Senior managers complain that it is difficult to recruit good staff for customer service positions. These jobs could be much more fulfilling if service delivery were approached in a positive spirit. In many companies it is seen as a cost item rather than a potential driver of turnover and profit. That’s why ambitious employees see it as a stepping stone and not as a route to the top.
Also, it can’t be fun when frontline staff try to calm down people who have spent ages finding a well-hidden phone number and then had to wait because ‘we are experiencing exceptionally high demand’ (pull that other one).
Artificial intelligence could help, if it is not used as a new weapon to confuse the poor customer, but is used in combination with competent and empathetic people.
The most important thing we want when we have a problem is to be heard properly and treated like we matter. Can that really be so difficult?
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