It is widely known that if a company truly means to deliver exceptional customer service it must nurture and sustain a strong customer-positive culture across the organisation. However, all that is widely known is not necessarily widely practiced.
Sometime back, in the process of resolving my complaints with a few highly regarded companies I was frustrated by the indifference, ineptitude and awful absence of logic displayed by the people dealing with me. I decided to explore why even well regarded, well-equipped and well-intentioned companies end up behaving in a manner that can best be described as schizophrenic. Why do they end up in wide gaps between policy and practice? Why mission statements turn into mere posters for public posturing? How does the policy-practice disconnect occur? Here is a part of the learning from the empirical research[i] that I had undertaken following the above incidents.
The Alchemy of Exceptional Service: Three Vital Groups
Three groups of people form a substantial part of the process that directly determines the speed and quality of responsiveness as experienced by the customers of a company. Therefore, as part of my research, I focused on two hundred individual respondents drawn largely from these three groups, with the largest number from the frontline customer contact employees. Answers to my research questions emerged out of the candid and quite often emotion-charged comments voiced by the very people responsible for standing by the customers to honour company’s commitments and beyond. Broadly, this is what explains why companies fail to keep practices duly aligned with the declared—and quite often well intended—policy.
- The Firing Line: Performance of an individual is a function of willingness to perform and the ability to carry out a given task. It is quite natural that most of the knowledge-empowered, skills-savvy and emotionally engaged customer associates—particularly in B2B situations— should be keen to project themselves as competent and reliable individuals and their company as a highly responsive and responsible company. Unwillingness of the individuals or their inability to carry out a task should, normally, constitute only a small part of the service failures. However, if in day to day operations, the employees perceive that management’s priorities, as reflected in their actions—or inactions—are inconsistent with the claims of a high degree of customer commitment, they begin to question the sanctity of the mission and values statements of the company. Employee engagement is dented, perception of self-interest gets distorted and initiative suddenly becomes risky. It is this cultural churn—or cultural schizophrenia—that deprives the frontline customer contact employees of the will to put in much needed discretionary effort for delivering exceptional service.
- Back-end Support: Another sentiment that emerged clearly from the VOICES of the respondents relates to the second group of people. To make sure that the company’s commitments are honoured, in letter and in spirit, the front-line customer contact employees have to depend a great deal on various inputs required from within the company. These inputs could relate to technical information, flow of materials, contractual updates, project plans and so on. It is generally known that internal customers are not taken very seriously but the situation can be even worse if there are no agreed internal service standards or if they are not rigorously implemented. Delay in providing the backup resources required by field service, eventually, means failure to honour contracted commitments, customer dissatisfaction and loss of face for the people on the firing line. This kind of organisational behaviour is a symptom of organisational schizophrenia.
- The Top Management: It is the top management group—more particularly the CEO—which, because of its prerogative for policy formulation and responsibility for its successful deployment, sets the framework within which the entire company has to work and achieve a multiple business objectives year after year. If delivering exceptional customer service and sustaining competitive differentiation is also one of the business objectives of the company then the most significant contribution a CEO can and must make is to unambiguously declare the essence of the following:
- Customer First: Evidence shows that shareholders have done better over a period of time when companies put the ‘customer first’. Accordingly, in the long term shareholder interest our company will follow ‘Customer First’ policy. Maximising customer satisfaction will be our goal and hence long term customer relations will take precedence over short term gains for the company.
- Culture of Discipline: The company will follow a culture of discipline — built ‘around the idea of freedom and responsibility within a framework’— that demands its people to be self-disciplined in thought and in action; to stick to the company’s core values and to consistently apply exacting standards at all times and at all levels, including the upper management. Performance reviews at all levels will be conducted with a rigour that brings the issues to the level of accountability. To be rigorous, not ruthless means that the best people need not worry about their positions and can concentrate fully on their work.
The Final Picture
In the companies which have managed to move people to a passionate commitment to the above approach you can see groups of people meeting the following description and a magical alchemy at work to create a distinct competitive differentiation for long time to come[ii].
- Emotionally engaged frontline customer-contact employees who are always willing to walk the extra mile — the mile that makes all the difference to the customer.
- Internal service providers who revel in empowering their front-line counterparts to honour company’s commitments — first time and every time. They make sure that requisite knowledge, skills and resources are available at the point of action.
- And, members of the top echelons of management teams who strongly believe in the dictum that their actions — and inaction — speak far louder than the written words, and who, exercising a high degree of self-discipline, visibly live the company’s core values, day in and day out.
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[i]This targeted research uncovered many areas of internal disconnects resulting primarily from human and organisational dynamics and seriously impacting the quality of customer service. How do they actually occur, how do they work through the organisation to create loss of objectivity, employee disengagement and unpredictability of employees’ behaviour has been brought out in my book Organisational Schizophrenia: Impact on Customer Service Quality.