CoverStory

Organizational Schizophrenia

Now You Know Why Customer Service Sucks

 

Today, Indian customers would like to think they are the nawabs and rajas on whom companies shower all kinds of goodies. The way they get pampered is making them feel they never had it this good. That’s until the sale happens. Ask the same customers six months later the story is usually different. It’s unfortunate that most Indian customers don’t expect post sales customer service to be as good as pre sales service.

Customers also wonder why and how most well-meaning companies that are so dynamic and friendly while marketing and selling, look out of sorts, and inept, about customer service quality.

India’s leading customer service quality guru Gopal K. Gureja has gone a step further and deeper to explain the dissonance between what companies promise and what they deliver. His new book titled Organizational Schizophrenia – Impact on Customer Service Quality, Gureja laments how thebig gap between intent and execution, policy-practice dissonance – which he calls organizational schizophrenia are seriously harming the employee well-being and how they diminish their ability to perform. Worse, how two-faced organizations not only provide shoddy customer service by making employees reluctant parties to it, they propagate a culture of dishonesty and lack of integrity

Gureja has been a passionatecustomer service professional and an evangelist in all the companies he worked for over three decades. He delivered high growth by becoming customer’s representative inside the company he worked for. Gureja retired as a senior executive at Thermax in 1995 and continues his zeal for customer service through teaching at MBA colleges. His first book s ‘Creating Customer Value’ in 1997 was on Crossword bestseller list.

Gureja backs his findings of poor customer service delivery, even by well-meaning companies, with empirical research from 300 real interviews with business leaders and customer-contact employees.

The companies he has chosen are real companies – ones which we normally associate with high quality of customer service. Gureja can spot a company that is suffering from organizational schizophrenia or had an attack recently if its leaders show the following symptoms:

Source – Organizational Schizophrenia – Impact on Customer Service Quality

•  Behavior becomes unpredictable

 

• Responsiveness becomes arbitrary

 

• Operating policies drift away from policy

 

• Mission statements begin to turn into mere posters

 

What is organizational schizophrenia?

 

The premise that only happy and fully engaged employees can deliver exceptional customer service is no longer a matter of debate – in fact, it never was customer delight are freely used but not meant. The bigger con these days is customer feedback. How many companies make an effort to inform customers what action has been taken based on their feedback? How many companies disclose the scores they receive from the feedback? How effective is the customer relationship management (CRM) software that most companies today possess?

Schizophrenia, in the clinical sense, implies a split between a person’s thought and emotions; inappropriate thought patterns that often do not match the emotions displayed or display emotions that fail to match the situation.

With organizations it is how they respond

Gopal’s 11 commandments for a kick ass customer service culture to opposing pulls – promise excellent customer service but stop short to cut costs; promise excellent work-life balance but expect employees to stretch and available at short notice all the time; when words such as austerity does not apply to senior leaders or owners; claim to be an innovative company but are risk averse or punish failure.

For them, urgency usually replaces what is important.

The author has found how people lose their minds when they are subject to contradictory orders.

You can know if a company is suffering schizophrenia by looking at messages employees get – both implicit and explicit. One way to know this is to ask how congruent are the messages they get from various bosses. Business leaders may think their messages are consistent but don’t make an effort to know how their messages are interpreted. Another area of conflicting message is the talk about collaboration but the compensation system of the company could still be favoring the high performing individuals.

Organizational schizophrenia is most visible in how far companies go to keep their promise on customer service delivery. While some well meaning companies still fall short of their promise, for most others it still is simply a marketing slogan. Slogans such as ‘customer is king’; customer is God;

Most Indian companies declare high degree of customer focus as their priority. To what extent does this priority translate into delivery of customer quality? Here are a few suggestions to make your company a truly customer service oriented entity

• Companies who put customer first end up with much better share holder value in the long run. The companies have to understand that both customer satisfaction and share holder value cannot be maximized at the same time. A choice has to be made upfront.
•  It is important to ensure that the company’s organizational structure has to support company’s policy. Any overlapping responsibility or vague description of roles can create conflict of interest.
•  Often new systems are launched on the declared deadlines even when some people know that it is premature to do so. Quite often one can live with downside better rather than launch a project prematurely.
•  Remember CRM packages do not generate customer satisfaction by themselves. Focus on quality and consistency of inputs and for disciplined compliances follow the practices.

• Outsource taste not responsibility.

• If the power of knowledge has to have its impact in full measure, it has to be available at the point of action. For the customer-contact or the frontline employees, day-to-day interaction with the existing or potential customersis a normal workplace routine. Every ’moment of truth’, whether it relates to sales, product performance, technical support or on-site service, offers an opportunity to extend a positive experience to the customer.

• Make sure that the senior/top management does not betray any lack of commitment to the core values either by some action or inaction.

• Conflicting performance targets can induce distortion in perception of self interest. A set of quantitative and qualitative targets are a fertile ground for distorted focus on numbers at the cost of qualitative targets.

• Inculcate a culture of discipline. Discipline in thought and in action. Make sure that value violation or people action in disregard to the current processes or systems are dealt with suitably. Soft pedaling of issues does not help motivate people.

• Encourage people to fight the system rather than enjoy inordinate fondness for subordinates. Keep in mind that highly engaged employees can also be most critical of things going wrong.

• Transmitting information is not necessarily ‘communication’ in itself. Communication is a stimulus, a response, a feedback, getting at the same wave length, and finally ending up in a desired behavior. Unless that change is seen, communication has not served the purpose it is intended to serve. The responsibility for ensuring that the end result is achieved lies with the ‘manager’.