Recycled Bullsh-IT

You would think that after decades of practice, Business to Consumer (B2C) companies would have worked out both the importance of customer service, and the mechanisms by which they deliver a good service at an affordable cost. Know Your Customer (KYC) is now mandated for financial and insurance companies dealing with many other businesses following this practice to reduce risk and protect the customer. Pity many organisations misinterpret this as Knob K.O. Your Customer.

 Luckily for purveyors of digital transformation technologies and services (currently packaged as Total Experience or the Internet of Behaviours), most of these companies are still struggling to provide anything like an acceptable service. Unluckily for the recipients of this service (including me), achieving a painless experience is nigh on impossible. 

 A recent encounter is illuminating: Like many others I had booked a family holiday last year that got cancelled when the world shut down. Refunds for the hotels, Airbnb, excursions, etc., were easily obtained from a variety of travel companies via email or online. However, the biggest costs were for the flights via an airline that used to be British and ruled the Airways, that I’ll just refer to as B’stard A-holes. Given the airline had cancelled the flight, I went on their website to discover they had removed the online refund option and just offered a voucher. To get my money back I would need to call them. Twelve weeks (and over fifty lengthy calls) later I finally received the refund. The experience was so stressful and painful that it is unlikely I will ever fly with them again. Obviously, other travel companies were as bad, so commiserations to all who went through similar torture.

 Other companies have resorted to extreme self-service supported by AI-powered passive-aggressive chatbots: “I am afraid I can’t do that, Dave, but I have despatched a Predator Drone to your location to end this call”.

Part of this is standard business practice: minimise the cost of claim, find someone else to blame and foist the costs onto them – no problem with this. But this can be achieved without making enemies out of your customers. The low quality of service I received is unfortunately still typical of many organisations. A lot has been written about the obvious business benefits of high-quality customer service, but few companies have worked out how to turn the PowerPoint slides into effective action.

 In practice there is still a lack of understanding of the quantitative value of the quality of customer service in organisations that should know better. Although most companies put the customer first in their mission statements, very few have translated this into a cultural shift in the behaviour of the staff involved in key customer processes. This is very much a people-driven exercise that explains the benefits of good service and encourages staff to improve the experience of customers when contact is made – the Moment of Truth. If the customer has a positive experience (a Moment of Magic), it will not only reinforce customer loyalty but also provide increased opportunity for the company through the social networking that the customer will engage in. However, a bad experience (Moment of Madness) will do the opposite – the customer will look to take their business elsewhere and tell everyone who will listen to avoid the company. Research has shown that Moment of Truth can have a ten-fold impact of the actual direct cost of the customer transaction, either negative or positive depending on the experience. 

 Does your organisation calculate customer service benefits this way? If not, then your competitors soon will if they are not already doing so. With customer service increasingly becoming a key differentiator in consumer decision making, it should be something that all B2C, and many B2B, organisations, should have top of their list of priorities.

John “KYC you where it hurts” Moe