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For the past 20 years as a corporate trainer and executive coach I've concentrated on human communication in commerce, especially in service and customer focus. It always amazes me that an area so critical to successful business today is inundated with insipid data, useless platitudes and banal advice. No area of business is more hobbled by the misadventures of common sense than Service. We fight it every day on the job. Business pundits telling us good service comes with experience or you just need to hire "people who care about people", or give them WOW! Or just focus on the customer. But these business sages never tell you how, when, or where to wow or focus. That's supposed to be just common sense. Let me let you in on a secret: Good service is never just plain ol' common sense. If it was, we wouldn't need to put up with this so often in our phone calls: "Uh hello, this is Harvey Muckabout. I'm either away from my desk or on the phone right now, but leave me a message and I'll get back to you. Oh, if this is an emergency, you can reach my assistant by dialing #312" So you punch 312. "Hi, this is Sam. I'm away from my desk right now, but leave a message and I'll get back to you. Or you can reach our front desk by pressing 0. Thanks!" Now you dial 0. "ACME Corporation; how may I direct your call?" "Hello, this is Russell Giles. I just need to find out if Harvey Muckabout is in the office today." "One moment I'll connect you." "No wait, I just need to ..." [ring] "Uh hello, this is Harvey Muckabout. I'm either ..." Now there is only one thing wrong with that standard, default voicemail message, but common sense will never tell you what it is. Consistent good service requires way, WAY more than common sense. In a previous article I suggested the following working definition: Customer service is always the customer's experience of the manner in which a provider delivers a product. So service is never a what; it is always a how. The tough thing about that definition is the phrase "customer's experience". Human experience is a bit dicey. It's made up of a bunch of sensory impressions mixed with current moods and intentions and altered by a unique personal history. And recent research has shown that a substantial portion of human experience is governed by elements of thought we are not even conscious of. So good, bad, great, or terrible service only exists in the customer's experience, and most customers are not even aware of their evaluation standards. That piece of information alone should save you a bundle on surveys and customer focus groups. And, if you could discover the criteria that govern customer service expectations and evaluations, you'd have something to work with. So, here are four elements of evaluation I've isolated from over a thousand in-depth interviews with customers dissecting their experience: One, as customers, we evaluate service based on speed. That is, the total amount of time it takes for a business to deliver its product AND the specific amount of total time we have to spend in any given individual transaction to define, select, order and purchase the product. Speed does not necessarily mean fast, but rather appropriate to expectation. Think about the last time you waited over an hour for professional assistance (doctor, lawyer, accountant) only to have that pro spend five perfunctory minutes with you, face-to-face. Two, we unconsciously measure the quality of the information we get, and the reliability of the product and provider. This shows up for us as something that I call certainty. Do not confuse certainty with profuse data. The amount of information a business provides is far less important than the customer's sense of understanding and knowing. Three, customers also evaluate our product delivery on the basis of ease. We consciously (or subconsciously) notice how much effort it takes to get a product and to simply deal with any provider in a transaction. Most businesses fail in the details here. A bank's loan application asks for the same information in three different places. Try to get a simple question answered about your DSL line and you are on the phone for thirty minutes dancing your fingers through a recorded service matrix that has you listening to twelve voicemails. (Also a violation of the speed expectation.) Finally, the glue that cements customer judgment is personal recognition, or to what degree a business and its staff acknowledge us as unique individual human beings with distinct wants and needs. Many service agents cannot even muster the most basic level of recognition, which is simple civility. You know, manners: Hello, please, thank you, pardon me, sorry to keep you waiting. At its highest level, recognition becomes appreciation. That occurs when a customer has the sense that a business truly knows how he or she feels. A business is sensitive to the unique individual challenges and needs a person has to deal with simply to thrive (or survive) in modern society. Any business that begins to interact with its customers at the level of appreciation gains an incredible competitive edge. So there they are, the four masters of customer service evaluations: Speed, Certainty, Ease and Recognition. Remember, many times one or all of this foursome may be operating outside the conscious awareness of customers. Your customer's experience of your service is an end product of the interplay of all four elements throughout the entire course of your interactions. And any flawed detail in speed, certainty, ease or recognition can kill an otherwise favorable impression. Now you have a working definition of customer service with some teeth. Service is a customer's experience of how a business delivers a product based on the customer's expectations of speed, certainty, ease and personal recognition. Try applying it to the next evaluation of your company's customer service. It just might be your executive edge. (NOTE: Allies Consulting offers Customer Service programs that can meet or exceed your expectations; they are designed to deliver real results. They also leverage our other programs, magnifying your ROI!)
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