The Middle of the Pyramid

Every operator would like to have its customers saying how delighted they are with the service they are receiving. However, high levels of customer satisfaction are not easy to achieve. But there are some top level principles which can help companies navigate to better customer service. In this article Allan Drew of Coote Harvard explains the cumulative nature of building great service.

Delivering great customer service is one of main business challenges of our time. As executives have gradually perceived the power of great service to increase revenues and profits, lock out competitors, support premium pricing and attract high calibre employees, they have also found that service improvement programmes produce variable results and can be expensive. As old-style state monopoly telcos are replaced by more competitive and innovative organisations, service emerges as a crucial weapon in the competitive struggle.

Advice on building great service abounds, but tends to emphasise a particular aspect –“Recruit people with the right attitude to look after your customers” or “Implement a CRM system to pull all the information on a customer together for your Service Reps.” or “Innovation in your products will bring the customers to your door”. As so often when advice seems to conflict, the truth is that, to an extent, the advice is both right and wrong.

It is right because usually the aspect of customer service being discussed is an important component of building great service. It cannot be ignored, and any service management team will have to think about that advice at some stage or another. BUT it is wrong in that it often does not position the particular aspect of service improvement relative to all the other important aspects. I learnt this lesson many years ago when, during a determined drive to improve satisfaction, we implemented widespread customer care training for all our service representatives. It was expensive and took over a year to complete the programme. And in the end how much improvement did we get in customer satisfaction? Actually it fell slightly. It was a mystery. Our people were enthusiastically trying out their new skills on customers but nothing was getting better. Why not?

The answer to “Why not?” took quite a time to emerge, but the eventual reason was straightforward especially with hindsight! Basically we found that it was not effective to train our people to be more customer focused when our product offering was not up to standard. In fact such training could actually make things worse, since in their desire to go the extra distance to satisfy a customer, our people were raising expectations and increasing the gap between what was promised and what we could deliver.

The resulting customer disappointment (dissatisfaction) was greater than it would have been if we had done nothing! This was my first experience of the need to do things in the right order if we were going to get sustainable improvement in satisfaction. And clearly, starting with a customer care programme was not the right way forward! Eventually it became obvious that there had to be a sequence of improvement programmes which, rather like putting the roof on a house, had to start with digging the foundations.

So what is the correct sequence for improvement? Well, the diagram

Fig. 1:

provided the insight which came about after a number of years working with all aspects of customer satisfaction improvement.

For the first level on the pyramid we found that the starting point for great customer service has to be good, robust products which do what they are supposed to do. And keep doing that year after year. To the point where, as separate products, they cease to be noticed. They get taken for granted. Nobody really thinks, when turning on a light switch, what a great job the electric company is doing. Of course customers used to believe that when electric light was leading edge stuff, but pretty quickly it became commoditised and is now not given a second thought. Unless of course it stops working in which case that is really bad news. It’s tough but true that commodities are completely ignored until they stop doing what they are supposed to. So from a satisfaction viewpoint product capability is basically all downside. And for most telco products, we are dealing with commodities which had better perform to spec all the time. Customers are a little more tolerant with innovative products (eg. mobile or data services) but that tolerance is fast disappearing which is only to be expected. New wave companies, which are not sorting out product reliability as commoditisation fast approaches, will probably not survive. So, on its own, I estimate that 100% product capability will deliver about 50% customer satisfaction at best.

The middle section of the pyramid is about service wrap. This is how we package and deliver the product. Important issues become the services promises which are made around the product, such as:

• how quickly can it be delivered?
• if it goes wrong how quickly and effectively can it be fixed?
• what sort of flexibility is there in the billing system?

This is where processes and systems are paramount with the key processes of provision, repair and billing being particularly important. Basically this is about promises the organisation makes to the customer and if we are chasing high levels of customer satisfaction these promises had better be kept.

Rather like products, promises rapidly become commodities – everyone remembers the one bad experience not the many good ones. From a management perspective there is also an opportunity to waste a pile of money here in process failure and never know about it. And customer satisfaction? Well, from my projects it appears that great process and system performance can get you to about 80% satisfaction. Maximum. And 80% is still not enough to generate loyalty and offset price competition.

The remaining 20% – the roof on the house or the top of the pyramid– is about the capability of your service people. Their attitude to customers, their willingness to go the extra mile for a customer with a special need, their ability to be polite and helpful in the face of criticism and so on – these are the qualities that change satisfied customers into delighted customers. Essentially these are emotional factors – difficult to identify and train but easy to recognise. Fortunately most people do not come to work determined to give customers a hard time, so enlightened management who hire the right attitude will generally find this bit works well.

And the final word? Well it’s no good having great people on the front desk if the promises they make to customers fail because the delivery process does not function or the product is full of bugs. Each piece of the pyramid has to be in place before the next layer can be effective. That’s why my customer care programme all those years ago did not deliver success – it was the right thing to do but was done in the wrong sequence. Incidentally I have generally found that, at least in the companies where I have worked over 30 years, the products were pretty good and so were most of the people. The big problems have nearly always been processes and systems, especially around new product launch, which were rarely properly tested and signed off. And I have never known a product group to delay a launch if a process was not up to scratch.

Then there is huge surprise over customer complaints, high cost and low demand.

So, my key message is:
For delighted customers remember the pyramid then focus on the middle!