I had the privilege yesterday of giving some ideas to a friend of my dad who was thinking of replacing his customer help line with a more responsive system. His current system is an answering machine. No kidding. Its very cheap, never misses a call and is completely useless because the tape hasn’t been replaced in 10 years. 
Now I’m no expert in this area and can only speak from an experience of being an intern in a US bank where they put me as a team member in a customer advocacy project. I’ll try to recall what I can.
If there’s a single thought that sets the tone and direction of customer service, I think its this: Do unto others what you want them to do unto you. It means putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. I’ll bet 90% of businesses will fail if their owners bothered to put it up against their own personal standards.
IMHO, crappy customer service exist because the company either has no fundamental philosophy of service or its completely amatuerish. Most Asian CEOs I’m told want nothing to do with customer service or believe its the responsibility of telephonists, highly-strung people thrown into wired dungeons who are often paid slightly better than janitors.
It is pointless to write about the lousy people at the call center or what systems to use if nobody in the company genuinely thinks its important so as not to put the cart before the horse, I’ll just talk about this fundamental first. Let me start off with a questionnaire.
1. Has the CEO ever done anything tangible and significant to add value to the customer service process other than talk about it to visitors?
2. Does the CEO believe the cost of customer service should be factored into the cost of his products?
3. Does the CEO demonstrate any evidence that he understands the connection between sales and customer satisfaction? (If he spends 100% of the time talking about sales and 0% about customer experience, you know the score).
4. Does the CEO demonstrate he understands where customer goodwill sits in the brand equity equation.
5. Does the CEO ask questions about customer satisfaction statistics? Is he even interested at all?
6. Is the CEO genuinely people-friendly?
If there are more no’s then yes’s in your answer, the company is doomed. There’s a gaping hole in a critical fundamental. Sell your stock while you can and get the hell out.
You’ll notice that every question I ask concerns the CEO’s attitude. Its because from what I’ve been taught, 90% of a company’s problems can be traced back to the CEO, especially those who treat customer dissatisfaction as a source of irritation rather than a strategic money-making insight. When golf and internal bickering gets more executive time and the CEO has a habit of distancing himself from customer issues, be careful.
Questions no. 3 & 4 are the most revealing to me. Apparently many CEOs are clueless when it comes to connecting the dots between experience quality, better sales and brand value. They’ll insist giving good experience costs money and that’s money we’d rather not spend so lets focus on making nice promises, pretty packaging and hard selling.
Its a lot like a marriage isn’t it. Getting married is the easy part. Its staying the course that’s the killer.
So when all a CEO does about experience quality is pay some obligatory lip service to shareholders, that attitude ripples down the line and hits the company squarely in the wallet. Executive indifference infects how equipment is bought, people hired and customer insight obtained. Customers hate aloofness to their problems so they hit out at the staff. Unhappy employees hit back at other customers who then hit out by dumping the company’s products. Market share dips and your share value tanks. Viral marketing then finishes the job.
And that’s how companies get AIDS. It can be terminal so before you buy into a company’s stock, it pays to give this fundamental a very close look.
So, you say save the cheerleader and save the world. I say dump the aloof CEO and save the company’s stock value.
Part 2: How to screw up satisfaction
[...] post @ 1600 Wall Street 26 07 2007 I’ve just posted something about how a company gets AIDS in my other [...]
Hey Bryan,
I am currently interested in investments and stuff, not that is it related to medicine, but I believe that I can earn extra (fat) income if I do somehow know how to invest smartly. So, this new blog of yours does help in some sense. Anyway, I have to say that it is another promising post coming from you. I have to say that from my experience with dealing with banks and companies as a customer, I find HSBC as the only bank that does look into their customers with great emphasis on what the customers really want. Their service is top-notched when it comes to personal banking. About companies, I seriously can’t find any company in Malaysia that has a competitive customer service if compared to those overseas. It’s true that I get fed up if the product I bought from a company is somehow damaged and I don’t get the promised after-sale services during the warranty period.
It’s simple in this country, when you want to complain or to ask for assistances, your call has to wait for at least five minutes before a person is willing to answer it; whereas, when you want to buy a product, you call for the first time and they’ll call you for the next however many times until you sign the documents for the purchase. This attitude has to change!
Hi Jimmy,
Yes I totally agree with you. The attitude has to change…from the TOP i.e. CEO or owner. Interestingly, I see parallels in China. I call it the famous char koey teow syndrome – the hawker who will tell you to get lost if you don’t like the price and his attitude. These traders/CEOs will exist only as long as demand exceed supply. Try that in Baltimore or London and we know what’ll happen.
For family owned businesses, I believe this part of Asia is 2-3 generations behind the US and UK’s standards of service. The hawker has to die of old age first (cannot cure the attitude disease already, its too advanced). The next generation – his son or daughter – may carry on the ‘lan si’ tradition and live off the savings of the dad as business starts to falter. The 3rd generation that takes over will find everything in tatters and struggle to survive, subsequently learning to be customer friendly if the business hasn’t totally collapsed by then. Only then there may be recovery. My 3-generation theory also covers businesses in China I think.
So I wouldn’t count on waiting to see if service will improve anytime soon. Realistically it’ll only happen on the removal of the CEO or the death of the proprietor.
Hi Bryan, Jimmy,
I work in a family-owned business company, the tradition of ” Lan-Si” exist.
If they are not happy with you, they will ask you to get lost ” systematically”. But, I do not expect any improvement from them.
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Hi dragonfly88, thanks for dropping by my blog. Yes unfortunately when they own the company they have complete control over it. This is why I recommend checking your employer’s background carefully before you join them. While they can reject you, you can (and should) reject them if they are substandard.