Without sales there is no business. It’s as simple as that. So it is still a bit surprising to me – naive fool that I am – how bad some companies can be at the basic process of dealing with customers and trying to sell them things.
I always enjoy talking to Lyn Etherington (who runs a business called Cape Consulting) about this, because she speaks more sense on customer service than anyone I have ever met. She sees things very clearly and – I especially like this – in human terms.
Why does bad customer service exist? Is it because of slovenly and resentful staff who lack basic skills? Well, these may be some of the symptoms. But usually, Ms Etherington says, bad customer service is simply a result of bad management. We measure the wrong things, reward the wrong things, and provide perverse incentives. We see customer service as costly, labour intensive and time-consuming – hence the lack of training - instead of being a necessary investment in the future of the company. We forget that customers are people too, and need to be treated as such.
The question in the headline is the sort of thing you get asked by people working for call centres in financial services companies. “Why don’t they say: ‘Is it your car?’,” Ms Etherington asks. Now, of course, insurers have to make sure that they are speaking to the owner. But you get the point. As customers we want to speak plain English, but get drowned in jargon and technical terms instead. You want to have a conversation with a human being, but are met by a corporate automaton working through a colourless script.
There is a long and sorry legacy of poor and under-performing call (or “contact”) centres in business. Why are they so bad? Some have used “average handling time” (AHT) as a measure, where (it has been argued) the shorter the call the better it is.
But this is, of course, nuts. Quick, fruitless calls that lead to several more are in nobody’s interest. The length of the call is almost irrelevant. It is the result that counts. That is why we should be training people so they can deal with the sort of calls that come in, not just pass you on to someone else or ask you to ring back. Now imagine a situation where staff are rewarded for getting the AHT down… Disaster.
Ms Etherington says that, far from seeing call centres as a cost of doing business, the best providers of customer service see their call centres as research centres, trying to find out useful information about their customers and the experience they have had dealing with your company. That, surely, is the way to do it.
Unless you actually want to go out of business, that is.
