Archive for the 'Articles' Category

The Perfect Support

Published on February 6, 2008 in Articles. 0 Comments

Imagine yourself as a person running a small-medium sized online store that concentrates on affordablly prized gift items, and say, it’s Christmas time. Everybody is on a shopping spree, and you have been waiting for this vacation to arrive, as it is the time of the year when your business really blooms, and with which’s revenues you have got to plan for the year to come.

Say, your site goes down due to some sort of problems associated with your server on say, the 23rd of December, or on Christmas eve. You will be contacting your hosting company in frenzy, and just imagine if there’s nobody there to provide you with prompt support and resolution for your issue.By the time boxing day arrives, nobody will need to send gifts anymore to anyone. You have lost your business, and now your site and business has got a notorious reputation of not being active when it counts.

The above is just a worse case scenario explained to put forward a point. Quality support is the backbone of a hosting company. It is the pillar on which a hosting firm rests it’s credibility. Speedy and accurate customer service is rare and indicates a superior overall hosting service. When choosing a web host, what customers generally look for are Server performance, Space, Traffic allowed, Features, Cost, and most importantly Customer support.

If a hosting company is one which takes it’s business seriosly, their technical support must be perfect by all means. Determining whether technical support is dependable is important, because if anything goes wrong with your site, you are going to be contacting your know-it-all customer care rep. However, in the real world, we know that knowledgeable customer care is hard to find.

Most of the hosting companies claim that they have techs working round the clock in their organizations, managing their state-of-the art systems. While this in fact may be true, sometimes, the people working with the support might be the most unprofessional and underqualified ones. Due to the huge demand for information technology professionals today, many web hosts are not able to find employees who are well trained in OS concepts, network technology and control panel specifications. Other firms pump in a lot of money to advertising and marketing and gives good quality customer support only the lowest priority. In both instances, it is the customers who eventually suffers due to the lack of competence in handling their issues related to hosting.

The following is a small article gives a brief insight into the hosting support considerations for the newbies in business, as well as any host who have got high regards for the quality standards of their company. Before proceeding, please keep in mind the fact that Web Hosting Support is not child’s play. It is something that is NOT to be taken for granted.

Finding the Right Support for you

Finding the perfect support for your company is not a very easy task. Every webhost who have got serious thoughts about their hosting support would be having certain expectation levels regarding the quality of support. Only if your support matches / outperforms your expectations would you feel relaxed, relieved and be happy with them.

The very first concern regarding support is how to keep things going 24 / 7. Every webhost provides their customers with a 24 / 7 support promise, and some even give their customers a money back guarantee on any failure to keep up the promise. You should be implementing methods to ensure that your support team covers the 24 hours of the day effectively, and co-ordinate between them regarding the technical and administrative aspects of your servers.

Then comes the cost part. There are options for maintaining an inhouse team of technical experts, or outsourcing to an outsourced hosting support company. You should choose your support wisely with efficient computations of your expenditure and profit margin. You should do it in such a way that the quality of support is not compromised, and at the same time you have the decent profit to enhance your business in the long run. Please note that in the very beginning itself, you should set the standards, and should never go below them. Remember – It’s a jungle out there, with huge competition. If you have to survive, you have to be the best; and to be the best, you have got to give your customers the best. Manage high standards…. returns would come automatically.

Web hosting support not only means providing technical solutions to your end customers; but the sales / billing support and timely administration of your servers are equally important. You can manage the sales / billing issues yourself, or you can avail the aid of a graduate with good customer skills, and excellent knowledge on the packages / features / options that you provides. Regarding the server administration, you require the service of a good system administrator to perform the timely software upgrades, and the other fine tuning aspects of the server for it’s smooth functioning. It is always an additional advantage to maintain a team of technical experts who can perform your technical support as well as server administration; rather than having separate teams for the same. It would reduce the overall costs involved, and will enhance quality of customer support due to the better knowledge of the servers.

In-House or Outsourced??

Now comes the big question. Do you need an in-house team of technicians, or do you want to outsource your support to a support company? There has been disputes over this on most of the web hosting forums. Both the options has got advantages and disadvantages. But on tallying with the positive and negative sides of both of them, my vote goes to outsourced support. A comparison of the advantages is provided in the chart below:

ADVANTAGES

—————

In-House

1) Direct interaction with the support staff in person

2) Direct recruitment of the support staff yourself, so as to meet your ideal requirements on first-hand

3) Local market knowledge and expertise when it comes to sales and marketing

4) Ready availability-upon-call of your in house team in case of any emergency

Outsourced

1) Far cheaper than what is required to maintain an inhouse support team

2) You can concentrate on your business marketing, while the outsource company takes care of the technical side.

3) Expertise in specific fields related to every server software.

4) No hassles with the planning of shifts or personnel to manage the 24 / 7 support, as it is taken care of by the outsource company.

5) No issues associated with training the support staff.

Outsource companies are able to provide you with high quality, but cheap support due to the low cost of living standards in those countries. Most of the hosting companies are located in the United States, Canada and Europe, and the major outsource companies are located in countries like India. Due to the comparatively lower cost of living in countries like India, the above is made possible. With inhouse support, you have to pay the wages that is par with the living standards in the United States and such; which makes it an expensive option.

There are several myths related to outsourcing jobs. According to the trade and foreign aid research conducted by The Heritage Foundation , the American economy has only benefitted from outsourcing jobs to the asian countries, and has not gone down, as the general concept is.

But with outsourced support, you have got to make the right choice. Due to the huge demand for professionals in the ITES ( Information Technology Enables Services ), many webhosts can’t find employees with expertise in the relevant fields. You should be doing a research on the work culture and standards of the different outsourced companies before making the right source. A search for the leading outsourced companies in forums like http://webhostingtalk.com can provide you with pro and con views that you’ll require to make the decision.

Still, most of the outsourced companies provide you with a testing period of upto a month to test them out. You can utilize this time period to analyze the quality of your support company, if you are not sure about it.

The disadvantages associated with the two types of support are provided in the chart below:

DISADVANTAGES

——————

In-House

1) Expensive when taking into consideration the living standards in North America and Europe

2) Headaches related to personnel management related with maintaining an inhouse team for support

3) Remedies are to be made by you in case of any immediate non availability of support staff due to reasons like their resignation without prior notice, termination, expiry etc.

Outsourced

1) No direct interaction in person with the support staff. ( overcomed if efficient chat support is provided with a contact person at the company )

2) Have to get accustomed with your support people, as they might keep on changing according to the outsource company’s internal policies.

3) Have got to make sure of the written ( spoken too, if required ) language proficiency of the company staff, as English is not the mother tongue in the outsourced companies.

The language barrier could be an issue with only a few cheap quality outsourced support companies. It would be a good measure to talk to their representatives / contact points over chat / telephone to get an idea of how it’s going to be overall. With the leading support companies, the language problems should not happen, as they would have required formal training both technically, as well as with customer orientation. Still, it is very important from your part to make sure of their support quality.

To summarize, it is always better to choose a good outsourced support firm, that maintains it’s promises and does not comprise on quality, rather than yourself employing separate staff to handle your technical support, sales / billing and server administration. ( Unless you have got the money to roll, and is keen on having all your employees available in person upon your call )

The Quality Factor

Speaking of quality, what do one exactly mean by or point to when talking about the Quality of Support ( QoS ) ? Quality is not an accident, but the collective output of well planned stages of service, with the very best systems to back them up. When we refer to the complete QoS, there are a lot of points that comes into consideration – Being knowledgeable, Polite, Communicative, Honest, Fast, Empathetic, Competent, Responsible and above all, overall Perfection. Let’s check out how these becomes important.

Being knowledgeable is the most important part. Always keep in mind that our customers needs competent people at the receiving end of their mails and calls. By being knowledgeable, we mean that the support person should be possessing the proper knowledge level related to the support and service that we are offering. In this case, say, if you are a host who offers Cpanel hosting on Red hat Enterprise Linux servers, the technical support staff that works for you should be having extensive knowledge in the following areas:

Linux Operating System structure

Linux commands – common and advanced

Linux Internet server implementations

Linux server security

Differences between RHEL, and other versions of RedHat Linux, and also other distros and flavors of Linux. Proficiency in Unix / Solaris flavors will be an added advantage.

Cpanel control panel proficiency using both fronted tools ( administrative / user control panel interfaces ) and also the Cpanel control panel specific files in the backend of the servers

Overall, by being knowledgeable, it means that the support team must be well qualified and trained to handle the job that they are doing. Choose your team of experts wisely.

Responsibility of your support team is another important aspect. There is a lot of difference between a person who has undergone years of dedicated computer study in school and college doing this job, and a teenager with some computer background doing it part-time. The support team should be responsible in addressing various heterogeneous issues, and should also be good with the decision making related to the smooth functioning of the servers.

Say, one of your servers is having an issue with the apache server software running in the server being not compatible with PHP, as a result of a latest control panel upgrade. Your support team must not only be able to fix the immediate requests from customers hosted in this server, but should also be taking the necessary steps to identify the root cause of the issue, implement it in the server under question, and also check the rest of the servers ( if any ) for similar compatibility issues, and get them fixed, so that no unnecessary botherations are avoided for both the party – the customer and the support rep.

To sum up things, the support techs should not be just people to see off the day to day issues of the end customer, but they should be responsible so as to ensure that the server is fine tuned to see off any vulnerability associated with it, so that no issues arise from within the server as a result of an exploitation of that.

Then comes the communication part. This is as important as being knowledgeable. A support technician needs to address an issue raised by you or an end customer in grammatically correct language, and also including all the important points related to the issue, that the customer should be made aware of. A polite, consice and communicative reply addressing the various aspects of a support ticket always gives the end customer a feeling of care. A good support tech is one who empathises the client, i.e, think by standing in the client’s shoes. When a support person can feel the client’s problems, and read in between the lines, it puts the end client at ease, no matter what the issue is. Just take the case of the following scenario. A customer has published the following support ticket:

==============================================================

Hi,

I am not able to send mails out of my account user@foo.com. The mails are not going out of Outlook Express, and I am getting the following error:

Mail refused error “sorry that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts error 553″

Please get it fixed ASAP. I am unable to contact my customers !!!

Paul Smith

==============================================================

And consider the following replies, which implies the same message, and tell me which one feels better:

Response # 1 :

==============================================================

This is since you are not doing POP before SMTP. Check your incoming mails, before trying to send them using OE.

Support team

==============================================================

Response # 2 :

==============================================================

Hi Paul,

This error is caused when email client software configured with multiple email accounts from different domains is used to send email to an account that it has not checked for messages first. To get over this, always make sure to check the incoming mails using your Outlook Express, before trying to send mails out of it. This is called POP before SMTP.

An easy remedy is to check your email from user@foo.com before sending or set your email client to check email every 15 minutes or close and reopen your Outlook Express. It shall work for you, and you shall be able to mail your customers in no time.

Best Regards,

Tech name

Support team

==============================================================

Upon examining the above two replies, what do you feel? No matter how frustrated the end customer who sent in the ticket might be, response # 2 will provide him with the “care factor” that response # 1 could not do. In response # 2, the support tech has done the following:

Analyzed that the customer is not very techny-savvy

Understood that he is trying to send in some important mail(s), and is frustrated with things not going working correctly for him

Replied the customer very politely and with atmost care keeping both the above two considerations in mind.

Support techs should always be polite to the customers. Some of the customers may even use harsh terms while mailing the support team, due to their frustration. A support tech should just ignore those comments, keeping in mind the fact that it is nothing personal and the customer is just angry with some utility not working for him properly. There are certain rare cases, when the support team receives really hard-to-interact-with customers. Some people might just do not understand what the support person is trying to say, or not listen what he is asking the customer to do. In these rare cases of non co operation, it is always better for the hosting owner ( you ) to respond to the customer asking him politely to co operate with the support team, or any solution to his problem might get unnecessarily delayed.

The overall perfection of a support team is the right combination of the following qualities:

1) Technical Superiority

2) Command over written and communicative skills

3) Politeness , Friendliness and Empathy

4) Responsibility

5) Endurance

The webhosts, on the other hand should also understand that the support team is an integral part of his business, and treat them with respect and consideration. The webhosting owner should be a good manager here, who knows how to make his support team work with their maximum potential for him. At the same time, he should not pressurize them by unnecessarily interfering in their job. Always keep them at ease, and make them feel free to approach you with any of their requirements / suggestions.

Conclusion

To conclude, when you appoint the support team, to assist with your business, make sure of the following things:

You get what you are promised of ( 24 / 7 support , and the exact time limits required to reply to, and resolve a problem )

Your support team co ordinates perfectly with you, and has got a good knowledge on the plans, services, and offers that you provide your clients with, so that they can be serviced better, and on time.

Your support team is friendly and courteous, and is always willing to go that ‘extra step’ when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Your support team is extremely knowledgeable and should be able to do anything that their job demands out of them.

You should be in excellent rapport with your support team, and should let them be at ease with you; and at the same time you should know where to draw the fine line as well.

In the webhosting business, where stiff competition awaits you, it is always the customer evangelism ( customers preaching the good points of your webhosting service ) that brings in clients. There is no publicity as mouth publicity. Your support team would be responsible for more than 80% of it. If they are good, your business shall flourish, and if it’s the other way around, you are going to have a tough time in the future.

So choose wisely. There is a bright future awaiting you.

Transactional Fold Creating Customer-Lead, Trust-based Value Generation Services

Published on February 1, 2008 in Articles. 2 Comments

Summary Overview

This article explains how an enterprise can leverage increased value generation, thereby aiding competitive advantage, by adoption of the `Enterprise Value Generation Service Orientated Architecture Platform’ (SOAP).

The SOAP model presents a holistic, product independent, business-integrated approach to creating a customer-lead, transactional trust-based, market leading enterprise.

The model creates ‘transactional fold’ - between ‘customer desire & transactional trust’ and `enterprise customer intelligence’ - closing the ’service transaction gap’ by full alignment and integration of the business and service strategies as well as the interrelated layers - including ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)- which represent the enterprises’ service portfolio. The primary benefits of which are:

? Increased business agility; responding quickly and efficiently to new business threats and opportunities ? Optimised business processes; introducing new and quickly change existing ? Reduced business and IT costs ? Greater reuse of IT assets ? Faster delivery of value to the business and its customers.

Introduction

The increasing importance of organisational agility within today’s global economy is the primary driver behind the rise and development of Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). A term coined around eight years ago, SOA is fast becoming the latest IT industry buzzword, defining how services can and are used to implement business processes whilst, providing an imperative for organisations seeking to grow and maximise not only customer current and latent needs but also, the ongoing customer relationship.

Parallel to the rise of SOA, the continuing growth of Internet users has spawned increasingly sophisticated use of web technologies and customer relationship management software in an attempt to leverage maximum revenue. Current statistics available indicate that as at February 3 2005, 817.5million people (12.7% of the world’s population) use the Internet; the monthly average growth of Internet users being 10.2 million per month from March 2003 to February 2005 (inclusive)1.

Indeed, every major vendor appears to now offer an SOA strategy with ’services’ forming the core of applications such as IBM WebSphere, Microsoft .NET, BEA WebLogic and Oracle 1Og. However, to focus SOA on IT delivery mechanisms only is to ignore major business opportunities. Only through full alignment and integration of IT and the business, a set of design and architecture principles and, a robust service delivery platform does SOA offer sustainable competitive advantage.

The SOAP model offers all of these as well as addressing age-old problems such as how to maintain customer loyalty and satisfaction levels whilst rapidly identifying emerging customer needs and desires.

The Need for SOAP As many companies collectively continue to spend billions on web and CRM technologies many have failed to meet management expectations in terms of return on investment. Part of the problem appears to be the piece-meal approach taken to implementation and, the absence of holistic and congruent business and service strategies focussed on the customer.

Many companies appear to have interpreted CRM as being all about the customer relationship in name only as often CRM metrics used to assess success are primarily based on cost savings via the automation of sales and service processes - by putting the responsibility onto the customer through self-service. Still worse, other companies implement CRM to gain only short-term revenue gains via targeted offers and cross-sell attempts. These tactical initiatives plainly do not underpin the building of lasting relationships.

Compounding these issues, a fundamental problem with CRM software is that it only records what the customer has actually bought and, when they bought it. The CRM software acting as a historic sales repository and personal contacts database. Though useful for marketing campaigns and carrying out trend analysis, the nature of the one-way transfer of information does not provide any opportunity for building trust. Indeed, mass e-mailings and unsolicited customer contact now creates information overload and represents a nuisance amongst customers as well as introducing a risk to the enterprise of facing fines under EU legislation2. So how to address this? Wish Lists. Wish lists provide the customer with the opportunity to tell you want they think they want or need - voluntarily. They create a two-way transaction the foundations of which are built purely on trust.

Clearly, therefore, SOA needs to focus on cementing long-term, collaborative relationships with customers based on mutual trust. Research has demonstrated many times that long-term customers are less costly to serve and that smooth-running relationships are less resource intensive. Companies with a strong reputation among customers also experience lower cost of capital and find their customers much more inclined to accept offers from firms they trust. Massad (2003)3 carried out doctoral research concerning Internet based customer transaction satisfaction. The research found that online purchasing service failures (online transactional or along the order fulfilment value chain) lead to low customer loyalty and repatronage rates and that, from the customer perspective, current online delivery methodologies are not robust enough to sustain even one service failure.

The research also found that most often the primary driver behind online purchasing behaviour is one of meeting deadlines. So for example, same day deliveries and customisation of the service offering should heighten perceived customer satisfaction levels and thus, heighten the probability of reorders/strengthen and develop the customer relationship. The key customer satisfiers identified within the research were:-

1. Timeliness of delivery of products ordered 2. Other service capabilities 3. Updating the customer 4. Perceived ease of navigation 5. Perceived price of products/services 6. Availability of products/services 7. Perceived ease of ordering 8. Past experience with service provider 9. Incentives 10. Perceived transactional security

Dissatisfiers were:-

1. Perceived effectiveness of communication 2. Perceived ease of exchange/returns/refunds 3. Perceived attitude 4. Billing accuracy 5. Perceived integrity of service provider

Underlying Principals of SOAP

Ever since Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz4 won a Nobel Prize for their research regarding asymmetrical information in 2001, companies have been trying to either exploit the miss-match or, address the imbalance in an attempt to gain competitive advantage.

Asymmetrical information occurs when one party to a transaction has much better information than the other. For instance, a company’s customers have a much better idea of what they desire than the company providing the products or services. Equally, current Internet buying habits are primarily held back by ‘customer transactional trust’ concerns regarding credit card security etc.

In short, this is creating a ’service transaction gap’ in relation to bringing the customer closer to the enterprise. When the customer is brought closer to the enterprise - by folding the transactional gap and reducing the asymmetries of information - the enterprise is able to provide efficient, customised services and products to the customer as well as quickly identifying customer latent needs. Only a holistic Enterprise SOA - such as the SOAP model - can create a `transactional fold’ and bridge the gap creating enhanced Enterprise Customer Intelligence and, increased customer confidence and satisfaction levels.

A good example of an enterprise addressing such customer desires and concerns is amazon.com who provide customers with innovative ‘mass customisation’ options, and quality assurance by way of customer testimonials, fraud guarantees etc. These initiatives in turn provide amazon with the opportunity to track and monitor individual user browsing habits thereby allowing the opportunity to build an individualised ‘profile’ of their current and potential customers. Amazon, as an enterprise, is therefore continually expanding its ‘enterprise customer intelligence’ - the driving resource in determining organisational direction in terms of:

* Identifying market opportunities and, * Strengthening organisational capability.

Conclusion

Many companies are failing to meet the challenges and opportunities the Internet brought. Narrow, blinkered vision has interpreted the Internet as an ‘addition to’ rather than an ‘instead of’ sales, marketing and customer relationship channel. Only by investment, broad-brush strokes - inherently high risk - and full alignment of IT to the business will today’s enterprise survive and thrive.

Terminology:

Business Levers : - In the following order:- 1. People 2. Processes 3. Information 4. External Relationships 5. Organisational Structure

Customer Desire : Connected to the Customers’ ‘need to heal’5 Enterprise Customer Intelligence - Refers to the data, information and knowledge the enterprise has/holds regarding the customer, for example, order records, personal details, browsing habits etc. Knowledge Capital - The collective experience and knowledge of the enterprise held within employees. The effectiveness with which knowledge capital is put to use differentiates the successful and agile enterprise from the mediocre. Knowledge capital is enhanced and accessed by creating conceptual and transactional knowledge opportunity networks within the organisation; between all Departments.

Latent Needs : Customer needs the customer is not consciously aware of. Financially successful companies create products based on customer feedback - but rely more on inference and intuition as to what products will appeal to their target customers. The general process of learning about and satisfying customer needs, known as market orientation, has seen a shift from responsive market orientation (knowing what the customer believes he/she wants) to proactive market orientation (anticipating his/her needs). The more proactive market-oriented a business is the greater its new product success will be.6

Mass Customisation : The customisation and personalisation of products and services for individual customers at a mass production price7. Implemented via the new interactive technologies, like the Internet, which allow customers to interact with a company and specify their unique requirements. These are subsequently manufactured by automated systems.

Quality Assurance : Broadly, quality is a degree of excellence; the extent to which something is fit for its purpose. In the narrow sense, product or service quality is defined as conformance with requirement, freedom from defects or contamination, or simply a degree of customer satisfaction. In quality management, quality is defined as the totality of characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs.

Service Transaction Gap : The gap between Customer Desire and Transactional Trust and, Enterprise Customer Intelligence.

Transactional Trust : “Trust” refers to relying on someone or something for a future action. The dictionary defines trust as having a confident dependence on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. From this perspective trust is a contingent emotional feeling, highly conditional in nature and subject to reappraisal. Transactional Trust originates with Customer perception, hearsay, guarantees, fraud prevention methods etc.

Transactional Fold : Closes the information asymmetries between the Enterprise and the Customer; by way of innovative, rapid response and integrated service layers. The enterprises’ expertise at this can be measured in terms of `transactional capabilities’.

Value Added Services : Not a form of basic service but services that add value to the total service offering. Characteristics include:- 1. Stands alone in terms of profitability and/or stimulates incremental demand for core service(s) 2. Can sometimes stand alone operationally 3. Does not cannibalise basic service unless clearly favourable 4. Can be an add-on to basic service, and as such, may be sold at a premium price 5. May provide operational and/or administrative synergy between or among other services - not merely for diversification

Is Bad Customer Service Killing Your Business

Published on January 27, 2008 in Articles. 0 Comments

It’s time to beat the old bad customer service drum again. I know, I’m sick of beating the drum, too, but as long as bad customer service runs rampant through so many businesses I feel it is my entrepreneurial duty to bring it to your attention. So grab a pen and prepare to listen to the sermon I’ve preached before: bad customer service is the bane of business. If the Almighty smote down every business that dispenses bad customer service, the world would be a much friendlier, albeit much sparser place. Consider a world without malls and fast food joints… would it really be so bad?

What puzzles me most is if bad customer service is such a death knell for business, why do so many businesses allow it to go on? Don’t they read my column, for Pete’s sake? I think the problem is that most bad customer service is doled out (or at least condoned) by business owners and managers who have ceased caring what their customers think. When you stop caring what your customers think it’s time to close the doors. Go find a day job. You’ll make someone a wonderfully disgruntled employee.

My latest parable of lousy customer service was actually experienced by my better half while attempting to buy my daughter a pair of basketball shoes. I won’t mention the name of the sporting goods chain store in which the bad customer service took place, but I will tell you that its name is similar to the sound a frog with hiccups might make.

As my wife waited for someone to assit, the four or five teenagers who had been charged with manning the store stood in a clump at the cash register giggling and flirting with one another as if they were at the prom instead of at work.

When my wife pointed out this fact, one of the employees, a cheeky lass of 16 or so, put her hands on her hips and said, “How rude!” The males in the group didn’t react at all. They were too busy arguing over who could take a break so they could chase other cheeky lasses about the mall.

Needless to say my lovely bride, who has the ability to instill fear into the hearts of even the most worthless employees, left the gaggle of giggling teen idiots standing with their mouths open in disbelief. How dare a customer tell them to do that with a pair of basketball shoes?

As much as I bemoan bad customer service I celebrate good customer service. It should be applauded and the purveyor of said good customer service should be rewarded for actually delivering satisfaction to the customer, above and beyond the call of duty.

So let me tell you the story of my new hero, Ken. I won’t tell you the name of the store in which Ken works, but let’s just say they started out selling radios in a shack somewhere long, long ago.

I first met Ken when I went into the store to buy a mixing board for my business that records audio products for the Web. In a nutshell, you plug microphones into the mixing board then connect it to the computer and you can record audio directly to digital format. Totally beside the point of this article, but I didn’t want you thinking that I was purchasing non-manly cooking utensils.

When I got the mixer installed it didn’t work. So I boxed it up and headed back to the store to return it. When I told Ken my problem he didn’t just grunt and give me my money back as so many bad customer service reps would do. Instead he asked, “Do you mind if I try it?”

“Knock yourself out,” was my reply, confident that if I couldn’t get it to work, neither could Ken. Ken took the mixer out of the box and went about hooking it up to one of the computers on display. He started pulling power cords and cables off the display racks and ripping them open and plugging them in. He tore open a new microphone and an adapter and kept going until he had the mixer hooked up and working. Yes, I said working. It turns out the mixer was fine. I just had the wrong power adapter.

Ken could have just given me my money back and been done with me. Instead he spent 15 minutes and opened a number of other packages that I was under no obligation to buy just to help me get the thing working.

I was so impressed that I not only kept the mixing board, I also bought another $50 worth of products. And the next time I need anything electronic guess where I will buy it? Even if it costs twice as much, I’ll buy it from Ken.

Now here’s the moral of the story: if you are a business owner who has a gaggle of teenagers in charge of customer service at your store you would be better off replacing them with wild monkeys.

At least monkeys can be trained.

Three Myths Of Customer Service

Published on January 25, 2008 in Articles. 0 Comments

At one time or another, all of us have been aggravated by bad customer service. The complaints are familiar: the dry cleaner who refuses to accept responsibility for staining your shirt; the salesperson who talks to a friend on the phone while handling your transaction; the hotel clerk who treats you like a trespasser instead of a guest.

The list goes on. And it happens all the time. Poor customer service is so rampant in this country that we’ve come to expect it.

Maybe that explains why most disgruntled customers don’t bother to complain to organizations that don’t give them quality service, they simply take their business elsewhere. They’d rather walk than talk.

Yes, I know, you’ve heard this before. Just as you’ve heard about the research revealing that unhappy customers do talk to their friends and family. According to customer satisfaction research studies, the average unhappy customer will tell nine or ten people about the poor service he or she received. In other words, large numbers of dissatisfied customers are routinely deserting organizations that displease them and are encouraging their friends to do likewise.

It’s a familiar message. You’ve heard it, your children have heard it, your dog has heard it; for the past few years everybody has heard it. Service excellence! That’s what consumers need!

Companies have certainly heard it. All sorts of organizations are striving to improve their customer service orientation. Hotels, hospitals, airlines, and online businesses now flood their customers with service quality surveys. Everywhere you look you see customer-contact people with service theme buttons on their lapels. Companies spend millions on training programs aimed at improving their employees’ service skills. Customer service has been woven into the fabric of so many corporate credos you’d think abrasive employees would be an extinct species by now.

Yet despite all of this, only a handful of organizations have managed to achieve a standard of consistently excellent service. For some reason, it just isn’t as easy as it sounds.

I think the problem is this: A lot of companies operate on the basis of some pervasive myths that make it difficult if not downright impossible, to achieve first-rate customer service.

1. The quality myth

“Pay attention to quality, and customer service will take care of itself.” Many organizations focus a lot of effort on manufacturing quality. Quality gurus like W. Edwards Deming, Philip Crosby, and Genichi Taguchi have helped hundreds of companies use techniques such as statistical processes control to increase the quality of their products dramatically. But these efforts are often thought to be the sole answer to remaining competitive.

Reality: Quality and service are interdependent. It’s impossible to describe quality adequately without considering it from the customer’s point of view. If your product can’t do what your customer wants it to do, it doesn’t matter if your engineering department is proud of its innovative design and your manufacturing department can boost a terrific production record.

Even if you measure product quality from the customer’s point of view, however, that alone does not ensure customer satisfaction. A superbly manufactured product with poor sales and service support will breed aggravated customers. How many products have you vowed never to buy again because of the poor service you associate with them?

Organizations that pursue quality improvements as the answer to all their problems are misguided. It is only part of the answer. Without superior customer service, efforts to improve product quality will be wasted.

2. The complaint myth

“Good customer service is a matter of knowing how to handle complaints.” “Call 800-111-2222 or contact us at www. customerservice.com if you have any complaints.” “Let us know if you’re unhappy with your room; we’ll change it.” “Please fill out this form. We want to hear from you.”

Companies have poured millions of dollars into making sure their customers have a chance to complain, complain, complain. The problem is, many of these companies never make strategic use of the complaints. And more often than not, they fail to provide complainers with satisfactory responses.

Reality: Without resolution, or at least some response, customers’ complaints are just so much hot air. A company that focuses solely on complaint handling may win a few battles, but it will lose the war to keep customers satisfied. And this approach is no solution for the great majority of dissatisfied customers who never complain, but simply walk away.

Superior customer service involves much more than handling complaints. It means striving to provide customers with no reason to complain in the first place. Strategies aimed at consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations are a must for achieving service excellence.

None of this suggests that you can forget about complaint handling, but it must be an integral part of a broader service strategy. Well-managed companies see customer complaints as a way to learn: What lesson can we derive from this complaint that will improve our service in the future? Successful companies also see complaints as opportunities to impress customers by going to any lengths necessary to resolve the situation to the customer’s satisfaction. In other words, successful companies pay attention to complaints, but dedicate most of their efforts to preventing whatever caused the complaints in the first place.

3. The quick-fix myth

“Good service is simply good common sense.” Many organizations try to take the easy road to improving service. They believe that by adopting a new service policy, introducing a new training program, or giving stirring pep talks to their employees, they’ll become known for their excellent service.

Reality: This is the most lethal myth of all. As we’ve seen, it’s not easy to achieve service excellence. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes. Organizations that build their reputations on service do so by observing not just one, but every “reality” there is to providing excellent customer service.

Good training without adequate selection is a waste of time and money. Carefully selected and well-trained service employees who are not empowered to look for ways to improve customer service quality are a waste of precious resources. Good service comes only from a well-executed, coherent strategy. All the pieces of the puzzle need to be in place.

The way we treat customers, listen to their needs and strive to meet their expectations will make the critical difference. We can continue to perpetuate the myths. Or we can face the realities, and take action to change.

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