If Technology Is So Great, Why Do We Need People?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Competency: customer service

Who benefits: all levels of an organization

Consultant Usage: idea generator for organizational consultants and customer service trainers

What’s it about? As strongly hinted in my last post, I am declaring February as Customer Appreciation Month (CAM). Very little peeves me more that poor customer service. I shall use this forum to express personal opinions both positively and negatively. I urge the readers of this Blog to add their 2-cents in the comments section. Who have you had a great experience with? Poor experience with? Rant or Rave, let’s hear from you.

Public enemy #1 on my list of least favorite customer service experiences (and there have been several frustrating ones) is Direct TV. Good thing they have the products I need or I would be long gone. They test my limits and endurance.

Which is why I begin this mini-series with Lame Customer Service Excuses and Hidden Masterminds (dedicated to you, Direct TV).

This is the way Robert Plant (hey, isn’t that a famous musician?) begins his excellent recent post on his Blog: “The next time a customer service rep says, ‘The computer won’t let me do that’ or ‘The system tells me what to do,’ remember this: Behind every such phrase is a set of processes designed, or at least endorsed, not by computers but by human beings somewhere in the corporate hierarchy. The system may tell the reps what to do, but someone told the system what to do.”

His post deserves a careful read. There are many nuances deserving of our prime thinking time. Senior executives who issue “efficiency” directives that may increase short term profits at the expense of customer loyalty. Mid-level decision makers without direct customer experiences designing the wrong systems that effectively turn customer service representatives and agents into devolving employees who often are provocateurs instead of problem-solvers. Pity the first line employee drenched under a waterfall of inaccurate or non-existent information. The powerless employees who create enemies of the very customers they are hired to serve. The next-to-useless application of technology frustrates and angers even the most loyal of supporters.

Mr. Plant has some pointed and poignant observations and some answers.

Here is a quick summary of his solutions. But don’t stop here. Go read his post and take in the magnitude of his concern and the details of these solutions:

1. (Organizations) should support their customer agents with technologies that are flexible and adaptive and that use case-based intelligent reasoning to anticipate customer and agent needs.
2. (Organizations) should reduce the experiential gap between employees and customers. With much of the corporate world’s customer interactions handled by offshore call centers, reps are often incapable of relating to customers’ needs.
3. (Organizations) should recognize the value of dialogue with customers.

Good advice for companies that prefer to stay in business.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.