 |
| ° 2001 United Press Syndicate. |
I’d seen the interview scenario before: Two team leaders,
neither of whom had the power to hire me, asking boilerplate questions that the
real decision-maker would use to determine whether I would have a future with the
company. This pair were almost twins, nearly identical down to facial features,
except that one positively brightened in response to my warmth and
self-effacing humor, while the other remained determinedly serious.
Smileyface asked the question I dread at these kinds of
interviews: “What would your supervisors say are your greatest strength and
greatest weakness?”
“Well,” I replied cautiously, “my greatest strength is my
ability to build relationships with customers. The downside of my approach,
however, is that it’s a little more time-intensive.”
Frowneyface, who had been silent up to that point, pounced.
“Oh, you take too long?”
This is precisely why I dread that question. On the one
hand, I’ve never felt comfortable shading the truth, let alone outright lying.
Generally, people have a right to hear the truth and an obligation to tell the
truth, leaving aside extreme cases and questions of national security. On the
other hand, this interview setup is designed to find reasons to not hire candidates, and I’d just given
one to Frowneyface.
To an accountant, the customer service department is an
expense; to maximize efficiency, the cost per hour of a phone line must be
divided out by as many calls as possible. The word queue is used very much in the British sense: behind the customer
you’re talking to, other customers are tapping their feet, impatiently waiting
to be served.
One hundred eighty seconds. Or less … preferably much less.
That’s the average time you’re given to verify the customer, dope out the
issue, resolve it, and get him/her off your line.
Of course some issues are going to be more time-consuming
than others. In some industries, specialized tasks or issues that regularly
require more time to research and resolve may be referred to a different group
with different time standards. Otherwise, the accountant’s bet is that there
will be more issues that take less than two minutes to resolve than there will
be issues that require four or more minutes. The rest of the time saved is
supposed to come from call control —
the ability of the representative to keep the conversation focused on the
issues.
For many customers, the emphasis on saving time is actually
ideal. This customer doesn’t want to be on the phone with you any longer than
she absolutely has to be, so the sooner the issue is resolved, the sooner she
can get on with her life. The most she requires from the representative
handling her call is that he be pleasant, attentive, knowledgeable and prompt;
he doesn’t have to be a “chatty Cathy”.
But not all customers are New Yorkers who want you to “cut
to the chase”. Many people require more from the person they’re talking to than
simple problem-solving; they prefer a less formal, more interpersonal
connection even in the simplest and most transient of human contacts. Then
there are those for whom the issue represents just the latest in the series of
irritants and frustrations that has comprised their day … or worse, their experience
with the company and/or the product. (Especially if you’re the third, fourth or
fifth person to whom they’ve spoken about the issue — hello, SPOC!)[*]
And then, of course, there are those customers who seemingly can’t follow a
straight line of thought, or who have to make a Homerian epic out of the
explanation.
These people aren’t
“time-wasters”. They’re your
customers every bit as much as the people who want to get off the phone faster
than you do.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow is famous for the maxim known as
the “Law of the
instrument” (aka “Maslow’s Hammer”): “I suppose it is tempting, if the only
tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Because
empiriometric science has been so successful at what it does, it’s given an
unwarranted level of confidence to people who believe that everything can be turned into a science — that is, convertible into
numbers, to be measured, understood and manipulated according to formulae.
Business is especially susceptible to this reductionist bent
precisely because it’s driven by numbers, especially those that have currency
symbols in front of them. Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and “lean enterprise” are all
examples of attempts to make business less of an art and more of a method. Even
specialists in recruiting and human resources can’t resist the drive to find
metrics and approaches that can make hiring the best candidates less of a
crapshoot.
The difficulty with such an approach is that it tends to
write off what can’t be reduced to a number as unimportant, irrelevant or even
unreal. The “Law of the hammer” describes a cognitive bias, professional deformation (aka “trained
incapacity” or “occupational psychosis”), in which one’s view of a problem is
limited by the perspective of his occupational specialty. If a hammer can’t fix
it, the reductionist might say, it either can’t be fixed or doesn’t need
fixing.
The “average customer” is a statistical construct, and
statistical analysis is an imprecise, uncertain tool. (In fact, probability
theory is our best clue that God has a sense of humor.) Individual people
deviate from the mean in ways large and small. Customer service representatives
don’t deal with “average customers”; they deal with individual people, each
with their unique needs and expectations.
Too much emphasis on call handling time, whether you use a
carrot or a stick, can drive the wrong behavior. Representatives become cold
and detached, their “I’m sorry to hear that” flat and insincere. Their
listening skills fall off; they start herding customers towards solutions that may
or may not suit the real problems. They opt for quick fixes that don’t reach
the underlying problem which creates the issue, virtually guaranteeing that it
will recur.
And why should they search for the underlying issue? There’s
no way to measure how many future calls you prevent
by solving the real problem. Metrics can track escalations, but who tracks de-escalations, those calls where the
representative soothes a raging, cursing customer and saves his/her business
with the company? How do you measure business
retained — the real goal of customer service? No ability to measure these
things doesn’t make them irrelevant.
The customer service
rep is the “voice” of the company to the customer, more so than any
commercial or PR flack. So it behooves the company to have “voices” that are
warm, friendly and engaging, who treat the customer as a friend to be helped
rather than as a problem to make go away. As a recent ad for a credit card
company puts it, the CSR should “treat you like you’d treat you”.
This means that, at some level, customer service will always
be an art rather than a science. Metrics have their place. At the end of the
day, though, to really listen to customers and get their feedback, businesses
must be willing to invest all the time needed.
Even if it’s more than one hundred eighty seconds.
