In today's fast-paced technology world, a little knowledge goes a long way. The more you know about the latest technologies available in your field, the better equipped you are to serve your customers.
I was initially taken aback by this but it dawned on me that it was not such a bad thing. At the end of the day, if someone felt uncomfortable speaking to someone in a call centre overseas, then they could pay extra to speak to “an Australian”. As for me, I will not be using the talk to “an Australian” option.
Most people have a story they like to share with their friends and colleagues about poor customer service. Many of us have more than one story! But how many of us talk about a positive customer service experience? In my experience, customer service needs to be ‘amazingly’ good for it to be talked about. But what is amazing service?
According to Kevin Stirtz, The Amazing Service Guy, ‘Amazing Service’ happens when your organization:
1. Delivers what your customers want, plus a little more, 2. In the context of your business, 3. Better than anyone else, 4. Every time with every customer - no exceptions and no excuses!
In the context of field service, ‘amazing service’ is extremely rare. Let’s take one scenario, where the customer is waiting at home for the engineer to arrive. We won’t explore the service experience up to this point but we will pick the story up with the engineer arriving at the customer site.
Now, the engineer (James) has arrived well within the scheduled appointment window but the customer (Mary) has just got off the phone from her child’s school. Despite having waited at home for the last couple of hours for the engineer to arrive, Mary now has to rush off to the school and cancel the appointment.
So, what happens next?
Conventional Service: James is really frustrated. He tells Mary that because of people like her he’s missing his quotas and getting paid less, and storms off.
Good Service: James is understanding of the situation, says “such things happen” and gives Mary a detailed list of channels that she can use to create a new appointment, including a case number so that she can avoid having to give all the details again.
Amazing Service: James, recognizing that Mary is in a rush, is able to instantly discover that while he can’t make it to his next job and back to Mary’s home, there is another engineer in the area with appropriate skills whose schedule can be rearranged to reach Mary after she returns from school, in about an hour and still within the arranged appointment window (if there is no such option, James can offer Mary alternative appointment slots by utilizing the mobile appointment booking capability on his mobile device). Either way, Mary is delighted that she does not need to telephone the contact centre again for another appointment. As well as creating customer delight, this ‘amazing service’ also helps to reduce call centre costs.
Check out this video to see an example of an employee going above and beyond their job description to help out a customer
What does your organization do for its customers that sets you apart from the competition?
Every morning, my day starts with coffee and the news which as of late has become nearly myopic at its focus on the economy, its poor state, and the unpredictability of “what’s next.” So I, spending so much brain-CPU on planning in my job, can’t help but wonder, “What’s the point?”
The “universe” of outcomes we had to plan for previously included, “What if demand is 20% higher than we think?”, “What if we have a major storm?”, and “What if we have to go contractors for an additional 5% of our work?” But things have changed....
Now the “universe” of outcomes includes things like, “What if our service budget buys capacity for 60% of the work?”, “What if our largest competitor closes shop?”, and “What if we have layoffs and need to outsource much more of our work?” My challenge isn’t that all of the possibilities are bad, because they are not. Actually, for many companies there are as many opportunities as there are problems depending on perspective.
My challenge is the volatility and unpredictability. Having thought further however, I recognize that now i s the MOST important time to plan. As we often quote Dwight Eisenhower, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Neither the volatility nor the unpredictability changes the act of planning, or its value.
The future never has been predictable, which means that the purpose of planning has always, and continues to be to ‘rehearse’ decisions, understand the impacts, and derive the best course of action. For the near-term, these decisions are delivered with confidence. For the longer-term, the decisions provide consistent guidance with an expectation that plans may change.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Source: BBCNow
Long-term or near-term, plans spread consistent expectations to the entire operation. And for those surprises to come, economic and otherwise; planning enables us to minimize the cost of bad news, and maximize the value of opportunities – because we thought about it ahead of time.
So plan away my friends! And when someone asks you how you can do any effective planning in today’s business climate, just ask them if they change whether they “look before they leap” based on whether they are leaping into a good, bad, or predictable place. It doesn’t matter so much what you are planning for, but just that you are planning at all…
