RUN WITH THE Big dogS™ newsletter
 Volume 3, issue 20

Should you be proud that your organization gets back to the customer within an hour?  Perhaps that standard is preventing you from delivering true customer service...John

Management idea

Our client was reviewing last year's strategic goals. A key result measure in their Dramatically enhance customer service! goal was getting back with an answer to their customers' questions within an hour.  They were quite proud to be consistently meeting that standard.  Upon discussion we were sad to learn that meeting the standard didn't have the expected customer impact.  Upon closer investigation, we found that customers didn't want to be called back within an hour, or even within 10 minutes.  What they wanted was to get the answer when they called.  In other words, within a single transaction.

We set a new Key Result Measure for the next year that at least 90% of all customer calls could be handled without having to return a call.  (This required additional training for the customer service reps, changing operations procedures to update the information in real-time rather than at the end of the day, and creating a new report to provide real-time information to Customer Support.) The effect on customer satisfaction was electrifying. It even turned out that putting a simple web front end on the real-time report enabled many customers to bypass calling customer support and get their answers directly 24/7.