Are You In-Sync With Your Service?

Are You In-Sync With Your Service? If Not, Listen To Your Customers.

I don’t know about you, but when I wait in line too long, or I’m having a horrific service experience;

First, I get upset!

Second, my “fix it” radar pops up.

Being upset is probably not a surprise, but the fact that many CXOs and VPs of business, probably don’t know the service problems within their own organization, might be a surprise to some. Fortunately, this gap is easy to understand.  All too often they don’t consume their own product or the service they provide.

• They don’t call the “normal” lines into call centers.
• They don’t wait in the normal lines to be served.
• They call special lines and friends that do special things.
• If they run a B2B business, they may not fully understand the end consumer or client base.
• If they do meet with “real” customer’s they may be meeting with other C-suite members that don’t experience “normal” service.

If you doubt me, (besides some of scripted situations) watch “The Undercover Boss”.  Without the entourage of handlers, call in for your next service issue, or talk unfiltered to your front line team dealing with customers every day.

In 30+ years of managing large service delivery organizations and 40+ years of my “fix it” radar popping up, I believe 90% of the problems have one single root cause.  That cause is the lack of Organizational Synchronization.   Some may call it, “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing”, or a more general and profound statement, “the business is simply discombobulated”.

This simply means that the End-to-End process to render service, a bill, or respond to a service issue is fouled up.  Each group thinks they are doing everything right, or at least doing it right 98% of the time.  When you accumulate the collective parts of 98% in all departments (Product Design, Marketing, Sales, Systems/Ordering, Warehousing, Shipping, In-Box Instructions, Billing, Call Center) that 2% gap becomes multiplied.

• Departments are silo’ed, by geography, organizational structure, leadership, design or systems
• Groups don’t communicate problems between one another.
• Some teams are acting as lone rangers, and fixing their shop, without realizing they are impacting others, including the customer.
• Systems are Operational and Silo Centric
• Policies and procedures are Operational and Silo Centric
• KPIs are Operational and Silo Centric

In this example of 9 departments, times 2% is an 18% miss by the time the customer accumulates their total experience.  That’s nearly 2 out of 10 customers being left with a foul taste, or a dropped or fumbled experience is multiple places.  According to Peeriosity, only 11% of business have highly integrated/measured views of End to End service performance.

What if that’s the 20% most profitable, or most vocal?  What if these experiences are compounded by multiple cases?  What if each department has a separate detailed view of these failures?

If you begin to look into your own business, or seek a company like Globulus to assist you, don’t be surprised that the End to End service satisfaction from you customers may be closer to 50% or below.  You will also discover most of your front line operational teams can tell you about only 50% of these faults, as they can only see 1-3 functions upstream (predecessors), and only 1-2 downstream (successors) functions.  Short of appearing on “Undercover Boss”, there are several methods to audit the End to End processes your customer’s feel, but often the real impacts are missed due to internal silo’ed perspectives.

By Tim LaFaver, COO/Co-Founder Globulus

Tim LaFaver is Co-Founder of Globulus, a consulting firm with a team of Director and above talent, who each have more that 20+ years experience in their given field and industry. They bring “been in your shoes” experience to businesses.  He is a passionate Customer Advocate and Change Agent for Businesses.  Prior to founding Globulus, LaFaver was Assistant Vice President at AT&T where he led the creation of Customer Experience Team, Program Office for Fiber/Ethernet Build to over 50K Cell Sites, US Telecom Expansion in 30 Cities and International Expansion in Mexico.