Customer Service - What do you see?

Everyone remembers a bad customer service experience. You could deal with the same company for years and maybe they provide fantastic service - they really go above and beyond. But what do you remember? If you said "the one time they screw up", you'd be right.

I came across this article - Your Customer Does Not See - and it really makes sense. It talks about doing all the right things but it doesn't get noticed by your customer. However, when you mess up once, they do notice that. How do you deal with that? Well part of that will be in being consistent. Have a set of policies and procedures that describe how you deal with each possible situation. That takes a bit of effort and certainly no small investment in time. But a happy customer is a customer for life, so in the end it has to be worth it.

Go the extra mile. Don't just flick off a quick email. Pick up the phone and talk to your customer. It is easy to miss the tone of an email and take it the wrong way but when you have someone on the phone, you can much easier deal with whatever the situation may be; put the fire out if you need to.

But probably above all else, make sure you listen to your customer. Ask them what they want, then shut up and let them tell you. If what they ask for isn't possible, it's OK to say so - you should never promise something you can't deliver, after all. In this case, explain what they want isn't possible and why. But really importantly, you then need to provide an alternative solution to the problem. Never just say no. Say not like that but this way will offer you some value.

I had a poor customer service experience recently with a web hosting provider. I had a technical issue that I understood and believed I knew the fix for. I logged a support case with the company and gave them all the relevant information so that they could come to the same conclusion. Instead, they answered some question that I didn't ask. I replied to them and got a response from a different agent. This guy also responded to some other question. I went through this several times, with several different agents over several days before I called and spoke to somebody who quickly escalated it to a more senior agent, Lo and behold, the problem was resolved almost immediately. The moral of this story? As the service provider, make sure you read and listen to what your customer is saying. Don't read the first line and assume you know the rest - or even assume you know more than the customer.

How much information should you give away?

As an IT service provider, we are there to support, maintain and where possible improve our customer’s IT systems. During the course of these works, a whole lot of information is collected from log files and error messages, research and testing and more. Well-run IT service providers - and certainly those who stick to IT Service Management frameworks such as ITIL - will have some form of knowledge management system implemented. In basic terms, this will be a knowledge base of documented issues, problems and their resolutions. It is likely that this repository of information will consist of specific articles documenting resolutions, as well as job notes from resolved issues. The whole point is that information is shared within the company, and future issues can be assessed against known issues for quicker resolution.

So far, so good. To run an efficient IT operation, it is vital to have and to share this information amongst your technical staff. It just makes the whole business of servicing your customers that bit easier. But speaking of the customer, how much of this information do you share with them? There are several things to consider here and it is worth looking at it from both the customer and provider standpoints.

The customer wants to see that you have done plenty for them to justify the fat bill that just landed in their inbox. They want to see that you fixed problems quickly and by being proactive, you saved them lots of dollars by avoiding potential lost downtime. Having said that, in my experience they are not interested in the technical details. They probably have no idea what HKLM_User is and don’t care what tweaking a Reg_DWORD value does.

From the service provider point of view, you want to keep your customers happy and as much as possible, give them what they want. But you don’t want to give away the farm to your ad-hoc customers. Give them enough information that tells them you are working for them and looking out for their business interests without necessarily giving away your intellectual property (IP). Having said all that, if you have customers on fixed-fee contracts, it could be in your interests to give customers access to that IP, so that in future they can fix problems themselves without having to call you. This is win-win really.

So what to do? Firstly make sure that all your work is documented and a mostly non-technical summary of work goes out with the bills each month. Implement some kind of knowledge management system (KMS) or knowledge base (KB) and give access to this to your fixed-fee customers. Encourage them to search this system before calling you. At the same time, you should probably not give access to this info to your ad-hoc customers. You can have the best of both worlds but the absolute key is getting your engineers to write-up useful notes in the first place. But that discussion is for another day …...