Insight Providing Best Service in Membership Organisations

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Customer service is most often thought about in the context of large corporate call centres many of whom provide excellent service (Amazon and first direct are often held up as prime examples), but equally with some well known cases who provide appalling service to their customers with long waiting queues, tortuous telephone menus and dreadful operatives (it’s probably best not to name the guilty here). Significant research and practical experience have gone into understanding best practice for customer service.

Membership organisations are, by their very nature, organisations that provide services for their members (and potentially other customers). Providing the best possible service experience is something that is not often considered, but is of great importance to help to ensure that members renew their membership and that the services can be provided cost effectively.

Customer service best practice can be applied in membership organisations to:

• Understand the root causes of any problems and identify solutions
• Ensure that members and other customers have the best possible experience when accessing the organisation’s services
• Provide feedback into the consideration of what services are providing greatest value to customers and into the development of new services and products

The best practice for service organisations comes from two key sources:

• The Systems Thinking work carried out by Professor John Seddon and implemented across a number of market sectors[1].
• The work of Bill Price and David Jaffe[2] on delivering Best Service.

Some of the headline issues raised by both are:

• It is common for blame to be attributed to the contact centre when there are in fact much wider issues to be tackled.
• Significant improvements can be made by eliminating what Price and Jaffe call “dumb contacts” and Seddon calls “failure demand” – these are in essence service contacts that have been caused by failures by the organisation, particularly in providing the right information at the right time (for example, sending an email or SMS notification about the a system failure and resolution status will result in far fewer enquiries).
• Care needs to be taken to understand what contacts are about and to make improvements to service based on this understanding (in contrast to managing crudely through statistics such as minimising call duration).

Systems Thinking

The ‘Systems Thinking’ work carried out by John Seddon is one of the key contributions to moving organisations towards service excellence.

The fundamental Systems Thinking concepts Professor John Seddon defines for service organisations are demand, value and flow:

• Demand – what services the contacts want (what they are demanding). There are two types of demand:
  • Value demand – calls / contacts that are carried out to obtain the value a person wants from their relationship with the organisation (i.e. the services or advice)
  • Failure demand – contacts/calls that result from failures, for example a failure to provide information or support that was required to fulfil demand at first contact
• Value – what the contact wants (value) from a particular conversation with the organisation – what matters to them, the services, products (including membership) and advice.
• Flow – how the contact flows through the organisation to get to the objective (obtain the value).

Examples of these are:

• Someone phoning for advice on an area of professional conduct:
  • Demand: wanting the advice
  • Value: the value to the contact is the advice (accuracy is important).
  • Flow: from the contact centre to the relevant department – the contact centre has to understand that the call needs some advice that the department can provide, transfer the call if possible, or create a request for the department to call the contact back.
• Someone who wants to upgrade their membership level:
  • Demand: wanting to upgrade
  • Value: the higher level of membership
  • Flow: the contact centre would take the call, and transfer it to the Membership department, either immediately, or as a request for the Membership department to call back.
• Someone calling to ask why the membership self service area of the website is not available (this is an example of failure demand):
  • Demand: why is the membership self service area of the website not available?
  • Value: information about when the website is back up, or if it is an urgent issue, to do what they wanted over the phone
  • Flow: the contact centre would take the call and provide the answer

Although the examples above relate to phone calls, they could equally well be emails or enquiry forms on the website.

The first step is to understand the type and frequency of demand – why are people calling and how often?

Failure demand can often form 50% or higher of the contact volume. Where there is failure demand, the organisation needs to act to turn off the causes. This will have a direct impact on costs and ability to concentrate on the value demand.

For value demand, these are the interactions the organisation wants, so the business needs to be geared to responding to these demands.

To understand these, you need to observe what happens in practice ... and measure and analyse. It is important, as part of this, to understand whether the different types of demand are predictable or not, as you can only sensibly do something about the predictable demands.

Management roles should not be concentrating on aspects such as call duration statistics as (in the first two examples above) this can lead to the desire to minimise call duration to control costs, which very often results in reductions in service quality (and increases in cost). Instead, looking at the first two examples above, management should be ensuring that these enquiries can be handled efficiently, with the correct responses being delivered as promptly, accurately and fully as possible.

Best Service applied to Membership Organisations

Part of a commitment to managing customer/contact relations is the commitment to ensure that a person’s experience of the service they get from the organisation is the best it can be. Bill Price and David Jaffe's work on best service has a number of applications to Membership Organisations, particularly those where relationship management and development is important.

Price and Jaffe’s approach as described in The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs is that the way to provide the best service is through the following (note: their use of "no service" is a misnomer - their book is very much in agreement with John Seddon's work):

1: Challenge Customer Demand for Service

Challenging customers’ demand for service is the starting point for Price and Jaffe’s approach to reducing service costs by improving service. This is mainly delivered through the following three items.

2: Eliminate Dumb Contacts

“Dumb Contacts” are the equivalent of John Seddon’s “Failure Demand” – the demand on service resources that is generated by errors or failures to provide the right information. In this context, “dumb” means dumb for the organisation to allow these contacts; not that the user is being dumb for asking the question.

Examples of dumb contacts are:

• “How do I pay my membership fee?”
• “What is the status of my enquiry?”
• “Am I booked on this event?”
• “Did you know about a problem with the website / when is it going to be resolved?”

Eliminating dumb contacts has a direct impact on costs. The best way eliminate dumb contacts is to provide the information through the appropriate communications media: self service on the website and emails from the CRM system or the fulfilment process for event management.

3: Create Engaging Self Service

Self service is an extremely cost effective way of meeting the information needs of stakeholders. It provides the answers to users’ simple questions and stops them from having to make dumb contacts. Self service enables transactions to be completed quickly and efficiently at a time that suits the user.

Taking self service further requires the analysis of the value demand to prioritise further items for self service implementation:

• Using self service to provide the information that would otherwise lead to failure demand
• Get more rapidly and easily to the (value demand) products, services and information; particularly by personalising self service so that the products offered are most likely to be the ones of interest

4: Be Proactive

A key element of stopping dumb contacts is to get in first if/when there are problems. So if for example the self service part of the website goes down, communication immediately (via a notice on the main website and/or emails as appropriate) with the expected duration of the service interruption and contact details for urgent matters.

Marketing campaigns are also a means of being proactive (anticipating demand), particularly if they are targeted at an appropriate market segment.

5: Make it Really Ease to Contact Your Company

Contrary to often found practice, offering web form, email and phone contact details prominently, is best practice:

• It ensures that needs/demands are met
• It allows the demands to be captured and analysed
• It provides a positive user experience – that the organisation is here to meet their needs, rather than trying to discourage communication, or hide from it
• It allows the user to use the communication route they want (which is likely to reflect the urgency of the need/demand)

6: Own the Actions Across the Company

Problems with service are rarely the sole responsibility of the enquiry handling / call centre. Where improvements are needed:

• Need to look at where actions are needed across the organisation
• Resolve any data quality issues
• Ensure that enquiries that are passed to other departments are passed across properly with complete information

Where problems are identified across the organisation they need to be resolved. These are as likely to be with the organisation’s products and services, and their fulfilment as with the contact centre.

7: Listen and Act

Put in place the mechanisms to understand what is being said by users and then act upon them:

• Ask for views from across membership and other stakeholders
• Ask for views / improvements / annoyances from staff
• Measure how services are being used, where there is demand for new services
• Ensure there is feedback from previous improvements into future improvements

8: Deliver Great Service Experiences

The organisation should have the objective of delivering great service experiences to ensure that existing members believe they are getting first class value and that potential members are given reasons to join.

To do this, it is important to ensure that the right metrics are in place to do this – focused round understanding the demand, value and flow, and ensuring that focus is not on the wrong things, such as minimising call handling times.

Role of IT and the Business in Service Improvement