Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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 (their use of "No Service" in the title is a misnomer - their book is very much in agreement with John Seddon's work, that you need to focus on the service that provides value to the customer, and provide that service well.):

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.

In the final post on best service, I'll address the roles of IT and the business in improving service.