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

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).

In the next post, I'll delve into the Systems Thinking aspects in more detail.