tJP

As a follow-up to the Feb 18 post of how marketing and the CFO should work together to deliver on ROI. From UK.

Return on innovation

So is Customer Service a Socratic Fallacy, a cost or is it real and core to the business?

I’m motivated to write this based on three recent things:

• Reading Richard Branson’s Book ( Business Stripped Bare)
• Read the B&T Magazine experience of testing the online response rates of various businesses
• Personal experience lately with a Telco and a Car Hire firm

Firstly, the only thing I remember from a Philosophy course over a decade ago was the term Socratic Fallacy - in ancient Greek times if you called something of “Quality” then it meant ‘Good Quality’ and when it was ‘attached’ to something it had real meaning. However that is all gone and its therefore a fallacy today - words such as value and quality are meaningless( can mean high quality or low quality) and words get copied and re-purposed willy nilly. So is the term Customer Service also a Socratic Fallacy?

The Branson book is an easy read, and you will get a very high-level view of his business philosophy - finding markets that are badly served in brand, price and customer service. Lots of examples and I thought that the customer service section good. http://entrepreneur.virgin.com/ Particularly as so many companies are so bad at it and how they don’t put it at the core of their business, it is routinely outsourced as a cost minimisation technique and it does not reflect the personality of the business.

In a similar vein an April B&T Magazine survey on eCRM was really interesting. It looked at the top 50 Australian companies responded to an email query. http://bit.ly/GPGnE. Various issues including response times measured on a calendar ( my summary) and vague and unspecific/vague/standard responses. Basically many of the companies are not well setup for online communications - so a few would likely use twitter for customer service. Also the personality might go away especially if corporate comms needs to sanitise everything. Also see Danny Flamberg’s examples on how this works in some companies such as Dell. http://bit.ly/PuB0c

Finally, I recently travelled to the UK - so I needed a car and a international roaming phone. The phone company took three attempts and over a week to get me to roam. Seemed to be no-interdepartmental comms, no closed-loop to ensure that ‘yes I have provisioned the service for you and it will be ready in 4 hours’ actually happened ( like I didn’t make a call in a week! ) Obviously this department worked Australian business hours and hot 24/7 etc. My attempts to communicate online involved checking on my bona fide’s and not fixing my problem. The car company was very weird - arrive in Heathrow with two cranky kids and need a car that was booked 6 weeks earlier - were the kid seats installed ready to go (no!), was the price charged twice that agreed by the Australian branch ( yes!) and when I called UK customer service I was told that I booked it in Australian and would need to call them on return - you only talk to customer service after the car has been returned to Heathrow! Strange but true and obviously finding a single number for sales and customer service is beyond them.

So is Customer Service a Socratic Fallacy - I think the reader needs to make up their own mind. My experience is that it Customer Service is not for the customer and probably is not about service as we might think it should be.