Today’s FT has a review of a new book about customer service, called The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs
As the review says, the overall premise is really straightforward: customers generally seek service from a company only when something’s wrong. Get those things right the first time, and people won’t want, or need customer service. Then, once things are going along well, resources you might have had to devote to extensive customer service and support — to fix things that are broken — you can devote to other areas where they’ll improve your products and make you more money.
One of the authors used to be a VP of global customer services at Amazon. I order a lot of stuff from Amazon, and I’m hard pressed to think if I’ve ever had to contact them directly about an order. Either I’ve had no problems, or all my questions have been handled by their web site. In any case, they use a metric called CPO — contacts per customer order. They’ve managed to slice this by 90 percent by figuring out why people need to contact them, what’s not working, and fixing it.
Think about this in terms of the mobile industry, in particular operators. I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that nearly all the service calls they receive are a result of something breaking or an error (whether it’s a technical problem or billing issue, and so on), or because customers can’t find adequate information about something on their own. From the review:
According to the authors’ research, customer contacts have four broad causes. About one in seven is triggered by basic quality defects (“It doesn’t work”). These must be addressed by underlying quality improvements. About a quarter take the form of “How do I?” questions. Here, the company has failed to communicate properly or its processes are confusing to customers, so it must identify and deal with these defects.
About 40 per cent of customer contacts are “Where can I get?” queries. Customers should be able to answer most such questions for themselves via a website or other self-service option that is easy to use.
The final 20 per cent of contacts are from customers wanting to buy stuff.
Think about the amount of resources that go to dealing with the non-sales contacts; then think about how many of those contacts have a positive financial result for the operator. Not very many of them. By employing some pre-service — that is, making sure things work as they should, and by providing customers with the information they need in an effective manner — operators could redirect their resources towards those cases where service contacts do require some human intervention, and on things like improved sales process that really benefit the business.
This sounds fairly obvious, but it bears repeating in this age of confusing tariffs, poor web sites and undertrained sales staff. And of course, solving these issues is much more difficult than it sounds. In any case, this book sounds like it’s worth picking up, especially if you’re in a customer care role at a mobile operator 
Useful post. I taught a large university class (n=850) and took the view of correct a problem before I get an avalanche of emails about exactly the same thing. We also wouldn’t want to cut off people entirely from human contact, the nature of service in a university being what it is. Discussing a technical problem can lead to a “sale”, in other words.
If I recall, any email that went out would result in at least 20 emails with enquiries - so about 2.5% - not bad. I thought we were doing worse than that!
So 15% failures; 25% how?: 40% where?; and 20% sales. And that is of people who contact them.
Thanks
Quite an interesting concept re: customer service… and thinking back, I’ve only consulted FAQs / dialled numbers when something has gone wrong.
Would be interresting to see if mobile operators / device manufactures could develop such a comprehensive online help section.. but I’m not entirely sure if it would have the same success. In some instances, the operator has had to reset a function on their end, which I don’t think would be possible without speaking to someone?
Unless the “search” tool for defining problems is very specific, I could see it taking a significant amount of time to locate the problem and answer… then again, the amount of time we sometimes wait on hold…
I have a mixed view on whether this would work for mobile operators; perhaps we’ll see.
It does work in mobile. We’ve applied it and taken 20% of the contacts out in a year. That’s a lot of money saved by the telco and a lot of time saved by the customers! The key thing is to remove contacts that are irrtant / irritant and free up more time to spend on teh ones where there’s a benefit to both parties. Take a look on our site and you can download free some papers looking at different rates & reasons of contact in different industries. Its the paper on 21st century metrics ( I have to fess up that Bill and David, the authors, are my colleagues in the US and Aus )
Precisely why so many carriers want to prevent their customers from downloading any application they want and running it on their phones. As soon as something goes wrong on the app, who do they call? Their call center, which now has to deal with someone else’s problem.
I am all for open. However, it is easy to see why the carriers are against this…