Toward Better Customer Service — Almohannad Alsbeai

Preface

I recently read two books on customer service, and I have spent a few months working in customer experience management — a role that is new to my career and, at the same time, deeply fascinating. I also recently took Dr. Obaid Al-Abdali’s “Customers for Life” course on the Rwaq platform. From here and there I gathered some of the fruits I jotted down in my notebook during this short journey. I mention these details to give credit where it is due. I hope you enjoy the read.

Customers and Complaints

The number of complaints received from customers is not directly tied to their satisfaction or loyalty. The comparison is unfair, especially when you consider some of the statistics that say only one in twenty customers actually complains.
Reducing the number of complaints is not a goal, and it can never be one.
A complaint is a tremendous source of learning, especially when it comes from the segment of customers who are loyal to your business and who want to share developmental ideas with you that are so original your own employees might never have thought of them.
Reducing the number of complaints is done through several means, the most important of which is root-cause analysis, so that the focus is not on the problem itself but on the causes behind it.
A customer complains when they find a contradiction between the service they receive and what they expected.
A customer complains the moment they feel they have been deceived. The deception may be real, coming from the service provider, or it may stem from the customer’s own ignorance of the terms of use or the user agreement they previously accepted without reading.
A customer sometimes complains because of their own lack of knowledge about the product or service.
A customer complains when they sense indifference from the service provider — whether through a slow response or through the provider putting its own interest ahead of its customers’.
A customer complains when they encounter rudeness in how they are treated. No matter how far a relationship deteriorates, no party has the right to mistreat the other.
Some service providers deceive themselves when they deliberately make it hard for customers to file a complaint and tangle up the procedures, as if to say: “If you can’t find your way to the problem, the problem won’t find its way to you” — like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. The point is not to reduce the number of complaints, but to study them and resolve them at the root so they don’t recur.
Multiplying the channels through which complaints are received is the safest solution for ensuring you capture the largest possible number of complaints.
It is difficult to automate complaint-handling mechanisms, because despite all the technological progress, a complaining customer still prefers a human listener on the other end who hears them out, not a foolish machine.
The way an organization handles a complaint is what turns a customer either into someone who switches to one of your competitors, or into a deeply loyal customer.

Indicators of Poor Service

There are several indicators that can signal a declining level of service in any organization:

A decline in the number of customers (average visitors) or a drop in sales, based on historical data.
A rise in employee complaints, as well as a rise in the number of resignations.
A low level of employee engagement and willingness to face customers — something that is measured through research.
Few authorities granted to employees, especially frontline employees.
Policies and procedures that conflict with customers’ interests.
The absence of service-level agreements — for example, having no maximum response time for a customer complaint.
The absence of a clear, documented definition of customer service and its responsibilities within a company.
Few or no courses given to company employees on customer service, on delivering outstanding service, on communication skills, and the like — all those courses that are important for sharpening employees’ soft skills.

Customer Expectations

A customer’s expectations are influenced by many factors, one of which is the advertising the service provider puts out. A provider that runs unrealistic ads condemns its product to failure and its reputation to ruin.
Customer expectations change over time, and they cannot be matched unless they are researched and surveyed directly with the customers themselves on a regular basis.
Customer awareness has grown far greater than it once was, thanks to the organizations running awareness campaigns about customer rights and thanks to the diversity of customers’ experiences. Their expectations about how they should receive service have also risen sharply, for the same reasons.
It is worth noting that, according to some research, delivering service in a way that merely matches customer expectations makes little difference if you compare it with delivering service that exceeds those expectations. What truly matters is knowing their expectations and delivering service that meets them.
Research is conducted with churned customers (those who have recently closed their accounts or stopped doing business) to understand the reasons behind their decision and to learn which of their expectations are being met.

Business Procedures and Policies

Policies and procedures are supposed to be designed to serve the customer and to put the customer’s interest ahead of the organization’s own. If the reality is otherwise, it means the organization is not customer-centric, and its chance of losing market share to competitors who orient themselves around customers and their needs will be high.
Policies and procedures are not scripture handed down from heaven; they must be reviewed and adjusted from time to time to make sure they aren’t the reason your services become more complicated.
The simplest rule for dealing with policies and procedures is this: if any policy or procedure is accused — whether by a customer or by an employee — of doing more harm than good, then that policy or procedure must be analyzed with the aim of redesigning it to meet the needs of the customer or the employee.

Types of Customers

The psychological states of customers vary when they visit you or call you, and each one is dealt with according to their state. There is no single magic method that suits everyone. Here are some examples of those states: angry and aggressive; silent and threatening; stubborn and argumentative; cunning and manipulative; aware and protective of your interest; seeking appreciation; lonely; talkative; uninformed; hesitant; emotional; rational; the negotiator; positive; negative; the chronic complainer.

The Customer Is Always Right

This is the most overused of all customer-service maxims. Employees are your internal customers, and without them your business will not survive. So I declare that the rule above is true — but within limits, and every organization must document those limits clearly. For instance: does a customer have the right to assault your employees physically or verbally? Is your customer still right if they reject every option you have offered them? Are they right if it is formally proven that they are gaming the system?
If a customer raises this banner, tell them that they are right, and that their satisfaction matters to you — but within limits and constraints. And if you have those limits written down, that is safer and better. Imagine if a customer read in the contract, for example: “You have the right to object, but you do not have the right to raise your voice at our employees, nor to assault them physically or verbally, and doing so exposes you to legal accountability.” How would their behavior change after reading such warnings?
It is not the employee’s responsibility to put up with the rudeness of an ill-mannered customer who raises his voice at them; rather, it is the employer’s responsibility to protect their employee from these verbal abuses that wear on the employee’s spirit and crush their motivation.
The employee or the customer — which one matters more? In truth, this question is like asking a married man: when a problem arises between your mother and your wife, which matters more — pleasing your mother or pleasing your wife? The successful husband will, without a doubt, please both sides.

Customer Satisfaction

Customers want to tell you the reasons for their dissatisfaction, but —

Some of them don’t know how to express their feelings, or don’t feel comfortable with the idea of talking and expressing emotions, or don’t have the time, so they ignore the idea altogether. And many of them have never found the right channel to get their voice through to decision-makers.
A culture of pleasing the customer and delivering outstanding service to them is a culture that the organization adopts from the top of the pyramid all the way down to the bottom.
Organizations must seek out ways to please and serve their customers. The notion that the customer should be the one searching for someone to serve them is a grave error. The moment a customer enters your organization, your showroom, or your point of sale, someone should be offering them help.
Marketing research is used to survey customers’ opinions and to measure their levels of satisfaction and loyalty from one period to the next, as well as to understand their needs so that products can be provided or developed to meet those needs.
Marketing research guarantees the provision of mechanisms and techniques that extract the hidden treasures from the minds of customers — those customers we mentioned at the start of this section, some of whom cannot express or describe their feelings.
Failing to gather information about your customers to learn their desires leaves you at the back of the pack. If you belittle research and its importance, know that your competitors are conducting plenty of research and changing their service strategies based on what they gather.
This is the age of information, and survival belongs to whoever holds the most up-to-date and most accurate information at the right moment — provided they put that information to use rather than leaving it on the shelves of oblivion to gather dust.

Communication Channels

When an organization has multiple communication channels, it is important to standardize how customers are responded to by providing unified templates and fixed scripts, most of which should not be altered when communicating with customers.
Failing to standardize, document, frame, and organize communication mechanisms through rules and policies leaves the door wide open to improvisation, and you will discover that every one of your employees responds to the same customer in a different way, even though the customer is asking the very same question.
The basis for the success of communication channels is not merely providing them, but being present in them with full readiness to deliver the appropriate service through them, at the right time and in the right manner. For example: what is the use of providing a call center where the customer will spend more than 10 minutes waiting to speak to one of your employees? And what is the use of providing a Twitter account if no interaction happens when someone reaches out to it?
Points of sale: those companies that have showrooms or points of sale must take more care than others to provide a comfortable space for customers — a space the customer enters and feels at ease in, so much so that they don’t mind sitting there for a long while. Interior design is a discipline in its own right, built on making the best use of space and using particular colors that instill comfort and reassurance in people.

Employees

Caring for customers and earning their satisfaction begins with caring for your employees and earning their satisfaction.
Make sure to provide a motivating work environment for your employees, because most recent research and studies center on the impact of the work environment in motivating the employee, raising their productivity, and increasing their innovation and creativity. So do not underestimate these matters, and do not be stingy in spending on them.
Make sure to guarantee a balance between work and the employee’s personal life, because you do not own any more of their time than the eight working hours you contracted for when you hired them.
Anything subjected to pressure gets its share of distortion. Remember that an employee under pressure becomes less committed to service standards, because the pressure they’re under stresses them out and channels all their attention toward finishing the service (the quantity) rather than how it is delivered (the quality). So don’t pile pressure on them and then expect them to deliver high-caliber service to your customers.
No matter how hard an employee tries to separate their personal life from their professional one, or the professional from the personal, they will not succeed. So take that into account, and remember that the employee is a human being, not a machine — a human who goes through circumstances and needs to feel that you appreciate that. German labor law may well be the best of all, hands down, at preserving employees’ rights and ensuring they are treated humanely; I mention this for anyone who wishes to read further on this aspect.
In many respectable, top-tier companies, the employee is called an internal customer. They treat them as a customer, measure their satisfaction, loyalty, and degree of engagement at work, ask them to evaluate their direct manager, and leave the door of suggestions and feedback open as wide as it can go.
Just as the levels of service delivered to external customers are measured, the same must be done for internal customers — the employees — for they are served by several internal departments. An employee waiting for service from a particular person or department within the company grows resentful when that service isn’t delivered, and that resentment reflects involuntarily in their behavior toward external customers.
Your customers sense your employees’ happiness; they sense the pressures the employees are under. And you, as the owner of an organization, do not want these negative feelings to reflect into the hearts of your customers.
Frontline employees are the most unfortunate and the lowest paid in many companies in the Middle East, even though they play a major role in shaping the impression formed in customers’ minds. The low salaries of this category of employees only guarantee employers that they will hire the least competent people.
Your employees are ambassadors for your organization even outside working hours. I once stopped buying the products of a certain dairy company for years because of the rude treatment I received from one of its employees.
If you want to be obeyed, ask for what is achievable.

Building the Relationship with Customers

The relationship with customers is the foundation of any organization’s success, which is why the use of customer relationship management systems has grown enormously since the start of the twentieth century, in order to preserve as much information as possible about past dealings with customers.
There are dozens of methods that cost the organization nothing yet make a big difference in the company’s relationship with its customers. I will devote a separate article to that, which I will publish soon, God willing.

Customer Service Strategy

At an advanced stage, organizations must create fixed standards for all services and put in place a service strategy — and this will not succeed in any way unless it secures the appropriate support from senior management.
This stage begins by building awareness among the organization’s members, from the top of the pyramid down to the bottom. Before launching the strategy and beginning to implement it, this must be announced through official channels. Ideally this takes place within an annual gathering that brings all employees together, with the strategy presented by the CEO in person. Another method is to use the hierarchical tree: the CEO meets with all of their direct reports, those reports meet with all of theirs, and the meetings continue until the picture of this strategy reaches the most junior employee in the company. The cheapest method — though less effective than the previous ones — is either to make use of the company’s internal magazine, if one exists, or to record a professional video of the CEO explaining the strategy and then circulate that recording to all company employees.
An organization’s move toward delivering better service cannot happen without training employees, and here comes the second step: focusing on frontline employees and on the service manager at the middle-management level, and on problem-solving techniques for all of the organization’s employees.
The third step comes through using business-process specialists to analyze all business procedures and redesign them where necessary, and this is when the time comes to put service-level agreements in place. If any procedure is redesigned, the story does not end here; rather, the impact, effectiveness, and influence of this new design will be evaluated on both internal customers (employees) and external customers.
This is where the role of measurement begins, in all its forms: measuring the degree of compliance with service-level agreements, measuring performance in operations, measuring employee performance and productivity, and so on.
On the basis of the measurement results, recommendations are issued to several departments within the organization to carry out specific actions.
This journey resembles a team climbing a mountain, roped together by a single line: the fall of any one of them brings everyone down.
The duration of change varies according to the size of the organization. In small organizations, the effects of change begin to appear after a period ranging from three months to, sometimes, a year. In medium-sized organizations, the effects begin to appear after a period ranging from six months to two years. As for large organizations (more than 1,500 employees), the effects begin to appear after a period ranging from one to three years. So the journey is not that easy, and there is no magic solution for changing a service culture overnight.

Service Standards: The Service-Level Agreement and Key Performance Indicators

When setting service standards, an organization must keep the following in mind: that they be specific, concise, measurable, designed around customers’ needs, documented, and co-designed by all the relevant employees; and that they be committed to the moment they are approved — the senior before the junior.
An example of standards: take call-center employees, for instance. In answering the phone, the service standard would be that the call be answered after three rings or within 10 seconds — and more can be folded in.
The standards that are set, just like procedures, are not scripture handed down from heaven; they are reviewed periodically and amended if need be.
Global best practices are usually consulted when designing service standards, and benchmarking studies are likewise drawn upon to gauge the level of performance against the local or global market.

Key performance indicators cover many aspects, among them satisfaction and loyalty indicators.

Conclusion

I apologize to readers that the text is center-aligned: right alignment is not an option available within LinkedIn’s settings. If I have erred, it is from myself; and if I have gotten it right, it is from God.

And God knows best; upon God we rely for guidance to the straight path.