Although it is hard to believe, there are situations in which customer service becomes detrimental to the organization (and to the customer), due to not having been implemented correctly. Having a customer service department or staff that performs this function is not a guarantee that you are providing good service to your customers. Not only this, but sometimes it would be better if these functions did not exist.
I am going to mention 3 situations in which this occurs, so that you can evaluate if your organization is in any of them, and find opportunities there to improve them.
1. The function of customer service falls exclusively on a department
It is a very common situation, not only with customer service, but with marketing, quality, human resources, etc.
This risk appears when organizations become so large that they begin to specialize and divide their functions, which is natural and positive. What is the problem, then?
The problem appears when those functions disappear from the rest of the organization to encapsulate in a single department.
Serving customers is a duty of every employee, at every job. If an employee reluctantly serves a customer, and responds to his complaint, "call customer service," we are in serious trouble. By creating the customer service department, the organization has removed this role from other employees, assigning it only to those in that specific department.
What is the solution?
These departments should be the ones who ensure customer service, but not the ones who bear all the responsibility. They have a special look at the rest of the functions, and they constantly ask themselves: How can we make customer service breathe in every corner of the organization? They then become promoters of customer service, providers of this service culture for everyone else.
In addition to this, of course they can fulfill specific functions like attention and claims management, but the customer service will be very impoverished if it is only limited to these functions.
2. The customer service department is disconnected from the rest of the organization
The client seeks to live a comprehensive experience. He perceives easily when he calls Customer Service, and this department is a capsule that is linked to the rest of the organization only through a message system.
If the operator serving a customer has never been through the operations that constitute the essential service, he does not know what those processes are like, nor the people who manage them, it is difficult to give an effective response to the customer who claims it.
This frequently happens when the service is contracted to an external company. You have to be very careful when doing this outsourcing. We are delegating to others nothing less than dealing with our customers.
What can they do for our clients? Will the client perceive that he is speaking with the same organization that provided the service, or with a telephone operator who is not related to it?
This single perception can be reason for disagreement for the client.
3. The customer service operator has no power to resolve customer problems
This situation has to do with the previous one, and may be a consequence of it. If the operator is disconnected from the processes, it is difficult to take actions to solve problems that have been caused in said processes.
Thus, the customer service department becomes a transmitter of messages, which are read and left in a system, but with very low resolving power. If customer service doesn't solve, it doesn't work!
Just this experience happened to me a few days ago. I have called to make a claim, and the operator answers me with information that I already knew, and also tells me that I have to call another number (the branch where I received the service), to solve the problem.
To my surprise at such a failure of service, I ask if she could not make that contact. She replies that she cannot make outgoing calls, but only receive them.
Clear evidence of their dissociation. An encapsulated employee, with no power to act, only the ability to read what the system says. Easily replaceable by a machine, isn't it? Is this the value that customer service adds?
And is your organization in any of these counterproductive situations? What can you do to make customer service an effective tool to listen to your customers, and solve problems that have already upset them, in order to recover them and not lose them forever? I leave you this challenge.
