Today the vast majority of businessmen and executives are convinced that customer service is a competitive advantage that can allow them to differentiate themselves from their competitors and acquire greater market share.
However, as consumers we continue to experience, almost as a rule, poor services; in some cases we could even use a stronger adjective. Why, if companies are already convinced that it is a market need, I as a client do not perceive a change? Could it be that they have done little or nothing to seek to achieve a quality service?
No, actually companies are trying hard and investing huge amounts of resources to find it; The problem is that the actions used do not attack the true origins of bad service in organizations; In other words, they do a lot, but with what is not noticed, or with what does not solve the problem.
What is the cause of bad service in our country ???
For 13 years we have carried out research to find out the methodology required to improve service in organizations, so we have discovered that companies make two mistakes in common:
Most of the staff and entrepreneurs feel that good customer service involves a smile from people and a dazzling friendliness.
Because the smile and kindness sound like the responsibility of the staff, the service is considered not adequate due to the lack of attitude of the staff who attend them.
In such a way, that then people think that it is a situation that must be resolved from the values and mentality of the customer contact personnel, and that is where the conflict lies. The Mexican-Latin American executive or businessman considers that attitude is something that depends on each person, and that - honestly - very few workers have.
Our research.
When we started the present investigation, the quality of the service was becoming fashionable in Mexico, so when we noticed that -initially- the results obtained by the companies were not encouraging, we decided that we should study how to improve the service in our country.
We honestly assumed - initially - that we would find an error in the implementation of the actions suggested by the foreign gurus.
The first thing we did was survey customers about the service they received and their evaluation of it. 91% of the customers we surveyed (several thousand) blame poor service on lack of attitude from staff.
The remaining 9% of clients commented that it was not the direct responsibility of the employee who attended them to give them the appropriate service. When analyzing whether there was a coincidence of circumstances between these clients, we noted that they were clients who had greater contact with the company involved (they were not occasional clients), many were distributors of manufacturing companies, or frequent clients of some organizations; which - according to them - allowed them to better understand the causes of their poor service.
We did not pay much attention to these clients because of the small proportion they represented, and because when looking at the most important theories of the moment, most of them focused on the attitude of the personnel who had contact with clients, so we consider that they were in the right place. correct path, especially if we added the results of our survey to Mexican clients. We honestly shouldn't have overlooked these revealing data, but we made the mistake of thinking that the patient (in this case the client) would know the cure for their illness (poor service), when this generally does not happen.
For this reason and based on the fact that the first response of the clients was in accordance with what the gurus suggested or assured, we decided to start taking the actions suggested by them, to change people's attitude and improve the service, trying to locate deviations or areas of opportunity.
First phase.
Actions were taken to change the attitude of the people (suggested by foreign experts) that the companies already had during the investigation, such as:
- We train our customer contact staff on motivation to make their attitude flourish. According to these gurus, attitude is a personal decision. We achieve influence to improve their working conditions: hours, work areas, permits, etc. We also influence to grant them a more attractive salary.
Unfortunately, all these actions achieved little (if not zero) results in customer satisfaction. We implemented one by one, and after waiting a couple of months for results and not getting encouraging results, we implemented the next one in the order that we present to you. No action managed to improve - consistently - the evaluation of the service by customers. There were only isolated cases of people who obtained some positive comment, but also received negative comments, which confused us.
We decided to continue experimenting. We found a theory from a famous service guru in the USA who claims that a solution to the problem of poor service is to hire new people with the necessary service attitude.
Neither slow nor lazy; We thought that we had finally found the key to our failures and began to suggest such actions to the companies that participated in the investigation.
Getting the attitude of service.
We started with the experimentation of new people with an attitude of service. We applied the suggestions of this theory without deviation, and succeeded in hiring a new person in each of the then volunteer companies during the investigation.
We thought that we would soon begin to obtain the desired results of service improvement. But it was not like that: although the new employees were selected in the same way, the results were surprisingly confusing.
The results obtained were presented as follows:
A) At the beginning, there were some collaborators who did begin to receive comments about their correct attitude and good service. But others, despite the same selection criteria, failed to make the customer perceive their attitude, or improve their evaluation of the service.
Initially, we came to think that - probably - we had not selected people with the same criteria. Hypothesis discarded when we note the following results.
B) After a couple of months, those employees who had shown their correct attitude and who had managed to improve the service to their customers; They also started with problems, although different, which confused us even more:
- They got good feedback from some customers and bad feedback from some others They started getting bad feedback from most or all customers They began to show a lack of interest in the customer and their problems. His enthusiasm waned or disappeared.
C) Some of the employees who -initially- received criticism began to show good comments from some customers, although not from all.
D) Employees who had not lost their enthusiasm, complained about their work and some changed jobs.
After taking in this recent disappointment, we decided to go back to the studio and try to find out what happened.
The base discovery
We go back to questionnaire data from customers who did not blame employees for poor service and did not assume it was an attitude problem (the 9% mentioned above). We surveyed clients in this group again in greater depth, and then we obtained new information that took a 360 degree turn in the investigation.
They all agreed that they did not blame the employee, after months or years of mutual interaction, because they knew that some problems they could not solve. The most revealing data was that all these clients, at the beginning of their dealings with the employees they defended (when they were new to the position or the company), IF they came to think that the bad service they received was the product of a wrong attitude.
This general response, gave us new information that would become the first stone of the real and useful results of this investigation: Staff attitude cannot ALWAYS improve customer service.
That year, we discovered that 100% of employees had the right attitude and showed no results in service.
After 252 organizations, and more than 10 thousand employees; our research shows that:
'' In 3 out of 4 times (exactly 77.3% of the times) in which a customer perceives a bad service and that he considers that the lack of service attitude is the culprit, the contact employee who attended him had the correct attitude: either when starting to work in the company months before the problem, either at the beginning of the evaluated day, or even when starting the case of the client who showed dissatisfaction '.
The enormous coincidence shows us that in most cases in which employees have the required service attitude, results will not be achieved in the customer's opinion. Certainly the discovery provided the reasons for our recent notorious failures.
However, knowing this problem continued to leave us with the enormous gap of finding the solution to improve the Service.
From then until today, we have continued to question customers about their opinion of the service they receive, and if the evaluation is negative, what is the reason that they consider influencing the poor service. The percentage of clients who receive poor service and who mention the attitude of the staff as the cause of their disappointments, is still higher than 90%; Although we have delved into when the comment is presented, trying to find out which edge the client to think that it is a lack of attitude.
After having a better view of the opinion of each client, we have gone to each employee to find out what happened in the specific case, either by reviewing the actions taken or through more information about the client, and even the collaborator himself; to know why the attitude of the employees is not enough to provide quality service to customers.
With all these deeper questions, and after grouping the most common answers, we discovered through cross-surveys that - regardless of whether the staff was new or old in the position -:
- The attitude alone does not give results The non-oriented attitude did not achieve results The attitude without the help of the company does not give results The attitude of the staff is lost with the passage of time; and / orThe staff with the attitude of service change jobs, when they do not achieve the results before the client, or when they feel that their effort is not valued.
But we also found what caused these deviations in attitude, which are summarized in two sentences:
- Greater and Better Leadership Support from the company itself.
After the 252 organizations, we have detected 4 problems that are the most common in organizations and that hinder, inhibit and kill the service attitude of the staff and that affect the service that customers receive:
- Breach of Promises Lack of Adequate Training Lack of Organizational Support:
Lack of Internal Service Culture
Lack of Decision Making Authority.
- Lack of Reward.
The origin of the service problem occurs when the company does not achieve that the attitude that the majority of the staff has to provide results in the customer's opinion. So, the solution is not just to motivate the staff or to get people who have the attitude of service, but the company must try to guide them to give results and maintain it so that the level of service is constant.
We can assume that this is the reason that we do not achieve interesting results in Mexico, it is that we attack the symptom that the client notices, but not the real cause that causes the client's perception.
It turns out that the real cause does not lie in the lack of elements with an attitude of service, but in the inability (almost always unconscious) of us leaders to polish that attitude and turn it into a potential in favor of the company. In other words, greater and better leadership is required for the service to meet or exceed customer expectations.
As long as we leaders do not identify that the cause of poor service is due more to situations outside the employee and more to leadership activities, the more difficult it will be to achieve the results and the more expensive the learning will be. Let us not allow the Paradigm in Service to continue: Service does not depend on employees only, it also depends on companies and their leaders.
