“Good customer experience can insulate businesses from the effects of competition on their margins.” (John Hughes: Director of Awards Management)
It was no credit to me that my piece on “Killer Service” last week coincided with a complete section on Customer Experience in the Sunday Times (11th November), for I only discovered it afterwards. Thus it was with some trepidation that I started to read it. As it happened I need not have worried, for it was little more than a celebration of the various winners of the UK Customer Experience Awards 2007, renamed after 13 years as the Service Excellence Awards. The change in name is clearly a move in the right direction, recognising as it does that competition is about the total customer experience, not just the way customers are treated by sales people, and hence involves the entire organisation. Even so, without in any way disparaging the winners or their achievements, I found it actually made rather depressing reading.
While one headline claimed the awards “are a celebration of superb service,” a closer reading certainly raises questions. For starters the word superb is subjective, and lacks any quantitative or qualitative meaning, and doubts are further fuelled by a comment that, “It’s worrying that for many companies the drive to improve has levelled out in the past three or four years.” These misgivings were not helped when a few lines further on I read that the awards, “this year attracted more than 350 entries” - across 6 categories! Excuse me, 350 entries!! That’s hardly X-Factor stakes and is hardly a significant number in the total field of UK businesses. It is only 1.2% of the 30,000 businesses that adopt the Investors in People (IIP) standard, and which IIP claims employ 27% of the UK workforce. Since IIP generally tends to be adopted more by the larger employers it would therefore be extremely conservative to say that there must be more than 120,000 businesses in the UK. But, if we take that number as a given, then 350 represents only 0.3% of the total population: a paltry proportion - and, if representative of the general interest in the customer experience of UK business, a figure that is truly depressing.
So, what does an organisation have to do to win an award? Simply, according to another item, to, “deliver on all fronts to profitably win, satisfy and retain customers better than the competition.” But who are the competition – the other entrants? Not quite, for the article goes on; “All entrants receive a comprehensive benchmarking report detailing their performance, described by some as the best £195 consulting fee ever spent. The report, drawn from a database of more than 1,500 award entrants, not only sets outs the company’s strengths and weaknesses, but provides insights into improving customer service.” Aha, the competition would thus appear to be the other 350 competitors plus all the competitors from the previous 13 years, which, as we saw earlier, was when the awards were simply the Service Excellences Awards, when the benchmarking was, or ought to have been, less comprehensive. So, unless the benchmarks are being constantly updated and using measures from businesses that are truly world class, something which these reports would indicate is not being done, the criteria for these awards may be of dubious merit.
All this is extremely disappointing, for the awards are clearly well-intentioned, and, as another article pointed out, “The product or service innovations of today quickly become commodities. … The thing you can’t copy is the thing that will give you a competitive edge and that is the history and relationships you have with your client.” Yet, while the reports all identify the specific actions that winners have taken to differentiate themselves, and one report even spells out the 10 lessons needed “to keep the customer satisfied,” the fact remains that there is little in the supplement in the way of new ideas, and nothing that is going to radically change the way business improves its “customer experience.” Indeed, the very headline retains the now outdated concept of “satisfied customers,” rather than reinforcing the fact that customer experience is about considerably more than a merely satisfied customer.
Yet all is not lost, for buried in amongst the 10, lesson 3 states, “Trust in your people. It is your people that deliver great service. The service winners all give their staff as much freedom, choice and opportunity as possible.”
The fact is, as Hal Rosenbluth proved “a company is only as good as its people” and thus if you aspire to ‘killer service’ you have to put your people first. The three most important elements of a superior customer experience are: People; People; People.
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