One of the biggest mis­takes that I have come across in my work as a ser­vice trans­for­ma­tion con­sul­tant, is busi­ness­es try­ing to cre­ate a great cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence by ap­ply­ing quick fix­es to their bro­ken (hit and miss) cus­tomer ser­vice. These fix­es re­main shiny and new for a short while and lose their ef­fect soon­er, rather than lat­er.

Let me say here, that if the in­ten­tion is to achieve a su­perla­tive, con­sis­tent and stan­dard­ised cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence, quick fix­es do not work. What’s worse, is the over­all dis­rup­tion to the val­ue chain that re­quires the busi­ness to keep restart­ing the ser­vice im­prove­ment process, by hav­ing to fix the prob­lems cre­at­ed by the failed quick fix­es.

Think of some­one vis­it­ing a doc­tor be­cause he or she is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing ex­cru­ci­at­ing stom­ach pain and the doc­tor sim­ply pre­scrib­ing pain re­duc­ing med­ica­tion and send­ing the in­di­vid­ual home. Any in­di­vid­ual would be hor­ri­fied at the lev­el of su­per­fi­cial­i­ty of the ap­proach, wouldn’t you agree? What­ev­er hap­pened to try­ing to fig­ure out the root cause of the pain, and us­ing the usu­al method­olo­gies (x-rays, MRIs etc.) so that a per­ma­nent so­lu­tion could have been achieved?

Same ap­plies to the fix­ing of bro­ken cus­tomer ser­vice. By bro­ken, I mean any lev­el of ser­vice de­liv­ery that fails to meet the ex­pec­ta­tions of cus­tomers on a sus­tained ba­sis, every time those cus­tomers ei­ther in­ter­act or con­duct trans­ac­tions with the rel­e­vant busi­ness. By this de­f­i­n­i­tion, it would be in­ter­est­ing to name the busi­ness brands that can claim to have an “un­bro­ken” ser­vice de­liv­ery pat­tern. The oth­er ques­tion that will sug­gest it­self, of course, will be, “Is your busi­ness one of the brands with an “un­bro­ken” rep­u­ta­tion?”

The quick-fix­ing ap­proach is dri­ven by a “just enough” mind­set that is root­ed in ex­pend­ing the min­i­mum ef­fort and in­vest­ment need­ed to keep the ser­vice de­liv­ery boat afloat. This mind­set is not re­al­ly about achiev­ing ser­vice ex­cel­lence, ser­vice lead­er­ship or ex­pe­ri­ence su­pe­ri­or­i­ty. It’s about, “let’s ex­pend on­ly the lev­el of ef­fort re­quired to en­sure that our ser­vice de­liv­ery is not chaot­ic.” Un­for­tu­nate­ly, this means aim­ing for the low­est com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor on the ser­vice de­liv­ery con­tin­u­um.

This mind­set shows up in ef­fort and in­vest­ment pri­ori­tised to those ar­eas that are deemed “prob­lem­at­ic,” and ap­ply­ing er­ror cor­rec­tion fix­es. This ap­proach ig­nores the equiv­a­lent re­la­tion­ship be­tween ser­vice de­liv­ery and the many mov­ing parts that must work in tan­dem, for the ul­ti­mate goal of su­perla­tive cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence to ex­ist. At­tempt­ing to fix prob­lems in their iso­lat­ed ar­eas, dis­re­gards their con­nec­tion to the val­ue chain and oth­er parts that may have con­tributed to the prob­lem ar­eas in the first place.

Let me ex­plain with an ex­am­ple. If the non-ex­e­cu­tion of fol­low-up calls, as promised to cus­tomers, has been iden­ti­fied as a ser­vice fail­ure and cus­tomer pain point, as­sur­ing those fol­low-up calls are made by front­line staff will on­ly fix part of the prob­lem if com­mu­ni­ca­tion, team­work and a sense of ur­gency are per­va­sive is­sues with­in the busi­ness. If front­line staff have to wait on the back-end staff to re­solve is­sues and the lat­ter take their good time to push the in­for­ma­tion to the front­line (don’t for­get the per­va­sive is­sues I men­tioned ear­li­er), the on­ly calls the front­line can make would be apol­o­gy calls, whilst await­ing the res­o­lu­tions.

The even­tu­al re­sult of all of this busy­ness? Ir­ri­tat­ed cus­tomers and frus­trat­ed front­line staff fed up with the ab­sence of per­ma­nent so­lu­tions. This is one of the re­sults of on­ly fix­ing parts of the ser­vice de­liv­ery chain and ig­nor­ing the wider is­sues that con­tribute to sys­temic bro­ken­ness. While the good news is that this piece-meal ap­proach is avoid­able, the chal­lenge is that mind­sets and habits are hard to break and busi­ness­es can be un­yield­ing if they have been fol­low­ing a fa­mil­iar for­mu­la for a while. On­board­ing a change to the modus operan­di will be back-break­ing, even in light of the ev­i­dence show­ing that the tra­di­tion­al ap­proach is in­ef­fec­tive.

An­oth­er im­ped­i­ment that caus­es an im­passe in adopt­ing a pro­gres­sive way for­ward, is that many busi­ness­es are root­ed in a sur­vival, rather than a su­perla­tive in­ten­tion, re­gard­ing their vi­sion and am­bi­tion for cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. The busi­ness­es that have achieved glob­al ac­claim for their brand of cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence, have ar­rived in that space through their holis­tic ap­proach to and stead­fast fo­cus on cus­tomer suc­cess. Achiev­ing and sus­tain­ing a su­perla­tive lev­el of cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence takes a colos­sal amount of ef­fort. On­ly those busi­ness­es ful­ly com­mit­ted to be­com­ing “glob­al” in their cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence brand­ing, will step away from be­ing sat­is­fied with in­cre­men­tal im­prove­ments and mi­grate to method­olo­gies that de­liv­er quan­tum shifts.

This mi­gra­tion will mean a move­ment away from a hard-wired in­tran­si­gence to­wards change that has no place in a world that is evolv­ing around every busi­ness. It al­so means that the time has come to recog­nise that a holis­tic cus­tomer suc­cess strat­e­gy, in which all func­tion­al units of a busi­ness will be re­quired to enun­ci­ate their con­tri­bu­tion to de­liv­er­ing cus­tomer val­ue, is the new busi­ness strat­e­gy.