The Paradox of Complexity & Alignment

With the increasing new technologies and associated complexities, the specializations in technology areas are getting deeper day by day. From the days of IBM mainframe one stop solution, the computer industry has been sliced into specialized domains with each companies focusing on specialized products and services like ERP, cloud computing, mobility, global connectivity, social media etc. The internet computing has enabled business with anytime-anywhere computing and helped business in drastically reducing the cost, transaction cycle times, speed of delivery.  Almost all the industry segments like banking, manufacturing, retail, travel, transport, telecom etc adopted Internet technologies to deliver business benefits to end customers.

On one hand the Rapid rate of technology changes have pushed organizations in this catch up game of specialization; on the other side Customer needs are changing -expecting personal attention, demanding more with less, faster & cheaper with better quality products and services.   

Whether we look at technology domains or the functional domains like retail, manufacturing etc., each of them are changing at a fast pace, the business models are changing, use of technology is increasing, customer expectations are getting more personal. Each of these domains needs specialization with deeper knowledge to manage in their respective functional areas. It is becoming more and more difficult for large organizations to maintain balance between functional expertise and business expertise. As business grows and specializations increase, more and more organizations have quickly adopted quality systems to standardize and streamline the operations. Standardization and Specialization worked perfectly in the era of mass customization, but in today’s internet age customers expect individual care and attention. In addition to rapid changes in technology and business models, the customer expectations have become more personal and individual experience based.

As we saw in the  case of Platinum customer, too much specialization and standardization make the customer irrelevant. Customer needs are either looked through the lens of specialized functional silos or through the standard processes and systems. With more and more standardization and specialization, customer service management becomes mechanical with no human touch. In earlier sections we studied the influence of command & control model which has put us on autopilot of winning and control. The silo mentality forces us to think vertically with no interest in the broader aspects and the big picture, similarly we are fixated on the events and transactions due to process centric mentality. 

In addition to the command & control model, the other reinforcing influence on our mental models or the theory in use is the education and teaching that has been imparted on us right from the childhood. The Teacher centric education has molded us to be good at accumulating knowledge in our memory banks that can be remembered and recalled anytime, great followers of instructions (no questions, please!),  and to be competitive to win the sprint, not the marathons. We are trained to work on the known territory of plane, hard ground but we fail miserably when we encounter swampy, low land which is an unknown territory. Even as we join our professions, we are trained very well to work on assembly line situations with standard input & output passing through well defined processes. The customer executives falter when customer’s query falls outside the script, we may blame them but that’s how service professionals are trained, to strictly follow the instructions and no questions. Our trainings focus more on what and not so much on how, they teach us about fishes but not so much on fishing.

Zappos, a company known for its innovation and service excellence, encourages it’s employees to be adventurous, creative and open minded. At Zappos, they don’t measure call times, the average handle time which focuses on how many calls each rep can take in a day. They think performance metrics like this can translate into reps worrying about how quickly they can get a customer out of the phone. The customer executives are not given any scripts, because they trust their employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. The customer executives are given the freedom to let their true personalities shine during each interaction and to emotionally connect with the customers. When customer calls looking for specific styles of shoes that is out of stock, in those instances every rep is trained to research at least 3 competitor web sites and direct the customer to the competitor like the vegetable vendor.

Zappos is a classic example where they have achieved highest in service excellence by enabling every customer executives to be who they are, instead of scripts & rigid processes they are given the freedom to let their true personalities shine during each interaction with the customers.

Service Leaders as Reflective Practitioners coach their team members to look at every customer situation as unique and help them to balance between rigor and relevance to walk in the swampy, low land. The passion & ownership of vegetable vendor & Zappos employee needs to be ignited in every individual worker and that happens only when we have a shared Vision and employees are given the freedom to let their true personalities shine during each customer interaction.

Copyright Sunil P Rangreji

Does Service Really Matter? Reflections #1

Reflecting on the case study of Vegetable vendor and the Platinum customer, we see that how specialization & standardization can make the customer irrelevant. Especially in today’s global world where growth is the mantra of the day, as organizations scale up their operations, it is assumed that standard processes and team of specialists can run the operations like a factory. In large business operations like retail, telecom service, health care service etc, the customer is treated like a part entering the assembly line that is subject to system of controls & processes. As the customer comes out of this assembly line, what he wanted and what he gets is irrelevant to business, what is important to the customer executive is the process; the customer behind the machine or the process is not seen. What is the need for the vegetable vendor to jump out and get something for the customer even if it is not available in his shop? When the customer executive’s job is only to complete the transaction and strictly adhere to the processes, they don’t see the human being inside the customer unlike the vegetable vendor. If the customer executive is rewarded for the target numbers he achieves, obviously there is no motivation for Value Creation.

If we train & educate our service professionals to work on a plane, hard ground of assembly lines and equip them to follow instructions & processes and then reward/penalize them based on the target numbers, how do we expect them to work in swampy, lowland? The reality is swampy, lowland where things don’t always work as written in theory books or process manuals. Like the vegetable vendor, one needs to jump out, not necessarily to the next shop but at least to understand what customers want. In the case of platinum customer, we saw that the customer found his own solution to solve the billing problem.

The model of Technical Rationality –the view of the professional knowledge has most powerfully shaped our thinking about professions and to work with rigor in a plane, hard ground. From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving and the professionals are trained to solve problems of choice or decision through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. Technical rationality depends on the agreement about the ends. When ends are fixed and clear, then the decision to act can present itself as the instrumental problem. But when ends are confused and conflicting, there is yet no problem to solve. This is the dilemma in our rigor of processes & metrics versus the relevance of unique customer situations. Our training and education system ignore the key aspect of service management, value creation and innovation. We are equipped to work only in high, hard land, on assembly lines where both means and ends are defined; we are programmed to just follow the instructions to work in the mode of input-defined process-output.  

Every organization needs standardization at some point and the quality systems, policies and procedures become part of the system. The key for success here is, how do we still keep alive the passion and commitment of the vegetable vendor and how we keep the capabilities connected with reality. If the customer executives are trained to follow the process, use only the scripts, and if the Manager’s performance is assessed only based on the numbers like growth, volume, speed, efficiency etc, it’s a tough call to focus equally on value creation & customer satisfaction.

The objective of building capabilities, acquiring deep knowledge & specialization is to solve customer problems or design solutions to meet their needs. But if specialization builds silos that are operating only in their domain with no regard for customer needs, it defeats the business purpose. When the process capabilities fail to connect with real operations issues like escalations, project transitions etc it becomes a constraint to service delivery. People & Process capabilities need to have adaptable capacity to work on swampy, low ground; specialization & standardization designed for plane, hard ground are deterrents for service excellence and business growth. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality but if concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge and our actions are going to be helplessly blind.

Theory & concepts are not made only for ideal conditions. The Service Leader should look at every problem situation or opportunity as unique and use the concepts only to educate the mind, to see deeply, and not force fit the theory. He/She should train & prepare the Manager’s and their team to focus both on process & value creation. Theory and Practice both are important and any extreme position will yield bad results, reflecting on theory and experience is the key for transformation. The Reflective Practitioner doesn’t see the deductive thinking process as the end in itself, rather they bring life to it by integrating the inductive process to evaluate the situations and recognize the gaps between vision & reality, theory & practice. The Service Leader as a Reflective Practitioner loops back the edges of contradictions, conflicts, complexities & uncertainties and moves from specific application to general concepts through the inductive process to bridge the gaps.

Copyright Sunil P Rangreji

Does Service Really Matter? Case #1

The Vegetable Vendor:

When I go to the vegetable vendor in my locality, the personal attention & care I get is amazing. The shop keeper would know what I want to buy, what vegetables my family likes, how much I buy, our weekend routines & festive seasons, etc. He would select the vegetables for me, fresh, green, tasty ones and if I don’t want to buy something he would beautifully explain the characteristic of that vegetable, how and where it was grown, why it’s good for health etc. If something is not available, he would jump in to the next shop and get it for you.  

On the contrary, every time I go the supermarket, I say to myself –have patience! When I go to a supermarket, inspite of all the great colorful interiors, variety of products neatly organized etc, I feel lost in the crowd, the atmosphere very dull. There is no personal touch, least attention given to individual customer needs. As I enter these retail shops, it takes a while to figure out what is where? I have learnt to do it myself as there is no point in asking the sales person, now after few visits, I may know better than him or her.  Once you find what you wanted to buy, you will see many other things catching your attention, all nicely packed and neatly stacked up. If you encounter something new, you need to study and understand on your own by reading the printed lines on the product. Ask somebody for help, who cares? The most common answer is, it’s printed on the backside, if not the sales person will tell you politely to check it on internet.  They look so helpless, but very busy talking among themselves, watching TV or may be just watching all the people come & go. 

Does Service Really matter to them or their Managers? What a difference!!!

With hardly any education or training, Why should the vegetable vendor be so caring and committed? The obvious answer is money, but if you look deeper, it’s definitely beyond money, it’s about their love, passion and commitment for their work. The vegetable seller would know anything and everything about vegetables; we can clearly see how much they love vegetables. The way they wash, hold, display each vegetable shows how much they care, not just the vegetables, they equally care about the person who wants to buy them.

The Platinum customer:

Sometime back I received a mail from my mobile service provider Thanking for my loyalty and informing that as a Platinum customer I will enjoy some special privileges like Priority access to the service advisor, 100% assured express service recovery etc.

Incidentally just few months before I had series of problems with this service provider and response was just pathetic. My GPRS billing shot by more than 200% for no reason, first I thought may be it’s a billing error but the same increase was reflected in next 3-4 months bills. I called the Helpdesk and asked for the reasons for this increase and also shared enough data on the past bills for the same usage and the service advisor said she will call me back. I waited for a week, there was no response and I called them again but to my surprise, the ticket was closed. I wanted to escalate and I was put on hold for 15 minutes saying the Manager is busy, not available etc. I kept on trying, many times the agent cut the line intentionally when I referred my case and after 2 weeks I got a chance to speak to the Manager and the response was worse than the first level support and there was no hint of any resolution.

One day suddenly I got this brilliant idea to solve this problem, just change the plan!!! 3G plan was anyway offered at almost 25% of my GPRS bill. So changed to 3G plan and my billing came down drastically and the reason for GPRS billing remained a mystery.

My billing problem got resolved but I got onto a different problem. The 3G performance was very poor, it was not reliable, very slow, worse than the GPRS speed and again I raised a problem ticket with their helpdesk. It was again a long chain of events with no resolution, ticket was opened and closed without my knowledge, when I called again they opened a new ticket, somebody said it’s a problem with my mobile phone and again closed the ticket.

While this was going on, I received this email saying I am a Platinum customer enlightening me about the special privileges etc. Now atleast I thought, there is some ray of hope, but platinum or steel, it made no difference to the service advisor or his Manager. Then I wrote a mail to Head of Services about my great service experience as a Platinum customer and I got a prompt response saying the problem will be resolved on high priority.  Then followed a series of calls & even visits to my house to check the signal strength etc and I was told the problem will be resolved in a month’s time as they had planned for some upgrades.

Now it’s quite some time since this happened, nothing much has changed, I am still fighting with myself to come out of the clutches of  customer loyalty. Platinum customer is just a label for some service leaders & their team and they may never understand what customer loyalty is? Only the customer understands the emotional connect with a brand…

Critical Reflections:

• Do 1 in million customers really matter to very large service providers? Is the customer taken for granted?
• Why the customer support executives fail to go beyond the rigid procedures & transactions and why they fail to understand the real problems of customers?
• Is the Service Leadership about building long term service loyalty or just the growth and quarterly revenue targets?
• Why is the passion missing in Service teams and no focus on Value creation and differentiation?
• Are we only trained to follow the instructions, how can we jump out like the vegetable vendor and go the extra mile to create Value?