In a typical boardroom, self-service is promoted as a great way to increase customer loyalty and to reduce costs. Strangely enough, in many cases customers are not picking it up as expected. How come?

Introduction

“Why outsource customer service to a professional provider? The customer will do it himself for free and provide inputs for ‘Big Data’ in the process” is fine as a strategy, looks great at first sight, but often fails in execution as customers remain calling the customer service department.

Often, although not always, we make self-service so difficult that indeed the customer does not want to learn another such convoluted way of getting things done and thus sticks to the current channel fearful of having to learn finding her way through the next jungle. Or she calls the old-fashioned customer service representative, who fulfills the order for her, also (still) for free. How come?

Complex legacy

In many cases, customer service employees are forced to work with legacy systems no self-respecting salesforce would work with, on data maintained by either itself or the sales force with no obvious purpose, so data quality generally ‘leaves something to be desired’ as well. Often, this legacy structure is leading when designing the ordering process to be executed by the customer himself. As I identified the mission of Customer Service a little while ago in http://peteralderliesten.nl/blog.php?post=74 as “helping customers in the abundance of features of the abundance of products”, the additional goal in these instances becomes to help guide the customer through the jungle of abundant legacy system requirements. All Tarzan’s working in a Customer Contact Center somehow generally does not seem to work.

Let me use an example: as avid readers of this blog are aware, I am a customer of a large telecom provider. For a simple fixed net (‘Festnetz’ or ‘DSL’) connection for at home, one is provided with, has to be aware of and know the following numbers: Modem-Installation code, Telephone number, Transaction number, Order number (3 different ones), Delivery number, Action number, IMEI-number, Customer number (2 different ones), Vodafone-VO-ID , Unidentified number(!), Modem article number, Customer password. No wonder customer service employees make mistakes. One can only imagine the despair of customers, who have received significantly less training on using the company systems. The ultimate complexity of the ‘automatic installation’ is mind-boggling, as I described earlier in (http://peteralderliesten.nl/blog.php?post=61).

Superfluous steps

Then there is a drive to automate administrative processes like invoices. Rather than the provider sending out paper invoice, or even electronic ones, the customer is now seduced to download the invoice himself. For this, she has to log-in, for which a User name and an Internet password are required. In the case above, after log-in, the customer needs to have an additional On-line registration code to get to the Financial data.

One of my current banks sends me a monthly reminder to download my bank statements, threatening that these statements will not be available anymore after an unspecified period of time. Another of my banks makes these statements only available for 15 months, very convenient if you do your taxes in April of the following year. Why can’t these statements be mailed just as well? Yes, it would require mail server capacity etc. but the downloading of these statements requires system capacity just the same. An additional advantage is that a bank may mail the statements in between DDOS-attacks, so the customer is less bothered – and exposed – to these interruptions in service.

Superfluous data

Then you have identified which product you want, and you have to identify yourself inclusive of all kinds of superfluous personal (‘intimate’) details. Why my birthdate is necessary for mail-ordering is beyond me, just as why I would indicate ‘my personal security question’ which only decreases the security for those instances where I really need that feature.

It may sound like a good idea for a Business Intelligence-officer to collect such data through the force of order entry to fulfill her personal goals of filling x% of certain fields in the database, but for the whole customer service perspective it is killing of course. Not to mention that in e.g. my personal case, most of the information is invalid anyway. (Multiple systems in the world consider January 1st, 2000 as my birth date. I can assure you there is no real life person who would ‘compliment’ me in that manner.)

Failing Help-feature

To add “injury to insult(!)”, the deformations above not only apply to ordering systems but also to ‘Help’-features, where endless lists of Frequently Asked Questions are thought up by some junior staff members instead of filled by the questions really asked by previous users.

Problem

Where in the board room self-service is sold as a great feature to the customer, we are in effect putting more and more of the onus of work for the customer on her own shoulders: where in the past she could passively await the envelop with the statement, now she has to become pro-active.

Therefore, I can not accept that these bungling changes are such great customer service improvements: they are really a cost-cutting measure, by which we replace our administrative staff by activities the customer undertakes herself. When I stated such an opinion to business acquaintances, several times the first reaction of my conversation partner was a defensive one that “I am not to think like that”. This elephant apparently should not endanger the gospel of self-service in the porcelain cupboard of customer service.

However, as long as we refuse to see the situation as it is, we keep continuing on this path of customer alienation. It is not true that as long as the customer just does it, that this feature is a great innovation or improvement, no, we are risking customer loyalty. When I look around, more and more people are starting to find all this blind self-service cumbersome. From customers we now also hear that they prefer to call a customer service because that is easier. If I want to order a train ticket it takes me all kinds of log-ins, at the train station it is done in no time with an agent. No wonder, if you compare an experienced person who does it 50 times a day versus somebody who does it once a month…

Solution

That does not mean that we should skip self-service altogether, no, but we should spend more attention to the efficiency design of self-service portals. Where we now mainly seem to focus on extending the customer’s stay on the portal to upsell her yet another feature, we tend to forget that most customers want to get on with it as soon as possible. Yes, we should focus on those abandoned shopping carts, but let’s not forget about the average time it takes to put in an order (Average Order Time). Are the interfaces intuitive? How much errors are made by an average customer? Only then we can proceed on the road of ever-increasing self-help which really can contribute to an ever-improving customer service.

(Originally posted May 27, 2014)