CHAPTER 12
Customer Care
When discussing customer care, a good place to start is with an example of a company that does it right. The Walt Disney Corporation is a great example of such a company. In its customer care and service, Disney strives to delight its customers. First, it refers to its customers as “guests,” which sets the tone Disney wants. People are inclined to treat a guest with care and courtesy.
The second thing that Disney does is to refer to all of its employees as “cast members.” This creates a sense of being on stage. Employees are playing parts or roles as cast members. They can focus on playing their roles well and also benefit from being able to separate themselves from the roles. Being able to do this is a benefit, because the employees may not like to think of themselves in the roles they play. As an example, there are no people who are garbage collectors, but there are people who play that role. This may be a subtle difference, but it affects the attitudes of the team members involved.
Service
Like the Disney Corporation, your team provides a service. You can adopt the same techniques to create a better experience for your customers. How will you refer to your customers? Are they customers, users, or bill payers? They are the ultimate reason for your team’s existence. The focus of a business function should also be on the people involved, not just the computer system. What kind of positive focus can you include when referring to the customer?
This book uses the term “customer,” and sometimes “user,” because these are commonly understood terms in the industry. For your team, start looking at customer care by looking at your attitudes toward your customers. Examine your attitudes before getting into the mechanics of how to implement customer care. Your team will take their lead from you, the manager. The way customer care is implemented will mirror your positive or negative attitudes toward the customer.
Now look at your attitude about your maintenance team. This book uses the term “team member,” and not “resource,” because “team member” makes one think of a person, while “resource” could mean a laptop or a meeting room. How do you refer to your team members? Are they the ones representing you? Are they the skill base that walks out the door every night that you pray will come back to work the next morning?
An effective way to have your team develop proper care of the customer is for you to model effective care of the customer. People follow the actions of their leader, not his or her words. So if you preach good customer care but personally ignore the customer, your team will most likely ignore your words.
Attitude is crucial, but substance is also important. How do you translate your attitude into action and build positive relationships with the entire customer group? In other words, how do you build trust? The key components that help govern your actions when dealing with your customer, your team, or even your family are:
• Listening for the real problem and delivering a solution
• Never committing to something you can’t deliver
• Responding quickly to high-priority problems
Customer Care Mechanics
So how do you build a structure that will create a high probability that the customer experience will be positive?
You need to first identify all the methods by which the customer could engage your team and then specify how customers should use each method. Having a complete list of methods will help you in setting expectations of your team as well as the customer. Not having a complete list will leave back-channel communications unaddressed, which can cause problems. The methods include:
• Desk phone
• Cell phone
• Home phone
• Personal pager
• Group pager
• In person
• Instant messaging
• Work management system
• Help desk
Non-Emergency Contacts: You need to determine which method your team prefers that customers use to contact the maintenance team for non-emergency items. Some methods may not be practical in your circumstances, and some may be less preferred by your team. For instance, you may want all requests to go through a centralized help desk. If this is the case, you still will need to address what should happen if a team member is contacted in person and given a request. Should the team member call it into the help desk, enter it into the Work Tracking Tool, or just complete the request without documenting it?
Emergency Contacts: You need to specify the appropriate method for customers to contact the maintenance team for emergencies. A help desk, group pager, or desk phones are typically used. You can see the problem if e-mail is the method used. No one may see the message for a while. Whatever solution you devise, it must function even when people are on vacation or when you offer 24-hour coverage and people have left for the day.
Group Pager: You may want to provide a single pager or cell phone number to the customer community as the single point of contact. In this case, you will need to create a schedule for rotating the pager or cell phone duty among the team members. With the advances in technology, you don’t necessarily have to hand off the group pager or cell phone when the rotation changes. The group pager number could be used for all the maintenance team members’ pagers. Everyone will know that only the person on duty should respond. The same can be true if a common cell phone number is used.
The best place to document your policy is in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The requirements will thus be clear for both the customer and the maintenance team.
You will also need to set guidelines for the team response to a call. Within what time period must the duty person respond to a call? How frequently should a status call be made to the user if a problem is not resolved immediately? Should team members contact anyone else, such as you, the manager, when an emergency occurs?
Effective problem resolution by your team will help foster trust among the customer community. A high trust level will be a major asset to you; because the customer trusts your team, you may not have to provide status updates as frequently as you would need to otherwise. The customer may be less demanding because your team has the reputation for getting the job done in a timely fashion.
Customer Problems
You may be thinking that you know what to do if the customer has a problem, but what if the customer is the problem? This sometimes happens, and there is no easy fix. But the following guidelines, most of which require you to be proactive, can help you deal with the situation:
• Build supportive relationships with the different levels of the customer’s business. Where a lower-level user may be unreasonable, the manager may have a different view. If you already have a relationship with the manager, he or she might be able to help mitigate the issue.
• Rely on documented agreements such as the SLA and its procedures. If a user doesn’t know what the customer agreed to, you could present the SLA and explain that the service level reflects how much the customer wanted to pay for the service.
• Rely on the sponsor or business owner of the system to approve enhancement requests. Some users push for enhancements in order to obtain functionality that was originally rejected for reasons of cost by the project team. Users may take this approach when a system has just been placed into production and moved into maintenance.
Customer Care Metrics
The way to measure the quality of the service your team is delivering is to get your customers’ views. The best way to measure customer satisfaction is by means of a periodic customer survey.
Quarterly customer surveys at face-to-face meetings are recommended. It will be valuable to you to review survey scores and compare them to past scores for that customer. But the dialogue between you and the customer during the meeting can be even more meaningful. What the customer says will provide you with more information on areas that need improvement (e.g., processes) than the survey itself possibly can. Your just being there and listening to your customer discuss issues of concern will powerfully demonstrate your commitment to service. Chapter 21, “Customer Survey,” provides more details.