Digitization killed customer service

A few days ago I was asked to attend a brainstorming session to come up with clever training ideas for a team of sales desk staff. The goal was to persuade the L1 support staff to stop forwarding all requests further to the technical department.

I asked to have a look at their task list. It was a 4 page long bullet-ed list of products and services, and digital platforms, and online catalogs, and FAQ documents, and links. One could have gotten very easily lost in this maze of data. But could training help?

Customer service was replaced by self-service

Once a very person-oriented organization, with a few products in portfolio and a lot of manual processes, the company had been going through a decade of digital transformation, portfolio expansion and, of course, cost cutting strategies.

The customers were offered more self-service options and digital services. At a first glance, one noticed the savings: less headcount for processing more turnover. But one-size fits all automated processes do not fulfill the diversity of customer needs and self-service IT outlets generate their own specific issues, which the classical brick and mortar industry did not have.

The cloud is not carefree

Add cloud solutions into the mix, and the need for customer support is perceived as diminished. Therefore, our service desk staff, most of whom had been working in the company for 10 to 30 years in various administrative roles, had been gathered together, depersonalized through a ticketing system and hidden behind a hotline number.

Local customer relationship management with customized practices was replaced through a procedure-driven standardized shared service center. Three years into the transformation the team was still not performing. In fact, the more people were hired to fulfill the function, the more backlog gathered. The first assumption was, of course, that the people needed to be trained.

There is blood in every revolution, even the digital revolution

As a technical training content developer I should have been very happy to have to train more than 150 staff in a program of over a year. But I wasn’t convinced that this would solve the problem. So I prodded deeper. Where exactly is the pain?

Turns out that most service desk consultants already know the products and systems the company uses very well. Yet they still limit themselves to forward email communication, instead of solving the customer issue. Why was that? Well, in the good old days, as many recall, each clerk used to have a portfolio of a couple of hundred customers, whom they knew so well, they could instantly solve 90% of their issues without help from the outside.

Now with the digital revolution and shared service center, each customer became a “case”. And the “case” often lacked key cues to make it easy to solve. Simple questions like “what”, “why”, “when”, “how” and so on, to give the problem some context and background and help with eliciting possible solutions straight away, were missing. The staff did not have the knowledge intuitively anymore, as they did not know the customer, nor did they have the skills or idea to analyse the case further. Instead, they just read their scripts, and if nothing obvious appeared to apply, they forwarded it.

Algorithmic versus heuristic thinking

I asked the customer’s team leader what he believes the team should be trained on. He replied they should know how to consult the knowledge base and FAQs and try to solve customer issues and not forward them. So they should do more of what they were already doing.

That’s an example of algorithmic thinking: put as much information in the right drawers and learn to pick the right drawer and use the information. It turns out the service desk was already doing that quite well. Procedures were fulfilled to the letter. But there was no true problem solving.

This is what heuristic thinking does, and that is actually a mindset, not a skill per se. It’s actually a very complex combination of lots of skills, from mental shortcuts, mind mapping, associations, to experimentation, trial and error, A/B testing and so on. It’s analyst stuff.

Have you noticed that you can hardly ever get in touch with customer support anymore?

The reality is that self-service comes with it’s own Pandora’s box of troubles: the need for permanent IT support (which many companies are not ready to spend money on), the limitation of user skills, the variety of environments, the lack of process alternatives, and so on.

That’s why, if you’ve noticed, some companies have dropped customer service all together. Try to get in touch with a human operator from your local telecom company and see if you can get that far. Many big companies have eliminated all direct phone numbers or email addresses and replaced them with FAQs and ticketing systems where you hardly ever get any customer support response.

Training for attitude

Back to our client, two things sprang to mind as recommendations for him to get to his goals with minimum of time and budget expense:

1. Write down a list of critical minimum pieces of information for the problem statement, so that, even if the issue is forwarded, the next specialist can at least already start testing some solutions, instead of getting back with the same list of clarification requests => this should solve 50% of the problem already;
2. Change the job description of the service desk operators to reflect an analyst role and train on the problem-solving attitude. We agreed on this scope and we will be experimenting together in teaching old dogs new tricks, hopefully to the satisfaction of customers.