Did they do well?

Many local authorities have been grappling with the problem of customer service. Many programmes of change have been tried and tested; some with success and others with notable failure. In the case of Ealing Council, ‘Response for making a difference’ was a substantial programme with promise of many efficiencies. Did they achieve their objectives? A substantial capital programme was authorised by policy makers to set up a customer response initiative which promised to change the way the entire council was supposed to function. Its a good time to visit the Council and to report on how the scheme has fared and to learn from its successes. However, there have been contradictory news which suggests that the scheme was actually abandoned. If that is the case what was put in its place?

Service providers continue to refer to the challenge of unlimited demand which has to be met with finite resources. Is this still the case? Yes and no. Local authorities are not start-ups. They have been in the ‘business’ for many years and so they would mostly know the specific patterns of demand they have to deal with. There are also many customer service management (CSR) and response management programmes on the market, offering various outcomes in terms of effective response, data aggregation, back office efficiencies and joined up service delivery. Customer response varies from centralised response at civic centres to several ‘one stop shops’ at various locations within borough boundaries.

It would also be useful to look at some of the CSR programmes. Which councils are using them and why? How much do they cost to install? In addition to set up costs, what further actions do councils have to take? At the end of all these comparisons, the main question to address remains: is the customer getting the right service at the right time and in the right format? We have not mentioned ‘the right price’. Is that not a key factor? No, not if councils are not charging for a service. However, there is a ‘price’; it is the cost that the customer has to incur in order to access the service. Customers do pay a high price for service failures.

More of these questions will be addressed in a future analysis. And yes, Ealing will be our first stop.

Broadband Services: Please do not show this to my service provider

Broadband services are rapidly expanding and new providers are coming into the market. There is no evidence available on how many service providers may be leaving the market.

 

Many magazines publish guides to the major services and use different criteria to highlight their distinctiveness, cost effectiveness and value for money. What does a customer expect from a good broadband service?  Quick and reliable access to the service is a good starting point. Cost is another factor but many people who work from home do not mind the cost as long as reliability is not compromised.

 

One can hardly expect service providers to discuss openly what types of complaints they receive. However they must know why customers are leaving them. Do they? 

 

A future article will deal with the top ten issues that have frustrated broadband service users. Service providers will then be invited to comment on how they have dealt with similar complaints. Even more important is how they review their customer service policies.

What can a solitary campaign achieve?

For a start, customer service campaigns are never solitary. There is always a group of seemingly undervalued and unrecognised people known as ‘the customers’ who step forward and expect to be acknowledged. I know of at least three managers who spend a great deal of their time in dealing with customer correspondence relating to service complaints but they are not able to link the feedback from customer correspondence about their needs and expectations with the opportunities they could create for upgrading service delivery. There are five challenges for these managers:

1. How to skillfully handle customer complaints
2. How to ensure that the same complaints are not repeated everyday
3. How to train other staff to deal with complaints – do you want to employ the world’s highest paid complaints handler because a director does not trust his own staff to deal with ‘irate’ customers?
4. In keeping with number 2 above, how should the organisation learn from existing complaints to the extent that it is able to integrate improvements into the delivery mechanism? The alternative is to keep on dealing with the same complaints repeatedly.
5. How to learn from other service organisations.

There will be more discussion on how to address these opportunities. What would also be useful is to discuss how service providers should avoid being reactive when things go bad. Good complaints avoidance programmes should be strategic, ongoing, continuous and be based on open communication. Simple? Not really. We hope to bring you a few examples of success.

The Campaign for Customer Entitlement is nothing new. There have been many commentators and analysts in the past who have campaigned on behalf of the customer. The popular media features to customer complaints against service providers on a daily basis. It makes even better copy when they name and shame service providers. However, in extreme and justifiable cases this may be the only alternative.

The Airport and the Airline

Consider the plight of the hundreds of travellers who were stranded at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 during the last few weeks. These customers of British Airways and British Airports Authority were angry, exhausted and complaining about their customer service entitlement.

 

Agnes Huffy[1] is an American consultant who advises airports and airlines. Her services might have come at a high premium last month at Heathrow, where the airport operator was blaming the airline in the early stages of the critical breakdown of services. The customers felt that their entitlement was going to be serviced by the airline because they were the service provider that had ‘taken’ their money. The roller coasters of customers’ emotions were probably matched evenly but in private by predictable waves of blame and confusion where airline and airport took turns in allocating fault.

 

Agnes Huffy, writing at a different time in relation to entitlement says “I was always under the impression that the delivery of good customer service was a key objective for all public contact jobs. I thought that a company’s success and survival depended upon its ability to provide excellent service to distinguish and differentiate itself from the competition. Today, it appears that such differentiating factors include a growing number of complaints about “service,” which many feel has disappeared not only from our vocabulary, but also from our overall travel experience”.

 

No Agnes, it is still there but customers seem to have become used to accepting declining levels of service in all spheres of the customer/service provider relationship. There seems to a cultural shift in accepting less for paying more. Someone was saying that service is better in Loitokitok.

 

Agnes Huffy goes on to ask, “ Have we irreversibly learned during our formative years to expect more than what is realistic? Perhaps our ambition and will to succeed creates a false sense of entitlement that we carry throughout our life experience. To understand the root of the issue, perhaps we need to consider the source. If you ask the disgruntled why they are disgruntled, we usually find it stems from a combination of a pre-conceived lack of trust, and an innate belief that they automatically deserve to get the most — regardless of the level of output or investment on their par”.

While I think I know where Agnes Huffy is coming from, I would not have said what she says next within ten miles of Heathrow Airport. Agnes Huffy says “ In a society where people are constantly clamouring to get the most out of everyday experiences in life, whether in business, travelling, playing, or at home, our perpetual expectation is to always get what we want. When this does not materialize according to our expectations, and in as timely a manner as we anticipate, we become frustrated, impatient and irritated, often generalizing the past negative experiences and perhaps even blowing them out of proportion. These negative mind patterns then continue to repeat themselves and become oppressive to our overall worldview”.

The customer for public services in Britain is described by labels, which reflect the different expectations of the service provider and the recipient. When my local council does not collect my rubbish bin, I may be classified as a disgruntled ‘resident’. But is the expectation of a reliable collection of my bin also not my entitlement?  Leave my bin outside for a day and the cat from 11 houses away will expose chicken tikka massalla that I did not share with him- he loves my food more than his own.

Armando Martinez, who works in the rather esoteric and higher-level world of ‘telcos’- telecommunications companies providing broadband and other personal media related services says, “ Entitlement is the process of authorizing a service (a music or broadcast TV channel, pay per view, etc.) or content (a movie, program, game or special event) to a customer. Entitlement also includes the assignment of rights, which are the rules that govern how services and content can be used”. Entitlement management systems are increasingly needed in Britain’s public sector. These systems should be capable of managing complex functionalities and challenges, such as those of collecting my bin, repairing my road, cleaning the street in live in and educating me to learn more about recycling the waste that my household generates. Is my local council’s entitlement management system able to track what service its customers, not ‘residents’ need? Has the council invested in capable systems to track how services are provided and how the delivery of entitlement is monitored by them?

Did the attributes provided below apply to the situation at Heathrow Aiport?  Could one have switched the labels? How many customers might have gone home feeling that it was service providers who were unhelpful, inattentive, impolite and unprofessional?

Customers		Service Providers
·         Unreasonable ·         Angry ·         Upset ·         Disrespectful ·         Demanding		·         Helpful ·         Gracious ·         Attentive ·         Polite ·         Professional

Agnes Huffy: “To have proper perspective, we need to adjust our way of approaching customer service interactions and communications. We should not expect rude treatment, and we should definitely not be so surprised when we experience kindness, consideration, and attentive customer care”.

Campaign for Customer Entitlement (presently with just one member) will be examining issues relating to customers’ right to service -entitlement, especially in relation to services. While the content will be drawn largely from public sector experience, there will also be occasional coverage of service delivery in business. The public sector has a lot to learn from business but the reverse is also true. 

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[1] Agnes Huffy, “Customer Service in an Era of Entitlement”. Airport Business, www.airportbusiness.com

 

 

 

 

Lets talk ‘rubbish’

Local authorities provide a group of services that known as ‘environmental services’. These services are perceived to be the most difficult to manage. The service group consists of waste management and recycling, street cleansing, street lighting, highways maintenance, parks and gardens, transport planning, parking services, CCTV, planning and control and some aspects of regeneration.

Inspection reports provided by the Audit Commission under the their Best Value inspections regime show that these services are not the most successfully managed. These services have often brought down the overall performance ratings of councils. Waste management and recycling remains a major area of concern. Why is waste management a problem?

There a number of distinct factors and more will be added over the next few weeks:

1. Waste management is a highly visible service and policy makers and politicians see it as a critical service
2. These services are high cost, capital intensive and require careful asset planning and management. Service managers have little or no control over strategic planning; the reasons vary.
3. Waste management and recycling is driven by tight time schedules and failure is not an option.
4. Waste management cannot be run by councils on their own. They must work with other local agencies and both the private and voluntary sector
5. Waste management poses some of the most significant challenges for customer consultation, handling complaints and dealing with the fallout.
6. Service providers often have to face the flak created by contractors
7. Many services are run by narrow minded functionalists, mostly engineers who see the technical logistics as more challenging than business modelling and planning
8. Performance management may be weak and service providers do not collect the performance indicators voluntarily
9. There is a serious skills gap – middle managers and customer facing staff need training and development but more courses is not the answer
10. Policy makers have not invested in strategic planning and taken a long-term view in most cases.

Lets stop here but return to each of the above issues in the future.  Do you want to talk ‘rubbish’ as well? Why not write to me privately if you do not want to leave a comment. Confidentiality is guaranteed. Please write to me at kalwant.ajimal@btinternet.com

We also have a Top Prize section where the most significant service failures experienced by readers will be featured. It is also important to balance this by featuring the best examples of action taken to improve the service. Note: where ‘naming and shaming’ is involved we reserve our right to check first with service providers.