Shooting in the dark- recruiters who fail.

Recruitment Agencies Fail on Customer Service

One of the outcomes of the present recession is that as notifications of vacancies by employers have fallen, a wide range of agencies involved in recruitment and selection have also cut back on their own staffing. The is quite understandable as the cost levels of the agencies have not allowed them to retain staff who, in turn have not been able to place people in return for commissions. Agency recruiters who work under such conditions must feel the danger of losing their own jobs even on a daily basis if they were to fail to match the needs of the job hunter with demands of the advertiser on a regular basis.

It seems however that many recruitment agencies which normally try to protect their reputations against poor service may have, during the last six months at least, given up under pressure or decided that as the customer may have to become more tolerant of the agencies or face the risk of alienating them. A former colleague who has been looking for the last six months says “ It almost feels at times that the jobs squeeze has given the agencies special ‘powers’ to become less responsive and more arrogant when they deal with us”.  Let us hope that she is wrong.

The use of email to submit applications seems to have suited all parties involved in the recruitment and selection process. There should be better information flow, more opportunities to match people against live and ‘stale’ vacancies and to make the job search more customer friendly from the point of view of the job hunter. The reality as reported by friends and colleagues suggests that something else may have been going on. Agency bosses and operators have a hard task of matching skills in their own teams. The decisions that are being made to provide strong and proactive support to recruiters and interviewers seems to be producing variable results. Under normal trading conditions there must be a critical mass of vacancies that sustains the overhead costs of the agencies. It seems that during the last three months the balancing act has been largely failing or even abandoned by agency managers.  Senior candidates for prestigious jobs talk about sending their applications to well established agencies and losing them in cyberspace or the IT ‘hole’. Very few agencies seem to be sending out acknowledgements confirming receipt of applications and there is extremely limited feedback on how the processing of applications even for time-sensitive jobs may be progressing. The agency is the ‘king’ and customer has been dethroned. Has the customer lost their importance just because there are more applicants and fewer jobs? Serious and honest answers are needed if good candidates are not to be stopped from applying. In that case the prospective employer pays the price. International agencies have also been known to disregard good recruitment practice for many years in preference for cost savings.

It would seem that there are systemic failures in agency operations.  With a few exceptions, most agencies have not installed automated response mechanisms suggesting that they are actually much smaller than their advertising board seems to suggest or that they have not made the right decisions relating to digital business design. Perhaps they ought to be taking a few tips from Slywotzky and Morrison who say that ‘Becoming a digital business is not about having a great website, setting up separate e-businesses, having next-generation software or wiring your workforce. It’s about using digital technology to become unique…to create and capture profits in new ways”.

It is said that the tail-end of the recession is a good time to invest in new forms of efficiency creation. Where agencies have lost good consultants or support staff, the least they may want to consider is to upgrade their digital preparedness.

There is a final point. The recruitment consultants who took for expertise and skills in their clients may need to occasionally turn the mirror on themselves. While their skills in sector-specific knowledge and interviewing techniques may be beyond reproach, have they mastered the basics of the in-house digital response system which may be abandoned as junior staff has left?

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.

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