In this month's Editor's Page, Keith Dawson reveals how incentives can sometimes undermine the most well-run customer care operations. In the scenario he describes, customers who call to cancel their Internet service reach agents who have incentives to discourage them from doing so. In theory, this approach to retention seems like an efficient way to sustain revenue from existing customers. But in practice, this attempt to prevent churn backfires because it creates a conflict between customers' expectations of service and the company's willingness to fulfill them.
Similar conflicts can occur with customer support, too. Phil Verghis has seen this firsthand. His consultancy, The Verghis Group, advises companies and educational institutions about how to support their colleagues and customers. Verghis also has direct experience managing customer support operations, most recently as vice president of infrastructure support with Akamai Technologies, an on-line network services provider.
Verghis' book, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive, includes a chapter that outlines how to align customer support with other parts of an organization. Such alignment has practical value. One of Verghis' clients struggled with internal conflict about how to handle product returns. Verghis credits the company's customer support team with discovering the source of the conflict, which was that the company maintained financial incentives to minimize product returns. These incentives inadvertently fostered a gatekeeper mentality, so that, as Verghis recalls, the company's engineering team sought to establish itself as the final arbiter as to whether customers were justified in returning products.
Unlike the engineering team, the customer support team was familiar with the expectations of both customers and the company concerning product returns. For this reason, the customer support team recognized how incentives to reduce product returns influenced not only the behavior of their colleagues in engineering, but also the behavior of customers.
"Customer support was the only group to connect all the dots," says Verghis.
Support is valuable; as Verghis points out, customers are often willing to pay for it. Although the company's incentives were supposed to lower expenses associated with handling product returns, they had the unintended effect of making it more difficult for customers to receive the level of support they expected, and therefore risked devaluing the support the company was able to provide.
Yet despite their insights about customers, Verghis finds that customer support teams struggle to earn respect, especially within corporate hierarchies. "There's a perception in many companies that support executives are not senior executives," he says.
In his book, Verghis suggests a number of ways that support operations, and those who run them, can demonstrate leadership within their organizations.
One way that support managers take on leadership roles is by cultivating relationships with their colleagues in sales. Why? Support operations often have more information about customers' questions and issues than salespeople. As Verghis writes, "Customers often tell different things to sales and support, particularly while negotiating renewals." By sharing knowledge between sales and support, support managers enable their companies to align the operations of both.
Sharing knowledge is also helpful among other areas within a company. To cite another example from Verghis' book, customer support managers can provide valuable feedback to engineering teams about how much assistance customers need with the products they develop. Such input from customer support is valuable because it helps companies design products or services to minimize the need for support.
If there is one lesson companies have learned in recent years, it's that customer feedback is a useful indicator of performance. Customers may not be experts in the inner workings of the products they use, but they know the difference between companies that make a genuine effort to assist them, and those that treat every request for help as a potential conflict.
Few companies look forward to receiving requests to cancel service, to return products or to provide support. But rather than attempting to deny the validity of these requests, companies can learn from them and prevent similar situations from occurring. As Verghis writes, "Preventing problems will save far more time and money -- and improve customer satisfaction - than merely fixing them."
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Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
10/1/06, Issue # 1910, page 40.
