Putting the customer back in focus

So many companies are jumping on the self-service bandwagon these days. Hailed as an integral part of CRM, the customer needs to be able to do everything himself, needs to feel empowered and fully in control.

Now of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognise that if customers can resolve their own problems there’s an immediate cost saving right there. Those responsible for the Profit & Loss balance sheet spontaneously get dollar signs in their eyes at the prospect of getting rid of the back office.

And so, not surprisingly, when I call my insurance company, my cellphone or energy provider, I am presented with an 8 level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to make my choices for the right queue. On my invoice I am referred to the company’s web site where I can log in and take care of my own matters, even live orders I can track with a “where’s my stuff?” function.

Problem is of course, that if you give the customer self-service and nowhere else to turn, it does have to deliver on its promise. It needs to enable the customer to serve himself. If it doesn’t it does the opposite of the original intent – it makes the customer feel less empowered and more frustrated.

Now supermarkets are the poineers of self-service, right? They have taken us weekly shoppers from our comfortable grocers and butchers to doing it all ourselves. Get your own trolley, get your own products, scan them yourself, pack them yourself, take the groceries to the car yourself and, yes, return your trolley yourself.

But even they get it wrong sometimes.

Ever asked in the supermarket where you could find an item, and a spotty teenager in a blue supermarket outfit points three isles further to a shelf somewhere, saying “Over there mate”. You want to ask for more detail but he wanders off, and you end up searching for it without success. You ask someone else and that person doesn’t know either and refers you to a colleague who works a few isles up. In the end, you find the empty shelf where it should have been but it’s sold out.

It’s when intended self-service goes very wrong – “it’s on that shelf mate…. somewhere”….. more like “shelf-service”.

That’s what I call unsuccessful self-service. In the first place, the signs in the supermarket are not enough to point you in the right direction and in the second place, when you ask someone you get a half motivated response without follow through.

Self-service is one of the major areas where organisations are going to score major CRM points if they get it right. If they don’t, they can do more damage than they could ever imagine.

Get it right, first time as it is incredibly powerful in creating a personal customer experience and will shape customer opinion for a long time to come.

Enable self-service, not shelf-service.