BMW serves as a good example
of a company that measures service vs.
providing it. But many companies fall
into this trap. Does yours?
Here is an example of what I mean:
My last car service:
Example:
Do you measure the speed of closing problems?
This is a very typical measure. But it’s important to understand that this measure can cause you to ignore customer problems, because your service staff is motivated to close out problems quickly, vs. take the time to actually fix them, because spending that time would result in a poor measured result.
So you end up with a backlog of problems that could have been fixed, unhappy customers, and sparkling measures for speed of closing problem reports.
Instead try:
Is your service staff trained in following service processes or in providing service?
In my example above, at every step, people were correctly following a process, resulting in my getting more and more tortured.
Customer service people who are trained in processes often delight in not-helping customers when they confident they are correctly following the process.
This is particularly infuriating to customers who want to be made to feel like someone at your company cares about the suffering you are inflicting.
Instead try:
Another idea:
In the BMW example I would have each dealership manage a contest for their service team to get together and come up with three new ideas for how to provide outstanding service. You could pay $1000 each for the best 10 ideas.
Instead of putting $10k into a survey, where you have sales and service people training the customers to give the right answers, which are of no real use to you anyway, you could be motivating Actual Service!!
The existence of the contest alone would inspire thinking about service, and you get much better ideas when you involve the people who actually do the work in coming up with the best way to improve it.
Look at what you measure and then look at the dark side of it.
If you were going to game the measures to come out looking good what would you do?
What non-intended result would occur? Because it will…
At the very least, if you are not serious about providing actual service, don’t torture your customers with surveys and processes that only annoy them, and give you a false sense of your greatness.
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