Good Customer Service Part 3

At the department or group level, the manager’s role is mainly about analysis and problem solving. It’s the Level 3 manager’s responsibility to track what kinds of problems the CSRs are dealing with and look for patterns that indicate a larger problem may exist. If calls about a specific problem breaking or failing are being received, for example, the Customer Service Manager (hereinafter CSM) should investigate to determine the nature of the failures, the percentage of units sold that are failing, and if possible the demographics of the customers who are reporting the failures. If all of these failure complaints are coming from people with some form of visual impairment, perhaps the design needs to be adapted to make it less visually complex; if all of the complaints are from a specific age group the product may be too technical, or not technical enough; if all of the products come from Michigan during the months from November to May, the product may not be sufficiently winterized…

Once a problem has been detected and verified, the CSM should be given the authority to pass along the nature of the problem and recommendations for its resolution to the appropriate department. This might mean quality control issues for the Manufacturing/Production people to work on; supply issues for the Logistics personnel to try to resolve; design issues for R&D to work out; offensive advertisements or obnoxious salespeople that Marketing should try to reign in; or even price or policy issues that will require changes to the Company’s operational strategy and general policy. However, the CSM should not be the one making policy or developing strategy, anymore than he or she should be down in the Engineering shop telling people how to improve the product’s features. As the name implies, the CSM’s primary role is managing the customer service function, and any related order capture, delivery, dispatch, logistics, public relations or promotional functions that are attached to his or her department. If a specific CSR or team of CSRs in consistently failing to resolve problems; if a specific delivery office isn’t getting orders to the customer on time; if orders are not being input correctly, or bills can’t be sent out in time because the orders are backlogged, it’s the CSM’s job to figure out why these things are happening – and prevent them…

Recruiting Third Echelon personnel from existing employees is often problematic, simply because many of the skills involved have nothing to do with the functions of front-line customer service personnel. Working directly with customers will not teach you anything about cost-benefit analyses, for example; or about accounting, marketing, finance, logistics or any number of management topics. If you want to promote from within – if having senior personnel who began at the bottom is important to your company image, your strategy, or your personal beliefs – then you need to institute personnel development programs that will prepare your people for more advanced positions, and you should at least consider tuition reimbursement programs for employees who want to study management (or any other topic that your company could use). This may sound expensive, but by the time we reach Third Echelon personnel the costs of recruiting and training are already non-trivial; if combined with other employee retention programs, tuition reimbursement and training can be surprisingly cost-effective…

It’s also important to consider that if the Third Echelon manager you assign to supervise the customer service function has the ability (and the resources) to do the job properly, he or she can provide information and analysis that will be invaluable to your quality control, engineering, logistics, marketing, finance and operations personnel, as well as providing your strategic planning shop with everything they will need to develop strategy and craft corporate policy…