Good Customer Service Part 4

By the time you get to the Fourth Echelon of the company you’re not really dealing with customer service management anymore; people at this level are probably also tasked with supervising other functions, and may regard customer service as just a nuisance, since it’s a cost center that can’t usually generate revenue. However, the customer service department has the ability to save the company significant amounts of money (by preventing lawsuits and detecting fraud) and to enable other divisions to make significantly more money (by improving customer relations and corporate image) – and if the customer service units are used for any significant order capture function, this kind of thinking is just absurd. However little corporate management may care for it, the customer service personnel are generally the first – and frequently the only – connection the customer will have with your company, and managing them can have an enormous impact on whether the company survives or fails…

The executives tasked with managing the customer service function have several important roles, including adopting policy, developing strategy, and setting up the rules and boundaries that the lower echelons will work from. For example, how much authority do you intend to give the first two levels of customer service? Should the First Echelon have the ability to reverse $100 worth of charges, or is $10,000 more appropriate? Or should all of the financial approval come from the second or third echelon levels? The less power you give the lower levels the more important it becomes to give them the ability to pass decisions up the chain of command – and the more time your second and third level personnel will spend answering questions and making financial decisions. No one is going to suggest that you should have decisions that could bankrupt the company made by a CSR making $14 an hour (even if that is double the industry-standard wage), but no one at the Director or Vice President level should have to sign off on a $20 refund, either…

That sort of trade-off occurs in every industry, and in every company that is big enough to have multiple levels of management. In some industries the level of autonomy you can extend to lower echelon personnel may be limited by law or safety regulation, while in others it may be unavoidable due to distance or isolation of various units from higher headquarters. But regardless of the external conditions, the approach you have chosen is part of your vision of the company, and it needs to be communicated to all of the people who will be charged with making it happen. Does your company want to present itself as an egalitarian organization, where you might find the CEO unloading suitcases from an airplane if you’re short on baggage handlers (the CEO of Southwest Airlines actually does this from time to time)? Are you a collection of the best and the brightest, where even the CSRs are technical geniuses (Apple did this from the start, but it has been adapted to other models; Men’s Wearhouse uses a similar approach)? Is your company a strict, well-run hierarchy, where higher management approves everything – but is always there to take your call if the CSRs can’t help you (IBM did this for years, and a lot of companies still do)? Any of these strategies can work, but only if senior management supports them – and you still have to decide which one will serve you best…

In my travels, I have noticed that the dominant company in every field – and generally the most profitable one, as well – is the one with the best customer service. I don’t believe that this is a coincidence. Good customer service can make the difference between making your customers happy and handing them over to your competition. But only if you’re willing to take the time and expend the resources to make that happen…