The Tightrope Walk of Customer Satisfaction

Good service makes customers happy, bad service drives them up the wall. Everyone knows this. Yet the reputation of customer service reps is a darn sight below that of tort lawyers and stock brokers. Comcast is being crucified in the media for its comically bad customer service and complete lack of internal alignment across its vast operations. A very painful process for a company anxious for approval to gobble up its largest competitor in order to rule cable in the US the way Sauron ruled Middle Earth. Why is it so hard to deliver good customer service? 

Because good customer service costs money. Large amounts of it, all the time. This means that there is a tradeoff between customer happiness and profits. These seemingly opposite aims must be held in perfect balance, or you risk falling off into either non-profitability or a damaged brand. Let's have a look at the tightrope.

Products and services are priced to include some measure of warranty and customer service. This surcharge is usually based on the expected number of defects and mistakes in the underlying business processes. 

To keep the price competitive, the 'service tax' is kept to a minimum. There is also a certain margin built into the sell price of goods and services to grow the company and show profit. Any activity that is not priced into the product or service itself is eating away the margin of the seller. This disincentivises gold-plating customer service, because it either makes the price uncompetitive or decreases profits.

Obviously, being too stingy has huge disadvantages, and in the age of Twitter it can kill your brand for good. 'Comcast' is going to mean comically bad service for a decade, even in the unlikely event the company manages to turn its customer service around. Conversely there is competitive advantage in having great customer service, because it makes your brand stronger.

Many companies create mechanisms to make sure they don't fall into the brand-killing abyss. Jim Collins wrote about Red Flag mechanisms, whereby the customer can truncate his invoice my crossing off unsatisfactory items. Lean Six Sigma places a lot of emphasis on the "Voice of the Customer" to make sure that feedback from the front lines is a big part of the decision making process. Measuring the Net Promoter Score gives feedback about how evangelistic customers are. The finance department makes damn sure that companies don't fall off the other side by providing service at a loss. Yet the fundamental tension between maximizing service and maximizing profit remains. 

There is of course a third way. Call it the Gmail approach. Call it Apple's baby-proof ease of use. Simply put, create a product or service that is so easy to use and so well-tailored to the demands and expectations of your customer that they are happy even without any customer service at all, or that they are able to perform most service themselves. Make support mostly unnecessary. This means really having your ear to the ground and be willing to do whatever it takes to deliver the right thing at the right time. It means lightness and agility to stay on top of changing expectations, not usually a large company's forte. 

This article, ironically, describes Comcast trying to do exactly that: deliver service that doesn’t need support. It did not protect them from the damage cause by mishandling the customers who did have to call. So even when your equivalent to the Genius Bar is barely used, it has to be very good and focused on having a happy person hang up, even when they don't want to be your customer anymore. 

The damage to the Comcast brand is done and cannot be repaired. The story however, can serve a greater purpose for monopolists and startups alike: give the people what they want, not just what you want to give them. Only a few true visionaries can tell customers what they want before they figured it out themselves, like Jobs did with the iPhone and Musk with the Tesla S. For everyone else, stick to the trenches and be quick on your feet. The battle for your brand won't be won any other way.

Separation of powers

There is a very interesting development in computing devices, namely the separation of interfaces from the rest of the computer. Cloud services, new devices like netbooks and new peripherals like Google Glass and Pebble smart watches divide the integrated computing devices of yesteryear into distinctly separate interface devices and processing devices.

Desktops, laptops and smartphones are all quite integrated, they are essentially complete computers in different sizes. Now that our computing is increasingly done in the cloud, our gadgets become focused on offering powerful, slick interaction with remotely hosted applications and content.

This trend has several interesting consequences. Interface devices like smart glasses, watches and portable screens can be upgraded separately from the silicon in the datacenter that provides muscle. Rather than shelling out for a Dell XPS or MacBook Pro with all the trimmings, it will soon be possible to buy an interface device like a tablet and use it for quite a while, without foregoing the benefits of regular increases in computing power.

Of course Apple and Samsung want everyone to buy a new flagship phone every year or two, but there has been a noticeable plateau of development in recent handsets. Adding gimmicks is not quite the same as new features, much to the dismay of Samsung's recently departed head of mobile design. It's high time that services and interfaces become the competitive differentiators, not the silicon underneath.

Using the same hardware for a longer time is also a lot more sustainable. Rather than tossing out a plasticy handset full of rare earths every year, having a trusty device to access online services for a couple of years saves tons of resources. Your 'internet device' could get a similar lifecycle to TV's, which have offered access to an ever wider array of services while being upgraded only once or twice per decade in most homes.

Service providers have a huge advantage over handset makers: customer data, workflows and online interaction with colleagues and friends become finely interwoven with the service over time. This builds very strong customer loyalty. I'm utterly useless without my Evernote and IQTELL subscriptions, for example. Also the R&D cycle of web services is a lot friendlier, allowing easy iteration of features and improvements with a constant revenue stream, rather than the billion-dollar gamble of developing a new device. There are good reasons to primarily sell services rather than hardware, and I wonder when the change of emphasis will occur. 

For now the iPhone remains a much more compelling product than iCloud, but only because the app ecosystem runs on the iPhone hardware rather than the iCloud platform. When Microsoft, Apple and Google have finished their current transformations there will be little to distinguish a desktop application from a mobile app from a web service, except the screen you view it on. That is when the time is ripe to complete the separation described here.

Storytelling

Recently, a former colleague re-joined the company for a special project. His nickname "Van Z" and past exploits were soon revived by long-time veterans, and to his amazement a lot of people he never met before knew of him and talents. This kind of company lore is great, it binds colleagues together in a shared understanding of what the company is all about in a much more fundamental way than the mission statement.

Babur & Companions
sharing tales around the campfire

The stories of past projects, remarkable customers and colleagues, and memorable moments are a living legacy of where we have been as people, as colleagues and as a company. These stories are repeated, embellished and woven together to reinforce what matters most.

The coffee corner in a great company culture is the campfire of its tribal identity, where colleagues confirm each others value and identity. Conversely, if the coffee corner where you work is the place to bitch about bosses and do some casual backstabbing you're well advised to work elsewhere, because the culture is showing severe symptoms of incurable decay.

My phone is keeping a track record of where I've been and what I've done, which is really useful for time writing and billing. More than that, it tells me my own story, helping me to remember and feel satisfied about the work I've done and the places I have been. It goes beyond the statistics of location and time to establish a narrative based on my comments and place names, and this is hugely satisfying.

Right now I'm working to lift our team reporting, daily standups and weekly review meetings to that next level of usefulness. As a project manager I need these reports and meetings to keep a firm grasp on our work. As a leader, I need them to reinforce what we are all about, which means that I need them to keep the narrative of our story as a project team alive.  Just like the phone app delivers more than bare stats, I want my project management to be about more than control.

What I find challenging is allowing the right amount of personalization and storytelling without fostering the kind of loose banter and improductive blah that clogs up far too many meetings already. In theory, meetings already work like this, which the confirmation of last time's minutes, the regular agenda items and a recap. In practice they're either really short and businesslike or really long and tedious, depending on the leader and the group.

My current approach is to frame each talking point in a narrative way, connecting it explicitly to what happened recently and what is about to happen. I also try to draw parables using existing company lore. Meanwhile the subjects under discussion are determined by the meeting agenda, and errant lines of conversation are pruned back with a meaningful glance at my watch. So far so good.