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.

Raising a digital native

My son, with a mere 18 months to his name, is scarily good at handling his mom's iPad and my Lumia. My conundrum is whether to encourage him stacking wooden blocks over playing with the iPad and take the shiny gadgets away from him, or let him play Baby DJ as much as he wants.

My hopes for his future certainly include more mental than physical labor, which implies that being a digital native is more useful than being a very good stacker of blocks. Character development, however, certainly requires that he gets his hands dirty with all kinds of physical things to learn about the power and limitations of being a man.

I wrote my first story 1991 on a Kaypro II with an eight inch green-on-black screen, technology from my birth year 1984. It was about a talking pen who helped an old writer overcome his writer's block. It led me to a lot of experimentation with the various bits of software and files in my dad's library of 5,25 inch soft 'floppies' and started a lifelong passion for all things digital.

My parents, bless them, made a visionary decision a year or so later: They got a modern IBM personal computer and a dial-up modem, and they let me and my siblings access the internet for a short time every day. Back then that meant hours of Microsoft Encarta and minutes of using AltaVista. When I was ten the son of a family friend introduced me to Turbo Pascal. It was the start of my career in IT to this day, and the best thing to happen to my young mind since learning to read in English.

My son is growing up in a world where computers and internet access are taken for granted,  his understanding of the technological underpinnings of his universe will be more conceptual than technical.
The way he deals with devices, apps and content he likes even before he knows how to speak leads me to believe he will be as much more fluent with the use of this technology than I ever was. His understanding is not about how the technology works, but how to use it in order to satisfy his needs.

So where do I step in and set the boundaries on his digital adventures? There is so much literature on parenting that arguments can be found for or against any policy. My goal is to raise a boy into a man, and these days that means he needs to be proficient in the use of software and services to get where he wants to go.

Character is more important than ability for life's tough moments and choices, and I find it hard to asses how that aspect of parenting is changed by living in a partly digital world. Right now I believe that I should always give him as much access to technology and connectivity as he can manage responsibly. Of course what that means in the day to day toddling about with my phone remains to be seen. I don't have all the answers, no parent does. Perhaps our kids will be able to Google it some day, although I suspect that Google will mean as much as AltaVista by then.

Such is the way of things, including, regrettably, the skill set that allows me to determine what my son can and cannot do. The odds are good he'll be blogging some day about  how his decrepit father gets lost in the world of sensory immersion feeds.

Turing's Secrets

Alan Turing is famous for being the father of modern computing, the author of computing's peskiest problem, and for being gay. The first made him famous, the second notorious among the Technorati, and the third got him fired, chemically castrated and may have driven him to suicide. There's a lesson here for the modern day internet and for all of us.

You see, Turing told a police officer about his boyfriend in the course of reporting a burglary. He believed the burglary was a crime that need to be persecuted and the truth about his boyfriend was just background information. That backfired rather spectacularly in the moral confines of mid 20th century England.

Computing is founded on theories of what is computable, and Turing laid a strong foundation with his eponymous Turing Machine, which models what kind of problems are computable and how. An upshot his theoretical framework is that when you add sufficient complexity to computing systems to get to work on complex problems, errors will occur that are neigh impossible to detect and resolve. We know and hate these errors as bugs. Basically we cannot make computers complex enough to be useful without a lot of bugs.

Bugs in software contribute to many evils, from a blue screen of death on your office computer to Air France flight 447 pancaking into the ocean because the autopilot's error message didn't contain any useful information for the pilots.

Bugs are also the source of vulnerabilities in software, vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious hackers, state agencies and clever pranksters. Vulnerabilities can and do reveal the secrets we artlessly entrust to our computers, much like Turing entrusted the fact of his gayness to a cop. There has been much ado about the Heartbleed vulnerability recently, one that impacts the integrity of 'secure' connections. It turns out that for a number of years this assumed integrity was, in fact, absent and an unknown number of supposedly secure connections were tapped.

You see, it's not about what is recorded or by whom. It's all just ones and zeroes that we pretend mean something real. The internet is the most epic story we ever told together. The problem is that we cannot control how others interpret our parts of that story. Virtual deeds have very real consequences, and we cannot predict what those consequences will be.

The moral confines of this age mean that it is okay to work online, play games online and look at naked adults online, but it's not okay to incite hatred or threaten someone online. But what of the next epoch? Russia, China the US and the EU are changing our world, right now, as you read this. What is okay today might be hugely embarrassing tomorrow, or even land you in jail.

There is a huge amount of mistrust against the state agencies who are surveying the internet, but not nearly enough. It's as if we can't make ourselves believe that our shared illusion is real enough to shatter lives, even though it does so on a daily basis. Our passwords are weak and often repeated. Kids post copies of their passports on social media instead of faxing it because they have no concept of how dangerous that is. People download or stream illegal copies of music and film even though they know they shouldn't. And people are going to jail, as the EU is proud to report. Sometimes fairly, oftentimes not so fairly. We just don't know if what we do today incurs penalties tomorrow.

Remember Turing. Turing the genius for his work on computing and his wartime work cracking Nazi code. Turing the innocent for not being more circumspect about his gayness. Turing the persecuted for his inhuman treatment at the hands of righteous moralists. Remember the lesson his story teaches, so we may avoid his misadventures.

To the Left

The first time I heard about Shift Left is when I read an IBM whitepaper on the optimization of tech support. It was amazing, obvious and, for most IT organizations, way ahead of it's time. It took two years before I had a customer asking for this concept, and it's an instant hit with every IT manager who hears of it.

The basic premise that support tickets become increasingly expensive if multiple and/or specialized parties are involved in resolving them. It is therefore advisable to optimize IT infrastructure and support in such a way that the bulk of incident tickets can be resolved quickly and cheaply. The following picture sums it up pretty well:

ShiftLeft - Picture by OGD ict-diensten, used with permission.

If you take, from left to right, IT infrastructure, end users, IT support, system administrators, and technical experts, you want the largest volume of tickets to be resolved mostly on the left, rather than on the right side. After all, when something fails the end user cannot work. If it's not automatically resolved of fixed by the user himself, he just has to wait around while the service desk starts burning time and money. When the service desk cannot resolve the issue, the more expensive system administrators get in gear and start billing, all the while leaving the end user unable to do part of his work. In short, the further 'right' the problem goes before it's resolved, the higher cost in time and money. Hence, the drive to 'Shift Left'.

There are a number of things a company can do to enable this shift left. First is very good knowledge management, where the service desk learns to perform as much of the system administrators job as possible without significant error rates. Secondly, the end user can gain knowledge of how to resolve common problems on their own by making a knowledge base and relying on community support, training for commonly used devices and applications, and digital literacy.
Both the service desk and the end user need to be assigned sufficient rights to resolve common problems on their own for these two measures to work. Thirdly, modern IT infrastructure can be configured to be highly fault-tolerant, and if you switch to cloud services the issue becomes moot and you only have to worry about internet access.

The purpose is to optimize for quantity. Back-end systems can fail over to each other. Users can find their own 'any key'. The service desk is well able to execute common changes and resolve issues on it's own, given proper guidance and training. Sysadmins would much rather hack away at a difficult issue once in a while instead of being inundated in relatively common and easy tickets. Ideally, the cost, volume and resolution time of tickets is greatly optimized.

Thankfully the technology like cloud services are evolving to give a seamless experience even if single components fail. Digital literacy is increasing quickly and end users are quite happy with devices and apps that are intuitive to use and manage without reliance on IT support. As more people use tablets, phones and purpose-built apps to do parts of their work, the IT department takes on the role of a facilitator rather than a break-fix oriented club of technicians.

* He/his has to serve for all genders here :)

Finding an IT service provider to love

One of the niceties about cloud computing and having digital natives in the workforce is that your IT department can mature from being a cog in your organization to a lever for success. Instead of just knowing all about the bits and bytes, the department needs to be at home in vendor management. Part of this new role is delivering and governing IT services with one or more outsourcing partners through increasingly relevant frameworks like SIAM and COBIT. The primary capability of the New IT Department™, however, is building great relationships.

The secret to a great marriage is seldom in the prenuptial agreement. Having a great spouse who complements your weaknesses and enhances your strengths can take you very far indeed, as evinced by the infamous Underwoods on Netflix[1]. Conducting a marriage on the basis of legal paperwork is a poor relationship at best. A shared vision and ambition, however, is an excellent basis.

Traditionally, outsourcing IT services is about trading money for certain capabilities that your business needs to do its thing. As IT is something that you notice primarily when it breaks down, lags or fails to do what you want, IT outsourcing contracts tend to be heavy on performance clauses. These are supposed to warrant that most of the stuff will work most of the time, and get fixed quickly if it does break. This approach to contracting is utilitarian, defensive and ultimately anathema to what outsourcing can enable your company to do.

The magic of great outsourcing is finding a partner with whom you add directly to each other’s brand value and culture. Finding the right partner is worth a lot of time and effort. If your business relies on localized, region-specific service to your customers, don’t outsource to a large centralized offshore IT service provider. How could that ever be a good match? If your employees often work from home, by all means get an IT partner that is willing to go out there and deliver the same kind of service at home they can expect in the office. Do you expect a lot of acquisitions to integrate? Find the service provided who specializes in on-boarding and integrating diverse IT capabilities into a common standard.

It’s not doable anymore to have the IT department serve all your current and future needs at a reasonable price, unless you are in that sector yourself. You need a partner. You might as well find the one you can love. Best Value Procurement is an approach to contracting that helps to form the basis for a more holistic relationship than one based purely of price and service levels.

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[1] To be clear, I don’t condone or extend the parable to the very skewed moral compass of the Underwoods.