Why targets make service companies deliver worse services
I’d always glided past the “management analysis” pages in the Observer’s Business section before, but last night happened to start reading Simon Caulkin on Service that doesn’t deliver.
It’s a fantastic explanaton of why having more targets actively makes these companies worse, rather than better, at what we want them to do, such as fixing a water leak.
Sample: How can a company construct a system that allows it to live with such opposites, claiming in good faith excellent customer service and conservation at the same time as it leaves the water running for a month, give or take a few days? That requires a minimum of four transactions with the company, up to six if the leak is underground (work it out), to fix a domestic leak?
The answer is, very easily. This is the norm, rather than the exception, in service companies. You do it by managing the trees and ignoring the wood, in the name of efficiency breaking up the process of serving the customer into individual activities (phone the customer, send a surveyor, send a plumber) and managing the activities according to detailed specification. The underlying purpose gets lost in the process.
It has scary implications for politics, and e-government, and pretty much everything around us which is getting broken down into “processes” in order to be measured. Read it. Then cull the people who implement these things.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Service Scrubber; and the man behind the Google-AOL deal (26 December 2005; score: 55.17%)
- Do bigger broadband companies give better or worse service? (16 February 2005; score: 54.39%)
- How to be consistently wrong: think like Paul Thurrott on topics like DRM (28 February 2007; score: 41.36%)
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September 6th, 2004 at 3:57 pm
Hi Charles
Great article indeed. Without wishing to start a thread whereby we all give our worst customer experience, I thought you might like the following which shows how the two channels of telephone and internet combine to offer a worse experience (and more expensive for the supplier - nPower in this case)):
1. Called to transfer supply for father-in-law. The main 0845 number did nothing - it was dead. Tried several times the same day, no result.
2. Went to website hoping I could do this.
3. Only option was to CONTACT US. I did this, filled out a very lengthy form including a long field called “Please enter your query below” maximum 5000 words. Got to end, and hit send. The form was rejected for numerous trivial reasons. Having corrected those, it was rejected because my query contained non-alphanumeric characters! It gave a list of unacceptable characters including but not limited to full stop, comma, ampersand, quotation marks etc etc! Yet I could have entered 5000 words if I’d wanted. Can you imagine 5000 words with no punctuation?!
4. Anyway, finally the form appeared to get accepted, after removing each comma, hyphen, full stop, quote mark etc! All the information they needed was now in the form (minus punctuation)
5. I waited… and waited… and waited.
6. 10 days later, I received a call from Customer services about the email query I had made. They obviously had some details as they had my father-in-law’s name. They asked me to call them in Customer Services on … 0845… the same number I’d originally tried to call without getting through.
So, they had multiple people interact with me (including a call to my mobile phone), yet the place where I could have (and in fact did) put all the information necessary and would have cost them nothing was ignored. I’m sure they rate their systems as having done a great job, and their people productive (no argument about the people themselves - courteous and efficient). But what the experience should have been and should have costed them is something very different!
Ian
September 6th, 2004 at 4:07 pm
Hey, I don’t mind if people want to do their worst experience. Though I’d prefer new scams - have you seen the fairground one? It’s fabulous.
September 6th, 2004 at 4:53 pm
I once ordered a bottle of whisky for my brother’s birthday from the then newly formed Drinks Direct. After putting all the details into a seemingly efficient online order form, my brother’s birthday came… and went… and no sign of the whisky was seen. I contacted them, and asked what had happened - they seemed puzzled and promised to get back to me. They did - and it turned out that due to a typo the bottle had not been able to get delivered. However this was not a typo on my part - I was able to check the order details on my confirmation email. They had actually re-entered the order into a separate system in order to process it - and this was where the typo had crept in!
September 6th, 2004 at 7:23 pm
NHS
More targets than you could shake a stick at.