Replying to LO29080 --
At
Thanks for your note.
AM de Lange wrote:
> (1) The person who deals with the customer is deaf to the articulated
> want(s) of the customer. The customer is an object rather than a
> human.
I agree. It took me some time to be really aware that most of the time
so-called call takers/listeners "roll-out" their pre-prepared scheme of
questions to deal with a customer situation. The very thought of being
quiet and just listening with as much concentration as you can muster just
wasn't part of their act.
> (2) The activities are organised in such a manner that it cannot match
> what the customer wants. This is often the case with organisations
> depending on IT when serving the customer. The person will often
> say to a customer who wants something specific "the computer cannot
> do it". The actual reason is that the computer programmer(s) failed to
> create a program which could do it. Here even the superior will
> respond in the same manner since not knowing self enough of IT.
I think this has much to do with the rapid growth of Call Centres (or any
other name meaning the same thing). The suppliers .. invariably IT
merchants .. "teach" staff in the Call Centre "how to answer a customer's
query quickly and effectively". I have seen whole scripts of questions
with decision trees on the PC's of Call centre operatives. They have to
read out the questions ..parrot-like: they look for a word in the
customer's response that is visible in their decision tree .. and press
the appropriate key. There simply is NO ROOM for a customer to describe
in their faltering home language what the problem is, what matters to
them.
And what happens? If the customer feels they are getting nowhere, they
terminate the call. If the call taker finds the customer not following
their script, they terminate the call by repeating the script again
causing the customer to give up in exasperation.
As part of my work, I try and train the call taker how to listen. We get
permissions to discard the script/call centre practice. And at the end of
the call, we ask the call taker to write one or two sentences summarizing
the purpose/content of the call. Oh .. we have an ear piece as well so we
hear the whole thing. We can listen, compare notes, and then discuss ways
of better listening, better questioning. I find that over a 2 day period
.. working with a group of call takers, and sitting with them on and off,
changes can be made.
It comes down to trying to answer the question "do you think the customer
got value from the way you handled that call? If not, what could you do
to make it better?"
> Apart from statistical analyses as you have suggested, the senior
> managers of those organisations can get off their little thrones, pretend
> themselves to be customers and then gain first hand experience the
> service which customers get. I think they dare not do it because they
> suspect the shocking experiences which they will get as customers
> and that they will be incapable of rectifying it with their management
> practice.
I guess one has to get the permission from a client, and at the
appropriate level of management to do a number of things.
1. To understand the demand placed on an organization.
2. To understand the value that customers get when they contact the
organization asking for something, or something that failed to be done to
be done (never less than 40 per cent in my experience).
3. To understand the capability of the processes in place to match and
meet that demand. During this investigation one will unearth the waste
that is generated in the sequential steps.
4. As we do this work, we unearth the conditions that constrain the
system. While some of those conditions as At suggests are IT related, the
majority have been "designed in" by management, usually in complete
ignorance of the consequences.
5. And to understand the management thinking that has caused the work to
be done in the way it is done.
To get the internal team who do this work to present back to their
managers is a big step. But to date, we haven't been thrown out. Whether
or not the management will listen to the "voices of their customer and
their process" and then lead their staff to redesign work so that failure
is eradicated, and waste is diminished is another question.
And then there is the whole issue of the content of the jobs done by
staff. Are they sufficient to enable staff to feel that they have
contributed to the well-being of the customer? Do they stretch the worker
such that they want to learn more? Are they simply so boring that the
worker couldn't care less?
I find it paradoxical that modern IT enabled workflow systems are doing
what Taylor did 100 years ago .. produce many jobs with the lowest level
of skill required. I refer to scanning and associating an index to an
imaged document. Hardly intellectually difficult!
And yet HR in their wisdom are recruiting the best .. those with the
highest educational qualifications.
... and to do what??
Roy Greenhalgh
--Roy Greenhalgh <rgreenh@attglobal.net>
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