"The customer is King". This noble mantra, mouthed by senior managers in every industry, is true in theory, but an ignoble lie in most practice. The customers have moved to stage centre in management thought and talk, but in real life they remain, not monarchs, but second-class citizens.
Yet a whole new discipline, Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, has been born and nourished by heavy corporate spending. Consultants also plot value chains backwards from the supposedly satisfied customer, and work out irresistible "Customer Value Propositions". A confusing orgy of direct mail descends on customers, willy-nilly. Call centres mushroom in unlikely locales to serve the customer better - and service simply gets worse.
In the much-trumpeted, new, customer-oriented culture, the Internet is meant to reinforce the revolution by providing better, faster access and response. But companies actually selling over the Net appear, according to an explosive new survey, to be even less responsive in cyberspace than on earth. The PLAUT business and technology consultancy, investigating returns policy and performance, found that only 15% of surveyed e-retailers offered excellent service. The rest provided after-sales treatment that ranged from the mediocre to the abysmal.
Service failure is not skin-deep. Its causes go far into the heart of management performance. The mistakes and mishaps are never isolated, unfortunate examples. They invariably spring from defects of the system and those who design and supervise that system. The great American quality guru, W.Edwards Deming, had it right: 85% of all defects are down to management - not to the workers.
No doubt, airline managements, for example, claim to strain nerve and sinew to serve customers better in the skies. Back on earth, though, you sometimes can't contact their salespeople at all. Everybody has shared this depressing experience. Call centres refer you uselessly around the press-button menus, tell you that "all our operators are busy" (as if you didn't know) and that your call "is being held in a queue" - which you also know full and furiously well.
Adding patronising insult to injury, an automated voice may tell you that "your custom is valuable to us", thank you for your patience (as if you had any alternative), and even (this is British Airways) boast that the endless wait is down to the success of their latest wondrous promotion. All this is laced together, naturally, by hideous music. Try to ring BA's head office to scream for help, and you find, bizarrely, that nothing is listed, only an 0345 number - which takes you straight back into Voicemail Hell.
All customer relationships rest on personal contact between the buyer and the seller. There are sound reasons, apart from lower cost, for automating that contact as much as possible. But the systems have rung down an iron wall between customers and suppliers. This is passing strange, since the supplier's staff are also human (despite their often inhumane behaviour) - and they also shop and buy. Top managements must surely sometimes be infuriated by other people's awful systems. Why do they persist with their own?
The answer runs deep into the realities of management. Executives talk about customers as if they are some strange and separate breed, described with demeaning phrases like "punters" and "bums on seats". The executive bums are similarly insensitive to the most important customers of all - their own staff. These customers depend on top management for sensible strategic direction, the effective operation of efficient systems, and proactive treatment as humans, not as "human resources".
When staff are mismanaged, customers inevitably suffer. That's why a practising ace at customer service, travel expert Hal Rosenbluth, entitled his book, The Customer Comes Second. To put your external customers first, in other words, put your employees first. Hard statistical evidence has established a clear link beween three types of satisfaction: employee, customer and shareholder. Satisfy the first, and the customers love you more: investors follow suit as sales and profits duly rise.
But many managers, even retailers, whose customers are highly visible, prefer the ivory tower to the store floor. They hatch their absurdities (some of them manifest, like Sainsbury's low-price advertising disaster with John Cleese) behind closed doors. Impervious to excellent suggestions and criticisms from lower staff, and to the potential huge contribution of middle managers, they are hardly likely to listen to the customers who are supposed to be kings (and queens).
Yet Andy Grove, the mercurial chairman of Intel, emphasises that customer complaints, "both internal and external" are "a very important source of information". That's patently true. So how chief executives answer personally addressed complaints (or don't) speaks volumes. Too many respond like the telecomms boss who received a heartfelt moan beginning "the service you provide to Cellnet customers is awful. I hope that this letter will not prove my point all over again by being entrusted to the customer service people for response". It was, of course.
In the much-trumpeted, new, customer-oriented culture, the Internet is meant to reinforce the revolution by providing better, faster access and response. But even companies selling over the Net appear, according to an explosive new survey, to be even less responsive in cyberspace than on earth. The PLAUT business and technology consultancy, investigating returns policy and performance, found that only 15% of surveyed e-retailers offered excellent service. The rest provided after-sales treatment that ranged from the mediocre to the abysmal.
Properly used, the Internet (like other high-tech systems) genuinely can improve responsiveness. That won't happen with a website like BA's, which lists a "dedicated" queue-up helpline, with neither names nor e-mail address for the customer services people. Likewise, established retailers can - and should - also benefit from the Web. Yet the serious faults identified in PLAUT's e-Returns Study included, not just a bundle of hyped-up dot.coms, but some lofty High Street names: W.H.Smith, Dixons, Tesco, Sainsbury, etc. Most surprising is the performance of Dell Computer, whose website generates gigantic volume, but which nevertheless badly flunked the returns test.
The sad experiences suggest that senior managers never take the elementary step of anonymously sampling their own service and services. If they are afraid of uncovering a can of worms, that's probably what they will find - and should always investigate and eradicate, digging right down to the underlying causes. Incommunicado bosses who delegate customer care to underlings, and never check their miserable performance, are themselves infected by systemic diseases that only they can cure. That vicious circle is everybody's root problem.
read all 70 gurus with one feed read all Read all media
