Views from no 1

Transparency and 21st Century Customer Service

I dropped in to a packed house at the ICS Annual Conference and a question was asked of the panel asking whether the 'old' version of customer service was fit for the 21st century. No and it was not fit for the last century either.

End the Big Lie

My vision for 21st century customer service is for us to address the big lie that has stopped the professional developing and maturing. The lie is that customer service professionals are there to administer customer-focused and friendly processes that meet customer needs and resolve their problems. They are advocates within the company of the customer view. Sorry but no – customer service people are there to attempt to explain and justify company-friendly processes to customers whose needs these processes do not meet and whose problems they cannot resolve. Customer service people are trapped into being apologists for the companies they work for.

The demands of the new transparency as set out by my current fave guru Don Tapscott - see him here http://www.usnowfilm.com/clips/53 talking about the revolution that is being caused by the new generation of digital citizens. The customers used to be held outside the boundaries with products being pushed out at them through the traditional distribution channels. Bring the customer inside and look at co-created products. The new power of customers to exchange information globally mean that if you are going to be naked, you had better be buff says Tapscott. If you are not up to this sort of scrutiny you loose trust. In the old days we have to admit that companies selling bad products sold hard often did well. But that will not work anymore. The power of transparency changes corporate behaviour. Need I mention Toyota again – the story is all the more sad since the company has built some great product. The Lexus has inspired customer service legends.

Agents of the New Honesty

The profession now has an opportunity to retake the heights and gain a new professional reputation. Wouldn't it be great if 21st century customer service reflected these truths, said goodbye to the old lies and became the advocates for and agents of the new honesty and collaboration with customers.

Can you digg it?

Colin Adamson

Again and Again and Again

Are some lessons too hard to learn? What is your take on the Toyota sticking pedal recall? It is like watching a car crash in slow motion as you watch the company go through all the predictable stages - deny, conceal, admit in part, mount legal defence, watch sales fall through the floor. It is not as if we have not been here before. The big US example before Toyota was Volkswagen US. They too had a problem with sudden and uncontrollable acceleration. VW is an engineering-led company and the first reaction was to blame the US driver who could not manage the thorough-bred Audi model that was involved in most of the problems. Well it did not work and for a long time, you could not give away Audis in the US market.

My take is that the warranty or aftersales department still has less clout than legal, finance and insurance departments. The bean counters leap in to limit the financial damage and while there may be quality control action, the data is sparse and difficult to interpret but hey it is only a few people. A silent recall may be in order but let us keep the lid on this. After all, the rationale continues, the last thing we want to do is to panic customers. The upshot of all this is that the company leaves it to someone else to panic the customer - a sharp lawyer working with a journalist or two, a quote from a legislator or the head of a government safety agency and bang the report on CNN and it all goes global. The company then suffers a degree of market damage and financial loss that dwarfs the expense of pre-emptive recall and settlements with customers who feel at risk.

Have any SOCAPiE members had personal experience of this sort of thing either as a consumer or as a customer service professional? Tell us your views.