I spend a lot of time thinking about customer service. How to make it more fun. Or to take it to the next level. It’s my occupation, after all. But there’s another reason: just like everyone else, I’m a customer too. And frankly I’m getting pretty tired of bad service!
It is so frustrating when you can see exactly how a customer service representative could have handled a situation, but didn’t. How he could have responded quickly and left you with a good feeling about the company, but didn’t. And while it would be easy to blame the service staff for the issue, sometimes they don’t have much choice if they want to keep their jobs. They have orders. And those orders usually come from their direct managers, who in turn follow the orders of a hot shot, like a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
So here’s an open letter to all CMOs who should know better.
Dear CMO,
As a measure of customer satisfaction, most KPIs are useless. I especially dislike the key performance indicator emails answered per hour, which is particularly dangerous for your customers. It’s KPIs like this one that lead to low customer satisfaction, resulting in angry posts on social media and blogs.
On the face of it, it seems like a great idea. What’s wrong with encouraging your staff to respond to customers as quickly and succinctly as possible? Customers get quick replies, your staff are fast and efficient, and you keep your staffing costs down (because you need fewer staff).
The problem lies in the fact that a fast answer is not necessarily a good one. Yes, speed is important. Customers who write to you with simple questions don’t want to wait forever for an answer. However, not all questions are created equal. Some of them require careful reading, not just a quick glance and then a macroed response to what you thought they were going to say.
So if you are using an answers-per-hour KPI, you’re penalising your staff members who are ‘unlucky’ enough to be allocated the more complex questions. If they read and answer those questions thoroughly, they’ll get through fewer emails per hour in comparison to their colleagues.
Stats versus true service
I know how online customer service works. I know just as well as you do that it’s not uncommon to get customers emailing for the nth time on the same issue. When you get such an email, you can sometimes see the string of quick and dirty answers from colleagues. Cursory, incorrect replies, forcing the customer to either give up or write back yet again.
In other words, you are setting your employees up to fail. If they actually take the time to help your customers, you will haul them into a meeting and tell them that they need to get their stats sorted or else risk losing their jobs. If they give fast and unhelpful or irrelevant replies, you praise them. And that’s what you call customer service?
Dear CMO, do us all a favour. Ditch your other KPIs in favour of FCR.
First contact resolution
Whatever you call it – First Time Fix, First Time Right, First Contact Fix – we strongly urge you to start measuring how many of your company’s customer interactions are resolved on the first contact. Give your employees some breathing space; allow them to read a customer email carefully, including any attachments or forwarded emails that may be part of the query. Then give them enough time to formulate a thorough reply that will give a decent answer to the question.
Most questions won’t require that much time. But the more complex ones – which are more likely to come from customers who have put a bit of time and effort into formulating their queries, and who are also more likely to put energy into taking things further if they don’t get a satisfactory reply – will get the attention they deserve.
Your job, dear CMO, will become that little bit harder, of course. ‘Emails per hour’ is such a nice, snappy, easily measurable metric. It sounds so good on paper. But it’s completely useless, and that’s a shame. It’s time to start rewarding answers that are useful, not just fast. Please? Do it for the customers!
Yours sincerely,
Kelly Atkinson
Your potential customer
