Transforming Customer Interactions – October 2014
Investment in the Customer Experience began to accelerate in the early 2000’s. One of the road markers for this trend was the publication of the Net Promoter Score[1] by Reichheld in the Harvard Business Review (Reichheld, 2003).
In the current environment, the majority of Australian CEO’s have Customer Experience as one of their top 3 strategic objectives. In most instances, members of the Executive Team now have NPS scores as a component of their bonus and incentive program[2]
With all this keen interest and investment, one should have seen dramatic and transformational changes to Customer Experience in Australia. Yet, the Customer Experience remains largely unchanged, and unfortunately for some has actually deteriorated.
We believe there are three key factors that account for the failure of most Customer Experience programs:
Investment in people’s capability (the ability to perform a task) as opposed to people’s capacity (the ability to understand and achieve a goal through resilience, will and way finding);
- Performance measurement and reward systems that perpetuate a task orientation over a goal orientation;
- Broad, unfocussed investment in the Service Ecosystem (product design, staff training, service mapping, customer touch points, performance management, organisational policies and information and billing systems) as opposed to targeted investment to remediate Service Dissonant[3]
[1] Net Promoter Score is a registered trade mark of Reichheld, Bain and Co and Satmatrix.
[2] (Source – 2013 Annual Reports NAB, Westpac, ANZ, CommBank, Telstra, Optus).
[3] (Service Resonance Company Pty Ltd, 2013)
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Transforming Customer Interactions October 2014 – secure
Theory of Service Dissonance – September 2014
At Service Resonance we don’t believe that people aspire “to perform poorly” and that organisations set out to intentionally foster a culture of mediocrity. With each customer interaction an employee doesn’t seek to sabotage the business and destroy customer loyalty. In fact, the opposite holds true and it is the service ecosystem (product design, staff training, performance management, organisational policies and information systems) that inhibits the employee from delivering a positive customer experience.
Customer service staffs are unique individuals. Most are grateful for the opportunity to work for a company and in our experience seek to make the company successful. Each employee has a deep sense of right and wrong, of fair and unfair. He brings these beliefs with him to every customer interaction. At Service Resonance Co. we refer to this as a service disposition and we all have them.
Without fail a customer service employee will seek to deliver a positive customer experience that is aligned with his internal service disposition. In a perfect service ecosystem, a customer service employee will deliver a positive customer experience every time. Of course, a perfect service ecosystem doesn’t exist in the real world. All too often the employee is prevented from achieving his goal, a positive customer experience, by faults in the service ecosystem.
Each time an employee is prevented from delivering a positive experience by a fault in the ecosystem it causes dissonance in the employee because the outcome is counter to his service disposition – his sense of right and wrong (Irem Metin, 2011 – Vol 1 No 6). We describe the build-up of cognitive dissonance due to faults in the service ecosystem as Service Dissonance. Service Dissonance accumulates over time leading to low employee engagement, reduced customer loyalty and low productivity.
Counteracting Service Dissonance is the positive feeling a customer service employee experiences when he can achieve his goal of delivering a positive customer experience. These customer interactions are described as being Service Resonant. These two forces, Service Dissonance and Service Resonance, are at play with every customer interaction. Ultimately, one of these forces dominates the service ecosystem and the organisation can be classified as either Service Dissonant or Service Resonant.
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Theory of Service Dissonance Introduction and Overview 2013 – secure