When I work with clients or engage with a business I sometimes use this technique – I wonder how a business would react if their customers had policies. The object of this exercise is to imagine what your business would look like if your customers treated you the way that your business treats them.  For example, I had a problem with my Pay-TV service.  The set top box was faulty and had to be replaced.  I was offered a four hour window in the morning or afternoon for the technician to swap out the unit.  A five minute exercise, open the door hand over the faulty unit and collect the new one, turned into a four hour marathon. I loathe it when people value their time more than mine. So, I decided to cancel the service.  Again, they wanted a four hour window to re-claim their equipment.  It wasn’t the service representative’s fault it was “Company Policy.”  I said, “well I have a policy of my own”.  I can offer you a morning or afternoon appointment one day next week to collect your equipment. Your technician can wait at my house and at some point during the four hour window I will arrive and give him the set top box! I find it gives a CEO good perspective when using this technique to explore how they think about the Service Ecosystem.  If a Company has policies that it wouldn’t survive if the customers had the same policy… then it is probably a poor service experience and needs to be redesigned.  The challenge is finding effective solutions that work for the business and the customer. I encourage you to give it a go sometime.  I think you will find it very entertaining to create your own policy the next time you get an unreasonable demand from someone selling you their services.

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.

Read the full paper:

Theory of Service Dissonance Introduction and Overview 2013 – secure