Why is customer service so boring?

Last week I was in Chennai to attend the Board Meeting of a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting customer service in the country. The meeting was scheduled from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.  Either because the Directors were too smart or the agenda too thin, the meeting wound up by 12.  I wish I were part of more board meetings like this! The Chairman decided to reward us by taking us for lunch to the ITC Grand Chola. Let me quickly tell you that I have been a great admirer of this hotel and speak about it in some of my presentations. They had ‘wowed’ me a couple of years ago when I stayed with them by giving me an iPad to take care of the controls in my room which enabled me to switch off lights, see who was at the door, switch on the bathroom light, etc. With that experience still in my memory, we went to the restaurant at 12.30 p.m. only to find the place still reluctant to take guests. A surly looking lady made us wait for 15 minutes before she found a place in the then empty restaurant. Breakfast litter were still around and someone apologetically told us that the IPL teams who were staying at the hotel had come in late for breakfast. Poor MS Dhoni, he is blamed if children do poorly in exams or if the restaurant is not ready for lunch. How much burden can the broad shoulders of the Indian Captain take!

Oh the days of the Empire!

Though the lunch buffet was priced beyond the reach of poor advertising professionals, there was an offer for a brand of beer that I had never heard of called ‘British Empire’. But then again Tamil Nadu has never really had a choice of liquor, but that is not the problem of the hotel. What was the problem was the poor service - like serving one person on the table leaving the others unattended, a failure to remove anything that was consumed; stone cold herbal tea … the list goes on. When I drew the attention of a senior hotel official dining at the next table, he just sent someone else instead of coming up directly to understand what the issue was. To me, one of the greatest things about the hospitality business is that even if a General Manager comes to your table, he will pick up the dishes because he is a service provider, however high his designation might be and I find that particularly stimulating. But here we had soiled napkins, dirty dishes and plates and no one even thought of cleaning it. Since we had a service expert in our midst (not me) we asked to see the Food and Beverage Manager.

Whither service retrieval?

Without going into a long harangue of whatever went wrong, let me quickly tell you that we told the Food and Beverage Manager everything in graphic detail. He listened patiently, made all the sympathetic noises, apologized profusely and thanked us for the feedback. Could he have handled the situation differently? Certainly. The people who were at the table were fairly important corporate clients running large corporations. Could he have given them a cake as a gesture of good will or a discount voucher for the next meal, a bunch of flowers… who knows? I am hardly a service expert but we were left severely disappointed even as we kept discussing it on the way to the airport.

So what is the learning?

Service is all about expectations. Was our expectation because it was the ITC Grand Chola? Did our experience seem worse than it actually was because they did not meet the basic “hygiene factors” which such a luxury hotel should attain? Customer expectations are rising by the moment and is our organization being left behind in the shifting sands of expectation? Have people forgotten the importance of a smile, an apology or a gesture? Are they painstakingly adhering to the boring repetitive aspects of consumer service - like cleaning the tables immediately after someone finishes eating? It is non adherence to these basic routines that both irritate and turn away customers. And finally one sobering thought. If this is the situation with a reputed high-class service organization like ITC hotels, where does it place ordinary mortals?

Thankfully every day is a new day and you can start afresh. But like we say in advertising “you are only as good as your current campaign”, every service organization needs to remember that it cannot sit back on its former achievements and begin every service day with a completely new slate. Have fun serving!

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As I sit in the Custommerce National Convention listening to exotic concepts such as customer-centricity, engagement, experience frameworks and multi-channel customer interactions, my mind started wandering. I can almost hear you saying “tell me another” but in my defence I must tell you that I was still staying in the customer experience realm but in my own selfish way, I was thinking about myself as a customer and my own experiences over the years. Was there anything truly outstanding that I have experienced as a customer that I could remember, relish and share with you?

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The trouble with customer service

Aspiring to create a service differential is a noble thing but make sure your routine services are handled well. While it is all fine to strive to build a service differential it is certainly risky to embark on the pillow trail if the other routine service stuff is not handled adequately.

Customer service or should one say the lack of it, is a great conversation opener. I always wonder which opens up tongues more, the brew from Scotland or poor customer service. I am sure it is the latter and even the most stubborn of introverts have no difficulty opening up to total strangers as their tale of woe about one service provider or the other finds a more than sympathetic listener who is more than willing to share his own horror story. Sadly though, there is a lot of heat that the subject generates and even a few laughs, but not too much light is shed on the way forward. After all, as Indians we love to criticise when the shoe is on someone else's foot even if we do not have something constructive to offer. But there are exceptions to conversations about service and I experienced this when I had the opportunity to interview Dr A. Parasuraman, Vice-Dean of Faculty and Professor at the University of Miami, an acknowledged expert on service quality and a renowned and respected academician. He has one more admirable qualification that I must table – he was my senior at Don Bosco school in Chennai's Egmore, and what better qualifications can a person have to talk about service or for that matter any subject under the sun! Tempted as I am to wax eloquent about my alma mater, my escapades that were part of my life there and my penchant for churning out impositions (with amazing regularity), I shall desist and stay with the less glamorous topic of customer service.

Pillow talk

Parasu, as he is affectionately referred to, had come to India to be the keynote speaker at the Custommerce summit at Mumbai earlier this month. I used the opportunity to spend quality time with him and as always he came up with some interesting insights that have been a feature of his writing and teaching over the years. His ideas made me think about my own experiences as a customer which too are reflected in this piece. He shared an interesting experience of his where he had been to a star hotel which welcomed him with a glitzy ‘pillow menu' in addition to the usual stuff that people who inhabit five-star hotels are familiar with. Even to this social class that has been there and done that a ‘pillow menu' is certainly a rarity and worth talking about.
So what happens when you see a glossy pillow menu listing ten different types of pillows (from soft to medium to hard), one of which would be delivered to your room at the touch of a button? The first is that you are impressed enormously and can hardly wait to rest your head on one of those fluffy things. The second, which does not have to wait till you go to bed and which happens almost immediately, is that your expectations from the hotel skyrocket (how good will this hotel be that actually thinks up a ‘pillow menu') and quickly plummet when the hotel forgets to give you your wake up call in the morning which is something that most hotels normally do without too much trouble. There is an important learning for organisations from this incident. While it is all fine to strive to build a service differential it is certainly risky to embark on the pillow trail as you can so easily end with egg on your face if the other routine service stuff is not handled adequately. As an aside, the innovation too is pretty expensive as you have to create a glossy brochure, actually find different types of pillows and handle the inventory for hundreds of rooms, not to forget the additional personnel that such a service entails.

Routine or non-routine?

Parasu spoke at length about the routine aspects of service and the non-routine aspects of service that companies constantly have to deliver. Let's take the case of airlines - ticketing, checking in people, delivery of baggage are all routine stuff and companies usually have a process to handle this. Of course, let's not forget for a moment that while these are ‘hygiene' factors, the inability to deliver on this could cause disproportionate angst when the airlines slip up on any of these. Parasu argues that while organisations do have a process for the delivery of routine service, they come to grief often when they have to face non-routine service demands. They usually have metrics to measure their performance on routine stuff, like how long it takes or should take for a person to check in, how long before the luggage arrives to the room after check-in, and so on.
What happens in the case of non-routine stuff is quite another kettle of fish altogether. How often have we seen tired, weary travellers anxious to go home after a long and draining flight only to be told that their baggage is not on the same flight! This is clearly a non-routine event and the service provider that is prepared for this, the one that has metrics for measurement and has a back-up plan to tackle contingencies such as these will win the service stakes.

Of course, every industry has its own share of non-routine events. Take the hotel industry - how often have we seen irate hotel guests losing their cool in the lobby when they are told they do not have a reservation, though they very clearly believe they have one! They tell the whole world, even if they are not interested in the story, about how pathetic the hotel is and how it needs to overhaul its reservation systems! We have seen in our own experience in the consulting business too, when a client wants as scope of deliverables something that we are not readily used to, the entire process goes into a tizzy and needless delays occur in submitting a proposal, which in any case is the easiest of the various stages in the consulting process.

A non-routine dosa!

With my mind full of routine and non-routine service experiences I came back to Bangalore, the dosa capital of India (or so we would like to believe). The newest joint making waves in Bangalore is a restaurant called Maiyya in Jayanagar which has people waiting forever (or so it seems) to get into, three stories that are brimming with hungry residents of Bangalore, a stand-and-drink coffee centre and a bakery all rolled in one. We went there as a large group and complicated the normally efficient hotel as we asked for non-routine stuff! Bangalore has this habit of inserting chutney inside the dosa which is a specialty (or a pain) depending on which side of the Cauvery you belong to. I cannot handle it whilst some in my group wanted it that way, our instructions to have a few with and a few without created so much chaos and caused so much angst, with the wrong dosas being served and being returned, and everyone including the waiter was thoroughly aggrieved in the bargain. I am sure that he never wants to see my bald head again and I am sure I am never going back. If only, I thought to myself, if only I could have stayed with the simple, routine dosa the way it is served in Karnataka, I might have never realised the value of the point being made by Parasu, for after all, nothing has such a lasting impression as the lesson learnt on an empty stomach!

Service is in the details

So here are a few thoughts that you can mull over in the context of customer service:
Is more time being consumed in talking about service in your company than actually delivering it?
Is your senior management committed to customercentricity and service?
How well is your technology integrated with your entire service offering?
How closely do you monitor both your routine and non-routine service deliveries?
Do you have metrics to measure and monitor both?
How good are your retrieval mechanisms when something goes wrong, for a retrieval situation can actually provide a wonderful opportunity to cover lost ground.

The reality is that service is hardly as glamorous as it is made out to be. It is unremitting, constant attention to detail, boring, repetitive but with great scope for both irritating and turning away your customers. And yet, there is a pot of gold to be won at the end of the ordeal, as so few service providers make the cut with an increasingly demanding customer.
Are you the one?

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly - Branding on Indian Turf.)

Image Source: InsideSocal