August 17, 2009

Too Much Customer Service in Enterprise 2.0?

Make no mistake that I am an over the top advocate for the customer within the enterprise. I developed these skills and attitude during the early nineties where I read every book on Customer Service and studied the success of great companies like Disney and Nordstrom's. I knew that this knowledge and mentality would play well inside the corporation. We repeatedly got comments like "you guys are a breath of fresh air" and "you can't be from IT?". So it shouldn't come as a surprise that I adopted and pushed my way into Collaboration and Social Software. These tools give the voice and control back to the end user and away from the tyranny of technology organizations. Our run for seven years was nothing to be ashamed and I think we changed the culture of the company from a collaboration perspective. The question that I place on the table is can you provide too much customer service or client-support?

My knee jerk reaction is hell no and you should go crawl in a hole for even thinking such blasphemy. However, if I take a different perspective then I can see where problems may emerge. If everyone provided the same level of service as Disney did then there wouldn't be a Disney in the first place. You go to Disney to escape from the customer no-service that prevails in most other companies. Therefore, it is understandable to see that other IT organizations can't match your service and there is some form of intimidation and resentment that emerges. What most people didn't see about our team is that we had world class design skills that were leveraged in our online support environment. We had resources that had 7-9 years experience in an IT customer service role. We also believed that our group would live or die by the level of service provided; it was the basis of our business model. Service wasn't an afterthought but the core principle where everything else revolved around.

Executives are concerned about scaling that level of service. Perhaps it is a cost issue; although our experience is that it requires far more resources to deliver poor service since the customer has to bring in their own consultants in addition to the IT staff. Our group was small by today's standards and it's far easier to coach and inspire a small group of customer warriors. You can't have one group delivering at customer service level 10 and the rest at level 5. Unless, you have the commitment that would allow you to leverage what the one group did across all the other different teams. Believe me, it is far easier to kill the one shining star than it is to change the entire galaxy of "good-enough" service providers.

Posted by Todd at August 17, 2009 7:48 AM

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