Like many firms in these days of credit crunch, we have been doing a bit of thinking behind the scenes about customer focus and how to improve our service standards. What we'd like to do is to try to work out what customer service means for a consultancy firm. (Interestingly despite spending a modicum of time on Google, I can't find anything about customer service standards/models in a consultancy context. If anyone knows of any, can you let me have them or tell me where to look).
Anyway I'd be interested in your thoughts about the following situation; what does it tell us about customer service?
We have a dedicated fax line in the house, though why isn't entirely clear; only lawyers and junk mailers seem to believe in these things anymore. A few weeks ago it went dead, so I called our friendly multinational telecomms company who sent out an engineer. (All well to that point.)
He wanted to test the socket, which sits behind my desk. When I pointed out the location, it was obvious that he had a problem; it's possible to get at it to plug things in (it requires bendy arms but it's just possible) but not to unscrew the face plate and see what's happening inside. No, he wanted full access. I explained that that wasn't possible without partly dismantling and pulling the desk away from the wall; that could take the best part of an hour. So off he went having re-arranged for someone to come back out the next day by which time I would have got the area clear. He also chipped in that the wiring was built into the wall (when we had the room done) which is something that their engineers would never do .... oh no, they only surface-mount for ease of access ..... silly me. By this time I was a bit hacked off to say the least.
So I duly got the area ready and waited for engineer no.2. He turned out to be very different. He plugged in a tester (which didn't need the desk to be moved), declared that the line was dead at that end and said that the next thing to do was to test the box outside where the various cables (3 phone lines, cable tv and broadband) all come in from the street. Lo and behold, there it was, a broken cable, now fixed and restored to normal after c.5 minutes work.
At this point he pointed out where his colleague had gone wrong; he could have tested the socket behind the desk and then gone outside and found the problem, without any need for re-arranging the appointment, getting me to waste time moving furniture around (and dropping various bits of IT equipment in the process - now dented but functioning), and generally annoying me by lecturing me about builders etc and implying that this was all my fault.
So was engineer no. 1:
1) lazy?
2) unimaginative and not prepared to think of a work-around for what must be a common problem - if the socket doesn't work, try the line where it comes in?
3) too process-oriented - I can't do stage 1 on my check list, so I'm not going to even try stage 2?
4) incompetent?
5) all the above?
Ultimately it doesn't matter; what it says is that customer service is all down to the person you actually deal with (0/10 for the first engineer; 10/10 for the second). I've always known it about this particular company and if it weren't for the switching costs, inconvenience and lack of certainty that anyone else would be any better (cf. our experience with mobile phone operators), I'd be off like a flash.
So how do we - or any other service company - stop ourselves from becoming like that?