Customer Satisfaction Isn’t a Process. It’s a Culture
Customer satisfaction isn’t about highly structured processes and programs but creating a culture of service.
By Andrea Olson
If you’ve ever worked the front lines, where you’re directly dealing with customers, you know that sometimes, a customer can’t be satisfied. It’s always a challenge dealing with a difficult customer, but many times, companies have hard and fast rules for how to engage with these customers, leaving employees in the position of facing anger, frustration, yelling, and even sometimes rage.
Is it essential to ensure every customer is satisfied? I would assume that most people would argue, “No.”
Yet customer engagement structures–specifically scripts, processes, and protocols–are designed to streamline this problem-solving and keep the customer happy, right? They don’t.
Think about when you’ve spoken with a salesperson, customer service person, or even technical support. Within minutes, or even seconds, it’s usually clear if you’re speaking to someone who is truly knowledgeable, has decision-making powers, and truly has your interests and needs in mind.
Compare that to speaking with an individual bound to a script, where they take you through an often unnecessary protocol, simply because it’s “company’s process.”
Of course, you’d get frustrated. It wastes your time and often requires you to repeat the same information or data ad nauseam. Companies can argue that the process delivers consistency and better responsiveness, but in reality, it’s designed to:
Keep customers in a slower decision-making process, to create the opportunity to wear you down and sell you ancillary products and services. It’s a typical technique used in selling cars, using time as a tool to draw out the process.
Protect the company from losing money or legal action. Simply put, if processes are standardized, they can ensure each box is “checked” to avoid any gray areas settling a dispute, as well as having proof to back up the company’s position on an issue.
Reduce company costs and expenses. If a company uses an automated system to filter customer support calls before connecting them with an agent, it reduces company costs including salaries, training, and benefits expenses.
In short, many customer service, sales, and support functions are not designed to serve the customer but rather serve the company.
It’s reasonable as a company to believe you can’t satisfy every customer. Companies should be aware of who are their truly challenging customers and consider whether you want to continue to do business with them. If that relationship between the company and the customer is toxic, sometimes it’s best to cut off that relationship.
However, if the company is not tooled up to truly listen to, engage, and serve customers, will have many more unsatisfied customers than happy ones. Or simply many who choose not to complain and migrate to the competition.
Organizations that focus on creating genuine satisfaction are those that listen, are proactive, and are insightful to the greater needs of their customers, first and foremost. They design their communications, processes, and training around the customer and the way they want to do business, rather than forcing them into following internal business processes. In short, it’s driving the organizational strategy and culture around service over cost-cutting.
So companies unwittingly create unhappy and dissatisfied customers due to their internal processes, procedures, and lack of employee training and support. The question isn’t how to satisfy all of your customers, but whether you are generating customer dissatisfaction from the inside out.