The Problem: Long waiting times and poor support over telephone help lines.
The Solution: Compel senior executives and civil servants to use their customer telephone line before being able to eat lunch or go home.
I’ve been using a few telephone helplines recently, and the service has been very poor.
Each helpline says they are experiencing ‘higher call volumes than normal’, no what the time of day or length of queue.
Most executives or civil servants in charge of such lines will seek to cut costs wherever possible, since they are not affected by the poor service.
There is a simple way to change, that, however; those in charge of helplines, or the companies that direct customers to helplines, should have to use the helpline each day before they are allowed to get lunch or go home, or indeed go on their annual leave.
Their lunchbreak would start when they dialled the number, and they would not be able to eat before they had resolved an issue (they would be given a different issue each day).
Such a scheme would force helplines to improve, as the powerful people in charge of them would then be affected by their incompetence, and would direct resources to improve the helplines so they could get to lunch.
The idea follows a common principle that those designing a system should use it, and also watch others using it, to make sure it is at the highest standard possible, yet this seems all too uncommon in practise.
It also creates a different type of incentive; rather than simplistic measures such as average wait on a call, or the time taken to resolve an issue, which are often manipulated to create the best stats, with this idea every day is a different event, providing specific and direct experience of the helpline’s efficacy.
As each day requires a different issue to be resolved, those issues which are ‘outliers’ in the statistics can be brought to the front of mind as the longest waits will cause the most hassle for those in charge, just as their customers experience.
Good customer service is at the heart of successful business, yet so many companies ignore it; making bosses of those companies use their services each day is a simple but effective way to improve customer service.
Being delayed getting your lunch each day causes real hassle and a consequent drive to change things to make your own life easier; that is a more powerful, and more inexpensive, motivator than simplistic monetary awards for hitting badly designed target metrics.
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