Managing Service Quality: The Customer Is Always Right
Service-quality improvements need to be thought through in advance and managed.
June 2004
By Jim Hendershot
Customer information systems (CIS) are almost never justified and implemented to realize dramatic gains in quality of service. Revenue improvements? Yes. Rates management flexibility? You bet. Delinquency and write-off improvements? Sure. Statutory pressure, including introduction of deregulation? Maybe not as often these days, but still true. Technology consistency, supportability, and application integration? Absolutely. This means service-quality improvement needs to be thought through in advance and managed.
External Customer Service Quality
External customer service quality is probably the most talked about area of service quality delivery, and there are several meaningful standards already in use that can be measured prior to implementing a new CIS and managed closely through going live and stabilization. First, the easy ones:
- Average speed of answer or average hold time equates directly to customer satisfaction and, curiously, can directly correlate to average call length. An angry call is a long call.
- Number of calls per billed customer and per billing cycle should be tracked and trended.
- Bad bill complaints, justified or not, should be measured, and satisfaction with resolution of bill complaints should at least be sampled.
- Timeliness of field calls and satisfaction with the outcomes are both meaningful.
- Executive and regulator complaint letters, justified or not, are important indicators. They should be tracked and reported.
Two difficult-to-capture areas of customer service diagnostics can lead to great improvements:
- Why are people calling you? Most of us don't call our utility to chat; we have a reason. If you can discover the highest-ranking call reasons and prevent people from calling in the first place, everybody wins, including the customer.
- Repeat calls. An alarming number of calls into the call center are from the same customers, often with the same complaints. Measuring first call closure can uncover process issues, authority issues, metering and estimation issues, and gaping holes in system delivery as seen by the customer. Your customer service representatives (CSRs) know why people are calling a second or third time. Sit them down, listen to them, and then take action.
Minimizing unwanted call volume will involve the entire organization because there will be underlying issues that the call center will not be able to fix.
Organizational Customer Service Quality
The real reason top-quality service providers are able to consistently meet or beat their own tough customer standards is that they have a strong service-quality ethic embedded in their organizations. People in those organizations believe that service quality is imperative and part of their every day, personal job.
If mapping all of the interdepartmental service touch points in your utility isn't a part of your CIS implementation and stabilization plan, it should be. Every part of the organization gets inputs from other internal sources and passes its outputs to people downstream. The delivery requirements and quality and timeliness standards for this departmental baton-passing are sometimes not agreed to and often are undocumented.
Technical Delivery Service Quality
A strong technical service-quality ethic is a great enabler for an organization, giving people needed tools and information. The basic areas to manage include:
- Outage documentation. Every full outage needs to be documented, and the underlying technical or process causes need to be discussed and fixed. This outage documentation needs to be shared with the impacted managers and the action plan to resolve the outage causes needs to be agreed upon.
- Online response time and batch job stream performance. Online response time is normally straightforward to manage, which unfortunately often means balancing this key area of internal service quality with needed incremental investment. Batch performance also affects everybody, but not so noticeably. Alternate business processes need to be set up that kick in when a batch has problems or runs long. More importantly, the causes of batch problems need to be aired and discussed.
- Output management. This is the fuel the organization needs to power through its jobs. Whether the output is financial reports, service orders, collection notices, updated online files, or bills and statements, each output should be measured continually by its receiver for timing and quality. A simple listing of all daily outputs with committed delivery times and a daily report of success in meeting those deliveries are necessary and helpful.
Process Management Service Quality
Your internal processes affect service quality to both the external customer and the internal staff. Key among these processes is change management. There is no larger cause of system and service-quality disruption than regular "planned" change. The organization needs to be thoroughly involved in changes to the core systems, especially CIS, and needs to sign-off on the change itself, the back-up and back-out strategies, the dates and times for the changes, the support staffing, and the communication and decision processes. The infrequent large changes often are handled in this fashion, but it is the small, seemingly innocuous changes that get you. All changes need to go through a disciplined, well-communicated review process.
Your delinquency follow-up, noticing, disconnection, and write-off processes not only affect the financial strength of the organization but have a tremendous affect on customer satisfaction. All of the classic collections metrics, such as account aging analysis, champion-challenger collection strategies, and individual collector effectiveness measurements should be in place. But the magic comes in gaining an understanding of why people are not paying. Your collectors know why. Feedback from the collectors can bring to light bill quality or delivery issues, rate inequities, bill calculation or estimation issues, fairness of fees, and dozens of other problems that are probably being felt by the rest of the customer base who quietly pay month to month, but grit their teeth every time.
Another major process area that affects customers every day is metering and exception management. We live in the world of stuck meters, missing registers, unread routes, mis-keyed reads, and repetitive estimations. The process for identifying suspect reads, working the exceptions, dispatching for re-read or repair, and gaining an accurate billing reading needs to be smooth and customer-centric. The use of estimations needs to be thought through completely from a customer perspective, knowing that repeat estimations will almost always cause phone calls and grief.
Action Plan
Start with your organization. Make sure you really want to have satisfied customers. Make sure you believe that it is more cost-effective to have satisfied customers. Make sure you are willing to take action necessary to measure, monitor, and move the organization to create satisfied customers. Then focus on the customer. Find out why customers call you, write to you, complain about you, and don't pay you. Underneath that body of learning is a rich vein of broken processes, bad perceptions, weak internal communications and expectation setting, and lack of focus on the real causes of poor service-delivery quality. Once you get to the real causes and fix them, the service quality metrics will improve, cost per account will improve, and happily, so will morale.
Jim Hendershot is a director with Capstone Consulting Partners and has over 25 years of experience in large-scale customer care, systems implementation and strategic business management. He can be reached at jhendershot@capstonepartners.net.
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