Improving Responsiveness
by Bill Porter, Porter Research

The number one complaint about service from customers is responsiveness. Although it’s a vague concept (How many ways can you define it?), customers think they know it when they see it or when they don’t. As the technical support industry matures, technology companies need to get a better handle on responsiveness if they want to be successful with customers who are raising the bar ever higher on what they expect out of their service experience.

As we’ve measured global attitudes in customer service over the past few decades, three areas have continued to rise to the top —responsiveness, accessibility, and resolution time. Companies regarded as “service leaders” by customers are rated highly for these three metrics while those organizations with service problems rate poorly. Service-problem companies, I believe, have an especially difficult time with responsiveness.

Poor customer satisfaction with responsiveness can be broken down into the following three categories:

Culture: Companies with poor responsiveness metrics don’t communicate or listen well. They also lack a sense of urgency. Finally, they just don’t seem to care about seeing a problem through to resolution nor do they seem eager to help customers.

Skills: Companies with poor responsiveness ratings typically lack important skills. It isn’t easy to get questions answered. In these organizations, service personnel don’t appear to know how to correct problems. They don’t appear to be knowledgeable to customers.

Service Business Process: Finally, organizations that score poorly on responsiveness usually have an ineffective “service business model” in place. Their first-point-of-contact is almost never helpful and is usually short on solutions. Timeliness is a big problem including inconsistent response times, no acknowledgement of requests, time between opening issues and a response, and the list goes on!

How does your organization stack up? Do you have a “culture of service”? Do your employees have the right skill sets to be highly responsive? What’s your service business model? If you can’t answer these questions, it’s probably time you started working on re-sponsiveness in a major way.

What actions can you take to score higher with customers in responsiveness? Although there are many, I suggest these five action steps as a start:

Hire People with a high “care factor”: Not everybody can be consistently helpful, cheerful, and energetic with customers, but they have to care and be able to communicate that to customers. Customers home in on this when they don’t.

Pay for performance: Reward good service behavior often. Use automated and web-based tools to regularly measure improvements in service satisfaction.

Get formal on timeframes: Whether it’s getting answers to a customer query or developing a workaround to a problem, tell customers what they should expect in wait time and other details. Have stated times (24 hours, two working days, etc) for typical categories of prob-lems.

Dissect your service experience: Have a third party shop and test your support and services organization and map out the touch points. What’s the service experience at every touch point?

Deploy technology at every turn: Post all fixes, workarounds, and FAQ you can think of. Use interactive query tools and instant messaging. Invest in state-of-the-art search and di-agnostic capabilities. Maybe a knowledge-based solution is right for you. Focus on the best self-service technologies available. Learn from companies with great service responsiveness like eBay and Amazon.

Work hard on responsiveness! It’s a frequent problem in global service organizations. By becoming more responsive, you’ll be more successful in meeting customer demands for an end-to-end, lower-cost, higher-quality service experience in the future.

About the author
Bill Porter is CEO of Porter Research, founded in 1989 and is the leading provider of outsourced Customer Knowledge Management services to the IT industry. He is also author of the best-selling Customer Service Book “Quest For Loyalty” available on Amazon and is currently working on a new book, “Gorilla Customers”, due out in 2005. bporter@porterresearch.com.

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