Do Business Well

Demand high standards from your service representatives

Make people smarter! The abilities of real people delivering service to the e-customer services person will need to increase so they can add value to what the system already provides. If service representatives are left innumerate and illiterate, unable to organize, disaffected and reluctant, they will probably not add anything positive to the service experience. The bar is raised for those able to justify their involvement in the process. It has already started to happen.

Is there a future where we will go to one man to buy everything? A man who is wired into the complete network and is fantastically adept at manipulating the available tools to get us what we need. He may be able to serve and support thousands of e-customers because each needs personal involvement so seldom.

The e-customer is prepared to put up with the (possibly very good) system but when it cannot do what he needs he expects superb human assistance. The e-customer will believe more in the system when exceptions are dealt with swiftly, competently and wisely. He will assume that the rest of the time it is working without human intervention.

The more distant the human representatives are the more important contact with them is. You may only ever see the e-customer representative on three occasions: in time of crisis, time of triumph or when there are public relations possibilities. Rather like a politician.

You think that I am exaggerating? Perhaps, but we can still examine the immediate need for your people to deal with multiple channels. Several great debates are ongoing as a result between the relative merits of self-service and human services. The call centre and the web.

Having people supporting the relationship who expertly deal only with one channel. Or training agents to deal with all channels. The debate will continue.

You need to consider what your existing agents can cope with. Once you consider the cost of involving a human in the process you will want to ensure that they add the highest possible value. If a person, after training, cannot cope with more than one channel it is questionable whether they will be able to add the desired significant value to the system.

They will need high skill levels — more than just talking and managing ten words per minute on the keyboard. They need to know how to navigate on the internet, type at a reasonable speed without significant spelling mistakes and deal with voice calls to meet very specific objectives.

Cool technology does not make people efficient or pleasant. Just watch an inefficient check-out clerk using a sophisticated cash till. It will take longer for you to buy your goods than it would take an efficient clerk to use a simple manual till.

Remember your e-service will still be delivered by people somewhere down the line. If you go outside your own country you will be more reliant than ever on people. Time to think about common training, processes and standards.

Full-time humans can be supplemented by digital personalities or avatars but not replaced. Such services can provide the e-customer with the details and the offers and the headlines that he wants in a way that is easy to digest. Personalization without being bombarded with unwanted choices — that’s the ideal.

Such advances will continue to be made as the technology becomes faster. We will be able to digitize ourselves to read the news which will make us sound very clever. We may be faced with pop-star images trying to sell us life insurance.

Building trust and integrity

As more choice is delivered to the e-customer he becomes fussier. This can translate into complaints but it can also translate into being more choosy about the kind of people he deals with. Where the morals and ethics of all available suppliers are interchangeable this won’t matter very much. But some companies are already noticing the advantages of having integrity and building the business around it.

The net and the web were both born with altruistic ideals. It is a very wise e-customer flower that includes in his array of fragrances and colours the very attractive ‘We have standards. We want to help the world’ approach.

E-customers are basically on your side. They want it to work. There may be a few grumpy ones out there, but on the whole they want the stuff that they buy to do the job it was bought for. There must be some failure fetishists around but they do not represent the majority.

But the e-customer does want to deal with people he can trust. People that he likes. So unshrink the people and let them connect — so that you can profit.

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