I don’t believe any business purposefully seeks to deliver bad customer service and yet as a customer it can sometimes feel that it must be part of their strategy when they make it so hard for you to get help.
How does this happen? There can of course be many contributing factors such as poor training, lack of process documentation, the wrong targets and poor IT systems. These are all factors but if you take a step back and look at this more objectively, if you as a customer are finding it hard to get good support then it is likely because the support agent is finding it just as hard to deliver good support.
What does all of this have to do with habits? Good question, so let's start by looking at what a habit is. Habits can be good or bad and we all have them. It might be checking your phone first thing in the morning when you wake up, grabbing the same breakfast cereal or stopping at the coffee shop that is right outside your office each day. Habits form when you repeat something often enough that it becomes automatic and performing it is almost unconscious, requiring very little effort.
Just like water flowing, the human brain seeks the path of least resistance. This is driven by energy conservation and is part of our genetic heritage. If something requires effort then we will seek to avoid it or find ways to make it easier.
Let's take an example of a customer support agent, let's call her Diana. Diana starts her shift in the morning and the first thing she has to do is to log onto the support system. She also has to log into the telephony system, her email and the corporate documentation library. Diana’s company uses a group mailbox for all support tickets so she then opens this and starts with the oldest unread message.
What is wrong with this picture? Well to start with there are too many steps for Diana to take to just be ready to begin her shift. There is a risk of being distracted and there is no obvious way to see which tickets are the most urgent as everything comes into the same bucket. Diana can easily forget to log into one of the many systems and either cause a delay providing support or at worst miss an urgent customer call. You might say that Diana needs better training and a checklist, that might drive some marginal improvements but really none of this is Diana’s fault.
The way things are setup is making it hard for Diana to do her job and so difficult to deliver a great experience for her customers. Lets get back to habits. To help Diana and her colleagues work more effectively we can introduce some good habits. The first thing to do is to make it easy to perform the steps needed. If its easy, Diana will be more likely to do it and after a number of repetitions it will become a habit. So what could this example look like with a little work?
We could start with moving away from a shared support mailbox and instead using a support platform that allows proper ticket management. This would allow telephony integration as well as a knowledge base for support staff as well as customers.
A single login to this system would be all that is needed and a dashboard is the first thing that all support agents see when they login, enabling them to quickly prioritise the most urgent or critical tickets and calls.
Once you have some good habits in place you can build on these. If there are additional steps you would like an agent to perform then you can link these to existing habits or you can use the inverse approach where there are actions you want to discourage. If you see a trend you don’t like then consider how to make it more difficult to do the wrong thing. Maybe it's a shortcut agents are taking like not filling in ticket metadata that you need for reporting. Make this a mandatory field before a ticket can be resolved and help drive the right outcome.
So just like runners who manage to get out every morning, it's not that they are necessarily more motivated or have greater willpower, they probably just remember to put their gear out the night before ready for the next day and make it easy to get out for that run!
Small changes can have a big impact.
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