Article ID: BM031
Category: Business and Management
Title: The Decline of Customer Service

This extract from 'Managing the IT Services Process' appeared in the launch issue of 'Business and IT Support' magazine, April 2004.

Back in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties, a new watchword emerged in IT user support. The key to our relationships with our users was to be 'customer service'. This was not just an IT movement, it had come from business as a whole. Companies were differentiating themselves from one another on the basis of service. The concept spawned television programs, magazines books and countless conferences. Some companies were remarketed on the basis that with better service, market share could be stolen from established players and competitors. Some made such a great job of this transformation that they are still around today and their reputation for service maintains (stand up and be counted, Virgin Atlantic, Richer Sounds and Tesco Supermarkets - some of my favourite brands). The nineties were the age of service, and how we hoped it would last.

Customer service was about adding value to the offering, and doing so without adding too much cost, so the customer would see this as getting more for his money. To achieve this, the point of focus would have to be the actual service staff themselves. 'Customer service' was a matter of service staff behaviour, such that the encounter between customer and provider would be one that left the customer smiling, having made not just a successful, but also humanly pleasurable transaction. Front line staff were taught to smile while they were on the telephone. They were selected for their charming personalities. We spoke at length about 'employee empowerment', by which we would give our customer-facing people a broader jurisdiction in their actions when dealing with our customers. We taught them negotiating skills and how to handle complaints. We're still doing it now, and that's good in itself.

While we were so keen to improve our service, we started to do ever more for the customer in order to improve his satisfaction with our provision. This makes business sense. The more he enjoys our interaction with him, the more likely he will be to return. When you are building market share, the repeat business generated by a loyal customer base is a very powerful asset. It provides a guaranteed income, or in the case of IT Services, assured and appreciated relevance and usefulness. It bodes well for the future and takes some of the desperation out of our job, because we can relax into our future rather than worry about it. So it reduces stress, and our success builds the self-esteem of our staff. This gives us more confidence to do even more for the customer.

But sooner or later, the more we do, the more we increase our cost base. Slowly, our price begins to rise compared with the competition, and our customers realise that they are paying for us to be nice to them. They start to make decisions about the relative priorities of price and service. Those who can afford it will go with 'service' - others will start to wonder if they really need all this service, or whether what they actually need is to get the same product without the added value and thus save money. And as our customers begin actively to take these decisions, the market begins to polarise, between those who want the product plus and will pay more for the service and those who want the product only and pay less for it.

This polarisation happened in the commercial sector as a whole (note the rise of Ryanair and Easyjet and any number of retail websites). It is happening in IT Services also. I could call the helpdesk to discuss my problem, but if I do I'll have to carry the additional cost to my time of waiting in the call queue, describing the problem to a first line operative, wait until somebody comes round to fix it and then have to describe the problem again. Or I could get on the corporate Intranet or the Internet and look up the answer. It may or may not be quicker, but at least I'd be doing something rather than sitting and waiting.

The world has changed since the service age. Markets have polarized. Users have become more sophisticated. They are also busier, which means they need quick resolution of their issues - but their increased busy-ness means they also have narrower attention spans and less time to devote to understanding what it is we offer. So they will take the shortest route to the solution rather than take the convoluted paths of fill-in-a-form, call-the-helpdesk, write-down-this-job-number that we have given them. Customer service is not the panacea it once was. It's no longer the obvious way of producing customer satisfaction, because that added value's consequential added cost has become a matter of choice rather than default for our users.

Depending on your point of view, the change either threatens the emphasis on customer service, or adds a new and even tighter string to our business bow. The new concept is 'productization'. At its most strategic level, it has allowed us to 'unbundle' the purely 'customer service' element from our service offerings, and offer only that as an additional choice. At a tactical level, it has allowed us to take greater control over both the customer relationship and our costs of service production.

Once, the IT Services department (or its fragmented forerunners) would make itself available to do anything the user wanted, and it would receive the request with fawning respect, diligence and enthusiasm in the name of customer service. This often resulted in haphazard delivery and unreasonable customer expectations along with some pretty hectic and stressful IT Services offices. Now, we have 'productized' our services. We're not just simply available - we market/sell a range of distinct and designed services, which the users can choose to take (or not). They know exactly what they're getting - we know exactly what we're making. They can go for high-cost, added value or low-cost, 'no frills'.

Because we've productized our work, we can measure the take-up of each of these services, which makes planning (and therefore staffing, skill management and workload planning) so much easier.

Having so many products suggests that the manufacture of our services will be extremely complicated. But that's OK too, because we've taken a leaf out of the book written by the chef at our local Indian restaurant. Despite the fact that we have fifty dishes on the menu (fifty services in the service catalogue), we have only three flavours of sauces which we keep hot on the stove at all times. By adding different meats and vegetables and perhaps an extra dash of chilli powder or garam masala on the plate just before serving, we can have a very simple manufacturing process and still turn out what the diners (users) see as a huge variety of dishes (services).

In chapter four, we looked at how the various procedures of the IT Services department and saw how they can be distilled down into very few processes. Maybe your three basic sauces are 'user support', 'change management' and 'moves'. But from 'user support' we get the services of self-help, helpdesk, problem solving, escalation, training and so on. From 'change management' we get development requests, procurement, software upgrades, equipment enhancement etc. From 'moves' we get installations, equipment transfer, loans, project support et al.

And by the way, we also do 'customer service'. But now, it is only an element of, or an adjunct to the range of services we provide. It is not the be-all and end-all it was touted as back in the nineties. The new relationship with our customers is based around a catalogue of distinct services. 'Customer Service' is now nothing more than the expression of our professionalism and is a trivial addendum deserving of little more than to be taken for granted.

Noel Bruton is an independent consultant and trainer who assists IT Services groups and helpdesks to improve the service they provide. Based in the UK, he has a worldwide clientele since establishing his consultancy practice in 1991. He is the author of 'How to Manage the IT Helpdesk - a Guide for User Support Managers' (ISBN 07506 49011) and 'Managing the IT Services Process' ISBN 07506 57235). He writes extensively in the IT press and is a popular speaker on the IT Support conference circuit.

For more information on on Noel Bruton's services, either call +44 (0)1239 811646 or email noel@noelbruton.com.