Building Service Resilience in Australia and New Zealand
Vice President, Service Product Strategy
We have come beyond the panic point of the pandemic. We’re now deep into its reality and are becoming familiar with the enduring new normal. Businesses know what their challenges are, and service leaders are recognising the gaps that must be filled by solutions that are suited for a considerably long period of time.
At the same time, the expectations of customers around service performance have also matured. In the early stages of the pandemic, there was a gentle understanding from customers of why an organisation might let them down on the service front. Customers were grateful if somebody was available to speak with them. Now, however, we’re seeing higher expectations as some companies have figured out how to keep the service light on and deliver quality services.
This means that even during an extremely trying time, service leaders can no longer hide behind the COVID-19 excuse. They have to deliver.
How is this achieved? High-performing service leaders in the current environment are focussed on four clear priorities. They are:
Speed over scope
Defence of budget
Employee wellbeing
Risk management in terms of location, security and behaviour
Let’s explore these in more detail.
Speed: In today’s customer service environment, speed supersedes scope
Speed has been a major theme in business since the pandemic struck. Technological implementations and transformations that had been planned to take many months were achieved in weeks, if not days. Entire workforces, some numbering in the tens of thousands, were shifted successfully to a working-from-home model over a single weekend. And attitudes towards flexible working, having remained stagnant for decades in Australia and New Zealand, were flipped on their heads in a few short weeks.
Similarly, the technological tools that service leaders put in place must create quick wins. Anybody who asks their CFO for months and years of lead time will be told to come back and ask again in two years. Service leaders have to find the low-hanging fruit, identify a solution and roll it out at pace.
They must use fast implementation techniques – cloud based turn-key software, APIs, low-code/no-code development, RPAs, etc – to deliver the impact immediately for the business and for the customer. It has to be snappy, but not quick and dirty, just choose the right tools and implementation styles to be quick. We’ve all heard about service centres that have been able to go virtual for thousands of staff in a matter of days or weeks, but why is speed so important?
Consider an issue such as government subsidies for first-home buyers. How many days do banks have, from the announcement of the subsidies, to build the subsidy into their loan approval process? Of course, they can take as long as they want, but if one bank can do it in three days, they will win customer business. If another bank takes three months, they will get no business.
That’s where customers of every business are at right now. There is plenty of competition, so if you can’t meet a customer’s expectations, they’re gone.
This is an interesting challenge. The technology procurement department has always talked about functionality and cost – it has rarely talked about speed. Now is the time to talk about speed.
Service leaders must defend their budget
The discussion around budget actually relates quite closely to the previous point about speed of service results to first pick the low-hanging fruit. Budget and speed go hand-in-hand.
As budgets across organisations are shaved, perhaps ten per cent, perhaps 20 per cent, perhaps more, it affects the service leader’s ability to implement changes fast.
Customer service leaders need to find ways to defend the budget to deliver a series of digital capabilities that are critical to give them a lower cost base to serve, improve agility and to change and maintain service level in uncertain times.
There are a number of actions that we heard service leaders in Australia and New Zealand have taken to defend their budget. In the early period of the pandemic many organisations lost service delivery and contact center capacities due to overseas and interstate lock downs. Service leaders had to act fast to invest in digital capabilities to fulfill the gaps in capacity.
Fast forward to November and service leaders have taken these actions:
Started measuring service operation KPIs for the digital and self service channels to show the long term impact on lowering costs while sustaining the service level.
Started monitoring customer preference and perceptions towards digital channels – customers today have a much stronger preference for these channels than they did before COVID , even the elderly age group.
In order to support reopening business premises and offices, resuming field services, organisations required investment in digital tools to deliver the speed required in contact tracing, safety and shifts.
Many businesses needed to rebuild their customer service team on shore in order to prepare for the impact of future lockdowns.
Remote service channels, once restored, helped the business in selling, upselling and renewing contracts while their field sales team were facing the challenges of lock down.
The data will provide a strong argument for service leaders to defend their budget. In addition, service leaders should consider using any available budget to remove their service team’s repetitive tasks. Give those tasks to automation, transcription AI and chatbots. Allow the service team to focus instead on a more consultative approach, one that will help the organisation to deliver the customer experience and sell more.
When success is found in this venture, the service team will clearly demonstrate its value to the organisation in the new normal. It will no longer be considered only as a cost centre. At that stage, there is a powerful opportunity to defend the budget and, in doing so, build greater success for the business.
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More Resources
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