May I help you?

"Thanks,I do need some help", I told the lady sitting behind the counter in the bank. I need an Internet user id and password for my savings account. The smile from the lady's face sort of disappeared and she directed me to pick up a form from the counter and fill up the same with my account details, which I gladly did. But to get the form submitted and receive an acknowledgement I had to spend 45 minutes waiting in a queue and the operations executive refused to provide me with a request id with which I could track my request from the call center.


This is not an isolated example, I know of many of my friends and acquaintances having been through such a nightmare while making a benign request like change in plan for their mobile connection or change their address on their savings account. In fact, my friend actually had to change her mobile number because the sales executive of the telecom company's marketing agency would not accept a request for change in the plan.


Having seen multiple such situations in most service organisations, I decided to explore the reasons behind this seemingly strange behaviours on the part of executives of organisations that come across as highly service oriented in their branding and marketing exercise.


The findings are quite interesting(some of the consumers may call it disgusting). Most companies have very stiff targets for their front end staff for closing new deals and bringing in new accounts. The incentives provided to the staff is also directed towards new customer acquisition and towards cross selling of services to existing customers. Handling queries like change in plan do not fetch any incentives, in fact there are instances where the managers(also carrying targets) encourage the executives to try and sell a new service when the customer walks in with a problem with the existing service.

Additionally most organisations do not focus on systems to handle customer service requests which are non revenue yielding in nature but require effort on part of the organisation to fulfill so even if there is a desk reading "May I help you" there is actually no system to back it up within the organisation.

This attitude of the middle level managers results in the executives trying to avoid registering customer service requests all together. Every request registered needs to be closed else it tends to escalate. So the best possible solution that executives trapped in such situations can think of is, don't register the request at all. Since, it has not been registered no one knows about it and it does not need to be closed.

A similar scenario exists in arms of the government in India that are primarily for public service. Last year, a court ordered that police departments are duty bound to register an FIR of any citizen and provide a copy of the report to the citizen. The court passed the order taking cognizance of a common problem faced by most citizens wherein the officers in the police force would avoid registering FIR. The reasons are quite similar to the scenario in the corporate world. There are over worked police officers providing security to politicians and trying to control crime at the same time with dated tools and processes that make it difficult to cope with today's smart criminal. So the best way to show a reduction in the crime graph is not to register complaints at all.

So what do you do when a policeman refuses to lodge your FIR? You contact the higher ups and bring pressure on the police officer. A similar culture is building in most corporate entities. Since, most of them do not have a mechanism to handle customer service requests, the enterprising customer connects with the senior manager to get the problem resolved. But in the process of reaching the senior management and getting the work done under pressure from the staff a whole lot of heartburn is caused which results in a unhappy experience for the customer.


Most organisations live from quarter to quarter burdened with the expectations of the shareholders to increase the customer base and hence the stock price and dividends. This usually percolates down to the level of the front end executives who have to face the burden of closing deals almost every day even in situations where there is actually no obvious demand in the market. There is a major disconnect between the top management perception of quality of service and the actual level of the same demonstrated on the ground.


Is the pressure to sell more and more resulting in crisis in the financial services industry across the globe. A couple of years back Taiwan's banking industry was engulfed in a Credit card crisis that resulted in major write offs at most banks. One specific case that was highlighted by the media then was of an old lady selling street side goods having been given credit of thousands of dollars when she had no obvious means of paying off the debt. Cards were also issued to students who had no income and were years from completing their studies and take up any jobs. More recently, there has been the sub prime crisis in the mortgage industry in US.


A number of economists and financial experts have and will provide a variety of theories for the crisis based on jargon that most of us don't understand. The fundamental problem, perhaps is very simple and one which our local grocery shop owners probably comprehend more clearly than most highly educated Business Managers. Don't lend money to people who do not have capacity to pay.

Maybe it is time to look at revenue assessment models by looking at the revenue from a customer over a period of time. This will typically result in effective customer service models that work on retaining customers and realising larger revenue per customer rather than a mad rush towards acquiring new customers with complete disregard to the satisfaction of the existing customers.