Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category
New Year’s Resolutions for a Government Shared Services Center
New Year’s Resolutions for your shared services center
I put together a list of New Year’s resolutions for your shared services center. These are ideas or initiatives that shared services center executives overlook or are too busy to attend to. None of these are big ticket items so they are well within the budget of a government shared services center. They focus your attention on the fundamentals of service delivery and are panaceas for complacency.
1Call your customer contact center as a customer. If you run a shared services center you probably do not get service in the same way that your customers do. If you have a question about your leave and earnings statement, for example, you probably pick up the phone and call your payroll chief. What you probably do not do is call your shared services center’s 1-800 number and get in the queue. You miss an opportunity to experience your customer service interface the way your customers do. To listen to your call menu and make judgments, like your customers do, about the quality of the interface and the timeliness of the service.
No CommentsCustomer Service – Turning Negatives into Positives
- Over the span of just a few days I had occasion to call two government contact centers and two industry contact centers for service. Since these interactions occurred over a short period of time they provided a unique opportunity to compare and contrast government vs. industry customer contact center service. Too often government customer service centers lack knowledge of basic contact center practices and protocols and indicate an inattention to the details that make for a less than satisfactory customer experience (See If You Can’t Beat ‘Em). Here are a few examples to illustrate the point. I would allow that they are merely anecdotal if they weren’t so typical of other experiences I have had with government customer service centers through the years. Ironically, the things that would transform these experiences from negatives to positives do not cost anything to implement and would even in some cases actually save time and money. What things?
No CommentsHow To Drive Innovation and Efficiency in Government Shared Services?
In the absence of a profit motive and a captive customer base how do you drive innovation and efficiency? This is the crux of the challenge with government shared services. In the private sector every entity in the company focuses unrelentingly on profit (revenue minus cost). Profit margins are increased by increasing revenue or reducing costs or both.
No CommentsDo you have a service recovery plan?
A recovery plan is a series of protocols or processes that are executed in the event of an unlooked for but anticipated failure. It is what BP did not have. Or perhaps they had one but it wasn’t viable. Moving into uncharted waters (figuratively not literally speaking) as they were, they should have given a lot of thought to the “what ifs” . With $millions at stake not to mention their reputation, developing (and testing) a good recovery plan – the “what we will do if something goes wrong” should have been right up there with “where should we drill?”. A service recovery plan is not a contingency plan or business recovery plan in the event of a natural or man made disaster. A service recovery plan is a script that is executed in the event of a (hopefully) infrequent but predictable service failure.
No Comments“If you can’t beat them…”
Recently I have had a couple of occasions to compare the customer service provided by a government contact center with the customer service I experienced and have come to expect from a private industry contact center. Sadly, the government’s service came in way behind the service provided by most Fortune 500 contact centers but I’ll let you be the judge. These two examples illustrate protocols that are standard for most contact centers but some how or other the government contact center manager missed them. Perhaps he or she do not think the public deserves the same level of service from its government that private industry provides its customers although, in both cases, we pay for it.
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