The power of ‘know’ and ‘no’ in effective customer service delivery

What is customer service?

In the 1980s, a team of American authors developed a service quality model SERQAL (Parasuraman et al., 1985). They originally identified ten elements of service quality (competence, courtesy, credibility, security, access, communication, knowing the customer, tangibles, reliability, and responsiveness), but in later work (Zeithaml et al., 1990) reduced these to five factors that equate to the acronym RATER:

Reliability: The ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.

The simplified RATER model allows quantification of the customer service process and has been widely used by service delivery organizations.

Within the information world the customer service standard is usually described as providing ‘the right information to the right person (or place) at the right time’. While that statement is certainly customer focused and encapsulates many of the RATER elements, is it also one that is more reactive than proactive?

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are used to track and record a company’s interactions with its customers. Different data around customer profiles, number of visits or calls, sales, and discussion points are stored in the database and then data mined for information in a way that the organization can use to increase or improve the customer relationship. They often track the return on investment (ROI) so that key customers can be prioritized and methods to improve ROI for other customers can be sought. CRM systems can also be used to track particular events and any correlation in the change in customer relationship, the launch of a new product for example, or following a significant conference or marketing event. Figure 1, adapted from Rigby and Ledingham (2004), illustrates the CRM cycle with specific information team-related activities linked to each segment of the cycle.

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Figure 1.

CRM cycle.

Increasingly there is a trend not just to simply track, measure, and exploit the customer relationship but also to try to quantify and describe customer experience – described as customer experience management (CEM). In practical terms, the goals, such as increasing sales, driving cross-selling and minimizing resources, remain the same but the focus in how to achieve that is shifted from the company systems and internal metrics and toward the experience the customer has with the company.

Companies are now trying to identify what makes for a positive and productive customer experience and using that information to build their CRM initiative. Designing the interactions, touch points, procedures, and systems (see Table 1) will allow the company to deliver that positive experience (Meyer and Schwager, 2007).

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Table 1.

The touch points, interactions, and experiences that contribute to customer experience.

Touch points	The liminal spaces where engagement with customers occurs. Typically considered through channels such as in-store, call center, postal mail, or online.
Interactions	The activities in which customers engage. Any business supports dozens, if not hundreds of interactions. With a bank, you can deposit money, withdraw money, write a check, pay a bill, move money between accounts, open or close accounts, apply for a loan, and so on.
Experiences	The sum of what the customer takes away from the interactions they’ve had with you.

Customer-centric relationship management looks at areas such as:

tailored marketing,

Not all of these are directly applicable to information delivery but, with some lateral thinking, many are – and others can be adjusted to fit. Customers may not pay in cash but do they pay in another way – with time. Can that be reduced to improve value?

Internal-facing information teams

Internal-facing teams, such as information teams, face some interesting issues; they share characteristics of both a business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) relationship since they service the business as another business but do also need to cultivate and manage customers in a similar manner to a B2C team.

Working in an internal-facing service department presents specific challenges for customer services. There is crossover with the techniques for finding, serving, and retaining external customers, but there are some unique issues. The primary of these is that the internal-facing service department is not generally an income generator. The second factor is that it is hard to quantify or measure service or deliverables in the same way that an external-facing sales team can measure sales in both quantity and value. Information units are not the only internal-facing teams within organizations, but they are more often called on to justify their position in the organization than say the communications team or human resources. The view of the information service function may be that of a business asset – but it may not be seen as business critical. Another internal-facing team, information technology, has addressed this issue by making itself an internally revenue-generating operation, using a full B2B business model, even as an internal team. That is, certainly one model but perhaps more effectively mirroring CRM techniques could enhance the information unit’s value to the organization without having to become a revenue source.

No direct revenue generation is one key factor that differentiates between internal- and external-facing customer service groups, but for information units another major difference is often the very diverse customer groups that the unit serves. Their customer base goes across an entire organization from executive level management, through to the shop floor. Generally, external-facing teams are focused only on the purchaser of their product, or their multiple products, though these usually fall within one broad category. If a company has multiple diverse product offerings, then they have separate customer groups to deal with these as they understand the importance of in-depth customer knowledge in developing an effective relationship.

The goals of sales teams are usually threefold – to sell products, to retain existing customers, and to grow the customer base. Certainly the information team also has a product or service to ‘sell’, and they need to keep their existing customers happy, plus they should also be looking to potential generation of new business by addressing information gaps within the organization. External sales teams can measure their success in absolutes – the number of new sales, the number of repeat sales, and the number of new customers, which can be directly correlated to organizational revenue. Information teams struggle to attach a specific monetary value to the services they deliver, although they can too measure numbers of deliverables and customers.

Specific issues facing information teams

Not being able to quantify the final value of their service and product to the organization in monetary terms is a significant issue. Products and services based on external content are often a large budget item, with a low-visibility value to senior management.

The value-add in this case cannot be quantified in monetary terms, but using CRM and CEM techniques should enable the information team to more clearly define the key areas where their service contributes to the organization, describe qualitatively where they provide either a service that the company needs that cannot be obtained without their knowledge and expertise or a company service and/or product that is improved because of that expertise (Rayport and Jaworski, 2005).

The ‘know’: Understanding your organization

To completely understand your customer you must first understand the organization in which they and you operate. What are the organizational goals and strategies? Reading and digesting all the company organizational documents is critical, for example, balanced scorecards, 5- or 10-year plans, company strategy statements, and annual reports. Systematically analyzing those documents and identifying where you directly and indirectly contribute, as well as understanding the organizational structure and where particular customer groups or individuals also directly contribute to those objectives, is important in your own strategic planning.

Identify the key decisions the company makes regularly, when they are made, and by whom. Could the information team more directly contribute to those decisions? Make sure you identify and can clearly explain where you have influence and where you can add value.

For information teams within an organization thinking about CRM from the perspective of CEM is probably more logical and would make it easier to achieve practical solutions to improve the experience of your customers. Looking at the touch points, for example, face to face, online (intranet and e-mail), presentations, deliverables such as daily news alerts, patent updates, and how those interactions are managed can reveal even small changes that could turn the customer experience into an even more positive one.

For instance, the difference between a physical and or an online presence – sometimes when technology is overused, would the relationship be improved by more face-to-face contact? How can that be achieved? Perhaps you could deliver key data both by e-mail and by a face-to-face meeting or arrange a coffee or lunch with the customer a few days after the delivery of a major request to ask for feedback and see if there are improvements or adjustments that could be made. Each situation needs to be assessed individually. Good customer service is not one size fits all.

The ‘know’: Identifying and describing customer groups and relationships

After you have understood the wider organization, the second key element is to understand your individual customers or customer groups. CRM systems rely heavily on generating data about the customer and their behaviours. Who are your customers? When do they use your service? How do they use the service? How do you communicate with customers? How proactive are you in contacting customers? Extensive profiling and developing strong networks are key to being able to provide the service that the customer actually needs.

Try to get real-time feedback. Regular surveys are useful but try to ensure that they respect employees’ time and only ask the few questions that yield the most important insights. Try to generate a steady stream of ideas for improvement.

Over time you can increasingly breakdown the various stakeholder groups you identify to target, ever more individually, services and deliverables to customers. Understand the networks within the organization and the networks to which your individual and customer groups belong. What types of network are they? Are they for collaboration or dissemination of information?

Look at the information flow, do you provide information to middle management which then gets fed into documents that go to a more senior level? Could you deliver that information directly to the senior managers? If you deal directly with senior management can you tailor the information more appropriately? If senior management questions the data or asks for it to be provided in another format does that question get back to you or are the middle managers answering that question for you without the absolute knowledge to answer it accurately?

Training your customers can be crucial in enhancing the relationship. Developing clear, consistent processes and even consistent naming of elements of the process can assist in getting the customer to participate in service delivery. For example, Starbucks use a standard language for their drink’s size; by constant iteration and verbalization during the order process, they encourage the customer to use that language too when ordering their drinks. This speeds up the process as there is less room for miscommunication and time wasted over unnecessary explanations (Frei and Morriss, 2012).

Customer involvement in the service often gives them a strong feeling of ownership that helps improve loyalty and buy-in to the product.

Identify customers, but also partnerships. Define the relationships you have with other groups or individuals in the organization. Sometimes groups or individuals are both a customer and a partner.

The ‘no’ (and ‘yes’): Your brand and your portfolio

A primary building block for excellence in customer service is a strong portfolio and brand. Often brand is thought of in terms of name, but it should be considered more widely than that. Brand is really about the service you deliver. In recent years, there has been a huge shift away from naming information units as libraries and giving them sometimes quite exotic titles in order to present a more dynamic image. The emphasis should be on having a clear portfolio, a set of services and deliverables that can be explained clearly. The importance of the actual name of the team will diminish.

It is very important to know exactly what you don’t do as well as what your team does deliver. Developing a clear service portfolio is critical. Information people are usually helpful by nature, and it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to assist with an out-of-scope request rather than saying no. This can be counterproductive. It devalues what you do provide as you probably can’t deliver against the same standard as your prescribed deliverables and you may be actually denying your customer access to the true expert on the topic. Say no if you can’t do something, and, if you can, try to understand and point the customer to the source where they can find the best answer to their query. If you can’t suggest an alternative, you should explain very clearly why you are saying no – lack of appropriate knowledge, sources, and so on. It is my experience that saying no appropriately either with a suggestion of how to find the information and/or why the request has been refused is very positively viewed by the customer and increases their confidence in the team and the deliverables you do offer, because you understand your own limits. In the mind of the customer, it generates the notion that if you are so clear about what you can’t do and why not you must be able to do what you say you will do to an excellent standard.

For each service/deliverable in your portfolio you should be able to describe the added value to the customer and/or the organization. Writing formal service-level agreements (SLAs) can be time consuming but very valuable in the long term. It helps focus the service or deliverable and ensures a consistency quality standard of delivery. The long-term goal should be to message this added value so strongly that eventually the customer will be able to describe the value add to you.

Writing your own strategy document and 5- or 10-year plan or your own version of a balanced scorecard can also be a worthwhile exercise – treat the information team as a business in its own right. Try to mirror the documents produced by the organization, in this way you can more directly focus on matching your deliverables with the current and long-term objectives of the organization. Think about producing an annual report, listing achievements, and plans for the next year(s) can be an effective communication tool to senior management. It can bridge the gap in their minds between your role and information they received, perhaps indirectly, in the previous months.

Developing your skill set

Having the right skills to deliver great customer service is important. Figure 2 is adapted from Senn et al. (2013) and combines with the skills identified in the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) to illustrate the skill areas that network-oriented customer managers should possess and develop.

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Figure 2.

Skill areas of network-oriented customer managers.

Further training and development

If your company or organization has a CRM system see if you can take advantage of CRM training offered to the external sales team. Ask if it is possible for staff to shadow a sales representative for a day. This will yield multiple benefits. It helps to understand the business from the perspective of its external customer as well as picking up customer service techniques that you can apply to the information team.