Designing Customer Service Processes

11.Self-Service Technologies (SSTs)
The ultimate form of customer involvement is self-service. Most people welcome self-service technologies (SSTs) that offer more convenience (i.e., time savings, faster service, 24/7 availability, and more locations), cost savings, and better control, information, and customization. However, poorly designed technology and inadequate education in how to use SSTs can cause customers to reject SSTs.
Three basic questions can be used to assess the potential for success of an SST and to improve it:
•Does the SST work reliably?
•Is the SST better for customers compared to other service delivery alternatives?
•If the SST fails, are there systems in place to recover the service?
12.Changing Customer Behavior
Increasing the customers’ participation level in a service process or shifting the process entirely to self-service requires the firm to change customer behavior. There are six steps to guide this process and reduce customer reluctance to change:
•Develop customer trust.
•Understand customers’ habits and expectations.
•Pretest new procedures and equipment.
•Publicize the benefits of changes.
•Teach customers to use innovations and promote trial.
•Monitor performance and continue to seek improvements.

9.Levels of Customer Participation
Understand the levels of customer participation in service processes, which can range from low, to moderate and high.
10.Customers as “Service Co-Creators”
Customers are often involved in service processes as co-producers and can therefore be thought of as “service co-creators”. Their performance affects the quality and productivity of output. Therefore, service firms need to educate and train customers so that they have the skills and motivation needed to perform their tasks well.

5.Service Blueprints
Service blueprints help to set service standards that should be high enough to satisfy customers. As standards need to be measurable, important but subjective or intangible service attributes need to be operationalized. This can often be achieved through service process indicators that capture the essence or at least approximate these attributes. Once standards are decided, performance targets can be set.
6.Design Service Processes with Emotional Intelligence
Service processes need to be designed with emotional intelligence. Below are the key principles about sequencing service:
•Start strong. The opening scenes of a service drama are particularly important, because customers’ first impressions can affect their evaluations of quality during later stages of service delivery.
•Build an improving trend. All things being equal, it is better to start a little lower and build a little higher than to start a little higher and fall off a little at the end.
•Create a peak. Customers tend to remember the peak!
•Get bad experiences over with earlier on so that negative aspects of the experience are less likely to dominate the memory of the entire service encounter.
•Segment pleasure but combine pain. Service processes should extend the feeling of pleasurable experiences by dividing them up throughout the experience, and combining unpleasant experiences into a single event.
•Finish strong. Ending on a high note is an important aspect of every service encounter, even if it is just a cheerful and affirmative “Have a nice day”.
A tool that helps to manage customer emotions is emotionprints, which documents likely customer emotions at each stage of the service process. The objective is to manage the customer experience well.
7.Customer Service Processes
Changes in technology, customer needs, and service offerings require customer service processes to be redesigned periodically. Symptoms indicating that a process is not working well include:
•A lot of information exchange is required; the data available is not useful.
•A high ratio of checking or control activities to value-adding activities.
•Increased processing of exceptions.
•Growing numbers of customer complaints about inconvenient and unnecessary procedures.
8.Objectives of Service Process Redesign Efforts
•Reduce number of service failures
•Reduce cycle time
•Improve productivity
•Increase customer satisfaction
Service process redesign includes reconstruction, rearrangement, or substitution of service processes. These efforts typically include:
•Examining the service blueprint with key stakeholders — customers, frontline employees, support staff and IT teams are invited to review the blueprint and to brainstorm for ideas on how to improve the process.
•Elimination of non-value adding steps.
•Reducing bottlenecks and balancing process capacity.
•Shifting to self-service.

SUMMARY

1.The Underlying Architecture of Services
From the customer’s perspective, services are experiences. From the organization’s perspective, services are the processes that are designed and managed to create the desired experience for customers. Processes are the underlying architecture of services.
2.Flowcharting and Blueprinting
Flowcharting is a technique for displaying the nature and sequence of the different steps in delivering a service to the customer. It is a simple way to visualize the total customer service experience. Blueprinting is a more complex form of flowcharting, specifying in detail how service processes are constructed, including what is visible to the customer and all that goes on in the back office. Blueprints facilitate the detailed design and redesign of customer service processes.
3.The Design Elements of a Blueprint
•The front-stage activities that map the overall customer experience, the desired inputs and outputs, and the sequence in which the delivery of that output should take place.
•The physical evidence the customer can see and use to assess service quality.
•The line of visibility clearly separates what customers experience and can see front-stage, and the back-stage processes customers cannot see.
•The back-stage activities that must be performed to support a particular front-stage step.
•The support processes and supplies where support processes are typically provided by the information system, and supplies are needed for both front- and back-stage steps.
•Fail points are where there is a risk of things going wrong and affecting service quality. Fail points should be designed out of a process (e.g., via the use of poka-yokes), and firms should have backup plans for failures that are not preventable.
•Common customer waits in the process and points of potential excessive waits. These should then either be designed out of the process, or if that is not possible, firms can implement strategies to make waits less unpleasant.
•Service standards and targets should be established for each activity, reflecting customer expectations. This includes specific times to be set for the completion of each task and the acceptable wait between each customer activity.
4.Developing Fail-Safe Methods
A good blueprint identifies fail points where things can go wrong. Fail-safe methods, also called poka-yokes, can then be designed to prevent and/or recover such failures for both employees and customers. A three-step approach can be used to develop poka-yokes:
•Collect information on the most common fail points.
•Identify the root causes of those failures.
•Create strategies to prevent the failures that have been identified.

Thus, the challenge for the service firm is to design SSTs to be as “idiot-proof” as possible, mitigate common customer errors, use customer poka-yokes, and even design service recovery processes for customers so that they can help themselves should things go wrong.35

A good way is to use the following three-step approach to prevent customer-generated failures:
(1)Systematically collect information on the most common failure points.
(2)Identify their root causes. It is important to note that an employee’s explanation may not be the true cause. Instead, the cause must be investigated from the customer’s point of view. Human causes of customer failure include lack of needed skills, failure to understand their role, and insufficient preparation. Some processes are complex and unclear. Other causes may include weaknesses in the design of the servicescape or self-service technology (e.g., “unfriendly” user machines and websites).
(3)Create strategies to prevent the failures that have been identified. The five strategies listed below may need to be combined for maximum effectiveness.

Fail-safe methods (or poka-yokes) need to be designed not only for employees but also for customers, especially when customers participate actively in the creation and delivery processes. Customer poka-yokes focus on preparing the customer for the encounter (including getting them to bring the right materials for the transaction and to arrive on time, if applicable), understanding and anticipating their role in the service transaction, and selecting the correct service or transaction.

Managers in charge of service process redesign projects should look for opportunities to achieve a quantum leap in both productivity and service quality at the same time.1

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.

Designing poka-yokes is part art and part science as most of the procedures seem trivial, but this is actually a key advantage of this method. A three-step approach for effectively using poka-yokes includes systematically collecting data on problem occurrence, analyzing the root causes, and establishing preventive solutions. This process is described in the context of preventing failures caused by customers in Service Insights 3 later in this volume.