The missing lever in service operations: Agility

It’s easy to think that digital is taking over the customer-experience world. Widely shared statistics underscore the point: “More than 90 percent of all data in the world were likely created in the past two years,” or “More people are on social networks now than there were on the planet in 1960.”

The important point isn’t the specific numbers—which often have a back-of-the-envelope feel—but the speed and scale of change they convey. Anyone working in a service industry can see how people’s expectations are radically different now than just a few years ago. An effortless customer experience is the new normal: customers see no reason why their interactions with service providers shouldn’t be simple and intuitive, personalized and providing instant responses. That’s what disruptive, digital players have taught them.

So just digitize everything and be done with it? Hardly. Our research has found that in many sectors, around 50 percent of customers (or more) still prefer human interaction—whether in person, by phone, or through chat. And instead of focusing on individual products or touchpoints, customers want to experience a full journey of interactions. That means meeting these expectations not only in digital channels, but consistently across all channels.

The crucial question is how. We think businesses should learn from digital players, which have proven that a new way of working, based on agile principles, provides a breakthrough in balancing resource constraints and achieving excellent results.

The crucial question is how. We think businesses should learn from digital players, which have proven that a new way of working, based on agile principles, provides a breakthrough in balancing resource constraints and achieving excellent results.

In fact, leaders should push even further than many startups have and use agile ideas throughout their service operations. Because agile originated in software development, many companies see it as primarily for their IT or product-development organizations. That leads to major gaps in serving customers: all too easily, great products end up undermined by bad experiences in customer care. So, to give customers the consistent, expectation-exceeding journeys they’ve learned to take for granted, companies need to become agile in all parts of their business, including service operations.

In the customer-care context, agile principles form a uniquely rigorous management approach in which customers are served end-to-end by empowered individuals working in self-managing teams. But achieving this end takes commitment up front: In our experience, digitization and agile principles need to go together in parallel. Digitization applies for repetitive, rule-based tasks, such as validating basic customer data. Agile ways of working, on the other hand, apply for more complex customer requests, such as supporting a wired-internet customer who’s moving to a new house and wants to continue service at the new address.

These types of interactions enable service-operations teams to exceed customer wishes in a strategic way and establish personal, emotional connections. For the customer moving to a new house, an agile “Customer Loyalty” team has complete responsibility to resolve issues directly, without hand-overs. Will the move take place on a Saturday? The team can see which crews are available for weekend service, or can provide a small discount if service can’t be started till the following Monday. Is there a question about whether the nearest connection has enough capacity? A technician member of the team can review local infrastructure data.

Even this short example shows a few of the requirements for an agile team:

  • Multi-skilled employees who are carefully selected and share a common working culture
  • Teams empowered through direct access to relevant systems and technologies, and
  • Sufficient freedom to make judgments and minimize transfers.

In this new world, the objective of leadership is to provide clear lines of sight to the playing field while leaving the playing to the teams.

The results are worth the hard work of changing longstanding habits. It’s not just customers who benefit—and they do, with 20-point increases in customer satisfaction. Employees win too, with satisfaction scores up 10 points or more. Efficiency rises by 30 percent or more too.

This is a wake-up call for the service operations everywhere. In our next post, we’ll explain how companies can make the agility step-change a reality in their organizations

The authors wish to thank Wouter Aghina, Deepak Mahadevan, and Christian Schröpfer for their contributions to this post.

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