Why Customer Experience Efforts Fail - Part 2: Unable to resolve products, processes, policies, and people

The inability to resolve conflicts between products, processes, policies, and people.

This is easily the hardest thing in creating an enterprise wide enjoyable customer experience.

When a company asks me to come in and examine where they are missing the mark, this is the easiest area to identify. Let me give you some examples.

Imagine a company who has had a strong direct mail presence in the market, all built around analysis in prospecting and acquiring new customers. Culturally, this part of the organization has built the company into an empire. Their models are built with several factors. One of those factors is overdraft, past due, and overlimit fee revenue. This company was so hellbent on capturing this money, so their models would be accurate, they would not empower the agents to waive fees.

Consequently, this part of the organization created another group that would be responsible for reviewing fee waiver requests, where they would control what could and could not be waived with their list of "minor rule breaks". The list, over time, had grown into a monstrosity that was more complex than a bill in Congress.

Meanwhile, the agents are helpless and put into a position of creating a miserable customer experience. "Call back in 10 to 15 business days" to see if you fee has been waived had become the phrase I heard the most when I spent time listening to calls.

The backlog of fee requests was huge. They added a non-value add process that ended up waiving more than 80% of the fees, and they never looked at the overlap with their "minor rule breaks" list.

When we examined this entire process, we found that one rule captured 91% of the fee waivers requests. This one rule, could easily be handed to the agents.

As a result, we were able to reduce callbacks significantly, eliminate a good portion of a back office process, and bring greater alignment among product, policy, process, and people.

When you reflect on your own company, it's important to examine where your efforts are cannibalizing each other. Using the 4 P's as a guide of where you are creating friction for your customers is great way to diagnose your problems and find the root cause.