Trust and the Human Touch

(Service Management Magazine)

The interaction of service engineer and customer is a crucial, yet often neglected, ingredient in achieving true success, argues leading author john mckean in the second and concluding part of his article on 'the human touch'

As I was at pains to point out in Part 1 of this article in the January/February issue of Service Management, positive interactions with customers cannot be accomplished without understanding, and then developing, the skills needed to create the most effective human communication between employee and customer.

This involves becoming a better listener, as well as a better communicator to customers, both verbally and non-verbally. Remember, success depends on your ability to implement the 'human touch' consistently across business functions.

Business should view their interactions as not only between customers and field service technicians, but also as encompassing every interaction, eg sales, marketing, call centre, billings, administration, scheduling. Each interaction is part of a series of interactions that comprise the total impression made on the customer.

As a result, they must all be consistently 'human', as one bad interaction will weigh poorly against even an exceptional performance in another area. The 'human touch' of each interaction of the series should be consistently measured by a hierarchy of human needs, their weighted importance, and linked to the supporting business processes.

The box below is a good example of the impact weights of how the overall impression made by a field service reaches far beyond technical service execution (chart and attributes adapted from Ray Kordupleski).

In each interaction, there are nine specific human interaction elements that need to be imbedded into each interaction to create a positive 'human' impression.

Integrate 'humanness' as a defined process

Each human touch can be viewed as one step linked to many other interdependent steps to make up an entire process. Business should focus on human touch as a process that enables not only a high degree of consistency in delivering their humanness, but also in helping to isolate activities that dehumanise.

Embedding these human attributes into core business processes that can be rigorously measured and continuously improved upon will create an increasingly human field service impression, as well as increased profitability. Applying the process-oriented disciplines of total quality management (TQM) develops this approach to the human touch.

A good example comes from the hospitality industry - Ritz-Carlton. Their room service technicians would regularly respond to common mechanical issues, eg light bulbs being burned out, dead batteries in television remote controls, or keys not fitting. All of these technical challenges were very 'fixable' separately, but coordinating proactive management over several hundred rooms was difficult. A quality team was created to strive for 'zero defects' in mechanical issues for every room. This team developed a system called CARE (Clean And Repair Everything) to reach their goal of defect-free guestrooms. This team suggested that each hotel take four rooms out of circulation each day to have the maintenance team totally refurbish them to zero defect status. This would occur each day until they reached the initial four rooms. From there, the cycle would be repeated. It required three months to cycle through all the hotel rooms.

After this program was instituted, Ritz-Carlton moved from an average of 50 'defects' (complaints about mechanical problems) per thousand occupied rooms to one 'defect' per thousand occupied rooms.

Design supporting technology to humanise (not dehumanise)

Currently, the implementation of technology to support customer interactions humanises and dehumanises in equal proportions. There are four basic approaches for implementing technology. The goal is to implement technology to increase the human quality of customer interactions and decrease the probability of dehumanising interactions.

Studies have shown that human beings' expectations are five times higher with technology-based interactions than with human-based interactions. For example, if a person logs on to a company's website, their expectations for accuracy, that it works right the first time, and speed will be five times higher than when interacting face-to-face with someone. Similar dynamics occur with telephone equipment. The lesson is that there is little tolerance for even minor technological flaws, since the resulting bad impression reflects on the entire business. One underlying reason for this is that people are expected to be 'human', whereas a machine is expected to work flawlessly.

Changing a field service provider's historical focus on task execution to one of balancing execution and humanness holds the future of differentiation for every company. To deliver profitably the best field services for customers, and in a way that acknowledges and respects their dignity and worth as people, strikes at the essence of what customers remember about your company's field service. Take the first step today and give a customer your smile.