Managing a football game is like customer service management
What is the purpose of customer service management? Hopefully, it is to get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and respond to those needs to create a valuable customer experience. What does good customer service management require? It needs the right strategy, the proper alignment of people, and the correct technology to achieve long-lasting and profitable relationships.
Let’s compare customer service management to something we all know — a football game. To win the game a company must effectively manage the customer life cycle from selection and acquisition through retention and the customer’s recommendation of you to others.
- Strategy. Every football game is characterized by the strategy of each team. Your company’s strategy will not be the same as that of any other company. It will be determined by your company’s goals, your customers, and the conditions under which the economy is operating. The strategy will include people, timing, software, training, a set of moves, a design of what to do and when to do it, and even scripts for what to say in particular situations.
- Offense. Obviously, there are some similarities among all teams — the desire to outsmart the competition, to outrun and outpass the competition, and the need to have possession of the ball more than the competition. The exact plays your team uses to achieve these will set you apart from the competition. The offensive strategy is what your company will do to reach out to its customers – present and future. This includes mailings, e-mails, offers, upsells, and cross-sells. It also includes anticipating their needs. If they bought product A two years ago, you must anticipate that they will be ready to update it in the next few months. And if they update, you may be able to help them decide to upgrade or add on another feature.
- Defense. Every team needs to sack the other team’s quarterback; however, that only happens a couple of times in any given game. Therefore, the defense must stop the run and break up the pass. And it wouldn’t hurt to get an interception or two. Defense consists of averting tragedy and solving problems. Often we only think of defense in customer service management. If a customer has an issue, it needs to be resolved immediately and it needs to be resolved in such a way that the customer is so delighted with the service and the attitude that he raves to his friends about how great the company is. That is the way to break up the running and passing game of the competition and, if you win a new customer, it becomes the interception.
- Team members. Each team needs players. Most of those players are highly skilled in their area, but are not necessarily the big-name players. They work as a team with each person’s skill set complementing the skill sets of the others. These are your call center agents. Each is an individual with a skill set that can be developed and that can complement the skill sets of the other agents. They have to be managed effectively (by their coaching staff) to avoid making costly mistakes (penalties in the football game). But they gain great yardage when they do a good job and make touchdowns when they do a great job.
- Coaching staff. The coaching staff of any team is its management staff. Obviously, this is far fewer people than the number of team members, but these people have a breadth and depth of experience. They can handle a great number of problems and situations. And they have highly developed people-skills.
- Playbook. We have all heard the players complain about how many plays a team has in its playbook. We have also seen players botch a play as a rookie because he had not learned the playbook. In customer service, the playbook is the software. Picking the right software (plays) and learning to use it effectively takes understanding your needs, your advantages over your competition, and your customers. Sometimes the plays get too complicated and cannot be executed in a game and sometimes the software we try to use has many exciting features, but just does not fit with our agents or our customers.
- Football. By size and by comparison to all the other elements, the football itself seems insignificant. But without the football, there is no game. It is the football for which the game is played and every move is designed. Without the customer, there is no business. Therefore, everything a company does needs to ask the question, “How will the customer feel about this?” If you think of a football game as being football-centric, then you will better understand your company’s need to be customer-centric.
