Your Customer Service Should Fail to Scale

Do customers really care if you have great customer service? I don’t want to call a company to help me build a new desk I purchased. I don’t want to call a company to complain about a service problem, either. Do you? Designing a function that can scale to mounting external pressure from failures seems to be a capability that many value. This is especially true if that design incorporates opportunities to grow your customers by selling something to them at, or around, a point of failure. If your first service failed, will the average customer succumb to the pressure to purchase yet another service? Apparently they do.

Wouldn’t the overall experience for your customer be better if you eliminated these touch points altogether? To what degree are call centers, or social media teams, integrated into the process of designing a service? Engaging customers in the wrong activity at the wrong time should be obvious (this just happened to me, again). What doesn’t seem to be as obvious is tracing …