This the third post in a series based on the HBR article Breaking the Trade-Off Between Efficiency and Service. The first post in the series was about co-production and last week’s post was about reducing or accommodating customer variability.
How many start-ups begin with the founding team saying some variation of the following: “We’re going to be different. We’re going to provide the best service. We’re not going to be like those big guys, haha, look at them with their bloated product and incompetent customer service. We actually give a crap about our customers.”
They respond to all customers emails within five minutes and ship features the same day they’re requested. “Look at us gooooooooo!”
At some point they start making real-ish money and hire someone to answer customer support emails. “Provide amazing service,” they instruct “It’s easy,” they think, without actually saying it out loud.
The problem is that the person the founders hired isn’t a founder, so they’re not able to “provide amazing service” without bugging the founders with a bunch of questions, which, the founders are mostly okay with because they want this person to have the right information, but boy is this a lot of work training this new team member.
A few months later the support person raises their hand, “can I get some help in the support queue?” “You want help answering some emails,” one of the founders asks? “Yes, but also what do you think about hiring someone else full time?”
The founder thinks about it. They’re just about to begin their Series A fundraising round. They can’t hire someone right now “What if we put answers to the most common questions on our website?”, one of the founders asks in Slack. “Wait!”, another founder responds, “don’t we want to provide amazing service? How can we provide amazing service if we’re making customers do a bunch of work answering their own questions?”
The support person blinks a few times and then goes back to answering emails.
Low-cost accommodation
Of course, self-service documentation is commonplace these days, so the above scenario is a bit of a stretch. And yet, we might forget that by publishing documentation and nudging customers to use it, we’re asking customers to do work that we could be doing for them. And that’s okay. (Usually1). This low-cost accommodation is a way to provide the same outcome but with considerable savings to the company.
Why would a customer who has gotten used to a full-service customer experience accept having to do work themselves? The HBR article explains the delicate balance:
For companies to succeed with a low-cost accommodation approach, they must persuade customers to do the work. This “persuasion” is typically achieved through some redefinition of the customer value proposition. That is, customers need to feel compensated in some way—whether through lower prices, greater customization, or other benefits of being in control—in order to feel good about doing work they think the company should be doing.
As consumers ourselves, we usually welcome self-service documentation if it gives us the control to solve problems faster. We’ll do the work if it ultimately gives us what we want at a reasonable cost.
Businesses can of course go way beyond just documentation to provide low-cost accommodations, often with significant up-front investment. Chick-fil-a, for example, is able to accommodate nearly any request that customers cook up. Do you want a spicy chicken sandwich on a multi-grain bun, hold the pickles? Sure thing. How about an unsweet tea with just a splash of sweet? You got it. Or maybe some cut-up chicken mixed with cream sauce, cheese, and bacon? We call that a Hot Brown2—coming right up.
Chick-fil-a not only trains their teams to be able to handle just about any accommodation, they’ve designed their entire ordering system around making it happen. They even offer the same level of customization you can find in stores within the Chick-fil-a mobile app. Their significant investments in service technology allows them to accommodate a high degree of customer variability at a low cost at the point of sale.
Low-cost accommodation isn’t the only way to creatively address variability in customer behavior. The other approach is uncompromised reduction, which we’ll look at in the next post in the series.
“Deflecting” tickets via documentation—or fancy AI bots that match your question to the right self-service answer—is all the rage these days, but not all customer contacts are purely a cost center. If support interactions present an opportunity to add value, you may not want to go straight to documentation as the solution.
For example, perhaps your relationship with customers is relatively weak because your self-service sales process doesn’t give you a chance to really get to know your customers. Having customers email support for certain issues might be a way to deepen the relationship with them.
More practically, if you have multiple products that you could potentially sell customers, you may not want customers to self-select away from a sale. Self-service documentation that says “This product feature isn’t available in the package that you serviced” ends the conversation. Directing customers to contact you to learn more could be a way to address the customer’s underlying pain point with a product you’re happy to sell to them, if only they would reach out and tell you.