It is common for organizations to commission consulting work to “improve customer service”.

Far too often, the expectation is that the consulting work will lessen the turnover of customer service agents, improve the average customer satisfaction rating on some digital survey or provide a positive “customer experience”, whatever the fuck that means.

Consultants would be best to manage clients’ expectations about what needs to be done to improve customer service.

Generally, the answer lies in improving the product to lessen the number of calls to customer service, empowering customer service to compensate clients who have been wronged, more computing power, and of course more dedicated resources from Product Development (Engineering) to address/repair features that are unstable/half cooked.

In other words, consulting Customer Service is all about empowerment vis a vis their very  own organizations, and far less about creating a “wow” experience with the client.

Now this clearly is common sense but common sense is not so common. And, since so much of customer service is “lip service” in an ever cruel digital world, consulting work commissioned for customer service units is often “perfuming the pig“+-as opposed to a genuine effort to make service better.

+Thanks Sherry for introducing  me that term