Keeping service simple

I had two internal meetings today that reinforced with me how important it is to keep customer service simple.

The first one was with a long-time employee, a brilliant product person and people manager.  We talked about a lot of things, but one thing she mentioned really struck me.  She said that our current employee performance evaluation has so many facets and details that it has gotten away from what really matters – client satisfaction, client retention and campaign optimizations that make an impact.  She suggested that we move to just those three competencies, and I loved the simplicity of her recommendation.

The second meeting was with an employee who recently moved into a new job.  He told me that the new role was refreshing because he was able to really focus on helping clients and solving their problems from start to finish, rather than worrying about completing a specific number of tickets each day.  While I loved his new perspective, it made me think that on his previous team, they were more worried about targets and productivity than actually helping clients.  They were caught up in the complexity of our productivity formula versus thinking about client problems.

If you are running a service team or function, it can be easy to get obsessed with the metrics, productivity, targets and quality of client communication.  It makes sense – that’s part of your job.  But it’s also great to be reminded that service is simple, and sometimes getting back to the basics of just helping a client is incredibly refreshing and reinvigorating.