Customer Service Insight-Over Serving
Although you have probably heard of over-promising and under-delivery in reference to customer service, over-serving is a genuine phenomenon that affects businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes. Sometimes over-serving results in significant consequences and hard feelings between you and your customers.
Quite simply, over-serving is the providing of extras or preferential treatment to our customers. On the surface, it seems that over-service is a good thing. Providing extra value to customers. Something that many of us have been taught since we entered the working world. Give them more than they pay for. Customers love it and it equates to the loyalty factor.
The rub comes when it is no longer feasible to provide the extra service. Imagine this scenario: Your organization has a small, but extremely local customer base that shops on Saturday evenings. These customers have been with you for a long time and contributed to your success, growth and reputation within the community. Financial analysis indicates that the costs associated with staying open exceed the net income generated on Saturday night. Add the additional liability of more staff required and you have a classic loss leader. Close the Saturday evening hours and you risk losing that customer base and alienating them. Stay open and risk economic death by pin prick.
Or another scenario: As a seller of lawn irrigation supplies, you have always provided your customers with sketches and consulting for installing their sprinklers, timers and piping. This little extra was always greatly appreciated and lauded by your customers. Now you are son busy, you do not have the time to offer the drawings without risking the loss of another customer order. The reason that you opened this business is to grow successful and you now have robust customer traffic.
A final scenario: You offered premium pricing to a customer to secure their business. That business has yielded significant growth in your company. Growth costs money and the price breaks that made sense to get the business is no longer doable. Do you risk the loss of the premium customer? Are you concerned that a competitor might undercut your pricing?
Getting out of an over-service situation is never easy and requires a systemic and long-term view of the organization. The first and most important step is to be sure of your options and uber-sure of your analysis. The next step is to evaluate scenarios where the over-service can still be offered. How many customers do you need to sustain Saturday evening hours? Can we hire staff, efficiently and effectively, to still offer schematics of sprinkler systems? Can we reduce associated costs to continue to offer preferred pricing? Those are the questions to evaluate prior to eliminating an over-service.
If the correct answer is still to eliminate the over-service communication and timing are key. Users of a soon-to-be reduced or closed service must be given notice and a chance to adapt. As a rule of thumb, one month per year that the service was provided should be used as a notice period. So, if your Saturday night hours were in place for five years, you should begin the notice and communication cycle about five months in advance of eliminating the extended hours. When increasing prices, you may want to work around natural calendar starts and stops such as the first of the year or the beginning of a quarter. The only way to soften the blow of a reduction in over-service is through straight forward, frequent and well timed communication.
The elimination of an extra is never easy but you can minimize the impact on your customers while maintaining your bottom line.
