Who's Serving Who?
The danger of 'courtesy calls' being used as SLA enforcement mechanisms
By Samantha Mazer, Principal Consultant , The Thoughtscape Group

As an organisational performance consultant and unabashed research junkie, I am a huge proponent of organisations seeking and leveraging feedback from stakeholders.    I am, however, less enamoured of the trend towards courtesy calls that profess to be checking customer satisfaction but in fact provide no value-add or any feedback opportunity.    Often, and most concerning, are those used as a thinly veiled check on service level agreements (SLAs) with external service providers.

By way of example we recently installed a solar energy system in our home, purchased from a major energy supplier.   The advertising was clear, the price was competitive, the web interface for the purchase was simple and the follow up scheduling call was timely.   The day before the installation was to occur, we received two courtesy calls to reconfirm the installers would arrive between 8 and 10am the next morning and be done by lunchtime.

After a third 'courtesy call' the morning of the installation, imagine our surprise when the installer arrived 15 minutes late, dropped off the panels and advised that he would return 'some time later this afternoon' to install them.   Around 2pm, with no installer in sight (and having had to reschedule my afternoon appointments) I received another 'courtesy call' from the energy company.   Before I got past "I'm still waiting..." I was interrupted and told I would have to ring the energy company directly if I had a complaint because this call was just to check whether or not it had been done.  

Clearly the system of so-called 'courtesy calls' was instituted to measure compliance with the installers' SLA and had nothing at all to do with courtesy or fixing any problems they might discover.

It's not uncommon for organisations to use sub-contractors to deliver services, and of course measuring compliance with SLAs is a fundamental part of ensuring minimum standards are met within that business model.   However what my energy company--and many other organisations--are failing to recognise is that using the customer to monitor service providers creates a sensitive conundrum.  

Service level agreements are predicated on the knowledge that failures and problems are inevitable.   Using courtesy calls as a compliance monitoring mechanism has some merit, but only if they include a mandate for the caller to respond in a meaningful way to any issues they uncover.    When that element is absent, the call serves only to exacerbate the customer's frustration as well as making your company appear unconcerned and  unresponsive.

Economies achieved through the use of external service providers are rapidly eroded when the SLA breach that saves you money (through enforcing contractual penalty clauses) is the same one that loses you a customer.    Spending the time and money to create systems that allow customer facing staff to resolve issues is a small price to pay for the freedom to outsource certain functions.   There are also a range of other simple organisational interventions that can help to more closely align your external service providers with your company's ethos, goals and standards.

Customer service is one of those nebulous terms that means different things to different people. That's why Thoughtscape talks in terms of organisational performance.    If any of this is sounding familiar, maybe your company would benefit from talking to Thoughtscape.