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The Human Factor in Service Design

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The human factor in service design
John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea Focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale.

Poor customer service isn’t a headache just for consumers; it’s a problem that vexes senior managers too. Balancing the trade-offs between the cost of services and the customer experience benefits they provide is difficult. Ensuring that frontline workers can efficiently and consistently execute service offerings across a far-flung organization is harder still. Along the way, many com-

panies lose sight of what makes human beings tick—for instance, by overlooking well-known principles of behavioral science when delivering services—and thus unwittingly predispose customers to dissatisfaction. At the same time, the customer service landscape is changing as social media and new mobilephone technologies give com-

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panies unprecedented access to data on customer interactions, while the technologies are changing the nature of the interactions themselves—for example, by amplifying the speed and impact of customer complaints.

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How human is our service?

Three questions
Against this backdrop, some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, these companies are lowering costs by 10 percent or more while improving customer satisfaction scores by up to 30 percent. In this article, we’ll look at three such companies—a provider of cable-TV and Internet services, a technology company serving small and midsize businesses, and a car rental company. From their experiences, we’ve distilled three interrelated questions that CEOs and other senior executives should ask themselves before

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