Surface Ripples

Salami-Slicing Service

One of the key tenets of any organisations service standards should be that customers are as well informed as possible about what services are available, how they are delivered and their price.  Some call this “transparency”. 

To make this work, we need to train thoroughly all customer facing staff (whether face-to-face or on the phone). Even product development staff need to understand the impact of their actions on customers. What product manager/developers may see as a “minor tweak” may actually be a major inconvenience to customers.  Think of when your local supermarket rearranges its product shelves… 

There’s nothing more annoying for a customer to be told one thing, make a decision only to be given another bit of information, make a decision and then receive another sliver of information which invalidates the first decision and so on (we’ve all been there). 

Sometimes this situation comes about due to new staff coming onto the team without proper training or encountering a new situation for the first time. There’s no excuse, however, for not being fully informed about all the “regular” products and services.

The other reason could be lack of communication, as when one department changes something without informing others. Whatever the cause, continuous small changes, “updates”, “upgrades” and so on (salami slicing”) can drive customers to despair as a well-loved product or service that met their needs morphs into a chimaera with no Bellerephon to save them. 

These days, customers are more aware and more demanding than ever. Unless our organisation offers a specific product or service that is unobtainable anywhere else, it’s easy enough for customers to switch to another provider. With the ever-increasing channels offered by social media, it’s also a moment’s work to publish unflattering stories about such and such an organisation’s poor service.

Whilst training budgets are often the first to be cut in hard times, there are plenty of businesses out there who will attest that it’s more expensive to repair a damaged reputation after an example of poor service/poor communication from lack of training than it is to give that training or have that communication in the first place.

This is where smaller businesses with flatter organisation structures and fewer employees have the upper hand over their larger competitors and their “internal processes”. Small businesses tend to have better communications as everyone may even work in the same room, making it easy to overhear conversations or have an impromptu “team meeting”. 

For larger organisations, the constant “trimming” or “updating” of services (the “salami-slicing” of the title of this article) is what can finally drive once-loyal customers to desert after the point of no return reached. We can only “update” services or products so much before they no longer meet customers’ needs, obliging them to look elsewhere. 

I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management.  I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website  provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.  

Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Selling

posted by William Martin @ 08:56