Have you ever checked into a hotel that has a good reputation with exceptional benefits and once you have checked into the hotel you find that the service is below average? Last week I checked into a very nice hotel and the hotel was undergoing renovations and upon checking the Web site there was not mention of the renovations. As you can imagine, my experience was not very good and although the hotel gave me some free services for the failure the initial experience had ruined my stay. I formed an opinion as a result of comments made at check-in that the hotel was not being transparent in to their customers. The feeling that I had was one of disappointment, that I was being delivered little value, especially for the money I paid.
On the same trip, I was visiting a restaurant where the staff worked as a team to overcome adversity without impacting customer service. Prior to arriving, the restaurant called me to let me know that they were a down a cook in the kitchen due to ill health. When I arrived at the restaurant the waiter took the order and communicated beautifully through the course of the evening. When an extended gap between the entree and main course became apparent, he inquired if he could bring something "complements of the house" to help alleviate the gap. Needless to say the meal was one of the best I have had this year and the waiter who is the interface between the kitchen and the meal and his ability to recognize the situation was empowered to deal with it.
One of the traps that I have experienced of late especially in incident management is a lack of empowerment to those delivering support. The standard process is that you call or email the Service desk and then the incident details are taken and more often than not someone will call you back a little later. Now if the problem is easily resolved it may be simply resolved while you are on the call but more often than not most issues today are a complex mixture of business and IT. The consumer doesn't really care about the process or the domain of control they simply want the service restored and business as usual restored. This requires a focus not on the process but rather an understanding of the business service being consumed and the process for dealing with the incident process based upon that understanding. The result would be a change to the remedial action that is based on the quickest path to service restoration, leading to a change in the skill set with which we staff our Service desk. A great example of this is a utility company in North America that understands this and has merged its various "desks" together. Whether you are requesting direct IT support or support for one of the many intelligent IT devices that are used in the business, you can call, email or request online the service\request and it is intelligently routed to an appropriately empowered agent. That is not to say there will never be escalation and every contact is resolved at the first contact, but certainly the customer satisfaction metrics are exceptionally high.
In my opinion, we are all going to have to think about how we function and run our Service desks, especially as more "digital natives" enter the work place. Digital Natives join the workforce with not only their iPods in their ears but also they are both technically literate (wanting and prepared to solve their own problems) and have little patience for long delays before service is delivered. They don't want to hear about process or experience lengthy delays while someone gets back to them.
