Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

In reading and researching a lot of problems related to customer service, there is one that we really need to take a hard look at: complexity of products and services offered.

When I have read the numerous customer service issues around the world, there are many problems that are related to training, employee attitudes and the way a business prioritizes customer service that are legitimate failures all around.

The thing I want to talk about today is the amount and diversity of products and services offered by some companies that make it almost impossible to give good customer service with.

This comes down to the overall strategy of a company and whether they are setting up their employees or call centers for failure.

We need to start asking hard questions like:

- How much of an expert can a customer service representative be concerning a certain number of products?

- Can it be uniformly applied across a wide spectrum of employees?

- Is it realistic?

- Do we have too many products or services offered?

- How much information is needed to service each offering?

- Are there components that interact with one another and so require knowledge on both or other products or services?

This is one side of the customer service equation that isn't talked about too much, that it is possibly a systemic problem, rather than poor employees or management. To me, Dell (DELL) falls within this category, among many others. There are just too many things that they offer to allow any type of consistency among workers.

They are attempting to deal with it by downsizing their product offerings and cross-training (this is a good step), but they must deal with the entire underlying management philosophy and purpose for being in business.

We all need to check out our underlying assumptions in relationship to our products and services and ask ourselves whether they can be properly serviced or not. If they can't be than we need to redefine who we are and be willing to drop things until we bring ourselves to the place where we can offer our customers the service they deserve.

To do anything else is to court disaster and a public relations nightmare.