Fumbling Customer Service Handoffs

Source: NY Times

In healthcare, practitioners have been paying attention to "handoffs" for quite some time in an effort to improve patient safety.  An handoff is when a patient is transferred from one clinical team to another, or when critical information about a patient is transferred from clinician to clinician.  Fumbling a handoff can lead to a serious medical error.

Now, KPMG's Scott Lieberman argues that similar fumbled handoffs lead to many customer service problems at companies.  In Fast Company, Lieberman writes:

Ask your department heads how things are going, and you’ll hear good news. Leads and engagement are up, sales hit quota, and customer service is chipping away at response time. Every dashboard is green.

But ask your customer, the one that’s been passed along three times in five minutes between chatbots and agents and intervention specialists, and you’ll get a different report. Because she’s explaining her story for a fourth time: This company knows my birthday, my shopping history, and my shoe size. But they can’t remember the conversation they had with me 60 seconds ago.

And yet both things are true. Your dashboard is green, and your customer is on a hamster wheel. That’s the trap. Companies grade their performance one department at a time. But your customer is grading based on her experience of one company, start to finish, and the whole operation’s getting a D-plus.

The gap between those two scorecards lives in the handoffs—the moments a customer passes from one team to another—and that’s precisely where most companies are struggling.

Lieberman's description rings true for those of us who have called a customer service center recently.  The process can be maddening, particularly when you are transferred from one department to another.  Understanding how customers live through an entire process is critical.  How often must they be transferred? For what reasons?  How often do they get frustrated and hang up?  What information must be constantly repeated because it is not transferred effectively?   Solving these pain points requires understanding the ENTIRE customer journey, and that often can be very complicated.