You Can’t Put a Price on Customer Service…Seriously, Don’t

If the customer experience is a race, then affixing a price tag to your organization’s customer service is like tying your own shoelaces together.

That is the logic acknowledged by StubHub, which keeps its shoelaces separate and recently parlayed its culture of customer-centricity into a Hartford Courant award for best place to work.

A workplace worthy of that honor certainly makes the daily grind easy for staff. And, indeed, there is unlikely a single prisoner of the sweatshop-like traditional call center environment not tirelessly yearning for one with games-filled break rooms, intelligent seating arrangements, social events and generous vacation plans!

But StubHub’s real motivation, representatives for the popular online organization note, is not to create an environment that empowers agents to create a relationship of trust with customers.

And for that to happen, the organization has to be "all in" on the customer experience. It cannot simply declare itself committed to the customer; it must actually enable its agents to make good on that commitment.

Once cost of service enters the equation, that commitment is irreparably destroyed.

Regardless of one’s belief in the ethics of business, he certainly cannot fault organizations for operating according to logic. With profit maximization as a pivotal goal of business, expecting businesses not to minimize their costs is an utterly mindless proposition.

And so when the customer support process is seen as a cost, natural business instinct prompts executives to minimize that cost. Granted, this does not always necessitate a direct reduction in service quality—some would argue that providing better customer service in the short-term will lower support costs down the road—but it does force executives to scrutinize every moment its agents spend interacting with customers.

Inevitably, this mindset will spur trade-offs in the customer service process. From a dollars-and-cents standpoint, it might become superficially unappealing to engage beyond a certain threshold, and that means agents will be at least partially shackled in their efforts. No matter how strong the brand’s philosophical commitment to the customer, there eventually will come a time at which agents will be asked to choose between delivering the service the brand wants to deliver and that which the customer requires.

At StubHub, however, the organization eliminates the financial component to customer service. It surely looks at efficiency and productivity from a workforce management perspective, but when it comes to instructing agents on proper service protocol, they are not conditioned to believe that each additional moment spent with a customer equates to a wad of cash flushed down the toilet.

According to Marty Pelosi, a senior facilities manager at the ticket e-tailer, because the organization does "not put a monetary value on customer service…reps don't have the sorts of limits on how far they can go to satisfy customers that other call centers impose."

Thanks to that mindset, StubHub agents never feel as if they are unable to help a customer. And with that confidence comes great engagement to the brand and what it represents.

Training, for instance, becomes exponentially more valuable than it is in most organizations. While so many call centers train agents to avoid costing the company too much money, confident StubHub agents know they are being trained to better deliver for the customer.

With continuous learning and improvement a necessity for effective customer service delivery, StubHub’s culture is infinitely more conducive to achieving agent buy-in. When agents want to be better, they are going to get better.

And that all comes from demonstrating the value of customer service by not putting a value on it. The function is far too critical to the health of the business and far too essential to the harmony of the internal organization to dismiss as an unwanted cost, and businesses need to be sure they are doing everything needed to put customer service on its proper pedestal.

This is not a call to end the quest for productivity. It is not a request that enterprises leave the profit business.

Rather, it is a reminder that if the way your organization manages the customer support process differs from what you are declaring to customers, every facet of your operation is going to suffer. Forget optimal customer loyalty. Forget optimal agent engagement.

Forget being the optimal business.