by Thomas Howe
If you need any more evidence of the power of consistency, look no further than your local franchise restaurant. With few exceptions, the best restaurant in your town is not the Outback Steakhouse, but franchise restaurants are excellent examples of successful businesses with high customer satisfaction. Chili’s, Friday’s, and The Olive Garden will never receive a four-star rating, but you’ll leave your table very satisfied with your experience. The comparison is more than gastronomic. Of all startup businesses, restaurants are consistently among the worst financial performers– over 70 percent eventually fail–yet franchise restaurants have very high success rates. We laugh when Weird Al tells us that his lifelong dream is to get a part-time job at the Sizzler; the owner laughs as he deposits the night’s receipts.
For good reason, customers value and reward companies that provide consistent and predictable service. Many studies by industrial psychologists show that customers truly do have a “better the devil you know” attitude, and rank surprises low on their list of desirable qualities from the companies they patronize. Apparently, lower quality products and services are OK, but the inability to predict the quality of a service is not. We can see this in our own industry. For generations, the most dependable thing was dial tone. Every time a customer picks up a handset, dial tone has been there. Cell phones are a radical lowering in terms of service reliability from landlines, yet most consumers accept this without complaint. We have a different expectation from our landline phones and call the landline phone company with our mobile phones at the first sign of trouble.
People are simply happier when they can predict the level of the service they are going to receive.
Automation is surely the friend of consistency, just as human behavior is the enemy. Mature businesses invest in process and process technology mainly to enforce consistency of service delivery, with the resultant benefits of higher levels of control, leading to higher customer satisfaction, lower operating costs, and higher profit margins. Unlike employees who have to fill out forms and have com-pany-issued e-mail addresses, customers are harder to loop into any corporate process. For both groups, though, fast and easy aren’t normally associated with filling out forms or searching through an inbox. I believe that voice is under-utilized in terms of its ability to enforce consistent and uniform collection and dissemination of data to the general public or larger workforce. Not only that, voice carries an immediacy that other communication forms simply lack yet good process commonly demands. With the advent of lightweight programming models and service-oriented architectures, sewing voice into the business process is not only feasible, but it is often a superior alternative to traditional forms and e-mails.
An excellent example of how voice enforces consistency is found with pharmaceutical trials. For Big Pharma, the success of a trial is dependent upon consistent and accurate collection of patient data. Today, patients carry notebooks to record drug interactions and side effects. At the end of the trial, these notebooks are collected and transcribed. How much more effective would voice be in the collection of this life-saving data? First of
all, people can speak faster than they can write, so they tend to be briefer as they write their notes, losing information. In addition, critical timing data may be lost since notebooks don’t automatically record the time you write on them. Notebooks can’t demand that you write in them, but automated dialers can call you if it’s been a while since you checked in. Notebooks can be lost; it’s harder to lose computers sitting in a data center. Notebooks can’t be updated in the field; voice scripts can be updated at any time. All of these elements combine to make voice a data-collection mechanism that is consistent, appropriate, and universal. Consistency also has legal ramifications. Corporate liability exposures may be limited or eliminated by consistent notification of internal and external parties. As an example, many corporations protect themselves through employee policies; it would be a benefit to enforce the consistent and periodic notifications of them to employees. Automatic voice notification is the perfect channel to make sure that these policies are heard by the employees, especially when consents may be recorded.
Now that voice applications are simple to implement for organizations of all sizes, they can be used as critical collectors and disseminators of information. Since we all have access to a phone somewhere in our lives, they can also be the platform for consistency. V
Thomas Howe is a long-time telecom consultant, writer, and speaker who is the CEO of the Thomas Howe Company, providing expertise in improving the business process with real-time communications. He can be reached at howethomas@aol.com.
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