Why Scripting Won t Work with Branded Customer Service

Why Scripting Won't Work with Branded Customer Service

Some organizations work hard at grounding their brand in their culture, but the vast majority are not systematic about this. Most marketing departments assume that culture work has been completed once a marketing agency has shaped their brand, or they never consider creating a service culture their responsibility in the first place. In addition, all too many organizations don't know how to live and deliver their brands without tightly scripting service staff, which makes them seem constrained and unnatural.

Nido Qubein, chairman of Great Harvest Bread, relates the experience of talking on a toll-free line with a major telecommunications company. At the end of the conversation, the woman he had been talking with said, "Thank you for calling ____." Nido knows that this particular company has spent huge sums of money to get staff to have the last word at the end of every telephone conversation with a "thank you" to the customer.

So Nido, in an experimental mood, responded, "No. Thank you for helping me by providing such wonderful service." There was a slight hesitation at the other end of the phone line. The woman must have figured out that if she hung up the phone at that moment, she would not have had the last "thank you" that she was explicitly told to provide. And she was likely being taped!

"No, really sir, I must thank you," she responded. When Nido tells this story, he indicates that he was in an airport and had thirty minutes to kill before his plane boarded. So he said, "No, no, no. It is I who must thank you." This exchange went on a few more times, at which point the woman exclaimed, "No, darn it, thank you." And cut off the call.

When supervisors write scripts for their customer service representatives, they are effectively telling the customers that they know exactly what needs to be said to deliver good service. First, we don't believe they can possibly know about every situation and every customer to make word-scripting work in all situations. Second, in so doing, they limit the staff's scope to connect with customers in an authentic manner. Scripting turns service encounters into simple transactions and does not benefit from the transformational impact that is possible when a brand touches at a heart and head level.

Unfortunately, scripted approaches to customer service are common as organizations attempt to measure against standards. Admittedly, scripts are easier to measure than free-flowing conversations, which is no doubt their inherent appeal. But tightly defined, compliance-driven scripting speaks to a remarkable lack of confidence in frontline staff to deliver appropriate and branded service on their own.

If service providers are given the freedom to express the brand that they support, then customers will have the sense that they are being treated as people and not as customers. If this does not happen, we agree with Professor Douglas Holt at Harvard University, who argues that customers will become even more cynical than they are if every customer touch point is experienced as a blatant promotion for the brand. This is definitely not what branded customer service is about! ^[31]

Part of the difficulty is that many organizations have gotten too tightly caught up in measuring quality standards a la the founder of the quality movement, W. Edwards Deming. ^[32] Many believe that if we define and measure service delivery precisely enough (just as we do with product assembly), then somehow good service will have been delivered. Yet it is the outcome of the experience, evaluated from the customers' perspective about what they have been led to believe should happen, that is the true measuring stick.

As one of our colleagues, Anne Bogelund-Jensen of TMI, Denmark, likes to say, "You can't standardize your service, but you can set standards for your service." Once a service brand has been defined, that definition is basically static until human interaction makes it dynamic.

^[31]For a complete discussion about the history of branding in relationship to consumer culture, see Holt, "Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?"

^[32]There are dozens of books about Deming and the quality movement. Two such books are Mary Walton and W. Edwards Deming, The Deming Management Method (New York: Perigee Press, 1988), and W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Boston: MIT Press, 2000).