The Successful CXO
Committed to Customer Service

About one-quarter of IT projects fail while another half are completed lacking functionality, late, or over-budget. Only a third are considered successful.

A Customer support initiative is an IT project. It will succumb to the same failings as other IT projects if it goes down the same road as most other IT projects.

What are these Five Fatal Faults?

1. Trying to implement too much at once.
2. Pushing sales at the expense of listening to the customer.
3. Starting with the customer support agents instead of the C-Suite.
4. Focusing on a single channel at the expense of the rest.
5. Calling it "an initiative".

#1:Beginning or revamping customer support involves a lot of steps, a lot of people, anc a lot of work. Sometimes taking smaller chunks at a time is better advised. Maybe start with a single product line or a single channel, as a pilot perhaps. As the smaller project is completed, several kinks should be worked out allowing the rest of the roll-out to proceed a little more smoothly.

#2: Naturally we all want to sell and create revenue. But if you are not listening to your customers how will you know what they need? You can't just tell them anymore, they already know. Let them tell you, don't pitch sales over the top of the voice of the customer.

#3: Nothing kills a project faster than lack of committment and support from the top. If this is an important part of the business, it needs to treated as such. Someone in the C-suite must be the champion of the customer support project. Lower level staff simply cannot do it on their own. And starting with the customer support agents will guarantee a project that is dead in the water.

#4: Multichannel support is here to stay, so customer support must be available for all the channels your customers prefer to use now, and you need to pay attention to trends showing how people are using them as time goes by. If only one channel has the C-suite love poured on it, the other channels get downright jealous. They become inconstent, outdated, and unusable.

#5: Calling something an initiative literally says "this is the beginning". But what about the ongoing work? An initiative is never really done because there is always work to do to improve the process, the technology, the training, and the business. This requires committment of everyone from the C-suite on down far past the initiative stage and into the foreseeable future.  And then farther yet. Changes will occur and the CXO must stay "right in the buggy" as my Dad used to say. No laurel sitting. It's uncomfortable.

I'm sure there are other ways to trip up when implementing or improving customer support, but these five are fatal all on their own. Take care to avoid these pitfalls and you have a much better chance of being part of the successful bunch.

Here's hoping you and many, many of your colleagues make it.