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If you have not not been under a rock in the last two years you will have noticed a trend across all business sectors which can be summarized as ‘Less is More’. If you are like my friends in Operations Management you know about Lean Manufacturing. If you’re into the ‘Web 2.0′ thing or into agile software development you will have heard Less is More from the likes of 37Signals. It’s also something to think about when blogging or podcasting. Even artists subscribe to the theory - minimalism.

Obviously one could go through many industries and pinpoint areas that could benefit from this ideology. Today I would like to point out customer service, because I had an interesting interaction with UPS yesterday. As you may have read in ‘A Breath of Fresh Customer Service‘, I had an excellent interaction with AllPosters.com after receiving a movie poster with a broken frame. After printing the UPS label they sent me, I went to UPS. Short story short - I was in there for around 60 seconds. I was amazed.

I was amazed by this process. I had the best customer service experience of my life and it was in dealing with two companies to achieve a resolution. I never had to speak to a single customer service representative. The only bottleneck in the process was me finding time to make it to the UPS Store. Even better, once I email AllPosters the return UPS tracking number they will begin packaging my replacement.

When I say Less is More in customer service, I do not mean lessening the value or availability of your customer service. I mean use technology and processes to create a smooth interaction with your customers. It is not hard to believe that less interaction with customer service creates value for your customers. We hate dealing with customer service. I loathe calling any call center for help.

Creating a transparent edge to your company can help you achieve less customer service interaction with your customers and that creates more value to them. It also creates more value for you and your customer service resources. I also think it increases your chance of saving that customer.

The more difficult you make it for you customers to resolve issues the more difficult you make it for yourselft to resolve issues. Customer service should be simple. Transparency will help you achieve that. Manage your edge.

technorati tags:managing the edge, edge, customer service, less is more, transparency, simplify

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