One thing I like about engaging good small companies is having a one-stop-shop in the resolution of problems. Often, when you hire good small-businesses and they encounter a problem requiring specialists, they do not pass the buck to the client, but own up the problem and try to find a suitable expert to attend to it. They avoid piecemeal resolution of problems, and shield clients from having to interact with many service providers, unless by the client’s request.

Corporates and small-businesses growing into departments on the other hand, tend to provide more specialisation that come at the expense of good customer experience.

When engaging with bigger companies, it is as if one needs an intense technical understanding of the problem, diagnose it properly, identify relevant experts and fully describe the problem to ensure the involvement of the right team. Failing which, and if the service provider involves skilled trade workers, you risk paying different teams’ call-out fees besides costs for the diagnostic report and related resolution of the problem.

Business expansion and departmentalisation should not be at the expense of good customer experience. By Nimroth Gwetsa, 30 April 2019.

What is it about division of labour in a departmentalised organisation that instead of ensuring decisive and specialised resolution of problems, it often creates more headaches for customers? The advantages and perils of smaller businesses can be easily understood, as are those for a departmentalised organisation as the business expands.

A smaller company often has a centrally integrated problem management process. And this is owing mainly to the small-business manager wanting to avoid disintermediation by ensuring “control” of the problem resolution throughout. Small-businesses tend to be all things to everyone. This approach is not always suitable and sustainable. This explains the need for more departmentalisation as the business expands.

Departmentalisation is supposed to create specialised smaller business functions or units ensuring customer problems are competently and decisively resolved. However, owing to the need to keep operational costs as low as possible, this often results in the employment of smaller teams with limited capacity and voluminous work they have to complete. Instead of departmentalisation ensuring faster resolution of problems, it actually prolongs the existence of problems, increases finger-pointing and lack of problem ownership among teams. The result would be rapid deterioration of the customer’s experience of interacting with the company.

Business expansion need not result in the deterioration of customer services. The need to maintain acceptable profit margins directly affects the type and extent of services delivered to the customer and their experience when interacting with the company.

The motor industry, banks and many telecommunications companies in those sectors are notorious for dropping the ball when their least subscribed new products increase into mainstream offerings. They find a way of even charging more for better customer experience. And if unwilling to pay more for the same service they diligently provided initially, customers end receiving “best-efforts” kind of service that often imply receiving delayed assistance, if at all.

Rather than risk losing customers and relying on the loyalty of customers from old relationships when the business was small, it is best that well calculated risks of ensuring retention and attraction of new customers be taken.

The promotion a company receives from satisfied customers is priceless and more cost-effective than employing expense marketers to help build the company’s brand. Promotion from satisfied customers does not mean there should be no investment in professional marketers. It simply means such promotion should not be about putting lipstick on a pig. Such promotion will fool some people some times, but not all the time. It becomes important, therefore, to do the right thing from the start and even during business expansion phase.

Examples of the right things to do include, among others, maintaining:

• Increased automation
• Conducive staff working environment
• Higher staff satisfaction levels and attrition rate
• Regular staff training to ensure better product and services knowledge and skills
• Problem ownership
• Effective planning

Many business managers are reluctant to automate processes to help improve customer experience and ensure workforce spends time on issues requiring dynamic and human intelligence decisions. Perhaps the reluctance is owing to their poor understanding, fear of technology and costs. Or their reluctance to consider automation is owing to the notoriety of many IT companies failing to deliver solutions on time, costs and as expected. Such fear is understandable, but ultimately unreasonable.

No business can successfully expand and be profitable with highly satisfied customers and workforce not overwhelmed with work, without extensive use of technology. Otherwise, such businesses would need to maintain higher headcount levels to maintain same satisfaction levels by staff and employees. Without increased automation, either staff’s welfare or customer experience is sacrificed to ensure profitability in an expanded business.

Higher staff turnover cannot be good for ensuring better customer experience. In such situation, customers would be subjected to interactions with new people all the time and having their problems falling through the cracks.

Even if attrition rate is kept low, staff in expanding businesses should be able to solve bulk of the general issues to minimise need for escalation. Escalations and referrals can result in customers explaining themselves afresh every time the issue is passed from one person to another.

The problem cannot be owned when no one is held accountable for its resolution throughout. In departmentalised businesses, staff who initially interacted with the customer have a tendency of sending the e-mail describing the issue to another staff member and quickly removing themselves from its resolution. To them, the e-mail serves as an escalation, in which case they consider the problem to now be another person’s concern and no longer theirs. The toing and froing of the issue results in the neglect of the customer and heightened tension among staff.

Expansion should not be accidental but planned. Such plans should not only focus on increasing the sale of products and services, but also the understanding of and preparations to handle the implications to operations of the planned business expansion.

Let such planning also include contributions from staff so they are drivers of that change and are prepared and ready to handle the new situation.

Let your expansion be a good story you can share with other smaller, yet growing businesses. Best wishes!