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Artwork by Dieter Braun

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The human factor in service design
John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea Focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale.

Poor customer service isn’t a headache just for consumers; it’s a problem that vexes senior managers too.Balancing the trade-offs between the cost of services and the customer experience benefits they provide is difficult. Ensuring that frontline workers can efficiently and consistently execute service offerings across a far-flung organization is harder still. Along the way, many com-

panies lose sight of what makes human beings tick—for instance, by overlooking well-known principles of behavioralscience when delivering services—and thus unwittingly predispose customers to dissatisfaction. At the same time, the customer service landscape is changing as social media and new mobilephone technologies give com-

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panies unprecedented access to data on customer interactions, while the technologies are changing the nature of the interactions themselves—for example, by amplifying the speedand impact of customer complaints.

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How human is our service?

Three questions
Against this backdrop, some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, these companies are lowering costs by 10 percent or more while improving customer satisfaction scores by up to 30 percent. In this article,we’ll look at three such companies—a provider of cable-TV and Internet services, a technology company serving small and midsize businesses, and a car rental company. From their experiences, we’ve distilled three interrelated questions that CEOs and other senior executives should ask themselves before they introduce new services or conduct a reality check on the health of existing ones. Taken together,the questions can help spur productive conversations among top-team members, raising the odds that a company’s services will be both efficient and effective.

It’s no secret that the quality of a company’s service interactions matters greatly in creating a positive experience with customers. Yet few companies focus on how customers form opinions about those interactions. By applying wellknownprinciples of psychology and behavioral science to service designs and working harder to understand what really motivates— and irritates—customers, companies can begin improving the experience quickly and at low cost.1

Consider the experience of the cableTV provider that looked to behavioral science to help improve its widespread reputation for bad service. The company started by examining thecharacteristics of its most important customer interactions— phone calls initiating new service— and quickly identified several pain points. The calls, for example, typically contained off-putting directives from agents, as well as “dead” periods when customers felt that their time was wasted. Worse, the calls often ended with awkward billing discussions and legal disclosures. The companycompletely redesigned the calls. First, credit verifications occurred earlier, and in the background, while agents helped customers set up their accounts. This approach eliminated awkward silences, as well as the frustrations that arose at the end of calls if customers were found not to be creditworthy. This new approach also allowed customers to feel more in control,

For more about using large-scaledata gathering to shape strategy, see “Seizing the potential of ‘big data’,” on mckinseyquarterly.com.

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by adding simple choices to the conversation: “How do you want your billing to be set up?” for example, or “How would you like your installation to be conducted?” By reframing as choices what had previously been directives, the company found that consumers began rating the interactions...