What is good service? What is excellent service? Jim Giacobbe, the President and CEO of United Solutions Company shares his thoughts on defining excellent service in part one of his article on service anticipation, cultivating the right work environment, and how CUSOs can remain competitive.
For 32 years the United Solutions Company (USC) has gone above and beyond to provide outstanding customer service, the hallmark of our success.
We ask ourselves, “Why are clients coming to United Solutions?” The answer is that technology is moving at lightning speed, so quickly that credit unions can’t keep up. They could spend their entire time working on security or technology demands and not be able to focus on running the credit union. Instead, they come to United Solutions Company because they realize that the technology landscape is becoming far toocomplicated.
We also understand good service isn’t the same for everybody; credit unions are not one-size-fits-all. To some, good service is just getting a call back. To others, it is first- call resolution, i.e., our ability to resolve the issues right away from the first phone call. Some people value a friendly voice on the other end of the phone. Some feel that just our knowing who they are when they call is an advantage. Knowing what your clients value is highly important when you’re providing good service. We don’t just know who they are when they call, but we know how they want to be serviced.
Let’s take it to the next level: how can we know what our clients will want before they ask for it? In the process of meeting this challenge, we coined the phrase “service anticipation.” Let’s say a credit union needs business intelligence software. A different company could say, “We have business intelligence software for you!” They then drop the technology into the credit union, train the employees, and leave. When they come back a year later, no one remembers how to use it. We see this behavior often enough that we can anticipate the outcome.
United Solutions provides both the software and the complete service for that technology. We can give a credit union the technology, let them run it themselves and just provide as-needed support, or we can actually provide total service for them. Our staff knows that we can’t say, “Oh, we gave them the software. They’ll take care of it themselves.” For most credit unions, we know we will provide comprehensive, end-to-end support, including installation, setup, and maintenance, so that our clients can efficiently run their credit unions.
Service anticipation can also be demonstrated with regard to regulation and compliance. We’ve seen what audit and security reports other clients have needed in the past, so we can anticipate what other credit unions will need. From the beginning, we’ll send those reports to clients monthly so they’ll have time to look over them and be prepared. When an auditor asks for a certain report or document, our client will already have it. We are giving credit unions the right information before they even know they need it. That’s service anticipation.
Service anticipation also means knowing what technology to provide. If our client has a big field of membership and their members prefer self-service technology, we have to know that to provide the right products and services. Many of the businesses and credit unions we service are very technical in nature. They want to have self-service products because their members and customers want to find the answers for themselves and not have to call someone or go in to a branch or place of business.
I actually had a client tell me just the other day, “I never have to talk to you. That’s great!” But we also have clients that are the polar opposite and especially value close contact. When they are confronted with a problem, they want you to tell them how to fix it. Even if they find the answer on their own, they call us at United Solutions Company because they want us to walk them through it. But, that’s the point. We understand the values of each of our clients and can anticipate the types of products and levels of service they will need. This is key to providing excellent customer service.
