Shared services vs quality ?

When Joep Van 't Hek published his experience with the call center of T-Mobile, lots of people recognized the situation. I personally also had a "yes, I know what he is talking about" kind of feeling (especially when I think about my last call to my telco and about how many buttons I had to press on my phone to get where I wanted to be). Communicating as a "customer" with a big utility or telco company always goes through call centers. Despite the huge investments, these call centers do often fail to meet the customer expectations and leave a general negative impression of "too slow and not adequate". Do these companies realize this?

Quite similar within the corporate world, shared services are also often not perceived as synonym of quality of services. As an individual employee, HR and IT are the most commonly established and contacted shared service centers. And also in the corporate world the experience is quite similar with what Van 't Hek experienced with T-mobile.

Strange if you realize that these call centers/shared services are basically established to create economies of scale (read optimize the service and reduce costs) but equally for professionalisation of service (like standardisation, harmonisation, specialization and increased re-directing towards experts). Isn't "improving" the service level and "meet customer expectations" part of the objectives?

I am quite sure that the cost objective has been met in most cases. The professionalisation on the other hand is much more difficult to measure, and what about the quality of service? Too often quality is measured through quantitative statistics (how many tickets, processing time, waiting time for customer ... ) and seldom through the real perceived quality of the services supplied. Only some more advanced service management system do ask for feedback on the delivered service.

This is according to me a the only good way to really know how the "customer" perceived the service. Imagine what you would say if you first had to wait "25 min before being helped by a telco call center agent" or "when an inexperienced Indian IT help desk person after 3 calls finally understands and solves your PC problem".

It starts with capturing the feedback and listening to your "customer's perception". Necessary ... but not sufficient of course, but surely a first important step for lots of (internal and external) service providers. let's start here and listen to the customer.