Step 3: Unleash Your Customers

The move to self-service is usually a cost-cutting initiative. But as we've discussed, it's not enough to just cut costs. Again, the goal here is self-service that's so good that you can cut costs while raising prices. When we ask organizations how much extra they charge for self-service, they often look at us as if we're crazy.

Innovating without empathy rarely delivers the same kinds of results, particularly when it comes to customer-operators. Technology makes it possible to dramatically expand the customers operating role, but that doesn't necessarily translate into better numbers. Many banks learned this the hard way in the 1990s. As retail banks increased the number of low-cost channels for customers to use to serve themselves —voice-recognition systems, ATMs, online banking — the institutions inadvertently undermined their margins. That's because customers didn't necessarily migrate to the lower-cost solutions. Instead, many simply increased their numbers of transactions overall, still coming to the teller window to deposit their weekly paychecks while also hitting the ATM and checking their balance online. In some cases, these high-tech tools enabled customers to engage their finances at a deeper level, which then increased their demand for traditional, high-cost banking services. Here's the irony: these banks were trying to save money with online tools, but instead, they designed a more costly model. Customers became much more expensive to serve, which wasn't sustainable. When your goal is service excellence, we suggest taking the opposite approach. Customer job design, especially self-service design, works best when you first work to increase the quality of the service experience, to make the service more convenient or customized (or whatever drives value in your business).

Our point here is to not run your business by the comment box. It may feel good, at least at first, but here's the catch: customers typically don't understand the implications of their requests. It's your obligation — to them and to you — to put their demands in context, to evaluate the trade-offs of expanding your offering.

Innovating without empathy rarely delivers the same kinds of results, particularly when it comes to customer-operators. Technology makes it possible to dramatically expand the customers operating role, but that doesn't necessarily translate into better numbers. Many banks learned this the hard way in the 1990s. As retail banks increased the number of low-cost channels for customers to use to serve themselves —voice-recognition systems, ATMs, online banking — the institutions inadvertently undermined their margins. That's because customers didn't necessarily migrate to the lower-cost solutions. Instead, many simply increased their numbers of transactions overall, still coming to the teller window to deposit their weekly paychecks while also hitting the ATM and checking their balance online. In some cases, these high-tech tools enabled customers to engage their finances at a deeper level, which then increased their demand for traditional, high-cost banking services. Here's the irony: these banks were trying to save money with online tools, but instead, they designed a more costly model. Customers became much more expensive to serve, which wasn't sustainable. When your goal is service excellence, we suggest taking the opposite approach. Customer job design, especially self-service design, works best when you first work to increase the quality of the service experience, to make the service more convenient or customized (or whatever drives value in your business).

Our point here is to not run your business by the comment box. It may feel good, at least at first, but here's the catch: customers typically don't understand the implications of their requests. It's your obligation — to them and to you — to put their demands in context, to evaluate the trade-offs of expanding your offering.