Why some services end up being hostile and how to avoid it?

The festive season is upon us, and families all over the UK will be flocking to theatres for the uniquely British tradition of pantomime. Let’s hope that Covid doesn’t dampen things this year, as theatres make the bulk of their money during panto season.

I once had a London theatre client who discovered that their ushers, who’d been working in the role for years, had gradually taken it upon themselves to hunt down people who were trying to sneak in at the interval. The number of people doing this was tiny, perhaps under 1%, but the ushers saw their job increasingly as a policing role.

The implication of this on the 99% of other customers was palpable, my client told me. Customers felt that the ushers were being overly domineering and pushy. Rather than looking to the ushers for assistance, customers tended to avoid them, finding them a bit terse and unhelpful.

My client was a new leader trying to bring about a customer centred change in the organisation, so it was in her interests to work out what was going on. No survey had told her this, because who would write a survey question about the usher experience being weird. Instead she’d gleaned it from her own conversations with customers and colleagues during her first few weeks.

Is this a customer experience problem? Superficially, yes. But underneath the surface something deeper is at work: The ushers were now more in service of the business and less in service of the customer. This had created an inadvertently hostile experience. Something that was making the service experience of going to the theatre worse for customers.

I’ve seen this pattern throughout my career. Where a service finds itself focusing on the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

Here’s another example. Many large service organisations have very real problems with fraud. A minority of customers are intentionally trying to defraud the system. So, understandably, service providers work hard to identify and stop these activities. The downside is that the whole service can become biased to this intent, with the other 99% of customers feeling like they’re treated as potentially fraudulent customers.

Take insurance. My own work with customers in this sector reveals time and again, across providers, that they feel the claims process puts them on the back foot — as guilty and having to prove their innocence. There’s a strong sense of a hostile experience here. Even though the customer may have bought the insurance product in the context of a friendly experience, they very often describe the claims process as becoming adversarial and distinctly unfriendly. It doesn’t matter that the industry pays out on over 95% of claims made, what customers remember is how they felt during the claim process.

I’ve seen this service pattern in so many different sectors:

• Bank account opening
• Tax collection
• Immigration control

Clearly ushers in a theatre acting tough in the auditorium have very different consequences compared to an immigration system acting tough nationwide. Arguably, in some circumstances the pattern is more intentional than in others.

Either way, service designers and organisations need to be continually alert to their intent, asking themselves who’s interests they serve. Is it the 99% of customers who’re hoping to have an enjoyable night at the theatre, or the revenue they need to protect from the 1% of people sneaking in at the interval?

This goes right to the heart of being more customer- or human-centred, and why it’s so easy to say “we put the customer at the heart of what we do” than it is to actually to deliver on it.

Every service serves more than one purpose — the policy or business targets of the day live in constant tension with the rhetoric of customer and human-centredness. To fail to admit this creates an awful confusion in our organisations.

What to do about it

Avoid an inadvertent culture of hostility: Make sure everyone in the organisation knows that the 1% of “bad customers” are just that, 1% of a larger population of good customers. Don’t slip into the mistake of designing your whole service around that 1% at the expense of the 99%.

Avoid a biased culture of policing, by actively designing a culture of servicing. Gather regular qualitative feedback from customers to explore what’s missing for them, not just dry surveys to explore what already exists. This would have helped the ushers see the unintended consequences of their actions. The Home Office is now training staff in British colonial history, one assumes to mitigate the risk of future bias.

Use data and automated decisioning with care: organisations are rushing to develop an integrated attitudinal and behavioural segmentation of all their customers, so they can act up on it in targeted ways. The goal is to provide more personalised, targeted servicing. But these strategies follow the trade wind of the wider culture — if it’s one of service hostility, then don’t be surprised if the data gets used for hostile purposes. It appears the Home Office had two problems — they didn’t have good enough data to correctly identify who was allowed to be in the country and who wasn’t, yet they still used that data to pursue people in a service culture of hostility. The poor data was poorly weaponised, and now compensation is due to those impacted.

Similarly, if customers are making an insurance claim, they don’t expect to suddenly face a hostile experience, especially when the whole brand experience of marketing, sales and sign up was one of loveliness and joy.

Be honest about intent: recognise that your organisation serves different needs. Avoid all-out commitments to ‘customer-centredness’ unless you’re really going to give up on your other outcomes. Your staff and customers will call you out on such purpose-wash the moment they smell hypocrisy.

Better to promote balanced goals. My preference is “service-centered”. It recognises that we, and our frontline colleagues, want to do a great job of serving customers and citizens, but it’s honest that we also have to serve shareholders and ministers.

When you understand the service pattern, you start to see that hostile experiences are unfortunately all around us. But they aren’t organic or inevitable. They’re the result of human decisions, whether intentional or unintentional. As service designers and business leaders we have a duty to distinguish between them and act accordingly.