First, second and third line

It is a very common approach to have service provision to customers split into layers, or lines.  The first line is the one that greets the customer and gathers information about them and their requirements.  This is where the customer gains their first impression of the business and usually covers their high level and easy to answer requirements .  The first line is responsible for answering a percentage of the business that it receives but what it cannot resolve is passed onto to the second line.

The second line is where staff are located who have a better understanding of some of the more complicated issues that the customers will have. Second line people also have more time to deal with the customers and tend to operate in a less pressured environment.  Again, the second line is responsible for answering a percentage of the business that it receives but there is some work that even they are not skilled enough to resolve.

The most intractable problems or the most difficult work is passed on to the highly skilled third line, the elite troops of the service provision.  This is where you’ll find the most experienced, most respected and usually the most highly paid people.  They really know their stuff and can take all the time they need to help the customer out.

This all seems to make sense as it allows organisations to filter low skilled and low value work and concentrates the efforts of the most skilled workers where it is most required.  Surely this maximises organisational value.  This approach, however, has a number of obvious problems:

• The real experience and skill is divorced from the day to day experience  and so has little stake in the running and improvement of the organisation,
• The ability to fix grabs the glory and  becomes more valuable than the ability to prevent,
• The customers with the biggest issues or needs are asked to wait the longest time to get the attention they need,
• The staff at the front of the business are under-skilled and so undervalued,
• There is an implied and reinforced career path away from the customer to the more technical roles, which encourages a lowering of the value of customer service.

So this very common approach doesn’t maximise organisational value at all, indeed it does the opposite as the business becomes tuned around issue resolution rather than customer contact.

The approach that should be adopted is to drive skill and organisational knowledge as close to the point of contact with the customer as possible.  Make sure that the people who greet the customer are able to resolve all issues that can be done at that point of contact.  Only those which require a site visit, or parts to be ordered, or something to be manufactured should be handed of to a second line.

In this way:

• The highly skilled staff will experience the day to day issues that the organisation and its customers face, leading to innovation and real improvement,
• The ability to prevent will become more valuable than the ability to fix,
• Low value work is driven out of the work flow,
• Customers issues will be addressed more quickly,
• People will want to work in serving the customer because of the ability to deliver service, leading to high job satisfaction.

This approach takes more effort to implement and is not easy but, after all customers only contact organisations because they want something.