Trickle-down Customer Service?

I recently bought mud guards for my Kia, thinking this would be an easy way to enhance the appearance of the vehicle, as well as reduce mud splash on the finish - particularly in the wintertime.  Finding a Kia dealer near a local bike trail I frequent, I placed my order -- and happily picked them up a week later.

The arrival

The guards were well packaged, and included installation instructions (a 1-page photocopied page) for the front guards, and another (different) page for the rear.  (It's a pretty simple task, so instructions are not really required.  Out of curiosity, though, I took a look at them.)

The installation

There were several gotchas which became apparent as I reviewed the instructions and compared them to the actual guards and the vehicle.

1. First the titles of the instructions were reversed.  The instructions entitled "REAR MUD GUARD KIT" actually referred to the front guards, and vice-versa.
2. Then, the front guard instructions (um, the ones actually entitled "Rear Kit") refer to three screws already on the vehicle that need to be removed.  Indeed there are three, however, the actual guard was missing the drilled hole for the middle screw.  (Not to worry, handyman that I am, I quickly drilled the missing middle hole in each of the two front guards.)
3. If that wasn't bad enough, the photocopied instructions (above right) had been copied over and over so many times, that the 4 pictures that were supposed to show the details of the (albeit simple) process looked like a Rorschach test -- and were therefore completely useless. 
4. To add insult to injury, there were extra holes on the guards which did not correspond to any existing hole on the actual vehicle's body.  (I've not yet decided whether to drill them or not.)

The irony

One more image (left) completes the story for you.  Remember those instructions that looked like a Rorschach test?  Compare this with what the Kia internal staff get.  On the outside of the box the guards came in is a label with information intended for the various Kia employees handling the guards and ultimately getting them to me -- the customer.  This data is as clear as can be -- color coded, large fonts, with a wealth of unambiguous information about stock location, part number -- a whopping 19 pieces of data in total -- all about my lowly mud guards. 

And what do I, the customer, get?  A Rorschach test and parts that don't match the instruction nor the actual vehicle.

The lessons

As I chuckled over this comedy of errors, it occurred to me that the customer service operations of many corporations have devolved into what I call "trickle-down customer service."  They make great pains to fine tune and automate their internal operations (made so much easier now with everything run by computer) with the mistaken notion that all this internal busywork will improve the external customer experience.  The problem is that nobody thinks about (or cares about) the customer experience, and none of this high-tech wizardry benefits the customer in the least.

Let's face it.  Trickle-down economics didn't work, and neither does trickle-down customer service.  The only approach that works is to put the customer first, and look at the entire process from their perspective. 

At Information Results, we ask ourselves every day "How does this feel to the customer?" Putting ourselves in their shoes helps us stay focused on their needs.  We wouldn't have it any other way.