National Customer Service Week often focuses on the visible side of service: responding quickly, solving problems, and supporting customers when they need help.
But today’s theme, Service Culture to Improve Productivity, highlights something less obvious.
Productivity isn’t only about doing more in less time; it’s about removing the small points of friction that slow people down every day, and the challenge with friction is that it rarely announces itself.
The ‘it’s fine’ conundrum
A few months back, OneSearch Managing Director Liz Jarvis wrote about the kind of operational friction that becomes part of the working day without anyone really noticing.
The extra email you always have to send. The process that takes three steps when it should take one. The recurring issue you’ve experienced often enough that you’ve stopped expecting it to improve.
As Liz observed, these frustrations build up until they become background noise. For conveyancers, that’s an especially familiar experience. Transactions already involve enough moving parts, deadlines and competing priorities without stopping to question every small niggle. When something is mostly working, it’s often easier to work around it than challenge it.
The problem is that every workaround comes at a cost. Not necessarily a dramatic one – more often it’s measured in minutes rather than hours. But when those minutes are repeated hundreds or thousands of times across a year, they become something far more significant: a real drain on productivity.
Why service culture matters
This is where service culture enters the conversation. A strong service culture isn’t simply about being helpful, friendly or responsive, important though those things are.
At its best, service culture creates an environment where identifying and removing friction becomes everyone’s responsibility.
It encourages organisations to ask:
- What’s making life harder for our customers?
- Where are people spending time unnecessarily?
- Which recurring frustrations have become accepted as “just the way things are”?
Those questions matter because productivity and customer experience are more closely linked than we often realise. When customers encounter fewer obstacles, they spend less time chasing updates, clarifying information or correcting avoidable issues. When teams understand where friction exists, they spend less time firefighting and more time delivering value.
The result isn’t just a better customer experience; it’s a more productive organisation.
The role of feedback
Of course, there’s one obvious challenge: you can’t fix the friction you don’t know exists. That’s why feedback is far more valuable than many organisations give it credit for.
Done properly, feedback isn’t a box-ticking exercise or a collection of compliments and complaints – it’s operational intelligence. It helps identify recurring bottlenecks before they become accepted practice. It reveals the gaps between how a process was designed to work and how customers actually experience it.
Most importantly, it helps organisations replace assumptions with evidence.
Why we opened a direct line
This summer, OneSearch launched a dedicated feedback channel for customers. The aim wasn’t simply to collect comments for a testimonial page or customer story. It was to create a direct route for customers to tell us where we’re getting things right and, just as importantly, where we’re creating unnecessary effort. Every submission is reviewed by our customer service team, led by Carol Dodd, because meaningful feedback deserves meaningful attention.
We’re still at the beginning of that journey, but we’re already convinced of one thing: the organisations that improve most consistently aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones that listen, learn and act.
A quick favour
If you’ve placed an order with OneSearch recently, we’d genuinely value your thoughts. Whether it’s turnaround times, communication, ease of use or something else entirely, every comment helps us build a clearer picture of where friction exists and where improvements can be made.
Because the goal isn’t simply better feedback – it’s better outcomes.
And as National Customer Service Week reminds us, better outcomes are often the result of a culture that listens, learns and continuously improves.
