One of our ‘truths’ is that customers and staff that interact directly with customers already know a lot about issues and problems … and often how to solve them. Listening to their stories is often inspiring. The following was inspired by a customer advisor on a recent client engagement.
For many companies, customer complaints are an irritation – they would rather not get them and they handle them grudgingly. There is no effort in getting complaints, they seem to arise naturally from everyday operations and find their way to you; and dealing with the ‘noise’ they create is considered a necessary chore, and simply part of doing business.
But, is that enough? The vast majority (90+%) of dissatisfied customers do not complain – they are the silent majority. How do you incorporate their voice into your business strategy? And what is the impact of focusing on complainants and trying to convert them to be loyal customers – whilst ignoring the others who do not engage with the company?
A new article on Budd Life this month explores these issues and offers guidance on how to engage successfully with this disengaged part of your customer base. It concludes as follows:
“ Wholehearted and sincere customer care is an absolute priority for all organisations in today’s hyper-connected, and hyper-competitive, world. You must care, and you must treat dissatisfaction seriously, because it hits both the top and bottom line. ….
Customer retention may well be critical to survival, and excellence in maintaining loyalty may be a significant competitive differentiator. If so, the quiet voices of the silent majority customers who are dissatisfied with their experience but do not complain are the key to success.”
Have you ever struggled with technology? Software crashed, got error messages that make no sense? Didn’t know which button to press next?
Well, it seems it may not be all your fault. David Pogue (technology reviewer for the New York Times) has that story.
Many of us are guilty of not making our services easy to understand and simple to use. Intimidating and confusing IVR interactions, complex transactions and fragmented organisational structures all serve to frustrate customers.
Thank goodness not all customers try to express their feelings in song. But, it is no less important to listen out for customer feedback through all channels and touch points just because it comes in less entertaining wrappers!
As David Pogue rightly say, “simplicity sells” – a message none of us can afford to ignore.
I was asked 3 questions about contact centres for a website recently and I thought I’d share them with you:
1) What was the biggest challenge facing the contact centre industry in the last 12 months and how did they overcome it?
Whilst there are sexy new things we’re doing like customer help customer, analytics and new ways of knowledge sharing, its really about the same old challenges to brilliant operating basics that should be the focus for managers who are making big strides.
TOP OF THE LONG LIST OF INTERACTING BASICS ARE :
a) Why customers have to contact you at all
b) How the business model changes to focus on removing unnecessary contact, driving excellence in self service and engaging the whole business in removing root causes of frustrations and listening to feedback and intelligence from the contact points
c) Operating effectively to meet demand
d) Understanding what knowledge the website and staff need to answer customer needs
e) the role of contact centres in providing feedback and intelligence to the rest of the business; and how to get the mountains of customer feedback gathered around the business to be useful
2) What are the key issues you expect the industry to be tackling in the next 12-18 months?
a) Embedding new business wide processes that remove at least 20% of unit costs every year by using feedback and what front line staff know to drive change
b) The move to customer help customer model causing the role of contact centres to change rapidly
c) The same ones as before on brilliant basics of running contact centres and self service channels
3) Could you give us some insights on how companies can stop doing stupid things to their customers and the benefits it is bringing to their organisations?
Our mission is “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?” so we have lots to say on this topic. If I can paraphrase the question – the most successful businesses are removing things systematically by installing and embedding new company-wide management processes based on a different kind of data. The least successful businesses keep kicking off analysis and then generating projects to fix things: we call this “it’s raining projects”. The least successful businesses are swamped with the feedback they request from customers, but don’t act on. For more contact peter.massey@budd.uk.com or take a look at www.budd.uk.com
I got these quotes from a colleague who’s recently been reading Jeanne Bliss’s book on the Chief Customer Officer. I think these can apply in many walks of life, in and out of work.
“Think small”
“Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself”
“Think one customer at a time, and take care of each one the best way you can.”
How often do we try to build strategies from the top down and without the real customer context, needs and frustrations in mind? Starting at the frontline, listening to staff and listening to the individual customers is such a powerful way of collecting the most meaningful data on what you need to do next.
There will always be someone willing to put forward the next big thing but how will you know it will make a difference to the little things?
Having recently joined Budd I wanted to transfer my mobile account from my previous business account, held by Vodafone, into Budd’s business telephone account, also held by Vodafone. Thinking this would be a one call fix, as I was not taking anything away from Vodafone, just changing billing details, I called expecting it to be a simple action. How wrong can you be!
A very polite lady advised me that they would have to send me the PAC number, I asked could it be given over the phone, no, I was told, I had to request the PAC number in writing, an email would do, but it could not be given immediately. She went on to tell me that once Vodafone received my email they could then send me a letter with the PAC number. Could I not receive this information by email I asked?, apologies, but no, this was not the process.
On receiving the letter I was advised, I would then have to send the detail to our internal admin team, who could then call Vodafone, who would then transfer the account billing details. Why, I asked cannot you do this now. Explanation given was that they were on different databases and could not transfer my details but had to go through an internal administrative process to enable another section within Vodafone to handle.
So from a simple request to transfer billing details internally within Vodafone we will generate at least 2 calls and 1 email to Vodafone, 2 internal calls to/from my admin dept, I have received 3 emails so far telling me the PAC number was coming, I have also received a letter from Vodafone with the PAC number and, I think, but I am losing track, there is another letter going to Budd’s admin dept to tell them what to do with it.
By my count that’s around 10 interactions for a piece of internal administration. Why?Surely with the number of people moving between business accounts this process should have been refined by now. Even if the databases do not talk the customer should not see the problem. I understand the need for security, but nothing was said they had to do it this way due to security issues.
So, I’m left a frustrated customer, dreading the day when something really goes wrong. On a high note however, everyone you talk to in Vodafone business team is always friendly and seems to be doing their best. So well done Vodafone business team, just please look at this process and consider how many other processes are frustrating to your customers. Might be time to actually listen to what the customer is saying?
A piece on unified communications caught my attention today. Findings from research commissioned by Siemens Communications Inc. was reported byTMCnet, its focus was on the techie side of unified systems, workflows, and communication process in customer-facing enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the findings show that large organisations waste a huge amount of money compensating for poor communications between staff. Eg enterprise of 1,000 people with average 62% in customer service and sales could be losing as much as $13million every year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses. Whilst all this is relevant and measurable, there is another waste going on in customer-facing organisations which often goes completely unnoticed. Namely, great nuggets of wisdom piling up on the frontline – I’m talking all those bits of realtime, qualitative feedback from customers via front line agents that if consistently collected, analysed – and then something done about them by the business – would enable companies to truly begin delighting their customers and bringing in revenues – not just plugging the leaks. Of course, you need a process and tools in place to do that – but often that’s not as complex as you think. Sometimes, it just requires managers to reassess what ‘thinking customer’ means in terms of sustaining feedback from the frontline – and start panning for gold. That way companies will get to hear what customers are really telling them, not just findings of a post call IVR survey – which rarely ask the type of questions that fundamentally make the difference to us, the customers.
Wow, getting my holiday blogs out of sync here…..This one’s about getting as far as New York but I forgot to publish it!
Spending my Virgin airmiles to go to New York. This is meant to be a reward for spending shed loads of money – so much going to Australia that we got enough to do New York for free.
It didn’t feel like a reward. Too many Virgin basics aren’t working. Time for some redesign of the basic experience I think. Otherwise why would Virgin think I’d spend a fortune with Virgin, next time I go business class
Here’s a few examples of how my time was wasted and their brand damaged from this one trip: 1) You cant share Virgin miles with close relatives even if you paid for the flight they earned them on
2) You can’t book airmiles and non airmiles travellers together via the website. The extras on a miles ticket is half the cost of a real ticket – hmmmm, call me sceptical
3) It took 65 minutes to book the 3 tickets manually
4) By the time they’d been booked the price on the site moved – upwards of course
5) Despite escalation during the call and after the call, no one at Virgin would talk to me about the price of the ticket that changed mid booking
6)The booking reference, cut and pasted from the reminder email, wouldn’t work so we couldn’t get access to the site to give US visa information or change seats or check in, resulting in 3 calls
7)The nice people in the Indian call centre couldn’t take a passport number of 8 digits in less than three attempts
8)At check in there are still monster queues all the time – so no one is scheduling staff to meet demand. This is highly predicatble and very frustrating
9) We got to use a member card to get us into the short queue on the premium line. It had one agent and we waited forever anyway. The lady next to us in the queue said this happens to her every time.
10)She told the supervisory types – 3 of them. Not one went and opened a desk or said they’d do something about it for next time. They just made placatory remarks, which of course wind you up up at the third time of listening to ‘there are more people coming’ – and there clearly aren’t.
11) Having a huddle of 4 supervisors talk to each other is not the same as having 4 supervisors open 4 lines to shift the problem
12) Asking to sit further forward in the plane, not an upgrade, got us moved a bit with the usual line of “the flight is full”. When we got on the plane it was a lie. The bulkhead row in front was empty. Many rows were half full or empty.
13) But apart from that its just like most airlines: indifferent
I’d love to talk to anyone at Virgin who’d like to talk about saving shed loads of money on frustrated marketing, frustrated staff and frustrated customers: peter.massey@budd.uk.com
I offered feedback to the supervisor at the airport but he was too busy dealing with the problems……obviously
Someone sent me a great email today. He’d heard me tell the Amazon story of the customer’s chair last week at the PPF conference. Jeff Bezos used to insist on an empty chair in every meeting – for the customer to be sat in every meeting. If the customer would be bored, disagree with what you decide or not understand what you’re talking about – change it there and then!!
The great email? – He’d cc’d “Customer” on his mail. A great way to check if your email diatribes would bore the customer and if he or she would agree with your decisions!!
So you may have heard that Dell set up a website called IdeaStorm on 16 Feb and it looks like that’s just what it has created. Unfortunately, just like the UK government’s recent online petition, you only get one side of the story. In this case, the storm came from the leading edge users who wanted Dell to ditch Windows and adopt Linux. Less radical but still a popular idea was replacing Internet Explorer with the leading alternative browser, Firefox.
Clearly, Michael Dell needs to think about the direction of the company. Embrace the tech heads with leading edge products (which they would find hard to support) or pander to the conservative mass market, Microsoft led world. Who did they think would respond on IdeaStorm?!
It’s just another example of an ill thought through customer feedback ‘campaign’ that generates a lot of the wrong publicity by giving Dell so much that they are unable to act on. It would be far better if they listen to everyone on a continuous basis – both staff and customers – about how they can improve the basics rather than looking the wow factor.
Read the full article in Business Week at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2007/tc20070226_415604.htm?link_position=link1
