Would you do
business with you?
By Eric Fraterman
(Eric is a friend and strategic partner. This article was recently
published in Customer Service Management)
If more company
presidents and their senior managers asked themselves this question
with the customers’ view in mind, many would answer “probably not.”
The reason? Customer service.
Much has been
said, done and written about customer service during the last
decade. Millions of dollars have been spent on programs, training
and systems. However, the results have been disproportionate and
often outright disappointing. In a recent issue of Fast Company,
the cover story declared “Betrayed ! The biggest lie in
business is ‘the customer is in charge’… How could an idea so right
go so wrong?” But surely, you may say, every company wants to
delight its customers. That may be true, but while bold promises
have been made, bad results have been the reality. The issue is not
that service is poor, but that the promised and necessary great
service is harder than ever to deliver!
Michael Hepworth,
in a Canadian Marketing Association publication, provides some facts
in support of the Fast Company report :
-
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (University of Michigan
Business School) stood at 74 in 1994, dipped to 71 in 1997 and
has only slowly re c o v e red to 73 in 2000.
-
Only one in three customers who have a problem and contact the
respective organization for help are satisfied with the response
they get. Customers who contact an organization for help and are
dissatisfied with the response are 30 to 40% more likely to take
their business elsewhere.
-
The average North American company has 11% of its re venue at
risk as a result of customer problems and how they a re handled.
-
$1 spent on advertising yields less than $5 in incremental
revenue, but that same $1 spent on improving customer service
can yield more than $60 in incremental revenue . And the need
for customer service in the new economy is as great as in the
old:
-
75% of all e-shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is
actually completed. Nine out of 10 shoppers who abandoned their
carts did so because of a lack of customer service.
-
72% of respondents said that customer service is critical in
shopping satisfaction, yet less than 1% of all e-commerce Web
sites offer live customer assistance.
-
Up to 30% of
Internet users re q u i re human intervention before purchasing
on the We b .
So what are
companies doing to resolve this issue? Today too many company
leaders spend their time and resources looking for magical
technology solutions. I call this “The Great System Seduction.”
Since we live in an age of “real time” and “1-to-1 marketing,” the
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems business is
burgeoning . However, a good system does not equal good service. The
European Centre for Customer Strategy predicts that future CRM
effectiveness will be assessed less through hard measures and more
through the stories people tell about a company. This means
companies must give the customer distinctive service experiences so
they will become advocates, telling stories to their friends and
colleagues.
Only if your
people are ‘turned on’ will you generate such legends!
The disappointing
reality is that the human element is frequently overlooked at the
expense of the systems challenges. Enduring and real customer
service success requires a passion for people—both
employees and customers. Author Jim Clemmer observes, “Too many
managers treat ‘their people’ as assets with skin wrapped a round
them.”
Debra Fields,
president of the highly successful Mrs. Fields Cookies, expresses
the flip side: “Customer service does not come from a manual or a
system… It comes from the heart. When it comes to taking care of the
customer you can never do too much and … there is no wrong way if it
comes from the heart!” In other words, we need a balance
between managing things from the head and leading people
from the heart.
While rational
strategy is essential, emotional intelligence accounts for as much
as 70% of the personal and organizational success factor. The
fundamental problem is that most business leaders are not
“pathological” about customer service and do not believe
passionately in it as a key differentiator. One of my clients (a
president who used the word “pathological” in his communications and
speeches about customer service) was successful in making service
excellence happen and royally reaped the commercial benefits. He did
not just make the rational strategy case for it, but he lived it
from his hear . Unfortunately there are too few leaders like
that. For many, the distance between head and heart is far greater
than the typical 16 inches… and therein lies the root cause of
customers’ continuing disappointment with the service they receive .
But if the
customer is king, why are so many companies still behaving like
republicans instead of royalists? There is often misalignment
between the people and the systems in place to manage them.
The challenge for
today’s business leaders is to put their people front and center; to
pursue
short - term
results while continuously aligning technology, work
processes and structure a round the people to enable them to
become customer-focused in all aspects of operation. After all, a
sharper customer focus means a sharper competitive edge.
T h e re are two
lessons in this:
-
M o re
organizations need to think longer and harder about the people
factor in customer service,
and
-
They must also
pay fanatical attention to managing each customer touch-point.
This is serious and hard work. Being “pathological” about
customer service demands passion fro m leaders. They must be pre
pared to walk the talk, be patient, pay attention to customer
detail, and constantly work on people-and customer-focused
alignments. Only then, when they have become “pathological”
about customer service, will business leaders truly be able to
say “Everyone wants to do business with me.”
Eric
specializes in customer-focus consulting. He helps clients achieve
increased customer-focus and operational effectiveness by ensuring
that externally the voice of the customer is captured and is
effectively deployed intern ally, so that business operations,
people and supporting processes work together to deliver
customer-value. The resultant improved customer service,
strengthened customer loyalty, organizational alignment and
increased employee commitment give clients a sharper competitive
edge.
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