Let the bloggin resume, thought that you might enjoy hearing this story.What your customers (and your sales force) are trying to tell you about the customer experience
Pick up any book on Customer Service and the first tip on how to improve or provide a good customer service experience is to “listen to the customer…” This advice is so incredibly obvious and intuitive that you shouldn’t need a book to tell you that! Yet putting it into practice is incredibly hard to deliver. Why? customers want...at least one company's customers
We recently completed a project for a Transportation Company on improving its customer service operation. Our task was to find out what their customer wanted in a good customer service experience. We surveyed over 500 customers, conducted multiple focus groups and held one-on-one interviews. And after all that data collection, what did the customers say they wanted?
They wanted the company to…get ready for this…”know them.” Know them and their business, and have an understanding of their business so that you can anticipate their needs and be a valuable partner. Doesn’t sound too difficult to deliver, right?
In this company’s case, it is difficult. They have no customer service standards and no rules to govern interactions. Oh, they also lack a centralized customer database or incentives to capture and archive customer conversation and data. To make matters worse they deliver customer service in a decentralize environment with over 100 centers, all operating independently.
Given that scenario you would think that this company could implement some simple fixes that would have a big impact—and there are some simple fixes. But what is interesting is why the company is in this state in the first place. When you get to the core issue you begin to understand the challenge.
At its core, this is an operations driven company, and customers can sometimes get in the way of efficiency. Their culture and core operating model is to move a box as quickly as possible from point A to B without damaging it. Customers who have special needs and/or require assistance slow the process down. In this company’s environment, delivering good customer service can sometimes be too costly and/or too inconvenient. The bottom line is that the process is more important than the customer.
So what does this tell us? Well, it may begin to explain why your company can’t deliver on customer expectations as well.
This is the introduction to a white paper on improving the customer experience that will be released soon. To receive a copy of the full story please click here.
