Customer Centricity, requires that organizations manage themselves “not as a group of products, services, territories or functions, but as a portfolio of customers.” They know how much money they make or lose with each of their customers or customer segments, and they understand why and understand in precise analytic terms exactly how their different customer relationships contribute to, or subtract from, the total value of the firm. Because they manage their customer portfolio on this basis, they know what to manage and where to invest in order to create sustainable profitable growth.
Customer centricity requires us to know our customers well. The group that has the most contact with customers is the support center or customer service or whatever we call it. It is the place where customer calls are routed. The starting point for customer centricity is a customer service organization that functions extremely well and uses tried and true best practices.
The first and most important of these practices and the one done least well is collecting ad hoc customer feedback.
How do we capture and ensure each comment, complaint, need and compliment is available for review and action? The normal process for complaints is to pass them to a management person, who generally listens well, finds some way to fix the immediate situation and calls it a success. But what have we learned? What do we know about how many such complaints come into the organization? It is pretty well accepted that only about 5% of unhappy customers complain, let alone any who have unfulfilled needs for other services. That means for every complaint we know about, there are 19 more that we don’t know about. We need to capture that 5% and encourage our customers to tell us about the other 95%.
What is the best practice? It is has two steps.
An education program for all customer facing individuals on how to detect customer feedback. First of all why it is so important to gather this information? Most front line people see complaints and short comings as personal affronts since they are often accompanied by a good deal of frustration or sometimes panic. Frontline personnel need to know that gathering this information is vital to the bigger organization and that it is used to drive change programs for customers. The best way to ensure they understand is to show them the results of their efforts on a regular basis. Some groups have used reward or incentive programs to change behavior. My thoughts have always been to watch what you ask for. It can drive behaviours you had not counted on.
Then teach the frontline people how to recognize a complaint or comment. Comments come in many forms and use a lot of different language. “This is not what I need” leads to valuable info about that customer and what he needs. Even more benign is “I thought it would be…”or “We are really having a problem getting…” It will take some time and effort to instill in people just what all constitutes a complaint or suggestion. Once that is understood information will start flowing.
A database is required. This is a simple step for support centers. Simply use the system on which customer requests are logged and create a category called “Feedback”. Now the complaint can be entered like any other customer request on the same system the customer service people are already using and simply given a different designation. The call will then be routed to management or whoever is designated to handle feedback and actioned like any other request. The customer will be contacted and his need or issue clarified and resolved. The manager will show the request resolved and the person who took the call in the first place will contact the customer to see if they are satisfied and close the request.
This last step is a best practice. It may seem unnecessary for the person who opened the request to have to get involved again but there are good reasons. It makes the frontline person more responsible, there can be no unclosed requests and the frontline person sees management is serious about how complaints are handled.
The comment or complaint has been handled like any other request and we have it logged in the database for statistical analysis. When we review customer requests at the end of the week or month we get a picture of exactly how many comments and complaints we get and can see if there are patterns and opportunities for new services. We have added knowledge about our customers and are therefore more customer centric.
If there is no customer request system, only an order processing system, it can be adapted. A no dollar order can be created and processed. It takes a bit of manipulation and imagination but it can be done. The bottom line is, unless we know what our customer wants and doesn’t want, it is impossible to supply it. If we don’t know what they need, they will go elsewhere to find it. Lost business!