The history books are full of examples
where little things meant a lot. The
histories of many companies could be a lot better if management paid closer
attention to every chance to tie customers
closer to their product or service. A positive customer experience is the place to
start any customer retention program.
“Every customer interaction is an
opportunity to build or destroy customer
loyalty,” says Steve Boyazis, executive
vice president at InfoCision Management Corp. “This ranges from how
simple the instructions are, to how
knowledgeable the salesperson is, to
how easy it is for the CSR [customer
service representative] to resolve issues
and problems at once.”
Smart Business talked with Boyazis
about some of the “little” things that make
a big difference when building customer
loyalty.
Is the focus on the existing customer or new
customers?
So much marketing, advertising and
development effort is spent on attracting
new clients — but more likely than not,
the most profitable customers are the
ones you already have. This means your
team has to shine when clients call back
and want to make a change in their merchandise or service order, or has a problem or a question. This is most likely
going to be the next time you get a
chance to interact with them. And that’s
when you have to provide a great customer experience.
Existing clients are already convinced
to purchase your product or service, so
the challenge is to assure that they will
continue to be good clients in the future
and that they will recommend you to
their friends.
What leads to a great customer experience?
Being in the customer care business,
we are always looking to find what leads
to a great customer experience. Some things are obvious, like it starts with the
people who are addressing the issue.
More specifically, are they friendly,
knowledgeable and passionate about
what they are doing?
Ultimately you have to strive to provide a resolution for clients the first time
they call with a concern. This actual metric always depends on the industry and
product, but shooting for a resolution
rate better than 85 percent is a good rule
of thumb. After that, there is no real silver bullet. It is really about doing all the
little things that help inspire trust and
confidence.
Can you share some touchstones that build
a great customer experience?
We’ve found that to be great at customer care you have to manage all the
details:
- Answer the complaint, question and
change calls quickly (less than 30 seconds). The longer people are on hold,
the more difficult the interaction is. - Have an efficient process to quickly
approve and manage rebates, alternative
offers and the like. - On the other hand, you have to be careful not just to give away things to
resolve the problem. - Ensure the folks on the phone have
access to all the appropriate product
and/or service information so they can
do the research themselves to answer
the question. Try to eliminate having to
escalate issues to other people in the
network. This should occur less than 10
percent of the time. - When things can’t be resolved, provide a timeline as to when they will be.
- Follow up with the client to make
sure things worked as described and/or
the action items were completed.
Do actual results prove your points?
We recently ran a customer care program that dealt with customers looking
to downgrade or cancel a service and
found that by doing a bunch of the little
things, 75 percent fewer customers actually canceled than were planning to
before we started working with the
client.
As far as we can tell, no one thing in
particular drove this success. But on
average, we answered the customers’
calls 30 percent faster, which led to few
angry callbacks. We were able to resolve
about 10 percent more of the issues on
the first call. We armed our communicators with better data so they could identify alternatives and solutions faster and
thus made the call about 30 seconds
shorter. And we called back over twice
as many customers to follow up on unresolved issues.
All of these little things ultimately
added up to the fact that customers were
more satisfied (by about 11 percentage
points) and the amount of business that
was actually canceled was 75 percent
lower than expected.
STEVE BOYAZIS is executive vice president at InfoCision
Management Corp. in Akron. Reach him at (330) 670-5877 or
[email protected].