The July-August 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review ran an article by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman entitled "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers."
(You can read it in its entirety by purchasing the article on pdf or go to your local library that has back copies of the HBR.)
That sounds heretical on the face of it, but after surveying over 75,000 B2B and B2C customers about their recent service interactions over various non-face to face channels, they came up with some statistics that suggest trying to go above and beyond for your customers doesn't reap as much reward as we thought.
Here is one set of stats that shows we would be better off just fixing our customer service to meet expectations in the first place. These are the some of the most common problems with customer service:
- 56% Had to re-explain an issue
- 57% Had to switch from the web to the phone
- 59% Said resolving an issue cost them moderate-to-high effort
- 59% Reported being transferred
- 62% Had to contact the company repeatedly to resolve their issue (not much first contact resolution going on out there, huh?)
Looking at these numbers, I think just fixing these problems would count as going above and beyond by most customers. The heck with the bells and whistles, just solve the problem the first time using just one channel.
These problems propel what Dixon, et al, call The Bad-Service Ripple Effect: the observation that serv ice failures not only cause existing customers to leave, but may make prospective customers stay away.
- 25% of customers are likely to say something positive about their customer service experience while 65% are likely to speak negatively
- 23% of customers who had the positive experience told 10 or more others about it while 48% of customers with negative experiences told 10 or more other people
If you think about it, when your customer service experience is positive, you are pleased that expectations were met and you move on. When you have a bad experience, what do you do?
You get angry. This is a much stronger, more passionate, and aggressive emotion that that "pleasant" feeling the positive encounter engendered. This makes it much more likely that those emotions will be given a public outlet, especially about an experience so many of us have shared.
You can't help it. This company just wasted your time, caused you to be late, disappointed you even more in their product, and just frustrated you in general. If the CSR was not skilled in empathic interaction (whuddaya want ME to do about it?!?!), it gets even worse.
What can be done?
Well, Matthew, Karen, and Nicholas came up with more than a picture of the problem; they came up with some ways to solve it.
First of all, and most likely to reap the biggest rewards:
Don't just resolve the current issue - head off the next one
This doesn't just involve first contact resolution, because that can be a misleading metric. 22% of call-backs involve issues related to the original problem, even if that problem has been resolved to their satisfaction. It becomes the "Why didn't you tell me this would happen?" call-back. By anticipating future issues caused by the originating problem and taking care of them, the customer is much more likely to agree that FCR has occurred. He doesn't split calls out the way your company does, he only knows he had to call AGAIN about something you should have known about and fixed for him at the time. (This is often evidence of a strong focus on call handling time.)
By the way, the article says this is the #1 issue that creates a difficult, and hence negative, customer experience. Fix this one and you're more than halfway done.
Next:
Train CSRs to address the emotional side of these interactions.
Make sure your website can answer the questions customers have.
Get feedback from customers who complain to correct the issues causing self service problems.
Give your front line employees the authority to create an easy way for customers to interact in the channel of their choice.
One last piece of information I gleaned from this article:
While we may still think most of our customers still prefer phone interaction, making us reluctant to try a full-scale change in the way the service center runs, it is no longer true.
As it happens, people no longer care which channel they use, in general. As other channels become more mainstream, the numbers of user will increase and phone support will become a smaller part of the pie. Since those new channels will have to implemented and integrated anyway, this makes it an even better time to overhaul the process all at once.
Have any of you recently changed your customer service process? Why and what were the results? Leave a comment so we can discuss.