Have you ever run a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon, or even a marathon? Would you consider stopping one mile before the finish line? Why not? Where’s the satisfaction in doing that? The sense of accomplishment? The bragging rights, even?
How many of us experience that let down in customer service experiences? Where the assistance we receive falls just short of totally resolving our issue? What about the products that aren’t quite right in either functionality or ergonomics or even in the instructions for use?
Glenn recently ordered a button-down collar shirt. When it arrived, he inspected it and tried it on. It fit perfectly, but he suddenly started fidgeting with the collar. Turns out that the button holes had been stitched, but the slits hadn’t been cut. Now this is readily remedied at home but not so if he had taken the new shirt on a business trip where a seam ripper or small pair of scissors wasn’t available. Satisfaction level? – not so high.
Would you consider Glenn’s shirt to be defective? We did. It didn’t perform as expected, and it required intervention on our part to make it wearable. Where should the defect have been detected? Not at the customer’s, not at final inspection, but at the button hole making process. That extra mile for customers.
A Challenge For Your Organization
How often do our quality assurance methods look at our services or products through the eyes of our customers? I’d like to challenge you to test your own website and/or customer service contact methods.
Is Your Website User Friendly
How easy is it to find out how to contact you?
How many pages do you need to navigate through to find a contact?
How many ways do you offer contact – chat bot, email, web inquiry, or – gasp – a live agent?
Do you follow up to see if the transaction satisfactorily resolved the issue?
Navigating Your Telephone Support
How many phone trees do your customers have to navigate? Are the prompts easy to follow?
How many handoffs do your customers encounter?
How many times must the same information be repeated?
How easy is it to reach a live representative? And are they knowledgeable, trained, and empowered to go “off script” to understand your issue(s) and to promptly provide an acceptable resolution?
Do you follow up to see if the transaction satisfactorily resolved the issue?
Now that you’ve take the challenge, what improvements will you make to improve customer satisfaction and maybe even earn their loyalty? To be known as that organization that goes the extra mile?
Leveraging Your Customer or Tech Support Services as Surrogate Customers
Another consultant once shared with me that when she started working with a new client, she asked their customer service staff to keep a log for 30 days of the things that they said, “no” to customer requests. She said that the logs provided valuable insights into the customer experience as well as policies that might need to be revisited.
As the head of Quality many years ago, I changed industries. I tried her clever strategy as a way to quickly understand what things we needed to address to improve our customer satisfaction. It was easy to discover training deficiencies, out-dated policies, and occasionally new products or services we could introduce that would meet our customer expectations. And another added benefit to this approach was that our customer service reps finally felt heard. They had long been on the “bleeding edge” of customer frustration with no real ability to make meaningful change.
This simple exercise yielded great benefits – externally and internally. Please ask your customer service staff to keep a log for 30 days of things they said, “no” to customers requests. Then send us an email summarizing what you learned.
