
Is It Possible to Get Better Service with Lower Costs?
But now, one customer’s mail, tweet or comment about you, may reach millions of people in an instant.
More importantly, customer satisfaction has become the best way for reaching and convincing prospective customers. Here is the result of “Engaging Advocates rough Search and Social Media” research by Comscore, Yahoo!
76% of consumers recommended companies they trust to a friend or colleague!
These actions are:
Communicating about their positive experience with others (57%)
Recommending that someone make a purchase (41%)
So it is understood that, we should make our customers happy and keep them satisfied. This leads to the concept of sustainability. Sustainability of customer satisfaction means “smarter companies” and “smarter behaviors.”
Smarter Tools
The structure and the methods of customer service management should change.
Symptom:
Your call center is getting more and more seat in time. Is your product or service problematic? No. You need end to end and collaborative service management tools otherwise your call/contact center founded to solve problems becomes reasons for new problems.
Submitted, in progress, resolved…. these are ticket statuses. Customers want to know what “in progress” means. They are wondering which department is handling the problem, where it will go from there, and how long it will take to resolve.
Customer service management is much more than ticketing. It is a type of business process management.
Symptom:
Why hasn’t Mr. X’s problem been solved? It has been “in progress” for …. days, weeks,… What is the reason? … No information. The only information that ticketing provides is “ It is in progress”. So you should pick you phone and call everyone to find out what is happening.
Therefore issues and requests and consequently the processes and information needed to resolve them are changing. This means that you need new workflows and interfaces and/or improvements to existing ones. You need to be agile enough to adapt to changing worlds.
So what will happen? You and your IT guys, vendors, and consultants will solve your problem in time. Do you believe that? What will happen if they tell you that they have “more important things to do”? (They might be telling the truth.)
So you need tools to design or modify your issue resolution workflows and interfaces without any help from IT or other vendors.
Smarter Results
Why do we need to be and act smarter? Because today, the cheapest and most powerful way of gaining new customers is satisfying the current ones. Here is a research about the most valuable customer by V. Kumar, J. Peterson, R. Leone, Harvard Business Review (“How Valuable is Word of Mouth?” 2007)
“A company’s most valuable customers are customers who are both excellent buyers and marketers (they bring in a lot of referrals).”
For that reason, companies should collaborate to resolve customers’ issues. At the same time, we should keep in mind that “every complaint is a present.”
Answer these nine questions. How many could you answer with a “yes”?
Do you have a single customer view across all channels?
Do you know who is working on an issue, who will be next, who is on time and who is late?
Can you design processes, user interfaces, SLAs and escalations without writing codes ?
Is your customer service management integrated with your systems ?
Do you have knowledge-base for end-users and self-desk for customers ?
Can you keep your customers updated via email and SMS ?
Can your customers track their complaints from your website ?
Do you manage complaints according to ISO 10002 standards ?
Are you able to analyze the complaints for customizable KPIs ?