Surface Ripples

How Do You See Your Customers?

The way a business sees its customers influences the way it serves them and therefore its continuing success.

Perceived management “wisdom” dehumanises customers by teaching that they are a source of income and that one should find as many ways as possible to extract this. This has resulted in the development of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems designed to track, record and analyse a business’ interaction with customers and how much revenue is earned from each customer, contact or product, as well as how much each customer costs to serve. Customers become fruits to be squeezed for juice, and they’re clever enough to tell!

Systems segment customers by age, income, socio-economic group, education, sex, postcode and any other number of categories. Systems “slice and dice” them to determine the best way of squeezing more out of them, identify new opportunities to sell a particular product, or reduce costs of service.

As pressure mounts to increase revenues and productivity and/or to cut costs, customer service gets relegated to low-cost “service centres” far from the customer they’re meant to “serve”. Typical examples of this in the UK are the offshore Call Centres so often vilified in the press. So intense have the complaints become in some cases, that some organisations are bringing their Call Centres back to the UK (albeit still to more remote – read “cheap” - locations).

Another strategy is to push customer-handling further “down the line” to more junior (and therefore cheaper) staff who have little authority and work from “decision trees” to handle up to 95% of possible customer enquiries. When they get a problem they can’t solve, they have to refer “up the line”, causing delays.

A friend of my parents had a typical encounter with one “Call Centre”. She called up to ask to speak to her bank branch and was told that the person to whom she was speaking could handle any question. She said that in her opinion only her branch could answer her question, but was assured that this was not the case. Her question: had she left her glasses on the counter at her branch?

With all the “science” and cost-consciousness, what people forget is that it’s the “traditional” methods that often produce the best results. As technology improves, it is becoming cheaper to provide certain services, but in the end, it is the customer’s experience that dictates whether they will continue to use a particular supplier. Cheap can work, but many of us have encountered expensive and poor service more than once.

Good service begets customer loyalty which begets repeat business. Although people have realised that it costs more to bring one new customer on board than to keep one happy, processes seem to focus more on extracting more cash rather than making the experience pleasurable and therefore maximising that which is already there. Yes, one has to have “new customer initiatives”, but how many “existing customer initiatives” does one hear about? How many initiatives does one hear about designed to treat customers as the people that they are?

Michael Heppell in his book 5 Star Service offers some great insights into what makes for good service – and it’s all about treating customers not as piggy banks but as people. As long as customers are seen as cash cows, there will always be room for organisations who “treat them right”.

Labels: Customer Care, Selling, Strategy

posted by William Martin @ 16:51