Customer Service That Astonishes

In February I wrote a post about a recent service recovery experience with Swiss Chalet.

I thought I would share the subsequent follow up I had with the manager of the particular store I mentioned.

The franchise manager called a couple days later because I had made a comment through their website about my experience. I thought it would be interesting to see how they reacted.

The timing of the return call was pretty quick, but upon connecting, her first concern was to ensure that the issue was with her particular location — and not another  location. I confirmed it was her location.

She then asked what I wanted to make this right — yes those were her exact words. I indicated I wasn’t looking for anything — I had just responded to the feedback form that was made available to me for feedback. They had asked — so I assumed they were interested in what I had to say.

She then indicated that she was calling because “the Franchise owner wanted me to clarity that it was their store”.

She saw I had received a $6.00 credit and said “she would take up with the central organization”. Implying that somehow, someone else had dropped the ball in the total experience.

And that concluded the call. Not even an apology on behalf of her store.

My Perspective: This encounter is part of a much bigger problem I am seeing in the service industry — particularly the auto industry. The follow-up survey for customer satisfaction.

You know the one — where corporate has arranged for a survey company to call customers to gain feedback and then punishes the outlet if they have poor performance.

This results in employees basically asking people to give them a high ranking so the employees/outlet doesn’t get in trouble or even penalized. Talk about a skewed result. Employees start to “game” the system when feedback is used as a stick.

How is this type of information gathering supposed to help businesses improve? They have missed the real opportunity for honest feedback because they have forgotten the purpose of the feedback loop.

 So have a look at your customer feedback programs. Are they focused on improving the experience or punishing the laggards. Are they being implemented simply because you know that you should be measuring customer experience — or are you using this important tool to fine-tune and continuously improve.

There are much more effective ways to deal with the poor performers.

I spotted a couple interesting articles about the power of online reviews (word of mouth). Articles in BizReport.com and Internet Retailer report on Forrester Research’s recently released report called ‘Myths and Truths About Online Customer Reviews’.

Forrester Research indicates that while 81% of people look for information online, and are influenced by what they read — they also do not base their purchase decisions on that information. In fact only 14% always trust an online review. There are slight variations by target audience and category, but the good news is that bad online reviews can be survived. In spite of bad reviews, people sought additional information either from a professional reviewer (37%) or followed up directly with the company (7%).

My view is the lack of personal connection with the reviewer made their motives and credibility suspect. We don’t have a context for why they provided a poor review. Was it a disgruntled employee or a customer with unreasonable expectations? People want to make their own decision and online reviews are a research tool as part of the decision-making process.

However, compare that with an offline review — word of mouth from someone we know. What makes off-line reviews so powerful is that we know the person, we trust them and therefore their views are already in the context of a credible reviewer. We may already have discovered similarities in expectations that align with our own values, so their opinion holds special value.

A bad review online may not be a death knell, but bad offline reviews from someone we know will surely have an enormous impact on any business.

Many of you will have heard or read about the new report released by the CMO Council that describes the current role of the voice of the customer in marketing decision-making based on a survey of 480 executives. It is a dismal state of affairs given the sputtering we hear about the importance of customer service.

Reports have already been published in major industry publications such as AdAge and AdWeek, as well as blogs too numerous to mention.

Some key findings include;

• Nearly two-thirds of companies do not have a formal Voice of Customer program in place.
• Only 31 percent highly rate their organization’s commitment to customer listening.
• Only 13 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback.
• While 74 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages
• Only 12 percent are using a word-of-mouth marketing platform to drive online customer advocacy.
• 58 percent of them believe the Internet and social media have changed the level of influence and expectations of their customers, but only 14.5 percent track word of mouth on the Internet and only 16 percent regularly monitor online message boards for complaints and feedback
• 37 percent said they gather insights from customer engagement situations
• 56 percent said they have no programs tracking or propagating positive word of mouth among customers
• Only 33 percent of the respondents think their companies are very good at resolving complaints
• 58 percent said their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics
• Only 29 percent said their companies rate highly in their ability handle and resolve customer problems or complaints

I think you would agree that this is a dismal state of affairs. From all this data, two things stand out for me.

1. What gets measured gets done: Unless people are being recognized and rewarded for an activity it will not get done.
2. Empowerment: If improving the customer experience is not central to your value system and everyone isn’t empowered to effect change, then change will not happen.

At the end of the day, even though everyone seems to espouse the value of customer service, it still isn’t being effectively leveraged to create a point of difference for organizations. I believe those of us who focus on these two truths will win the day.

Check out the articles (and some of the comments) – they make good reading. You can download the Executive Summary here.

The authors wrote in Industrial and Organizational Psychology that employees will feel — and act — engaged when their employer creates conditions that permit them to do so. The key condition for feeling engaged is fair treatment, which creates a feeling of trust and, in turn, feeling safe to be engaged.

They feel that some people confuse engagement with satisfaction and/or commitment and consider retention and turnover to be indicators of engagement. However, Macey and Schneider said employee engagement concerns both feelings of engagement, focus and enthusiasm, as well as engagement behavior, proactivity and persistence.

Engagement is not equal to satisfaction. Engagement connotes energy and not satiation, while satisfaction connotes satiation and contentment but not energy.

The authors contend that employees come to work ready to be engaged, and the challenge for organizations is to create conditions that will release that energy. I agree. Do you?

Cheers!

Most organizations have put considerable time and money into developing a benefits package that is a positive for their employees. Rightly, they expect that these benefits will contribute to a positive work environment and overall engagement.

However, Andy Philpott of Accor Services (one of the UK’s leading providers of employee benefits, rewards and loyalty services), reports that in a recent study they conducted of rewards, benefits and employee engagement that only one-third of employers (33%) believed staff understand what benefits are available.

More concerning is that just one in five employees (21%) claim to have a good understanding of the value of the benefits available and one in 10 admit they have no clue about the value of these benefits.

Employees also seemed unsure whether their pay, benefits and incentives packages were competitive when compared with people doing similar jobs in similar organisations. Only 33% felt their company was competitive on pay, 25% on benefits and just 17% felt their organisation offered competitive incentives.

It is critical that we communicate the value of our benefits package effectively to staff. Successful communication is an foundational element in building employee engagement and the resulting performance, motivation and productivity benefits are not maximized if people are unaware of what the benefits are.

Cheers!