Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
Is your After Sales Service Department the centre of excellence for Service, the Champion of Customer Relationship Management CRM, in your company?
Quite a mouthful, what does it all mean, our world is full of jargon and acronyms, sometimes so much so we have forgotten what the true meaning is. As the After Sales Service VP or Manager for your organisation do you believe that you could help your company to quickly and efficiently utilise the concepts of CRM to deliver increased customer satisfaction and improved profitability? A simple question. Rather than try and add another definition to the long list of definitions, (as at the moment there appears to be as many interpretations of the terms as there are practitioners).
I would propose that instead we set it out under some quite specific headings that are based on the capabilities needed to support the CRM concept. These capabilities are strongly evident in customer focused companies, particularly in their service organisations that have a reputation for top class service.
There are a number of capabilities, but four stand out as most important. There is a high degree of overlap but each stresses a different type of capability.
Culture and Vision
The culture of a company is about the individuals that it comprises. The word employee is an unfortunate term as it implies that a person works for someone else and not together as a team. A number of companies have moved away from the term employee. Walt Disney for example calls their people “Cast Members”. They encourage their people to see themselves on stage when working. On the doors into the arenas is the word “ stage”. How many people smile when they speak to a customer? Have you ever tried to smile when you are angry? Or have you ever tried to reprimand a child, when you are amused at their misdeeds?
If the company is to be customer centred then the focus within the business has to be on delivering good service to the customer. A Mission statement is great, but without the commitment of the staff, it can’t be delivered.
What does it mean for a service organisation to be totally committed to creating satisfied customers? To the shop manager who wanted his people to know what good and bad service felt like it meant training his staff in how it felt to be a customer. He gave each staff member £50 and sent them out to purchase something they would like from one of his competitors shops. They could keep their purchases, but had to report their total experience and feelings during the process. He found that this instilled in his staff a desire to make sure their own customers were given excellent service.
Another manager had a technique for ensuring that the customer was always considered first and foremost. At every meeting there was a chair set aside labelled “Customer”. He then set two rules in meetings with respect to the chair. Nothing could be discussed, unless it could be discussed in front of the customer and the meeting had to add value directly or indirectly to a customer.
Many companies have focused on tailored and be-spoke product to get away from commodity labels, and use software to support this. However, as products have become more and more sophisticated and full-featured, the vast majority of customers will inevitably consider that they need after sale support, which is specific to them. This provides the opportunity of establishing a one on one relationship with the customer, which reduces the impact of commoditisation and provides personalisation
Customer information
One key focus of CRM is to fully understand the customers’ requirements. Many managers understand the life cycle of a product but how many know the lifecycle of customers. The research normally defines the different stages as; the Pioneers, who purchase by brand, technology and product originality; the Early Adopters, who purchase by brand, technology and ease of use; the Early Majority, who purchase by brand, reliability, customer service, vendor relationship; the Late Majority, who purchase by ease of use, customer support, price; and, the Laggards, who purchase because they feel left out and need customer service.
Brands and labels such as BMW or Nike appear always to have existed. However investigation shows that what created the brand in the first place was a good quality product with good service. For example the Daewoo company has spent many millions of advertising money on promoting the way it cares for its customers, as they have recognised that this is the fastest way to establish a brand name, which they can then trade on. Brand is important but in all cases it has grown through a lineage of good service. Some simple rules of thumb are; understand how the customer defines quality; let the customer know you have heard them; and, talk to the customer, every day, every week, not only when you want to sell them something, or when they have a problem.
Given that every individual customer is unique and different. The concept of one-size fits all, does not seem to work today. Henry Ford’s concept of any colour you want as long as it is black was about reducing the cost of manufacture and thereby making the car affordable to the majority. When he did this it was the right thing to do, he succeeded in creating many satisfied and loyal customers by giving them the means to own a car. One counter to this mass production in the States, after this, was the trend towards completely personalised cars. To increase sales the manufactures brought new models out every year each one bigger and more ostentatious than its predecessor.
Recognising what drives customer service is key and differentiating the business along these lines has the advantage of changing the rules in your favour. Today another example of tailoring is the popularity of personalised number-plates that shows the continuing desire to personalise and individualise, that exists in the consumer environment today.
Skilled Staff
How often do you hear the boast, we might make mistakes but we have a good recovery. A laudable attitude on the face of it, but far better to do it right the first time. If you want to make a point of offering service it should be a planned endeavour not spur of the moment. There is a need for some companies to move from motivation through loyalty and fear, to motivation through a vision shared. People never forget to do things they want to do, they often forget to do what you told them. Everyone in your organisation, in one way or another, works with the customers. The staff, such as the engineers, must have the right tools, parts, diagnostics, software, manuals, etc if they are to do a good job. Catch people doing the right things and reward them.
It is important to understand the difference between good customer service and being well processed (all the right things done efficiently). Europeans used to react badly to “Have a Nice Day”, “ Missing you already”. They felt they were superficial and gratuitous statements. However when someone says it with conviction it is very different. This is the difference between being well processed and receiving good service.
Quite often an area gets well known for something and everyone moves into to get the reflected glory or to find and secure the ingredient of success. The city of Dublin, currently, is highly regarded as one of the best places to locate a call centre, however recruiting and keeping good staff to ensure high levels of service is a now a nightmare.
If one company experiences an attrition rate which is significantly less than the average, the reason is usually because the staff simply like what they do. They like to be renowned for going the extra mile and looking after the customer.
Two simple actions that increase employee and customer satisfaction are; firstly treat your colleagues like customers, and; secondly think of yourself as a customer. People who like people find it natural to take the customer’s point of view.
All personnel face incoming customer calls and must be trained to be responsible for customer service, the term for this is normally empowerment of the staff. However empowerment without training is akin to a ten year old driving a Porsche.
Continuous process improvement
To achieve best achievable practice it is necessary to know what Best Practice is. Best Practice is often very straightforward. A football coach from one of the Premier league clubs many years ago used to remark. “Never mind how skilled, or how fast they are, I can train them in that, but have they learned to do the simple things well?” The simplest of all things is to eliminate anything that constrains or stops your people from serving customers efficiently and predictably. The people who do the job are the best people to ask what constraints are imposed upon them. Sounds idyllic, but if you remove imposed constraints, they are more likely to remove the constraints they have put on you.
Learning from Best Practice has always been a good way to learn. Learning from different industries that execute the same processes and that have already been through the mill, is probably the best way of all, as long as it is appropriate and applicable.
Applying the axiom of “ Under Promise and Over Deliver”, when setting customer standards, it is critical to consider what can be delivered, what is achievable. The process has to be under control, it has to be totally relevant to the customer and achievable, i.e. ”All customer enquiries have to be answered within 4 hours, not the current 8 hours” must only be promised when the people and processes are in place to deliver the new standard. Finally the performance levels have to be measurable. If someone is to be praised, they need to know it is deserved. Everyone likes praise, but undeserved praise is worse than unfounded criticism.
If your total business had to test itself or rate itself on these areas, how do you believe you would score, how would the customer service operation score? How would your customers rate you, do they like you as a supplier, do they think your service organisation is a centre of excellence within an excellent company? When did you last ask them?
