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Consistency Across Channels
I recently attended a Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange during which Purdue’s Mike Trotter talked about customers’ expectations for reaching the companies that serve them. Trotter is the executive director of the university’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality. According to Trotter, a recent Purdue study found that 68 percent of customers will not do business with companies that don’t offer multiple channel choices for interaction. That’s up from 61 percent last year. These customers want access to companies via the Web, via phone, and in person (either at retail or with a salesperson). Easy enough for most firms. The catch is offering consistent service delivery across those channels. “If you don’t, you give customers the right to shop [competitors] for answers,” Trotter said.
One specific area of challenge that Trotter noted is at retail. In-store staff are often “as dumb as rocks,” he said, because they don’t have the same Web access to information that customer do. Improving this situation will become increasingly important as today’s teens – who routinely combine channels to get what they want – enter the workforce and extend their purchasing power.
But don’t rush off to add channels. Only add channels that add value. “Talk to customers and understand their needs first,” Trotter said, adding that companies should start by talking to their most profitable customers.
The fact is, building customer relationships across all access points will improve the stickiness of the relationship, and provide value to both customer and company.
Joe, It's certainly true that customer expectations are continually increasing and that market leaders are setting the bar for service, regardless of industry. One executive for a utilities firm who I saw speak last year made the point that when he was setting up his organization's online self-service system, he didn't look solely at what his competitors offered; he also looked at the overall B2C market to see what customer experience the service leaders were providing.
Easy to contact is a basic requirement to do business on an ongoing basis. Many companies do have a lot of channels to deal with customers. So basically, outstanding problem is not a company’s lack of access by customer. The problem is how quick the issue is addressed and problem is solved and is it solved with a lot of courtesy, politeness, professionalism and care after the customer accessed the company.
We are living in the e-world, where customers require answers immediately to their questions, while so many companies are still using their standard lead time to try to set up customer expectation, and call it a success and label the customers as “excited customer” if they inquire again before the set lead time.
The challenge for many services related industry is customers need premier service, while they are not willing to pay the premier price. Then are the customers to blame if the service is not to their expectation due to they do not want to pay extra? Or the service could be extended to many more customers without raising the price?
Many “smart” marketing programs are trying to segment customers and segment the service they provide and charge to customers on customized service. Wrong. Every customer expects customized service every time there is a contact with the company. The customer expectation is changing. A premier service once adapted by competition or once customer experienced it, should be regarded as standard order querying factor. Please do not manage your customer expectation. Just do whatever necessary to meet their expectation and if at all possible, exceed. Many companies have a mission to exceed customer expectation. This is extremely difficult thing to do. How do you know what your customers expect now? They may pay for a 3 star hotel and expect a 5 star service.
For example, a delay in products delivery is communicated, and customer is made aware of this. Do you create good customer experience by informing customers there is a delay? No. Customer is just being patient. What the company is doing is simply not worsening the customer experience, not improving it.