Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Three challenges: incentives, responsibility, enterprise process. Many incentives are counter to good service (timed calls, #calls handled). Where there is no responsibility there is no budget for focus. Along the lines of this latter item, few companies still are fundamentally redesigning their business processes from the perspective of their relationships.

All of that said, a lot of sins can be covered up and/or made more bearable with a little love, but to give it, employees have to receive it -- the cultures of most businesses are too sterile to nourish the growth of empathy. My suggestion is to replace CRM (fundamentally transaction-based) with C+RM: Cherish + Respect Methods.

Mila:

Getting Customers to Love YOU? What companies need to 'get' is that getting customers to love you...means loving them even more!

When I was at Lands’ End, Fortune Magazine did an article on us called, “Getting Customers to Love You.” The big revelation about why we were loved was that we could be counted on. We established peace-of-mind with our guarantee. We trained our telephone reps to not only know the products backwards and forwards, but to care why customers were buying them. Our graveyard shift operators were some of the busiest in the business because of the calls they’d receive in the middle of the night from insomniacs who, sure, would buy a turtleneck, but were also on the line to hear the friendly voice on the other end. We had quality standards that customers could count on because we flew quality assurance experts to the plants every thirty, sixty and ninety days throughout the production cycle to ensure they were on course. Products were inspected once and sometimes twice when they came through our doors. And when you called in your order, it was on its way to you usually within twenty four hours. Customers loved us because we respected them and their time. And we made sure that we translated that respect to actions they could see and feel. In the time that’s gone by since then, I’ve experienced a multitude of cultures; some close to that of Lands’ End, but most far removed from that respect that we were able to weave into our operation and business decisions.

The fact of the matter is that it’s the unusual organization that’s set up to let people think and act collectively on behalf of customers. We’re stuck in our silos making independent decisions; taking isolated actions for the purpose of executing our discipline, achieving good numbers and earning a good review. Of course the customer experience doesn’t happen neatly down each individual silo. The customer experiences a company horizontally, across the silos. This is the breeding ground for the lack of respect customers feel and the discontent they have with us. The typical silo structure bumps the customer disjointedly along to deliver the outcome of its experience. It’s only when the silos clang and clash into one another that the total experience comes together. And the customer becomes the grand guinea pig, experiencing each variation of an organization’s ability, or inability, to work together. Not much customer respect or love results.

Here are five great steps for how to get there:

STEP 1: Elevate customers as an asset of your business. Right now, you can probably recite where you are in meeting your sales goals. Do you know
as much about your customer goals? These are the counts of customers in and customers out, a clear accounting for customers by profitability and revenue by segment, customers who renewed with you and why, and customer referrals. This is about elevating customer metrics into the strategic stratosphere—to make the knowledge of customer gains and losses as widely and wildly understood as if you made quarterly sales goals. If you’re not keeping track of this end game, of the quality and quantity of customers voting to stay or leave based on the experience you deliver, you will continue your dependence on survey scores and the
fake number quest. You need to essentially wage a campaign to power the customer metrics onto the strategic agenda of your business.

STEP 2: Create a system to track and trend complaints and comments.
Stop doing regression analysis and all of the other crazy things you do with the customer survey data that doesn’t connect to anything operational in your business! Instead, channel that energy into listening in on customer calls for a few days. As you listen, create categories of issues, which will start to repeat by hour two of your listening in. And before you spend a single cent on technology, get your
leaders to listen in, acknowledge the categories, and agree to accountability by category. Then move on to establishing a consistent way of capturing the issues for every channel with customer contact: phones, sales, web, etc. Companies have been dancing around doing this for years…and it is time to commit. This will give you the real time answers to what your customers like and don’t like about their experience with you. And when you get that database in order, you can take this further to show the financials and opportunity cost attached to ignoring customer issues. Many companies now are attaching complaints to customer records and can actually show the
movement of customers in declined spending and defection per problems encountered. Now that will get you traction and drive change in operational performance faster than
looking at a survey score and trying to figure out what it really means.

STEP 3: Listen to the frontline. regularly.
Your frontline is hearing from your customers every single day. And if you don’t listen to them regularly you’re missing one of the easiest and most potent ways to understand the experience you are delivering to them. At Lands’ End, we did something very simple which you can begin doing immediately. And it doesn’t take technology or a task force or anything
more than the will and commitment to do it. On a monthly basis, select 10-20 people from the frontlines of your company, from sales or service or the front desk. In fact you should rotate people in from the different groups. Invite them saying you want to hear from them on what customers need, and what they need to serve customers. Put the chairs for the frontline in a circle. Put a chair in the middle and have your CEO sit in it. The frontline talks, the CEO listens, someone takes notes. You take action. The end. This was our ‘improvement strategy’ for years at Lands’ End during the formative period in the 1980’s and 1990’s when we were making our way into people’s hearts. It’s simple and it works. Try this.

STEP 4: Prioritize and fix thE top 10 things bugging your customers. Inactivity from the survey data exists because people don’t know what to work on. Some companies are able to ask the survey in a way that asks the question and also asks the
customer to rank its importance. If you’re still doing surveys, this is the best way to go
because you can prioritize the issues. When you start tracking and trending complaints, this is even clearer because the volume of complaints will identify the most important issues. The
key is to focus. In one financial services company, we called these customer issues the “cracks
in the foundation” of the business. There were nearly a hundred of them. But we focused on fixing ten every six months. These became the shared responsibility of leaders and their compensation was tied to it. And it got action. We make the customer work way too complex. Just start listening to customer issues, prioritize them and fix them. End of story.

STEP 5: Work to believe. Very little shreds of respect remain, if any, after we’ve put customers through the third degree that many experience when they encounter a glitch in our products and services and actually need to return a product, put in a claim or use the warranty service. As tempting as it is to debate customers to uphold a policy to the letter of the law, suspend the cynicism and work to believe your customers. Most are going to honestly relay what is happening to them with your product and service. And because of all the ‘ifs, ands, and buts’ in our policies we’ve conditioned customers to come in with their dukes up when they have a problem. With good reason. We’ve programmed our frontline to be cynical of customers through the creation of policies that protect the corporation from the lack of judgment of the minority. Work to eliminate the question of doubt about your customers’ integrity. It will do wonders for the attitude and actions that your frontline brings to their interactions with customers.

Remember, Customers Defect When the Silos Don’t Connect…

The outcome of our inability to work together is the gift we give our customers. We force our customers into navigating our organization charts just to get what they need from us. The end result of their experience is usually not planned. It’s the defaulted experience that comes from the customer receiving the individually planned and executed tactics and actions of each separate area of our companies. These come together in a seemingly dim-witted chain of events that has the customer thinking; “Do they talk to each other,”: “What are they thinking,” and “Why do I have to take this anymore?” Customers vote with their feet and decide if they will stay or leave based on their perception of how much we value them and how we treat them. And more are leaving every day just because of our inability to do the basic blocking and tackling of delivering our products and services to them.

So, getting customers to love you has got to start with showing them the respect they deserve by making it painless and eventually a joy to do business with you.