3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Customer feedback is vital for businesses to determine if they are adequately meeting the needs of their consumers. While obtaining insight into the customer experience and doing everything possible to ensure consumers are happy should certainly be a priority, businesses must also remain aware of costs associated with the process.

As pointed out by Bill Fotsch in blog post titled "Track Customer Experience, but Don't Forget the Financials" on the Harvard Business Review, many companies have implemented programs intended to produce better quality for consumers that later on had to be scaled back because they became too expensive to keep up and running.

Companies have even found themselves in deep financial troubles in the pursuit of better quality such as when oilfield-supply provider The Wallace Company had to file for bankruptcy shortly after winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990. Moreover, front-line employees at businesses have had to make tradeoffs between customer satisfaction and costs in certain situations, such as letting bounced-check fees slide or honoring a warranty that has expired.

Fotsch suggests creating a daily or weekly dashboard that would include customer feedback and comments, as well as important financial numbers pertaining to the budget and costs per customers. This will enable employees to not only keep track of short-term tradeoffs that would keep costs under control, but also gain knowledge about potential long-term benefits a specific tradeoff that many appear expensive at first but prove to be worth it in the end.

"If they schedule a lot of extra service visits, for example, or regularly honor those expired warrantees, the cost of service will rise," Fotsch wrote in the blog. "But there’s likely to be a payoff in greater customer loyalty — meaning less churn and reduced customer-acquisition costs."

With this type of approach put forth by Fotsch, employees on the front-line wouldn't have to struggle in deciding if giving an extra benefit to a customer is affordable for the company, thus saving the company from a financial mess.