Call Center Management Featured Article
It's Customer Loyalty Month: What Are You Doing for Your Customers?
There are a whole lot of examples of bad customer service today, and far fewer examples of stellar customer service. Interacting with customers is a complex and delicate balancing act, and many companies strive to find the spot where they can offer “good enough” customer service without losing customers. But customers who drop a company seldom announce that they are doing so, so many companies are losing far more customers due to poor service than they might think.
On the flip side, improving the customer experience, even a little, can raise revenue and reduce costs. According to Emmet Murphy and Mark Murphy, authors of the book “Leading on the Edge of Chaos,” a two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10 percent. Think about that: despite general business perceptions, raising the quality of customer support can actually reduce costs. Since it costs far more to woo new customers than it does to keep existing ones, this makes sense.
April is a good month to start improving customer loyalty, as it has been designated Customer Loyalty month. Customer loyalty expert and author Shep Hyken, writing for Business2Community, notes that while companies should emphasize steps to raise customer loyalty every day, there are some special things that contact centers can do to make a start.
Keep your promises. It’s easy to tell a customer, “I will make sure this is resolved before your next bill arrives,” but much harder to make that come true. Customers will fiercely reject companies that don’t keep their promises. If the actions for a resolution are the job of another department, ensure there is follow-up for these actions and customer support personnel can verify that promises are being kept. (This may involve the implementation of mandatory internal work collaboration solutions with alerts.) If you tell a customer you’ll call him or her back in an hour, make sure it’s an hour or less.
Reach out to your customers. There are a whole host of business solutions today – analytics springs to mind – that help companies anticipate customer needs. (Example: a customer who bought a new refrigerator four months ago might need new water filters.) The trick is to make sure it’s personalized, timely and not too intrusive. A phone call from a live outbound sales rep, an e-mail or a text message can do wonders toward improving the customer relationship. Spamming customers with non-personalized e-mails or tying up his or her phone with robocalls will have the opposite effect.
Map the customer journey. Too many companies design the customer journey – the path customers must take from first outreach to resolution – for the company’s convenience. When they do this, they are likely making customer interactions longer, more confusing and error-prone than they should be. Re-map the customer’s journey from a customer perspective, and align your internal processes from there.
Use best practices. Contact center employees are the ones on the frontline, so chances are good that they have the best insight into what makes customers enthusiastic. Ask them to share their experiences of how they have taken extra effort to boost customer loyalty in the past, and share these experiences during training or team building meetings.
While every month should be customer loyalty month, this month is a great time to begin a program. Take steps to ensure that the customers you have today will be your customers at the same time next year. In the long run, your company will reap financial benefits.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi