The Real Life Of CRM: Politics, Health Care, E-Mail And Coffee Shops

By David Sims 

Where the customer relationship management rubber hits the road has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with those techie toys most people confuse with “CRM.” Here are four instances of real CRM either winning or losing customers, and you don’t need anything more than an off-the-shelf laptop for any of them:

E-mail Failure

Companies are getting slack and lazy about answering your customer service e-mails -- when they get around to it at all. From Chiropractic Economics:

According to an annual survey conducted by Hornstein Associates, a marketing company, customer service via e-mail has declined steadily since 2002.

In this year’s survey of 49 companies, including Microsoft, GE, Toyota, Coca-Cola, IBM (News - Alert), Wal-Mart, P&G, Apple, J&J, Costco, FedEx, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Berkshire Hathaway, only 33 percent of companies responded to e-mails within 24 hours, down from a high of 63 percent in 2002.

The 2007 survey is sent to more than 49 companies. Each company has been sent the following one sentence e-mail for the past seven years:

“What is your corporate policy regarding the turnaround time for e-mails addressed to customer service?”

Only 51 percent of companies responded in any time period.

Doing It Right

Some companies do listen to customers’ ideas – and act on them:

MyStarbucksIdea.com was launched a month or so ago to collect ideas from people on how Starbucks can improve service, products, profits. “So far,” the Associated Press reports, “Starbucks has already promised to offer free wireless Internet access in stores and rewards through its loyalty card.”

Here we see the Mom and Pop coffee shops repaying Starbucks a bit. Contrary to popular perception Starbucks did not drive everyone else out of business, but did worlds of good for independent coffee shops and other coffee shop chains, as their number and quality have skyrocketed since Starbucks raised everyone’s expectations for both coffee and the coffee shop experience. One coffee shop chain’s location strategy is explicitly stated as “Open as close to Starbucks as you can,” next door if possible.

But as wonderful as the company is, Starbucks is the proverbial corporate battleship when it comes to nimbly navigating customer expectations. The rejuvenated Mom and Pops have found ways to build loyal clienteles in the face of Starbucks – offering free Wi-fi and loyalty cards being two of them. Now that Starbucks is open to suggestion, here’s hoping the Moms and Pops find new ways to attract customers and the bar for everyone gets raised yet higher.

Health Care Customers

Health care is a business, and needs to pay attention to customer service too.

“Poor service drives Americans to switch providers, or drives them away from better-qualified providers, leading to inefficiency, higher costs and lower quality of care,” according to a new report, including a survey of 1,003 Americans.

The survey, produced by management consultants Katzenbach Partners and titled “The Empathy Engine: Achieving Breakthroughs in Patient Service,” finds that one in four Americans has switched or considered switching doctors, hospitals or clinics because of negative experiences, according to the research. Fifty-two percent say they choose hospitals and clinics based on whether they believe employees understand their needs, only one in five say they choose based on convenience.

The study says under the right conditions healthcare providers “excel at improvising and finding small but important solutions.” Texas Children’s Hospital empowers its employees to solve problems on their own. They acted on their own to bring in a mechanic to fix a door when a mother and child needed privacy. Mayo Clinic staff found a way to schedule appointments more than six months in advance -- in spite of the limitations of the computer software -- by creating their own improvised system.

The study found a group of employees at NYU Medical Center “that organized their own program to create new patient service standards. They created meetings and a reward system, and exerted peer pressure -- in a nice way -- to get other employees involved.”

Politics

Gary Hargens is a politician wannabe who gets it.

According to the Rapid City Journal, Gary Hargens, a Democrat, has announced his candidacy for the South Dakota Senate in District 34 promising… good customer service.

Hargens, a resident of Rapid City for 22 years, tells the newspaper that his rural upbringing in Miller, along with his experience with Black Hills tourism for the past 22 years, give him a great understanding of two of the largest industries in the state of South Dakota.

He currently works at The Journey Museum in Rapid City, and believes that “excellent customer service,” in the Journal reporter’s words, “is the basis for any success.” This is a politician who understands what he’s really being elected to do:

“In order for government to be successful, you must give all the residents of South Dakota the best customer service, regardless of their political party affiliation,” he said.

Indeed. Enough of this guff about politicians being “leaders,” no sensible person wants to be “led” by government, they have a name for that style of government: “fascism.” For a sensible, freedom-loving person government is there to work behind the scenes to keep the rules running, fix the potholes, enforce contracts and property rights and put on a decent St. Patrick’s Day parade while we “lead” our own lives.

This puts politicians in their proper place as semi-obscure, unobtrusive civil servants, with duties far more similar to the city, district and state manager for McDonald’s than to those of Hugo Chavez. Properly understood, democratic representative federalism of the sort America has should be operated as a big public service organization, with elected representatives in the same position as company management undergoing job reviews every two or four years and subject to contract renewals or termination by the voters.

Generals, head coaches and private enterprise executives are leaders. Sure it’s a lot more exciting and fun to be a leader than to be a county commissioner or lieutenant governor, but if politicians want genuine leadership they can get honest jobs. Otherwise they’d better understand that customer service is their real job, and that we don’t want politicians to “lead” us, we want them to just take care of the day-to-day issues and leave us alone.

So vote Hargens. CiS

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