Customer Service

The customer is KING! So we are led to believe. However, more often than not, customers are made to feel like some kind of annoying parasite and difficult to get rid of. Are we truly that demanding or are companies just not getting it?

On a daily basis, I am a customer as well as being a customer service consultant with 16 years experience. I feel that I am in a unique position to provide some insight on customer satisfaction, which is of crucial importance vs. experiencing dissatisfaction.

The facts are that each company has a customer service department, a quality department or, at least, has someone in charge of customer satisfaction. At the start of the customer profiling chain, marketing is in charge of articulating wishes and expectations and translating these into actionable and measurable services.

In theory, having two departments fully dedicated to customers current and future needs should guarantee our kingdom.

Maximum data please!
The first step in providing customer excellence is to listen to the customer. I acknowledge that companies have multiple sources of information: The most common are those tedious and long surveys where we are asked to rate our experience, complete forms and respond to street polls. Companies also regularly organize themed customer workshops, customer visits and request industry analysts to support them. They have, in my opinion, enough information to figure out how to please us.

Dedicated to not having a clue!
We customers are quite cooperative, understanding that in order to get what we want, we need to speak loud and clear and that is exactly what we do when asked.
However, from loud and clear, our opinion mysteriously gets transformed into something that no company service representative understands. How can you possibly know how to serve a customer when the data, explaining what the matter is, is in graphical and numerical format? In other terms, customers dish out words and employees are fed bits and bytes and it is with this information that customer improvement plans are made!

The truth is, our verbal and written feedback is difficult to process and for several reasons: it arrives in abundance, in multiple formats (by web, email, telephone transcript, handwritten), the data is rarely comparable and it would take an army of people a long time to extract any significant information. To date no reliable text analysis technology, which is capable of automating some of this work, exists.

Building the kingdom:
Generally speaking, it is the individuals who listen, use common sense, take initiative, demonstrate intuition and passion that lead to great customer experience. These are the people’s-people.

Unfortunately, the people who hold positions to drive change and make decisions want facts, figures and justification. The data spreadsheets and graphs form the base for change, justification comes from collecting more data more often. The consequence? Process and policy changes are implemented; costly improvements are designed, specialists are hired to do additional data crunching in order to build the five-star customer organization.

But did we say we wanted a five-star treatment with bells and whistles or to simply feel like kings? It is obvious that numbers do not translate into emotional state, which is what customer service is all about.

Nathalie Frechet is the founder of Passion 4 Customer, a company dedicated to European complaint management and customer intelligence. Passion 4 Customer manages customer feedback across 8 European countries, 7 industries in 4 languages. Visit us at http://www.passion4customers.com