Customer rightfulness
Published by Esteban Glas on October 29th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Social Media, long term thinking
The title Certainly called my attention my eye: The Customer Is Not Always Right — Now What? The post from Forrester’s Bruce Temkin makes reference to an article on the Boston Globe. The Globe’s article is a collection of a couple of cases in which the rightfulness falls on the company side, on the customer side, or in the shady tone of gray called “in between”.
Everyone who works on customer relations (Ahem! Mark) knows that you can’t always be right and that the customer doesn’t always make a good case. The key resides on how to handle each individual case. Some customers can quite easily acknowledged when presented with the other side of the story, yet there are others that might be harder to convince, not to mention those almost impossible to handle.
Where call center scripts and training usually fails is in the most basic of all things: handling human interactions. No one likes to hear that that particular thing that happened is not covered by the warranty, or that you did not follow installing instructions, for instance. Those in contact with customers usually forget that the voice / text at the other end belongs to a human that can get quite emotional when the truth is awful enough.
Bruce comes up with a list of his own “what to do”. I can agree with most his points but one:
Not all customers are equal.
Don’t use the same rules for treating your most profitable customers that you apply to your less desirable ones.
Not quite. There is no real way to tell how potentially profitable a customer can be. For starters, and on the most basic level, no one can tell what a customer will buy next. Maybe a history of purchases can give some insight, but not always accurate. On a more complex level there is really no way to tell the mouth-to-mouth power a certain individual might yield.
Upon first impression a lonely buyer might seem less interesting (in terms of profits) than the buyer for a large company, yet the case might be that the lonely buyer can influence a lot of people.
All users deserve the best possible treatment (whether they are right or wrong) because, in the end, that will always transform in more profits.
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October 30th, 2007 at 12:43 am
A lot of these kinds of rules come from the assumptions that no processes are perfect - there will always be fallout, and exceptions that need to be worked. A second assumption is scaricity of resources to handle the exceptions - that they are expensive in terms of labor and goods / dollars. This concept of scarcity suggests that a strategy is needed - perhaps a prioritization along some dimensions.
Prioritizations might follow customer spending patterns, or perhaps inversely proportionate to liklihood to defect. Or, perhaps it’s just priotiization based on squeaky wheel - spending to silence your loudest critics.
I look at the policies of other industries and find myself often chaffing against them. Why do credit card companies slowly increase the rates of good, loyal customers, while offering heavy discount incentives to attract new members. Only upon notice of termination (intent to close the account) do they make some effort to extend a lower rate? Businesses often tend to spend to attract new, rather than investing to keep those clients they have. Cell phone, satelite, and cable service providers all invest to cannibalize competitor client bases, while failing to protect their own.