Customer service

It’s a simple enough concept: keep your customers happy and they’ll keep coming back. It’s also a proven fact that by offering a consistently positive customer experience, you will not only enhance your brand offering, but it can also be instrumental in its overall success. So why do so many brands overlook the importance of providing good customer experience – particularly B2B brands, which are failing to cement this vital element into their company’s overall strategy?

Customer experience covers all interactions between an organisation and a customer. Every direct or indirect contact you have is measured against their expectations, whether it’s the actual performance of the company or the emotions that the interaction evokes. “A brand needs to convey five or six positive feelings to its customers,” explains Huw Watkins, account director at marketing consultancy Kae Marketing Intelligence. “These are made up of emotional feelings such as trust and confidence, and physical feelings such as speed, ease of use and accuracy.”

The delivery of great customer service doesn’t have to be the preserve of premium brands. The Mandarin Oriental offers a very specific, luxurious customer experience, but Travelodge, which also offers a positive customer experience, focuses on comfort and ease. What’s important is that a brand consistently delivers the same feelings at every moment of a customer’s journey.

However, there are many B2B (and B2C) brands that are slow on picking this up. Watkins says that one of the main reasons is because many companies tend to think from the ‘inside out’ rather than ‘outside in’. “Their main considerations are operational or financial and decisions are made from an internal perspective rather than from the customers’ point of view. This is too short-term, can end up costing more and is damaging to the customer experience,” he says.

For example, having a call centre abroad will reduce costs, but it is likely to cause more frustrations from the customers’ end and will only cost more, in terms of money and customers, further down the line. The flip side is that if call centre staff were trained to solve minor technical issues for example, customers could be helped at the first instance, there would be less pressure on the technical department, costs would be reduced and the customer ends up happier.”

Starbucks is a classic example of a brand thinking from the ‘inside out’. Its chairman, Charles Schultz, sent a memo to his senior team in February this year, highlighting the actions that in retrospect had combined to erode the Starbucks customer experience as it sought to grow from 1000 to 13,000 stores. These included the introduction of automatic espresso machines, which improved the speed of service but reduced the sense of theatre, while the decision to move away from bagged coffee to plastic boxes improved costs, but also reduced the coffee aroma. Also, the move towards standardised store designs may have enabled rapid rollout, but it also reduced any sense of store individuality. “These were sensible decisions, but they removed the sense of personality and diminished the customer experience,” says Watkins. To offer good customer experience, companies need to find out what their customers’ needs are and how they are segmented so they can be treated accordingly. “They must think from the outside in and ask themselves how the customer feels.”

Moving targets

This is easier said than done though, particularly for B2B companies, says David Arrowsmith, head of customer intelligence at business software company SAS. “Gathering and utilising customer information for B2B marketing can be trickier than for B2C because it is targeting an organisation as well as an individual,” he explains. “At some point that individual will leave or get promoted, so the data relationship becomes more complex, targeting becomes less accurate and customer experience diminishes.” Nigel Southern, MD of customer relationship management company, Reference Sites, agrees. “Keeping track of what’s going on in large companies, which can be a big swirling mass of constantly-changing staff and new products can be hard and very quickly get out of date,” he says. “Customer data typically degrades at a rate of two per cent per month – or 25 per cent of the database per year – so for long-term growth and positive customer relationships, it’s vital to build an up-to-date database of customer experiences.”

B2B companies are also guilty of not finding out enough detail about their customers. “They might have plenty of transactional data – for example, Customer X bought this and Customer Y bought that – but that’s about it,” says Arrowsmith. “This is only one stage up from a sales rep taking badly jotted notes about customers, which provides inaccurate, subjective information. It’s never been more important to understand customers and what they want at a really granular level, but B2B companies are throwing this information away.”

Look at the bigger picture

Arrowsmith says it’s important to take a holistic view of how the customer behaves. “Our interactions with companies are far more complex now – we interact with them on the web, on the phone and face-to-face, so it’s vital to gather all this information into one place – using one source of data is not enough.”

SAS recently launched a tool called Customer Experience Analytics to allow organisations to do just this. “It drags data from various online and offline sources,” explains Arrowsmith. “From a customer calling a call centre to looking on the website, all interactions are registered, which enriches the data you have. For example, it not only tells you what products are being looked at on the website, but also how many seconds are spent looking. This can be critical information as it can be used to cross- or up-sell.” It can then be used to tailor the way in which the organisation interacts with each of its customers.

Dee Roche, head of strategy and marketing at e-solutions company Transversal, agrees all companies should look at personalising their customers’ experience. Its Sales Engine solution does so by offering online content and ads in response to questions asked by customers on their websites. “Knowing what your customer wants is priceless information a brand can act on, which can also be used in conjunction with other response mechanisms such as chat or virtual sales,” she says.

Barclays bank is one company benefiting from this kind of technology – customers using the ‘Ask a question’ feature on the site are served advertising alongside answers to their queries. Ads change automatically depending on their relevance to the questions, or to products and services that Barclays is looking to promote. This targeted marketing is aimed at increasing cross-promotion and growing online sales of Barclays’ products. Roche says that click-through rates for these ads are exceptionally high compared to the industry standard.

Get personal

Mortgage Brain, which targets mortgage intermediaries and other financial advisers, is also using this approach to promote its Premier Edition software. Developed by agency Twentysix Leeds, the three-month campaign, which launched at the end of July, uses DM and email to drive prospects to a personalised microsite. Existing customer data is segmented so content differs according to whether the contact is lapsed, existing or a prospect. Advisors who go on to visit the site are tracked by Mortgage Brain’s customer services representatives and contacted by phone within a few minutes of initial online contact in order to answer any immediate questions, which adds a human dimension to the campaign.

Gail Dudleston, MD at Twentysix Leeds, says that the campaign helps put the brand at the forefront of people’s minds. “Each individual has their own microsite, which features the contact’s name so it is highly personalised. And as it is integrated with the call centre, it means Mortgage Brain is better placed to know who is interested or having trouble downloading the application form, for example, and can respond in the appropriate way – either by calling them or opening a chat window on their desktop. It really is maximising conversion rates.” She adds that whereas with other campaigns there might be three weeks between the first contact and second, with this method contact is immediate and gets to the customer as soon as they’re thinking about it.

Head of happiness

Maintaining a human element at a time when technology is all-pervading is also important to remember when it comes to offering good customer experience. London-based E-Courier hired a head of happiness in October 2006 after its use of IT to track parcels and send couriers to their destination not only removed the inefficiency of human allocation, but also a human touch. “There wasn’t a dedicated customer service function and there were cracks,” explains the current head of happiness Steve Kemp. “My role is to make sure that day-to-day customer issues are investigated and resolved, and long-term, to look after our customers according to their needs.

“Because we are completely separate from the sales team and operations team, it means we have a certain amount of impartiality – sales is usually after more business and the operations department can get defensive if someone complains. My team is in the middle and it means the customers know they are being looked after with their own interests at heart.” Pauline Cochrane, head of strategic and supplier relationships at the Customer Contact Association (CCA), agrees that it is important to establish a central department who is responsible for customer service. “Offering good customer service needs to be at the heart of every business,” she says. “It’s important that someone takes charge – either at board level, or someone who can be a direct channel to the board. This is fundamental to every business.”

E-Courier is also looking to establish a ‘Happiness Index’, which will use feedback to show how happy their customers are by scoring the company on a number of criteria including speed of delivery, appearance and attitude of couriers. “We want to see our level of customer experience improving and it’s important to get feedback from our customers in order to do so,” adds Kemp.

Customer feedback and complaints is another important area to consider according to Rachel Edwards, marketing director at complaints and feedback management company CDC Respond. “If a customer complains and has an issue resolved, statistics show that they will be eight times more loyal. This shows the importance of having a channel open to your customers – the relationship can still be recovered, as long as the complaint is listened to and dealt with,” she says. “Complaints also highlight issues and can be used as an early-warning system and if the data is analysed, then changes can be made to improve the business.”

Your customers are the ones that actually use your products or services so it makes sense that they should be behind the drive for change. So if listening to them could make all the difference, isn’t it about time your customers were always right?

 

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