Integrated Business Analysis Complaints
integrated business analysis complaints
Advocate for Customers: Customers Stay Where They are Wanted
Customer satisfaction and retention is linked directly to customer communication and education. A quality strategy for customer service is discussed below. A focused effort to identify with customers, to listen and communicate with them, is a continuous cycle that leads to satisfied customers and produces customer loyalty and retention. It can also yield lower cost for customer acquisition through referrals. Customer service is not just nice to do, it has a bottom line impact on the life blood of the business.
The Customer View and Voice:
The customer view must be considered in everything a business does as part of an effective strategic plan for customer service. As businesses properly identify their customers and identify with their customers, the need to listen to those customers is the foundation for standards and procedures of the business. Those standards and procedures are then based on actual customer expectations rather than business perceptions of what customer service should be. It has been my experience with more than thirty years in business that the cause of most customer complaints is the failure to listen and failure to properly and timely inform customers as part of a full dialogue with them. That failure can be avoided through the following guidelines.
Hire for Service:
Employees and independent contractors should be hired or engaged for superior customer service. Seek customer service oriented people when staffing for positions. Employees or contractors must be helped to identify their internal and external customers and how to best serve them. Employees and contractors must be proactive in a reactive business environment. They should also be fully engaged in identifying customer issues and concerns to management and suggesting solutions.
Customer service should be made part of the training development, performance criteria and evaluations of employees and contractors. Pride and prestige should be instilled in the ability to provide customer service. Customer service responsibilities should be delegated throughout the organization and not isolated to a customer assigned function. Customer service is broader than a specific position. All employees should be empowered to serve customers by involving them to identify service needs and solutions.
Businesses encourage innovation and flexibility in their standards, services and products to respond to diverse and changing customer needs. Those efforts can be consistent with providing quality services. Teamwork in that regard should also be built, recognized and rewarded, as well as individual efforts toward superior customer service.
Train for Superior Customer Service:
Recognize that employees and contractors want to provide high quality customer service. Enable their efforts through increasing the emphasis on training for customer service. Build a customer service emphasis into all training programs. Continuously improve a focus on customer service training and development by integrating customer service training in new employee orientation and formally structured customer service training.
Communicating with Customers:
Business should also continuously explore ways to communicate with customers about products and services. That relationship can be advanced in a number of ways. For example: regularly survey customers and solicit customer suggestions; anticipate customers’ questions and then follow-up to ensure that communications are responsive to customer concerns; encourage timely and informed communications with customers, employees, contractors and others; emphasize the value of realistic promising, as well as keeping promises to customers; conduct reviews of how decisions impact customers; and encourage communications among employees and contractors to respond to customer concerns.
Invest in Customer Complaints and Reactions:
Customer relationships can be preserved and retained through root cause analysis of customer complaints, concerns and reactions. That effort is management by fact. A focus on the factual issues impacting customer relationships helps to avoid the emotion that can adversely affect them. Customers frequently express frustration regarding the absence of coordination and timely responses to their concerns. They may be confused as to who is responsible for resolving concerns. Therefore, some concerns do not receive needed coordination among company individuals, functions and operations.
The failure of company individuals to take ownership and coordination of the customer’s concern rather than merely referring customers to other areas of the company are cited by customers as a breakdown in service. Excessive reliance on voice mail with unreturned telephone calls, multiple transfers and referrals are also cited as causes of escalated complaints by customers. Employees and contractors should be encouraged to own the issue, problem or concern. They should be encouraged to address and coordinate for seamless service to customers rather than simply transferring to another area of the business.
Addressing issues and concerns immediately or on a timely basis can also defuse customer complaints. Returning calls promptly and conveying results on a timely basis, even those decisions that customers may not necessarily accept, may be key to preserving relationships. I have found that pre-empting a follow-up call by the customer through an earlier timely returned telephone call can allay many complaint situations that only become aggravated by the need for the customer to follow-up. I have also found through experience that conveying a decision that may disappoint the customer’s expectations is better than leading the customer to anticipate a later favorable result. For example, rather than initiate yet another review when a customer’s complaint has been escalated through all levels of management without a change in decision, it is better to advise the customer at that point that further review by the company will not yield a favorable result. The customer should then be honestly informed of other options such as their possible recourse to third party business mediation, legal or regulatory review if they are available to them.
Emphasize Customer Retention and Conservation:
Recognize that relationships with long-term customers promote the profitable growth of the business. Customers can truly be multi-generational or at least referral sources. Find opportunities to thank and reward customers for their loyalty. Reinforce the importance of superior customer service through in-house communications and publications. Promote the coordination of communications and customer service among all operations and functions to service the customer as a business account and not only as an individual or functional obligation.
Further Recommendations:
Invest the time of executives of the business to understand customers’ reactions to the business. Marketing teams and functional areas should regularly brainstorm and analyze customer complaint causes and prevention. Ensure customers and employees have complaint access and review. Constantly communicate and listen with customers, stakeholders having an interest, right or ownership in the business and with regulators regarding customer concerns and reactions.
Listening skills are a most valuable and viable customer service competency. In a global environment in which people express themselves in second languages or through written forms of communications, such as emails, it is vitally important that businesses take the necessary time to listen. This additional effort to communicate and inform customers can ensure that those customers know they are being heard and that they are wanted as customers. That effort can encourage them to stay with the business. It is key to long-term business success.
About the Author
In addition to having served as the Customer Relations Officer at Nationwide Insurance Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and as former chair of SOCAP, the International Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, Glenn Soden is an attorney. His career included positions as Associate Vice President of Corporate Governance, Director of Government Relations, national legal counsel for personal lines and commercial insurance claims and as national commercial accounts claims attorney. He formed Advocate for the Customer, LLC, currently serves as a SCORE, Counselors to America’s small business, volunteer counselor and as an adjunct faculty member teaching business ethics and corporate social responsibility, in addition to serving on several non-profit boards.
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