When I recently flew from Bangkok to Manila, I read a report in a newspaper that only 27% of the companies that participated in a service competition in Germany have a high opinion about their companies’ customer service. Nevertheless, it seems that despite their awareness, a lot of companies fail to address their service problems. I can give you so many examples from my own experience.
Lufthansa, the German airline, made me fill out a cumbersome online form to get back to me via e-mail only two and a half weeks later (with an incomplete answer). Etihad and Emirates, two leading airlines from the United Arab Emirates, have excellent services on board, but they fail to deliver on the ground. Both took three weeks to answer e-mail inquiries. That is not an acceptable standard. If you want o be a 5 star airline, you have to understand that the whole customer experience is more than just the experience in the plane.
AIS, a big telecommunications company in Thailand, is struggling with their call center operations. If you need to talk to somebody in English, it might take an hour until you reach a call center agent or that someone will phone you back.
When I phone my credit card companies, there is always a struggle with the automated voice response. It can happen that during one “conversation”, you have to key in your credit card number three times.
Recently, I wanted to open an online trading account. I contacted two American companies. One responded after six weeks (for online trading, where a trade takes just a few seconds!), the other one got back to me within two days, but finally took almost three months to complete the opening of the account due to their complicated procedures.
I am sure you have had your own fair share of bad customer service experiences. Isn’t it surprising that so many companies still don’t care about their service? After all, it is a key criteria for buying decisions and for customer loyalty.
Let me share with you three tips that have worked very well for me.
1. Make customer satisfaction and customer loyalty part of the key performance indicators that you monitor regularly. You might even link part of the compensation of your employees to customer satisfaction indices. Outstanding customer service needs to be a firm part of your company’s culture. Ideally, providing outstanding customer care should be part of your company’s mission and vision statement. Everybody, from top management to lower ranks needs to be committed to provide outstanding customer services.
2. Go one step back: don’t state “Customers First!”, but rather have a philosophy where employees come first. When Vineet Nayar published in 2010 his bestselling book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down”, it caused quite a stir.
However, companies like e.g. Southwest Airlines under the leadership of Herb Kelleher and Starbucks under Howard Schultz had implemented and lived that mantra long time ago. And also at my previous company, the “Employees First” philosophy has served the employees, the customers and the shareholders very well.
3. Divert some of your advertising budget to improvements in your customer service. A lot of companies spend high amounts on advertising, while at the same time failing to address their customer service shortcomings. Therefore, it makes sense to reduce some of the promotional spending, and rather invest in finding solutions to enhance customer service and customer loyalty. After all, we are all aware that it costs about seven times more to acquire a new customer than keeping an old one.
