MalcolmSays

Malcolm Says

I start from the premise that customers expectations are never unrealistic.  We may think they are but with the odd exceptions customer are reasonable and believe that their expectations are realistic.  The challenge for companies is to understand the specific expectations of their customers and ensure that where it makes business sense those needs are met. 

One of the myths is that meeting customer expectations or proving a better customer experience means spending lots of money.  In a lot of situations it costs very little or even nothing. It’s not untypical for me to make at least three or four recommendations to a client that have a high positive impact on customers at zero cost them.  (I have specific examples for anyone who is interested to know more).

The second major point that many companies miss is that improved customer experience leads to better customer retention. We’ve seen many different surveys that claim that 50% - 70% of customers leave due to how they have been treated by their supplier or their by staff.  I use this information to do a very simple ROI for clients to demonstrate the value of investing in improving customer experience.  In several cases the ROI based on improved customer retention was in excess of 50%.

There are a few articles on my web site that give a bit more background to my thinking and some example of what customers really care about rather than what we think they care about.   http://www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML

There are two sides to this question. The first is about the mechanics of collecting feedback and the second side is about motivating people to give you feedback. To me the motivational aspect is much more important that the methods of collection.

Customers and staff will give you feedback if they perceive that the information they provide will ultimately be helpful to them. If you don’t have a relationship with a customer or you only have a poor relationship they are very unlikely to give you feedback. The main exception is when they believe you have really messed up and are not giving them the product/service that they expected. A tool to help is my RET factor approach. The higher the RET factor rating the better the feedback. (More on www.simpleplans.co.uk ). RET stands for Relationship, Expertise and Trust which I measure using a survey and produce simple numerical results. I have one client with a very high rating who gets 80% return whenever he asks his customers for feedback. Others with much lower RET rating are lucky to get 10% to respond. As a quick indicator simply ask yourself about how your customers feel about each of the RET factors (Relationship, Expertise & Trust) in dealing with your organisation. It will give you an indicator about what level of results to expect.

Finally to be helpful to the person giving you the feedback you must tell them upfront that you will share results with them. You then must share those results along with what you will do, or will not do, based on the results you have received. Organisations that don’t do this will get declining levels of feedback from staff and customers.

Malcolm Says
Listening to customers and acting on what they say ia easy. Here is the secret of sucess.Step 1 The CEO spends a lot of time going out talking to customers and tells his senior staff team what he has heard and asks them what they are doing about issuses that he’s discovered.Step 2. The senior management team not wanting to be caught out by the boss go out and listen to lots of customers and fix the problems before the CEO finds out about them.Step 3. This process is repeated through all levels of the organisation.

Tesco are the masters of this approach.

Malcolm says:

I do a lot of customer relationship surveys and when we ask what customers really care about the same top three points come up almost every time.

1. Your… see more expertise

2. The quality of your product/service

3. Your price positioning

Get these three things right as perceived by the client and they will be happy.  But, that is just the cost of entry. To make her/him so happy that they continue buying from you needs digging deeper into other aspects of what they really care about. These additional factors relate to processes, relationship and trust and will be very specific to your company and your customers. So you have to ask and not assume what makes them happy or unhappy.

Malcolm says

It’s easy to spend too much time trying to second guess competitors plans when quite often even they are not clear about them. However, it is important to know enough about competitors to clearly position your company and products. To me the best way to do this is to ask existing customers and people who you would like to be your customers. Questions to understand could include:  Are there things that you like about our competitors that we don’t do? What is it that you like about us and why do you stay with us? It’s also important to understand what alternative ways they could spend their budget and what their business strategies are. “Competitors” are not just companies with similar products or services.Often questions like these are akward for companies to ask for themselves. Get outside help to find the best ways of getting to the answers.

When you start asking these types of questions you gain valuable information from a customers perspective that you can use to modify your sales and marketing plans or even your overall business strategy. You will most probably learn that customers care about a range of things that you will have never considered. To you they may not necessarily be logical or sensible but they are factors that influence buying decisions. One real example that I discovered was the customer who liked the way that their supplier broke down the details on the invoices because it made it easier for them to internally recharge. That was the only reason why they stayed with that supplier. This led to the no brainer decision of don’t change the invoicing system and see if it is, or could, be an important differentiating factor for other customers.

Malcolm says

In my experience often the most interesting and useful customer feedback does not come through Sales or Marketing. It comes from functions that deal directly with the customer such as Customer Services, Logistics and Finance. I ask these people what customers are saying and often get some amazing information that by its very nature Sales and Marketing would have no way of capturing. For example the customer whose main reason for using one supplier was the way that they invoiced. (It fitted in well with their own internal systems.) Then there was the customer who didn’t like the way that boxes were opened for testing by the supplier. They thought they were faulty. These customers had told people in their suppliers company about these things before but the people in Logistics and Finance didn’t know who to tell or that this type of information was important.

So my recommendation is to forget trying to further automate stuff that Sales and marketing collect and focus on asking staff at the main customer touch points what they are hearing.