Time after time in discussing potential CRM technologies with clients, the issue of customer loyalty is brought forth. Clients want to make sure that their customers keep coming back. Depending on the type of relationship, one bad transaction can lose a customer.  When the process of  sales and service is discussed, ask how many layers of onion are between you and your customer. How does it taste?

The good news is that today there are more technologies than ever to get closer to the customer. These range from traditional customer care to social media. Depending on the product or service you could easily and cheaply implement: Video,  Twitter, User Comments, Photos, Slideshare Presentations, Facebook/LinkedIn, etc. Check out My Starbucks Idea built on the Salesforce.com Force Platform. They have received more than 60,000 unsolicited customer posts! Some great ideas have come from their own customers like the “Splash Stick”. They encourage ideas, feedback and even criticism! Plus, it has generated outside press and awesome word of mouth. You cannot ask for better customer loyalty.

Now maybe your business is not on every corner and might not be all that “sexy”. You still have customers, you still have relationships, they still have ideas, they still provide feedback, and they still provide criticism. The trick is to find the right medium to get you close to the customer. Then loyalty will grow.

Price and cost cutting are the keys to success. These “myths” are seemingly ridiculous and this will be the final post on the subject. (Huzzah!)

It is not about price and cost cutting, it is about efficiency. In a past life with a software provider in the CRM space, our pitch was simple. Your business is going to grow exponentially. Your service costs will too. We will keep your costs in check and allow you to do more with less. Pretty simple elevator pitch, but it worked. Time and again, we had clients realizing millions in ROI from our products. Many of the implementations that I worked on nearly a decade ago are still in full production. Same code, same process. Example, one enterprise software client is currently running at over 75% of all inbound service calls though their implementation. It is so successful, that they are now challenged with replacing it since the provider stopped supporting the product years ago. They have had difficulty duplicating that success. Get efficient and find the next area to generate new efficiencies. It does not have to be more complicated than that.

More on the Ten Service Myths

Having spent a lot of time in various call centers around the world, I have notice a constant. Employees (CSRs) will work to maximize the process or plan to their benefit. This is no different than a Sales Rep figuring out how to maximize a comp plan with the least effort or Dev Manager taking a red pen to an MRD. CSRs touch the customer so the impact could cause customer dissatisfaction. To say that they are the cause though it not right. Management needs to shoulder the burden and lead by changing the process and connecting with customers. If you are management and believe that your troops are the problem, you need to look long and hard in the mirror.

How do you measure the effectiveness of customer service?

In a traditional enterprise software model, customer maintenance revenue was a great measure of the effectiveness of customer service. In the Cloud subscription-based world, maintenance revenue does not exist. So how do you measure? It is certainly not by measuring complaints.

It is not whether the customer is right or wrong. It is that every contact with a customer is an opportunity to improve business results and the relationship. To borrow from Steve Yastrow: Is it a slap or a kiss? Are the contacts with the client and customer relationship-building or relationship-eroding?

In today’s climate, relationship-building is more important than ever, and it is always important.

This is another “myth” that I find puzzling and is just not sound business. Phone calls are more costly than other methods of incident resolution. Plain and simple fact. Most serivce centers have to find ways to scale without increasing headout (i.e. Productivity gains). There are many companies that are utilizing “phone free” technologies with huge ROI and even improved job performance of customer service reps (CSR). Here is an example.

A client in the enterprise software space had one CSR who was a borderline performer. Always closed just enough incidents to stay out of hot water but was by no means a rock star. Then our application was deployed. He was taken off the phones and put to work only doing online assisted service. The application gathered telemetry from various sources and presented the CSR with answers to the “20 Questions” that they normally asked. His productivity soared and earned him the nickname of “8 by 11″. He was now closing 8 incidents by 11 AM — more than he would in a typical day on the phone. The positive feedback from the customers he serviced nearly quadrupled. In this case, people perferred not talking and so did the CSR!

…that alone is the key to success.

I am not sure how this is a service myth for success. Everyone likes a prompt phone answer, but in this day and age that is not always practical. It can even be turned on its head.

A client had an issue with holds times. They simply were unable to answer the phones during peak times. Hold times of over an hour were common for their off-the-shelf enterprise product. The could not scale and needed a less expensive service experience. They decided to go with an online product. I won’t go into too much detail but the online service solution was as fraction of the cost of answering the phones on the scale of 10 cents to a dollar. Together we came up with a marketing program to drive enablement by inviting the callers on hold to try the online solution. After the invitation was played three times, callers dropped and used the online tool. Adoption soared. The ROI was tremendous.

All because they could not answer the phone the quickest.

I am not an oenophile, but I do enjoy a nice wine. Here is a recent discovery that is more than affordable and very good for the sub-$6 price.

2006 Two Vines Cabernet Sauvignon

Cheers!

One of the biggest challenges for sales and service is customer expectations.  The needs, wants, and preconceived ideas that a customer has for your product can skew the service experience. These days a disappointed customer can put a poor service experience out to the world instantaneously. Customer expectations start with sales. The best in sales close new business by tying product and/or solutions to revenue generation or cost savings. Customer expecations are furthered by services teams deploying those product and/or solutions. Once the solutions are in production, who from the organization guide those customer expectations?

Another useful post from Destination CRM Blog.

10 Service Myths

1. Always exceed customer expectations.
2. If you answer the phone the quickest, that alone is the key to success.
3. People always prefer talking to people.
4. The customer is always right.
5. If complaints are down, customer service is better.
6. Employees are the cause of the most dissatisfaction.
7. Price and cost cutting are the keys to success.
8. If your company is at 90 percent satisfaction, you should declare a victory.
9. If you measure Net Promoter Score, you are done insofar as analyzing your customer loyalty.
10. If you have a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, everyone is happy.

The 10 points detailed have me thinking and will work up some examples and lessons of these for the rest of this week.