 |
IN THIS
ISSUE:
What happened to customer
service? [
Read ]
Randy Taylor examines how CRM stands in the way of
delivering customer service.
Do you hate your customers? [ Read ]
Mike Ellsworth explains how to use technology to show
customers you care.
"So what?" needs to be asked more
often. [ Read
]
Dan Wasser explores how two simple words can improve
customer insight.
What happened to
customer service?
-- Randy Taylor,
Co-CEO
Why companies should support good
customer service as the lead for CRM
Is it just
me, or has customer service been lost in the battle to employ
customer relationship management (CRM) practices? I’ve been working
with several large organizations lately on a personal level whom I
know have initiated some sort of CRM effort to improve their ability
to predict and support customer needs, but it seems like the
technology, the strategy or the business objective for their CRM
effort is impeding the customer from being serviced even at a basic
level.
I know part of the one-to-one approach is to treat
those 20% of customers, the ones who support most of your business
with very unique service and understanding, but what happens to the
other 80%? Are we the ones who are left standing out in the rain? We
still have money, and are entitled to a basic level of customer
service.
Let me share with you a couple of my recent personal
experiences that help illustrate my point:
A major retailer,
who has opened home improvement, remodeling stores nationwide, has
been visited several times by my family-we’ve recently moved and are
remodeling our kitchen. We’ve purchased a refrigerator, dishwasher,
cook top, ventilation systems, and lights-combined these amount to a
pretty substantial dollar figure. Yet, this doesn’t seem to carry
any weight. Once the order was placed, we lost all of our customer
clout. Now, no one can tell us the order status, and sales people
don’t want to follow up because they were not the original
order-taker. Worst of all, and there is not good system or
department to support these requests for order tracking. Where does
that leave a customer like me? Working the phones like a
telemarketer to gain the information needed.
Another example
is a major telecommunications company. I personally have several
accounts ranging from long distance, wireless, internet access and
web hosting with this company. My original intent was to use one
company in order to gain some leverage as a customer so I could get
better service. Surprisingly, this tactic is useless with this
company because; a) they still haven’t integrated their customer
files, and; b) even when they know a customer has all of these
accounts, they manage each as a silo. While there are many specific
instances where the company failed to provide acceptable customer
service, a recent example involved trouble with my wireless phone.
It always worked well in my house, and I always set it in the same
place on my desk. But of some reason, it stopped receiving calls -
well, let’s just say it receives them right into voice mail without
ringing the phone. The company could not help me other than saying
the signal wasn’t strong enough to recognize my phone, ignoring the
fact that I could make calls on the same phone. After some testing
of my own, I finally determined the phone was going bad. Too bad,
the customer service “experts” couldn’t have helped me more with
this problem when I needed it.
Both of these examples, while
abbreviated, show there are customers in the “80%” category whom
deserve better service. The examples also show where it should not
be the customer’s job to spend all of their time to do the leg work
that ordinary service at a company should help with.
So is
CRM impeding customer service? I think there is a misguided movement
that says if you identify only the cream of the crop customers and
service them, then you will be more profitable at the expense of the
rest of the customers.
What to do? If you are a company that
relies on a both product and service - which most do in some manner,
there are several things you can do to make sure you address the
needs of your customers.
- If you employ a CRM practice or CRM methodology, make sure
this practice oversees the approach and service of the customer
service area. Whether this is a formal customer service group, or
simply service levels with all employees, it is important to know
how all customers will be treated and document the steps for
consistency. Make sure these steps are followed.
- If you are looking into improving or deploying CRM in some
way, evaluate the balance of analyzing and categorizing customers
over your company’s need to service customers. Understand all
aspects of the cost benefit analysis for CRM. There is a
significant cost to poor service regardless of how much the
customer spends.
- Review current service operations. Understand how the
customer’s needs have changed since these operations were set up.
Are there practices that need to change with the times? With the
age of high technology and mobile computing in rapid growth;
understand the customer’s point of view and expectations, and
provide appropriate, acceptable service.
- Train for empowerment. If those employees who service
customers are well trained and understand all options and
ramifications from both customer and the business, they will make
the right decisions to support customer service needs. This allows
for the flexibility in decision making companies should benefit
from when employing CRM.
When it comes to CRM, companies do
not manage customer relations. Customers manage the relationship
with companies. Therefore to effectively employ customer
relationship management, companies must provide service the
customer. A well satisfied customer will be much easier to retain
and sell to over time.
Randy Taylor can be reached by
email at: mailto:%20rtaylor@taylorharkins.com
[ Return
to Top ]
Do you really
hate your customers?
-- Mike Ellsworth,
Executive Consultant
Last issue
we discussed how the music business is trying to kill a marketing
golden goose by cracking down on file sharing companies. Instead of
mining the wealth of user preference data and exploiting the ability
to touch their customers via the Instant Messaging capabilities
built in to file sharing services such as Kazaa and Morpheus, media
companies are trying to litigate their problems away. Meanwhile,
savvy marketers outside the music industry are finding new ways of
using Instant Messaging and other technology tools to build brand
loyalty and develop a better understanding of their
customers.
This issue we take a look at other ways the
entertainment industry has gotten it wrong. In a recent article
in Fast Company magazine, permission-marketing guru Seth Godin lets
the media moguls have it with both barrels. He described their very
real predicament this way:
On one hand, you hate your customers. Which is entirely
understandable. After all, they keep stealing your products. Then,
after they steal your products once, they form global clubs to
make sure that everyone else has your products too.
On the
other hand, you hate the talent who actually make your products.
Which is why your bands are suing you to get free, your writers
are posting their ideas on the Web for all to see, and your actors
are looking for ways to remove you so that they can talk directly
to their audiences. No, it certainly isn't easy being a
monopolist.
Godin lists various customer sins media companies worry about,
from file downloading to sneaking illicit outside food and drink
into movies. The media moguls respond to these crimes by trying to
create even more criminals: Suing every file sharing service in
sight, running crying to Congress to criminalize CD and DVD burners,
and enforcing draconian contract rules on the artists that produce
their content.
At heart of all this conflict is the
ever-popular paradigm shift: The rules of the game have changed. The
rules of being a media company used to involve managing scarcity.
Once upon a time, there were only three TV channels; now there are
hundreds. There used to be a handful of popular music genres; now
there are dozens. There used to be only one way to get a music album
or a movie; now, unfortunately for the media business, there are
thousands. The rules are changed, and rather than adapting, the
media business’ response is to hate their customers and hate their
workers.
Technology Can Change the
Game
What has led us to this state of affairs?
Technology.
Just a few short years ago, when 14.4Kbps modems
were the way most people connected to the Internet, it was
unimaginable that music file sharing would ever threaten the
foundations of an industry. But even then, the media moguls hated
their customers, spending inordinate amounts of cash cracking down
on fan sites that published lyrics to popular songs (a practice that
still goes on). Because they wanted to manage access to scarce
commodities, media companies tried to stamp out the flowering of fan
interest online. In the new media economy, a better idea would be to
find a way to encourage such fan expressions, to learn from them and
develop them.
Witness Prince’s approach to his fans: His
Purpleness established the New Power Generation Music Club, which
has become more than just an online fan club. For a hundred bucks a
year, fans get first dibs on the first 15 rows of concert tickets
(at $125 per!), at least four brand new Prince CDs in the mail
throughout the year, priority access to any open sound checks and
after parties, downloadable wallpaper and lyrics, news and updates,
a special NPG chat room to chat directly with Prince, and access to
downloadable songs. For a recent concert in Minnesota, around 1,000
passes were sold to NPG Music Club members from around the world who
were allowed to roam around Prince’s studio/venue, Paisley Park,
during the day and hear Prince perform each night. Fans also sat in
a studio with Prince’s record producer to hear a new live CD, and
paid $5 to pose for photos on the motorcycle from the movie
"Graffiti Bridge."
Does Prince hate his fans? It doesn’t
appear so. And his approach is an evolution of the online fan club
efforts of other artists such as Sting (offering
a Sting diary, photos, a quarterly newsletter, and email alerts for
$25/year), Aerosmith (offering
preferred and advance ticketing, Meet & Greets with the band, a
CD-ROM, a travel service, a newsletter, exclusive merchandise,
online discussions, and frequent flier miles (!) for $35/year), and
David Bowie (offering an
exclusive CD, three channels of BowieRadio, access to unreleased
audio and video tracks, personal journals, contests, an online
community, exclusive Webcasts of Bowie in the studio, online chats
with the star, five customized e-mail addresses
(yourname@davidbowie.com), and 10MB of personal Web space for
$65/year).
Love Your Customers
So
what do these artists have in common, besides the fact that they
don’t hate their customers? Effective use of technology.
Even
if you’re not a pop star, and you’re not in the entertainment
industry, your business can benefit from the same kinds of tools and
techniques used by these pioneering artists. Here are some ideas you
can use for your business.
-
Publish an online newsletter. An online newsletter
(like this one!) contributes in many ways to your company by
enhancing its image, building brand, and fostering loyalty. Yet
your online newsletter must do more than offer product information
and usage tips. It must provide other value, perhaps in the form
of industry news, opinion pieces, how-to, problem-oriented
articles, or a feedback forum. A newsletter is a way to touch your
customers and prospects periodically--every week, month, or
quarter. You must respect their attention and provide value rather
than product commercials.
-
Create an alerts email list. We’re all swimming in a
sea of information, and our attention is pulled in different
directions almost minute-by-minute during the day. If you can
offer a service that will alert your customers to important
industry events, they may welcome you into their inboxes on a
frequent basis. The key here is to only bother them when it’s
really important. Make sure to offer a feedback option with each
email: "Did you find this essential, interesting, OK, boring,
intrusive?"
-
Create online events. You can sponsor an online chat
with your CEO or schedule Webinars (Web seminars) to demonstrate
product features or present industry experts discussing the
problems of the day. Once again, you’ll need to use offline
promotion techniques to drive the critical mass for each event.
Once you have your attendees assembled online, make sure to
exploit the event to find out what they think. Pose questions and
have attendees vote. Have participants take a survey. Take live
questions from the audience. If you work it right, many attendees
will want to stay on long after the scheduled end asking
questions.
-
Create an online community. Establish your Web site
as a destination for your customers, a place where they can go to
discuss your products, their business problems, and give you ideas
for new features or products. You can use online chat room
technology along with shared file areas, Instant Messaging, and
online access to your customer service to build a customer
community.
Although this is a potentially fantastic asset
for your product or service, it’s also quite difficult to do. The
first challenge is building a critical mass. You’ll need to use
all your offline marketing tricks to get enough of your customers
to participate. The second challenge is dealing with the
customers, especially those who might have something nasty to say.
You need to take an online community seriously, and find effective
ways to deal with complaints and other negative communications.
This leads to the third challenge: devoting enough resources to
the community. Your customers will participate online to the
extent that they can benefit from your involvement. If done
properly, an online community can expand your customers’ usage of
your products or services as they pick up usage tips and other
product information.
-
Close the loop with your customers. If used properly,
the Internet is potentially the greatest communication mechanism
ever devised. It’s a way to find out your customers’ opinions on
every conceivable aspect of your industry, your company, and your
products. There are a variety of mechanisms to do this, from
tracking which links in your newsletter are clicked, to online
opinion surveys and votes. Use these tools to ask your customers
what they think. And then follow up.
Learn the
lessons
There are two lessons to be learned from the
current problems of the media industry.
The first is to be
aware when the rules of the game change. It takes a lot of courage
for a company with a vested interest in the status quo to recognize
a dramatic market change and then move to exploit it.
Here’s
an example of one drastic, out-of-the-box solution for the
entertainment industry proposed by Professor Andrew Odlyzko of the
Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota: Have the
telecom industry buy all the media companies. "Total recorded music
sales in the US come to a grand total of about $15 billion per
year," Professor Odlyzko says, "while telecom spending is over 20
times higher. Thus in the abstract, it might be a wise investment
for the phone companies to buy out the studios." He’s not foolish
enough to believe this would ever happen, but it just might solve
the media-pirating problem by making money off the transfer of
content rather than licensing the content itself.
The way
technology is accelerating, there may be a paradigm shift in your
industry. Whether or not there is today, be sure there will be in
the future. Is your organization nimble enough and ready enough to
do what it takes to exploit it?
The second lesson involves
your relationship with your customers. Do you love them, or do you
hate them? Do you use all the tools at your disposal to make their
lives easier, to find out what they want, and to help them use your
products and services? Or do you believe this Internet thing will
blow over? There are fantastic technical tools available to help you
improve your relationship with your customers. Will you use them, or
will you be like the 60-year old local dairy that only recently put
phone numbers on its home delivery trucks because, "We don’t want
all these people calling us!"
Mike Ellsworth can be
reached by email at: mellsworth@taylorharkins.com
-----
Additional
reading on this topic:
Read more about peer-to-peer
technology and marketing in CTOMentor’s white paper, Peer-to-Peer
Computing and Business Networks: More Than Meets the Ear, available
at www.ctomentor.com/p2p/index.html.
-----
[ Return
to Top ]
"So What?" needs to
be asked more often.
-- Dan Wasser,
Executive Consultant
Throughout my career, I have had
the privilege of managing many very intelligent people. Yet I
continue to challenge them with a simple two-word question - "So
what?" I am presented with graph after graph of data, backed up by
table after table, usually in a font too small to even read. Each
time this occurs I ask my standard "So what?" question. I have asked
someone to investigate an issue and I receive what I will call
reprocessed data—data taken from a single or multiple databases with
the intention of bringing all the pieces together. Nevertheless, it
does not answer the question. It does not solve the business
issue—it only adds to the downtime in addressing the issue and to
the lost opportunity in finding the answer. Worst of all, it adds to
a lot of frustration.
You need to challenge your employees.
The next time you're presented with a tomb of information, and I
will stretch the use of the word information because it's probably
only reprocessed data with little to no information being provided,
ask the "So what?" question. You will be surprised at the
deer-in-the-headlights' look you will receive. Note this is not so
much as a challenge to their professionalism. It may lead to your
desk; you asked for something and that is what you got. The old
adage "I got what I asked for but not what I needed."
Let me
give you an example. One of my clients had asked me to determine the
demographic profile of their consumer. Simple enough. We had the
data on 60,000 households and all of their supermarket purchases. I
gave this request as it came into me, the straightforward
demographic question, to one of my direct reports. She came back
with the following a few days later:
Brand X buyer profile: married, kids in the
house, income greater than $75,000/year, White, male is employed
full time, homeowner.
She provided me with a number of
graphs depicting these demographics along with a spreadsheet with
basically the same data, only in tabular form. I hit her with my "So
what?" question. She defended her approach saying the client asked
for these demographics and that's what she provided. I challenged
her by saying the client does not simply want to know the
demographics as a fun fact. Obviously, they plan to use this
information for some other purpose. I knew in speaking with the
client that they were planning to introduce some new media into
their marketing to the consumer and was trying to determine which
magazines to use to deliver their message. My direct report never
asked the question so I didn’t immediately provide the insight. Yes,
this was a test and an education opportunity. She performed as well
and as poorly as I thought she would have, and learned something in
the process.
The client actually did not provide me with this
magazine information until I asked him what he planned to do with
the information. By asking the question, the data will drive itself
to provide the answer. By not asking the question, all you'll do is
slow everything down and disappoint those who are looking to you for
information, not reprocessed data.
Dan Wasser can be
reached by e-mail at: dwasser@taylorharkins.com
[ Return
to Top ]
Insights to Action™ is a bi-monthly
publication of Taylor Harkins Group.
Copyright © 2002,
Taylor-Harkins Group. All Rights Reserved.
About
Taylor-Harkins Group
Taylor-Harkins Group is a professional services firm
specializing in optimizing marketing operations to drive revenue and
improve ROI. Using structured, time-tested proprietary frameworks
and best practices, we produce high-impact results by leveraging the
optimum mix of people, process, and technology in refocusing
marketing toward activities that generate results.
For more information about Taylor-Harkins Group, visit
our website http:///
or call Dave Harkins at 630.820.2087
Follow this link Privacy Policy
for information about how we handle personal
information.
|
|
 |
|
