complaints

NickB

Customer service basics can make all the difference (part 2)

In the first part of this two-part article I dealt with some examples of keeping the customer informed and managing their expectations. There’s a common theme emerging in both those and the following examples of basic customer service – and my experiences over the post-Christmas period emphasised this:

Communication is everything

Here’s the remaining four of my six basics…

3) Don’t hassle the customer

My in-store experience at Warren Evans was a classic example of getting the level of attention just right. We were greeted by an assistant, Michelle, who determined our needs, then showed us the range of potential beds. She then left us to get on with working out which one we liked and when we’d made our choice, took us through the transaction, including the commitment to dates.

Warren Evans is by no means the only store that can get this right – it’s something every floorwalker in a store should be trained up in and, in my experience, most stores can get it right. However, when stores move online, the ability to judge how much attention a customer needs seems to go out of the window. In part this is understandable since the customer is not visible in the same way as a physical store, but sites often over-compensate by forever pestering you to provide feedback or reminding you that you had the temerity to leave goods in your cart without completing the transaction.

Feedback and nudging customers to complete make good sense commercially but don’t always lead to customer satisfaction. Involving customers actively in the evolution of online services helps you to get these details right.

4) Pay attention to unspoken needs

My most frustrating recent experience came on my birthday at the beginning of January, where I had arranged to meet family at a central London restaurant. It’s a reasonably well-established American-themed venue and seemed just about right for a lively celebration. On arrival it appeared to be too lively as our table was close to the bar area where a singer/guitarist was providing live entertainment for the evening. I did a quick tour of the restaurant looking for a quieter table, at which point the manager spotted what I was doing and immediately moved us to a better table. So far so good, sadly there will be some negatives to come…

5) Deal brilliantly with complaints

…and indeed, the restaurant managed to get so many basics wrong that a 15-point complaint email followed. However, the initial attention to my dissatisfaction with the table was a great example of one element of dealing brilliantly with complaints and that’s dealing with them before they happen.

A further example followed when two aperitifs took 20 minutes to not arrive. On raising this – an expression of dissatisfaction, so a complaint in all but name – we were offered them gratis.

Overall, despite good food and great company there were other basic restaurant service elements that left something to be desired, so I emailed the restaurant at length. I received an email the following day from the manager we had seen who demonstrated the following good practice:

  • Acknowledged the error(s)
  • Apologised
  • Offered compensation, even though none had been requested.

In this case the compensation is four free dinners, which we’ll take up soon, if only to check that the promised improvement in service has been implemented. Sometimes I think it’s a mixed blessing having me as a customer…

6) Don’t be average

Part of the problem with the restaurant was that, whilst Ben the manager was attentive, the other service staff didn’t seem to be on the same page. Certainly, they were not responding to what should be a given at a venue like this: that my desired outcome is a great evening out, not just some reasonable food and drink.

Many retail outfits – particularly in the food and hospitality sector – are content to provide average transactions. I reflected on this when writing the first part of this piece in a nearby outlet of a coffee chain (inexplicably named after a decadent Roman emperor). I ordered my flat white and it was prepared in short order but, whilst the assistant wasn’t in any way unpleasant he wasn’t exactly personable.

I don’t expect hugs or a life-transforming experience when I’m buying a coffee, but I couldn’t help thinking an opportunity had been missed for a bit more human interaction, otherwise I might as well be buying coffee from a vending machine.

First world problems?

Dissecting one’s own experiences like this is an occupational hazard when you’re in my line of business and sometimes it can seem like I am obsessed with what might be termed ‘first world problems’ but the problem for first world businesses is that competitive advantage can be gained from getting all these things right, particularly when so many companies don’t.

Will you seize the opportunity to fix your service basics and get ahead of the competition?

 

NickB

People not process will turn your complainers into raving fans

Complaints are a customer feedback goldmine and one that companies ignore at their peril. But how you handle the complaint is even more important: it’s a moment of truth that can turn a disgruntled customer into a raving fan – or drive them raving mad.

A company’s typical response to creating a great complaint handling process is to start with the process. This is a mistake.

The secret to great complaints handling is not process, it’s people. And, more specifically, the right people with the right set of skills and attitudes.

A recent example illustrates this…

My wife had a bad experience in a branch of Caffe Nero, having been served a panini with next to no filling in it. Since Caffe Nero encourages online feedback she duly complained online, even enclosing a photo of the sub-standard toastie. It took weeks for this complaint to turn into the promised compensation, with my wife – not overly bothered about the amount of redress, but now annoyed that she wasn’t being listened to – sending further emails to enquire as to what had happened. Compensation eventually arrived, admittedly with profound apologies for the poor response – clearly a less-than-perfect process in operation there.

A more customer-centric approach from Caffe Nero would have worked much better: if my wife had been encouraged to complain in the store or, even better, the staff had noticed an uneaten panini and asked if it anything was wrong with it, the matter could have been dealt with there and then.

But this requires people on the front line who

  • can detect a potential sub-standard offering
  • are empowered to sort it there and then
  • possess the judgement to offer appropriate redress
  • recognise that their obligation is to create raving fans

and provide feedback to the originators of the problem.

Put like this, it’s hardly rocket science, but it does require a people-focused approach as much as a customer-centric one. An approach where you recruit people with the right attitude and the train them up to refine their ‘soft’ skills to do the right thing by the customer when things go wrong.

NickB

4 questions to check… are you exploiting your complaints goldmine?

Have you got PPI? Do you think you might have had PPI? I’ve lost count of the times that some click-bait ad has popped up to ask me that question or, on some occasions, I’ve had to take a phone call from someone aggressively selling me PPI claims services I don’t need. Well, now the Financial Conduct Authority has got in on the act and enrolled none other than the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in an advert to urge people to get their claims in before 29th August 2019.

In my not-expert view it’s a crap advert, but it’s clearly been effective, as it’s resulted in over a million visits to the FCA website’s PPI pages. And this is actually good news because PPI mis-selling was an outrageous con perpetrated on banking customers – everyone who bought a policy without realising it should get their money back.

Despite its dubious qualities as an ad, I say hats off to the FCA for giving people an Arnie-sized shove to complain.

Because I don’t think as customers we complain enough.

And, moreover, I don’t think companies realise what a goldmine they are sitting on when customers do complain.

You heard it: complaints are a goldmine.

But they’re a goldmine that’s under-used.

Think about it: a customer who complains about a sub-standard product or service has taken the time to tell you how that product or service fell short of their expectations. And since you set those expectations, that’s direct feedback on product and service quality.

How does this valued resource get treated? I’d say, pretty poorly.

Try this simple test. Does your company:

  1. Reward people who provide feedback?
  2. Empower people in customer contact/complaints handling roles to provide redress or compensation when complaints are received?
  3. Keep the customer informed throughout the process of the complaint and ensure that they leave the process with a better opinion of you than when they started?
  4. Dedicate sufficient resource to understanding the nature of complaints, their root causes and any underlying systemic issues that make it tough to eradicate the root cause?

If you’ve answered yes to all four questions, you probably don’t need to be reading this article (but thanks for getting this far!) and I’m guessing your company enjoys an outstanding reputation for customer experience. If you answered no to any of those, then you’re not capitalising on that free or near-free resource, so here’s how to fix it:

1. Incentivise customers to provide feedback

It doesn’t have to be a big incentive – Pizza Express runs a ‘How Did We Dough’ (groan) service that provides customers with a voucher for a free portion of dough balls every time they feed back on a specific dining event. It’s kept me in additional dining out calories on quite a few occasions and must cost the restaurant chain next to nothing to administer.

2. Empower the front line

A great many customer satisfaction issues can be resolved at the time they occur, saving a vast amount in back office processing costs. But the problem is for many large organisations that there’s too much process and not enough trust. You have intelligent people in your company: time to start relying on them to do the right thing.

3. Make sure your complaint handling process delivers a great customer outcome

Too often, the outcome of a complaint handling process is to minimise or control the amount paid out in compensation rather than to focus getting the customer to be a raving fan of the company. When I worked on a remediation project for a major bank I was astonished to find that nobody bothered to ask customers what they thought of how their case had been handled and what they now thought of the company. I’m guessing that their opinions might not have been great, but if you don’t ask, you have no idea how well your process is working. Keeping the customer informed about progress is another way to keep customers dissatisfaction from worsening while you consider their grievance.

4. Invest in analysis and actioning the results

This is probably the hardest bit – or at least it seems to be, because I keep coming across root cause analysts who don’t have enough resource to do this highly necessary job. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the data’s usually rubbish – badly classified or with insufficient recording around the time of the incident (and that’s why PPI has taken so long to sort out and cost the banking industry so much), and secondly the job’s not a glamorous one – you’ll get more management attention for a customer experience improvement project that targets NPS scores than one that tells you why those scores are poor in the first place.

And that last point is worth re-iterating: because you’re mining data and customer experience for things that don’t work and need fixing, you’re going to be ‘underground’ dealing with inadequate processes and all the sad customer stories that result. It’s unglamorous, dirty work but, with the right resource, can deliver ‘gold’ not just in terms of customer satisfaction but in improvements to the company’s bottom line.

As Arnie would say: ‘Do it’.