Why do so many organisations still do so little to win their customers hearts? Why do organisations all too frequently become less customer-focused, the larger they get? Most important of all, what can be done to rectify this situation?
Research that Charteris has carried out, involving close to 2,000 employees at five major organisations across a range of sectors, has yielded a finding that is both surprising and alarming. We found that much as 70 percent of corporate effort at the organisations surveyed was not, in fact, devoted to activities that truly added value for the organisations customers.
This survey suggests that much of this 70 percent of basically misguided effort is devoted to either of the two following types of activity:
1. Activity related to customers but that doesnt offer customers any real value
Examples include:
• repeated requests, such as from various people at extensions to which the customers phone call is passed, for the customers personal information (e.g. requests for the customers name, address and phone number) or requests for information relating to the products the customer holds with the organisation
• repeated requests for security validation made by different customer service staff
• repeated transfers of phone calls to other departments
• customers being asked for information that is not even relevant to them
• customers phone calls being put on hold for several minutes
• the closing of organisations convenient physical branches. The closure of many local post office branches has prompted considerable customer opposition. Many banks have also encountered much customer resentment relating to closing many physical branches; this resentment has been so great that banks have generally had to do a 180° turn on their branch closure policy
• not being able to talk to a real person. Automated telephone answering systems can be extremely annoying when they do not give customers an easily accessible option that allows the customer to talk to a real person. Some systems even appear to be deliberately designed to make talking to a real person impossible, or close to it.
• organisations failing to give customers the convenience of a precise time slot for when a delivery will be made or a visit by a service operative will take place. Many organisations seem to think it is fine to tell customers that someone will be calling, for example to pick up a faulty domestic appliance, between 9am and 1pm or even between 9am and 5pm.
2. Internal activities that actually have no directly beneficial effect on customers at all.
It follows from all this that organisations need an effective and reliable way of deciding whether a particular activity does in fact add any real value to customers. I use the following three questions to test this. Ideally, a given activity should elicit a yes to all the questions: if it does, the activity will be adding very significant value to customers. The fewer yes-answers there are, and the less you can answer yes generally, the lower the value to the customer.
The three questions are:
• would the customer value, or be prepared to pay for, the activity that the organisation is carrying out?
• does the activity improve something for the customer?
• it is important for the customer that the activity is done right the first time?
Of course, this analysis has to assume that the customer is behaving and thinking in a reasonable way.
In practice, havent we all suffered the consequences of organisations inflicting irritating and customer unfriendly behaviour and attitudes on us? Put a group of people together in almost any social context, and you can be pretty confident they would be able to pool a large number of justified gripes about how organisations have treated them, their customers.
The gripes will (probably) be varied and numerous, but their source is always likely to be the same: the organisation cant be bothered to, or doesnt have the imagination to, really focus on its customers agenda, but expects its customers to do things the way it, the organisation, wants customers to do them. The vast majority of customers will not be happy with this, and if the organisation persists in this attitude, its customers are likely to leave.
You might expect the recession to have been a wake-up call for all organisations that are anything less than totally focused culturally and at a practical, operational, level around their customers agenda. But it doesnt seem to have been.
On the contrary, just as people tend to become more introverted and preoccupied with personal difficulties during period of intense stress, theres a sense that many organisations have become more, not less, inward-looking during these recessionary times.
True, there may be some benefits of such an attitude: when organisations cut internal costs this may have some eventual benefit to customers, but - and its a big but - if an organisations doesnt understand properly what its customers really want from it, theres a serious danger that when it cuts internal costs it might actually be reducing or even demolishing the very structures that are playing a vital role in its customers being given the value they seek from it.
What applies to cost-cutting applies to every aspect of an organisations activities: all changes to those activities ideally need to be completely informed by a detailed understanding of what customers want from the organisation now, and in the future. Also, there is invariably something holistic and comprehensive in the demands the need to focus on customers makes upon an organisation. It really is something that should inform every aspect of the organisations operation.
Stephen Hewett, head of Customer Centricity at Charteris plc
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