Everyone has a nightmare customer service story, usually featuring a long wait for and/or an unhelpful customer service representative. Leslie Ament gets to hear these tales of woe every day as managing partner at Hypatia Research, a Lexington, Mass.-based company focusing on customer and market intelligence.
Ament's job is to help companies understand and increase the value of customer relationships. An example of how Hypatia assists in the customer service sphere comes from Ament's own personal experience. She signed up for a program from a healthcare company to get a selection of healthcare supplies delivered automatically every three months. When she called to change her selection of items, the customer service agent opened a new billing account for her, rather than updating the existing one. "They started mailing me bills for one account and charging my credit card for the other. When I called each month, they'd happily credit my account, but nobody ever fixed the original problem."
When the duplicate account was sent to a collection agency, Ament repeatedly phoned customer service and eventually the corporate headquarters. In frustration, she finally contacted one of the company's top executives and asked if she wanted to be the subject of one of Hypatia's case studies. Problem solved.
Few of your customers have that kind of influence, but given the importance of customer retention and reputation, you should treat them as if they do.
An essential first step to maintaining happy customers is to understand customer complaints. If you conduct customer satisfaction surveys, you probably have a wealth of structured data to mine; there are also ways you can collect and analyze textual data.
To mine textual data for flaws, someone has to read the data. That's because customer service representatives inputting data in a customer relationship management system and customers using a Web-based interface will use different terms to describe the same problem.
There are ways to make the process less onerous, of course. You can create a field in your CRM application where the representative enters a summary of the problem, and then mine that for keywords such as problem, complaint, unhappy, dissatisfied and contractions such as didn't and won't. Even simpler, you can create a field for follow-up and consolidate those for auditing. Another method for discerning customer dissatisfaction involves using blog-specific search engines to find out what customers are saying about you in public forums.
Ament's advice is simple. If you're in a mature industry and your best bet for growth is either mining your current customer base or growing your market share, start working on processes to collect customer interaction data and then audit it on a regular basis. "It's not difficult to do an audit, though it is sometimes difficult to find the correlations between cause and effect — that is, finding out what's causing the problem." By doing this, you'll be able to find your company's flaws in your customer data, and take action. "You will both stave off customer migration and each customer will bring you a higher lifetime value."
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