ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘customer-satisfaction-and-expectations’ CATEGORY

CEM has been identified as a  key driver of customer loyalty and profitable growth, is a trending topic in the manufacturing industry. But for many manufacturers this is still a greenfield operation. So where do you stand and how do you get started?

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Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains the importance of understanding your customers. How they differ from each other, how they are the same and most importantly how they use your products, in order to understand how best to serve them...

Every day you deal with a multitude of customers that may vary by type, size, installed base, usage, personality and everything else that ultimately differentiates one customer from another.

However, one thing always remains constant – their business systems and equipment are extremely important to their day-to-day operations.

Even if the equipment you support is not necessarily the most important piece of equipment in their facility, it will generally always be of significant importance to your primary customer contact, as it will typically be their direct responsibility to “manage” the internal availability and operation of the equipment to all of the users at their facility.

 

In many cases, your customer contact is the primary individual through whom all other users at the facility must obtain permission to use the equipment (i.e., via employee passwords, or ID/key cards, or the like).

They may also be integrally involved in the monitoring of machine usage on a daily, weekly, and other periodic basis – either from manual observation, or through the availability of remotely-generated reports.

They are typically the “gatekeepers” for access to the equipment, and it is generally their responsibility to manage, monitor and control its usage over time.

Accordingly, they are very important within their own organisations – and you are very important to them.

However, despite this common thread that runs through virtually all of the customers whose equipment you support, it is also important to remember that each customer account may also be different in terms of:

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• The various types, brands, models, and numbers of equipment they have installed at their respective facilities;
• The ages of the individual devices that are covered under warranty, service contracts, extended warranties, or on a time-and materials basis;
• The usage patterns of the equipment at each of their individual locations (i.e., continuous vs. intermittent use; single vs. multiple shifts; simple vs. complex applications; etc.);
• The volume or throughput they regularly execute; and
• Any other unique and/or specific differentiators that may distinguish one customer from another.

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However, at the end of the day, the one common denominator among all of the customers you support is the fact that they all depend on the continuous availability, operation, and usage of the business systems and equipment they have installed at their facility – and your primary customer contact is generally the one that shoulders most – if not all – of the internal responsibility to ensure that it is always running, and that there are no significant occurrences (or even worse, recurrences) of equipment downtime.

The single most effective means for gaining a full appreciation of your customers’ reliance on their business systems and equipment is to first understand how they use it.

For some, the equipment is an integral component of what they do on a day-to-day basis. Customers in the manufacturing, financial, medical, aerospace, legal, government (and many other) segments will tell you that their business systems and equipment are “essential” to their business operations – that when the system is down, their production is severely impacted, leading to serious financial, safety and personnel consequences.

Although some of the customers in these segments may have multiple and/or redundant machines in operation, when even one goes down, they feel it – and they want it back up and running as soon as possible.

For example, a retail establishment’s Point-of-Sale (POS) system may be the only means they have for providing their respective customers with a receipt, order confirmation, coupons or other important transaction-generated documents.

 

When their system is down, they may be unable to serve their own customers and, as a result, may find themselves temporarily “out of business” (i.e., think when the POS system goes down in a boutique clothing shop, or a McDonalds, etc.)

For these, the reliance on the equipment you support may be perceived as being even more critical (at least on a relative basis).

However, regardless of the specific industry segment or type of customer you support, there will always be a basic – and corresponding – level of reliance on the business systems and equipment they have installed at their facility.

As such, it will always be in your – and their – best interests to fully understand the extent to which they rely on the equipment you support so you will always be prepared to work from a stronger base of understanding with respect to exactly what your customers are dealing with, when they’re dealing with an equipment failure.

 

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Field service engineers are the unsung heroes that keep our world moving writes Bill Pollock, Strategies for GrowthSM...

In most cases, the customer relies heavily on its business systems and equipment and, in turn, your customer contact will rely heavily on your field technicians – personally – to make sure that the equipment is always up-and-running as expected.

In fact, you can safely assume that the customer is not nearly as interested in the technical nature of the equipment as it is in the solution it provides for his or her tasks-at-hand – that is, namely, performing the tasks, functions and operations that it is relied upon to keep the business up-and-running – with as little downtime as possible, and with no disruption to ongoing business processes.

As such, it is important to recognise that, in the customer’s mind, if the equipment is not working optimally – regardless of the technology that may have been built into it – it is “worthless”.

There is just so much that the customer itself will either be inclined – or permitted – to do in order to get the equipment back in working order following a failure. In most cases, the field technician will be the sole entity that the customer will be able to count on to make that happen – and this should deservedly carry along with it a great deal of responsibility and accountability. Just to put things in perspective, think of the case where a customer uses an ATM machine to withdraw cash – virtually anywhere, or anytime of day.

When the machine is down, they generally do not care whether it is due to a hardware failure, a software glitch, a network problem, or simply that it’s out of cash or paper tape for the receipt. All they know is that they needed cash, and the machine couldn’t deliver. Regardless of the specific reason, there was a failure, and the failure was duly noted in their minds. The same situation also occurs in the office environment, where the customer is also a “consumer” of your company’s products and services.

 

Customers will typically not care whether the reason their copy machine went down was due to a hardware or software failure, a paper jam, or anything else – or whether the cause was the machine’s fault, their fault, or nobody’s fault in particular. Again, all they know is that they needed to make a copy, and the machine didn’t work. That’s where the services provider comes into the picture.

And, based on how your field technicians enter the frame, you can either be perceived as a “knight in shining armour” – or as a part of the problem – depending on how you have been able to position yourself in the minds of your customers throughout the course of your relationship – i.e., Customer Relationship Management, or  CRM.

For example, if you have continually shown your customers that they can depend on your technicians to support both them and their equipment – and that you always have their best interests in mind – then, you will have established a type of bond that suggests that you are working as their “partner” to keep their systems up and running.

However, if you have consistently given them the impression that you do not have their best interests in mind – because your technicians have been repeatedly arriving late at their site, at the last minute, or that they always have a “lame” excuse for why the equipment failed again – then you will have positioned yourself outside of any real partner relationship, and have staked out, instead, a position on the “them” side of the “us vs. them” equation.

 

Remember, in the customer’s mind, it is generally the totality of the value that the equipment provides that is most important – not just the technology, nor the reliability of the equipment, nor the service level agreement that provides ongoing support coverage.

Customers continually look at any and all aspects relating to the systems and equipment they use, and their respective applications and functionality.

And your organisation’s field technicians typically represent the only “real” physical manifestations of the service and support that keeps it up and running.

Customers may rely heavily on their systems and equipment to support their day-to-day business operations – but they rely on you even more to ensure that the equipment can continually do what it is supposed to do.

 

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Whilst technology drives innovation within our industry, we must not forget the basic fundamentals of field service, namely putting the customer at the heart of everything we do writes Aberdeen Group’s Aly Pinder...

How should service define success?

Is it good enough to meet SLAs? Should service leaders primarily focus on cutting costs by reducing truck rolls? Do they need to prioritise field productivity; turn as many wrenches in a given day as possible?

These are all noble endeavours, but in 2016 the customer must come first. Internal efficiencies and meeting basic levels of service will keep the lights on, but it won’t grow the business. “Good enough” service is no longer good enough. This evolution demands that service leaders change the metrics they use to define success. As seen in Aberdeen Group’s State of Service research, the top metric which determines success is actually customer satisfaction.

 

The emergence of customer facing metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, and first-time fix rates, has highlighted the fact that the customer is king

 

The emergence of customer facing metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, and first-time fix rates, has highlighted the fact that the customer is king. Service, more so now than in the past, has to deal with empowered customers and competition. No longer can the field team solely be reactive or leave a customer site without resolving the issue. Customers are more knowledgeable and can amplify a bad service experience to a global network of peers.

Top performers understand that happy customers renew service contracts, buy more offerings, and refer new business. For this reason, service organisations have to juggle efficiency goals with customer focused metrics to hit at both at the same time. And with so much technology and analytics at the fingertips of the service executive, it is imperative that they don’t get paralysed looking at too much.

The Best-in-Class focus on the right metrics which drive differentiation and value to the end customer. The rest is great for a spreadsheet. But strategy and innovation needs to focus on the customer. Service leaders that want to excel in 2016 cannot afford to focus on KPI from a bygone era of service. Your customers want you to be successful because that means you can help them grow. But they don’t care if your bottom line is as trim as possible or that your technicians are taking the most optimised route. The customer wants the right technician with the right tools to solve their problem when they get on site to avoid extended (or any) downtime.

This changes the way service must view the metrics that matter both for them and for their customers. Happy customers result in a happy service business.

Don’t lose sight of what matters.

 

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Kirona enable Riverside Housing Association to improve customer service.

One of the UK's leading registered social housing providers, Riverside Housing Association, has implemented Kirona's  Job Manager and Xmbrace DRS software to manage the work of responsive repairs teams across the north of England enabling the Customer Service Centre to deliver improved customer service.

Riverside provides affordable housing and support to people of all ages and circumstances. Michael McGowan, Projects Manager at Riverside explains: “Customer service excellence is key for Riverside, and as an organisation we continually measure how we are performing and address what improvements we can make. Customer feedback from our Star Surveys highlighted to us that improvements were needed regarding how repairs were reported, scheduled and managed. Riverside prides itself in transforming lives by providing well maintained, good quality affordable housing, so ensuring the repairs and maintenance of our properties is optimised is another key area for us.”

McGowan continues, “We have successfully rolled out Kirona’s dynamic scheduling software Xmbrace DRS and the mobile worker application Job Manager to approximately 70% of our housing stock. The software is used by our Customer Service Centres and to our contracting repairs partners across Merseyside, Manchester, Yorkshire, Humberside and Cumbria. We have seen an immediate positive effect since using it, with reductions in the time it takes to process a repairs request from a customer, with the customer no longer having to contact us multiple times to get their request scheduled, and the Customer Service team are delighted too as they are able to book and change appointments with clear real-time visibility of availability and jobs can be booked in the same area on the same day, reducing travel time.”

Ryan King, Mersey North Planning Team Leader commented “I find that DRS is very effective when it comes to the daily planning as it’s a clear system which offers benefits such as being able to batch the areas by post code per operative, it is also a helpful tool as we can use it as a database for repair information i.e. special instructions which reach the operative’s PDA device such as avoiding school run times.”

Neil Harvey, Kirona CTO, added “Riverside approached Kirona with a vision of how they wanted their services to improve, and we worked with their teams in an open and transparent way to deliver their workforce management solution to enable them to improve their customer service.”

 

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UPDATE: LEADING UK SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROVIDER TESSERACT JOIN LIST OF PROVIDERS TAKING PART IN THIS YEAR'S SUMMIT...

UK based software company Tesseract have become the latest specialist provider to join the select panel of session sponsors adding a further layer of insight into what promises to be an interesting two day session bringing together a mix of practitioners, solution providers and academia to discuss the key challenges in delivering service within an aftermarket environment.

Tesseract, pioneers respected within their field for delivering both the worlds first windows based field service management software as well as the worlds first browser based field service management software are joined by a well rounded group of solution providers including Kuehne & Nagel who will be providing insight on service logistics, Syncron who offer parts and inventory management solutions, and TrackUnit who offer telematics solutions.

 

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The 2nd World Chief Service Officer Summit takes place in London, UK, on March 14th and 15th, with a focus on Manufacturing Aftermarket. Field Service News is pleased to be a media partner for the event.

The manufacturing sector is changing rapidly.  As sales reach saturation point and competition increases pressure on prices, manufacturers are seeking other revenue streams.  Revenue from aftermarket sales will become increasingly important and customer service will have a higher profile. That presents both great challenges and great opportunities.

If you are in manufacturing, repair and operations, this is the summit for you. Come and hear about the latest developments in spare parts supply, 3D printing, CRM, leasing and service support  for products such as autos, heavy equipment, medical device, yachting, aircraft and consumer electronics.

Over two days, in four themed sessions, delegates at the summit will hear from over 20 speakers, learn what the key trends are in service development, hear what competitors are doing and how to deliver service in a customer-driven environment.

Sessions include:[unordered_list style="bullet"]

•   The Global Market Outlook and Internet+ Market
•   Supply Chain Management & Innovative Service Design
•   Technology Innovation and Profitability
•   Field Service & Mobile Workforce Management

Among the confirmed speakers are: Peter Rudzio, CLAAS Service and Parts; Wim Vercauteren, Manitou Group Alvaro Lizarraga, SANY Europe; Waldir Gomes Goncalves, Embraer Executive Jets; Robbert Kerber, LuiGong Machinery Europe; Per Stjernqvist, Volvo Construction Equipment Denmark; Alexandre Marrot , Xerox;  and Professor Tim Baines, Director of the Aston Centre for Servitization Research and Practice.

For more details and to register to attend click here:

 

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Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave Field Service News Editor-in-Chief  Kris Oldland the low down on the innovations .

Having spent 2015 focusing on productivity improvements in Microsfot Dynamics, Microsoft is turning to customer service experience enhancements in 2016.  "It has probably been one of the most significant areas in innovation and investment we've been making in Microsoft," Patterson states.  "We see that organisations today are operating still like they were ten years ago. They are still trying to compete on the basis of price or on the strength of their product or service that they have for their offerings. But key data is really beginning to emerge that a lot of consumers today are largely beginning to stay with brands due to the customer experience and we see customer service playing a huge role in that realm of differentiation."

We have all been part of good customer services experiences but those that we remember oftentimes are the most extremely bad ones. What we are trying to do for enterprises today is really help them understand their customers, help them engage with their customers and help them empower their employees to really drive and centre that degree of engagement."

"While organisations may understand this dichotomy, the reality that they find themselves in today is that a lot of their tooling is dated, a lot of their systems have not been modernised to keep up with the needs of their customers and they are struggling with the proliferation and explosion of channels in the digitalisation of the service experience like never before."

Indeed,  in the modern world of the empowered consumer building a cohesive customer experience that translates across the multitude of different touch points with your organisation is critical. "This notion of digitalisation and the empowered consumer really is creating a juxtoposition with the enterprise, because the agent today is mostly dealing with technology and screens that were built for the last decade of computing."

 

This presents one of two key challenges for today's service-oriented organisations.  While the challenge to deliver the level of service excellence is spread across a growing number of channels, simultaneously there is the challenge of overcoming high employee churn rates within customer service roles which Microsoft analysis of labour statistics around the customer service role both in the US and the UK has revealed as worryingly high at around 27%. "If you think that one in four of your team is turning over every twelve months increasingly it's a really struggling proposition to keep employees engaged and empowered to ultimately to deal with customers. "

"And that meta-trend - the ability to engage with customers and to empower employees - is really what's driving Microsoft, what's driving our innovation force behind our set of releases."

With their latest roll out their Dynamics platform, Microsoft is looking to resolve these challenges with three new elements that Patterson describes as being at the centre of that employee empowerment and customer engagement problem set for an organisation. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and one that is likely the headline grabbing development, is a complete overhaul of the user experience.

"Most CRM systems have been built over time with this notion of the relationship and relationships take time to emerge and unfold for an organisation," explains Patterson. "So it's s oftentimes that a CRM system is designed with lots of data, lots of forms and lots of views. For organisations who need to keep up with high scale but low amount of data within an interaction there was a dichotomy between the optimised user experience and the user experience we find today in most CRM systems."

"So we went back to the drawing board and back to the core of the user experience itself and designed what we think is the most productive user experience for customer service agents on the planet."

A bold statement indeed.  So what is the detail behind the hyperbole?

Interactive Service Hub

The UX Microsoft has introduced is called the interactive service hub. It has the ability to handle large screens of information, and to take a screen and easily turn it into an interaction. It's a technology that many will be familiar with in social solutions, Patterson readily admits. However bringing it into the customer service team at large to help them engage across all the digital channel - web, social email and so on - could be a very powerful tool.

"There is also a focus on building much tighter integration between what Microsoft refer to as Tier One agents (those who have to deal with the most volume) and Tier Two agents (those who have to deal with the escalations coming from the tier one team).  This could prove an important aid in increasing efficiency resulting in speedier resolutions for customers.

 

That interplay between tier one and tier two today for most organisations is where you see the highest degree of latency in closing a business operation. It is our belief that if we can bring the tier one and tier two teams together in a way that information is continuous and seamless throughout a service funnel, then we could help teams react, respond and resolve issues much easier than before.

Smarter customer engagement

2016 will see the release of what Microsoft calls smarter customer engagement.  It's an interesting concept that builds upon their own social engagement technology while addressing what is perhaps a key flaw. "What sentiment and social screens have proven is that it's a signal, a belief at a point in time but it may not get to the full unearthing of a customer perspective on things," Patterson begins. "So in addition to some advances we're making in the social engagement side we're introducing our Voice of Customer solution." This is based on some tech acquired last spring to go to the next level of voice-of-the-customer and feedback as part of the business process."

"When you combine the sentiment analytics with the enriched information on an interaction or on a survey perhaps, organisations can further understand their customers in a way that's not just only a point in time or what they might have said on a social network. The combination of these two is how we see organisations truly coming together to engage in new ways with their customers."

Knowledge capture and management

The third of the new developments particularly caught my attention as it is a tool capable of helping tackle a significant issue being faced by many, many field service companies: the challenge of capturing the knowledge, locked away in the heads of a workforce rapidly set to walk away from the business as they reach retirement age.

Again the challenge is two-fold, firstly there is the capture of this knowledge to ensure it remains in the organisation and secondly there is the need to make this knowledge easily accessible.

 

Microsoft's knowledge capture platform incorporates a WYSISYG designer to allow for simple and easy creation of content, as you'd expect, but perhaps more importantly they have also included social collaboration tools which allow companies to bring teams of people together to work in tandem on the creation of an article.

The upshot of this is that either each article becomes less disputed or you create fewer articles authored by individual experts who have distinct points of view. Either way it makes for a more streamlined approach to developing a knowledge bank and when the aim is to help deliver quicker understanding to your workforce and swifter resolution to customer problems, then quality should always trump quantity.

This is also something that Microsoft are acutely aware, says Patterson, pointing out that most knowledge management solutions have been built more as knowledge aggregators which end up taking in so much volume and so much data that agents really get lost in the cloud of information.

"Often what happens is an organisation will spend so much time indexing and not enough time thinking about the meaningful information that helps drive an interaction to a resolution.  Over time the knowledge index becomes less and less trusted by the customer service team."

"So our focus was putting the knowledge into the core hands of the agents and the experts inside an organisation who can put the right information into the hands of the customer service interaction team so it can become a more thoughtful and ambient experience for an agent."

Supported by a powerful machine learning engine, the knowledge management tool analyses the content of what an interaction is about and pro actively surfaces and pushes the right knowledge into the hands of the agent whilst they are taking the call. This ability to place focused content intelligently in the right place at the right time could hugely improve resolution times within a service centre. However, the magic doesn't end there as the system essentially continues to refine itself through each interaction.

"Once that intersection between knowledge and interaction come together that binding, that fusion if you will, actually tunes the machine learning engine even further and enriches it even further this article solves this problem," enthuses Patterson.

Each of these developments are exciting in their own right but together it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 2016 is certainly shaping up to be an impressive update to the platform.

However, when it is bundled together with Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity suite, for a cost of between £40 and £95 depending on your own configurations, this becomes a platform offering fantastic value. Long may it continue.

 

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What will be the key technology trends in 2016 for customer service engagement? Customer contact technology specialist Sabio outlines its top ten trends for 2016 and suggests five initiatives that should be top of  any field service company's digital customer service agenda.

“Today’s customers are having their service expectations reshaped by advances in consumer technology, and will become increasingly frustrated when having to engage with brands that don’t perform to the same levels as their best practice competitors,” commented Sabio’s Head of Consultancy, Stuart Dorman. “Offering more intelligent service and making it easier to engage can make a huge difference - not only by helping organisations to optimise operational performance, but also in terms of freeing up customer time so that they can actually spend more of their lives doing what they actually want to do.”

Dorman's predictions for the top trends for effective customer engagement in 2016 are:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1.  Understanding the true impact of mobile – ever-increasing smartphone penetration means that a growing proportion of service interactions will be transacted on smart devices, so it’s essential that service providers ensure their customer journeys feature clear links to live service via an effective contact centre interface.
2. Placing Embedded Service at the heart of the web browser – with over 50% of customers going online before engaging with a contact centre, it makes increasing sense to embed service options within web pages – a trend that will develop further as WebRTC progressively turns the Web into an open communication platform.
3. Video-based service becomes mainstream – initial video pilot projects are now going live as organisations, particularly in sectors such as financial service, begin to see video support as a premium differentiator that can strengthen brand relationships.
4. Messaging platforms scale to deliver social service – social networks are busy building out their messaging platforms, and will start to open them up to commercial brands who recognise that’s increasingly where their customers are likely to be. With platforms like Facebook Messenger already supporting voice, organisations need to be ready to support those customers who want to engage directly from their social messaging environment.
5. Increasingly smart use of data and analytics – Speech and text analytics have now become essential contact centre technologies in the same way that customer feedback did 5 years ago. Now organisations are looking to leverage the immense computing power of the cloud to take this one step further. By combining multiple data sources such as voice of the customer, CRM data, speech/text analytics and contact centre meta data, organisations are using big data analytics techniques to drive an even deeper understanding of their customers.
6. Much smarter Virtual Assistants – the same technologies that are powering consumer search services are now being applied to intelligent virtual assistants. Rather than clicking, tapping, scrolling and typing - customers will increasingly have conversations with your website to get what they want, helping to transform their overall experience.
   [quote float="left"]Technology isn’t the barrier – it’s your internal siloes that are causing the problems...

    

7. Enabling natural dialogues through speech recognition - Ever-improving natural language understanding will go beyond simple speech recognition to create natural dialogues that effectively mimic agent interactions. Where the next generation of speech-enabled applications will quickly evolve, however, is in their ability to translate caller intent data into a more conversational, intelligent self-service experience for customers.
8. Biometrics gathers real market momentum – thanks to fingerprint recognition on millions of smartphones worldwide, consumers are now treating biometrics as a mainstream technology - with some using the interface over 30 times a day as they ‘sign-in’ to their personal device. Voice and fingerprint biometrics help to achieve the previously incompatible goals of both enhancing security while simultaneously delivering reductions in customer effort.
9. Removing the digital siloes - it’s hardly surprising customers get frustrated, when so many organisations still operate and manage their digital and contact centre strategies separately. Closing this gap, and recognising that when people call contact centres today they have probably already been online first, will increasingly define how successful organisations are in delivering on their end-to-end digital customer service goals. Technology isn’t the barrier – it’s your internal siloes that are causing the problems!
10. Measuring and reducing customer effort - the customer effort measure is all about surfacing those issues across channels that are making life harder than necessary for customers. Once identified, these can be systematically addressed to help reduce service costs, decrease customer churn and improve overall service levels.

“It’s also critical that organisations have the right strategic direction, infrastructure and expertise in place to take full advantage of these key technology directions,” added Dorman. “At Sabio we believe there are a number of specific programmes that digital customer service teams need to concentrate on over the next 12 months if they are serious about reducing effort and building an integrated Digital Front Door for their customers.”

Dorman says that in 2016 customer service organisations need to focus on:[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• Laying the foundations for Digital Service – organisations will need to draw on a broad portfolio of technologies in order to develop the kind of integrated journeys that will make life easier for customers. This will demand the development of ‘Digital Front Doors’ that embrace the end-to-end journey across both self-service and assisted interactions.
• Embed service into every digital journey - providing customers with true embedded service support for each stage of their digital journeys, with more context-sensitive embedded online service applications that draw on web chat or click-to-call to help resolve queries and enable customers to progress to the next stage of their journey with significantly reduced effort.
• Becoming Customer Service Session Designers – until now a major barrier to true end-to-end customer journey design has been the cost and complexity of creating solutions that draw together different parts of an organisation. Now, using the latest engagement development platform technology, customer engagement teams have the opportunity to take advantage of snap-in tools to ensure rapid and more cost-effective solution development.
  Experiment by creating your own Customer Experience lab – it’s often difficult for organisations to know exactly which strategies or technologies to deploy in order to achieve their goals. It’s worthwhile establishing your own Customer Experience lab to find out how new ideas measure up when applied to a meaningful sample of live interactions.
• Recreate your Roadmaps based on Customer Experience -Reducing customer effort and building a more seamless experience requires the development of detailed UX-based roadmaps, breaking down specific elements to consider how much of the experience is actually value-creating and how much is wasted through waiting due to overly-complex or broken processes.

 

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We all know the old adage ‘the customer is always right’ and in all honesty we’ve all questioned the truth in that statement at least once in our lives, but how do we ensure that we stay in control when that customer problem becomes a problem customer?  Bill Pollock, President, Strategies for Growth has some suggestions.

Not all customers are “problems”, but as long as their equipment is down, they are experiencing a “problem”. In fact, most customers realize that their equipment will go down from time to time, and most interpret this as nothing more than an inconvenient “fact of life”.

However, particularly when the customer feels they have not received good customer service and support in the past, or if the machine has undergone a succession of similar types of failures one after the other, there is an increasing chance that even a “good customer” can turn into a “problem customer”.

Sometimes it’s your fault, sometimes it’s someone else’s fault within the organisation, and sometimes it’s the customer’s fault – however, when all is said and done, it will be the field technician who is the one who will have to deal with it.

Typically, the best way to distinguish between a “customer problem” and a “problem customer “is to observe the way in which the customer is handling the situation.

For example, if the customer remains cool, calm, and collected throughout all of its discussions with you regarding a specific service event – regardless of how many discussions you are forced to have – then, you may consider the problem to be more equipment-focused then customer-focused.

However, if you and your company are doing everything possible to get the equipment up and running, get the replacement parts to the customer site as soon as possible, or get a quick “fix” to a software glitch, and the customer is becoming increasingly less cool, calm, and collected, then you may soon be dealing more with a “problem customer” than with a “customer problem”.

 

We’ve all heard the expression, “The customer is always right”. Well, that is not always true.

The general rule of thumb is, “The more ‘right’ the customer is, the more likely you are to be dealing with a ‘customer problem’; however, the less ‘right’ the customer is, the more likely you are to be dealing with a ‘problem customer’”.

In some situations, it may not be entirely clear which is the case. The one thing that is clear, however, is that in either case you will still need to treat the customer in exactly the same way – that is, assuming they are “right”, and treating them accordingly.

However, dealing with an irate customer takes the situation to an entirely new level! We’ve all had them – irate customers! And, the bad news is, we will continue to have them for the duration!

However, there are two ways in which to experience irate customers; either directly as result of a specific event or situation (i.e., a failure in the middle of a key production run, a repeat failure, a self-inflicted failure, or any other number of product- and/or time-related reasons), or because we have made them irate (i.e., treated them poorly, didn’t respond quickly enough, looked like we weren’t paying attention to them, etc).

In most cases, the former types of situations are largely out of our control; however in virtually every case, the latter are entirely preventable. Of course, the best way to avoid having to deal with an irate customer is to do everything in our power to accommodate them – within reason!

But, that does not always work and, accordingly, there will generally be times when we will need to do some immediate – and intense – “damage
control”.

The main focus of any damage control on the part of the field technician would be primarily to:

• Address the situation directly, and attempt to resolve it quickly, completely and satisfactorily;
• Explain the reality of the situation objectively and calmly to the customer;
• Provide any relevant data or documentation that proves your case, if requested;
• Be prepared to correct any misinformation or misperceptions on the customer’s part to avoid any further miscommunication; and
• Explain concisely and accurately why a specific situation may have occurred, what positive actions you will be taking to correct it, and when they could reasonably expect the problem to be resolved to their satisfaction.

In the services profession, you will probably always be running into some customers who, for one reason or another, simply like to be “irate”. This is a fact of business life, and you should be prepared to deal with it as best you can.

However, by continually embracing and utilising a “Listen, Observe, Think, Speak” (i.e., LOTS) approach in all of your customer interactions, you can successfully reduce these types of instances in most cases.

 

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