Leadership Courseware Blog

A significant part of customer retention is having a business model that makes it easy for customers to do business with you. Customer service should not stop at the trouble desk. Instead, it should permeate the entire company, especially to those in roles that have contact with customers, including those who are often are in the background, e.g., accounts receivable personnel.

Is This The View You Present to Your Customers?

This fundamental approach to business requires companies to have and live by a genuine customer focus. To be genuine, a customer focus must be translated into policies, procedures, and a way of interacting with customers that is truly service oriented. If companies allow themselves to lose their customer focus, it is easy for people within the organization to begin seeing customers as interruptions to their work flow. This negative attitude toward customers influences how people interact with customers in person and through systems implementation. Combined, the effects of these things affect how customers perceive how easy it is to do business with your company—and how they feel about you.

It’s Often the Little Things

Telling customers that you can’t help them, for example, may be factual, but telling the customer that you can’t help them and that they have to call someone else is unforgivable. How about taking the responsibility to transfer the call, or contacting the appropriate person on the customer’s behalf to communicate the issue and ensure that the appropriate person follows up? Why not go the next step and call the customer back in a couple days to make sure that their issue was resolved?

I am actually a fan of auto-attendant phone answering systems, but forcing customers to select from a menu of items that does not correlate to their immediate concern with no directory and no way to reach a human being is absurd. What message does that communicate to your customers?

Forcing all customers to take every issue through Customer Service or the Trouble Desk is a questionable approach. Yet if this is your model, make sure that those who answer the phones have accurate and up-to-date account information, and can connect the customer to the appropriate resource in a timely manner.

The Evolution is Often Hard to Discern

Companies generally do not fail in all aspects of customer service all at once. Poor customer service is like a cancer. It starts with a primary malignancy within the organization that contributes to an inappropriate view of clients, which causes people to think and act in ways that are not in keeping with good customer service. Over time, the symptoms spread until they permeate all aspects of the organization. By the time you realize customer retention has become a problem, the cancer will have spread widely and will require major changes to eradicate it.

Here is an example of an extreme case that we recently experienced. I am not revealing the vendor’s name, because the purpose of this post is to point out what can happen if any company loses its customer focus, not to cast aspersions on any one. This is a long story that you would not believe, if it were not true!

Background

In September of 2008 we entered into a service agreement with a vendor to provide a certain level of needed services to our company. The agreement could only be terminated or modified to reduce services at the end of the 1-year service period, and only then by providing a written request 60 days prior to the anniversary date. Due to changes in our business, we provided written notification of our desire to reduce the level of service at the end of the contract period, September 30^th, 2009 or earlier if possible.

Calendar of Events

Exceeding contractual requirements, we provided written notice 90 days prior to the end of the first term and again 60 days prior to the end of the term, and then we attempted to contact our sales account manager to communicate our needs verbally. And so began the frustration:

• We left numerous voicemails for our Account Manager, but got no response for over two weeks.
• We called customer service and received a commitment to relay our message to the account manager, and still another week passed with no response.
• We called customer service again. They accessed their database and discovered that the account manager assigned to our account had been changed. They transferred our call to the new account manager, who was not in, and so we left yet another message.
• This vendor uses an auto-attendant phone answering system that requires you to either know the extension of the party you wish to call or select one of the options they have pre-programmed, none of which provides access to a directory. Once again, we called customer service. This time, however, we finally were able to speak with account manager #2.
• Account manager #2 informed us that the contract could not be amended, claiming that he could do nothing until the end of the first term. Nonetheless, he promised us that our billing would reflect the requested reduction in service at the beginning of the second term.
• The first billing statement of the second term reflected no changes. We called account manager #2 and got his voicemail. After two weeks of repeated calls with no response, we again called customer service, and the representative left a message for account manager #2.
• After another week of no response, we called customer service yet again to learn that account manager #2 was no longer responsible for our account. So the rep forwarded us to account manager #3.
• Account manager #3 listened to our story and said he would have to research all the account records to see what had been done regarding our request. We were now 60 days into the new term and were still being billed at the original service level—150 days (5 months!) after our initial request for a reduction.
• Account manager #3 took two more weeks to get back to us. When he did, he told us that no change documentation could be found and asked us to provide proof that we had actually requested the change.
• We forwarded our email requests to account manager #3, who then informed us that the change we requested should be reflected in our next billing statement.
• At the end of the third month of the second year, the billing statement we received reflected no changes. We attempted to contact account manager Number 3. After repeated voicemails with no response, we contacted customer service. Account manager #3 was no longer our account manager. We were now 90 days into the new term.
• Account manager #4 contacted us to let us know that the problem had been resolved, and that we would see a full credit on the next billing statement.
• At the end of the next month, however, our statement had not changed. At that point, I stopped all payments, sent notice to the vendor’s accounts receivable department that I was withholding payment, and told them why I was doing so. I sent a copy of this correspondence to the vendor’s customer service department.
• Shortly thereafter, I received a call from a man who identified himself as a Director of Customer Services. He assured me that he would get to the bottom of the issue and call me back the next day. We never heard from him again.
• A few days later, I received a call from the vendor’s accounts receivable department telling me that they would be forced to seek remedies under the agreement, if I did not pay the amount due. They didn’t seem to understand or care that they owed us money.
• Beginning in March 2010, five months into the new term, I instructed our accounts payable group to pay the vendor the amount we would owe based on the lower level of service that we requested. We continued to be billed for the full amount, amassing a substantial past-due amount and threats of collections.
• Finally, at the end of the seventh month of the new term, there was a credit posted to our account that brought our account up to date.
• At the end of the eighth month, and again at the end of the ninth, we received billing statements for the full amount of the originally contracted services, both of which included late penalties for past due amounts.
• In the 9th month we also learned that Account Manager Number 4 is no longer in charge of our account.

The Result

Now we have submitted written notification to the vendor that we will be terminating our services Agreement at the end of the current term. It is too bad, because the services that we contracted for were provided with a high-degree of quality and met all our needs. It is a shame that they made it so difficult for us to acquire and use those services.

I will not speculate on the whys that led to the lack of communication, the failure to act upon our request, the failure to follow-up on commitments, the apparent lack of up-to-date account information, or the failure of their internal processes and systems to affect a simple reduction in service.

If our experience is consistent with what this vendor’s other customers are experiencing then it is likely they would not be around to fulfill our needs for another year anyway. If we are an anomaly subjected to special treatment, then I can only say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

If You Want to Keep Your Customers, Consider the Following:

• Make it EASY for them to do business with you!!!
• Don’t put obstacles in their path.
• Don’t hide behind auto-attendants.
• Don’t allow your people to hide behind other departments, or pass the buck.
• Don’t hide behind contracts that don’t allow for extenuating circumstances.
• Don’t put the burden of getting help on the customer.
• Don’t let your promises become empty. Follow up and do what you promise to do.
• RESPOND to customer requests promptly. Resolve their problems right away.
• If you must change account managers, notify the customer and provide the new contact information.

Customers are not an interruption to your workflow, they are the reason you exist.

Tags: customer focus, Customer Retention, customer service, Leadership, management, Sales