When is a complaint not just a complaint? When it results in a customer being so peeved about how his or her complaint is addressed, that he or she “cancels” future interactions with the offending business. This inability to course-correct with a customer has just cost the business future earnings, the building of brand equity with the offended customer’s pipeline of referrals and social media fallout if the unacceptable response is converted into a post or a reel.
A missed opportunity occurs when a business commits a sin that either could have been avoided with a customer, or could have been handled in a way that would have been beneficial to both the business and the customer. A missed opportunity results as well, when a business fails to take advantage of any opportunity to serve its customers until they are delighted.
A missed opportunity occurs when a business commits a sin that either could have been avoided with a customer, or could have been handled in a way that would have been beneficial to both the business and the customer.
Missing an opportunity to course correct with a customer is a common occurrence that bedevils some businesses on a daily basis and often stems from unforced errors on the part of the businesses. Let’s take a look at a few of these errors.
Not taking the time to know and understand one’s customers inside out, is a big error. Without deep and continuous aggregation of customer intelligence from multiple sources, customer blindness may result, due to insufficient or faulty understanding of customer expectations and needs by the business.
Additionally, the absence of rich customer intelligence may cause sales, marketing and service delivery strategies in turn, to be crafted around faulty assumptions, leading to less effective hit rates and more costly rates of customer acquisition, over time.
Not taking the time to know and understand one’s customers inside out, is a big error.
When it comes to customer intelligence, the unknown must become known.
Another error, especially amongst those businesses that have quite a bit of in-person traffic, is not having a customer-facing infrastructure that enables decision-making to happen as close to the customer as possible. This design also works for those businesses that offer e-commerce transactions.
Why do customer contact staff have to be constantly escalating to upline supervisors and managers in this day and age, when the “immediacy” of customer support should be an experience differentiator? The trick is to ensure that customer engagement expertise is entrenched at customer contact levels and further buttressed by an endowment of decision-making authority to allow the customer’s needs to be resolved on spot and to his or her delight.
Another error, especially amongst those businesses that have quite a bit of in-person traffic, is not having a customer-facing infrastructure that enables decision-making to happen as close to the customer as possible.
Allowing customer contact staff to make decisions on-spot, would be a game-changer in a competitive environment. Can you imagine the customer impact if a business were to roll low effort, convenience, responsiveness and ease of doing business into a brand experience, consistently? My guess would be the racking up of innumerable loyalty points.
Entrusting customer contact staff with wide decision-making authority is not commonplace, nor is its statistical infrequency a mystery. it’s about being risk averse. Business leaders do not have the confidence in their customer contact employees to take high quality decisions on their own. Overcoming this flaw means recruiting high potential candidates intentionally and developing the desired constellation of skills.
Another error is the common occurrence of under-resourced contact centres and customer support units.
Another error is the common occurrence of under-resourced contact centres and customer support units. There’s a difference between a call centre and a contact centre. The call centre is pretty much dedicated to directing callers to the right internal landing points, whilst responding to the most basic of questions, queries and requests. A contact centre is populated with employees who are product, service and process specialists, fully trained to resolving high level customer issues across a full suite of omni channels.
Today’s customers require contact centres, given the demand for optimized solutions at customer interface points.
A major unforced error is the competency gap between supervisors and their direct reports. The gap is often so wide that departments struggle to meet daily business objectives, with service impairment becoming one of the major casualties of this institutional flaw. Of course, the fix for this default setting would be to boost hiring efficiency, with a focus on finding new hires who are highly predisposed to accelerated learning and who, with focussed coaching, enable their departments to function at high levels of efficiency.
Missed opportunities do occur. The mission, I believe, is to ensure that they do not become the legacy of the business.
Missed opportunities are avoidable. I believe that when a business wants to become an engine built for execution, it begins to pay attention to areas as competitive readiness, internal skills stacking, developing well-oiled teams and consistent measurement of its progress.
Missed opportunities do occur. The mission, I believe, is to ensure that they do not become the legacy of the business.