Listen to your customers to know what they need. This will save you from spending money on marketing your products. Photo/FILE
By Miriam Mukasa
How many companies really take time to engage their customers without using metrics?
By customer, I mean the end user of products or services, employees, suppliers, colleagues or different departments.
What is your reaction when a customer makes a suggestion or files a complaint? Do you ignore the phone calls and e-mails or ask a junior colleague to deal with the matter? Treating customers with such contempt often leads to loss of clients, a move that leaves companies to resort to spending large chunks of their budgets on marketing.
The irony is that if more companies connected with their customers, not only would they have plenty of satisfied customers, but feedback could guide them to new market trends.
The recent demise of companies that were once goliaths indicates that some choose to ignore customers especially in the era of social media.
Companies should engage more with customers to save on paying consultants to tell them what their customers really think about products. Ask customers directly and use this information to improve, innovate or launch new products.
Customer connection need not be expensive. A recent report by McKinsey & Company (New York), titled ‘Why the COO should lead social-media customer service’ says “Social media offers a chance to redefine the delivery of service to customers, changing the way they think and talk about a company’s brands while drastically lowering service costs.
Seventy-one per cent of consumers who have had a good social-media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. But are they assigning the right organisational “owner” to those efforts?
Connection versus collection
Given the rising influence of social media in today’s marketplace, the question is how many companies actually use Facebook, Twitter to connect rather than collect customers.
Collection is building up a following or contacts and there ends the story.
Yes, companies may have millions of Facebook fans, but only a few are using the opportunity to engage directly with their customers.
Look at the sheer brilliance by which US President Obama and his team engage directly with the American people— both friends and foe fathom the power of well-used social media.
Save money
The truth is, if companies had proper customer connection channels this would lead to a reduction in defects and waste. Companies would not be launching or developing products or services that no one wants to pay for. Instead, they would get early feedback from customers and cut their losses.
There is no shame in cutting losses early. Engaging or connecting with customers means receiving advice about your product in real time—not three months after an expensive launch.
By engaging your customers from an early stage of a product lifecycle, you are giving the customer a sense of ownership and as stakeholders, they have a vested interest in ensuring your product or service succeeds.
Variation and defects
Ask most companies how they review or measure performance in relation to customer services and they will reply; average i.e. average time, average response, average quantity and so forth.
However, does average accurately reflect your organisation’s performance?
If you are a restaurant owner, your metrics may indicate that on average customers had to wait 13.4 minutes before they were served their main meal and you may be satisfied with this figure.
However, had you engaged with customers directly, then they would have given you the full story that your “satisfactory” average waiting time of 13.4 minutes in reality is actually made up as follows: Monday 10 minutes waiting time, Tuesday 15 minutes; Wednesday 20 minutes, Thursday 8 minutes and Friday 14 minutes.
However, customers do not like variation— so in actual fact, this is what you should be addressing. While you remain pre-occupied with average time, your customer is far more concerned about variation in time.
Average means little to customers since they know they cannot risk eating at your restaurant regularly since they don’t know how long it will take for them to be served.
A restaurant owner can do far better by engaging customers, looking at the complaints they have raised, identifying what is causing the variation in times, and then addressing this variation through improved processes.
Customer satisfaction
One of the popular practises at the moment is Six Sigma—a methodology that focuses on the customer.
Six Sigma wants to improve effectiveness of an organisation while at same time cut inefficiency. It is highly dependent on finding out customer needs and enables us to understand who our customers are.
By doing so, we are then able to introduce new or improved processes that address customer concerns. By balancing two goals—productivity and a satisfying customer experience— this raises the performance bar.
Ms Mukasa is managing-director of AfricaTalentbank.com Limited
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