"Touching" Your Customers

Many years ago we had a unique opportunity to work with the senior management of a communications company as well as their IT management and support staff in the same week. So what, might you ask, was so unique about that? Well, the dynamics of the engagement provided the freedom to relay feedback from support and operations to management and vice versa without damaging relationships or risking the jobs of those candid and honest individuals. The outcome came as a shock to corporate management: the company was totally out of touch with both its customers and its staff. Decisions were made in isolation without visibility to the downstream or, for that matter, even upstream impact.

This project came to mind when I distributed an article recently to my advisory team, "Taking a Whack Against Comcast," which relates a disturbing story reminiscent of the Michael Douglas 1993 movie, "Falling Down". The response to my email broadcast was interesting. One respondent shared their experience with a cell phone company over the past TWO YEARS trying to get an incorrect, yet recurring charge, off their monthly invoice. Another said they were transferring all their communications, email, cable and telephone, to another service because they were "tired of the poor customer service" practiced by their current provider. I have personal experience with a rented international mobile phone from my cell phone provider that never worked the entire time I was in Europe. And I'm certain all of us can relate to the frustration of dealing with phone trees, recorded messages and web interfaces that fall short of anything remotely resembling customer service.

That is why I found an article in Monday's "Investor's Business Daily" interesting. If you are a subscriber, look on Page A8 for the article on Netflix, "Wooing Customers With Call Centers." If ever there was an explanation of how customer service can be used to differentiate a business from its competition, this is it. The article starts off with a simple, direct and impactful sentence: "Humans matter." In short, here is the essence of the message:

• Netflix and Blockbuster are in direct combat in a highly competitive industry;
• Netflix must differentiate itself from its competition;
• Netflix has opened a new call center to deal with customer issues, acting on a desire to be aggressive in reducing "customer churn";
• Other industries, financial service firms in particular, have worked to improve their call center operations;
  
• Implementing automated call and email handling exclusively as a cost control mechanism has negatively impacted satisfaction;
• Call center outsourcing has impacted service quality (Dell);
• Netflix consulted best practices in call handling to differentiate their call center operations.
  

Many organizations implement technology solutions under the guise of enhancing customer service. Customers recognize this as a shallow ruse of concealing the real motivation: to cut costs. As Michael Osier, VP of IT operations at Netflix said: “Customer satisfaction comes down to treating people the way you want to be treated.”

Wow! What a concept!