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CUSTOMERSERVICE11032003
By Bill Perry
Charleston Regional Business Journal 11/3/2003
CUSTOMER
SERVICE
Want to find
out how you’re doing? Just ask.
A
lot has been written through the years about customer retention and loyalty.
Carl Sewell, owner of Sewell Cadillac in Dallas, Texas, wrote one of the most
popular books on the subject, Customers
for Life.
Serving customers is a real passion of
Sewell, not only because he feels strongly about it, but also because it makes
dollars and cents for his business. In his book, Sewell says that when he sees
someone walk into his showroom for the first time, he sees $332,000 in lifetime
revenue if he can gain and keep that
person as a loyal customer. New car upgrades, second and third cars for the
family, as well as repairs all add up.
Sewell went further at his dealership,
however. In order to keep customers for life, he needed to know what they liked
about doing business with him and, more importantly, what they didn’t like.
So he asked and got some interesting
feedback. Customers didn’t like his service hours (8-5 Monday-Friday); didn’t
like being without a car while theirs was being worked on; thought some of the
service staff was rude; and hated
having to bring their cars back a second or third time for re-work.
All of this honest feedback gave
Sewell some improvements to work on—like Saturday repair service, free loaner
cars (he has a fleet of over 300), a first-class waiting room with current
magazines, freshly baked cookies, croissants and hot coffee.
The point of all this is customer feedback. If you want to keep
your customers, you have to know what they want and need, and the only way to
do that is to ask or even beg for
feedback. Since only 2-4% of unhappy customers complain and instead merely
defect, you have to be proactive in your feedback efforts.
In our book, Exceptional Customer Service, David, Lisa and I talk about
remembering the ABC’s of effective customer feedback. They go something like
this:
Ask.
There are millions of ways to get feedback—customer comment cards, written or
telephone surveys, posting of feedback phone numbers, in-store kiosks and even
web-based surveys. The problem with all of these methods is response rates,
which are generally very low, in the 10-15% range.
I like interviews and focus groups of
selected customers as methods of getting feedback. Simply take a few minutes
each week to call some of your loyal customers and ask them how you’re doing. I
like the question, “What’s one thing we could do to improve our service?”
Believe
what they are telling you. Many businesses encourage customer feedback only to
dismiss negative comments as trivial or beyond their control. “This was just a
fluke, let’s wait till next month and see if it’s a trend,” is a typical
response. You should consider each complaint as a gift, an opportunity to improve NOW.
Communicate
the results. When a pregnant customer of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream
wrote a letter complaining about the sparseness of walnuts in a pint of Chunky
Monkey ice cream, the company sent her an apology letter along with a coupon
for a free pint, saying “We know you have to feed that baby.” Score! They just
created a customer experience.
Do
something with what you’ve learned. Research by TARP in Arlington, Va.,
suggests the root cause of customer complaints can be traced to one of three
areas: individual employees, the company, or the customer, with 80% of the complaints
traceable to the last two.
Bill Perry is president of The Charleston Center
for High Performance Organizations. He co-authored the book “Exceptional
Customer Service” with Lisa Ford and David McNair, and gives seminars and
speeches on customer focus. He can be reached at billperry829@aol.com.
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