Servicing Your Way to Customer Retention, Loyalty and Satisfaction
1 Mar, 2002
By: Dina VanceWith the adoption of customer relationship management as a mainstream business strategy, today’s contact centers must change the way they relate to the customer. How is that different from years past? Over the past 5 years, contact centers have migrated from service-oriented to sales-oriented. Along the way, however, we’ve become revenue and sales driven and lost the service component. Sales, when done absent a complimentary service strategy, reinforces the belief that chasing the almighty dollar is more important than chasing the almighty customer. In reality, contact centers exist because of the customer, and the primary job of the center is to make sure customer needs are met, to enhance retention, loyalty and satisfaction. In today’s economy, perhaps more so than ever, there is a clear mandate for contact center leaders to modify their focus from simply selling the next service to servicing every sale.
Why Service, Why Now?
Consider the economic reality in the contact center. Today contact centers are experiencing fewer sales opportunities and yet there is additional pressure for the sales agents to maximize every call opportunity. As sales agents get too focused on closing the sale, they often forget about the behaviors required to deliver a quality customer experience. Recent call monitoring in more than 15 nationwide contact centers revealed that of the 110-130 calls per day a service agent takes, approximately 78-85% of the incoming calls are problem related. As this number has continued to rise over the past few years, this suggests that customers may be under more stress, their expectations are higher than ever, and technologies have allowed them to solve simple questions in an automated fashion. Therefore, their instinct to argue, challenge or question the agent might be higher than normal. So, an aggressive approach that invigorates the contact center team to produce more sales-per-hour without regard to customer need is counterintuitive during an economic downturn. Leaders aware of this paradox can prepare agents accordingly for the anticipated change in customer attitudes, and develop a strategy that encourages agents to use sound judgment and better decision making on every call. A trait common to companies that are known for world-class service is having empowered representatives capable of handling complex situations and meeting customer needs. Sound judgment as the cornerstone of a strong service philosophy, helps your representatives to be more confident and encourages customers to remain loyal to the companies that they know and trust.
Now is the time to remind agents that the word ‘sales’ begins and ends with the letter “s” for service, and only through a focused effort to provide exceptional customer care will the center be rewarded with strengthened customer relationships and many more sales opportunities. The corollary is that the metrics in the contact center must also migrate from revenue per call, conversation ratios and sales per hour to include customer satisfaction, customer retention and loyalty.
The Bottom-Line is You Must Service to Sell
A mission critical message has begun to reverberate throughout U.S. companies today – service is critical to organizational success. Recent research proves what the rest of us intuitively believe, and have begun to experience in the contact center industry:
• In the October 2001 Trendsetter Barometer Report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, it was reported, “virtually all CEOs of the nation’s fastest growing companies (87%) singled out customer service as being very important to the growth of their business over the next 12 months. And among all growth sources studied, 31% expect quality service will produce the single most profitable return for each dollar invested.”
This statistic sends a clear message -- success is first driven by the balance of service, and then sales. It is about providing value to the customer so you are repeatedly selected as the customer’s chosen provider. To make service mission critical, the strategy must transcend both the service and sales teams. The entire center must innately understand that in truly customer-focused organizations, the best sales calls are simply an extension of exceptional service, and an uncompromising commitment to satisfy a customer need or solve a problem.
Investing in Quality
Investing in quality customer service means building a strategy where customers are viewed as individuals who have wants and needs that your contact center can address. Caring for the customer must be demonstrated during the call, regardless of whether it is inbound, outbound, sales or customer service. This requires adopting a simple, behaviorally-based customer interaction strategy designed to empower staff and enhance customer satisfaction. By adopting a behaviorally based skill model to improve customer service and sales interactions, you’ll be well on your way to enhancing loyalty.
The first set of skills is designed to help the customer calm down and relax. Contact Center Agents need to understand that the customer’s threshold for pain is low, and they can’t take the customer’s complaints, words, or frustrations personally. When customers relax, they allow the agent to take control of the call, and set the stage for a quick move to meet customer needs.
The next step in the process requires skills to identify the cause of the customer’s problem and determine a path to successful resolution. Agents then inquire, but not with traditional open and closed ended techniques. Instead, agents must ask questions that reflect the situation at hand and the issues, which arose. They conclude with questions to determine how best to resolve the problem or meet the need.
After successfully demonstrating the skills outlined above, the customer should have confidence that their need will be met, or their problem will be resolved. With confidence in the agent, the customer will then be able to relinquish control and allow that agent to ensure that customer satisfaction is achieved.
The message for contact center leaders is clear: embrace the needs of customers now, like never before, and make a concerted effort to connect with them. Become focused on the source of customers concerns as a path to profitability. As a part of this mandate for service, we must do several things to build an enhanced contact center culture:
• Make the connection between service and sales. Help agents understand how to be customer-centric on all of their calls, and then give them a clear strategy for handling them.
• Coach and measure to improve desired results. Involve managers as coaches to sustain long-term behavioral change, and then measure the change in retention, loyalty and customer satisfaction.
• Improve the talk about profits, sales and revenue projections by focusing your leadership messages on the customer. Do this in your written, verbal and coaching messages. And do it again. Results will naturally follow.
The contact center’s ability to provide service excellence in both sales and service calls will help increase customer loyalty, create a positive customer experience, and a reason to call back again and again.
