ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 47) EXPERT’S ANGLE or training for employees. The key is doing the basics well. Finally, many of the delighters creating the greatest lift in loyalty, like crossselling and proactive education, actually make the company money and reduce customer problems and, therefore, service expense. Quantify the payoff of soliciting and handling complaints well. In most consumer products Percentage dissatisfied with fees and charges and services industry sectors, a customer who complains and is satisfied by the follow-up resolution is 30 percent more loyal than a noncomplainant and 50 percent more loyal than a complainant who remains dissatisfied with the follow-up resolution. In the box on the previous page, are two simplified cost-benefit calculations for getting customers to complain and for satisfying them, and spending more to satisfy customers rather than leaving them dissatisfied. In both models the assumptions are: 1) that the customer is worth at least $30 in profit over a year's time; 2) the cost of handling the complaint is about $5; and 3) the company satisfies at least 75 percent of callers. For small-ticket items, for each complaint heard, between 10 and 100 problems of a similar nature are either unarticulated or handled by other touch points or organizations. Extrapolating what you receive to the whole marketplace, you can estimate the revenue impact on the marketplace as a whole of the issues flagged by the complaints. KEY REQUIREMENTS OF AN EFFECTIVE VOC PROCESS and reporting. > Integrating customer data from multiple channels for a unified picture of the customer experience. > Timely reporting of customer data tailored to the stakeholder audience. > Linking the VOC data to revenue and profit implications to set priorities and create an economic imperative for action. > Formal processes for translating customer response into specific actions and targets. > Enabling the company to track the impact of the VOC process. > Linking VOC identified issues to strong incentives. The most prevalent weaknesses and most challenging of the requirements to implement are creating an integrated plan, executing the integration, quantifying results, and providing actionable reporting. What makes the process actionable is the level of granularity captured, stored, analyzed, and reported. Many companies view the VOC as customer surveys. However, customer calls, emails and letters provide more actionable data because they are timelier, and, at the issue level, the problem or question is affecting customer loyalty right now. BENEFITS OF A CALL CENTER-BASED VOC PROCESS Why base the VOC process in the call center? It gets the most robust, timely data on the customer experience. Many companies view their survey process as their VOC. But, surveys are a lagging indicator, reporting experiences days or weeks after they occur. The call center tends to have easy access to operations data not available to market research units that administer surveys. At a delivery company, for example, operations data indicating a package missed its connecting flight, the phone call from the customer inquiring why it has not been delivered, and the survey two weeks later concerning the experience describe the same event. The call center is in the middle and best position to collect and integrate the data into a unified picture of the experience. More reasons to solicit customer contacts via the call center include: > Reduced problems leading to lower cost and higher loyalty. Customers who ask ques- tions can be educated to avoid problems. > Improved products by eliminating customer frustration. Recognizing customer points Consumer Dissatisfaction with Price Vs. Problems Experienced 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 74% 52% 31% 22% 10% 0 1 2 3 4 to 6 7+ 39% This is what is required for an effective VOC process: > Unified ownership of the VOC process by a single executive. > Unified collection and use of customer data to support analysis icmi’s insight N=3,520 respondents Number of problems encountered in last three months www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 47 http://www.icmi.com
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