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» Bain - The real meaning of loyalty
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Involving The Whole Organisation
The use of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) is enabling leading organisations to empower customer-facing staff
to take ownership of issues and handle complaints effectively and efficiently, thus reducing customer frustration
and helping to retain customer loyalty. At the same time, organisation-wide complaint management software and systems
help to support a customer-focused culture where front-line staff are encouraged to share their ideas for improvement,
and senior business leaders are held accountable for reducing the cause of complaints.
Empowering Customer Facing Staff
"When customers are surveyed on what is most important to them when dealing with customer service, invariably the top responses relate to first-contact resolution and query ownership"
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In the early days of, what was then a small UK mobile-telecoms organisation, company directors and senior managers
from across the business were given a dedicated line that they could contact anytime in order to relay a customer
complaint. Day or night, they could explain the complaint and identify the customer. In those instances where the
issue couldn’t be resolved immediately, the customer would be provided with a unique reference number, the contact
details of a named company-representative, and the personal promise of a resolution within 24 hours.
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Imagine the response we used to get from customers who received this level of complaint-resolution. The company is
now a multi-billion pound global communication conglomerate, and it was innovative initiatives like this that enabled
the organisation to differentiate itself from the rest of the market, build market share at a phenomenal rate, and
ultimately grow to become the business success it is today.
By replicating this type of customer service philosophy, and empowering all customer-facing staff to direct and own
complaints, leading-organisations are able to offer first-line complaint resolution. When customers are surveyed on
what is most important to them when dealing with customer service, invariably the top responses relate to
first-contact resolution and query ownership. Empowering customer-facing staff in this way and supporting them with
system solutions such as Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software, leading organisations can truly differentiate
themselves in a crowded market-place.
This success story is just one of the many ways that an organisation can use customer feedback and empower
customer-facing staff to support a customer-focused strategy aimed at delivering bottom-line impact.
Tapping into a large pool of knowledge & experience
Leading companies are increasingly recognising the knowledge that they have at their fingertips by tapping into the
experience of their front-line staff who, collectively speak to hundreds of thousands of customers each year.
By facilitating effective and efficient two-way feedback process, recognising and rewarding improvement ideas
generated by staff, and feeding this information into regular strategic development forums, leading organisations
are able to react to customer dissatisfaction by changing non customer-focused policies and procedures. At the same
time, they are able to better understand customer expectations and develop products and services which continue to
meet and, wherever possible, exceed those expectations.
The value of this experience, knowledge and insight (gained in a much more cost effective and focused manner than
expensive market research) is helping leading organisations to better understand and serve their customers.
Encouraging teams to take ownership of the root cause of complaints
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In order to create truly customer-focused business processes and policies, business leaders need to be fully aware
of the impact of decisions which, on paper look like sound revenue generating or cost saving decisions, but in
reality have such a negative impact on the overall quality of service, that the bottom-line is adversely affected.
By encouraging an organisational culture where complaints and customer feedback is included in the decision-making
process, senior leaders and their teams are held accountable for reducing the cause of complaints and ensuring that all
business decisions take adequate account of customer satisfaction.
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"How often has your organisation had to do a quick policy u-turn, when the modification of a service which was initially considered loss-making, resulted in a mass defection of high-value loyal customers? – it does happen!! "
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"77% of industry executives feel that their organisation offers superior customer service whilst only 6% of customers agree"
[Source: BAIIN 2006]
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Lots of organisations talk a good story on this
subject, but only those that practice what they preach can truly differentiate themselves and reap the benefits of higher
customer retention.
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