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arketing Management Strategies
How to Develop an Outstanding Customer Care Culture
“Delivering good customer care is no longer good enough - to gain strategic advantage you must deliver Outstanding Customer Care”
How do you create long-term, sustainable business advantage? Product innovations can be copied, promotional campaigns can be mimicked, as can technology and design advancements. Developing an Outstanding Customer Care culture (“OCC”), however, is an intangible intellectual resource, which is very difficult to copy. How to create this “intangible” advantage is still, apparently, a mystery to most organisations. Customer clubs and customer loyalty schemes are all in vogue but are, again, easily copied by competitors.
You can only gain strategic advantage, however, relative to the other players in your game – your competitors. These days the reasons “Why” and the “What” we need to do are pretty clear to most tuned-in business owners. The challenge still remains with the “How”.
Developing an OCC culture is a total integrated, organisation-wide process. It’s a mindset. It’s more an attitude than a procedure. It must be developed and nurtured over time. And it is not just for the customer service people. Managing the customer is no longer a function of the customer services, marketing or sales departments. It’s everyone’s job - from the cashier to the warehouse staff to the accounts personnel and the telephone receptionist. Everyone has the responsibility of turning every customer experience into a strategic advantage.
It’s a Slow-Slow, Drip-Drip Campaign
Creating an OCC culture will not happen by telepathy. Because of its “intangibleness”, it requires a slow-slow, drip-drip campaign. The gap between strategic intentions and serving a customer must be bridged. In other words, every single person in the organisation must be a strategic implementor and thinker.
I was recently served in a restaurant by an OCC strategist. This waitress didn’t just do the basics well. She established that I was a local businessman with the potential to bring a lot of repeat business to that restaurant and also had the ability to create a lot of other customers for the restaurant through my sphere of influence. She not only gave OCC but outstanding strategic service.
Feargal Quinn in his book Crowning the Customer, writes “All too often the real energy of the marketing front goes into attracting new customers whilst the ultimately more important task of nurturing the existing customer base gets a lower glamour rating”. Of course he’s right. Almost half a century ago, Peter Drucker wrote that “there is only one valid definition of business purpose; to create and keep a customer”. The purpose may still be the same but, of course, the world has changed dramatically.
Different Kinds of Customer
Customers are now more sophisticated, more mobile, more highly educated. Customers today are fickle, whimsical, impatient, choosy and disloyal - they have choices and opportunities as never before. They expect good products and accompanying services as minimum standards. A small paragraph in the newspaper, a short feature on television, a recommendation by a friend, a slight economic upturn or downturn, a small increase in interest rates, a small change in your corporate identity, or the greeting of your front office receptionist or sales people, a bad word from a customer in a pub, supermarket or shop or on the street can drive customers towards or from your business. It’s tough. You know this. Yet survey after survey, feedback after feedback, points to the fact that you have a better chance of keeping a customer for the long-term by delivering the “softer” elements of OCC in an exceptional way.
Yet the fundamental question - the critical question - still remains: “If everyone understands the significance of Outstanding Customer Care, why is it that the great majority of organisations struggle with its delivery”? The answer still remains with the “How”. How do you change your fundamental “way of doing business” and the thinking mechanism of everyone in your business. It means addressing the very essence of the personality of each person, team, and the culture of your business itself. And in most small businesses the personality of the found/owner is a huge dominating influence - whether s/he appreciates that fact or not. So the best place to start an OCC culture revoluton is right here.
A Question of Values
It’s really a values question. Values are the best procedural system in the world - 150 rules are not as good as one simple value statement. For instance, I know an organisation whose number one value is “To conduct our business with energy, integrity and professionalism in a client focused team culture”. The MD just keeps asking the question “Do you think that sale/meeting/task was completed in a professional way”? Everyone knows the standards and the philosophy, so it’s an easy question to answer!
New procedures and systems will help this process but, on their own, will make no real long-term strategic gain. Redesigning, repackaging, even developing totally new products, may help in the short-term. Segmentation and integrated-marketing by themselves do not gain that winning edge. Your competitors are probably using similar tactics and strategies.
Ultimately, it’s a culture thing which is wrapped up in the human dimension. You must get to grips with intangibles as strategic weapons for 21st Century advantage. I suggest that one of your most valuable intellectual capitals today can be your ability to define, measure and develop a core OD and culture called Outstanding Customer Care. It’s the faster, most long-term and most reliable way to transform your business, delight your customers and dramatically improve profitability.
Why Customers Stop Doing Business With Your Firm – Stop Customers Leaving Your Business NOW!
To keep your most valuable customers, you must understand why some customers leave as well as why they stay. Today, the single most effective way to increase profits and build customer satisfaction and loyalty is with an integrated outstanding customer care programme … just “satisfying” customers is simply not good enough any more. You must exceed your customers expectations and give them an exceptional experience when they come in contact with your business. This means that fewer customers fail to come back.
The reason customers stop doing business with your company may surprise you. The research says that 68% do not come back because of “attitudes of indifference” and poor service from the staff of that business … 14% leave because they don’t like the product/service and prefer a competitors product or service … 18% leave for other miscellaneous, minor reasons. Is it possible that two out of every three customers that stop doing business with your firm have left because they feel that you don’t really care about their concerns and needs?
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Less resource loss fixing problems for dissatisfied customers.
But it gets even worse. Dissatisfied customers talk to others about their dissatisfaction. The most comprehensive research in this area indicates that unhappy customers tell nine or ten others about their complaints. The ripple effect can neutralise, even paralyse, your pro-active customer and marketing efforts.
The flip side of this coin is that customers who have their problems solved satisfactorily with your firm also talk. They tell, on average, five other people about how their problem was resolved. Furthermore, if they are delighted with the exceptional service with which their complaint or problem was dealt with, 95% will continue to do business with your firm again.
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Less price sensitivity and costly discount giveaways.
The fact of the matter seems to be that customers will buy more, and buy it more often, leading to increased sales and boosting profits provided they are given the OCC treatment. It is the ultimate way to differentiate your business from that of your competitors.
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More word-of-mouth recommendations from your key customers.
The research indicates that it costs, on average, five times as much to win a new customer as it does to keep an old one. So many companies put so much effort into creating new customers, and so little resource and concentration into keeping their current customers that the equation is upside down. The lifetime value of your current customer, not just in the money they spend with you, but how they do their marketing for you if you leave them with the OCC delight factor, is quite incredible.
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More resources positively deployed to keeping and adding value to current customers.
Share-of-customer may be a better measure of future success than market share. Again think of the residual value and ripple effect of loving your customers to death and the enjoyment and personal satisfaction that these kind of interactions generate in your organisation.
Gordon Selfridge was the first man to say “the customer is always right”. He proclaimed this great motto in the 1930s, yet the mystery of delivering outstanding customer care and exceptional service is as big a mystery as ever. The biggest problem with differentiating your business in this way is based on a wrong assumption - the assumption is based on the belief that service excellence will happen of its own accord or because you express a desire for it to happen. The reality is that developing an outstanding customer care culture is hard work and takes concentrated effort over an extended period of time.
The ripple effects are, however, very beneficial - happier staff connect better with your customers, sell them more, and more often. These customers tell other customers and the benefits continue. Your staff are less inclined to leave and are far more productive. Loss of customers, retention of staff, more sales, higher productivity, and market differentiation all go to the bottom line and are very difficult to copy by your competitors.
So stop losing and start winning with outstanding customer care.
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