I spent 45 minutes yesterday on phone with the customer service agent of a company trying to fix a mistake from their side that should not have been made in the first place.
Felt pity for myself and for the agent helping me.
Got me thinking about one of my past clients that sold similar services and handled a huge volume of customers.
Their customer satisfaction scores were top notch in the industry. And the money they spent on customer service was around half of their closest competitor.
They did three things extremely well:
1. Process design: a lot of time invested in designing, testing, and iterating customer facing processes before rolling them out.
2. Philosophy of FTR - First Time Right: incentives to the backend teams to get it right in the first go. This significantly reduces mistakes, the need for the customers to call back, and ultimately the volume of service requests.
3. Agent empowerment: a certain degree of autonomy to the frontline agents so they could use their discretion on simple, low value requests without going through the loops of exception approvals.
Every time I have to call up a customer service and have to waste time trying to fix something silly, I just wonder:
1. Have the senior execs of the company ever tried getting first hand experience of their own customer service?
2. What does it take to fix it?
#customerexperience #service #management #consulting