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Dazed and confused
Author: Bill Cusick
February 28, 2005
You would think, given all the money and time and effort spent by companies on this customer relationship thing over the last few years, that the situation would be getting better. And you would think, if you ask senior execs at those companies, that they would be motivated to say customer experience is an issue they’ve gotten their arms around.
Boy, would you be wrong.
212 senior executives across the globe gave themselves pretty dismal marks in this survey. 59% don’t even feel they deserve the customer’s loyalty, up from 45% in 2003. And over 8 of 10 don’t know the average annual value of their customers. Almost 9 out of 10 don’t know the cost of a customer complaint.
So, everyone is now talking about customer experience at major corporations - heck, some now have full customer experience departments - and things are getting…worse.
Some of these companies need to call us.
What happened at Radio Shack?
Author: Bill Cusick
February 21, 2005
I want to know, what the heck is going on at Radio Shack? I’ve popped in to my local store, over there next to Walgreens, two or three times in the last couple months, and I’m confused.
It used to be that one only ventured into the little storefront reluctantly - for an ac adaptor, battery, alligator clip or whatever. The customer would be met by a dismissive glance, and would be a lone explorer, searching forlornly among the mislabled cables, plugs, and ham radio parts.
But now, now, when you walk through the front door, you find yourself in a new land, a bountiful, attractive (ok, at least more attractive) retail space with this season’s models of computers and cell phones and tvs. And more important, you are met with people, nice people, people willing to help you. They are earnest! They know where things are! They know how to work the register! And, as a result, I’ve gone back, not just for a CAT 5 cable or an adaptor, but for a cordless phone.
So what happened? Are they paying employees differently…a new company initiative? I don’t know, but I want to find out.
Hey, Joe…
Author: Bill Cusick
February 15, 2005
This is my attempt at a positive post after a run of customer experience warning shots over the last couple weeks. I’ll try. It’s just that the world is rife right now with examples and research that isn’t flattering to many companies that serve up less than steller customer experience.
But here’s one! A couple months back, a Caribou Coffee opened just a block away from the office. Yeah! And through the first few weeks, as I strolled in each morning for my first cup of coffee, I noticed some flubs in customer service…BUT, they were good-natured flubs. The people behind the counter were happy: happy to be there, happy to talk to customers, and happy to fix their flubs. ("That was a medium vanilla half-caf latte with whip? Whoops, give me a minute and I’ll fix that for you, on the house!")
Even now, every morning, the same happy guy behind the counter guesses at my order as I walk in. "Morning, medium light roast?" He still gets it wrong most of the time, but who cares? (It’s LARGE light roast.) He’s nice. So three cheers for my Caribou!
Oh, and not that I’m addicted or anything, but free refills! How cool is that?
“You want fries with that?”
Author: Bill Cusick
February 10, 2005
In the last ten years or so, we’ve seen an explosion of CRM products and innovations. There are millions of dollars being spent on software and initiatives to better and more profitably manage the customer relationship. So…let’s look at the results!
Research done by Haberfield and Associates, as described in latest ABA Banking Journal, looked at household penetration by product (checking accounts, cds, IRAs, etc.) from 1982, and then again in 2003. I’ll spare you all the stats and just give you the bottom line: with the exception of home equity lines of credit, there was no appreciable gain in household penetration. Meaning: for the bluster and all the cash expended, banks are no closer to successfully cross-selling customers than they were over twenty years ago.
Fairly amazing, isn’t it? It seems that banks might want to get back to the fundamentals regarding customer experience and cross-sell activity. Start with asking tellers to smile and say hello. You can get to the enterprise-wide CRM platform after learning to crawl. Baby steps…
The rich are people too
Author: Bill Cusick
February 4, 2005
Apparently wealthy folks appreciate many of the same customer-service courtesies as the rest of us, and, you know, maybe a little more. This according to recent research that asked people worth seven figures what they want from companies with which they do business. The affluent are seeking individualized service and are concerned with privacy, saying they want their information to remain confidential. However, they want their data to be utilized by the company to provide more customized service and products.
Let’s file this under the "not rocket science" category.
