Technology Newsletter Article

(Ghostwritten)

In Pursuit of the Ultimate in Customer Support

by Phil Verghis
President, The Verghis Group
Author, The Ultimate Customer Support Executive (Silicon Press)

What would it take to elevate your company’s customer service and support? What would bring it up to a higher standard? What would it take for you to deliver the ultimate in customer service and support—and turbocharge your career in the process?

To become an Ultimate Customer Support Executive, as I explain in my book, you must learn to wear two hats. First, you must represent the company to the customer. That’s obvious. At the same time, you must represent the customer to the rest of your company. You must become a fierce and fearless champion on behalf of your customers, and represent their interests to other departments.

This means holding co-workers' feet to the fire, which can be unnerving—even intimidating, particularly to those of us in support. But when you do it on behalf of the customer, and make it clear that that’s your motivation, you’ll be on the path toward earning the respect you deserve. This will have an enormous impact on your organization—and your career.

Take Charge of the Entire Relationship

Do more than just feel your customer's pain. Communicate their dissatisfaction to the rest of your company—then work for changes that will make things better. You must fight to eliminate any obstacles that stand in the way of your customer getting the best possible customer experience, within the constraints of the organization’s  goals.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become a fearless advocate for your customer.

Here’s one important way to do this. Dig down and uncover the root cause of every incident, before you consider it resolved. In our interrupt-driven world, few customer support people bother with this step. Instead, we manage and report on the symptoms, i.e., the incidents, while ignoring the underlying issues that prompted the call in the first place. That keeps us busy—usually too busy. But call volume could be reduced in the long run by taking ownership of the problem now. Fix it sooner rather than later.

Most of us take good care of a customer after they report a problem. But to boost service up to the next level, we must start taking care of customers before they contact us. To be most effective, you must take charge of the entire relationship. Once again, this is not normally within the scope of customer support. Actually, it is not normally within anyone’s scope— that's why it is so often overlooked. This can be costly both to the customer’s experience and the customer’s loyalty. 

It’s About Respect

An Ultimate Customer Support Executive must earn respect from the rest of the company. Then you must demand it.

To earn respect, you must deliver results. To demand respect, you must contribute more. You must understand how your business operates, and be able to view it the way top management does. Look around your own organization, and see if you can answer these questions:

• What does each department do? What value does it bring to the customer?
• Which departments bring in revenue? How?
• What is revenue and what’s overhead?
• Where do your company’s revenues come from?
• How much do your top customers contribute to the “bottom line?”
• Come to think of it, what exactly is the bottom line? And is there a “top line?”

To demand respect, you need to know the answers to these questions.

Relax. It won’t take an MBA to grasp the basics. But to demand respect you should get familiar with things like balance sheets, cash flow statements and profit & loss statements. All are briefly explained in my book, or you can research the answers online.

Understanding the “business of business” allows you to view the financial workings of your company the same way upper management does. It’s a tremendous asset to know what the boss means when she talks about the “bottom line.” It’s even better to contribute to it.

The traditional way to fatten up the bottom line, of course, is by reducing spending. But to command respect, you should aim higher—at the “top line” of an income statement. Ask yourself, how can my department and I generate additional revenue? Don't think that it's outside your domain. On the contrary. According to the Association of Support Professionals support-related services now contribute more than half of total revenues for most B2B software companies, and generate an even larger share of their total profits.

Every boss values and respects employees who bring in additional income. To earn respect, think of ways you and your team can kick it up a notch. Here’s one important way.

Customer Surveys, Invaluable Feedback

You can’t kick it up a notch until you know how your customers feel about your company. That’s where periodic customer satisfaction surveys come in. They’re like your annual physical. Customer surveys take the temperature of your customer, and answer questions that are vital to your company’s health:  

• Are your customers really satisfied?
• Are you providing the right services to the right customers at the right price? Or do they want something else?
• Are they puzzled by new features you’ve introduced, but too embarrassed to admit it?
• Are any of your clients ready to bolt to a competitor? Why?

Luckily, you don’t have to become an expert in surveying. It’s usually more efficient to partner with a company like CustomerSat that specializes in measuring satisfaction and uncovering answers, even to questions you may never have thought to ask.

Is your company asking? More importantly, are you listening?

Most companies aren’t. Few companies bother to ask existing customers if they’re happy, what they like and dislike, how things could be improved. Sure, they do it for customer support interactions, but far less often for the overall customer relationship. Even more disturbing, most companies never contact former customers, those who have defected, to find out what happened, why they left, and if there’s anything they can do to change their minds. This data has tremendous value, both in winning back lost customers and wooing new ones.

It’s easy to rationalize this omission, given the interrupt-driven nature of customer support. After all, the support queues are already jammed, and your downsized support staff is already stretched to the max. Who has time to reach out to customers on a proactive basis?

You must find the time. It’s worth it. Here’s why.  

Boosting Customer Loyalty

Ask any marketing specialist which is cheaper: Keeping a current customer, or acquiring a new one? It costs six to eight times more to win a new customer than retain an existing one. With that in mind, the value of customer satisfaction measurement becomes obvious.

According to a 2002 article, surveying contented customers can increase profitability over the course of a year. Compared to customers who have not been surveyed, these customers are:

• Three times more likely to open a new account
• 50% less likely to defect to a competitor
• More profitable

As CustomerSat’s slogan so aptly points out, you can indeed profit from customer feedback.

Improve Your Internal Processes

Listening to customers has another valuable benefit. Their feedback can help you discover ways to improve your internal business processes, and focus on what’s really important to your core constituencies. For example, you might discover that one particularly laborious process yields little value to the vast majority of your customers, so the process is edited or eliminated.

This streamlining can lead to higher satisfaction rates, greater loyalty, less turnover and higher revenues. A win-win for both parties.

Customer Surveys: Handle with Care

Like any customer interaction, customer surveys are fraught with potential risks. That’s another argument for entrusting them to a pro. For one thing, even when customers are asked their opinion, they often don’t feel like we’re listening. Worse, the customer sometimes feels that things are stacked against her. 

Compare it to the last time you bought a car. Let’s suppose the salesperson treated you well, and you were relatively satisfied. After signing the paperwork, he takes you aside and puts a “How did I do?” questionnaire under your nose. He leans close and pleads that anything less than an a 5 (on a scale of 1 to 5) will cause his dealership to get in trouble with the automobile manufacturer.

This approach demeans the process. When their opinion is asked, customers should feel that they’re not being pressured to give bogus responses, and that they are being listened to—and that you are acting on their issues and ideas.

Action Management

The better you know your customers feelings, the more effective your subsequent actions will be. Knowing what you're doing, why the customer bought, how you impact their business—these are critical. Taking action in a timely manner is crucial. Respond promptly to dissatisfied customers, make things right, and you’ll discover that your customers will also inform you about issues in areas outside your traditional scope.

One powerful strategy is to respond in near-real time when a customer says they were less than satisfied with an issue. When I was Vice President of Infrastructure & Support at Akamai, we implemented a callback system that replied to customers with a less than "satisfied" rating to a question within 15 minutes. In effect, any rating of less than "very satisfied" was treated as a high priority issue, and we responded in that timeframe.

To make our response even more effective, the courtesy callback was handled by a manager or other senior person. This person was not only specially trained in dealing with customer issues, with a high sensitivity to customer satisfaction, but they had both the knowledge and the clout to resolve issues immediately.

You can imagine the customer's response. Our immediate callback, plus this kind of VIP treatment, both shocked and delighted the customer. We made it clear they were important to us, and we did whatever it took to resolve the issue in their favor. Very often the customer cited this lightning-quick response as a reason for staying loyal—and even upgrading his level of service.

This is what I mean what I talk about delivering the ultimate in customer support. Can your company afford to do any less?

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Phil Verghis is president of The Verghis Group and author of The Ultimate Customer Support Executive: Unleash the Power of Your Customer. A preeminent expert on global service delivery, he is a highly sought-after speaker around the world. Prior to founding the Verghis Group, Phil was the Vice President of Infrastructure Support at Akamai Technologies. He was chairperson of the Strategic Advisory Board of the HDI, the largest membership based technical support organization in the world.

Among his many industry accolades, Phil is the only two-time winner of the Service 25 award, given to individuals who have made a significant impact in the field of service and support. He can be reached at phil@verghisgroup.com.