ICAE Spring 2009 Roundtable – The Customer Care Revolution Wants YOU!

Scott Broetzmann is a revolutionary.  He wants you to join that revolution, one that will touch the lives of people across America.  He wants to drive change and shake up the old order.  And like all revolutionaries, he’s got some subversive ideas aimed at challenging conventional wisdom and sweeping aside the way things have been done.  He even predicts the weather. According to Broetzmann, if you want to survive the customer care storm headed your way, you’d better become a card-carrying member of his revolution right now.
 
Broetzmann, president and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC), led the ICAE’s Spring Roundtable, April 27, 2009, with the message: “Surviving the Perfect Customer Care Storm.”  His message – surviving the storm is going to require all of us to move to a new paradigm in customer complaint handling and problem solving.  In an economy that has morphed from periods of superheated competition and to one of the greatest periods of turbulence in three quarters of a century, a reinvigorated culture of customer centricity is more than just a good idea.  It’s even more than just a survival strategy.  A culture of customer service is a prescription for greater success and market leadership for organizations that truly understand and respond to the value of customer care.
 
Broetzmann led off his presentation with one of the worst customer relations gaffes that anyone in the audience of 70 insurance customer relations staffers and state regulators had ever heard. It involved a customer of a major cable TV and Internet services provider and one very persistent consumer.  The customer essentially embarked on a second career of demanding a resolution to a problem she was having with her DVR service.  After more than 40 calls, a technician finally resolved the problem and the company provided one month’s free service.  A happy ending?  Yes, at least until the customer’s next billing statement was addressed to someone by the name of “B**ch Dog.”
 
Granted, this gaffe represents a culture of customer care at its nadir.  It’s anecdotal and extreme.  However, it demonstrates a deteriorating customer care environment that in a 2007 study showed only 12 percent of consumers had a great deal of trust in the products and services they purchase every day.  In 2008, that number had increased to only 13 percent, not a particularly meteoric rise.

Back to the future?
 

Broetzmann commented that at least one throwback to the 1970s was better than it is today.

“The customer care culture is worse now than it was 30 years ago,” he said. “And keep in mind that back then there were no 800 numbers and no entities such as J.D. Powers & Associates to measure customer satisfaction and quality. Indeed, the last time we saw a revolution in the customer care culture was the late 1960s, the time of Ralph Nader and a much more robust Federal Trade Commission. Now, fast forward to today and consider that most people do not view the current customer care environment to be anything like the one that they grew up in. Expectations are about as low as they’ve ever been today.”
 
Broetzmann noted that even customers’ lower expectations often go wanting, particularly tragic when even a simple, non-monetary apology would mollify customers and give them a sense that someone is listening to what’s important to them. An apology is a form of non-monetary currency that organizations have complete control over, and which costs nothing. 

Noting that 80 percent of Gross Domestic Product is now accounted for by services, Broetzmann noted the implications of that astounding figure.

“This is an amazing statistic to get your arms around,” he said. “The services sector is a much harder category of economic activity to get your arms around.  It’s squishy and intangible.  However, the brand loyalty impacts of doing even a so-so job of listening to and mollifying customer complaints and issues are enormous.  Even doing a mediocre job in this environment can have significant impacts on your bottom line.  Imagine the impact that embracing the customer care revolution and cultivating a culture in which every employee is a customer experience scientist.  There is money to be made in effective complaint handling.”

Even mediocrity pays off

In several recent “rage” studies of consumer attitudes, the brand loyalty implications of good versus poor customer relations were measurable and significant.  Brand loyalty metrics  among customers who were satisfied how a consumer complaint was handled were four times more likely to respond favorably, i.e. recommend or speak well of a company or product, than customers who were simply “mollified” by an acknowledgement of a problem.  Further, satisfied customers were 15 times more likely to have a favorable impression than customers at the other end of the continuum who were dissatisfied with how a complaint or problem was handled.

Now, consider the fact that negative experienced can result in word-of-mouth reports to other consumers at a rate of 40 to one, i.e. one person having a bad experience may over time relate that experience to up to 40 individuals.  In the case of negative customer relations experiences, bad news indeed travels far and fast – and the availability of a plethora of Internet sites set up by grassroots customer complaint advocates to harvest bad reports means that your single negative customer experience can go “viral” tomorrow and encircle the globe in a day or two.

You can get there from here

So if business has been on a downward trajectory with regard to customer perceptions of trust and satisfaction, how do we turn things around – especially in an environment in which just staying in business can be a challenge?

“We have to create a service culture and operations that truly value the dignity of the consumer,” Broetzmann said.  “We need to challenge our fundamental beliefs about what customers want, and focus on a true customer care ethos rather than simple compliance.

“We need to realize that to more and more people, time is the new currency of customer relationships,” he added. “Consumers are finding it more and more difficult to make contact with living, breathing human beings when they call most organizations. They see the introduction of technology, i.e. voice message systems and endless menus, as barriers that say you don’t want to talk to them.”

Time and again, Broetzmann noted, getting in touch with someone who can help becomes a ‘Where’s Waldo’ experience for the average customer.  And it’s taking a toll on customer attitudes and perceptions.  He noted a recent survey that reported two-thirds of all consumers feel that the time spent on complaint activity was not worthwhile and rendered no positive payback for the investment in time.

“What all of us need to do is to cultivate organizations of customer care scientists,” Broetzmann said. “We need to take a more systematic, scientific approach to the various ways we try to learn what customers want and how we respond to those wants. We need to realize that money alone does not ensure customer satisfaction, and that psychological currency is just as important: apologizing to the consumer without necessarily admitting blame, aspiring to a standard of dignity and delivering what was promised and asked for.

“Listen to the voice of the customer,” he added, “but also commit your organizations to taking a more scientific approach to finding out what’s important to your customers. There are new tools coming on the market all the time to help you gather customer-attitude data, some of them free online. You should conduct baseline studies every 24 to 48 months supported by tracking surveys on an ongoing basis.

“And remember, it’s not enough just to collect data,” Broetzmann said. “You have to connect the dots and understand how what customers are telling you can help you improve your relationships with them. Accept the fact that you may indeed not fully understand what customers want from you, but that a more scientific approach can help you get where you want to be.

In the end, building a culture of customer care stewardship is about much more than compliance, business ethics or simple courtesy.  At a time when consumer trust is at near all-time lows and the technology revolution can enable customer complaints to go “viral” and global overnight, a culture of customer care stewardship can be a competitive advantage as powerful as any product or service on the market today.

Ready to join the revolution? 

Click here to view Broetzmann’s presentation.

Click here to view the results Scott shared regarding Telephone Customer Care Practices.

Contact info:

Scott Broetzmann
Customer Care Measurement & Consulting
703.823.9530
Email: scott@customercaremc.com
www.customercaremc.com