Читать книгу Your Customer Rules! - Bill Price - Страница 6

Customer service today gets slammed by customers right and left. While technology offers the promise of highly customized, seamless customer experiences at limitless scale, few companies have fulfilled on that promise. Consumers seem to share the impression that service and sales interactions are getting worse, not better. In many industries, customers are complaining more, with Internet-enabled breadth and speed. To pull a few recent headlines:

“Complaint-to-Compliment Ratio of MBTA Tweets Remains High.”1

“Npower Ranks Top for Moans: Customer Complaints Against Energy Giant Soar 25 %.”2

“70 % of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter.”3

In the utilities industry in Australia, for example, the volume of complaints to the central complaints body (the Ombudsman) has risen dramatically despite no significant change in customer numbers – doubling in five years, four times the rate of population growth. Similar complaint bodies in other countries such as the Office of Communications in the United Kingdom show complaint rates rising over the same period.

Despite billions spent to win customers' affection, we are only just exceeding the levels of customer satisfaction reported in the early 1990s. In addition, customer switching between providers is on the rise, often prompted by a poor customer service experience.4 The companies that are lagging in customer experience perform poorly compared to customer experience leaders across a variety financial data points. For example, a Watermark Consulting study compared the six-year stock performance of customer experience leaders and laggards against the S&P 500, and found that leaders exceeded the S&P by 28 percentage points while laggards registered a 33 percent decline in stock value.5

As we all wait endlessly on hold with customer call centers across the world, only to keep repeating information to agents that we've given elsewhere in the purchase process, who can resist yearning for the good old days when mom-and-pop stores offered personalized and knowledgeable service? Perhaps selection and store hours were more limited, but at least business owners knew their customers as well as they did their products and were excited by both. Perhaps you can still remember going into the corner grocery store with Mom, watching with delight as the owner pulled out something special that he had ordered for her, along with a treat for you. Reconciling past and present creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that recalls a scene from the iconic '80s film Back to the Future, in which Michael J. Fox, transported via a plutonium-powered DeLorean back to 1955, stops dead in his skateboard tracks as he watches customers being waited on at the old full-service gas station.