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| Customers dump Companies due to bad experiences. Source: Rightnow Customer Experience Report |
Customer experience and customer experience
management is all about technology and its right use. This is what many of the
articles that one could read on various platforms can make one think.
Just that it isn’t.
I guess I contributed my share to this
misconception, too. My excuse is that I am a techie by trade and at heart.
Sure, technology is a part of delivering a
good customer experience but there is much more to it. Technology enables the
digital presence of a business and helps its employees delivering better
experiences – if available and used.
But delivering a good customer experience
first and foremost involves people, then policy and process. Technology is the
last priority contributing, it is an enabler, a means to an end – not the end
itself.
On the other hand there are reports over
reports saying that customers stop doing business with a company after bad
experiences, sometimes even after a single bad experience, e.g. shocking 89 per
cent according the 2011 Rightnow Customer Experience Report, or 62 per cent
according to the 2015
Parature Global Customer Service Report. The 2016 Institute of Customer
Service UK Customer Satisfaction Index finds that most UK customers want a
balance of price and service, given there is a minimum service level. And the
list goes on and on.
While all these statistics likely have some
grain of truth there are also numerous examples of poor customer experience not
having a detrimental impact on a company. This is probably in part due to who
asked the question, how the question was asked; this often relates to who paid
for the survey.
Astonishingly, there are plenty of incidents
where companies get away with poor customer service or a poor attitude to
customer experiences. This stretches across industries and it indicates that
customers do not routinely dump a company because of a single poor experience.
Let me give you some examples out of the
automobile, telco, banking, and airline industries – with different outcomes.
A Carmaker’s Royal Screw-up
VW. By now everyone has heard of their
‘Dieselgate’, so there is no need to go into the ‘what happened’ part of the
story. There is no doubt that in case of a car a lot of the experience lies in
driving it and the car’s quality, but there is also some in the purchasing
process. And there is a brand promise. Many customers bought their diesel VW
because of the promise of low emissions. They didn’t what they bargained for.
Now, while in the US customers get a sizable refund VW still deems it right to
reject all claims of wrongdoing in Europe. Legally, they may even be right, but
this is beside the point. The point is that VW apparently prefers a policy of
covering up and waiting out to the, admittedly more difficult and probably
expensive, one of offensively and credibly driving clean engines.
Still, VW has become the biggest
car manufacturer in 2016 with a year-over-year growth of almost 4 percent.
Another Banking Tale
My wife and I share a credit card account
that is linked to our airline loyalty membership. This comes pretty handy. Now
the airline points that are calculated from the card usage go against one
account – mine, because I used to fly more. This changed, so we ventured to
linking the cards to my wife’s account.
Impossible.
The only way out would be going for new
cards, with new card numbers and all the associated hassles of changing card
numbers that we stored as method of payment at some vendors.
The reason? The bank’s company policy.
Asked what the purpose of the policy is there was no reply …
We didn’t change cards.
Telcos are always good for a Custserv Story
On Sunday, January 29, 2017, Spark New
Zealand suffered a major mobile and broadband outage. Despite being reported as
fixed by the company it essentially lasted the rest of the day, services
being stable again only in the late afternoon. Of course people asked for some
compensation for services that weren’t delivered – on Facebook and Twitter, and
likely also on the phone. I myself asked on Twitter with no reply on Monday (and
till now, for what it is worth).
https://twitter.com/twieberneit/status/825808889236987904
On Facebook people got told that this is a
technology issue, and that Spark apologizes for inconveniences, but that
technology is not fully reliable and hence there is no need for any
compensation. Just to be sure: There are also business customers, who were
affected.
I am still with Spark as a provider. And I
doubt that they received many cancellations.
The Joy of Flying
No list on poor experiences can do without
an airline tale. This one is about Australian budget carrier JetStar. JetStar
has a policy of closing the check-in counters half an hour before departure.
Closing means exactly that – even if personnel happens to be still at the
counter – there is no more check in, even for passengers without checked
luggage. They also have a way of sending the boarding pass via text message.
Just that this doesn’t always work – and if it doesn’t work there is no way of resending
it. Imagine an early morning flight where every minute of sleep counts. On this
one I had a fiery discussion with their call center with the result: Be early …
Of course the plane was late, too. After
all they have a reputation for being late.
I didn’t fly JetStar since.
The Moral of the Story
As these examples indicate, customers by no
means are abandoning brands in flocks because of poor experiences, let alone a
single one. Add the regularly followed strategy to offer new customers better
prices than existing ones and to not reduce their fees correspondingly.
Many products and services are far too
sticky for just moving on – it is too much hassle.
So, as a bottom line, companies will
continue to follow strategies that are good for them and not for their
customers, unless customers follow through with the threat that is implied in
reports like the ones I mentioned above.
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