A recent BEye article illustrates all the required pieces, parts and needed to successfully acquire customer information and to ultimately enjoy lowered customer acquisition costs ,improved retention, and increased profitability as loyal customers increase their spending.
While I believe the author is correct in his thinking about the business intelligence processes (i.e. focusing on diminishing the broken connections from the many islands of information), I think many organizations may erroneously believe that having better, cleaner and more comprehensive customer data will magically elevate them into a customer retention leader.
What’s even more fundamental than having the most advanced customer information tools (including business intelligence) is making customer service a core tenet of the organization. Often times the big customer service strategy boils down to the little things:
For instance, how many times have you experienced:
- Eternal hold times when trying to get telephone help for nearly any product or service
- Entering your account number multiple times only to be asked for it again by the agent
- Never finding the answer to your not-so-frequently asked question
- Rude or less than enthusiastic treatment by the customer service representative
There are certainly technologies and techniques that can cost-effectively solve many of the so-called customer relationship problems, but the company first needs to make satisfying the customer a priority. In addition, companies need to decide to respect each customer’s time and then behave like they really do.
Consider Zappos who’s corporate mantra is “powered by service” who beyond just giving lip service to customer service, have made it their culture. Incidentally, they have been richly rewarded by an $800 million acquisition by Amazon who also vows to keep them operating autonomously.
Glimmers of hope
Not is all gloom in customer service. A recent wired magazine article talks about taking on an abundance philosophy and embracing “waste” by not being miserly about offering your resources (many, like disk storage that cost close to zero) as a way to further endear your company to your customers. Two examples that come to mind include:
- GMAIL offering gobs of storage so I don’t have to bother deleting and archiving messages (why can’t my bank do the same thing with my transactions so I don’t have to manually update quicken if I wait longer than 90 days?)
- Call centers actually taking your number and calling you back when an agent frees up so you can be productive in the mean time (and thus respecting your time while maximizing theirs).
In conclusion, I love solving customer visibility problems with the heads-up preparation and display of customer data, but it certainly is a bummer when those sophisticated capabilities are “wasted” on a Laissez-faire customer service philosophy. In such cases, it would be better to save the business intelligence budget and allocate more dollars for a better product, richer employee comp plans or what the heck, better office coffee.
If, your organization however, is committed to great customer service on all fronts and will take action on the measurement of those fronts, then by all means bring on the BI!
