Achieving customer care excellence

President, Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing and Chief Manager Hatton National Bank, Greater Colombo R.M.P. Dayawansa was the chief guest at the first certificate awards ceremony of the Kent Ridge, Certificate in Customer Service Program at Nipunatha Piyasa in Colombo. His keynote speech was 'Achieving Customer Care Excellence'.

Organisations today are facing severe competition which is now termed as "hyper-competition". Customers and the consumers are becoming more and more knowledgeable, demanding and they want things in their-way.

Organisations need to understand the fact that in the face of competition they have to make their value offering more attractive. They must find a way to differentiate and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage over their rivals.

The question is how to differentiate in a market where everyone is attempting to offer the best value to their customers. There are three key approaches available to a marketer among many others. Firstly product innovation and then convenient delivery channels and finally ensuring of a superior service mind-set within the employees.

Competitive edge

Take product innovation where certain strong brands like SONY, Nokia and Gillette have been able to stay ahead of the competition due to superiority of the product. These brands offer the organisation a competitive edge over the others. Superior products however can be copied by the competitors who have resources and competitive advantage through superior products as such, may not be sustainable.

Coca Cola's motto has been "to make available a bottle of Coca Cola within everybody's arms reach". Wherever they operate they ensure an extensive distribution so that consumers have very easy access to the product. DELL computers put the personal computer market upside down when they started delivering personal computers through DHL or FEDEX to the door step of the consumer within 24 hours of on-line ordering. The organisations such as NIKE, LEVIS, and AMAZON.COM etc. over the years have been able to make mass customization i.e. the delivery of products on-line where customers order the products and services through web-sites. Today not only DELL but all other computer manufacturers deliver computers to on-line customers. Therefore, achieving competitive edge through easy delivery will not sustain as competitors will be able to copy it quickly.

Best attention

Only differentiation that cannot be copied by the competition quickly is the superior service mind-set of employees. This is where the customer is treated as No. 1 priority across the organisation and entire work-force is geared to provide the consumers the best attention they deserve. Research has shown around 70% of customer defection (loosing customers) is due to poor attention paid by the employees. Customer defection arises when promises are not kept or delivered. Over promising the customers and not keeping those promises really makes a customer disgusted. When the gap between what is expected and what is delivered (perceived) is wider, service quality standard falls.

Clear understanding

The top management should be able to clearly understand the needs of customers and should be able to provide solutions through superior service to meet clients' expectations. Today satisfying customer needs might not be enough and organisations should strive to achieve "customer delight" which means exceeding the customer expectations.

It is no doubt that superior service mind set of employees is something that cannot be copied easily although products and delivery systems can be copied and may not sustain as a point of differentiation.

Lets see how to differentiate an organisation from the rest through a superior service mindset. Among other things there are three "R"s that can be paid attention to.

First R being the "Responsiveness" to customers and customer needs. Every team member in the organisation should be willing to help and provide assistance to customers during the customer interactions. Willing employees will run an extra mile to facilitate customer needs and transactions.

Jan Carlzon in his popular book titled "The Moments of Truth" says that every meeting with a customer and a staff member should be made a satisfying and memorable encounter. He says "every customer encounter is a moment of truth for the customer". He took over as Chairman in the 1980's an ailing airline i.e. Scandinavian airline system (SAS) and found that 10 million passengers during a year meet up with at least five staff members for 15 seconds in average.

Superior service

He said there are 50 million customer encounters during a year which is 50 Million moments of truth (MOT). He emphasized that every team member should be responsible and accountable to make all these MOTs satisfying and memorable to the passengers. He ensured that every single staff member undergoes various seminars and workshops on customer care through which SAS built a superior service mindset internally. Within few years Jan Carlzon was able to transform the loss making Airline into one of the most profitable in the world.

Second "R" is the Reliability. Organisation should deliver their promises to win the confidence of customers. Over promising and under delivery makes serious doubt in the customers as regard to dependability. Organisations must maintain "clear kept promises" throughout in order to improve reliability and dependability of service in the minds of customers. Competency, courtesy and Credibility should be displayed to give a good assurance about service quality. Ability to handle a particular transaction in a competent and courteous manner therefore enhances the elements of reliability.

Affects loyalty

Third "R" is the "Recovery" which is how an organisation does recover from a service complaint made by a client. Organisations must really appreciate complaining customers because today 90% of unhappy customers do not complain but they just switch over to other competitors. Owing to mis- handling of a transaction over a service encounter can affect customer loyalty in a greater scale.

However, if the particular complain is handled professionally the loyalty levels can be raised to a level more than what it was.

Most of the time organisations take a defensive stance due to not being able to understand the emotions of the customers. This is a delicate situation which requires professional approach knowing what to do and how to respond.

On a certain occasion a credit card holder noticed that few transactions have been duplicated in the monthly statement. He immediately called the Card Centre of the particular bank who confirmed that wrong entries had been reversed and the customer had now been refunded with the sum involved and that will appear in the next month statement as a credit. At this point customer loyalty went down and he was feeling uneasy, as the statements are not error-free.

Appreciation

However, within few hours the branch manager of the bank where he maintains accounts telephoned him and apologised again for the lapse on the bank's part and also emphasised that how valuable that client to the bank is and appreciated him for banking with them. At this point the card holder realised that the bank is serious and concern about the mistake on their part. Customer loyalty went little up again.

To be continued