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Jonathan
Fusing Sales & Customer/Relationship Management
Thanks for stopping by -- we have moved our blog to www.attachmenttheoryblog.com please take a moment and visit.
Jonathan
Posted by Jonathan Saint-John at 12:23 PM 0 comments
If your customer service process includes inflicting your customers with the task of entering data over and over again, your playing Russian roulette -- with the gun pointed at you, and the customer clicking away when they become frustrated. At some point your customer is going to hang up, walk away or worse bad mouth your organization. Nonetheless, the frustration you have inflicted on your customers’ tarnishes their positive buying emotional memory. This memory is quickly and surely replaced with the latest frustrating contact, manifesting itself into a desire to seek relief or at best, a better solution, and there you have it --- the reasons to leave are piling up.
However, for the customer centric organization, there is a simple answer, engage technology to assist and manage your customer service process. Process and content-focused technologies, such as BPM (Business Process Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) or WCM (Web Content Management) provide a means to protect the customer relationship process, streamline your interactions, and allow for enterprise wide collaboration and to identify, fix and redirect broken processes in a flash.
(click, click, click, boom!)
Posted by Jonathan Saint-John at 2:41 PM 0 comments
Labels: Account Management, BPM, Custom Service, customer service, ECM, Open Source, relationship management, sales
In my opinion 2010, will be the year of the come back, I think companies will start to look at their current client base and try to secure those relationships. There is automatic revenue potential if the relationship is intact.
Both selling organizations and clients recognize that it is more cost effective to expand relationships, than it is to acquire new ones. The complexities lay in understanding the strength and challenges faced by both organizations and how to exploit them for combined relationship advancement.
However, over the last year most selling organizations have had their eyes on new client acquisition, which, is indeed a necessity, but has overlooked current customers, and thus the overlooked customer has been acquired by another organization.
So there lays the rub – new or existing business, I say both. Get new business first from your existing clients then from new client acquisitions, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of revenue. Nevertheless, the selling organization must, bear in mind that the current client relationship is indeed the golden goose, and squeezing it will only kill it; so tread easy to reap the rewards of loyal, expanding, revenue generating clients.
Posted by Jonathan Saint-John at 12:13 PM 0 comments
Yesterday, I had the experience of bearing witness to two extremes in customer service, and ironically it was with AT&T, which just got voted the worst in customer service.
It all started when AT&T told me I could change a rate plan. So, I called the customer service center and told the representative what I wanted to achieve. She was very nice and said “No problem”; I could hear her typing away, as I thought to myself Wow, she is actually documenting my call.
I was told all was done, so I went on my way to a client meeting. All of a sudden, I noticed I had not received any e-mails since 10:00 am, which was 4 hours ago. During my commute I called AT&T back to explain what I believed had happened, which was that the customer service representative must have made a MISTAKE yes, an error. That is, she had switched off my plan versus downgrading the pricing. Long story short as this still makes me twitch; I spent a total of 70 minutes on the phone trying to get my problem resolved with no such luck.
Later, I spent another hour on the phone with two other customer service representatives trying to fix my dead Blackberry. My experience with these two customer service reps was like rubbing bleach into an open wound. During these calls it was no longer a MISTAKE—it was my phone’s fault—it must have broken down and thus I needed to call technical support. Fat chance I was dialing another AT&T call center to go through triage again for the fourth time—seems that the first customer service representative must have been IM-ing instead of documenting my call. Lucky for AT&T and my blood pressure, I hit one of the white areas on their blue map and lost the call.
James, if you’re reading this, I want to say thank you! Thank you for doing what most organizations don’t or can’t do in the best of times, that is having the ability to pull off a graceful recovery, and save the relationship. I have been an AT&T customer for at least 8 or 9 years, and you and your recovery methods will keep me coming back.
Today, more than ever we must protect our current customer resources. Sure, we will drop the ball now and then and yes customers will be angry, but they will be the happiest when we can recover from our mistakes with grace, and remind them that they are the reason we are in business.
In downturns, customer sometimes feel stuck with a vendor and will tolerate much more than in an up economy—but do not be fooled, they will leave you as soon as economic storm clouds have drifted away.
Companies today have lost sight of their current customers, and this is directly related to the people they hire. Organizations are hiring cheaply, not taking in to consideration the customer impact when hiring employees. Companies use one section of the company for hiring which must meet the needs of another section, and in some cases the two different parts don’t ever meet. Further, a majority of companies today use software to screen would be applicants, however the relationship between your organization and your customers is human and therefore, should be selected by humans. Your associates are not calculating rates of return, or processing batches of transactions, whereby their hard skills need to be validated through experience screening. I don’t know of any software on the market today that can better determine the soft skills of an applicant better than a human.
The answer in my opinion is be innovative and think holistically when hiring, use social media to paint a picture of the applicant, have actual sales/service departments screen via social media as well as resumes, try to find an applicant that matches your sales/service guru, better yet have your guru screen and chat with the applicant, they know what works. It’s a cut-cut world out there, but the companies that take the risks now will reap the rewards later.
Posted by Jonathan Saint-John at 4:09 AM 1 comments
Labels: ATT, customer service, relationship management, sales
Sifting through all of the tweets and blog entries yesterday from #ODSC -- found the information compelling and fresh! The ideas were creative and innovative -- the new expanded life of ECM is about to take hold.
Posted by Jonathan Saint-John at 6:06 AM 0 comments
Labels: ECM, ODSC, Open Source
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