By Tim Shier on 2008/09/02
Client service is a discipline as old as sales itself and while the underlying principles have remained almost unchanged, the way individuals engage with companies has changed substantially. With the development of the Internet the opportunity for clients to both find you and leave you in favour of your competitors is substantial. It's no longer the case that companies operate in a captivated and non-competitive market. The barriers preventing consumers from switching between companies are so low that a single unresolved customer slip up is often enough to lose a client for good.
As all marketing managers know, the cost of acquiring a new client is considerable and in the world of increasing competition it is becoming consistently more expensive.
The only solution is "relationship marketing" - also known as client retention marketing or client service. This functions on the principle that if you can make your clients happy and provide them with legitimate value then they will become word-of-mouth (WOM) agents for your brand. This provides the mechanisms for new sales to be made without an upfront investment by the company.
People Like Me
The Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that upwards of 50% of people trusted people like themselves more than any other form of information or referrals. As such, it shows that relationship marketing is fast becoming the only real way to contact and convert new clients. Advertising is out. Word-of-mouth is in. And who better to perpetuate this word-of-mouth than your happy clients?
Creating Happy Clients
The process of creating happy clients is another story all together and usually requires 5 activities to be completed by the company:
- Provide a service that the client is looking for.
- Provide quality which is consistent with the price.
- Deliver services within the client's expectations.
- Deliver the amount of human interaction that the client desires.
- Ensure relationship is built on trust and honesty.
The first point is a complete function of marketing. It is the responsibility of the marketing team to explain the service (or product) so that it is both realistically represented and portrayed as the best solution for its particular target market's needs. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the marketing team to subtly convey the brands marketing message to all clients. This then empowers them to share the correct message with others at no additional cost.
Quality and price are proportional - as quality goes up the expectation is that the price will follow suit. As such, an increasing price automatically results in higher expectations of quality. It's always a difficult tightrope to walk but a little market research will usually provide the answers here.
Delivery in the same time frame as promised is of utmost importance. Clients are paying for something to be done by a certain date. Failure to meet these deadlines will result in a very unhappy client (ask anybody with a Telkom telephone line). It is important that timelines are carefully constructed and that expectations are managed - particularly if deadlines slip by due to unforeseen factors.
Delivering the amount of human interaction that the client desires and ensuring that the relationship is built on trust and honesty are both directly linked to client service related elements of this strategy and need to be managed carefully should WOM be effective:
The amount of human interaction which a client wants may vary between a yearly birthday wish all the way through to an hourly update - it really depends on the level of familiarity between both parties. Take Google for example. It would be very disconcerting if Google phoned you every time you went to make a search just to check that you were enjoying their service. That said, a brand such as a hotel chain would be foolish not to contact a high percentage of clients to gather feedback. It is all about creating brand touch points and through them providing a channel by which clients can communicate with the brand.
In the past companies and clients would typically have one, maybe two, touch points. The primary touch points were one-to-one meetings and maybe personalised posted letters. In the past these two touch points amounted to the total interaction a client ever had with a brand.
With the growth of the Internet, client/company touch points have increased dramatically. On a daily basis we find ourselves communicating with clients via Facebook, Instant Messenger, phone, email, their blog, our blog, Twitter - the list goes on. As a consequence it becoming increasingly difficult to separate personal and relationships and while this may be great in building long term relationships it can result in too much contact with the client.
The Challenges of Online Client Service
The Internet has caused a number of problems with the typical model of client service. In the past it was the responsibility of senior staff members to periodically contact all clients and build relationships with them. In today's highly connected environment the volume of brand comments has increased substantially and the failure to respond to an attempt to communicate has the potential to go terribly wrong - just ask Dell.
In the past a disgruntled client would tell maybe 20 individuals about the bad service they have received and thankfully conversations happened in silos between the company, the client and some of the client's close friends. But now all commentary is in the open and it's a matter of hundreds if not thousands of people seeing the negative comments and changing their opinion of your brand - as was discussed by Giacomo Rizzolatti through Mirror Neurons.
It's Not All Bad
These public opinions of your brand are of tremendous value to client service and should never be thought of as negative (despite what the brand manager has to say).
If your clients are investing time in producing commentary about your service you can be sure they are looking for you to improve on it. As such, you have a very rich opportunity to engage with them and either resolve their complaints or build them into brand evangelists - all the while improving on your customer service.
Better still, by resolving the complaint and then declaring it publicly, you are effectively saving yourself time. Individuals who have had the same problem will invariably find the same blog post and comments and with that they will find the resolution. As such, commentary on a blog or forum in response to a complaint (provided it's quick sincere and truthful) will amount to the resolution of a high number of other complaints along the same topic.
Online Reputation Management tools are fast becoming a necessity in today's highly connected environment and given a bit of time they will become central to any client service or relationship marketing exercise. Put quite plainly: if a client wants to engage with you, be sure you have the mechanisms to know about it and be able to facilitate a rapid resolution.
Tools such as BrandsEye.com provide an excellent means of finding and collating consumer commentary about your brand. It's then a matter of designating one or two members of the team to engage with these mentions and look to resolve them.
The next 10 years are going to be fascinating and it has been theorised that word-of-mouth marketing is soon going to be the only way to contact your target market. The question then is, just how do we get ahead of the wave to ensure long-term success?
