Friday, September 5, 2014

Improving experiences for the most demanding customers


The summer has been hectic with customer  deployments, balancing work and personal life, kids and businesses. With all things happening here and there I neglected writing, even with all those extra time on long flights. Now finally on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Manila and have time to write about demanding customers. Customers who demand for the best, they are everywhere, like you and me. There have been a few surprises in exceeding customer expectations and there are bad misses. Let’s take SAS as an example, on a  flight to Stockholm the stewardess started singing, entertaining the entire flight, it was short flight but then again, they exceeded expectations. On the flight back SAS lost my luggage, then promised to send it to my flat after it arrives on the next flight. The bag arrived at the airport but they were not able to deliver since they can’t find my flat and only got it 8 hours later. Now I wonder if SAS delivery spend 8 hours finding my flat in a small city, how lost can they be in running an airline business and much more lost in delivering good customer experience.

The most demanding customers today can be found having mobile phones, of which they demand excellent services in every way. From providing voice services where the expectations is zero dropped  calls, very fast data speed and excellent customer service. Every mobile operator in the world strives to provide the best quality of service to their customers, however not all of them succeeds. In my previous post I talked about several apps on the market today that allows a mobile phone user to test their services and share it on the net. The question in doing that is what benefit is it to the actual user? Does it give him/her a better service? Or do he/she use it to justify moving to another service provider. It is true that service quality is a big driver in churn, however is much more than a slow data in a particular area, its all about the overall experience from services provided to interaction with a service personnel.

Now imagine, instead  of calling your service provider to complain about bad services or bad experience, would you rather simply tap your phone and it takes care of the rest? Including getting updates about the bad service you experienced all the way to getting if fixed. In this way we can demand of better service, we can demand of faster response and faster resolution, we can demand of being in the know, we can demand of the correct fixes instead of  customer service agent simply selecting the top 10 answer on their list of issues.

If a service provider is able to meet our demands, what's next?





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