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When Your Customers Return By Ed Romson, CEO, Rocair Corporation I have been lucky enough in the past few months to travel to many of the business centers of the world. I am writing this to you from Singapore, and as you know I have recently been in India (see Reflexiones desde la India). I have also had the chance to do some work in Europe recently. During all of these travels, I have been hearing very good news. The world economy is getting better. I heard this from an economist who was sitting next to me on the airplane, I have observed it in the US and in Europe, and I now see it happening as I travel and work in East Asia. As an outside observer, I am also seeing very good signs in Argentina. With an old currency and a new President, it appears that conditions are improving. My contacts in Buenos Aires inform me that business is picking up. As one who has been watching the economic indicators in Mercosur over the past few years, I have noticed that those indicators are improving as well. This may not be apparent to you from the middle of the situation, but be patient my friend, positive things are happening. All of this means that you will be seeing more new customers and that you will see the return of old customers, too. This is the perfect time to start to put in place some of the customer care policies that I have been writing about over the past few months. Some people feel that the best time to implement new customer programs, or install new systems, is when business is at its peak. My thought is counter to that. By thinking that you will wait until profits are up and customers are coming in, you may never get to a point where it is possible to implement these programs. It is best to solidify your relationship with your new customers early. Remember, it is easier and cheaper to keep existing customers than to find new ones. If you improve the service you give to customers now, start paying attention to what they are saying, and start improving your quality of service immediately, these actions will pay off over time. When you are manufacturing a product, you need raw material to start the making the product. Similarly, excellent customer care and the processes we have been talking about are the raw material of expanding sales and attracting new customers. You make the investment in raw material in order to produce product, you should look at investing in new customer programs or systems the same way. Yes, installing a new customer tracking system is expensive. Yes, implementing a new system of metrics to understand how your staff is performing costs time and money. Yes, even training your staff to handle customers more creatively and to provide quality service takes time. But no, you should not wait to make that investment. In fact, doing this while business is slow gives you the chance to make the right decisions and take the time that is required to make these changes correctly. In the article "Haciendo crecer su Estrategia de Servicio al Cliente", I wrote about how to design an overall Service strategy, but let us look at how you might design and implement a project to improve one aspect of your customer service. First, of course, you must decide what needs to be done. Take a step back from the day to day activities of your business and ask yourself, where would changes make the most impact on how you deliver your product or service to your customers? Is it on the front line, where your employees meet customers and make that very important first impression? Is it in the area of understanding what your customers want from you and from your products? Is it in the basic quality of your products or services? What you are looking for is a change that will cost the least to implement but make the most impact on how you treat your customers. Once you have decided on the change to put in place, take the time to understand how you will measure the success of this project. Will you be able to tell you are successful by the reduction in the number of complaints you receive? If you measure the increase in sales, can you assume that the project has had a direct effect on that increase? It is best if you are able to understand both the costs and the benefits of the change in monetary terms, and therefore calculate a return on investment. Even without a direct measurement you should be able to see if your changes are making a difference and make adjustments to optimize the results. As you know, change is stressful. In difficult times, even positive change can have a dramatic negative effect on your employees. One way to minimize that effect is to communicate about the change with those who will be affected. Explaining what is going to happen, why it needs to happen, and enlisting their help, will ensure the implementation goes smoothly. If the project will affect your customers, finding the most effective way to communicate the change with them will have a double effect. It will help to smooth the transition to the new process and it will show your customers that you are concerned about their reaction, thus increasing their overall satisfaction. Once the change has taken place, check, using your measurements, that what you expected to happen actually happen. Too often, managers make changes and then fail to check to see what kind of effect those changes have had. You can adjust the process if unexpected things happen, and you can also see the positive results of the change. Communication with employees and customers should continue at this stage as well. Positive results reinforce the change and letting both groups know that you are aware of problems and will help smooth out issues that might arise. This is all basic project management thinking, but at times managers do not have the luxury to think in these logical steps. Implementing new customer focused changes now, to show your current customers that you value their business, and to attract new customers, will have a long range positive affect on your overall revenue.© Copyright Rocair Corporation. All rights reserved. |
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