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The Hidden Gold in your Customer Data By Ed Romson, CEO, Rocair Corporation Last month, I wrote about collecting customer data. You need to understand who your customers are and what they are saying to you. I believe the second part of that effort is most important. Truly hearing and understanding what your customers are telling you will help you direct the company towards better products or services and greater profits. The best way to do this is by using reports about what those customers are saying. This reporting does not have to be expensive. It does not matter what size your company is, once you have collected the data about customer contacts, reporting on that data should be easy. This can be done on a small scale by collecting the notes about your customer contacts and evaluating them. If you are using database program like FileMaker Pro or Microsoft Access to gather customer data, use the built-in reporting features. An additional software program, like Crystal Decision's Crystal Reports, can be used to extend those features. On a large scale, all Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have reporting capabilities. The problem is that some companies do not take that extra step of evaluating the data they collect. There are two types of customer reports that you can use. The first type are reports that I consider most important to your business. Call them the "voice of the customer". These reports tell you how your products or services are being used and perceived by your customers. They give you valuable information about how to improve your products or processes to more closely match what your customers want. They can also save you a lot of money. I will give you an example. When I worked for a major computer manufacturer, I managed the telephone call center that supported a new line of laptop computers. These were the first real laptops to be sold. Because these were new products, and because they were critical to the success of our company, we set up a reporting system that we called "Hot and Emerging Issues". We told the support agents to note down anything that the customer said that could be an issue with the product. The employees talking to the customers are the best source to identify a problem that they were hearing about again and again; and to flag that issue as "emerging". We put together a report about these issues every day for the first three months of the product's life. We evaluated the report with a team of managers and support agents every day. We discussed actions that should be taken to stop or correct issues before they became big problems. One afternoon we were discussing a quality problem that an agent brought up. We had received three calls about the issue that day. We talked to the manufacturing plant that evening and the problem was found and corrected by the time the manufacturing line was started the next morning. If we had waited until we started to get product returns to investigate the problem, thousands of units would have been in the hands of customers. The ability to quickly identify new issues and to take actions to correct them is critical to your success. This applies if you are making a product or delivering a service. If your way of delivering a service is producing poor results, it is very important that the process be changed before it becomes a habit or "the way we do things here". Your customers are the best source of information to tell you how your processes are working. Another type of report that can lead to improved products or services is called the "top ten" report. This report is based on the quality principle of the "Pareto" chart. Designed by Vilfredo Pareto, a French economist, in the early twentieth century; the chart is based on the principle that eighty percent of your problems are based on twenty percent of causes. If you identify the top problems, you will be able to make the most cost effective changes to improve your business. This type of graph is created by counting the number of contacts received about an issue and ranking the issues from high to low. The "top ten" issues are identified and are investigated to see how they can be corrected. Once the root cause is identified and corrected, that issue should drop off the list. Other problems move up onto the top ten report. This process of continuous improvement allows you to move forward, producing better products or delivering higher quality services, and thus increasing revenue. The key for success with these "Voice of the Customer" reports is to set up a process to take action on the information the reports provide. Reports that sit on your desk and do not generate action are not even worth the paper they are printed on. Effective companies assign individuals or teams to take responsibility to resolve the issues that are uncovered by the reports. The second type of report is the kind that most mangers think about, reports based on operations data. How many times are customers calling? How long does it take to answer their questions? How efficient are the support agents in answering the calls or emails? How satisfied are your customers? These questions are important to the success. Your business may be very good at measuring productivity. If that is true then the main question becomes "how good is good enough"? This will be the topic for my next column when I discuss benchmarking your organization against your competitors. © Copyright Rocair Corporation. All rights reserved. |
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