Empirical Rationalism and Other Oxymora
Use the Data/Information You Have!
A funny thing happened to me last week…. my health insurance company called me on my cell phone to conduct a customer satisfaction survey with my two month old daughter. Now, first of all, they KNOW that my daughter is only 9 weeks old! After several calls to get the faulty billing and account information correct, they did in fact pay for her birth. Second, they KNOW that they were calling on a cell phone. I think it is pretty odd that they assumed that I would be interested in paying for the privilege of helping them improve their customer satisfaction. However, the fact that I was paying for the call aside, I did the survey. Another aside, after about 10 minutes, they got to the Ultimate Question (you know, the only question the you need to ask and measure?). Somewhere along the line, I think they missed the whole point of the customer satisfaction exercise…
Anyway, the whole experience got me thinking about using the information that you have within the business. There is an old adage the goes something along the lines that you can’t have wisdom without knowledge, knowledge without information and information without data. It seems to me that, in the quest to gain wisdom, more and more businesses are over-looking the data and information that already exists within the business. Knowledge of the customer — that is, synthesized and critically analyzed information derived from organizational data– is simply non-existent in many businesses. My experience with the company in question has been horrific. In fact, in the past year, there has been a problem with EVERY single on one of the claims that I filed. However, instead of inferring that they have a problem from the data that they have already have in their CRM system, they choose to collect more data! It’s easier to collect data than to act on it, particularly quantitative data. This tendency is endemic in a lot of businesses. As the problems get worse, management just drills deeper and deeper into data that ultimately has no meaning. Meanwhile, customers defect and profitability suffers.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Andrew on January 29, 2007 at 5:53 pm, and is filed under Customer Management, Management, Marketing, References & Book Reviews. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
No trackbacks yet.
A VC on VoC: Why CEOs Should Talk to Angry Customers
about 1 month ago - 1 comment
Don Rainey (VC in DC) has a great post on Business Insider on why CEO’s should always talk to angry customers. At least 75% of the time simply by taking angry calls I would learn about employees who were inconsiderate to customers or vendors. I couldn’t be everywhere. I couldn’t see everything. But dealing with
Mr. Customer… You’re Fired!
about 3 years ago - 1 comment
After my post on my upcoming research, an article was sent to me on IBM “firing its customers”. The big news in the article is a rumored restructuring at IBM, but buried toward the end of the article was this tidbit: … Global Services will be eliminating not just employees but customers, too — customers
You Can’t Measure What You Don’t Manage (or Something)
about 3 years ago - 2 comments
My wife and I bought a new car a couple of weeks ago and a few days later the inevitable customer satisfaction survey came in the mail. In all, I’d say it was a pretty good experience and the sales and service teams probably would have earned a “4″ or “5″ out of “5″ on
New CRM Site
about 3 years ago - No comments
I spent a few hours over the weekend revamping the main strategyst site. My objective is to build a comprehensive resource for sales, marketing and service/support professionals, as well as anyone interested in CRM. Anything missing? Any registered user can add weblinks. If you want to be able to add to the “clips and quips”
Your Loyalty Costs Too Much
about 3 years ago - No comments
To contain costs, Borders recently announced that it changing the rules of their customer loyalty program. Under the old plan, customers that spent $50 got a 10% discount on their entire purchase on a day of their choosing in the following month. Pretty straight-forward and a very good deal (particularly for frequent book shoppers) According
Don’t Just Complain, Ask For What You Want and Other Useful Tips
about 3 years ago - No comments
In light of the recent high-profile airline customer service meltdowns and promises to do better, the WSJ offers a few tips for frustrated travelers: Don’t ask them to “make it right”. Instead, specifically ask for what you want. Make the compensation fir the problem (and make sure the problem is real). According to the article,
Big Numbers are Really Scary (or You’ve Been Mugged)
about 3 years ago - No comments
OMG! March Madness is going to cost US businesses $3.8 billion in lost productivity; or is it $3.5 billion? Or $1.4 billion? Or $1.5 billion? Or $1.2 billion? Or is it only $889.6 million? I guess it doesn’t really matter, I better run out and buy some web monitoring/blocking software just to be safe! Early
Bad Apples Rot From the Head Down
about 3 years ago - No comments
Although we’ve discussed it here before, Pete over at Share Tactics has stumbled on one of the littler known aspects of customer satisfaction; that is, employee satisfaction. As the as the eyes, ears and (for better or worse) the voice of your organization, your employees are one of the single biggest factors contributing to the
More on Platforms and Open Product Acrhitectures
about 3 years ago - No comments
In 2006, the concept of platforms moved into the mainstream business conscience. The emergence of SalesForce.com’s AppExchange, Amazon’s e-commerce platform and Google’s APIs has stirred the imagination of industry pundits and entrepreneurs alike. Despite the recent hype, open product architectures are not a new concept. In 1993, the Harvard Business Review ran an article explaining
Keeping Pace With Agility
about 3 years ago - No comments
With more and more discussion about customer co-creation, product development 2.0 and the inclusion of collaborative technologies into the CRM stack (CRM 2.0), it is important to understand how the adoption of these methods impacts the established business processes and the overall culture of the organization. Customer information flows through an organization on a prescribed
about 3 years ago
Hi Andrew. I wonder how often overlooking existing information is caused by one department’s incapacity to see the information created and/or stored by the other departments, rooted in inflexible or just bad CRM software.
Here’s an example: When I have a technical issue with my cellphone, I call my carrier. A customer service rep. autenticates me then asks for my model number and service area (Why these two things are unknown to them each time I call escapes me). Soon the rep is telling me to reboot my phone and to try a few other things, none of which work. Then they transfer me to a technical services rep. who promptly begins their portion of the call by giving me a serious case of déjà vu by asking me to repeat nearly everything I just gave to the customer service rep.
Why don’t I “defect”? I have, and the other companies seem to operate this way too. Ugh.
about 3 years ago
There are probably a couple of things at work here silos and narrowly defined job functions — does the market research manager/customer sat manager have unfettered access to the underlying data? Secondly, analysis of the data usually takes a deep functional understanding of the data. This is not something that can be easily outsourced. I am not sure that the software is bad, but rather a result of poorly modeled business practices. Although, I did some reseach a while back, something like less than 20% of CRM customers had more than one CRM module installed. That is they were running just SFA, MA or CSS.
Re: Monopolies… I think this will only work for a time. Car sales are notorious for bad customer experiences. I heard on the radio yesterday an ad for a dealership that claimed “none of our salespeople work on commission”.