I have always been impressed by the clarity of thinking from Glenn Neland, former head of the supply chain and customer experience at Dell when I was at the company. Glenn showed how we could take these powerful new online tools and use them to improve on what Dell had always done—engage directly with its customers, partners and employees. He put together a team and charged them with overhauling the ways Dell would communicate in a new environment.
I asked him to share a few insights he gleaned along the way.
Here we are direct from Glenn:
The top attributes for a company: “Receptivity, responsiveness and consistency are the three attributes most important to the delivery of good customer support.”
Equality: “You need to ensure that every customer gets the same level of service—a critical element to satisfying the customer.”
Listen to the details but don’t lose sight of the big picture: “We may be receiving thousands of calls or inquiries every day, and although we are responding to each of them individually we may not have the ability to really understand the big picture. We need to understand why the customers are calling, whether they believe they are getting their problems resolved and whether there are new issues developing within our customer and product base.
Metrics are key: “We need both metrics that measure our performance in terms of response, the types of problems our customers are experiencing and our product performance. But we also need to have other listening posts that help us determine if the metrics we have set up are really delivering the customer experience we desire to deliver. Are there new issues developing? Are there other problems we should be resolving? Are our products really performing the way the customers expect them to? “
Don’t over-quantitate: “These listening posts can take a variety of forms, but what we found most useful was customer inputs that came from blogs, surveys and personal interactions. It isn’t always quantifiable but these customer interactions will typically provide momentum when a new issue is developing and to which the organization isn’t responding. It will begin to create a sense that we have a problem and prompt us to begin diving deeper on the issue in order to understand it and put in place the appropriate countermeasures.”
Stop metrics that cause the wrong behavior: “You have metrics in place that guide certain behaviors within the organization. Periodically, you will find these metrics are not creating the behavior you wanted, or you may decide that the behavior you wanted isn’t providing the best customer experience. Change the metrics.”
Be clear on why you change: “When you are managing a large organization you can’t change the direction too quickly or too often, or you will just cause confusion. Secondly, the organization may have compensation tied to these metrics. Changing them causes changes to the compensation plans. Clearly communicate what you are changing and why.”
Consistency of response matters: “If you have a small organization that is centrally located and delivers your customer support, you can probably trust them to figure out what the best solution is for each customer inquiry. However, when you have thousands of people in several diverse geographical areas and cultures, all providing customer support to a customer base that is just as diverse, you find that creating a consistent response to customers is just as important as providing a good experience. “
Work in real time worldwide: “With online support, we could make a few software changes in one location and now all of our customers from all over the world would see a new and different response.”
Glenn, thank you. These are great insights for today’s business leader.
All the best, Bob
Networks