Jananas

If your company is like most others that I’ve encountered you probably have a customer service department. Except that their function is likely limited to dealing with escalated complaints and performing a once or twice yearly customer satisfaction survey.

They’re reactive. They deal with problems after they’ve arisen. They deal with the problems that they know about, that get reported, that are serious enough that someone was angry enough that they followed up. They miss all the problems that people didn’t report because they were more minor or because the customers didn’t have the energy to fight the good fight.

I think its much simpler than that and I think that its proactive.

It starts before a product or service even hits the market. In fact, it starts before its even been developed. Its a focus of corporate culture that means that a customer centric view is always present. That all staff members care about the product and are actively thinking about how to make it better. That your customer service staff are involved from the beginning and help develop business requirements.

Why is this important?

Because if you are thinking about customer experience from day one, you will build better products. Better products mean that you’ll have fewer calls into your call centre, fewer complaints about bad software or service, and all around more satisfied customers.

One of the key elements is the importance of time. Take a little more time thinking about how your customers use the software, how they interact with your staff, why they call the call centre. And then test. And then test some more. Test longer than you think would be necessary. Why? Because it means that you’ll catch more of those mistakes that customers would otherwise be frustrated about and call in for.

What else is important?

Don’t wait until your annual customer satisfaction survey to see how you’re doing. One, you’re probably too late to garner useful feedback. Two, the way that you frame the questions likely makes the information useless and unable to be actionable.

Instead, actively listen to your customers. Search for yourself through channels like twitter or using tools like google alerts or blog searches. What are people saying about you today? If you can identify a problem now, you can fix it faster and it’ll impact fewer customers. I could go into much more detail on this, but Julien and Chris did a bang up job of explaining why its vital in Trust Agents.  So trust me, and give it a read.

Test me out. Test out my theory. I’ll bet that in the long run it’ll save you money and improve your customer relations.