- The economic crunch is here
- Company revenues decline
- You get told to reduce service levels
- You reduce staff and/or cut the hours of cover
- There's a dilution in the customer experience
- This causes an erosion in customer loyalty
But this need-not be the outcome, as a recent McKinsey article highlights. This report covers the possibility of finding your customer 'Break Points' and carefully tracking this to avoid a complete drop in customer satisfaction.
One alternative to this is managing your customers down to lower cost-to-serve channels such as online, without a drop in quality of service. As I mentioned in a previous post, this can also be difficulty to pull-off correctly, but then this is a recesssion... and you don't just judge the person during the good times do you?
2 comments:
I agree. Cutting service levels seems like a recipe for a death spiral. Even besides the transactional revenue, think salea and marketing. Satisfied customers are really the asset that drives growth.
I recently posted on how customer marketing can be used toward this end and that a down economy makes it even more relevant.
http://referencesuccess.com/2008/10/27/customer-references-in-a-down-economy/
Thanks for your good work.
Joshua
Thanks for your comments and the link to your own thought-provoking article.
It will be a very narrow-minded (or exteremely narrow-margined) company that decides to significantly drop its service levels over the short-medium term.
Those companies that correctly manage: offerings, customer communication & satisfaction whilst remaining flexible through the bad times, are usually ideally situated to make the best of the situation when it eventually improves.
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