Friday, December 12, 2008

Managing customer expectations in a downturn

If you're in the business of serving customers, you can see the story unfolding before you.
  • 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
So tricky days ahead then as we welcome the ever-decreasing cycle of recession-based customer services.

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?
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 12, 2008 at 7:21 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hayden SutherlandDecember 13, 2008 at 11:48 AM

    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.

    ReplyDelete