Dave Harries: Grant, I want to ask you a little bit about customer service after sales service and that sort of thing because I’ve become aware, over the years, that sometimes it’s easy for businesses to take customers for granted. When you’re a prospect, they’ll spend a great deal of the time trying to turn you into a customer, but once you are a customer, perhaps they don’t seem to care about you as much. Are there some rules that it’s a good idea to follow as a business?
Grant Leboff: I think there’s a couple of things that businesses really need to think about. The first one is lifetime value. It amazes me how many businesses I speak with who don’t really understand their lifetime value of a customer. Now, how long does an average customer stay? Could we get them to stay six months longer, a year longer? What would that mean to the bottom line of our business? If you look at lifetime value of a customer and you can start to see the ongoing revenue, in those terms, it means people are a bit more motivated.
Everybody knows the value of bringing a new customer in – Oh! we’ve just won some new business and everybody’s very excited. Whereas servicing our customer for another six months, that you’ve already serviced for 18 months is slightly less exciting, but if you know what the lifetime value is and what that looks like, I think you make a more commercial case and perhaps get the leaders of a business more enthusiastic about it as well. So I think that’s one thing that needs to happen. The other thing is, I don’t think customer service is a very good way of thinking about it. I know that’s what it is, but I think we should be thinking, always, in terms of customer experience.
We should be thinking in terms of; what is the experience a customer has or a prospect has a before they even meet me, when they go on my website or where they find out about me? What is the experience they have through a sales journey which could be online, it could be face to face, it could be anything? What is the experience they have when they first used the service and what does that ongoing experience look like? You have to holistically look at the entire experience that you’re giving a customer and once you think about it in terms of experience, you start to design experiences. Service is something you do, experience is something you actually have to design and think about. And once you design and think about it and then you think about how does the sales role dovetail is that experience? How does the operational dovetail into that experience? How do our customer service agents dovetail into that experience? I think you get something more joined up and more interesting. So I think it’s a reframe of how we think about things.
Dave Harries: And presumably, if we get that right and that customer experience is a very positive one for the customer, that’s far more likely not only to lead to them staying longer, but it might lead to them referring us as well and us finding brand new customers?
Grant Leboff: Absolutely. I think that’s true. When we’re looking at lifetime value of a customer, we can also say, and if we can turn that customer into an advocate, what is that worth to us? We won’t turn every customer into an advocate because some human beings are naturally not inclined to talk about things in those ways. They’ll use the service very happily and never mention it to anyone. You’ll have others that are very inclined to do that, but those ones that are inclined, that we can service and give them a great experience… what’s the power of advocacy? What’s their worth of advocacy to us? So I think all of these things, when you look at it from a commercial perspective which… let’s be honest, businesses going to do unless they’re not for profits or social enterprises. We can then start to justify the efforts we put into that. I think people often, wrongly, see servicing your customers just costing money. I want to make the most profit I can and the more service we give, the less profit margin I’m making. If you can start to put some metrics behind it, you can then justify some of that time and effort and actually map it out in a better way.
Dave Harries: And I suppose the reverse of that coin as well as if we don’t get that customer experience right, we could also get negative stuff going out into the marketplace about us. So well, fine, they were okay, they did a decent job at first, but they don’t really look after us. That’s going to impact again on our perception in the marketplace.
Grant Leboff: Yes, you’re 100 percent right, but the other thing is, are we over-servicing certain clients? If it’s all done by customer service agents on a telephone, you may find that Sarah in your customer service department loves speaking to Bob because he’s really friendly and really good, so she rings him far more times than she really should. Bob’s really happy, but on his spend and justification where we’re overservicing him. So if you map out that experience better, you stopped dissatisfaction, but you also know commercially where it makes more sense to put more effort in because commercial businesses, it’s okay to do that. It doesn’t mean giving anybody a bad service and experience, but it just means where should we be putting more time and effort as opposed to customers that perhaps you get a lesser service from us. Not a not bad one, but just a lesser one because it doesn’t make commercial sense.
