Is your company a company that is easy to work with?
1. Introduction
Many companies have top quality products and services, but when it comes to contacting them, having to pay their invoices or checking the movements of the current account, the quality of the commercial face is very poor and leaves much to be desired, causing the client to withdraw and in many occasions to stop operating with the company.
The product is of quality, it has passed the successive and various quality controls, but when you contact the company or try to have such contact, the operators are always busy or the treatment they have towards customers is unpleasant. And what to say about those companies that invoice products not purchased, or amounts that do not correspond or the prices stated are higher than previously agreed.
What happened? The directors of these companies believe that quality is limited to the quality control of the products or services they generate and market, and not to related services related to customer service, sale, dispatch, attention to claims, attention for guarantees, billing and accounting for sales and collections. This limited vision of quality generates customer dissatisfaction, their withdrawal and a high cost to operate with the company on behalf of the clients, but also for the company when dealing with orders, shipments and numerous claims.
For both the marketing company and the client company, the deficiencies imply costs of working hours, costs in communications media and can even lead to costs of procedures and legal complaints. The same costs are valid for individuals, who must face the loss of time, cost of travel and telephone expenses, plus "headaches".
Customer and sales losses are almost unreported. Sales are expressed in the Results Charts, but what about lost sales, and what about lost customers? Clients are a high value asset, however in most companies the loss of various components that make up accounting assets is noted, since clients are not accounted as assets their losses do not give rise to any special report, except that it is a client of great specific weight.
All organizations lose clients, but very few make efforts to recover them. The factors influencing customer retention and loss vary from company to company and are often complex, but especially in service companies they depend mainly on the satisfaction that customers obtain with the quality of the service.
2. Managing the company with customers in mind
The anger of the clients does not have to do in many cases with the products, their characteristics, qualities or prices. Products are generally up-to-date, well-made, and reasonably priced. What really leads to such anger is how complex, problematic and exhausting it is to operate with these companies, to the point where many say "even if they gave us your products for free, we could not afford to work with you". These cannot be listed as companies that are easy to work with.
Company with which it is easy to work (ECLQEFT), means that, from the customer's point of view, interacting with it requires the least possible cost and effort. It means that the company accepts orders placed at the time and by the most comfortable means for the customer; It means that the orders are expressed in the terminology of the buyer, and not in the twisted nomenclature of the company. It means that it makes it difficult for the customer to check the status of his order; that eliminates the endless series of useless phone calls to officials who have no information or interest, and who have been trained only to pass the call on to some other equally ignorant official. It means that the company issues a single invoice that is written in understandable terms,and not with the hidden codes of the company itself, or in its internal references, and which since its inception has been designed so that the client can understand and use it; in short: an invoice that can be deciphered by someone who is not an expert hieroglyph analyst.
The importance of becoming an ECLQEFT derives from the principle that says: the price of the product is only a part of the cost of the client. The check that you deliver to your supplier is not the total cost you incur for working with it, there are also other costs. The customer must also interact with the sales representatives, formulate the order, receive it, check it and store the merchandise; receive and interpret the invoice, pay it, return the products that are not in good condition, and other tasks. All these tasks cost the customer money, and not everything ends up in the supplier's box. In some cases, the general costs of working with a company are almost as high as what the customer has paid for the order.
If the company's order procedure is unclear, the customer should waste time and money trying to translate it. If the company doesn't offer customers some easy way to check order status, they'll have to make their way through exasperating phone calls to answering machines whose recorded voice offers no information. If the delivery system is fickle and unreliable, the customer will have to waste time and money in devising how to cover the company's banalities. If the invoice sent to the client is difficult to understand, the client will have to waste his time clarifying the situation with the staff of the company's billing department.
If the company has designed its way of operating taking into account its own comfort and objectives, leaving aside the needs of its customers, they must suffer the consequences, and the company will also bear its costs and damages. The more difficult it is to work with a company, the greater the burden and costs it imposes on its clients and, of course, the less competitive this company will be.
Being a company that is difficult to work with is an almost inevitable consequence of the way traditional managers think about the nature of the company. The traditional company is focused inwards. Its only loyalty is directed towards its owners and directors, in it the needs and desires of its clients do not count. The company that remains focused on itself, instead of focusing on customers, will not survive.
3. Evaluating the company
How do you know if the company is a company that is easy to work with? In order to answer this question, it is essential to make the following evaluation:
- Promote complaints to customers, in order to be able to become aware of the inconveniences and problems they have in the relationship with the company. Have a register of complaints, problems and inconveniences, keeping a statistics of them, to know the numbers of cases, their frequency and the importance that they have for the clients and the company.Revealing the processes in which the company is related to its clients, from this survey should arise the level of problems, delays, costs and inconveniences that occur. Carrying out customer surveys to find out their opinion about the level of satisfaction generated by operating with the company. Carry out benchmarking tasks in order to compare the speed, quality, cost and satisfaction of the company's customers with similar companies.,analyzing their processes and organization in order to implement the necessary changes in the company.
4. Improving customer relationship
Two systems are fundamental, process reengineering and continuous improvement. A reengineering that allows activities and processes to be recreated in order to reduce response times, improve customer service, raise the quality of information and billing processes, and facilitate interaction between the company and customers. Reengineering is the fundamental overhaul and radical redesign of business processes to deliver dramatic improvements in results. In this case, the desired result is to make the company a company with which it is easy to work.
Applied reengineering, it is necessary to proceed to a process of continuous improvement in order to sustain and improve over time the new levels of satisfaction achieved. Every day it is feasible to improve something, be it billing, the way of making claims, the information provided to the customer, the way of getting orders among many others. In many opportunities it is not necessary to reengineer and it is feasible to give a better response to customers just by imposing the philosophy and tools for continuous improvement.
Managers and staff must always keep in mind the objective of making it easier for customers to operate with the company, for which they must constantly and systematically pursue the improvement of all processes that generate that objective. Among these it is essential to keep your ears very open to customer complaints and comments, keep records of complaints and needs expressed by them, conduct surveys, monitor levels of satisfaction, and keep statistics related to internal processes related to the Relationship with customers.
Empowerment allows power and decision-making to be introduced to the lower levels of the organization, thus leading to better relations with customers and speeding up the resolution of complaints they may have. People who work face-to-face with the client can make their own decisions without seeking support at management levels.
The decrease in the number of hierarchical levels of the organization allows compliance with the organization chart, bringing managers closer to the customer service lines, and consequently allows them to be informed of the needs and complaints of the customers and employees who serve them.
The elimination of the functional organization to move to an organization through processes allows to reduce response times and improve the quality of care and services.
Improve information systems so that you can follow the processes and see the organization as a whole. The improvement must contemplate the full access of all the processes, the data already incorporated into the information system.
5. Conclusion
Let's pay attention to the following case, which happened to the editor of this work. He has contracted a mobile phone service, having adhered to a plan which implies a predetermined monthly payment, corresponding to a certain maximum number of minutes of communication. At the time of making this payment, he receives an invoice at his home for an amount much higher than agreed, clarifying the same that this corresponds to the use of services, services that the client never used, nor was it in the clauses of the contract. This generated in the client the loss of working time, which he had to allocate to go to the Agency of said company to make the claim, and then the waiting time to deal with the withdrawal of said services and the corresponding adjustment in billing,which meant more than an hour and a half of lost time, plus the cost of transportation and parking of the car. It should be noted that in the previous month he had to carry out the same procedure.
This is a clear example of a company with which it is difficult to work, due to the costs and time lost due to a poor management service on the part of the company providing the services.
Imagine that this person is not only subject to waste time with this company but also with others that generate the same inconvenience. It is also obvious that you cannot indulge in wasting your time moving and making paperwork to make corrections of invoices motivated by internal problems of companies every month. That leads to making decisions, and these are linked to stop operating with those that generate more complications and loss of resources.
A company that continually generates complaints from its customers is a company that is undermining the patience of its customers, and when customers get angry they not only stop operating with the company, but also tell about this bad experience to every person who put you ahead.
6. Bibliography
- The Agenda: What every business dominate the decade. Michael Hammer. Edit. Crown Business. 2001.Transforming the botton line. Tony Hope and Jeremy Hope. Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd. 1995. All power to the customer. Karl Albrecht. Editorial Paidós Company. nineteen ninety six.
As a complement to what is stated in this article, the following virtual conference "Customer service, a growth strategy" is suggested, in which Fanny Cristina Pava, expert in customer service, presents the benefits of a culture of customer service in the companies.
