Iunctura Daily -- Center for Strategic Relations
I've edited down this post from Iunctura, which is a delightful piece:
Kristine Kirby Webster's article on the mutual relationship necessary to build trust with your customer base is a great read. Here is the article in abstract with commentary.
Key points to remember:
Trust is a product of a positive association with your company, that not only will your products do what you say they will, but what the customer expects them to do. Inherently customers don't trust companies that sell, the majority of their experiences are negative.
Successful brands engenger strong two-way communications in relationship development. This communications includes information sharing, and listening for customer concerns. I'll add that positive communications contribute more to the relationship than negative ones.
Every buying relationship is a long-term investment.
Relationships are built over time one interaction at a time
ntl so need to understand this stuff it hurts. I remember some considerable time ago producing a dcoument in conjunction with my then boss, called the Moments of Truth. There were so many key points when ntl interatced with the customer and so many possibilities for error, that we spent a considerable period of time streamlining processes. This in itself led him to appoint me to build the intranet interface and content to support customer services. The year in which that launched Cabletel (as ntl then was) won JD Power's award for best Customer Service in the Telcos in the UK. (I won't claim all the credit - I had a good team working for me - but I know it made a considerable difference).
Yesterday I saw a memo praising our work in improving our call centre metrics. This primarily consisted on driving down call waiting times, etc. What I wanted desparately to see was some index, some measurement of customer satisfaction. It was nowhere to be seen. How then, despite a lot of people's hard work do we know we have been successful? Because our MD says so? I have a lot of respect for him but he is a numbers man. I think some of the softer issues get missed.
Somehow I wanted to link this in with ntl being suddenly more risk adverse. Perhaps its something to do with retrenchment that we are still more inwardly looking, when we should be looking outward to solve some problems. After all, that's what I'm trying to do here find answers from elsewhere...
Posted by Paul Goodison at July 23, 2003 09:42 AM | TrackBack